The SAGE Handbook of Critical Pedagogies 2019946948, 9781526411488

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The SAGE Handbook of

Critical Pedagogies

SAGE was founded in 1965 by Sara Miller McCune to support the dissemination of usable knowledge by publishing innovative and high-quality research and teaching content. Today, we publish over 900 journals, including those of more than 400 learned societies, more than 800 new books per year, and a growing range of library products including archives, data, case studies, reports, and video. SAGE remains majority-owned by our founder, and after Sara’s lifetime will become owned by a charitable trust that secures our continued independence. Los Angeles | London | New Delhi | Singapore | Washington DC | Melbourne

The SAGE Handbook of

Critical Pedagogies

Volume 1

Edited by

Shirley R. Steinberg and Barry Down Assistant Editor

Janean Robinson

SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road New Delhi 110 044 SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 3 Church Street #10-04 Samsung Hub Singapore 049483

Editor: James Clark Editorial Assistant: Umeeka Raichura Production Editor: Manmeet Kaur Tura Copyeditor: Sunrise Setting Proofreader: Sunrise Setting Indexer: Cenveo Publisher Services Marketing Manager: Dilhara Attygalle Cover Design: Naomi Robinson Typeset by Cenveo Publisher Services Printed in the UK At SAGE we take sustainability seriously. Most of our products are printed in the UK using responsibly sourced papers and boards. When we print overseas we ensure sustainable papers are used as measured by the PREPS grading system. We undertake an annual audit to monitor our sustainability. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019946948 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-5264-1148-8

Introduction © Barry Down and Shirley R. Steinberg, 2020 Editorial arrangement © Shirley R. Steinberg and Barry Down, 2020 Section 1 Introduction © Shirley R. Steinberg, 2020 Chapter 1 © SAGE Publications, 1983 Chapter 2 © Lilia I. Bartolomé, 2020 Chapter 3 © John Willinsky, 2020 Chapter 4 © Deborah P. Britzman, 2020 Chapter 5 © Ramón Flecha, 2020 Chapter 6 © William H. Schubert, 2020 Chapter 7 © David Geoffrey Smith, 2020 Chapter 8 © Hermán S. García, 2020 Chapter 9 © Marcella Runell Hall, 2020 Chapter 10 © Arlo Kempf, 2020 Chapter 11 © Paul L. Thomas, 2020 Chapter 12 © Christine E. Sleeter, 2020 Chapter 13 © William Ayers, 2020 Chapter 14 © Luis Huerta-Charles, 2020 Chapter 15 © D’Arcy Martin, 2020 Section 2 Introduction © Paul R. Carr and Gina Thésée, 2020 Chapter 16 © Joe L. Kincheloe, 2020 Chapter 17 © Benjamin Frymer, 2020 Chapter 18 © Soudeh Oladi, 2020 Chapter 19 © Philip M. Anderson, 2020 Chapter 20 © Rodney Handelsman, 2020 Chapter 21 © Antonio Garcia, 2020 Chapter 22 © Nathan Snaza, 2020 Chapter 23 © Cathryn Teasley and Alana Butler, 2020 Chapter 24 © Marlon Simmons, 2020 Chapter 25 © Peter Pericles Trifonas, 2020 Chapter 26 © Marc Spooner, 2020 Chapter 27 © Jane McLean, 2020 Chapter 28 © Michalinos Zembylas, 2020 Section 3 Introduction © Gregory Martin, 2020 Chapter 29 © James D. Kirylo, 2020 Chapter 30 © Robert F. Carley, 2020 Chapter 31 © Stephanie Troutman, 2020 Chapter 32 © Samuel D. Rocha and Martha Sañudo, 2020 Chapter 33 © Robert Hattam, 2020 Chapter 34 © Gresilda Tilley-Lubbs, 2020 Chapter 35 © Marta Soler-Gallart and Teresa Sordé Martí, 2020 Chapter 36 © Graham Jeffery and Diarmuid McAuliffe, 2020 Chapter 37 © Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter McLaren, 2020 Chapter 38 © Shirley R. Steinberg, 2020 Section 4 Introduction © Cathryn Teasley, 2020 Chapter 39 © Domenica Maviglia, 2020 Chapter 40 © Colin Chasi and Ylva RodnyGumede, 2020 Chapter 41 © Juan Ríos Vega, 2020 Chapter 42 © Aristotelis Gkiolmas, Constantina Stefanidou and Constantine Skordoulis, 2020 Chapter 43 © Madhulika Sagaram, 2020 Chapter 44 © Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner, Michaela P. Stone and Marco Montalbetti Viñuela, 2020 Chapter 45 © Brian Dotts, 2020 Chapter 46 © Kathalene A. Razzano, 2020 Chapter 47 © Jaime Usma, Oscar A. Peláez, Yuliana Palacio and Catalina Jaramillo, 2020 Chapter 48 © Nicholas D. Hartlep and Pipo Bui, 2020 Chapter 49 © Henry A. Giroux, 2020 Section 5 Introduction © Four Arrows and R. Michael Fisher, 2020 Chapter 50 © R. Michael Fisher and Four Arrows, 2020 Chapter 51 © Ann Milne, 2020 Chapter 52 © Jeremy Garcia, 2020 Chapter 53 © Shashi Shergill and David Scott, 2020 Chapter 54 © Jennifer M. Markides, 2020 Chapter 55 © Adrienne Sansom, 2020 Chapter 56 © Renee Desmarchelier, 2020 Chapter 57 © Perry R. James, 2020 Chapter 58 © Rose Marsters, 2020 Section 6 Introduction © Robert Hattam, 2020 Chapter 59 © John Smyth, 2020 Chapter 60 © Tricia M. Kress, 2020 Chapter 61 © Concepción Sánchez-Blanco, 2020 Chapter 62 © Sandro Carnicelli and Karla Boluk, 2020 Chapter 63 © Dana M. Stachowiak and Leila E. Villaverde, 2020

Chapter 64 © Angelina E. Castagno, Jessica A. Solyom and Bryan Brayboy, 2020 Chapter 65 © Haggith Gor Ziv, 2020 Chapter 66 © Teresa Anne Fowler, 2020 Chapter 67 © Sheryl J. Lieb, 2020 Chapter 68 © Barry Down, 2020 Section 7 Introduction © Barry Down, 2020 Chapter 69 © David Zyngier, 2020 Chapter 70 © Khadija Mohammed, Lisa McAuliffe and Nighet Riaz, 2020 Chapter 71 © Revital Zilonka, 2020 Chapter 72 © Gang Zhu and Zhengmei Peng, 2020 Chapter 73 © Phillip Boda, 2020 Chapter 74 © Guofang Li and Pramod K. Sah, 2020 Chapter 75 © Galia Zalmanson Levi, 2020 Chapter 76 © Ramón Flecha and Silvia Molina, 2020 Section 8 Introduction © Michael B. MacDonald, 2020 Chapter 77 © Silvia Cristina Bettez and Cristina Maria Dominguez, 2020 Chapter 78 © Awad Ibrahim, 2020 Chapter 79 © Maria Padrós and Sandra Girbés-Peco, 2020 Chapter 80 © Elbert J. Hawkins III, 2020 Chapter 81 © Shuntay Z. Tarver and Melanie M. Acosta, 2020 Chapter 82 © Toby Rollo, J. Cynthia McDermott, Richard Kahn and Fred Chapel, 2020 Chapter 83 © Tanya Brown Merriman, 2020 Chapter 84 © April Yaisa Ruffin-Adams, 2020 Chapter 85 © Sherilyn Lennon, 2020 Chapter 86 © Annette Coburn and David Wallace, 2020 Section 9 Introduction © Michael Hoechsmann, 2020 Chapter 87 © Jeff Share, 2020 Chapter 88 © Michael Hoechsmann and Alfonso Gutiérrez Martín, 2020 Chapter 89 © Sabrina Boyer, 2020 Chapter 90 © Brian C. Johnson, 2020 Chapter 91 © Tony Kashani, 2020 Chapter 92 © Juha Suoranta, 2020 Chapter 93 © Cherie Ann Turpin, 2020 Chapter 94 © Ki Wight, 2020 Chapter 95 © SAGE Publications, 2011 Chapter 96 © Gerald Walton, 2020 Section 10 Introduction © Leila E. Villaverde and Roymieco A. Carter, 2020 Chapter 97 © Gregory Martin, 2020 Chapter 98 © Leila E. Villaverde & Roymieco A. Carter, 2020 Chapter 99 © Judith Dunkerly-Bean and Kristine Sunday, 2020 Chapter 100 © I. Malik Saafir, 2020 Chapter 101 © Michael B. MacDonald, 2020 Chapter 102 © Claire Robson and Dennis Sumara, 2020 Chapter 103 © Peter R. Wright, 2020 Chapter 104 © Mary Drinkwater, 2020 Chapter 105 © Lalenja Harrington, 2020 Chapter 106 © Christopher Lee Kennedy, 2020 Section 11 Introduction © Shirley R. Steinberg, 2020 Chapter 107 © Douglas Kellner and Roslyn M. Satchel, 2020 Chapter 108 © Andrew Hickey, 2020 Chapter 109 © Priya Parmar, 2020 Chapter 110 © Dawn N. Hicks Tafari and Veronica A. Newton, 2020 Chapter 111 © Tony Edwards and Kerry J. Renwick, 2020 Chapter 112 © Paul L. Thomas, 2020 Chapter 113 © Nwachi Pressley-Tafari, 2020 Chapter 114 © Mark Helmsing, 2020 Chapter 115 © Teresa J. Rishel, 2020 Chapter 116 © Jo Lampert and Kerry Mallan, 2020 Section 12 Introduction © Renee Desmarchelier, 2020 Chapter 117 © Stephanie L. Hudson, 2020 Chapter 118 © Joseph Carroll-Miranda, 2020 Chapter 119 © Sarah E. Colonna, 2020 Chapter 120 © Edmund Adjapong, 2020 Chapter 121 © Jennifer D. Adams, Atasi Das and Eun-Ji Amy Kim, 2020 Chapter 122 © Shawn Arango Ricks, 2020 Chapter 123 © Constance Russell, 2020 Chapter 124 © Marissa Bellino, 2020 Chapter 125 © Jodi Latremouille, 2020

We dedicate this set of books to the notion of social justice in education…to making a difference, to causing a fracture, to reading between the lines…to criticalizing the work we do as educators. And to the memory of Paulo Freire, Joe L. Kincheloe, and Jesús Pato Gómez, who paved the way…leaving us far too early. Shirley and Barry

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Contents Dedication v List of Figures xvii List of Tablesxix Notes on the Editors and Contributorsxx Acknowledgementsxxxix Introduction to the Handbookxl Barry Down and Shirley R. Steinberg VOLUME 1 SECTION I  READING PAULO FREIRE Shirley R. Steinberg

1

1

The Importance of the Act of Reading Paulo Freire; translated by Loretta Slover

3

2

Linking My World to the Word Lilia I. Bartolomé

9

3

Freire Contra Freire: An Interplay in Three Acts John Willinsky

13

4

A Note on Free Association as Transference to Reading Deborah P. Britzman

17

5

Dialogic and Liberating Actions Ramón Flecha

20

6

In the Spirit of Freire William H. Schubert

22

7

Fake News and Other Conundrums in ‘Reading the World’ at Empire’s End David Geoffrey Smith

29

8

Freire’s ‘Act of Reading’: Inspiring and Emboldening Hermán S. García

38

9

In Gratitude to Freire Marcella Runell Hall

40

10

Of Word, World, and Being (Online) Arlo Kempf

42

viii

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

11

The Critical Redneck Experience Paul L. Thomas

46

12

On Learning to Claim Text Christine E. Sleeter

48

13

‘I Am a Revolutionary!’ William Ayers

51

14

The Importance of Paulo Freire in the ‘Act of Reading’ Luis Huerta-Charles

59

15

Share and Sustain: Two Steps to Paulo D’Arcy Martin

62

SECTION II SOCIAL THEORIES Paul R. Carr and Gina Thésée

67

16

Critical Pedagogy and the Knowledge Wars of the 21st Century Joe L. Kincheloe

75

17

The Frankfurt School and Education Benjamin Frymer

94

18

The Nomad, The Hybrid: Deconstructing the Notion of Subjectivity Through Freire and Rumi Soudeh Oladi

104

The Reader, the Text, the Restraints: A Cultural History of the Art(s) of Reading Philip M. Anderson

118

19

20

Deleuzeguattarian Concepts for a Becoming Critical Pedagogy Rodney Handelsman

135

21

Specters of Critical Pedagogy: Must We Die in Order to Survive? Antonio Garcia

157

22

Critical Pedagogy Beyond the Human Nathan Snaza

173

23

Intersecting Critical Pedagogies to Counter Coloniality Cathryn Teasley and Alana Butler

186

24

Locating Black Life within Colonial Modernity: Decolonial Notes Marlon Simmons

205

Contents

25

Critical Pedagogy and Difference Peter Pericles Trifonas

26

Critical Pedagogy Imperiled as Neoliberalism, Marketization, and Audit Culture Become the Academy Marc Spooner

ix

218

225

27

Critical Pedagogy: Negotiating the Nuances of Implementation Jane McLean

236

28

Critical Pedagogies of Compassion Michalinos Zembylas

254

SECTION III  KEY FIGURES IN CRITICAL PEDAGOGY Gregory Martin 29

Meeting the Critical Pedagogues: A North America Context (Paulo Freire and Beyond) James D. Kirylo

269

273

30

Gramscian Critical Pedagogy: A Holistic and Social Genre Approach Robert F. Carley

289

31

Still Teaching to Transgress: Reflecting on Critical Pedagogy with bell hooks Stephanie Troutman

302

32

Ivan Illich and Liberation Theology Samuel D. Rocha and Martha Sañudo

310

33

From South African Black Theology and Freire to ‘Teaching for Resistance’: The Work of Basil Moore Robert Hattam

320

Coming to Critical Pedagogy in Spain Through Life and Literature: Jurjo Torres Santomé and Ramón Flecha Gresilda Tilley-Lubbs

334

34

35

Interviews with Marta Soler-Gallart and Teresa Sordé Martí Marta Soler-Gallart and Teresa Sordé Martí

346

36

Interview with Henry A. Giroux Graham Jeffery and Diarmuid McAuliffe

352

37

Interviews with Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter McLaren Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter McLaren

368

38

Influenced by Critical Pedagogy: Interviews with Critical Friends Shirley R. Steinberg

380

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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

SECTION IV  GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES Cathryn Teasley

401

39

From Theory to Practice: The Identikit and Purpose of Critical Pedagogy Domenica Maviglia

405

40

Reimagining the University as a Transit Place and Space: A Contribution to the Decolonisation Debate Colin Chasi and Ylva Rodny-Gumede

416

41

When I Open My Alas: Developing a Transnational Mariposa Consciousness Juan Ríos Vega

428

42

Critical Pedagogy and the Acceptance of Refugees in Greece Aristotelis Gkiolmas, Constantina Stefanidou and Constantine Skordoulis

439

43

Indigenous Critical Pedagogy in Underserved Environments in India Madhulika Sagaram

453

44

(Dis)Ruptive Glocality Through Teacher Exchange: Realizing Pedagogical Love in the Chilean Context 469 Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner, Michaela P. Stone, and Marco Montalbetti Viñuela

45

The Sun Never Sets on the Privatization Movement: A Return to the Heart of Darkness in a Neoliberal and Neoimperialist World Brian Dotts

480

Teaching Global Affairs: Problem-posing Pedagogy and the Violence of Indifference Kathalene A. Razzano

496

46

47

Promoting Critical Consciousness in the Preparation of Teachers in Colombia Jaime A. Usma, Oscar A. Peláez, Yuliana Palacio, and Catalina Jaramillo

505

48

Vietnamese Students and the Emerging Model Minority Myth in Germany Nicholas D. Hartlep and Pipo Bui

518

49

Revisiting Hurricane Katrina: Racist Violence and the Biopolitics of Disposability537 Henry A. Giroux VOLUME 2

SECTION V  INDIGENOUS WAYS OF KNOWING Four Arrows and R. Michael Fisher 50

Indigenizing Conscientization and Critical Pedagogy: Integrating Nature, Spirit and Fearlessness as Foundational Concepts R. Michael Fisher and Four Arrows

547

551

Contents

xi

51

A Critical, Culturally Sustaining, Pedagogy of Wh¯anau Ann Milne

52

Critical Indigenous Pedagogies of Resistance: The Call for Critical Indigenous Educators Jeremy Garcia

574

Ethical Relationality as a Pathway for Non-Indigenous Educators to Decolonize Curriculum and Instruction Shashi Shergill and David Scott

587

Flooded, between Two Worlds: Holding the Memory of What Used to Be Against the Reality of What Exists Now Jennifer M. Markides

604

Dance and Children’s Cultural Identity: A Critical Perspective of the Embodiment of Place Adrienne Sansom

630

Indigenous Knowledges and Science Education: Complexities, Considerations and Praxis Renee Desmarchelier

642

Navajo Sweat House Leadership: Acquiring Traditional Navajo Leadership for Restoring Identity in Our Forgotten World Perry R. James

658

53

54

55

56

57

58

The Navigator’s Path: Journey Through Story and Ng¯akau Pedagogy664 Rose Marsters

SECTION VI  EDUCATION AND PRAXIS Robert Hattam 59

561

A Critical Pedagogy of Working Class Schooling: A Call to Activist Theory and Practice John Smyth

677

681

60

Critical Pedagogy as Research Tricia M. Kress

694

61

Poverty and Equality in Early Childhood Education Concepción Sánchez-Blanco

704

62

Critical Tourism Pedagogy: A Response to Oppressive Practices Sandro Carnicelli and Karla Boluk

717

xii

63

64

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Queer(ing) Cisgender Normativity: Reconsidering Critical Pedagogy Through a Genderqueer Lens Dana M. Stachowiak and Leila E. Villaverde

729

Culturally Responsive Schooling as a Form of Critical Pedagogies for Indigenous Youth and Tribal Nations Angelina E. Castagno, Jessica A. Solyom and Bryan Brayboy

743

65

Feminist Critical Pedagogy Haggith Gor Ziv

758

66

Schooling, Milieu, Racism: Just Another Brick in the Wall Teresa Anne Fowler

771

67

An Existentialist Pedagogy of Humanization: Countering Existential Oppression of Teachers and Students in Neoliberal Educational Spaces Sheryl J. Lieb

68

Vocational Education and Training in Schools and ‘Really Useful Knowledge’ Barry Down

SECTION VII  TEACHING AND LEARNING Barry Down 69

Critical Pedagogy, Social Justice and Contesting Definitions of Engagement in the Classroom David Zyngier

783

797

811

815

70

Critical Pedagogy and Anti-Muslim Racism Education: Insights from the UK Khadija Mohammed, Lisa McAuliffe and Nighet Riaz

71

Pedagogy of Connectedness: Cultivating a Community of Caring, Compassionate Social Justice Warriors in the Classroom Revital Zilonka

841

Counternarratives: Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Critical Caring in One Urban School Gang Zhu and Zhengmei Peng

854

‘More than an Educator but a Political Figure’: Leveraging the Overlapping Intersections of Disability Studies and Critical Pedagogy in Teacher Education Phillip Boda

869

Critical Pedagogy for Preservice Teacher Education in the US: An Agenda for a Plurilingual Reality of Superdiversity Guofang Li and Pramod K. Sah

884

72

73

74

828

Contents

xiii

75

Teaching Social Justice Galia Zalmanson Levi

899

76

Creating Global Learning Communities Ramón Flecha and Silvia Molina

909

SECTION VIII  COMMUNITIES AND ACTIVISM Michael B. MacDonald

923

77

Moving from Individual Consciousness Raising to Critical Community Building Praxis Silvia Cristina Bettez and Cristina Maria Dominguez

927

78

Arab Spring as Critical Pedagogy: Activism in the Face of Death Awad Ibrahim

941

79

Schools as Learning Communities Maria Padrós and Sandra Girbés-Peco

950

80

Love Unconditionally: Educating People in the Midst of a Social Crisis Elbert J. Hawkins III

961

81

‘We Do It All the Time’: Afrocentric Pedagogies for Raising Consciousness and Collective Responsibility Shuntay Z. Tarver and Melanie M. Acosta

974

82

Critical Pedagogy, Democratic Praxis, and Adultism Toby Rollo, J. Cynthia McDermott, Richard Kahn and Fred Chapel

989

83

Presence and Resilience as Resistance Tanya Brown Merriman

1003

84

African American Mothers Theorizing Practice April Yaisa Ruffin-Adams

1016

85

Deploying Critical Bricolage as Activism Sherilyn Lennon

1025

86

Critical Community Education: The Case of Love Stings Annette Coburn and David Wallace

1036

VOLUME 3 SECTION IX  COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA Michael Hoechsmann

1055

87

1059

Mediating the Curriculum with Critical Media Literacy Jeff Share

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88

Empowerment and Participation in Media Education: A Critical Review Michael Hoechsmann and Alfonso Gutiérrez Martín

1074

89

Dangerous Citizenship: Comics and Critical Pedagogy Sabrina Boyer

1083

90

It’s ‘Reel’ Critical: Media Literacy and Film-based Pedagogy Brian C. Johnson

1097

91

Critical Media Literacy Tony Kashani

1115

92

Critical Pedagogy and Wikilearning Juha Suoranta

1126

93

Diversity in Digital Humanities Cherie Ann Turpin

1139

94

Missing Beats: Critical Media Literacy Pedagogy in Post-secondary Media Production Programs Ki Wight

1146

A Shock to Thought: Curatorial Judgment and the Public Exhibition of ‘Difficult Knowledge’ Roger I. Simon

1157

95

96

In a Rape Culture, Can Boys Actually Be Boys? Gerald Walton

1175

SECTION X  ARTS AND AESTHETICS Leila E. Villaverde and Roymieco A. Carter

1187

97

Critical Public Pedagogies of DIY Gregory Martin

1191

98

OASIS – (Re)conceptualizing Galleries as Intentionally Pedagogical Leila E. Villaverde and Roymieco A. Carter

1206

99

Critical Pedagogy and the Visual Arts: Examining Perceptions of Poverty and Social Justice in Early Childhood Research with Children Judith Dunkerly-Bean and Kristine Sunday

100

Performance Pedagogy Using the Theater of Justice I. Malik Saafir

101

Thanks for Being Local: CineMusicking as a Critical Pedagogy of Popular Music Michael B. MacDonald

1220 1233

1242

Contents

xv

102

Critical Life Writing for Social Change Claire Robson and Dennis Sumara

1255

103

Towards a Critical Arts Practice Peter R. Wright

1269

104

Theorizing a New Pedagogical Model: Transformative Arts and Cultural Praxis Circle Mary Drinkwater

105

106

Through a Rhizomatic Lens: Synergies between A/r/tography, Community Engaged Research, and Critical Pedagogy with Students with Intellectual Disabilities Lalenja Harrington The Pedagogical Afterthought: Situating Socially Engaged Art as Critical Public Pedagogy Christopher Lee Kennedy

SECTION XI  CRITICAL YOUTH STUDIES Shirley R. Steinberg 107

108

109

110

1294

1313

1327

Resisting Youth: From Occupy Through Black Lives Matter to the Trump Resistance Douglas Kellner and Roslyn M. Satchel

1329

Where Does Critical Pedagogy Happen? Young People, ‘Relational Pedagogy’ and the Interstitial Spaces of School Andrew Hickey

1343

Lyrical Minded: Unveiling the Hidden Literacies of Youth Through Performance Pedagogy Priya Parmar

1358

‘They Laugh ’Cause They Assume I’m in Prison’: HipHop Feminism as Critical Pedagogy Dawn N. Hicks Tafari and Veronica A. Newton

1365

111

Young People, Agency and the Paradox of Trust Tony Edwards and Kerry J. Renwick

112

Excavating Intimacy, Privacy, and Consent as Youth in a Hostile World: A Critical Journey Paul L. Thomas

113

1279

Art and Erotic Exploration as Critical Pedagogy with Youth Nwachi Pressley-Tafari

1374

1386

1400

xvi

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114

Youth, Becoming-American, and Learning the Vietnam War Mark Helmsing

1411

115

The Bully, the Bullied, and the Boss: The Power Triangle of Youth Suicide Teresa J. Rishel

1421

116

Pedagogies of Trauma, Fear and Hope in Texts about 9/11 for Young People: From a Perspective of Distance Jo Lampert and Kerry Mallan

1439

SECTION XII  SCIENCE, ECOLOGY AND WELLBEING Renee Desmarchelier

1451

117

Critical Body Pedagogies in Technoscience Stephanie L. Hudson

1455

118

Computer Science Education and the Role of Critical Pedagogy in a Digital World Joseph Carroll-Miranda

1464

Where the Fantastic Liberates the Mundane: Feminist Science Fiction and the Imagination Sarah E. Colonna

1476

119

120

Conceptualizing Hip-Hop as a Conduit toward Developing Science Geniuses Edmund Adjapong

121

The Crit-Trans Heuristic for Transforming STEM Education: Youth and Educators as Participants in the World Jennifer D. Adams, Atasi Das and Eun-Ji Amy Kim

1497

Who Hears My Cry? The Impact of Activism on the Mental Health of African American Women Shawn Arango Ricks

1508

Fat Pedagogy and the Disruption of Weight-based Oppression: Toward the Flourishing of All Bodies Constance Russell

1516

122

123

1486

124

Forwarding a Critical Urban Environmental Pedagogy Marissa Bellino

1532

125

An Ecological Pedagogy of Joy Jodi Latremouille

1543

Index

1559

List of Figures 43.1 The progression of association of ideas and continuity of experience in Indigenous pedagogy across India 455 43.2 The approach used to accelerate children at a rapid pace in Hyderabad, India 458 53.1 A cyclic perspective on the historical relationship of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in Canada 594 54.1 Highwood River 605 54.2 Water at the level of the train bridge 606 54.3 Mud tracked out 609 54.4 Waiting for a bin 609 54.5 Trapped moisture 610 54.6 Farewell to art 1 610 54.7 Farewell to art 2 611 54.8 Three bins in three days – throwing it all away 611 54.9 Jacked up 612 54.10 Rotting on the inside, right next door 614 54.11 Sporting goods store – facade 615 54.12 New pub and hardware store – fronts615 54.13 Delivery in 30 minutes or … never616 54.14 Dentist office, now launderette 616 54.15 Posters to mask the empty insides 617 54.16 Mmm ... noodles 617 54.17 Antiques or roadhouse? 617 54.18 Hardware – not fixing anything 618 54.19 Real art gallery, ‘not fake’ 618 54.20 Fake bake shop, (really) for lease 618 54.21 ‘WE ARE STiLL CLEANG UP PLEASE DON’T TOUCH OUR SUPPLYs AND FURNiTURE’ 620 54.22 Diner – a permanent fixture 621 54.23 Little Big Bear Gifts – a facade on a facade 621 54.24 Going nowhere 624 54.25 No news 625 54.26 Filming today 625 54.27 From hardware, to workwear – false advertising, no sales to be had 626 54.28 Roadhouse/Antiques/Roadhouse – rotating facades 626 54.29 Diner, rear view – a facade on all fronts (Markides, June 2018) 627 54.30 Low and slow 627 63.1 Intersectionality versus assemblages 737 63.2 Gender as a rhizome 740 72.1 The conceptual backdrop 856 81.1 Course activities within a Diversity of Human Services course that illustrates Village Pedagogy 982

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81.2 Preservice teacher learning activities from a literacy methods course framed around the Black Studies Critical Studyin’ pedagogical framework 985 85.1 The cycle of inquiry extending the bricolage to incorporate community activism1029 85.2 A particularly troubling and well-known local image 1031 85.3 My public critique of the logo 1032 86.1 Pat’s collage 1039 86.2 Sam’s collage 1039 86.3 Creative conversations at the collage table 1040 86.4 Collaborative dialogue at the collage table 1040 86.5 Jane’s collage 1044 96.1 The tweet of Nathaniel Prince 1179 S10.1 The interplay between art, aesthetics and critical pedagogy 1188 99.1 Money machine 1226 99.2 Pedagogy of a new childhood redesign cycle 1229 104.1 Transformative Arts and Cultural Praxis Circle (TACPC) 1282 108.1 The Bike Build workshop space 1346 108.2 Teasing-out where next to proceed 1349 108.3 A scene from a typical discussion 1349 

List of Tables 56.1 The impact of the construction of the neoliberal subject on classroom implementation of curricula inclusive of Indigenous knowledges 651 62.1 A summary of our critical rethinking of tourism education 724 87.1 Conceptual understandings and corresponding questions 1062 111.1 Purpose statements from state and national curriculum documents 1378 120.1 Students’ science-themed raps 1494 121.1 Crit-Trans heuristic1506

Notes on the Editors and Contributors THE EDITORS Shirley R. Steinberg considers herself somewhere between the 2nd and 3rd generation of critical pedagogy. Originally an American, she discovered critical pedagogy in Alberta, Canada as a student of David G. Smith and Julia Ellis. Her high school teaching career took a radical left turn after only a year and she determined to complete a doctorate based on the criticalizing of media using bricolage, a philosophical research methodology she refined with Joe L. Kincheloe (2nd generation). Expanding her idea of pedagogy into cultural studies, her work blended the critical with the pedagogical and cultural. The author and editor of many books and articles, her research interests have generated (often with Kincheloe) Critical Multiculturalism, Christotainment, Kinderculture, Critical Bricolage, and Postformal thinking. As Research Professor of Critical Youth Studies at the University of Calgary, she engages local, national, and global community work with and for youth, refugees, immigrants, and other disenfranchised groups. Barry Down is Professor of Education at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia. In 2003 he was appointed the City of Rockingham Chair in Education (2004-2013) at Murdoch University, the first such position funded by a local government in Australia. In this period, he worked on a number of Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Projects investigating issues of student engagement, school-to-work transitions and early career teacher resilience. He has co-authored seven books (with long time collaborators John Smyth and Peter McInerney) including Critically Engaged Learning: Connecting to Young Lives (2008); ‘Hanging in with Kids’ in Tough Times: Engagement in Contexts of Educational Disadvantage in the Relational School (2012); and The Socially Just School; Making Space for Youth to speak Back (2014). His most recent book is entitled Rethinking School-to-Work Transitions: Young People have Something to Say (with John Smyth and Janean Robinson). His research interests focus on young people’s lives in the context of shifts in the global economy, poverty, class, school-to-work transitions and student dis/re/engagement.

THE SECTION EDITORS Four Arrows (Wahinkpe Topa) (aka Don Trent Jacobs) is Professor, School of Leadership Studies at Fielding Graduate University and the author of numerous publications on ‘Indigenous worldview’, including Unlearning the Language of Conquest, Teaching Truly and Point of Departure. Paul R. Carr is a Full Professor in the Department of Education at the Université du Québec en Outaouais, Canada, and is also the Chair-holder of the UNESCO Chair in Democracy,

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Global Citizenship and Transformative Education (DCMÉT)(uqo.ca/DCMT/). His latest book, with Gina Thésée, is “It’s Not Education that Scares Me, it’s the Educators…”: Is There Still Hope for Democracy in Education, and Education for Democracy?. Roymieco A. Carter is Director of the Visual Arts Program and University Galleries at North Carolina A&T State University. He teaches courses on graphic design, digital media, visual literacy and theory, and social criticism. He is a graphic designer of print, web, and motionbased media. He has written articles on graphic design education, art education, critical pedagogy, Black studies, gaming, human computer interaction and graphics computer animation. Renee Desmarchelier is the Associate Dean Learning, Teaching and Student Success for the Faculty of Business, Education, Law and Arts at the University of Southern Queensland. Her scholarly interests include Indigenous knowledges, critical pedagogy and participatory and Indigenous research methodologies. Her research has centered on how teachers negotiate Indigenous knowledges in their classroom praxis and the cultural interface between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing. R. Michael Fisher, a member of the Adjunct Faculty, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, is an educator, artist and fearologist who has been at the forefront of fear studies curriculum development for 30 years. He has published five books, including World’s Fearlessness Teachings, an original resource for leaders. Robert Hattam is the Professor for Educational Justice in the School of Education, University of South Australia and he leads the Pedagogy for Justice Research Group. His research has focused on teachers’ work, critical and reconciliation pedagogies, refugees, and socially just school reform. He has published numerous books on critical pedagogy and educational inequality in vulnerable communities. Michael Hoechsmann is an Associate Professor and the Program Chair in the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University, Orillia. His research focuses on digital and media literacies, cultural studies and education in formal and non-formal settings. He is a co-Investigator on two SSHRC (Canada) funded research grants, a board member of Media Smarts: Canada’s Centre for Digital and Media Literacy, and the co-chair of UNESCO GAPMIL North America. Michael B. MacDonald is an Associate Professor of music at the MacEwan University Faculty of Fine Arts and Communications in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. His research areas include popular music scenes, screen production research, ethnographic film theory, ciné-ethnomusicology, and audiovisual ethnomusicology. Michael is the founding program chair of the MusCan Film Series held annually at the Canadian University Music Society conference and serves on the editorial board of the journal Intersections. Gregory Martin is an Associate Professor in the School of International Studies and Education at the University of Technology Sydney. His work is transdisplinary with a focus on critical pedagogies, spatial politics and participatory methodologies, including the power of storytelling to promote learning and change. Cathryn Teasley is Assistant Professor of Education at the University of A Coruña. Her research on anti-racism, socio-cultural justice, nonviolence and gender equity in teacher

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education is informed by critical pedagogies, decolonial studies, peace studies, queer theory and feminisms. Her latest contribution is to the Handbook of Theory and Research in Cultural Studies and Education. Gina Thésée is Full Professor in the Department of Teacher Education, Faculty of Education, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), and is also Co-Chair of the UNESCO Chair in Democracy, Global Citizenship and Transformative Education (DCMÉT) (uqo.ca/DCMT/). Her latest book, with Paul R. Carr, is entitled “It’s not Education that Scares Me, it’s the Educators…”: Is There Still Hope for Democracy in Education, and Education for Democracy? Leila E. Villaverde is a Professor in Cultural Foundations at the Department of Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations, Dean Fellow in Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at UNCG and Senior Editor of The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy. She teaches courses on curriculum studies, history of education and critical pedagogy, gender studies, visual literacy and aesthetics, and critical inquiry.

THE CONTRIBUTORS Melanie M. Acosta is an Assistant Professor in the department of Curriculum, Culture, & Educational Inquiry at Florida Atlantic University. Her scholarship is focused on critical issues in teacher learning and preparation to support African American educational excellence. Dr. Acosta began teaching as an elementary school teacher and a community organizer for a grassroots parent empowerment group. Jennifer D. Adams is a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor at The University of Calgary holding a dual appointment in the Department of Chemistry and Werklund School of Education. She researches creativity and science, teacher identity, and informal science education and environmental education. Her work centers critical, decolonial and sociocultural approaches. Edmund Adjapong is an Assistant Professor in the Educational Studies Department at Seton Hall University. He is also a Faculty Fellow at The Institute for Urban and Multicultural Education at Teachers College, Columbia University and the author of #HipHopEd: The Compilation on Hip-Hop Education (Volume 1 & Volume 2). Philip M. Anderson is Professor Emeritus of Education at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has published extensively on reader response, the literature curriculum, censorship and cultural aesthetics in education and society. William Ayers is a Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (retired) has written extensively about social justice and democracy. His books include A Kind and Just Parent; Teaching toward Freedom; Fugitive Days: A Memoir; Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident; To Teach: The Journey, in Comics; and Demand the Impossible! Lilia I. Bartolomé is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Her research interests include the preparation of effective teachers of linguistic

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minority students and the exploration of teacher beliefs about minoritised students. Dr Bartolomé’s publications are extensive and include notable books such as Ideologies in Education: Unmasking the Trap of Teacher Neutrality and Dancing with Bigotry: The Poisoning of Cultural Identities (with Donaldo Macedo). Marissa Bellino is an Assistant Professor of Education at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ), where she teaches social foundations and science methods to preservice teachers. Her teaching interests include environmental sustainability and science education through a critical lens. Marissa’s research interests explore youth experiences in urban environments, environmental education and participatory research. Silvia Cristina Bettez is a Professor in the Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations (ELC) Department at The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she teaches about issues of social justice in a graduate program. Her scholarship centralizes social justice with a focus on fostering critical community building, teaching for social justice, and promoting equity through intercultural communication and engagement. Phillip Boda is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University. He holds a PhD in Science Education and an EdM in Teacher Education from Teachers College at Columbia University. Phillip’s work investigates the overlapping intersections of cultural studies/disability studies, urban teacher education and STEM education. He is the editor of the book Essays on Exclusion: Our Critical, Collective Journey Toward Equity in Education. Karla Boluk is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at the University of Waterloo. Karla’s scholarship examines how to bring criticality and creative pedagogy to the classroom in order to enhance sustainable tourism education. Sabrina Boyer is an Associate Professor at Guilford Technical Community College in English and Humanities. Her research interests include queer theory, LGBTQ2+ studies, Feminist theory, LatinX studies, critical pedagogy and media studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations and a Post-Baccalaureate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from The University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Bryan Brayboy is President’s Professor, Special Assistant to the President for American Indian Affairs, and Director of the Center for Indian Education at Arizona State University. His research focuses on the experiences of Indigenous students, staff, and faculty in institutions of higher education. Deborah P. Britzman teaches at York University in Toronto. She is Distinguished Research Professor, holds the York University Chair of Pedagogy and Psycho-social Transformations and is a psychoanalyst. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the author of numerous books and articles, with her main contribution being to the field of psychoanalysis with education. Pipo Bui holds a PhD in European ethnology from the Humboldt University of Berlin. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in communication from Stanford University. Pipo currently works as Director for Corporate and Foundation Relations at EarthCorps, a nonprofit organisation that cultivates emerging environmental leaders from more than 90 countries.

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Alana Butler is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University in Canada. She has taught in a range of settings that include preschool, English as a Second Language, adult literacy, and university undergraduate. Her research interests include the academic achievement of low-socio economic students, race and schooling, equity and inclusion, immigration and settlement studies, and multicultural education. Robert F. Carley is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and The Politics of Practice and Autonomy, Refusal, and The Black Bloc: Positioning Class in Critical and Radical Theory. Fred Chapel is a member of the faculty of the Education Department at Antioch University, Los Angeles. He was a middle school science teacher for 25 years and brings a wealth of experience in inquiry-based pedagogy to his teaching. Sandro Carnicelli is a Senior Lecturer in Events and Tourism at the University of the West of Scotland. Sandro has been developing research in the fields of tourism in Brazil, New Zealand and Scotland for over ten years. His main research interests are adventure tourism, tourism education and outdoor learning. Joseph Carroll-Miranda is an Auxiliary Professor at the Graduate Studies Department of the College of Education of the University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras Campus. He is a strong advocate of both Computer Science and STEM education as issues of social justice. His research interest include youth culture, teknoculture, hacker culture, critical pedagogy and transforming traditional classrooms as spaces of creation and innovation. Angelina E. Castagno is a Professor of Educational Leadership and Foundations, and the Director of the Diné Institute for Navajo Nation Educators at Northern Arizona University. Her teaching and research centers on equity and diversity in US schools, and particularly issues of Whiteness and Indigenous education. Colin Chasi is Professor in Communication Studies and the Head of the Department of Communication Studies at the University of the Free State in South Africa. His latest research is focused on the transformation of higher education, in view of the contemporary decolonization debate. He is rated as a nationally recognised researcher by the National Research Foundation of South Africa. Annette Coburn is Senior Lecturer and Programme Lead in Community Education at the University of the West of Scotland (UWS). Following 23 years as a community education and youth work practitioner, Annette began teaching in Higher Education in 2003. Her on-going youth and community research has examined aspects of border pedagogy, equality, social justice and well-being. Sarah E. Colonna is Associate Program Chair of Grogan College at The University North Carolina, Greensboro and Lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research interests include feminist thought and pedagogy, equity and diversity, leadership and young adult literature. Atasi Das is an educator activist and doctoral candidate of Urban Education at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research focuses on critical numeracy − a framework

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examining numbers as social and political activity. She collaborates with Spark Teacher Education Institute on advancing a liberatory praxis − learning and doing to collectively create an equitable society. Cristina Maria Dominguez is a doctoral student in Educational Studies with a concentration in Cultural Studies at The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and serves as a graduate assistant in the department of Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations. Dominguez’s current research interests include: critical pedagogy, social justice education, and everyday relational social justice teaching, learning and action work. Brian Dotts is an Associate Professor of Educational Foundations at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Educational Foundations: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives and The Political Education of Democratus: Negotiating Civic Virtue during the Early Republic. Mary Drinkwater is a Lecturer at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto, Canada. Her research focuses on issues of arts and cultural practices for democratic and transformative education. She was lead editor and chapter author for Transnational Perspectives on Democracy, Citizenship, Human Rights and Peace Education. Judith Dunkerly-Bean is an Associate Professor of Literacy, Language and Culture and Co-Director of the Literacy Research and Development Center at Old Dominion University. Judith’s research is situated at the intersection of critical literacy, social justice and human rights. Tony Edwards has been a teacher educator in Australia and more recently Canada. He has contributed to the learning and professional development of preservice teachers in a range of contexts. His research is primarily focused on the possible impacts upon an individual student’s habitus as they are presented with support to explore possible futures. Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner is Associate Professor of Literacy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The author of over 70 publications, Varner’s expertise centers on race and critical international engagement. Ramón Flecha is Doctor Honoris Causa of the West University of Timişoara and Professor of Sociology at the University of Barcelona. He is a researcher of the projects WORKALÓ (FP5), INCLUD-ED (FP6) and IMPACT-EV (FP7). He has published in Nature, PLOS ONE, Cambridge Journal of Education, Harvard Educational Review, Qualitative Inquiry, Current Sociology and Journal of Mixed Methods Research. Teresa Anne Fowler is a doctoral candidate at Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary. Teresa’s research interests lie with Whiteness, masculinities, anti-racist pedagogy and critical pedagogy. Her doctoral dissertation explores how Whiteness reproduces in schools and how this leads to a radicalisation of White boys and manifestations of violence. Benjamin Frymer is Professor in the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at Sonoma State University, and previously taught at Columbia University’s Teachers College, UCLA, and

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Trinity College. He writes in the areas of education, self and society, and cultural studies focusing on the study of film education, contemporary alienation, violence, and ideology. Antonio Garcia is an independent researcher, founder and organizer of the International Žižek Studies Conference (est. 2012), executive director of the Žižekian Institute for Research, Inquiry, and Pedagogy, and co-editor with Rex Butler for the Žižek Studies Book Series. In addition to being a Žižek scholar, he has focused on developing his own original theoretical work called constellar theory. Hermán S. García was a faculty member at Eastern Washington University, Texas Tech University, Texas A&M University and New Mexico State University. He is currently Regents Professor/Distinguished Professor Emeritus at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces. Jeremy Garcia is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Education and is Co-Director of the Indigenous Teacher Education Project at the University of Arizona. He is a member of the Hopi/Tewa Tribes of Arizona. His research focuses on decolonisation, critical Indigenous curriculum and pedagogy, Indigenous teacher education, and critical and culturally sustaining family and community engagement within Indigenous education. Sandra Girbés-Peco is a Post-doctoral Researcher at the Department of Teaching and Learning and Educational Organisation at the University of Barcelona. She is also a researcher at the Community of Researchers on Excellence for All (CREA), where she develops work on gender studies, community involvement and educational actions to overcome poverty. Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. The author of hundreds of articles and books, including The Terror of the Unforseen and American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism. He is a columnist for Truthout. Aristotelis Gkiolmas has a BSc in Physics and a Masters and PhD in Science Education. He is member of the Laboratory Teaching Staff of the Department of Primary Education, University of Athens. He has participated in numerous international conferences on critical pedagogy and is a member of the editorial board of the journals The International Journal of Critical Media Literacy and Green Theory and Praxis. Alfonso Gutiérrez Martín is a Full Professor of Education at the University of Valladolid. (Spain). His interests are in media literacy, digital competence and teacher training. He has been involved in different European projects related to media education and he was the lead organizer of the first and third International Conferences of Media Education and Digital Competence in 2011 and 2017. Rodney Handelsman is a founding teacher of a public alternative high school in Canada. He has taught K-12 and worked in the field as a researcher, teacher educator (McGill, OISE, UKZN), pedagogical consultant and curriculum writer. Lalenja Harrington received her PhD in Educational Studies and Cultural Foundations from The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she is currently Academic Director for

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the Integrative Community Studies certificate. She is most interested in exploring the intersections between art, community-engaged research and pedagogical approaches with the potential for engaging marginalised folk as scholars and researchers. Nicholas D. Hartlep holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee in Urban Education (Social Foundations of Education). He is currently the Robert Charles Billings Endowed Chair in Education and Chair of the Education Studies Department at Berea College. You can follow his work on Twitter at @nhartlep or at his website, www.nicholashartlep.com. Elbert J. Hawkins, III is a native of North Carolina who resides in Jamestown. Currently, he is a doctoral candidate, a professional high-school counsellor, nationally certified through the National Board for Certified Counselors (National Board Certified Teacher–School Counseling/ Early Childhood through Young Adulthood). Mark Helmsing is Assistant Professor of Education and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of History and Art History and the Folklore Studies Program at George Mason University. Mark’s work uses critical theories of affect and emotion to explore how people feel about the past and how the past makes people feel. Andrew Hickey is Associate Professor in Communications at the University of Southern Queensland. Andrew publishes in the areas of critical pedagogy, public pedagogies and emancipatory social practice and has undertaken large-scale projects with departments of education, schools and community groups internationally. Stephanie L. Hudson is a Doctoral Student in educational studies, concentrating on cultural studies and women’s and gender studies, at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Stephanie is a Teaching Associate in the Cultural Foundations Program. She teaches, researches and writes across disciplines in biology, cultural foundations of education and feminist studies. Stephanie’s research interests include curriculum studies, feminist theories and pedagogies, teaching and learning in virtual spaces, feminist cultural studies of technoscience and critical body studies. Luis Huerta-Charles is an Associate Professor of Multicultural Education at New Mexico State University. He is a Nepantlero border-crosser that aims to prepare teachers as social activists in order to transform our unjust and unequal society into a more just one. Awad Ibrahim is an award-winning author and a Professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa. He is a curriculum theorist with special interest in critical pedagogy, hiphop studies and Black popular culture, cultural studies, applied linguistics, social justice, diasporic and continental African identities and ethnography. Perry R. James is an educator who lives and works in the Navajo Nation. A fluent speaker of his language, he was brought up with the traditional ways of the Ni’hokaa’ Diyin Dine’é. Currently a doctoral candidate at Fielding Graduate University, his research uses Indigenous Interpretative Autoethnography to prepare Navajo leaders. Catalina Jaramillo is a teacher educator at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Colombia and an EFL teacher in a public school. She has served as a research assistant at Grupo de Investigación Acción y Evaluación en Lenguas Extranjeras (GIAE) in the line of language and education policies at Universidad de Antioquia.

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Graham Jeffery is Reader in Arts and Media at the University of the West of Scotland. His work spans participatory and community arts practices, creative pedagogies, cultural policy, urban studies and community development. He has led numerous action research projects with diverse communities in different places around the world. Brian C. Johnson earned his PhD in Communications Media and Instructional Technology from Indiana University of PA. An avid film fanatic and scholar, his book Reel Diversity: A Teacher’s Sourcebook was recognised by the National Association for Multicultural Education’s 2009 Chinn Book Award. Richard Kahn is an anarcist educator at Antioch University, Los Angeles,whose primary interests are in researching social movements as pedagogically generative forces in society and in critically challenging the role dominant institutions play in blocking the realization of greater planetary freedom, peace, and happiness. Tony Kashani is an American author, educator, philosopher of technology, and a cultural critic. He holds a PhD degree in Humanities with emphasis on culture studies from California Institute of Integral Studies. He is the author of five books including Movies Change Lives: A Pedagogy of Humanistic Transformation. His interests are interdisciplinary scholarship and pedagogy on humanities in the digital age and social justice. Douglas Kellner is George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education at UCLA and is author of many books on social theory, politics, history, and culture. He is the author of The American Horror Show: Election 2016 and the Ascendency of Donald J. Trump, and American Nightmare: Donald Trump, Media Spectacle, and Authoritarian Populism, and the Collected Papers of Herman Marcuse. Arlo Kempf is an Assistant Professor of Equity and Education in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Arlo’s research interests include teachers’ work, anti-racism and anti-colonialism in education, and critical perspectives on educational standardisation and neoliberalism. Christopher Lee Kennedy is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York, who creates site-specific projects that examine conventional notions of ‘Nature’, interspecies agency and biocultural collaboration. Kennedy is currently Assistant Director of the Urban Systems Lab at The New School University. Eun-Ji Amy Kim is Lecturer at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia in the School of Education and Professional Studies, her area is social diversity and Indigenous education. Her research interests are Indigenous science education, ReconciliACTION through relationship-based and land-based teaching Joe L. Kincheloe was the Canada Research Chair of Critical Pedagogy at McGill University in Montreal, and the founder of The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy. Born in the mountains of Tennessee, he was raised to recognize inequities within society and became the humble champion for the oppressed. The author of 60 books and

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hundreds of articles, he is to be remembered as a rock n’ roll musician, father, partner, and friend to many. James D. Kirylo is Professor of Education at the University of South Carolina. Among other books, he is the author of Paulo Freire: The Man from Recife, Paulo Freire: His Faith, Spirituality, and Theology (with Drick Boyd) and Teaching with Purpose: An Inquiry in the Who, Why, and How We Teach. Tricia M. Kress is an Associate Professor in the Educational Leadership for Diverse Learning Communities EdD programme at Molloy College in Rockville Centre, NewYork. Her research uses critical pedagogy, cultural sociology and autoethnography to rethink teaching, learning and research in urban schools. She details this approach in her book Critical Praxis Research: Breathing New Life into Research Methods for Teachers. Jo Lampert is a Professor of Education at La Trobe University in Melbourne. While she also researches in the area of children’s literature, most of her daily work is in teacher education for high-poverty schools. Jodi Latremouille completed her doctorate in Educational Research at the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary. She is a sessional instructor in the Faculty of Education at Thompson Rivers University. She also taught high school French Immersion and Social Studies. Her research interests include hermeneutics, ecological and feminist pedagogy, social and environmental justice, life writing and poetic inquiry. Sherilyn Lennon is a Senior Lecturer in the Education and Professional Studies faculty at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. Her research interests include literacy, gender, rurality and emerging qualitative and post-qualitative research paradigms. She is the author of numerous publications including the monograph, Unsettling Research, published in 2015 as part of the Critical Qualitative Research series. Galia Zalmanson Levi is a critical pedagogy and feminist teacher educator in seminar Hakibbutzim College and in Ben Gurion University in Israel. She was co-founder of the teacher education program for social justice and peace education. Galia combines activism and leading social change in the public education system with academic research. Guofang Li is a Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Transnational/Global Perspectives of Language and Literacy Education of Children and Youth in the Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia. Her research interests are longitudinal studies of immigrant children’s biliteracy development, diversity and equity issues and teacher education for diverse learners. Sheryl J. Lieb is Adjunct Professor at Grogan Residential College and Humanities Lecturer in the Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies programme at The University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her areas of specialisation and research interests include philosophy of education, critical pedagogy, ethics and intellectual virtue development, existentialism (as philosophy and pedagogical practice) and cultural studies. Kerry Mallan is Professor Emeritus at Queensland University of Technology. Her work is cross-disciplinary, with a focus on children’s literature, youth and popular culture and digital

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media texts and practices. Kerry was the founding director of the Children and Youth Research Centre at QUT. Jennifer M. Markides is a Métis doctoral candidate in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary. Her graduate research examines the stories told by youth who have transitioned from life-in-schools to life-out-of-school within the same year as experiencing a natural disaster. She is also an educator, researcher, and author in the area of Indigenous education, and the editor of three books on Indigenous ways of knowing and research. Rose Marsters is of Cook Island descent and is a Ng¯akauologist, a practitioner who is proficient and drives a movement in Ng¯akau (heart) pedagogy and intelligence. She serves both the Pasifika and M¯aori communities including her employed tertiary role, at the Waikato Institute of Technology, Wintec. Her interest is on enhancing capabilities of practitioners in appropriate culturally responsive practice. Teresa Sordé Martí is a Serra Húnter Associate Professor of Sociology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her work focuses on the Roma ethnic minority in Europe looking at social mobilization, women’s rights, education, and health. She has worked on projects with the European Commission and is a member of CREA. D’Arcy Martin is a veteran labour movement educator, having created, administered and facilitated courses within unions across Canada and internationally for over four decades. D’Arcy has extended his popular education practice to community, policy, academic and other activist settings, and has written widely, including the book Thinking Union: Activism and Education in Canada’s Labour Movement. Domenica Maviglia is Doctor of Philosophy in Intercultural Pedagogy at the Department of Cognitive Science, Psychological, Educational, and Cultural Studies of the University of Messina. Her work focuses mainly on critical pedagogy and the theoretical and historical research in the field of pedagogy, with a particular emphasis on the philosophy of education, the history of pedagogy and the history of education. Diarmuid McAuliffe is the academic lead for Art-in-Education at the School of Education and Social Sciences, University of the West of Scotland. His research includes developing critical school art pedagogies and runs a series of public seminars in this area, most recently for the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. Lisa McAuliffe is Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for Inclusive Education in the School of Education and Social Sciences at the University of the West of Scotland. Her main research focus is the interface between inclusive education policy and practice. Lisa is particularly interested in the role of teacher education in promoting inclusion and social justice. J. Cynthia McDermott is a Professor of education and the Regional Director of two Antioch university campuses in California and is a two-time Fulbright recipient. She has been a classroom teacher K-12. Peter McLaren is Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he co-directs the Paulo Freire Democratic Project, he is Fellow of

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the Royal Society of Arts and Commerce (London, UK). He is the author and editor of over 50 books including Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education, now in the 6th edition. Jane McLean. Currently an Academic Instructor at the University of New Brunswick, Dr McLean is a retired educator with 35 years’ experience teaching English Language Arts. In 2001, she developed and implemented a critical feminist course for Grade 12 students called Women, Media, and Culture, now taught in high schools throughout New Brunswick, Canada. Tanya Brown Merriman has taught in public, parochial and charter schools; she has taught nearly every grade level from Pre-K to doctoral students; and she has served as an administrator and designer of new schools and curricular programmes. She teaches at the University of Southern California, she is the author of Those Who Can: A Handbook for Social Reconstruction and Teaching. Ann Milne is a White educator who led the Kia Aroha College community’s almost 30-year journey to resist and reject school environments which alienate Indigenous M¯aori and Pasifika learners, to develop a critical, culturally sustaining learning approach centered on students’ cultural identities and to develop their critical consciousness, which she discusses in her book, Coloring in the White Spaces. Khadija Mohammed is Senior Lecturer in the School of Education and Social Sciences, at the University of the West of Scotland. She is Programme Leader for Early Years and is also a Teacher Educator. Her doctoral work centers around race equality, exploring the experiences of Black and Minority Ethnic Teachers in Scotland. Khadija supports educators to become confident and empowered to promote equality, preventing and dealing with racism. She is also the co-founder and Chair of the Scottish Association of Minority Ethnic Educators. Silvia Molina is Associate Professor at the Department of Pedagogy at the Rovira i Virgili University and a Researcher at the Community of Researchers on Excellence for All (CREA). She has published in journals such as Qualitative Inquiry, Frontiers in Psychology and Higher Education Research & Development. Veronica A. Newton is an Assistant Professor of Race in the Department of Sociology at Georgia State University. Her research focuses on how Black undergraduate women experience gendered racism at White universities. Her research interests include Black feminist thought, critical race feminism, trap feminism, hip-hop feminism and hip-hop. Soudeh Oladi is a Postdoctoral Fellow and SSHRC Project Manager at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Dr Oladi’s foundational research focuses on interdisciplinary scholarship and is deeply rooted in critical pedagogy, philosophy of education, social justice education and Eastern and Western educational philosophies and spiritual traditions. Maria Padrós is an Associate Professor at the Department of Teaching and Learning and Educational Organization at the University of Barcelona and a Researcher at the Community of Researchers on Excellence for All (CREA). She has published in journals such as Teachers College Record, European Journal of Education and Qualitative Inquiry.

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Yuliana Palacio is a Foreign Language Teacher from the School of Languages, Universidad de Antioquia in Colombia. She completed her graduate studies in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Boston University. She is a member of the Grupo de Investigación Acción y Evaluación en Lenguas Extranjeras (GIAE) research group in the line of language and education policies. Priya Parmar is an Associate Professor of Secondary Education at Brooklyn College-CUNY. Her scholarly publications and books center on critical literacies, youth and hip hop culture and other contemporary issues in the field of cultural studies in which economic, political and social justice issues are addressed. She is the author of Knowledge Reigns Supreme: The Critical Pedagogy of Hip Hop Artist KRS-One. Oscar A. Peláez is a teacher educator and researcher. He coordinates the research field in the ELT programme at the School of Education, Universidad Católica Luis Amigó in Colombia. He is also an academic adviser to the university’s undergraduate and graduate students in the area of education language policy. Zhengmei Peng is a Professor of Comparative Education and the Director of the Institute of International and Comparative Education at East China Normal University. His expertise includes comparative education, German pedagogy, Western educational philosophy, theory of knowledge and curriculum studies. Kathalene A. Razzano holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from George Mason University. She currently teaches in the Global Affairs Program at George Mason University, and the Media & Communication Studies Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She specializes in cultural studies, feminist social theory, political economy, critical pedagogy, critical legal studies, and media studies. Kerry J. Renwick is a teacher educator with experience working with preservice teachers in both Australia and Canada. Her research interests focus on social justice experienced and developed at the personal level and in the context of the family. Nighet Riaz is an early career researcher and associate lecturer at the School of Education and Social Sciences in the University of the West of Scotland. Nighet’s research explores moral panics and the perceived disaffection of young people, with a particular focus on Black and Minority Ethnic and Muslim communities and youth. Shawn Arango Ricks is the Assistant Vice President for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and an Associate Professor of Race and Ethnicity Studies at Salem Academy and College in Winston-Salem, NC. She is an intuitive healer, licensed mental health and addictions counsellor, and life coach in private practice focused on helping Women of Color on their healing journeys. Teresa J. Rishel researches child and adolescent suicide in exploring sociocultural relationships, student alienation, bullying, diverse students, hidden curriculum and leadership roles in schools. She focuses on critical theory and pedagogy, curriculum theory, and social justice. She works with organizations interested in sharing experiences or difficulties of suicide-related school issues.

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Claire Robson’s federally funded postdoctoral research at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver) investigated the potential of arts-engaged community practices. A widely published writer of fiction, memoir, and poetry, Claire’s book, Writing for Change, shows how collective memoir writing can effect social change. Samuel D. Rocha is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. Ylva Rodny-Gumede is the Head of the International Office and Professor in the School of Communication at the University of Johannesburg. Ylva is a former journalist with experience from both print and broadcast media. Her current research focus is on transformation and innovation in higher education. Ylva is rated as a nationally recognised researcher by the National Research Foundation of South Africa. Toby Rollo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Lakehead University. April Yaisa Ruffin-Adams is an instructor in the African American and African Diaspora Studies program at The University of North Carolina,Greensboro. Her research interests focus on African American mothers, educational equity, and social justice. Marcella Runell Hall is the Vice President for Student Life/Dean of Students and Lecturer in Religion at Mount Holyoke College. She was the founding Co-Director for the Of Many Institute for Multifaith Leadership and program advisor/founder for the minor in multifaith and spiritual leadership at New York University. Marcella has written for Scholastic Books, the New York Times Learning Network, VIBE, and various academic journals, including Equity and Excellence in Education. Constance Russell is a Professor in the Faculty of Education, Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Canada. She co-edited the award-winning book The Fat Pedagogy Reader: Challenging Weight-Based Oppression through Critical Education, edited the Canadian Journal of Environmental Education from 2004–16 and currently co-edits a book series, (Re)thinking Environmental Education. I. Malik Saafir is President and CEO of The Southern Renaissance in Little Rock, Arkansas. He trains education, business, government and nonprofit leaders how to end poverty in the African diaspora. Previously, he was Visiting Lecturer of African/African American Studies at the University of Central Arkansas. Madhulika Sagaram is the founder and President of Adhya Educational Society, a nonprofit engaged in improving the quality of education in underserved government and private schools. She is also the founder of Ajahn Books and the Ajahn Center for Pedagogy. She has a vision to develop research, engaging with the theory, practice and outreach of pedagogical perspectives in education across socio-cultural diversity in India and the world. Pramod K. Sah is a PhD candidate and Killam doctoral scholar in the Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia. His research work is driven by the core values of social justice with a focus on class and ethnicity and English-medium instruction (EMI) policy in multilingual Nepal.

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Concepción Sánchez-Blanco has been Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer of Curriculum, Instruction and School Organization at the University of A Coruña since 1995 (Faculty of Educational Sciences). Her research focus is on the pursuit of justice and equity in early childhood education through ethnography, action research, case study, critical pedagogy, anti-bias teacher education, social inclusion and anti-violence. Adrienne Sansom is a Senior Lecturer in Dance and Drama at the University of Auckland. Her academic interests include social democracy, social justice and social change through the arts, and her research and writing focus on the body and embodied knowing in education, critical pedagogy and cultural studies. Martha Sañudo is Full Professor of Philosophy at Tecnológico de Monterrey at Centro de Investigación en Humanidades. Roslyn M. Satchel is the Blanche E. Seaver Professor of Communication at Pepperdine University and is an affiliate faculty in Seaver College’s Social Action and Justice Colloquium and at Pepperdine’s School of Law. Her research focuses on social justice, intersectional community organizing among marginalized groups, and critical cultural/race/media literacies — especially, as relates to law, religion, and media. William H. Schubert is Professor Emeritus of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where he held professorial and administrative positions from 1975 to his retirement in 2011. At UIC, he received numerous awards for scholarship, teaching, and mentoring. Schubert has published 18 books, over 250 articles and book chapters, and has made approximately 300 scholarly presentations. David Scott is an Assistant Professor in the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary. His scholarly work involves investigations into how educators interpret and pedagogically respond to new educational curricular mandates including calls to engage with Indigenous histories, experiences, and philosophies. Jeff Share is a Faculty Advisor in the Teacher Education Program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research and practice focus on transformative education; preparing K-12 educators to teach critical media literacy for social and environmental justice. His published work includes Media Literacy is Elementary: Teaching Youth to Critically Read and Create Media. Shashi Shergill is an Assistant Principal at Connect Charter School in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Shashi was a 2015 recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Excellence in Teaching History. Shashi is currently undertaking her doctorate in education at the University of Calgary exploring ethical and cultural relationality in forming partnerships between Indigenous and non – Indigenous schools. Roger I. Simon was Professor of Sociology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto, Ontario and founder of the Association of Critical Pedagogy in Canada. Over his forty years of teaching and writing, he influenced generations of professors and public educators in Canada. Simon authored numerous articles and seven books, the last, A Pedagogy of Witnessing: Curatorial practice and the pursuit of social justice.

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Marlon Simmons is an Associate Professor at the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary. His scholarly work is grounded within the diaspora, decolonial thought and communicative network practices of youth. Marlon’s research interests include schooling and society, governance of the self in educational settings and the sociology of education. Constantine Skordoulis is Professor of Epistemology and Didactical Methodology of Physics at the University of Athens and Academic Director of the postgraduate programme ‘Secondary Science Teachers Education’ of the Hellenic Open University. He has published extensively on issues of history of science, science education and socio-scientific issues with a critical perspective. Christine E. Sleeter is Professor Emerita in the College of Education at California State University Monterey Bay, where she was a founding faculty member. Her research, published in over 150 articles and 23 books, focuses on anti-racist multicultural education, ethnic studies and teacher education. David Geoffrey Smith is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta. His teaching and research have focussed on interculturality in curriculum through critical globalization studies. His books include: Pedagon: Interdisciplinary Essays in the Human Sciences, Pedagogy and Culture; Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth: Globalization, Empire and the Crises of Pedgogy; Teaching as the Practice of Wisdom; and CONFLUENCES: Intercultural Journeying in Research and Teaching: From Hermeneutics to a Changing World Order. John Smyth is Visiting Professor of Education and Social Justice, University of Huddersfield, Emeritus Research Professor Federation University Australia, Emeritus Professor of Education Flinders University of South Australia, Elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, a former Senior Fulbright Research Scholar and the author of 35 books. Nathan Snaza teaches English literature, gender studies and educational foundations at the University of Richmond. He is the author of Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism and the co-editor of Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies and Posthumanism and Educational Research. Marta Soler-Gallart is Full Professor of Sociology at University of Barcelona and director of CREA. She is President of the European Sociological Association and has served on the Governing Boards of the European Alliance for the Social Sciences and Humanities, the ORCID Board of Directors, and as the Expert Evaluator for the EU Framework Programme of Research. Jessica A. Solyom is an Assistant Research Professor at Arizona State University in the Center for Indian Education. Her recent publications have explored postsecondary education for American Indian and Alaska Native students, critical research methodologies, and American Indian college student activism for education rights. Marc Spooner is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina. His research interests include homelessness and poverty, audit culture and the effects of neoliberalisation and corporatisation on higher education, social justice, activism and participatory

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democracy. He is co-editor, with James McNinch, of the award-winning book Dissident Knowledge in Higher Education. Dana M. Stachowiak is the Director of the Gender Studies and Research Center and an Associate Professor of Curriculum Studies at The University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her research interests are in transgender studies, equity education, and literacy curriculum. Constantina Stefanidou was born in 1976 in Athens. She is a physicist who obtained her PhD in 2013 in History and Philosophy of Natural Sciences in Science Teaching. After 12 years in secondary education, she is currently Faculty Member at the Department of Education of the University of Athens as Teaching and Laboratory Staff. Her research interests are in science education, historical and philosophical perspectives of science and didactics of science. Michaela P. Stone is Assistant Professor of Early Childhood at the University of Northern Vermont. Her scholarly interests includes mathematics, critical disability studies and the role of differentiation and engagement in cross-cultural contexts. Dennis Sumara is Professor at the Faculty of Education at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. His areas of research include curriculum theory, teacher education and literacy education, as oriented by conceptual interests in hermeneutic phenomenology, literary response theory and complexity science. Kristine Sunday is an Assistant Professor of Teaching and Learning at Old Dominion University where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in early childhood education. She holds a PhD from the Pennsylvania State University in Art Education. Kristine draws from post-structural theories and qualitative research methods to pose questions about children, learning, and the visual arts in early childhood classrooms. Juha Suoranta is Professor of Adult Education at Tampere University. He has published extensively on critical pedagogy and public sociology. His latest books are C. Wright Mills’ Sociological Life and Paulo Freire: A Pedagogue of the Oppressed. Dawn N. Hicks Tafari is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education at WinstonSalem State University. Her research interests include Black boys in public schools, Black feminist thought, Black male elementary school teachers, hiphop culture’s influence on social and individual identity development, hiphop feminism, critical race theory, composite counter storytelling and narrative research. Nwachi Pressley-Tafari, a native New Yorker, has been a developmental educator for over 20 years and is now Adjunct Professor of Diversity, the Humanities, and College Success for ECPI University. He holds a certification in life coaching and is a licensed New Life Story coach. Shuntay Z. Tarver is an Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University in the Department of Counselling and Human Services. He is committed to social justice with a particular focus on the experiences of African Americans within various ecological systems (i.e. schools, justice systems, and families).

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Paul. L. Thomas, is Professor of Education at Furman University. He taught high-school English for 18 years in South Carolina before moving to teacher education and teaching firstyear writing. He is the author of Teaching Writing as Journey, Not Destination: Essays Exploring What ‘Teaching Writing’ Means. Follow him at http://radicalscholarship.wordpress. com/ and @plthomasEdD. Gresilda Tilley-Lubbs is Associate Professor, Social Foundations, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the author of Re-Assembly Required: Critical Autoethnography and Spiritual Discovery. Her research in Spain for a critical autoethnography examines life under Franco’s dictatorship following the Spanish Civil War. She is also investigating critical pedagogy in teacher education with colleagues in Spain and Mexico. Peter Pericles Trifonas is Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto. His areas of interest include ethics, philosophy of education, cultural studies, and technology. His books include: Deconstructing the Machine (with Jacques Derrida); International Handbook of Semiotics; Roland Barthes and the Empire of Signs; and Umberto Eco & Football. Stephanie Troutman is a Black feminist scholar, mother and first-generation college student. She is the Associate Professor of Emerging Literacies in the English Department at the University of Arizona. She serves as affiliate faculty in Gender & Women’s Studies, Teaching, Learning & Sociocultural Studies, Africana Studies and the LGBT Institute. Cherie Ann Turpin is an Associate Professor in the English Program at University of DC. Her publications include the book How Three Black Women Writers Combined Spiritual and Sensual Love, as well as articles in various journals and anthologies. She is completing Afrofuturism and African spiritual traditions, as well as Digital Humanities and Diversity. Jaime Usma is a Teacher Educator and Researcher at the School of Languages, Universidad de Antioquia in Colombia. In his recent publications and studies, he examines language and education policies being adopted in Colombia and their social, economic and political implications for different educational actors, ethnic groups and communities. Juan Ríos Vega is an Assistant Professor at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, Department of Teacher Education, where he teaches courses on English as a second language (ESL) and diversity in education. His research interests include K-12 Latinx students in education, queers of color critique, and LGBTIQ+ populations in Panama. Marco Montalbetti Viñuela is an independent scholar and photojournalist with over 20 years of experience, five of which were spent documenting the teaching-exchange programmes described in his article in this Handbook. David Wallace is lecturer in community education at the University of the West of Scotland. For the better part of 40 years he has been a passionate advocate for social justice through informal, collaborative and community-based education. His research and teaching interests have mirrored an engagement with distinctively Scottish practices in community education and with an overarching concern for social justice.

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Gerald Walton is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University in Canada. His research focuses on school-based bullying as othering and he speaks and writes on Whiteness, free speech, masculinity, gender expression and identity, sexuality, and rape culture, among other topics. He edited the 2014 collection, The Gay Agenda: Claiming Space, Identity, and Justice, published by Peter Lang Press. Ki Wight is an instructor at Capilano University in Vancouver in the Communication Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies and Motion Picture Arts programmes. Her doctoral work, at Simon Fraser University’s Equity Studies in Education Program, looks at the relationship between media education and systems of oppression. John Willinsky is Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University, as well as Professor of Publishing Studies at Simon Fraser University. He directs the Public Knowledge Project, which conducts research and develops open source scholarly publishing software in support of greater access to knowledge. His most recent book is The Intellectual Properties of Learning: A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke. Peter R. Wright is an Associate Professor of Arts Education at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia. He works across the arts with a commitment to personal, social and cultural inquiry, agency, education and expression, health and wellbeing, and Creative Youth Development. His interest is in teacher development in the Arts, Teaching Artist pedagogy, ArtsHealth, socio-aesthetic pedagogy, and social justice. Michalinos Zembylas is a Professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies at the Open University of Cyprus, and Honorary Professor at Nelson Mandela University in the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation. He has written extensively on emotion and affect in relation to social justice pedagogies, intercultural and peace education, human rights education and citizenship education. Gang Zhu is currently an Associate Professor at the Institute of International and Comparative Education, East China Normal University. His expertise encompasses teacher education, comparative education and urban education. His publications, in both English and Chinese, have appeared in Compare, Journal of Education for Teaching, The Asia-Pacific Educational Researcher and Computer-Assisted Language Learning. Revital Zilonka is currently a 4th-grade teacher at the Neve Hof elementary school in Rishon Le’Zion, Israel. She received her PhD in Cultural Foundations from The University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Haggith Gor Ziv is a Senior Lecturer Seminar Hakibutzim Teachers College of Education in the Early Childhood department Special Education Program, Tel Aviv. She teaches courses in critical feminist pedagogy, disability studies and inclusion. She has facilitated Jewish and Arab dialogue groups, and published Critical Feminist Pedagogy and Education for Culture of Peace. David Zyngier is Associate Professor at Southern Cross University, Australia. A former teacher and school principal, he has written extensively on student engagement, social justice, democracy and education and pedagogies that enhance achievement for all students but in particular those from communities of disadvantage. He established the Public Education Network in Australia.

Acknowledgements When we first proposed the idea of a Handbook on critical pedagogies, our global friends and colleagues displayed remarkable passion, inspiration and commitment that allowed the book to evolve. They generously created space in their busy lives to share something about the emotional and intellectual labor involved in doing critical pedagogy in diverse and challenging contexts. We invited over 160 colleagues from 6 continents to contribute to our project, these scholars, educators and community activists all shared a deep understanding of the radical possibilities inspired by Paulo Freire. Their stories open us up to multiple ways of knowing, interpreting and acting in the world based on context with diverse theoretical, methodological and practical approaches. We thank them for their exceptional contribution, patience and solidarity. Individually and collectively these are some of the most outstanding scholars in the field. We appreciate their willingness to support this project from conception to completion. Their contribution is a powerful illustration of the kind of solidarity that lies at the heart of critical pedagogy. Our Section Editors provided guidance and expertise in their chosen fields often at short notice. Paul R. Carr, Gina Thésée, Greg Martin, Cathryn Teasley, Four Arrows, R. Michael Fisher, Rob Hattam, Michael MacDonald, Michael Hoechsmann, Leila E. Villaverde, Roymieco A. Carter, and Renee Desmarchelier responded to our requests, assisted with reviews, collaborated and assisted our authors, often at short notice or tight deadlines…we cannot quantify how invaluable their participation was, and continues to be. Members of the editorial board have our gratitude; not an easy task, editing such diverse articles…some academic, some storied, some autobiographic, some historic: all critical pedagogies. Acknowledgment to Dara Nix-Stevenson for her early contribution to our venture. We acknowledge with reverence and respect, our dear friends and colleagues both past and present who have played a crucial role in advancing the development of critical pedagogy. Their influence has been profoundly important in shaping the lives of so many contributors to this collection. We will hear a great deal from and about them in the chapters to follow. Paulo Freire’s ground-breaking work provides our foundation, his work permeates the thoughts and actions shaping this collection. The seeds for this collection of work was sown by Joe L. Kincheloe, whose vision of tentative critical pedagogies and unique radical love paved the way for that fateful day when James Clark from Sage Publishers showed interest and faith in our massive volume proposal. There aren’t enough synonyms to thank James: his authenticity and conscientiousness in dealing with a Yank, an Aussie, and scores of global critical pedagogues for three years deserves a shout-out. We wish to offer our deep appreciation to Janean Robinson, our Assistant Editor. Janean somehow managed to deal with the idiosyncrasies of the editors, the various technologies and tracking systems, thousands of emails, hundreds of reviews and all sorts of crises but always with good humour and grace. Thank you Janean, you are loved, you are respected, you are appreciated and acknowledged. Without our families, life partners – David and Jenny, children and friends closest to us… over the past three years, without you, none of this would be possible. This has been a complex and challenging project that could not have happened without your love, care and support. Barry wishes to thank his institution, Murdoch University for providing him with the space and resources to undertake this important work.

Introduction Barry Down and Shirley R. Steinberg

THE LEGACY OF PAULO FREIRE In 1970, the first English-language edition of The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire, was published. For a half a century, the book has been translated into scores of languages, championing a call for radical change in schooling and a humane, social shift to contextual education. Henry Giroux claims that the book changed his life, and, indeed, it certainly changed his career. Giroux’s paradigm-shattering book Theory and Resistance in Education, published in 1983, named Freire’s revolutionary philosophy as critical pedagogy. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, critical pedagogy became the counter-narrative to traditional ‘banking’ approaches to education. The book challenged the epistemological foundations of transmission models of teaching and learning and the institutional structures and social practices which hold it in place. In the past 50 years, critical scholars have re-formed education through sustained

critical pedagogical analyses and discourse. Indeed, some publishing houses have centered their entire education lists around this intervention. Many outstanding books have been published on critical pedagogy, building upon Freire’s work and expanding it to include analyses of contemporary sociocultural shifts and global transformations (e.g., Britzman, 2003 Leistyna et  al., 1999; Darder et al., 2003; McLaren and Kincheloe, 2007; Duncan and Morrell, 2008; Kincheloe, 2008; Apple et  al., 2009; Giroux, 2011; Malott and Porfilio, 2011; Smyth, 2011; and Emdin, 2017). This book assembles over 160 scholar activists from 39 countries who are deeply engaged with advancing Freire’s transformational project for the purpose of creating a more humane and socially just world. In communion with Freire’s writing (e.g., 1970/2000, 1998, 2000, 2007, 2014), they share a commitment to the values of critical curiosity, democracy, dialogue, respect, dignity, humility, hope, justice, solidarity,

INTRODUCTION

commitment and compassion as the cornerstones of a new social imaginary beyond the ‘mutating’ value system of global capitalism (McMurtry, 1999). The task of critical pedagogy becomes even more urgent in these dark times (Arendt, 1973). The rise of populist authoritarianism, fascism, war, violence, poverty, hunger, slavery, genocide, Islamophobia, environmental degradation, child labour, post-truth, forced migration and cruelty have provided a point of existential crisis in the world. It is very easy to be overwhelmed by the historical, economic and social defects of the world driven by the destructive forces of global capitalism and neoliberal ideologies, including privatization, commodification, commercialization, consumerism and individualism (Harvey, 2007). It can lead to a sense of fatalism and determinism as there appears to be no alternative to the way things are (Bourdieu, 1998: 29). The absurd, irrational and cruel are normalized in an era of relentless social-media propaganda promoting a range of neoconservative and neoliberal ideologies perpetuated by what Henry Giroux (2014: 9) describes as the ‘disimagination machine’, which perpetuates antidemocratic and authoritarian forces by ‘distracting, miseducating, and deterring the public from acting in its own interests’. In this context, Freire (2004: 105) provides us with a language of both critique and possibility which involves a dialectic between ‘denouncing’ the dehumanizing conditions under which we are living as well as ‘announcing’ that another world is possible. Critical pedagogy is central to this broader political project because it helps us to question common-sense assumptions, beliefs, values, rituals and practices that serve to mask hierarchical power relations. It provides a way of interrupting the seductive power of corporate/popular culture and the effects of what Donaldo Macedo (1993) describes as ‘literacy for stupidification’. Over 70 years ago, Adorno and Horkheimer (1944/2000: 15) warned about the illusionary

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and deceptive impact of the culture industry, which encouraged people to ‘forget suffering’ and ‘the last remaining thought of resistance’. Indeed, these ‘interferences to critical thought’ (Shor, 1980: 49) only serve to depoliticize and distract people from the real task of becoming more fully human through creative practice. It is the process of reclamation of the critical, self-reflective, moral and democratic purposes of education that lies at the heart of Freire’s legacy. In response, this collection brings together an impressive global network of scholars, educators and community activists committed to the moral vision and practice of critical pedagogy to alleviate human suffering. To this end, the book attempts to provide a coherent and purposeful international conversation by moving from a singular or universal critical pedagogy to multiple pedagogies and perspectives. Freire was concerned that his work not be turned into a dogma, a paradigm or a singular methodology, hence our desire to promote a plurality of approaches and perspectives held together by the radical love of Paulo Freire. In the Foreword to Freire’s Pedagogy of the Heart, Martin Carnoy explains how Freire addresses progressives everywhere, urging them to remain ‘active, authentic, democratic, non-sectarian, and unifying’ (Freire, 2000: 8). In the Freirean tradition, he argues that progressives must continuously examine their underlying strategies. New conditions demand new answers to some of the same old difficult questions: What is the role of progressive politics in the world system, now a new global-information economy? What is the role of progressive intellectuals? And what is the role of democratic education, again now in the information age? (Freire, 2000: 8)

Addressing these kinds of questions is what animates the individual and collective work of the authors in these volumes. For this reason, we begin with a set of personal reflections from friends and colleagues

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who have worked with or been profoundly influenced by Freire’s ideas (Volume 1, Part I). We invited them to respond to a formative piece of Freire’s (1983) writing entitled The Importance of the Act of Reading. Here, Freire reflects on his own childhood in the neighbourhood of Recife, Brazil to explain how the ‘act of reading the word and the world’ are inseparable: one infers the other. For him, the act of reading cannot be separated from context or lived experience and is, therefore, ‘laden with the meaning of the people’s existential experience’ (Freire, 1983: 10). Pivotal to Freire’s work is the understanding that reading is foremost a political act, never neutral nor objective, but capable of generating ‘difficult knowledge’ (Britzman, 1998) for the purpose of resisting all forms of oppression and creating a better world. In pursing these aspirations, Freire (1974/2007: 12) believes that critical or problem-posing education places people ‘in consciously critical confrontation with their problems, to make them the agents of their own recuperation’. What Freire is advocating is the responsibility or duty to fight against fatalistic discourses that may not always be in our own best interests. In Daring to Dream: Toward a Pedagogy of the Unfinished, Freire (2007: 4–5) explains how we are called ‘to transform and re-form the world, not to adapt to it. As human beings, there is no doubt that our main responsibility consist of intervening in reality and keeping up our hope’. To this end, Freire (2007: 25) speaks about dreams and utopia as a fundamental necessity for human beings. For him, ‘There is no tomorrow without a project, without a dream, without utopia, without hope, without creative work, and work toward the development of possibilities, which can make the concretization of that tomorrow viable’ (Freire, 2007: 26). In short, Freire (2000: 100) believes that ‘Our historical inclination is not fate, but rather possibility’. Herein lies the rationale for our work and those who have contributed to it through their own unique stories, circumstances and experiences.

Our authors bring their own particular histories, experiences, languages, cultures and perspectives to the struggle for social justice. Their work (as well as that of many others not included here) is intimately grounded in the critical pedagogies which have emerged in particular social, political and cultural contexts. In reading these accounts we gain a sense of how each of the authors take up Freire’s challenge to not only ‘speak about the limits of education’ but to engage with what can be accomplished ‘where’, ‘how’, ‘with whom’ and ‘when’ (Freire, 2007: 64), and in the process we see how our work as educators ‘is not individual, but social, and that it takes place within the social practice he or she is a part of’ (Freire, 2007: 64–5). Finally, we are interdisciplinary scholars, educators and community activists who do not seek to create a unilateral doctrine; that would be antithetical to Freire’s intention. Instead, we seek to learn from traditional critical pedagogical paradigms and from those working between these paradigms, working in the tentative, the elastic, the ever-changing margins of revolutionary and scholarly pedagogy articulated so clearly and passionately by Freire.

WHAT IS CRITICAL PEDAGOGY? Drawing on the legacy of Freire and the tradition of democratic education (Dewey, 1916/1944) we bring together scholars and practitioners committed to the realization of Freire’s vision and practice of critical pedagogy. What emerges in the three volumes is the understanding that critical pedagogy is not something easily defined in terms of a particular theory, curriculum or method, which would be anathema to Freire’s problem-posing approach to education (1970/2000: 79–86). As Gregory Martin points out in his Introduction to Part III of Volume 1, critical pedagogy is ‘an umbrella term which captures a broad range of

INTRODUCTION

approaches and standpoints that have emerged in response to unjust laws, policies, issues and practice’. Like our dear friend and mentor Joe Kincheloe (2008: 8), we find it difficult to define critical pedagogy in a brief and compelling manner because it asks so much of the educators and students who embrace it. Given the complexity and breadth of the body of work in this handbook it is apparent that there is a lot to comprehend in terms of knowledge, pedagogy, politics and culture. Therefore, a reasonable starting point might be to share a set of basic concepts identified by Kincheloe in his book Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy. By way of summary, Kincheloe says critical pedagogy is: • Grounded on a social and educational vision of justice and equality • Constructed on the belief that education is inherently political • Dedicated to the alleviation of human suffering • Concerned that schools don’t hurt students – good schools don’t blame students for their failures or strip students of the knowledges they bring to the classroom • Enacted through the use of generative themes to read the word and the world and the process of problem posing – generative themes involve the educational use of issues that are central to students’ lives as a grounding for the curriculum • Centered on the notion that teachers should be researchers – here teachers learn to produce knowledge and teach students to produce their own knowledges • Grounded on the notion that teachers become researchers of their own students – as researchers, teachers study their students, their backgrounds, and the forces that shape them • Interested in maintaining a delicate balance between social change and cultivating the intellect – this requires a rigorous pedagogy that accomplishes both goals • Concerned with the ‘margins’ of society, the experiences and needs of individuals faced with oppression and subjugation • Constructed on the awareness that science can be used as a force to regulate and control

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• Dedicated to understanding the context in which educational activity takes place • Committed to resisting the harmful effects of dominant power • Attuned to the importance of complexity – understands complexity theory–in constructing a rigorous and transformative education • Focused on understanding the profound impact of neo-colonial structures in shaping education and knowledge. (Kincheloe, 2008: 10)

Thus, a fundamental feature of critical pedagogy is the preparedness to interrupt common-sense ways of seeing the world with which people have grown so comfortable (Kumashiro, 2004). At the root of critical pedagogy, then, is the willingness to confront injustices and relations of power which hold them in place. This requires a fundamental transformation in the ways in which knowledge is produced and legitimated and by whom. This critical intellectual work requires a shift, or ‘repositioning’, whereby we ‘see the world through the eyes of the disposed and act against ideological and institutional processes and forms that reproduce oppressive conditions’ (Apple et al., 2009: 3). The task of rethinking requires a new language and set of theoretical tools capable of helping us to ‘think anew, to think otherwise … away from convention and cant’ (Burbules and Berk, 1999: 60). As Arendt (1958/1998: 5) argued in her effort to comprehend the evils of totalitarianism, what the modern world requires is a ‘matter of thought’ that opposes the kind of ‘thoughtlessness’ which leads to ‘the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of “truths” which have become trivial and empty’ and remain one of ‘the outstanding characteristics of our time’. In this context, we find Kincheloe and McLaren’s (2005) notion of ‘evolving criticality’ especially useful. For them, critical pedagogy ‘is always evolving, changing in light of both new theoretical insights and new problems and circumstances’ (Kincheloe and McLaren, 2005: 306). This spirit of

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criticality seeks to comprehend diverse forms of oppression including class, race, gender, sexual, cultural, religious, colonial and ability-related concerns. Roger Simon sums it up pretty well when he states that criticality involves figuring out: why things are the way they are, how they got that way, and what set of conditions are supporting the processes that maintain them. Further … we must be able to evaluate the potential for action that [is] embedded in actual relationships. To think these tasks through requires concepts that can carry a critique of existing practice. (Simon, 1998: 380)

Of course, criticality can be sometimes ‘violent and destructive’ because it endeavors to disrupt some deeply entrenched ‘truths’ and taken-for-granted assumptions, beliefs, values and practices (Ball, 2006: 1). The contributors to this handbook do exactly this. They draw on a range of critical theories to help them challenge existing injustices and oppressive institutional arrangements as they attempt to transform inequitable, undemocratic or oppressive policies and practices. Thus, critical pedagogy involves a twofold move: first, to develop a critical sensibility about the way things are and, second, a willingness to take action to change the status quo. It is this desire to engage in forms of social criticism as well as activism that are the hallmarks of critical pedagogy. Delving into each of the chapters we gain a greater appreciation of the complexity of this work. Each of the authors, in their own unique way, draw on a range of critical theories to guide their thinking and action. While these critical theories have their own intellectual histories, points of emphasis and explanatory power, together they highlight both the commonalities identified by Kincheloe (2008) and the differences within the tradition of critical pedagogy. It is beyond the scope of this introduction to rehearse these theories in any detail, although a cursory overview does provide a sense of the rich multiplicity of theoretical influences deployed by our authors.

Most notably, the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (Giroux, 2003); progressive education (Dewey, 1916/1944; Kozol, 1967, 2005; Postman and Weingartner, 1969); schooling and the political economy (Bowles and Gintis, 1976; Harris, 1979; Apple, 1982; Carnoy and Levin, 1985); feminism (hooks, 1981/2014; Gore, 1993); anti-racism (Gillborn, 1995), critical race theory (Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995; Leonardo, 2005); Indigenous knowledges (Smith, 1999); critical media and literacy (Macedo and Steinberg, 2007); critical youth studies (Ibrahim and Steinberg, 2014); critical multiculturalism (Sleeter and McLaren, 1995; McLaren, 1997); liberation theology (Gutiérrez, 1971/1988; Freire, 1985: 121–42); and critical ecopedagogy (Kahn, 2010), to name a few. While Freire provides a set of foundational, and even necessary values (moral, ethical, political and pedagogical), critical pedagogy itself is far more expansive than his work alone. As Freire (1970/2000: 90) himself insists, critical education is a process which endeavors to continually ‘make and remake, to create and re-create’ the world in a spirit of epistemological curiosity, dialogue, humility, solidarity and love. Herein lies the major strength of critical pedagogy: it is never static, formulaic or complete but perpetually in motion, or, in the words of Horton and Freire (1990: 11), ‘a permanent process of searching’. This collection seeks to add, no matter how modestly, to a rich archive of critical pedagogy inspired by Paulo Freire around the world. We are mindful that our work builds on the spirit of generosity and hard labour of thousands of scholars, teachers and activists who engage in the struggle for social justice daily.

HOW IS THIS BOOK ORGANIZED? This Handbook consists of three volumes divided into 12 sections, four per volume. In total there are 125 chapters. The book is

INTRODUCTION

intended to be a central resource for multiple audiences, including academics, pre-service and in-service teachers, postgraduate students, educators, social workers, artists, activists and community workers. For this reason, the book offers multiple points of entry depending on one’s interests. From the seminal writing and influence of Paulo Freire and social theories to the enactment of pedagogical insights and practices in universities, colleges, schools, classrooms, communities and non-formal spaces, readers are encouraged to engage with the ideas, debates and practices in critical pedagogy. We now provide an overview of each volume and some context for each of themes that will be extended through a series of provocations by the section editors.

Volume 1 In Section I: Reading Paulo Freire, we begin with a set of 14 short personal responses to Paulo Freire’s (1983) piece The Importance of the Act of Reading. We deliberately chose this article because it provides a starting point for the conversations to follow. The notion of ‘reading the word and the world’ seems to be a pivotal moment in comprehending the power and significance of Freire’s work. Indeed, as we read these personal responses from a range of eminent scholars and activists we gain a much deeper insight into the ways in which Freire’s ideas have profoundly influenced their lives. From the moment we invited our colleagues to share something about their encounters with the writing of Freire, there was an immense sense of excitement, passion, joy, generosity and love as each of the contributors reflected on their own personal intellectual and pedagogical journey. What they describe in their own particular ways is the power of ideas, commitment, dialogue, justice and action to create a more humane and socially just world. We believe these kinds of stories reveal a great deal about two fundamental

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questions which preoccupied Freire’s work – namely, what does it mean to be more fully human and what does it mean to be educated? We are sure readers will find these encounters interesting and informative on many levels. In Section II: Social Theories, we provide an opportunity for the authors to open up a range of social theories that have shaped their thinking and practice. The intention is not to provide some kind of definitive shopping list of social theories but to indicate the ways in which the authors use different critical theories to illuminate their understanding of injustice and what might be done about it. In this sense, we begin to see how theory and practice (praxis) interface to generate new insights with which to address persistent problems, questions and concerns in multiple contexts. Importantly, it opens up opportunities to engage with a range of theoretical orientations and to appreciate how different authors respond to the challenges posed by Freire’s desire for dialogue and his acknowledgment of the ‘incompleteness’ of the human condition. In Section III: Seminal Figures in Critical Pedagogy, we examine the contribution of a number of influential thinkers in the field. For obvious reasons, this section of the Handbook presented a number of dilemmas. We are mindful of not eulogizing particular individuals over others; this would be a fraught task, as Gregory Martin points out in his introduction. Rather, we wanted the contributing authors to provide a sense of how a range of critical thinkers have influenced their own work. As such, this is by no means an encyclopedia of ‘key figures’ in critical pedagogy: it offers a number of provocations to engage with some important writers and ideas. We endeavor to extend this conversation through four additional chapters of interviews (Chapters 34–7) to provide some personal insights into the ways in which people who have worked in critical pedagogy understand the intellectual, emotional and political nature of their work, which may not

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always be accessible through normal publishing outlets. In Section IV: Global Perspectives, the focus shifts to the global context of critical pedagogy. With the emergence of ‘global capital and the new imperialism’ (McLaren and Farahmandpur, 2005), critical pedagogy takes on new and important work as it seeks to comprehend the seismic shifts in the global economy and the implications for nation states, the economy, education, teachers’ work and students. The contributors in this section draw attention to the fallout from what Sasson describes as the ‘new logics of expulsion’, which is a way of not only capturing the growing levels of inequality but ‘the pathologies of today’s global capitalism’ especially its ‘brutality’ and ‘savage sorting’. Each of the contributors in this section undertakes a critical analysis of how these forces play out for marginalized communities, groups and individuals, and in the light of these experiences they identify the kinds of pedagogical responses required to alleviate suffering.

Volume 2 In Section V: Indigenous Ways of Knowing, the editors, Four Arrows (aka Don Jacobs) and Michael Fisher, explain the synergies between the aspirations of critical pedagogy and Indigenous peoples around decolonizing and Indigenizing movements in education. In this section, Indigenous knowledge and knowing are used as a form of resistance against oppressive colonial policies and practices which have for far too long subjugated Indigenous voices and ways of knowing. As Linda Smith explains so lucidly, Indigenous peoples around the world have had ‘to challenge, understand, and have a shared language for talking about the history, the sociology, the psychology and the politics of imperialism and colonialism as an epic story telling of huge devastation, painful struggle and persistent survival’ (1999: 19). As part of

this ongoing struggle, the authors describe a range of critical pedagogies grounded in deep listening, storytelling, integration with nature, spirituality, justice, human rights and a spirit of ‘fearlessness’. In Section VI: Education and Praxis, section editor Rob Hattam frames the discussion by reminding us of the temporal nature of critical pedagogy, which is ‘an unfinished project’ on three levels: first, ‘taking up powerful diagnoses of the times’; second, ‘taking up readings of the places we live in’; and, finally, ‘responding to philosophical investigations’. Drilling down into this framework, the contributors examine the implications for understanding praxis, including the classed, racial and gendered dimensions of education. Each of them brings their own unique take on the diagnosis of the problem under investigation, its particular context and alternative strategies and tactics. What ties these takes together is an unwavering belief in the emancipatory potential of education to address unjust policies and practices, which serve to demean and denigrate the most marginalized in society. In Section VII: Teaching and Learning, the emphasis shifts to the terrain of teaching and learning in schools and communities. In the context of unprecedented levels of interference from ‘right wing’ ideologues and their prescriptions (standardization, back-tobasics, scripted lessons, high-stakes testing, accountability, competition, commodification and privatization) to fix the so-called educational crisis, teachers, schools, communities and students are under assault. These ‘backlash pedagogies’ (Gutiérrez et  al., 2002: 335) blame teachers, progressive ideas and linguistically and culturally diverse and poor children for the perceived problems of education and society. According to Giroux, this ‘pedagogy of stupidity’ is focused on ‘memorization, conformity, passivity and high stakes testing’ (2013a: 2) rather than the ‘practice of freedom’ (Freire, 1970/2000: 80). In response, the authors provide examples of alternative pedagogies based on a

INTRODUCTION

more hopeful and optimistic vision of education that draws on notions of inclusivity, engagement, social justice, connectedness, learning communities and culturally responsive pedagogies. In Section VIII: Communities and Activism, there is a fundamental recognition that the work of critical pedagogy occurs in multiple sites beyond formal institutions like schools, colleges and universities. Indeed, Freire’s (1970/2000) book Pedagogy of the Oppressed advanced the view that education can be a radical tool for social change if linked to the needs, desires and aspirations of local communities and their ‘funds of knowledge’ (Gonzalez et  al., 2004). In this context, the work of community activists like Saul Alinsky (1989) reinforces the pivotal role of community organization, Indigenous leadership and collective action in the fight for social justice. Each of the contributors to this section recognizes the necessity of building local knowledges, networks, capabilities and power through the development of critical awareness and activism, both locally and in association with wider social movements.

Volume 3 In Section IX: Communication and Media, the focus is on the proliferation of mass communication and media in shaping the identity, needs and desires of young lives, for better or worse (Rosa and Rosa, 2011). Doug Kellner and Jeff Share (2007) explain how experience and everyday life for young people in the 21st century is vastly different from that of our own childhood. They argue that today’s world is ‘media saturated, technologically dependent and globally connected’ in ways previously unimagined (Kellner and Share, 2007: 3). Therefore, it would be irresponsible not to equip students with media literacy skills and critical awareness of how ‘media construct meanings, influence and educate audiences, and impose

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their messages and values’ (2007: 4). Critical media literacy is a significant pedagogy not only in countering the pervasive influence of corporate/popular culture in producing consumer-citizens but in ‘deepening and extending the possibilities for critical agency, racial justice, and economic and political democracy’ (Giroux, 2000: 171). These critical literacy strategies are brought to life by the contributors, who draw on critical literacy theories to investigate a variety of media including film, comics, public exhibitions and Wikilearning and analyse the implications for critical citizenship and democracy. In Section X: Arts and Aesthetics, there is a turn to affect (emotions, feelings, relationships and love) to understand the revolutionary potential of artistic endeavor and aesthetics in creating a more participatory, connected, sensual, creative and humane world. There is an appreciation of what it means to be alive through creative practice. In an interview with Donaldo Macedo in 1985, Freire spoke about the things he likes to do. His response reveals a great deal about the profound importance of affect in people’s lives: “I love to eat; I love music; I love to read; I love sports; I love the sea, the beaches; I love to receive letters; I love children; I love simple things, common, everyday places; I love Elza; I love to write” (Freire, 1985: 197–8). In this short exchange, Freire manages to not only capture the essence of being human but also identify the dynamic relationship between the emotional and intellectual dimensions of knowledge production. In this section, our authors, activists, artists, educators, describe how they use arts-based processes to raise critical awareness and commitment to social justice (Beyerbach and Davis, 2011). They identify spaces and places where they can connect to young people’s lives, harness their creativity and imagination and change context. These artists/educators appreciate that there are multiple ways of knowing and interpreting reality (e.g., imaginative, creative, intuitive, empathetic, kinaesthetic and aesthetic) beyond the limitations of

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Western scientific rationality and objectivity (Kincheloe, 2008: 224–6). In Section XI: Critical Youth Studies, the contributing authors address two interrelated questions: first, how are young lives being constructed and consumed under global capitalism. Second, what kinds of counter-narratives are possible? There can be no doubt that young people today are the casualties of a period of unbridled free-market individualism and competitiveness, with devasting effects captured in the stark language of ‘collateral damage’ (Bauman, 2011), ‘cruelty’ (Giroux, 2013b) and ‘disposability’ (Giroux, 2009). In this ‘rapidly mutating and crisis-ridden world’ (Best and Kellner, 2003: 75), the authors provide a set of counter-narratives to illustrate the emancipatory potential of critical pedagogy. At the heart of this pedagogical work is a commitment to working with young people as co-researchers/ participants capable of producing knowledge relevant to their own lives and circumstances (Cammarota and Fine, 2008). These ‘warrior intellectuals’, as Kincheloe describes them, develop the ability to think critically and analytically and in the process ‘use their imagination to transcend the trap of traditional gender, racial, sexual, and class-based stereotypes and the harm they cause’ (2009: 388). In Section XII: Science, Ecology and Wellbeing, section editor Renee Desmarchelier sets the scene by calling out the challenges facing the planet, human societies, the natural environment and individuals. She goes on to argue that what is required is a fundamental shift away from dominant ways of knowing in the Western scientific tradition of positivist epistemologies and cultural imperialism and towards cultivating the different ways of knowing found in marginalized and subjugated knowledges of the oppressed. The authors in this section take up the challenge by providing a critique of the dominant approaches to science education. They use the lens of feminist readings as well as developing alternative approaches to an ecological pedagogy of joy, health and well-being.

IN READING THESE VOLUMES As editors and authors, we do not endeavor to name, define nor place critical pedagogy. Rather, we have attempted to collect the works, stories and research of those who engage within the tentative notion of criticalizing education both in and out of schools. We hope for a fluidity of thought within our work and honour Freire’s intent to create an ongoing dialogue which we continue to revise, augment, argue with, contemplate and celebrate. Critical pedagogy did not evolve to become orthodox; indeed, we embrace the unorthodox and hope to add to these pedagogies as they continue to evolve and develop.

REFERENCES Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. (1944/2000) The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. New York: The New Press. Alinsky, S. (1989) Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. New York: Vintage. Apple, M. W. (1982) Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education: Essays on Class Ideology and the State. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Apple, M., Au, W. and Gandin, A. (2009) (eds) The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education. New York and London: Routledge. Arendt, H. (1958/1998) The Human Condition (2nd edition). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Arendt, H. (1973) Men in Dark Times. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Ball, S. (2006) Symposium: Educational research and the necessity of theory. Introduction. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 27(1): 1–2. Bauman, Z (2011) Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Best, S. and Kellner, D (2003) Contemporary youth and the postmodern adventure. Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, 25: 75–93.

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Beyerbach, B. and Davis, R. (2011) Activist Art in Social Justice Pedagogy: Engaging Students in Glocal Issues through the Arts. New York: Peter Lang. Bourdieu, P. (1998) Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. (1976) Schooling in Capitalist America. New York: Basic Books. Britzman, D. (1991) Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach. Albany: State University of New York Press. Britzman, D. P. (1998) Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Britzman, D. P. (2003) Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach, Revised edition. New York: State University of New York Press. Burbules, N. and Berk, R. (1999) Critical thinking and critical pedagogy: Relations, differences, and limits, in Popkewitz and L. Fendler (eds), Critical Theories in Education: Changing Terrains of Knowledge and Politics. New York and London: Routledge. pp. 45–65. Cammarota, J. and Fine, M. (2008) Revolutionizing Education: Youth Participatory Action Research in Motion. New York and London: Routledge. Carnoy, M. and Levin, H. M. (1985) Schooling and Work in the Democratic State. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Darder, A., Baltodano, M. and Torres, R. (2003) (eds) The Critical Pedagogy Reader. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Dewey, J. (1916/1944) Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan. Duncan, J. and Morrell, E. (2008) The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities for Moving from Theory to Practice in Urban Schools. New York: Peter Lang. Emdin, C. (2017) For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood … and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Freire, P. (1970/2000) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (1974/2007) Freire: Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (1983) The importance of the act of reading. Trans. Loretta Slover. Journal of Education, 162(1): 5–11.

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Freire, P. (1985) The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Freire, P. (1998) Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Freire, P. (2000) Pedagogy of the Heart. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (2004) Pedagogy of Indignation. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Freire, P. (2007) Daring to Dream: Toward a Pedagogy of the Unfinished. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Freire, P. (2014) Pedagogy of Commitment. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Gillborn, D. (1995) Racism and Antiracism in Real Schools. Buckingham: Open University Press. Giroux, H. (1983) Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey. Giroux, H. (2000) Stealing Innocence: Corporate Culture’s War on Children. New York: Palgrave. Giroux, H. (2003) Critical theory and educational practice, in A. Darder, M. Baltodano and R. Torres (eds), The Critical Pedagogy Reader. London: RoutledgeFalmer. pp. 27–56. Giroux, H. (2009) Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability? New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Giroux, H. (2011) On Critical Pedagogy. New York: Continuum. Giroux, H. (2013a). When schools become dead zones of the imagination: A critical pedagogy manifesto. Truthout, 13 August, 2013. Retrieved 15 September 2014 from: www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/18133when-schools-become-dead-zones-of-theimagination-a-critical-pedagogy-manifesto Giroux, H. (2013b) Youth in Revolt: Reclaiming a Democratic Future. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press. Giroux, H. (2014) The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking beyond America’s Disimagination Machine. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. Gonzalez, N., Moll, L. and Amanti, C. (2004) Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities and Classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence-Erlbaum and Associates. Gore, J. (1993) The Struggle for Pedagogies: Critical and Feminist Discourses of Regimes of Truth. New York: Routledge.

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Gutiérrez, G. (1971/988) A Theology of Liberation. Trans. Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Gutiérrez, K., Asato, J., Santos, M. and Gotanda, N. (2002) Backlash pedagogy: Language and culture and the politics of reform. The Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies, 24(4): 335–51. Harris, K. (1979) Education and Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Harvey, D. (2007) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. hooks, b. (1981/2014) Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. London: Routledge. Horton, M. and Freire, P. (1990) We Make the Road by Walking. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Ibrahim, W. and Steinberg, S. (2014) (eds) Critical Youth Studies Reader. New York: Peter Lang. Kahn, R. (2010) Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy Movement. New York: Peter Lang. Kellner, D. and Share, J. (2007) Critical media literacy, democracy, and the reconstruction of education, in D. Macedo and S. Steinberg (eds), Media Literacy: A Reader. New York: Peter Lang. pp. 3–23. Kincheloe, J. L. (2008) Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy. An Introduction. Dordrecht: Springer. Kincheloe, J. L. (2009) No short cuts in urban education: Metropedagogy and diversity, in S. Steinberg (ed.), Diversity and Multiculturalism: A Reader. New York: Peter Lang. pp. 370–409. Kincheloe, J. L. and McLaren, P. (2005) Rethinking critical theory and qualitative research, in N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (eds), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd edition). London: Sage. pp. 303–42. Kozol, J. (1967) Death at an Early Age. New York: Plume. Kozol, J. (2005) The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. New York: Three Rivers Press. Kumashiro, K. (2004) Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning Toward Social Justice. New York and London: RoutledgeFalmer. Ladson-Billings, G. and Tate IV, W. F. (1995) Towards a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record, 97(1): 47–68.

Leistyna, P., Woodrum, A. and Sherblom, S. (1999) Breaking Free: The Transformative Power of Critical Pedagogy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review. Leonardo, Z. (2005) Critical Pedagogy and Race. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Macedo, D. (1993) Literacy for stupidification: The pedagogy of big lies. Harvard Educational Review, 63(2): 183–207. Macedo, D. and Steinberg, S. (2007) Media and Literacy: A Reader. New York: Peter Lang. Malott, C. and Porfilio, B. (2011) (eds) Critical Pedagogy in the Twenty-First Century. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. McLaren, P. (1997) Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the New Millennium. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. McLaren, P. and Farahmandpur, R. (2005) Teaching against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. McLaren, P. and Kincheloe, J. (2007) Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Know? New York: Peter Lang. McMurtry, J. (1999) The Cancer Stage of Capitalism. London: Pluto Press. Postman, N. and Weingartner, C. (1969) Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Rosa, J. and Rosa, R. (2011) Pedagogy in the Age of Media Control: Language Deception and Digital Democracy. New York: Peter Lang. Sasson, S. (2014) Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press. Shor, I. (1980) Critical Teaching and Everyday Life. New York: The University of Chicago Press. Simon, R. (1988). For a pedagogy of possibility. Critical Pedagogy Networker, 1(1): 1–4. Sleeter, C. and McLaren, P. (1995) Multicultural Education, Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Difference. New York: State University of New York Press. Smith, L. (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin: University of Otago Press. Smyth, J. (2011) Critical Pedagogy for Social Justice. New York: Continuum.

SECTION I

Reading Paulo Freire Shirley R. Steinberg

As we compiled the chapters in these three volumes, it became apparent that while we were hoping to contextualize critical pedagogies in the present, we needed to historically anchor them. Seeking to find a definitive piece from Freire, other than the obvious Pedagogy of the Oppressed, we wanted to find something that would speak to not only his development of the field, but to his own professional etymology. We sought an example of his work that could elicit memories within those who began in the 1980s and early 1990s, during the development of critical pedagogy as ways of knowing. I was in a search for an accessible piece, with few (if any) citations, maybe pinches of social theory, a work which spoke to teachers and to scholars. Significant to the endeavor was to locate writing that would elicit a critical pedagogical nostalgia, remind us of Paulo’s oeuvre, and to allow thoughts to associate freely with his words. I am not sure quite how I located our silver chalice (by the way, Freire would hate this

metaphor), but I came across an old text from a speech Paulo delivered in Campinas, Brazil in November of 1981. The speech was translated and published in the Journal of Education (Vol. 165, no.1: 5–11) in 1983 as ‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’, and brought us to where he began. Beginnings are essential and understanding our critical pedagogies, they take us to context, to the essence of how we came to be. The article witnesses the union of the personal and the political self within Freire, a way of being which is found within all of his work. This short article was perfect for our intent to include an example of his early work. Taking on the proverbial life of its own, the provocation was clear … we would enter into a dialogue with the article. Writing a brief email to the first 20 authors who came into my mind, I invited each to write a short response to Paulo’s early work. I asked them to keep within 500–3,000 words and to craft a narrative response. Barry (Down) and I

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were astonished at the eager and immediate responses from our colleagues. Within weeks we had 14 intuitively autobiographical contributions for the first section of the Handbook. As the article by Paulo lays the warp, each response is woven within as the weft is transversed into a precious cloth. Organized in no particular manner, the following responses with Paulo begin our volumes. Our stories begin with Lilia Bartolomé’s recollections of her own literacy journey into reading in Spanish, led by her mother who guided Lilia into her love and appreciation for literature which reflected her own origins and authentic cultural/linguistic ways of being. John Willinsky’s interplay follows Paulo’s muse of reading in three acts, situating Freire’s political influences, through schools, to the notion of ‘real reading’. Recalling the ignominy of finding her young self consigned to the ‘bad’ readers group at the age of six, Deborah Britzman examines the act of reading with free association leading to the notion of an interpretive act. Ramón Flecha recalls reading Freire as a 15-year-old student in Bilbao, just awakening to the political within the act of reading. Twenty years after the experience, he met Paulo as he worked to have him awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Barcelona. Bill Schubert recalls his early years as a teacher and student without knowing Freire’s work, finally discovering him on a mimeographed paper by James Macdonald; one smiles at the intersection of these three men on pages in the early 70s. I am reminded of my own intersections through my mentor, David Smith, who introduced me to Paulo Freire in the mid 80s. David takes up the notion of dialogical pedagogy and the political and he juggles notions of reading the word and the not-so-truthful world. Hermán García carries on with Freire’s thoughts on reading the world, and the celebration resulting from our own empowerment, engagement and critical understandings

of that world. Marcella Runell Hall understands through Paulo’s work that her multiple positionalities create her political and spiritual selves. Arlo Kempf reminds us that words have moved from his own early reading, Mr. Mugs, to what he terms, corporate think-spaces – social media and networks; he sees Paulo’s words as foundational for future world and word navigations. Understanding his designation of ‘redneck’, Paul Thomas relates the irony of his literacy/reading childhood, as criticality was facilitated unwittingly by his parents. Christine Sleeter celebrates her students’ discoveries as they find ways in which to insert themselves into their own texts. Bill Ayers remembers his own development as a pedagogical/political person, asking the question: what does it mean today to be a free person living in a humane society? Luis Huerta-Charles discusses children of poverty and marginalization and the development of alternative pedagogies. He relates the ways in which Freire’s teaching opened Brazilian peasants to read, consequently allowing them to vote, creating a new political stance. He notes that neoliberalism has made attempts to seize Freire, reminding us of the essential nature of criticalizing pedagogy. I mentioned earlier that David Smith had introduced Paulo Freire to me. Indeed, it was through D’Arcy Martin’s work that this introduction was made. In Section I’s concluding chapter, D’Arcy tells of his work with Paulo and making the film, Starting from Nina: The Politics of Learning. Watching this film in David’s class was my first moment of conscientization, as teachers and Freire discuss pedagogy for working-class children being created through their own life experiences. What precious gifts we have in this group of essays, inspired by Freire and carried on by our continued work to create a literate and equitable world.

1 The Importance of the Act of Reading1 Paulo Freire Translated by Loretta Slover

The question of the importance of reading is addressed by considering the ways in which experience itself is read through the interaction of the self and the world. Through examining memories of childhood, it is possible to view objects and experiences as texts, words, and letters and to see the growing awareness of the world as a kind of reading through which the self learns and changes. The actual act of reading literary texts is seen as part of a wider process of human development and growth based on understanding both one’s own experience and the social world. Learning to read must be seen as one aspect of the act of knowing and as a creative act. Reading the world thus precedes reading the word and writing a new text must be seen as one means of transforming the world. In all my years in the practice of teaching – which is political practice as well – I have rarely allowed myself the task of inaugurating or closing meetings and congresses. I have, nevertheless, agreed to speak here, though as informally as possible, about the importance of the act of reading.

In attempting to speak about the importance of reading, it is indispensable for me to say something about my preparation for being here today, something about the process I inserted myself into while writing the text I now read, a process which involved a critical understanding of the act of reading. Reading is not exhausted merely by decoding the ­written word or written language, but rather anticipated by and extending into knowledge of the world. Reading the world precedes reading the word, and the subsequent reading of the word cannot dispense with continually reading the world. Language and reality are dynamically intertwined. The understanding attained by the critical reading of a text implies perceiving the relationship between text and context. As I began writing about the importance of the act of reading, I felt myself drawn enthusiastically to re-reading essential moments in my own practice of reading, whose memory I retained from the most remote experiences of childhood, from adolescence, from young manhood, when a critical understanding of the act of reading took shape in me.

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In writing this text, I put objective distance between myself and the different moments in which the act of reading occurred in my existential experience: first, reading the world, the tiny world in which I moved; afterward, reading the word, not always the word-world in the course of my schooling. Recapturing distant childhood as far back as I can trust my memory, trying to understand my act of reading the particular world in which I moved was absolutely significant for me. Surrendering myself to this effort, I re-created and re-lived in the text I was writing, the experience I lived at a time when I did not yet read words. I see myself then in the average Recife house where I was born, encircled by trees. Some of the trees were like persons to me, such was the intimacy between us. In their shadow I played, and in the branches susceptible to my height I experienced the small risks which prepared me for greater risks and adventures. The old house, its bedrooms, hall, attic, terrace – the setting for my mother’s ferns – the back yard where the terrace was located, all this was my first world. In this world I crawled, gurgled, first stood up, took my first steps, said my first words. Truly, that special world presented itself to me as the arena of my perceptual activity, and therefore as the world of my first reading. The texts, the words, the letters of that context were incarnated in a series of things, objects, signs. In perceiving these, I experienced myself, and the more I experienced myself, the more my perceptual capacity increased. I learned to understand things, objects, signs through using them in relationship to my older brothers and sisters and my parents. The texts, words, letters of that context were incarnated in the song of the birds – tanager, flycatcher, thrush; in the dance of the boughs blown by the strong winds announcing storms; thunder and lightning; rain waters playing with geography: creating lakes, islands, rivers, streams. The texts, words, letters of that context were incarnated as well in the whistle of the wind, the clouds

of the sky, the sky’s color, its movement; in the color of foliage, the shape of leaves, the fragrance of flowers – roses, jasmine; in tree trunks; in fruit rinds: the varying color tones of the same fruit at different times – the green of a mango when the fruit is first forming, the green of a mango fully formed, the greenish yellow of the same mango ripening, the black spots of an overripe mango – the relationship among these colors, the developing fruit, its resistance to our manipulation, and its taste. It was possibly at this time, by doing it myself and seeing others do it, that I learned the meaning of the word squashing. Animals were equally part of that context – the way the family cats rubbed themselves coyly against our legs, their mewing of entreaty or anger; the ill-humor of Joli, my father’s old black dog, when one of the cats carelessly approached too near to where he was eating what was his. In such instances, Joli’s mood was completely different from when he rather sportively chased, caught, and killed one of the many opossums responsible for the disappearance of my grandmother’s fat chickens. Part of the context of my immediate world was also the language universe of my elders, expressing their beliefs, tastes, fears, values, and which linked my world to wider contexts whose existence I could not even suspect. In the effort at recapturing distant childhood, trying to understand my act of reading the particular world in which I moved, permit me to say again, I re-created, re-lived in the text I was writing the experience I lived at a time when I did not yet read words. And something emerged which seems relevant to the general context of these reflections. I refer to my fear of ghosts. The presence of ghosts among us was a permanent topic of grown-up conversation in the time of my childhood. Ghosts needed darkness or semidarkness in order to appear under their various forms – wailing the pain of their guilt; laughing in mockery; asking for prayers; indicating where their cask was hidden.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ACT OF READING

Now, probably until I was seven years old, the Recife neighborhood where I was born was illuminated by gaslights lined up with a certain dignity in the streets. At nightfall, the elegant lamps gave themselves to the magic wand of the lamplighters. At the door of my house I used to accompany the thin figure of my street’s lamplighter from afar as he went from lamp to lamp in a rhythmic gait, the lighting taper over his shoulder. It was a fragile light, more fragile even than the light of the lamp we had inside the house; the shadows overcame the light more than the light dispelled the shadows. There was no better environment for ghostly pranks than that one. I remember the nights in which, enveloped by my own fears, I waited for time to pass, for the night to end, for dawn’s demi-light to arrive bringing with it the song of the morning birds. In morning’s light my night fears ended up by sharpening my perception of numerous noises which were lost in the brightness and bustle of daytime but mysteriously underscored in night’s deep silence. As I became familiar with my world, however, as I perceived and understood it better by reading it, my terrors diminished. It is important to add that reading my world, always basic to me, did not make me grow up prematurely, a rationalist in boy’s clothing. Exercising my boy’s curiosity did not distort it, nor did understanding my world cause me to scorn the enchanting mystery of that world. In this I was aided rather than discouraged by my parents. It was precisely my parents who introduced me to reading the word at a certain moment in this rich experience of understanding my immediate world. Deciphering the word flowed naturally from reading my particular world; it was not something superimposed on it. I learned to read and write on the ground of the back yard of my house, in the shade of the mango trees, with words from my world rather than from the wider world of my parents. The earth was my blackboard; sticks, my chalk.

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When I arrived at Eunice Vasconcellos’ private school, I was already literate. Here I would like to pay heartfelt tribute to Eunice, whose recent passing away profoundly grieved me. Eunice continued and deepened my parents’ work. With her, reading the word, the phrase, the sentence never entailed a break with reading the world. With her, reading the word meant reading the word-world. A little while ago, with deep emotion, I visited the home where I was born. I stepped on the same ground on which I had first stood up, on which I first had walked, run, begun to talk, and learned to read. It was that same world which first presented itself to my understanding through my reading it. There I met again some of the trees of my childhood. I recognized them without difficulty. I almost embraced their thick trunks – young trunks in my childhood. Then, what I like to call a gentIe or well-behaved nostalgia, emanating from the earth, the trees, the house, carefully enveloped me. I left the house c­ontent, feeling the joy of someone who has re-­encountered loved ones. Continuing the effort of re-reading fundamental moments of my childhood experience, of adolescence and young manhood – moments in which a critical understanding of the importance of the act of reading took shape in me in practice – I would like to go back to a time when I was a secondary-school student. There I gained experience in the critical interpretation of the texts I read in class with the Portuguese teacher’s help, which I remember to this day. Those moments did not consist of mere exercises, aimed at our simply becoming aware of the existence of the page in front of us, to be scanned, mechanically and monotonously spelled out, instead of truly read. Those moments were not reading lessons in the traditional sense, but rather moments in which texts were offered to our restless searching, including that of the young teacher, Jose Pessoa. Some time afterward, as a Portuguese teacher myself in my twenties, I lived

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intensely the importance of the act of reading and writing – basically inseparable – with first-year high-school students. I never reduced syntactical rules to charts the students had to swallow, even rules governing prepositions after certain verbs, agreement of gender and number, contractions. On the contrary, all this was proposed to the students’ curiosity in a dynamic and living way, as objects to be discovered within the body of texts, whether the students’ own or those of established writers, and not as something stagnant whose outline I described. The students did not have to memorize the description mechanically, but rather learn its underlying significance. Only by learning the significance could they know how to memorize it, to fix it. Mechanically memorizing the description of an object does not constitute knowing the object. That is why reading a text taken as pure description of an object (like a syntactical rule), and undertaken to memorize the description, is neither real reading, nor does it result in knowledge of the object to which the text refers. I believe much of our insistence as teachers that students read innumerable book chapters in one semester comes from a misunderstanding we sometimes have about reading. In my wanderings throughout the world there were not a few times when young students spoke to me about their struggles with extensive bibliographies, more to be devoured than truly read or studied – reading lessons in the old-fashioned sense, submitted to the students in the name of scientific training, and of which they had to give an account by means of reading summaries. In some bibliographies I even read references to specific pages in this or that chapter from such and such a book which had to be read: ‘pages 15–37’. Insistence on a quantity of readings without due internalization of texts proposed for understanding rather than mechanical memorizing reveals a magical view of the written word, a view which must be superseded. From another angle, the same view is found

in the writer who identifies the potential quality of his work, or lack of it, with the quantity of pages he has written. Yet, one of the most important documents we have – Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ – is only two-and-ahalf pages long. To avoid misinterpretation of what I’m saying, it is important to underscore that my criticism of the magical view of the word does not at all imply an irresponsible position on my part in relation to the obligation we all have, teachers and students, to read the classic literature in a given field of knowledge seriously and continually, to make the texts our own, to create the intellectual discipline without which our practice as teachers and students is not viable. To return to that very rich moment of my experience as a Portuguese teacher, I remember as vividly as if it were today rather than a remote yesterday the times I dwelled on the analysis of the texts of Gilberto Freyre, Lins do Rego, Graciliano Ramos, Jorge Amado. I used to bring the texts from home to read with the students, pointing out syntactical aspects strictly linked to the good taste of their language. To that analysis I added commentaries on the essential differences between the Portuguese of Portugal and the Portuguese of Brazil. In this reflection on the importance of the act of reading, I want to make clear once again that my primary effort has been to explain how I became increasingly aware of its importance in my own life. It’s as if I were doing the archaeology of my understanding of the complex act of reading in my own existential experience. For this reason I have been speaking of certain moments in my childhood, adolescence, and young manhood. I would like now to conclude by reviewing, in general terms, some aspects central to what I proposed a few years ago in the field of teaching adults to read and write. First, I would like to reaffirm that I always saw teaching adults to read and write as a political act, an act of knowledge, and therefore as a creative act. I would find

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ACT OF READING

it impossible to be engaged in a work of mechanically memorizing vowel sounds, like in the exercises ba-be-bi-bo-bu, la-le-lilo-lu. Nor could I reduce learning to read and write merely to learning words, syllables, or letters, a process of teaching in which the teacher fills the supposedly empty heads of the learners with his or her words. On the contrary, the student is the subject of the process of learning to read and write as an act of knowing and a creative act. The fact that he or she needs the teacher’s help, as in any pedagogical situation, does not mean that the teacher’s help annuls the student’s creativity and responsibility for constructing his or her own written language and reading this language. When, for instance, a teacher and a learner pick up an object in their hands, as I do now, they both feel the object, perceive the felt object, and are capable of expressing verbally what the felt and perceived object is. Like me, the illiterate person can feel the pen, perceive the pen, and say pen. I can, however, not only feel the pen, perceive the pen, and say pen, but also write pen and, consequently, read pen. Learning to read and write means creating and assembling a written expression for what can be said orally. The teacher cannot put it together for the student; that is the student’s creative task. I need go no further into what I’ve developed at different times in the complex process of teaching adults to read and write. I would like to return, however, to one point referred to elsewhere in this text because of its significance for the critical understanding of the act of reading and writing, and consequently for the project I am dedicated to, teaching adults to read and write. Reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world. As I suggested earlier, this movement from the world to the word and from the word to the world is always present; even the spoken word flows from our reading of the world. In a way, however, we can go further, and say that reading

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the word is not preceded merely by reading the world, but by a certain form of writing it or re-writing it, that is, of transforming it by means of conscious practical work. For me, this dynamic movement is central to the literacy process. For this reason I have always insisted that words used in organizing a literacy program come from the word universe of the people who are learning, expressing their actual language, their anxieties, fears, demands, dreams. Words should be laden with the meaning of the people’s existential experience, and not of the teacher’s experience. Surveying what I call the word universe thus gives us the people’s words, pregnant with the world, words from the people’s reading of the world. We then give the words back to the people inserted in what I call codifications, pictures imaging real situations. The word brick, for example, might be inserted in a pictorial representation of a group of bricklayers constructing a house. Before giving a written form to the popular spoken word, however, we customarily challenge the learners with a group of codified situations, so they will apprehend the word rather than mechanically memorize it. Decodifying or reading the situations pictured leads them to a critical perception of the meaning of culture by leading them to understand how human practice or work transforms the world. Basically, the pictures of concrete situations enable the people to reflect on their former interpretation of the world before going on to read the word. This more critical reading of the prior less critical reading of the world enables them to understand their indigence differently from the fatalistic way they sometimes view injustice. In this way, a critical reading of reality, whether it takes place in the literacy process or not, and associated above all with the clearly political practices of mobilizing and organizing, constitutes an instrument of what Gramsci calls counter-hegemony.

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To sum up, reading always involves critical perception, interpretation, and re-writing what is read. I would like to close by saying that for these reflections on the importance of the act of reading I resolved to adopt the procedure I used, because it was consonant with my way of being and with what I am capable of doing.

Note  1  This article was first published in English as ‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’, Paulo Freire, Journal of Education 165(1), 1983. © Sage, 1983. It was originally presented as a paper at the opening of the Brazilian Congress of Reading, Campinas, Brazil, November 1981, and published in Portugese in A Importancia do Ato de Ler em TIes Artigos que se Completam, Paulo Freire, Cortez, Sao Paulo, 1983.

2 Linking My World to the Word Lilia I. Bartolomé

Paulo Freire’s ability to compellingly link the personal to the political and the pedagogical is evident in his discussion of his life as a young reader of both the world and the word. In his essay, ‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’, Freire provides captivating examples of his ability at a young age to discern the relationship between text and context while engaging with print.1 He poetically describes how ‘[t]he texts, the words, the letters of the context were incarnated in a series of things, objects, [and] signs … [I]n perceiving these, I experienced myself, and the more I experienced myself, the more my perceptual capacity increased’.2 Similar to Freire, I too have been ‘drawn enthusiastically to re-reading essential moments in my own practice of reading whose memory I retained from the remote experiences of childhood’ in order to better understand how it is that I learned to concurrently read the world and the word.3 Freire’s stimulating discussion of this essential component of reading and writing

the world and the word – linking to one’s cultural knowledge and experiences, especially at the initial stages of learning to decode and encode words – reminds me of my own experiences as a young reader of first English and then Spanish. I grew up in a working-class home located in the Mexican/ Chicanx Shelltown barrio of Southeast San Diego, California in the 1960s, when bilingual education or native language instruction was simply not available. Nevertheless, with my mother’s assistance, I learned to read in Spanish and to interact with content that was far more culturally relevant than what I found in my school’s English language basal series. As I describe in deeper fashion in a previously published piece, ‘Literacy as Comida: Learning to Read with Mexican Novelas’,4 it wasn’t until my mother taught me to read in Spanish using Mexican comic book novels as texts that I felt the intellectual and emotive pleasure of reading about my world in my beloved Spanish language. In the first grade, prior to learning to read in Spanish,

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I was taught to read in English using the ‘Dick and Jane’ whole word or sight word approach, which essentially required that students memorize repetitive sight words and sentences such as: ‘see Dick and Jane. See Dick run. See Jane run’. Although I was considered a successful reader of English, I often wonder if I would have started to fall behind once I could not memorize longer and more difficult vocabulary that could not be anchored in my own cultural reality or world. Fortunately for me, I believe that it was my Spanish language literacy skills that spared me from this fate that is all too often the case for many w­orking-class Latinx students. My mother’s instructional response utilized a simple phonics approach that mirrored the one she had been exposed to in the elementary school of her little village of Jesús María in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. I vividly recall how effortless and fun it was to learn vowels and consonants, then syllables, and then progress to whole words, phrases, and then complete sentences. Sentences such as ‘Mi mama me ama’ (‘My mother loves me’) and ‘Amo a mi mama’ (‘I love my mother’), with their focus on familial love, struck a powerful emotional chord in me. Similarly, many sentences created by my mother for me reflected our life, such as ‘Lilia es una niña estudiosa’ (‘Lilia is a studious girl’). Others were playfully taunting, ‘A veces, Lilia es una niña traviesa y burra. Lilia es una niña apestosa’ (‘Sometimes Lilia is a mischievous and stubborn girl. Lilia is a stinky girl’.) Oh, how I loved engaging with text that was so playful and personal! Once I had sufficiently mastered phonics, I directed my attention to the numerous novelas that my mother stored and traded with female friends and relatives. Novelas, or historietas as they are also known, refer to two once-popular weekly comic book-like series such as Memín Pinguín (Billy the Rascal) and Lágrimas y Risas (Tears and Laughter). Memín Pinguín was a favorite of mine because the series focused on the adventures and hijinks of a ­little Black boy, Memín Pinguín, and his best

friends growing up in 1950s/1960s workingclass, urban Mexico City. Memín’s close and loving relationship with his mother, Ma’ Linda, especially resonated with me since it mirrored my own relationship with my mother. Ma’Linda’s economic struggles as a single parent coupled with Memín’s concern for his beloved mamá pulled at my heartstrings and elicited my own empathy and concern. The comic book series Lágrimas y Risas was another serial publication – also written by renowned Mexican popular-culture author, Yolanda Vargas Dulché – that contained romantic tales with similar story structure and content. For example, the story, María Isabel, chronicles a humble, Indigenous woman’s rise to affluence, while Yesenia tells a similar story about a humble but strong-willed gypsy (or Roma woman) whose intelligence and honesty propel her rise in social status. A third type of novela that my mother read and shared with me were thicker, conventional novellength comic books that included a variety of genres, like La Novela Policíaca (crime and detective), El Libro Semanal (romance), and El Libro Vaquero (western). In contrast to the stilted language and inauthentic content of my ‘Dick and Jane’ basals, I perceived the Mexican novelas to be highly interesting and informative. (Although I must admit that I also enjoyed the somewhat ‘exotic’ language and content of the ‘Dick and Jane’ readers.) While many educators might question the appropriateness of presenting a second grader with texts that dealt with adult topics such as falling in love, infidelity, loss of virginity, and other romance topics, I recall feeling the thrill of reading about characters that looked like me, my family members, and other members of my community. Despite the fact that the novelas presented Mexican culture in a static, stereotypical, and acritical manner, I learned a great deal about Mexican culture and the Spanish language (especially in terms of Spanish language vocabulary development). Prior to reading the Mexican novelas, I had not consciously realized that there was such a thing as Mexican culture.

LINKING MY WORLD TO THE WORD

Reading these texts, I increased my Spanish language vocabulary and learned about cultural worldviews such as what constituted culturally ‘appropriate’ gender roles in general and female roles in particular. My learning about the cultural preference for females to be docile and long-suffering wives and mothers was met with incredulity and exasperation since I grew up in a household where my mother did not assume a subordinate role to my father. I can remember anger burning my cheeks because I felt it just was not fair for a woman to be expected to forgive men after being mistreated by them. I recall approaching my mother and female relatives to angrily express my indignation that female characters, in order to be ‘good’, had to allow others to take advantage of them. I recall my relatives’ acknowledgment that yes, most novelas portrayed good women as somewhat stupid but I should not confuse ser noble, con ser tonta (being kind with being foolish). Despite the sexist nature of the novelas, I savored reading, discussing, and challenging the dubious morals of the some of the stories because I found it gratifying (although I could not articulate it at the time) that Spanish speakers – people just like my family, community, and me – occupied these pages. In fact, I was especially impressed that the heroines were often typically brunettes (from humble origins), while the villainesses were blond (and upper class), which was the opposite of what I saw in US television shows such as Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie. I savored that in the world of novelas, brunettes were considered to be morally superior and more beautiful. Even at a young age, I apparently grasped and rejected dominant culture’s notions of beauty because they were counter to what I and other Mexicans looked like. Learning to read in Spanish at my mother’s side constituted the pivotal reading experience of my childhood. It is amazing to recall that my mother, with her limited schooling, was so successful in teaching me to read and write in Spanish. I cannot help but wonder how it was possible for her to be such an

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effective reading teacher when teachers with advanced degrees in US schools seem incapable of teaching working-class Latinx students to read. During my mother’s literacy instruction, I was presented with numerous opportunities to analyze, critique, and dissect a variety of narratives. Together with my mother and other female relatives, I learned to ‘construct’ the text read in order to understand the author’s intent, then to critique or ‘deconstruct’ the content and, finally, to ‘reconstruct’ the novelas so as to envision more socially just and joyful endings for the underdog characters portrayed. As a result of learning to read in Spanish about Mexican/Latinx characters, I developed a greater sense of agency and pride as I attended mostly low-income, urban, segregated schools. I also developed a healthy and confident academic identity that emboldened me to transfer my enthusiasm for and confidence in reading in Spanish to English. Exposure to literature that portrayed un-subordinated Mexican characters from all walks of life – from professional to blue collar helped me understand that, unlike life in my barrio where Mexicans worked hard and dirty jobs and were often portrayed as second-class citizens on US television, worlds existed where Mexicans were first-class professionals. In fact, it is my sense that my mother’s intervention served to short-circuit any potentially negative effects of my schooling. In the process, I developed pride in myself as a reader and as a Mexicana/Chicana. One key end result was that I felt affirmed and proud of my language and culture at a very young age although at the time I did not have the maturity or language to express these sentiments. This pride and confidence propelled me to work aggressively to excel, even when my teachers and other school personnel did not necessarily cooperate. In conclusion, I believe it was not so much the technical aspects (phonics) of my mother’s instruction that made the difference in my life. The actual strength and success of methods depend, first and foremost, on the

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degree to which they embrace a pedagogy that values students’ background knowledge, language(s), culture(s), and life experiences, and creates learning contexts where power is shared by students and teachers. As Paulo Freire eloquently states: Reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world.… I have always insisted that words used in organizing a literacy program come from the word universe of the people who are learning, expressing their actual language, their anxieties, fears, demands, dreams. Words should be laden with the meaning of people’s existential experience and not of the teacher’s experience. (Freire, 1983: 10)

Sadly, to this day, I continue to witness the transformation that Latinx and other linguistically minoritized students undergo during their elementary school years. Most of these students begin kindergarten wide-eyed and excited about school. However, by the end of elementary school, too many have become

bored, anesthetized, and, ultimately alienated and resistant after years of subtractive, culturally irrelevant, and mind-numbing education. My own early reading experiences highlight the power and potential of culturally relevant and counter-hegemonic literature to assist linguistically minoritized students to concurrently develop literacy skills and critical consciousness. Schools have the responsibility to utilize pedagogy that is culturally relevant and honors students’ already present funds of knowledge.

Notes  1  Paulo Freire, ‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’, Journal of Education Vol. 165, no. 1 (1983): 5–11.  2  Freire, ‘Reading’: p. 6, emphasis in original.  3  Freire, ‘Reading’: p. 5, emphasis in original.  4  Lilia I. Bartolomé, ‘Literacy as Comida: Learning to Read with Mexican Novelas’, in Words Were All We Had: Becoming Biliterate against the Odds, ed. María de la Luz Reyes (2011), 49–59. New York and London: Teachers College Press.

3 Freire Contra Freire: An Interplay in Three Acts John Willinsky

In ‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’, Freire offers heartfelt ruminations on parents, teachers, pets, ghosts, and books, as ‘informally as possible’, in an opening address to the 1981 Brazilian Congress of Reading in Campinas. Only the year before had he been able to move back to Brazil after 15 years in political exile. The country’s military dictatorship had passed an amnesty law in 1979 permitting the repatriation of exiles, even as the law sought to protect the faltering regime from human-rights prosecution. He does not mention his exile in this address, but describes returning, at almost 60 years of age and ‘with deep emotion’, to his childhood home in Recife, leading him to reflect back on the ‘gentle or well-behaved nostalgia emanating from the earth, the trees, the house’, in Loretta Slover’s translation (1983: 5, 8). Freire is, however, somewhat apologetic at having ‘inserted’ himself into the proceedings of the congress. There is, of course, little reason to apologize. How could we not be absorbed by the one who taught us to read

our own education in such important ways, taking us for a drive by his childhood home, neighborhood, and school? Still, he seeks to redeem this autobiographical turn by drawing a number of literacy lessons from the ripe mangoes of his past. I ended up stumbling over the lessons, shaken by how quickly he moves from the fluidity of his reading life to the rigidity of the lessons on ‘real reading’ and what is ‘truly read’. In trying to resolve the seeming discrepancies between life and lessons, I came across Freire’s own attentiveness to contradictions in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed: ‘Every entity develops (or is transformed) within itself, through the interplay of its contradictions’ (2018: 136). It is this contradictory interplay that I want to develop out of Freire’s meditations on reading. While Freire identifies the importance of the act of reading in his title, I find him demonstrating a much broader sense of this concept in this brief work. I think his address to the reading congress would be better framed as an interplay

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in three acts. By better, I mean more instructive for advancing the critical pedagogies that those of us gathered in this three-volume collection are seeking to advance. Reading’s first act comes early in life for Freire, as for us all. He introduces how, as a child, he first read with wonder the world of trees and birds, sky and clouds, dogs and cats. As this constant pulse of consciousness frames Freire’s earliest perceptions, he ‘learned to understand [i.e., read] things, objects, signs through using them’ (1983: 6). The process forms, for Freire, the famous association of world and word: ‘Reading the world precedes reading the word’ (ibid.: 5). These may have been the ‘moments in which the critical importance of the act of reading took shape in me in practice’ (ibid.: 8). He vividly conveys, for example, how he read ‘the dance of boughs blown by the strong winds announcing storms’ and the ‘black spots of an overripe mango’ (ibid.: 6). This hunger for making a greater sense of the world’s ways is a manner of reading that remains with us, although Freire sets it aside in reading’s second and third acts. School is largely responsible for the second act. Freire identifies this form of reading with three activities: learning grammar rules; ‘mechanically memorizing the description of an object’; and struggling through ‘extensive bibliographies, more to be devoured than truly read and studied’ (ibid.: 8–9, his emphasis). Freire takes issue with memorization, in particular, denouncing it as ‘neither real reading nor does it result in knowledge of the object to which the text refers’ (ibid.: 9). Yet his charge applies, by implication, to the whole of this educational act. His suggestion that this reading was not real gives me pause. It seems too categorical a call for a term that he otherwise uses with such metaphorical finesse. It begs the question of how many of our own students have found our most carefully curated reading lists ‘extensive’ if not excessive; how many read through them mechanically, if at all? Who among us did not, in our student days, plow through

such lists, only to later appreciate a passing familiarity with one or two of the many readings? Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, which Freire cites in his address, may be one example, Freire’s work may be another. It is hard to see what is gained by denying that common school activities count as reading or lead to learning. It unduly deflates what students work through in the course of a long school day. It sets apart those teachers who are not (yet) engaging in critical pedagogy – those whom we should be seeking to interest in this approach – saying to them, in effect, what you are doing in the name of literacy is not even reading. It seems more Freiean, if I may, to take a dialogic approach by exploring with such educators what they see or name as ‘reading’ in their own lives, as well as in their students’; it means asking what more they might want from reading, in treating it as a form of cultural action that addresses issues in the students’ lives, to again return to themes of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2018: 125–8). Still, I can appreciate the returning exile’s impatience with traditional reading lessons, especially with the dictatorship still clinging to power. After finding a place in the audience’s heart with his childhood memories, Freire might well have wanted to rattle their educational complacency by calling their sense of reading into question. In his third and final act, as I see it, Freire introduces ‘real reading’ (1983: 9). What makes it real is the reader’s critical engagement with word and world: ‘To sum up, reading always involves critical perception, interpretation, and rewriting what is read’ (ibid.: 11, his emphasis). Freire’s writing often (if not always) reflects these admirable qualities in ways that have engaged many readers over the years (‘Over 1 million copies sold’ declares the cover of the 50th Anniversary Edition of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed). Again, however, I can’t help feeling that something is amiss in suggesting that reading ‘always involves critical perception, interpretation, and re-writing’ (my emphasis). Freire is, in effect, pulling the carpet out from under

FREIRE CONTRA FREIRE: AN INTERPLAY IN THREE ACTS

his earlier claims in this address, in which his ‘reading’ is all about a ‘distant childhood’ amid ‘the enchanting mystery of that world’, while insisting that he is no ‘rationalist in boy’s clothing’ (ibid.: 7). The young Freire is continually reading the world the whole day long, with that reading occasionally punctuated by, for example, the nighttime emergence of ghosts that brought about a deeper reading of their puzzling mockery and wailing. In this address, Freire sets out his path in acquiring the critical interpretive reading of his maturity. He credits the efforts of his school teacher, Jose Pessoa. Elsewhere, Freire explains in more detail how Pessoa introduced him into an extensive world of distinguished teachers, writers, and scholars, some of whom he eventually met and held ‘unguarded, brotherly conversations’, including the writer and politician Odilon Ribeiro Coutinho and the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre (Freire, 1996: 51). They taught Freire how to attend to reading as an act of critical interpretation, although not initially in a political or revolutionary sense, but in what he identifies as ‘the aesthetic moment’ in writing and ‘the beauty of the language’ (ibid.), traces of which are found in this piece amid the scenes of elegant gaslights and fragrant flowers. The literary criticism and attention to language represents a rarified layer of meta-reading, built atop basic reading practices. It is to make an art, profession, or trade of reading, which is why I am hesitant about treating this form of reading as a norm. Even in the conversations that Freire clearly treasured, it was surely not wit and aperçu at every turn. It can only blunt the force of this pedagogy to be always on, in an always critical reading of the world’s every aspect. Who has the stamina to read everything deeply? Or perhaps more pertinently, who wishes to suffer such stamina in another? Even Marx, so persistently the revolutionary in his writing, was known for putting on the charm in person. But more than that, critical pedagogy, whether in Freire’s or other’s hands, is more effective when it is selectively applied to what calls out for a thorough rethinking and

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rereading. I must admit that it gives me pause to think that I may well have been all too selective and all too narrowly focused on a small array of related topics for far too long, as a Google search of my name might well suggest (to avoid needless self-citation). Still, I advocate this selective application of critical pedagogy as an effective way of helping teachers and students to work on what matters to them, why such a careful reading of such matters is needed, and how to frame a critical perception, defend an interpretation, advance a rewriting of those matters. The goal is not the critical reading, except as it brings to the fore a compelling basis and reasonable means for changing what is awry with the world. This is accompanied by a need to share and communicate, to make public and known, what has come of that reading. Much reading comes before that moment of sharing what’s been learned about the world; much reading and rewriting goes into what is going to be shared of it, and, one only hopes, some reading by others will follow such acts, even if their reading is in this same critical spirit. But these intense, concentrated efforts are not the always of the life of reading. Sometimes, reading is simply learning about an old black dog, as when Freire tells us about Joli, fondly recalling how his father’s dog protected ‘my grandmother’s fat chickens’ from the opossums (1983: 7). It seems unlikely that Freire expects us to subject the dog to critical perceptions, interpretations, and rewriting (even as I may seem to have done as much through this belabored analysis). Sometimes, writer and reader can agree, with bemused smiles, to let sleeping dogs lie. This point becomes all the more clear in comparing the chicken that figures in Freire’s Letters to Cristina: Reflections on my Life and Work (1996), published a year before his death in 1997. In Letters, which he wrote at the request of his niece, Freire poignantly describes how, after the economic collapse of 1929, ‘we had very little to eat’ despite the family’s middle-class markings of his father’s neckties and his aunt’s piano (1996: 22). One

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day, he reports, he and his brothers, feeling the hunger of those days, end up stealing one of the neighbor’s chickens: ‘In a split second, as if we had rehearsed it, premeditated it, we had the kicking chicken in our hands’ (ibid.: 24). It becomes the family’s meal with little said of it, although his mother’s silence was to long haunt him. Similarly, when he speaks to the congress’ participants about ‘the varying color tones’ of fruit (1983: 6), he makes it clear in Letters that those colors took on their significance through his daring ‘childhood fruit thefts’ that grew out of ‘our need to kill our hunger’ (1996: 21, 19). It is perfectly understandable that on returning to Brazil and in speaking to the teachers attending the congress, Freire focused on how he read the world and the word during his happier childhood years in Recife. He is no less free than any of us to rewrite his life in a multitude of ways. I only raise this aspect as it, too, points to how there is no always to reading, no ready sense of when a reading is sufficiently critical or adequately interpreted to then somehow count as real reading in Freire’s sense. It may be worth noting that no less a major interpreter of Freire’s work than Donaldo Macedo has commented on the interpretive significance of what Freire chose to omit, as Macedo notes that he ‘did not fully capture the layered complexity of Freire’s philosophy’ until he visited ‘the impoverished community’ to which Freire’s

family moved during those indelibly hungry years of his late childhood (Freire, 2018: 12). The differences between the chicken-andfruit stories serve as a reminder of how context shapes reading, whether in Freire being invited to open the Brazilian Congress of Reading in 1981 or in the invitation extended to a number of scholars, including myself, to comment on this opening address some 38 years after it was delivered. But then how unkind of me to read Freire against Freire in this way, using but a slight sliver of his work. Yet such critical questioning and rewriting are his prescription for keeping reading real. And because I believe it more effective and realistic to selectively exercise such skills, it seems worthwhile giving Freire his due on reading in a handbook of critical pedagogies.

REFERENCES Freire, Paulo. The Importance of the Act of Reading. Trans. Loretta Slover. Journal of Education 165, 1 (1983): 5–11. Freire, Paulo. Letters to Cristina: Reflections on My Life and Work. Trans. Donaldo Macedo. New York: Routledge, 1996. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. 50th Anniversary Ed. New York: Bloomsbury, 2018 (orig. 1970).

4 A Note on Free Association as Transference to Reading D e b o r a h P. B r i t z m a n

Would it be so far afield to relate Paulo Freire’s (1983) ‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’ and his return to ‘the most remote experiences of childhood’ (ibid.: 5) with that of a psychoanalyst who listens in on a case history? And, given that Freire mainly wished to comment on the significance of reading to his own life and to the creation of his pedagogical acts, might I, too, take a chance and freely associate to signs along the way and ask the affecting question, why is there a desire to read? Might I too search for lost traces of my long-ago childhood and link this prehistoric past to the currency of my commitments to protecting the life of the mind? Might I, too, narrate the transference, both positive and negative, both with love and hate, to reflect on what has become my education? And, if I can do that, would I then open a new reading, a new world, and a new approach to old and seemingly intractable conflicts? Might I too find that what reading teaches is that nothing is what it seems to be, that reality too must pass through my

subjective world, and that within the act of interpreting there is allowance for our earliest mental paradox, namely that we are always reading for what cannot be seen but can be still be imagined? One day, 60 years ago, when I was once six years old and therefore in my first-grade class, the teacher ordered me into the ‘bad’ readers’ group. I then stumbled upon the strange fact that I was going to be called a slow reader. My first grade had four reading groups: the good, the almost good, the not-so-good, and the truly terribly bad. All children knew that the pretence of the names of the groups (the butterflies, the bees, the frogs, and fishes) were mere cover stories for whether or not one was either good or bad. The bad (dumb) group was given a very stupid, thin, book of gigantic type. Each page held a large picture and a few rhyming words: ‘See, Skip, Jump’. ‘Jump, Skip, Jump’. ‘Jump, Jump, Jump’. Ad nauseum. The good (smart) group had a beautiful, thick book, filled with stories and adventures. I felt humiliated, jealous, and

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desperate. I had no idea how I could leave the dumb group. Indeed, I didn’t know why I was there. One day when the teacher was not looking, I went to the bookshelf and stole the smart book. I put the book under my coat and left school with the stolen book. I was very worried my mother would ask how I came to possess this book. So, I hid the book under my bed and only took it out to read when I was sure I would not be disturbed or caught. But I worried I would be accused of stealing the book. And I fantasied that my teacher would march to my house, demand I confess, and take the book away. Near the end of that first year, I threw the book out of my bedroom window. It landed on the roof. For the next few years I watched the weather destroy the book, until there was hardly a sign of my crime. I hoped no one would learn that I had stolen and then destroyed a school book. Reading was not only dangerous. Reading was my most complex emotional situation and my most obsessive fantasy. In the naïveté of a young child – where reason and unreasonableness and desire and anxiety were one and the same – I could not imagine telling the teacher I wanted to read. I symbolically equated my desire to read with a crime and with feelings of guilt. Somehow, I was really able to steal words and the words knew that. Of course, childhood is that privileged time when there is no difference between the animate and the inanimate and feelings were everywhere and attributed to anything. And, in childhood our transference to objects felt as powerful as did the transference of love, hate, and authority onto people. Yet I have to wonder today, what could it mean that I would learn the desire to read? Like Freire, who needed to assure his audience that his idea of the act of reading was and remains an emotional experience even as these affecting ties design intellect, I too must proclaim that in reading I was not ‘a rationalist in boy’s clothing’ (ibid.: 6). I was however a fabulist with the capacity for imagining the worst, and by hiding in sheep’s clothing, or so I thought, I held the illusion that I could

escape my fate and freely associate with my desire as a reader. I came to learn that just as with people, there would be transference to books loved and hated, understood and misunderstood. Only later did I learn why. Sigmund Freud (1899) has made the argument that our earliest memories involve two nearly opposing experiences – the actual and the imagined. Both are affected by leftover time and by the ripples of impressions. He described this complex as ‘screen memories’ (ibid.: 320), fragments of one event displaced from the original scene and projected onto another later event. It was Freud’s answer to the common questions of why people tend to remember irrelevant things, why people idealize a past never experienced, why we need a cover story, and why memory and forgetting are two sides of the same coin. The feeling of an event persists but the historical event is subject to the ravages of time, fractured and displaced. Memory is just that construction. Freud also compared approaching psychical life, or taking a case history, to an archeological dig. The bits of pottery and material signs of everyday ancient life are in fragments and scattered across a wide swathe of land due to the weight of the earth and its capacity for burial. The archeologist cannot be sure if the fragment found remained in its original place or, whether the bit of pottery had shifted to another location. But the metaphor of archeology could not quite address the liveliness of these fragments in mind. While today’s scientific instruments might aid in clarifying the time, date, and place of an object, the same cannot be said of the objects of human feelings and the traces that return at a moment, say, when staring out of one’s window and hallucinating a decaying book still there on the roof. I would have to say that reading is not only an interpretive act. It is also a mirror and at times a screening of the mind’s functions that involve how attention, reception, hallucination, bodily action, refinding, and notation form associative pathways and broken links between the inner and outer worlds. There is something that happens before interpretation

A NOTE ON FREE ASSOCIATION AS TRANSFERENCE TO READING

and it has to do with our susceptibility to the things we don’t know, to the destiny of life’s impressions, and then to the act of becoming absorbed and lost in the other’s words. Then, reading is like taking in one’s own case history. The details slowly become a story of revision. Reading is an act of projective identification and imagination for, after all, words must signify what is no longer there, and in reading we are able to associate with absence, a general principle for the capacity for symbolization as well as the forming of memory. Something stands in for something else but is not the original thing. This little lesson, that the book can stand for a crime, for a secret, and for an emotional situation also brings thoughts for a second chance to make a better world and a self that is less

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naïve, more assertive, and freer to associate disparate and fractured memories into a new narrative. And all these dynamic associations lend the mind its freedom and openness to things unseen so as to risk the self when one reads the dream of transference with the world.

REFERENCES Freud, Sigmund. Screen Memories (1899). The Standard Edition, Volume 3, pp. 303–322. London: Hogarth Press, 1968. Freire, Paulo. 1983. The Importance of the Act of Reading. Journal of Education, Vol. 165, no.1, pp. 5–11.

5 Dialogic and Liberating Actions Ramón Flecha

Freire’s first writing1 came to my hands in 1967, in the clandestine movement for democracy against the Francoist dictatorship. I was then 15 and was a high school student at Bilbao’s Jesuits’ School, where students with good grades were oriented towards professions such as engineering or business management. Education was not part of my professional academic objective, but Freire’s proposal provided us a theoretical and practical orientation for our literacy work in Bilbao’s shanty town. The act of reading conceived as a dialogic action, including its liberating sense, provided me with an educational vision that creatively connected with the activities of García Lorca’s La Barraca theatre and with the author’s work. García Lorca showed that common people made metaphors that were as creative as those of the best writers; he said that calling a roof’s ledge ‘eaves’ or a sweet ‘tocino de cielo’ [‘heaven’s bacon’] were wonderful metaphors. Freire’s theory oriented that thought pedagogically. It was

not about going to the shanty town to bring them our culture: together with the people who lived there, we had to construct a culture that could be, as shown by the popular metaphors, of the highest worldwide level and that allowed everybody with no discrimination of class or condition to enjoy humanity’s best creations. Freire’s dialogic proposal took that egalitarian, democratic and liberating orientation into the educational practice. With the dialogic act of reading, those poor people, who in many cases had never gone to school, could read the words and also the world; they could not be excluded from any human creation. I met Paulo in January 1988, when I proposed him as Doctor honoris causa of the University of Barcelona. The first thing he asked me about when he saw me was Ferrer i Guardia’s bibliography (Ferrer i Guardia, 1979), enthusiastically saying that his Modern School movement had had schools in Brazil too. Ferrer i Guardia was the most representative pedagogue of an anarchist, (very) pacifist educational tradition, really based

DIALOGIC AND LIBERATING ACTIONS

on what we today call human rights. In that tradition, many libertarian athenaeums had encouraged common workers, who did not know how to read, to enjoy the best literary works such as Shakespeare or Homer as well as essays such as Kropotkin’s ‘The Conquest of Bread’ (1995). Paulo loved encountering the Dialogic Literary Gatherings at the Escola d’Adults de la Verneda-Sant Martí in which people who were becoming literate read James Joyce’s Ulysses (2000), Homer’s Odyssey (2006), The Arabian Nights (2010) and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (2000) or Cortázar’s Rayuela (2016). He also liked knowing that the key pedagogical contribution to creating those gatherings had been his dialogic action. In those days, and other occasions, we talked a lot about the process that led from my first encounters with Lorca’s work and the athenaeums’ cultural practices, to the creation of the first Dialogic Literary Gathering in 1978 and what role Paulo’s work had played in that trajectory. In conversation, we came to the conclusion that it had been very important due to three coincidences and a great contribution. The first coincidence was the rejection of fatalism and determinism with which many critics then analysed education, saying that it could only reproduce inequalities and not transform them. The second was the conviction that, as Alain Touraine wrote about the Dialogic Literary Gatherings, sometimes ‘knowledge flows from the bottom up’2. The third one is the profoundly dialogic conception of democracy rejecting all kinds of dictatorship and authoritarian leaders, both

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from the right and the left. For all that, I still needed the ingredient that I learned from Paulo – the great contribution – which is the dialogic education he gave to the world. There are many activities which keep Paulo’s spirit very much alive, creating a better world for everybody, and the Dialogic Literary Gatherings is one of them.

Notes  1  It was a cyclostyled material that was distributed clandestinely which consisted of a part of “Education as the Practice of Freedom”, but it was not the book or a full copy of it.  2  Words of commentary from Alain Touraine about the book: Flecha, R. (2000): Sharing Words. Lanham, M.D: Rowman & Littlefield.

REFERENCES Anonymous. (2010). The Arabian Nights. Tales of 1001 nights. London: Penguin Classics. Cortázar, J. (2016). Rayuela. Barcelona: Debolsillo editorial. Ferrer i Guardia, F. (1979). La Escuela moderna. Guecho: Zero. Homer. (2006). The Odyssey. London: Penguin Classics. Joyce, J. (2000). Ulysses. London: Penguin Modern Classics. Kropotkin, P. (1995). The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings (edited by Shatz, M.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolf, V. (2000). The Waves. Knoxville: Wordsworth Classics.

6 In the Spirit of Freire William H. Schubert

I am grateful to be invited to respond to Paulo Freire’s (1981/1983) ‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’. I have benefited from and cited many of Freire’s writings in my work since the late 1970s but had not seen this piece. As I perused it, I was amazed by the ways in which Freire read and re-read himself, and as I read and re-read his writing I grasped more of the text of Freire’s life, and I often lapsed into reflection on dimensions of the texts that shaped who I am. I should probably say ‘that I have been, am, and am still becoming’– all simultaneously. As Freire reread texts of his childhood and youth, I accompanied him, renewing awareness of the corridors of my own childhood homes. I agree with his several admonitions to recognize that reading the world precedes reading the word, and I can see an interactive and transactive relation between the world and the word that evolves in complex convolutions as life continues, as every revised text transforms the reader and the world in meaningful ways.

Clearly, Freire exemplifies what he encourages readers to be and to do. As I read his short paper, I reflected on the possibility that Freire’s orientation is part of a larger spirit that he embodied, and that both his work and the many whom he influenced continue to embody. I see it as a spirit that I have known longer than I have been aware of Freire. I met Paulo Freire at conferences, and before that I corresponded with him when I chaired the nomination committee for the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Curriculum Studies Division of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) – a recognition we were honored to have him accept in 1990. When I saw Freire make presentations at AERA, and when I participated on the committee to draft the statement for his Honorary Doctorate at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1993, my brief encounters with him were surrounded with his spirit of tranquility, approachability, and wisdom, infused with his ethos of radical love.

IN THE SPIRIT OF FREIRE

As I read and reflected on this brilliant piece (Freire, 1981/1983), I realized that I had experienced six years of teaching in elementary school before having heard of Paulo Freire. Nonetheless, in my deepest moments of preparation for teaching I believe I somehow glimpsed deeply a Freirian spirit. This spirit that prepared me to be a teacher traces back to the dinner table with my parents, both highly regarded public educators, in the rural midwestern United States. Their discussions of interactions with teachers, administrators, students, and parents moved deeply inside me in ways that I still do not fully comprehend. My larger extended family included two great aunts and my maternal grandmother who were teachers in country schools – often in one-room school houses, one of which I attended for two years – and my grandfathers, one educated as a minister and the other as a politician and farmer. While they were all good teachers in their professional lives, I was most inspired and perplexed by the ways in which they taught me informally through stories, and play that extended those stories. And they taught through conversation, perhaps dialogue. When I came to my father with a problem he would usually tell me a helpful story from a similar dilemma in his life. My mother, grandmother, and great aunts would read stories from literary classics and then extend them as we acted out dramas together overcoming social justice; my grandfather would imagine episodes in which I was a character who helped others overcome oppression. Formalized schooling paled, even when these relatives were the educators, in comparison to the theatrical play and conversations that they drew from my interests and concerns. I am not sure my relatives knew how deeply they were teaching in those informal contexts, but they reached deeply within me because they loved me, and they helped me to imagine and create myself. Every summer, several of these relatives and I would take a road trip for three to four weeks through North America – each summer a different destination. We did this from

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1952 to 1964 and they often let me design the curriculum of those journeys. When I began college in the Fall of 1962, I was possessed with a fear of failure to be able to do college work since only a small percentage of my high school classmates went to college; however, with hard work I made the grades. As in high school, in college I talked with best friends about our future lives as we tried to figure out what we should be and do. In my sophomore year I had a kind of quiet epiphany. I was asked by a literature professor to read some literary criticism on the plays and short stories we read for his class. I did not know what literary criticism was! Nonetheless, as I read, I began to see that this opened up an internal conversation between me and the texts I read that was like my sessions with friends on the meaning of life – though the texts raised the bar of sophistication. Similarly, I began to see study as an extension of the childhood play and conversations with my family. At that point I concluded that immersion in these texts (literary, philosophical, historical, cultural, scientific, and more) was where I needed to be, but I could not express this discovery at the time. However, I was beginning to use intellectual texts to fashion a text within me, in what I would now call the spirit of Freire. I was beginning to ask what I later wrote about in almost every article and book: the worthwhile question – although it would be some years before I could articulate it. In my careers as teacher and professor I have called it the ‘basic curriculum question’. Time and again I have admonished educators, students, and human beings generally, to ask: what is worth knowing, needing, experiencing, doing, being, becoming, overcoming, sharing, contributing, wondering, and imagining? (Schubert, 2009a). That day in the Manchester College library – the moment of my epiphany – I realized that education, even schooling, could be writing the texts of my life. Moreover, I thought it would be good to help others to see that as a central tenet of education for everyone.

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That observation made me think anew about what I wanted to be and do occupationally. Teenage rebellion decided me against following the paths of my relatives as school teachers, despite their success, yet they had never said I should be a teacher. Before that day in the library, every time I took a good course I was inspired to change my mind about my desired occupation – from philosopher or theologian, to anthropologist or novelist, from art critic to sports writer, from biologist to psychologist, from novelist to poet, playwright, or actor, and more. However, at that moment I thought I could be all of these if I were a teacher or theorist of education. Curriculum was not in my vernacular, yet, but I enrolled in a teacher education program, and continued my pursuit of the liberal arts. It was soon clear to me that the liberal arts classes usually taught me more about the new meaning I embraced for education than the teacher preparation courses. The kind of teacher I wanted to be – that exemplified informally by my parents and other relatives – was not what the teacher education faculty offered. I craved the spirit of Paulo Freire, though I was unable to articulate this at the time. Here and there in my liberal arts courses, and through conversation with my enlightened and inspiring professor, I was able to pose and pursue problems and move beyond the banking model of education. Threads of praxis entered the fabric of the text I was becoming in the summer of 1964 when my best friend and I were political interns for senators in Washington, DC. It was the summer of civil rights legislation and being in DC opened me to what city life offered; both enabled my perspective to be less provincial, more cospomolitan, more activist. We were 20 years old and found many experiences that both enriched our sense of possibility and dampened our enthusiasm for careers in formal political spheres. The informal movements were just around the corner for us – facing injustices in spheres of race, gender, and the war in Vietnam. These are merely selective examples of my reading the world, reading the word, writing

the word, writing the world, and even trying to right some of the world. A kind of Freirian spirit resonated within me to re-read and rewrite the text that I was and to revise that text continuously. When I went immediately from college graduation to Indiana University to pursue a Master’s Degree, to avoid killing or maiming on highways or in Vietnam, I found a home in the Department of History and Philosophy of Education. There were several Deweyan scholars there and the Deweyan influence revised the text I was writing, the ways I was reading the world, reading the word, writing my text, and my commitment to read and write texts of and with others. Dewey’s advocacy of starting with the interests and concerns of learners, or mutual concerns of students and teachers, shifted my focus from how texts of liberal education help me read my world more fully, to how the texts of all those I meet serve that function for me, and I hope that my texts do the same for their texts. When I began teaching in elementary schools in the Chicago area in 1967, I soon realized that to teach well I had to read this new world of my life in teaching. However, that notion of reading was not in my vocabulary, but the idea of curriculum was part of my repertoire by then, so I started to play (harkening back to my relatives’ play with me as a child) with curriculum, expanding it beyond the usual meanings: cover the curriculum, uncover the curriculum, discover the curriculum, recover the curriculum, and so on. I thought I needed a curriculum to help me grow as a teacher, a barrage of ideas to enrich my teaching life with students, something that I read every day. So, I began to create a curriculum of self-designed in-service education. Much of it involved books, films, and myriad resources from the Chicago area – including friends. An even bigger part was played by the children who entered my classroom and the wealth of experiences they brought with them. The best of our times occurred when we read and re-read our worlds together and used that reading as

IN THE SPIRIT OF FREIRE

an opportunity to read the words of classroom texts, challenging those texts with the ones we were writing of ourselves, and using those texts to challenge and revise our own texts-in-the-making. Still, I had not heard of Freire. I found much sustenance in Dewey, and in John Holt, Herb Kohl, Jonathan Kozol, and Caroline Pratt, as well as a curriculum book that I felt a kinship with when I read it at Indiana University: Fundamentals of Curriculum Development by Smith, Stanley, and Shores (1957). I saw a lot of Deweyan influence in that text, and much of it resonated to help my text as a teacher grow. Little did I know then that J. Harlan Shores would eventually become my PhD adviser. The school district where I worked had a good library, and a progressive orientation, so I sought curriculum literature that expanded my sphere of study. After six years of teaching and studying, I applied for sabbatical leave to do doctoral studies at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign (UIUC), and I was fortunate to have the application accepted. At UIUC, a college of education with a laudable historic reputation in the curriculum field, I was pleasantly surprised when Harlan Shores told me that there was no program in curriculum studies, so we needed to create a program to fit my needs and interests. I was thrilled. That, I thought, would be a natural continuation of my self-designed inservice education or professional development project, though more scholarly I hoped, since it led to the PhD. I loved working with Professor Shores and other professors to design a set of courses, independent studies, and audited courses, from many fields, conferences, tutorials, and ponderings from my library carrel, to provide a strong basis for writing a dissertation that built on my previous experience and grew from my interests, concerns, and the problems I posed. One of my early courses was about the intellectual roots of open education, then a major phenomenon, and it fit the fact that I had helped design an open school – under

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the guidance of faculty members at the University of Wisconsin and colleagues in the Downers Grove, Illinois, public schools – and had taught there for four years. I was most interested in the roots identified by Professor Bernard Spodek that traced back to Quintilian in ancient Rome, and went through Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Robert Owen, Froebel, Dewey and many other progressives, Margaret and Rachel McMillan, and Michael Polanyi, among others. In that 1973 course we read a mimeographed paper by James B. Macdonald which would be published a year later (Macdonald, 1974). In it Macdonald cited and discussed Paulo Freire’s (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It was my first acquaintance with Freire. Studying Freire’s text gave me the capacity to understand more fully his spirit, much of which I concluded I already knew from multifarious experiences. Nonetheless, finding Freire’s work enabled me to read with greater nuance the world and the word that I experienced through the above stories. After studying much of Freire’s work, the gift of his article (Freire, 1981/1983) from Shirley Steinberg a few weeks ago and her invitation to read and respond fit beautifully with my attempts to write some memoirist stories in my retirement. I was so glad that in this piece Freire focused on his childhood, youth, and young adulthood. In so doing, he inspired me to read more deeply into my own world and the texts written within me. I offer deep appreciation to Freire for emphasizing the non-human dimensions of his reading of the world in which he grew up. The nuance and vibrancy with which Freire sketched for his readers, invoked in me a greater capacity to read similar dimensions of my places of growing: images of homes, their nooks and crannies (in which I played in solitary as a child and as I read Freire’s words I think of myself as he thought adroitly of himself, i.e., reading my world as ‘rationalist in boy’s clothing’, on page 7); similarly, I resonate with Freire’s commentary on the places where he learned to walk, talk, and socialize

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(some of the most profound and taken-­forgranted learnings for all of us); early encounters with written words, lights, colors, and gates (metaphorically as passages, too); encounters with trees, other plants, birds and their songs, and animals (all akin to reading my life as an only child growing up on a farm); and ghosts (I think of loving ancestors, unborn babies, and Chief Seattle’s (1855) warning of hauntings of children massacred by White oppressors). Therein Freire came to know the oppressed, marginalized, hungry, and illiterate, and I thought of how I came to know those realities. When Freire told of earth and sticks as chalkboard and chalk, I thought of the way my wife, Ming Fang He, telling me of how her father taught her to read the world and word with sticks on a dusty path, used to draw and write about a bird seen in the natural settings of China. Freire helped me see the elements of weather and geography (storms, lightning, thunder, lakes, rivers, clouds, islands, wind) as too often taken for granted in reading and writing texts of who we are. Taken together such influences illustrate the need to read and re-read social and political life within contexts of the nonhuman (often neglected, though maybe constituting a different form of living or being). And even with the barrage of dimensions of the world Freire portrayed in this small article, he makes it obvious that any reading of the world can be realized only partially, then more fully realized through successive readings. Despite this, it is impossible to grasp the whole. That all possibilities for any event or situation exist simultaneously is too much to grasp as Borges (1964) brilliantly conveys in his ‘Garden of Forking Paths’, the piece that awakened me to postmodernism in literature. It awakened me, too, to the apprehension of ­living multiple possibilities at once. I think, too, of the relevance of Freirian spirit in the reading and writing of my world in curricula over the years. Some brief examples: (1) I have written of the theory within persons (Schubert, 1982, 1989), meaning that in the process of teaching and learning we

grow our theory of our world, and now with Freire’s (1981/1983) article as a guide my conception of writing the world broadens and deepens. (2) I have argued that one of the best ways to engage in curriculum research is to write speculative essays (Schubert, 1991) and that notion is enhanced by Freire’s writing of the world. I have also elaborated on how much of anyone’s philosophical speculation cannot be written, because it is so vast and diversified, so fully in motion, that it cannot be rendered into words, and that is enhanced in what I see as Freire’s (1981/1983) emphasis to let there be writing that far exceeds what we can grasp in writing processes. Rather, it is embodied, or can only be lived, and that we need to let it thrive in embodiment and shared in dialogue. (3) I have often emphasized that we should be aware of the outside curriculum (e.g., Schubert, 1981, 2010), not only the school curriculum or other institutionalized curricula; outside curricula are formed and reformed from myriad combinations of our lived milieus in multitudes of nonschool settings. Freire’s (1981/1983) article accentuates for me that our reading of the world must embrace even more dimensions, combinations of things, as we write texts of words and texts of being. (4) I have argued that curriculum can never be fully for learners if it is not also of and by them (Schubert and Lopez Schubert, 1981). In the title and throughout the article we said that curriculum must be of, by, and therefore for students, and we illustrated examples from our experiences. As Freire (1981/1983) exemplifies and as he explicated earlier in differentiating problem-posing pedagogy from the banking method of education (Freire, 1970), curriculum as pedagogy must begin with the concerns of learners, their reading of the world. (5) This beginning with the experiences of the learning group struck me early on as so opposed to conventional practice in most schools that political action must be taken to enable it to occur. Realizing this, Freire brilliantly declares, ‘I always saw teaching … to read and write as a political act, an act

IN THE SPIRIT OF FREIRE

of knowledge, and therefore as a creative act’ (1981/1983: 10). It is the basis for asking and pursuing what is worthwhile, who benefits, and for moving to overcome whatever oppresses and skews the benefits. Also, Freire (1981/1983) helps me add nuanced understanding about the position I set forth in Love, Justice, and Education: John Dewey and the Utopians (Schubert, 2009b). My position in that book, based largely on Dewey, was that love must propel justice in education. As I re-read that text I will doubtless ponder for some time Freire’s admonition that the worthwhile teaching–learning situation ‘enables them to understand their indigence differently from the fatalistic way they sometimes view injustice’ leading to ‘organizing and mobilizing’ that in turn enables counter-­hegemony as Antonio Gramsci advocated (Freire, 1981/1983:11). So, what I have been calling the spirit of Freire and his work is a spirit of the best of humanity, never finalized, always in the making, and accessible in his roots (for instance in G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, John Dewey, Erich Fromm, Antonio Gramsci, Martin Buber, liberation theologists such as Gustavo Gutiérrez of Peru or Leonardo Boff of Brazil (see Lake and Kress, 2013)). Perhaps, this hopeful human spirit streams back to revolutionary religious leaders, such as Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Lao-tse, Muhammad, and many more, including persons who are no longer known but whose influence prevails. They share certain common lines of thought and practice, praxis, that should always be emerging, being re-­written, as has been done by authors in this volume. They read and reread words, and living texts that grow from multiple perspectives and pedagogies such as those developed by Joe Kincheloe (2008) and others. I feel fortunate to have shared a spirit of humanity from Freire (e.g., 1970, 1998), which I believe is a special spirit of humanity – a voice of growth, dialogue, justice, peace, and radical love to which all should aspire. Our world of conquest and oppression desperately needs the spirit many have shared with Paulo Freire. That spirit should be nourished so that

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it flourishes for current and future generations, especially empowered by Freire’s (1997: 101–7) heartfelt and steadfast sense of faith and hope in humanity.

REFERENCES Borges, J. L. (1964). The garden of forking paths. In J. L. Borges, (Ed.), Labyrinths: Selected stories and other writings (pp. 31–9). New York: New Directions. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (1981/1983). The Importance of the Act of Reading. Journal of Education, 165(1), 5–11. Freire, P. (1997). Pedagogy of the heart. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (1998). Teachers as cultural workers: Letters to those who dare teach. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Kincheloe, J. (2008). Critical pedagogy primer. New York: Peter Lang. Lake, R. & Kress, T. (Eds.). (2013). Paulo Freire’s intellectual roots: Toward historicity in praxis. London: Bloomsbury. Macdonald, J. B. (1974). A transcendental developmental ideology of education. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Heightened consciousness, cultural revolution, and curriculum theory (pp. 85–116). Berkeley, CA: McCutchan. Schubert, W. H. (1981). Knowledge about outof-school curriculum. Educational Forum, 45(2), 185–99. Schubert, W. H. (1982). Teacher education as theory development. Educational Considerations, 9(2), 8–13. Schubert, W. H. (1989). Reconceptualizing and the matter of paradigms. Journal of Teacher Education, 40(1), 27–32. Schubert, W. H. (1991). Philosophical inquiry: The speculative essay. In E. C. Short (Ed.), Forms of curriculum inquiry (pp. 61–76). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Schubert, W. H. (2009a). What is worthwhile: From knowing and needing to being and sharing? Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 6(1), 21–39.

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Schubert, W. H. (2009b). Love, justice, and education: John Dewey and the Utopians. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Schubert, W. H. (2010). Outside curricula and public pedagogy. In J. A. Sandlin, B. D. Schultz, & J. Burdick (Eds.), Handbook of public pedagogy: Education and learning beyond schooling (pp.10–19). New York: Routledge.

Schubert, W. H. & Lopez Schubert, A. L. (1981). Toward curricula that are of, by, and therefore for students. The Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 3(1), 239–51. Seattle, Chief. (1855). Speech to the Governor of Washington Territory. Smith, B. O., Stanley, W. O., & Shores, J. H. (1957). Fundamentals of curriculum development. [Revised ed.]. NY: Harcourt, Brace, and World.

7 Fake News and Other Conundrums in ‘Reading the World’ at Empire’s End David Geoffrey Smith

Paulo Freire’s articulation of a dialectic between reading the word and reading the world may be one of his most well-known and, indeed, celebrated ideas. It provides the foundation for dialogical pedagogy. It animates adult learners who come to realize that the language of their worldly surroundings can provide a text whose words are readable (decodable) in personally meaningful ways. It anchors learning to read in actual experience rather than in the mystical worlds of abstraction and objectified idealism. It provides an escape from enslavement in what Freire called the ‘natural attitude’ wherein one’s learning receipts are simply accepted as the way things are and unchangeable. In the simplest forms of praxis, all this seems relatively easy and straightforward. This may be termed naïve praxis. If a child loves baseball, you can take the key words of the game – ball, bat, strike, hit, run, walk, inning, etc. – as the basis for learning the very words needed to read stories of your favourite pastime and gradually the broader

world. Such activities could even inspire one to become a baseball writer; Freire always insisted on the importance of understanding the hopes and dreams of learners. (For a good summary study of Freire’s life and work see Gerhardt, 1993.) Things become much more complicated though when the other shoe in Freirean theory drops, namely, that all learning is political. This is when naïve literacy shifts to becoming critical literacy, and here the word critical doesn’t mean adolescent harping on the negative aspects of things, but literally ‘the turning point in a disease’, from the Greek word krisis, so used by early medical researchers like Hippocrates (400 bce) and Galen (200 ce). Start scratching simple words like ball and bat by tracing their material origins and the real stuff, the really difficult stuff, the stuff dealing with nothing less than the deeper truth of things, starts to reveal itself. And this can lead to trouble, which is why Freire flunked his final doctoral oral examination, why he spent several

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of his early adult years in jail, and why most of his adult career was spent in exile from his beloved homeland, Brazil. How things play out depends on where one is located geographically, and while the ends in view of critical work hold much in common regardless of one’s location – a healing of the body politic from its diseases of inequality, injustice, suppression of truth, etc. – the specific nature of that work will vary according to one’s place on the spectrum of power within the prevailing global order. Take the word baseball, for example. If you live in Canada you may be a fan of the Toronto Blue Jays, Canada’s team in Major League Baseball (MLB). As a child you may aspire to being a professional baseball player yourself, so persuade your dad to enrol you in a city kids’ league, or go to the nearest Canadian Tire store to buy some baseballs (and gloves and bats) to practise different skills in the neighbourhood park with other kids. Under the conditions of naïve praxis, yes, referring to the words in the game of baseball is a good way of gaining basic literacy. In this scenario, however, the material origins of a simple baseball never register as a topic of thought or conversation. Baseballs simply are available for purchase at a local store, then … game on!! Forget about the rest. The shift from naïve to critical literacy in this instance depends on not forgetting the rest of the story about baseballs. If Canadian teachers and students pose a simple question, ‘Where and how are baseballs made?’ they could be in for a shock, especially if Costa Rica is a favourite family holiday destination for its sandy beaches and interesting ecotourism. Since 1976 the Rawlings Co. has been the official manufacturer of baseballs used in MLB, and their production facility is in the town of Turrialba, Costa Rica. Originally the company was set up in Haiti, when the right-wing dictator (read friend of the US) ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier was president. In 1990, a socialist (read enemy of the US) Jean-Bertrand Aristide was democratically elected president but this was followed by

political violence and a coup, with Aristide fleeing to Venezuela and Rawlings to Costa Rica. Sarah Blaskey (2014) has written of the troubling conditions for workers who labour ten or more hours a day hand-sewing baseballs for the global market. According to a Costa Rican National Labor Committee report, life in the factory is like ‘living in jail’. Workers are required to keep to a minimum production quota of 156 balls a week. Failure to meet quota results in termination. Eighty per cent of employees suffer from shoulder injury and repetitive motion ailments but can be fired for complaining. A worker can be fired without pay for assisting a co-worker meet quota. Any attempt to form a union will result in termination without pay. The average salary for a Rawlings worker is $1.88 per hour, while in 2013 MLB’s gross revenue exceeded $8.5 billion, average player salary was $3.39 million per annum, and now former Commissioner Bud Selig’s annual salary was reported to exceed $20 million. Rawlings sells its baseballs to the MLB for $45 each, with only 50 cents reaching a worker in the Turrialba plant. Blaskey reports that most Costa Ricans are not interested in playing baseball. When Rawlings established its plant in Costa Rica it was set up in a ‘freetrade zone’ which allows it to pay no tax and no import duties on the necessary raw materials of sheep wool from New Zealand and cowhide from Tennessee. Rawlings is part of a global maquiladora phenomenon which allows US manufacturing companies to set up in impoverished countries, with minimum financial impediment, to benefit from high unemployment rates and consequent cheap labour conditions. Maquiladoras are a common practice of US business foreign policy in many parts of the world. The point is, how many kids in Canada who love baseball are aware of this other narrative of their favourite game? How could they ever find out if such stories never make it to mainstream media? What would happen if a school district tried to make it part of the

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formal curriculum? No doubt there would be strong resistance from the established business community, with accusations of pandering to ‘special interests’. In a course on Globalization that I taught at the University of Alberta, one of the activities was to go to a local shopping mall and ask the retail clerks if they knew the origin of the clothing they were selling and how much financial markup was on it. Most clerks pleaded ignorance, but on several occasions the store manager came out and threw the students out of the store with a directive never to return on threat of mall security being called in. When it comes to critical literacy then, there is a price to be paid. There are systemic elements in place to ensure that the fuller story of material objects and the political arrangements of their production and distribution never gets told. The status quo is under tight control of the rich and powerful, coalescing as the ‘Deep State’, a term coined by Canadian academic-turned-social activist Peter Dale Scott (1996), and which largely operates in secret, with unrelenting brutality if necessary. Yanis Varoufakis (2017) is the former finance minister of Greece who fought against the debt-accumulating bailout packages being forced on Greece by Wall Street banks and the International Monetary Fund. In 2015, a meeting was arranged with Larry Summers, Treasury Secretary of the United States (and former president of Harvard University) for Varoufakis to present the Greek case. In a moment of great poignancy, Summers looked Varoufakis straight in the eyes and declared that in politics there are two kinds of people, insiders and outsiders:

the geopolitical power structure. Everyone else can enjoy their opinions, theories, and recommendations, but in the end they are irrelevant. Democracy is simply a rhetorical mask behind which the true powers conduct themselves. Varoufakis, an academic economist as well as politician, eventually came to realize that ‘those embedded in the very heart of the network are usually too far inside to notice that there is an outside at all’ (ibid.: 12). All of this confronts critical literacy advocates, critical pedagogues, and other ‘readers of the world’ with a particular set of challenges, both for themselves as well as for the people with whom they work, for a better world as they would envision it. For one thing, secrecy is a guiding rule for those who control the operations of the global economy, at least from the perspective of the contemporary US imperium and the British empire before it. This rule of secret operation is longstanding. In the late 19th-/early 20th c­ entury British industrialist Cecil Rhodes was part of a larger Victorian vision foreseeing a world dominated by Protestant Christian values understood as necessary for a new kind of global federalism with Britain, and later the United States, as both its beacons and exemplars. As Caroll Quigley in his masterful study The Anglo-American Establishment described the goal:

The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price of their freedom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, follow a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do. (8)

One of the educational instruments established to secure this goal was/is the Rhodes Scholarship programme, with the brightest and best from around the empire invited to study at the University of Oxford with a view of grooming them for responsible positions within the emerging global federation (pace Bill Clinton). In the United States, the Rhodes Principle, as it may be called, had later iterations in

In other words, the world is currently run by a cadre of people deeply embedded within

[For Rhodes and his circle it] could best be achieved by a secret band of men united to one another by devotion to the common cause and by personal loyalty to one another. [This] band should pursue its goal by secret political and economic influence behind the scenes and by the control of journalistic, educational, and propaganda agencies. (Quigley: 1949/1981: 49, emphasis mine)

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the emergence of the radical right, starting in the 1950s with the work of James McGill Buchanan who saw in the 1955 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education (mandated desegregation of schooling) a broader principle of the right of government to usurp individual rights and freedoms. For Buchanan and his intellectual heirs, this decision foreshadowed nothing less than an end to economic and political freedom, posing a threat to the very idea of ‘America’, a threat requiring the most sophisticated and organized counterattack possible. Buchanan’s ideas were extended further and into the present by such figures as the Koch family (most notably Charles and David) who have sponsored university-endowed chairs, university presidential appointments, scholarship funding, and think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and in Canada the Fraser Institute, to say nothing of financially supporting mainstream media such as Fox News and CNN. That their own practices may violate the rights and liberties of others does not seem to register in their operating paradigm. And again, secrecy of operations is a given condition of participation in the paradigm. (For an extended discussion of Buchanan, see MacLean, 2017; for Koch, see Mayer, 2016.) Anyone who seriously challenges this Deep State may expect serious personal repercussions. The charge of being a ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ and hence a kook of some sort, is only one of the milder forms of repercussion. As Lance deHaven Smith (2014) has revealed, the very concept of ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ was itself constructed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the Deep State to slander anyone who questioned the orthodox view that the assassination of President J. F. Kennedy was anything other than a random attack by a solitary deranged, possibly communist individual. In Canada, the latest victim may be Professor Anthony Hall of the University of Lethbridge, who was forced to relinquish his position as a consequence of teaching a course trying to objectively assess the evidence that 9/11 was an

event constructed by neoconservatives in the Bush II administration in partnership with the state of Israel (CBC, 2016). Hall has never been allowed to publicly defend himself. In recent years, a view has been consolidating in the United States that the liberal democratic ideal is in crisis, not just because of the difficulties of implementing it, but because such an ideal was actually never part of the vision from the very beginning of the republic. Lewis Lapham, former editor of Harper’s Magazine and founder and editor of Lapham’s Quarterly, has recently written on the ascent of Trump to the presidency of the United States (Lapham, 2018). Personifying the link between money and power, Trump further embodies the second truth, which is that such power operates beyond the constraints of normal law and order. The framers of the US Constitution in 1787 shared the view of John Adams that ‘democracy will infallibly destroy all civilization’ (ibid.: 2). Similarly, James Madison, another Constitution signatory argued that democratic ideals lead the common people into conditions of ‘dangerous agitation for elimination of debts’ and ‘other wicked projects’ (ibid.: 2). The signatories’ political theory was essentially Platonic: the best government is ruled by a privileged wise and virtuous few who define the necessary arrangements for everyone else. John Jay, Chief Justice for the Supreme Court put the matter plainly: ‘Those who own the country ought to govern it’ (ibid.: 2). In more recent history the same scenario has played out again. As Wolfgang Streeck (2016), director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Research has argued it, the social contract between capital and ordinary people that underwrote political and economic policy after World War II began to unravel in the 1970s as the shared prosperity of the welfare state became unsustainable. Economic competitiveness precluded the possibility of fulfilling the rising expectations of the working and middle classes, to say nothing of the role of technology in increasingly undermining the levels of human labour required to

FAKE NEWS AND OTHER CONUNDRUMS IN ‘READING THE WORLD’ AT EMPIRE’S END

that point. The provision of easy credit by central banks, alongside a widespread insistence on the importance of staying in school (and hence out of the labour market) became two strategies through which the capitalist world system allayed a collapse. The strongest measures for survival came in the form of a resuscitation of the Platonic ideal, through the theoretical work of Leo Strauss, Friedrich von Hayek, and his American acolyte Milton Friedman. Neoliberalism economic policy was born along with its political sibling neoconservativism. Back to rule by elites. Turn market logic into a transcendent theology, with the market defined in studiously narrow terms of accumulation; social welfare be damned. Let market discipline be the defining moral trope with tentacles reaching into every aspect of public life, notably education, with the academy today, at least at its highest levels of administration, answering only to the siren of market demands. In the words of theologian Harvey Cox (2016), now ‘the market … is God’. In an ironic, perhaps tragic twist however, the Platonic requirement of virtue in the exercise of power has dropped off, giving way to the venality of pure self-interest. The increasing immiseration of everyday life in socalled democratic societies is simply reflective of the cost of doing business. While Streeck argues that the triumph of neoliberalism in Western societies is now virtually complete with forms of resistence undermined through such strategies as cooptation, this only means, surely, that the need for critical work – ­critical literacy, critical pedagogy – has never been greater, with the need for clear articulation of strategies that can draw people into that truth of things enabling life to be Life, and living more than an endurance contest. The rather bleak scenario drawn above should not be a signal for despair for those who desire a fairer world. As Buddhist theory reminds us, things are always in motion, with breakdowns and breakthroughs inevitably part of the process of Life itself. In concrete terms, there is no justification for believing that the current global arrangement

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of things, for example, is permanent. No amount of military might renders that order impervious to destruction, disintegration, or devolution. Indeed, the inauguration of the Trump presidency in the United States has been a harbinger of unprecedented destabilization on many levels, domestic and international, and in many deep respects this can be read positively if understood as a radical destabilizing of an international system that remained intentionally deaf and blind to its underside. And while nobody knows how things will actually unfold, in the meantime those involved in education, i.e. in the work of protecting the conditions under which life can go on creatively and healthily through the lives of the young, there is much to be done. What remains here, then, is to investigate how critical literacy may be understood and undertaken in the conditions of our current ‘situation’, as Freire would term it. Indeed a critical question may be ‘Is the world in fact readable in the age of “fake news”?’. To begin, I would suggest that the issue of fake news is not really the issue at all, in so far as propaganda and the manipulation of information to suit predetermined purposes is a practice as old as politics itself, as Philip Taylor (2003) has amply documented in Munitions of the Mind: A history of propaganda from the ancient world to the present day. The unique difference today lies in the proliferation of technologies of information and social media, and the saturation of the public sphere with ‘information’ that has suffered a severance from the deep narrative structures of its origins. Information in this context means instantaneous access to facts and figures, stories and images which produce the personal psychological effect of ‘seeming to know’ what is going on, but all this information is presented at such a speed and with such a seductiveness – designed to profit the owners of the technology – that an individual is largely at a loss as regards the ability to verify the truthfulness of any offerings is concerned, websites like FactCheck.org notwithstanding. Informationalism, as it may be

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called, is precisely a symptom of the totalitarian proclivities of the neoliberal state, since all discursive powers have now been subsumed and silenced under a single metaphysic, the fake metaphysic of the free market. The war over fake news currently raging is actually nothing less than a war over who shall control this metaphysic, with older long-standing liberal ‘democratic’ forces trying to preserve a global rules-based (Freeland, 2018) international market system, battling forces that inchoately recognize fundamental hypocrisy at the heart of that system. As Harold Laski (1919) argued in his brilliant deconstruction of the foundations of economic liberalism in Adam Smith’s theory of the free market, while free market logic liberated individuals from the control of the state and the establishment religion behind it, such control being a condition of the mercantilist economic theory that had pertained since the 15th century, the new 18th-century theory of the free market, celebrating ‘private’ enterprise and property, actually produces rather than relieves conditions of immense inequality, immiseration, and slavery. In Laski’s terms, the neoliberal undermining of state power except for the protection of market freedom means for most ‘not merely hardship but degradation of all that makes life worthy. Upon those stunted existences, indeed, a wealthy civilization may easily be builded. Yet it will be a civilization of slaves rather than of men (sic)’ (1919: 179). Such a claim may be quickly denied by most in the North American context but critical literacy must surely point out the nature of slavery in its present form. It is a slavery of the mind, of imagination, of a public sphere that denies entrance to any visions contrary to its own vaunted yet selective claims, a profoundly surveilled society kept intact through engineered strategies of infinite distraction. Today even education is not a space where human beings may gather to openly consider the auspices of their common life; instead it has been rendered as a ‘cattle chute into capitalism’, as Indigenous writer Thomas King (2013) has bluntly described it.

The rendering is subtle but deep, related to the training of desire, with authentic freedom masked by a freedom to choose only what has already been chosen for one through the genius of marketing and propaganda. The crisis, or ‘turning point’ (to invoke the medical history of the term) that must be faced today is the simple fact that the political economic tradition that has brought things to their current form is now inadequate for dealing with the very conditions that tradition has itself created, conditions of immense inequality and immiseration of both spiritual and material kinds. The remedy for this lies in several directions at once. One is the recovery of deep learning and a refusal of any kind of informationalism that neglects the deeply rooted discursive environment out of which genuinely new ideas can arise. In hermeneutic terms, this calls for the recovery of historical consciousness, but in present circumstances this historical consciousness must now recognize what has come upon it to challenge the orthodoxy of its narrative. The very narratives of history undergirding both public and private life within a capitalist order are now under siege from traditions of consciousness other than its own. In Canada, the Indigenous assault on the academy can be read as good news, if taken as a prying open of the underbelly of a belief system wherein undisciplined private-­property ownership and wealth accumulation lie beyond ethical debate, even in the midst of monstrous environmental degradation and widespread pauperization hidden behind convoluted statistics masking real conditions. In Canada, the average debt-to-household income ratio now stands at 171% (Wong, 2017). In real terms, the average Canadian is insolvent, clinging to life on borrowed time and money, highly vulnerable to downturns in global finance. In the United States, 43.1 million citizens live in poverty according to a recent study by University of California, Davis (Center for Poverty Research, 2016). Again as Laski has expressed it: ‘The danger in every period of history is lest we take

FAKE NEWS AND OTHER CONUNDRUMS IN ‘READING THE WORLD’ AT EMPIRE’S END

our own age as the term in institutional evolution…. History is an unenviable record of bad metaphysics used to defend obsolete systems’ (1919: 178). The vision of Chrystia Freeland (2018), Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs is a perfect example of the problem. In an acceptance speech for the ‘Diplomat of the Year’ award granted by the journal Foreign Policy, Freeland invoked Francis Fukuyama’s interpretation of the ‘End of History’ to mean that the half-century of competition between liberalism and authoritarianism had come to an end, with liberalism the victor along with an international ‘rules-based’ order guided by the United States, NATO, and its allies. It is this order that is increasingly under threat by a populist authoritarianism in many parts of the Western world, and which must be combatted, according to Freeland, for the necessary maintenance of that original post World War II order. Freeland’s analysis and vision is breathtaking for its blindness and the limits of its historical understanding, and it may be symptomatic of the condition of ‘insiders’ that Yanis Varoufakis, as mentioned earlier, noted: ‘those embedded in the very heart of the network are usually too far inside to notice that there is an outside at all’ (2017: 12). What is most noteworthy in Freeland’s analysis is its incomprehension of the authoritarianism of the liberal tradition itself in its own international practice. According to Nicolas Davies (2018) of Consortiumnews. com, since 9/11, wars have been conducted by the international ‘rules-based’ liberal order in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and Yemen at a cost of over six million lives. The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University estimates the financial cost of the post-9/11 wars at $5.6 trillion, taken from the public purse. Over 10 million refugees and displaced persons are a further consequence of the wars (Watson Institute, 2018). The point is, the dreamworld represented by figures such as Chrystia Freeland is not only sublimely foolish and not grounded in reality, it is also coming to an end and it cannot

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be resuscitated. The pushback of ‘populism’ is simply a domestic rendering of the pushback of colonized nations against European colonization on foreign soils. The underside has begun to rise up and speak, with a rage and inarticulate frenzy that only the most profoundly oppressed of souls can summon. In Freirean critical literacy terms of reading the world, the most important requirement for those within the Euro-American nexus may be one of re-reading, of re-reading the orthodox narrative from the underside of its history, alongside an owning of the bankruptcy of its own guiding metaphysic. The outsiders in Larry Summers’ paradigm must be read as actually part of the inside; the current insiders must recognize their dependency on the very ones banished by their paradigm to an outside that in actuality has been inside all along. One positive consequence of the unprecedented rise of social media is the erosion of secrecy, the primary weapon of power maintenance, and a blurring of the boundary between public and private action. The real politics, any enduring politics of the future will be guided less by party and ideological loyalties than by easier access to alternative interpretations of both global and domestic developments. A new democracy is being born, still in very nascent stages, of those whose understanding of present circumstances is enlightened by sources often dismissed pejoratively as conspiracist, yet which contains the necessary truths for a more inclusive future, a future where the wounded of the world, those wounded by the hypocrisy of a freedom that is only a freedom for the monied and the selfchosen few, have their legitimate place. This will be a polycentric polymorphous world, supplanting the crazed delusion of ‘full spectrum dominance’ (see Engdahl, 2009) of the neoliberal/neoconservative agenda that has ruled the world since 9/11. In closing I would like to consider a distinction made many years ago by Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, a commentator on a Zen classic, Refining Your Life: From the Zen kitchen to

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enlightenment by Dogen (1237/1983), a 13th-century Japanese Zen master. Following Dogen, Uchiyama makes a distinction between the ‘fact’ of life and the ‘truth’ of life. Roshi tells the story of a married man who falls in love with a young woman working in his office. He consults an advice column about what to do. One might expect the advice columnist to tell the man to ‘wake up’ and take responsibility for his wife and family. Or perhaps not. The point is, whatever advice is taken, there will still be ongoing problems and difficulties. These are the facts of life and playing around with them in dizzying perpetuity is the fate of all who have not faced the ‘truth’ of life which is the deeper reality marked by wisdom, the characteristic of ‘true adults’, as Roshi describes them. This is the sense of reality that pierces through the fact of both fake news and presumed-to-be-nonfake news to reveal the limitations of both for leading to the truth of things, since they are both transitory in nature and inexorably linked to time-bound assumptions about this and that. Efforts to learn the truth of things on the other hand leads to a kind of composure or settlement that is not blind to the travails of the world but is the mark of our true realization as human beings. It is the mark of all the world’s sages whose example invites us to an ever deeper consideration of the auspices of our lives; to lead us from lives of infinite distraction into that truth of life incapable of denial because it is Life itself. How does one, or one’s community, tribe or nation come into this truth? There is a hint in an ancient story of the Buddha when tempted by Mara, the Evil One, to renounce his enlightenment as itself illusory. ‘How do you know you are not deceived even now?’, asked Mara, to which Buddha, while placing his hand firmly on the ground, replied: ‘The earth is my witness’. To experience the truth of life requires a coming down to earth from the fantasies of utopian ideals severed from any fundamental living connection to the earth that sustains all living things. The rage of Indigenous peoples around the

world is precisely over a sense of violation of land and place, largely because the earth is our primary teacher, without which there is no pedagogical authority. Without a deep acquaintance with one’s earthliness, a teacher has not learned enough to have anything of lasting value to say. Today all theories of conquest, including pedagogical theories, are inevitably hatched in heavily rationalized urban environments that have forgotten the consequences of their own unearthliness, the primary consequence being an entrapment in the cage of one’s own subjectivity for which there is no outside, the very definition of the psychotic state. Medication in various prescribed and social forms may seem the only prescription available for this, when the real problem is ‘bad metaphysics’. In Freirean terms, the solution for those of us in the EuroAmerican tradition lies in re-reading the stories of our inheritances from the perspective of those who have been damaged by them, so that new forms of human solidarity may be born, carried by the truth of life, rather than simply by facts, whether fake or presumingnot-to-be-fake. Hard work indeed. Take courage! Study deeply!

REFERENCES Blaskey, S. (2014). Costa Rica’s major league concern. November 12. www.ticotimes.net/ 2014/11/12/costa-ricas-major-league­concern. Retrieved May 10, 2018. CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) News (2016). Lethbridge professor accused of anti-Semitism suspended. October 5. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/tony-hallsuspended-lethbridge-1.3793294. Retrieved March 9, 2018. Center for Poverty Research, UC Davis (2016). What is the current poverty rate in the United States? https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/ faq/what-is-the-current-poverty-rate-in-theUnited-States. Retrieved June 23, 2018. Cox, H. (2016). The market as God. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

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Davies, N. (2018). How many millions have been killed in America’s post 9/11 wars? https://consortiumnews.com/2018/04/25/ how-many-millions-have-been-killed-inamericas-post-9-11-wars-part-3-libya-syriasomalia-and-yemen. Retrieved December 10, 2018. deHaven-Smith, L. (2014). Conspiracy Theory in America. Austin: University of Texas Press. Dogen and Kosho Uchiyama (1983). Refining your Life: From the Zen kitchen to Enlightenment. NY: Weatherhill. Engdahl, F. W. (2009). Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian democracy in the new world order. Wiesbaden: Edition.Engdahl. Freeland, C. (2018). 2018 Diplomat of the Year Chrystia Freeland: Read the Transcript. Foreign Policy. June 14. https://foreignpolicy.com/ 2018/06/14/2018-diplomat-of-the-year-­ chrystia-freeland-read-the-transcript/. Retrieved June 23, 2018. Gerhardt, H-P. (1993). Paulo Freire. Prospects: The Quarterly Review of Education, 23, No 3/4, 349–358. King, T. (2013). The Inconvenient Indian: A curious account of native people in North America. Anchor Canada. Lapham, L. L. (2018). Due Process. Lapham’s Quarterly, XI, No. 2. www.laphamsquarterly. org/rule-law/due-process. Retrieved January 15, 2020. Laski, H. J. (Ed.). (1919/2018). The foundations of economic liberalism. In Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham.

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CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, pp. 162–182. MacLean, N. (2017). Democracy in Chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America. NY: Viking. Mayer, J. (2016). Dark Money: The hidden history of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right. NY: Doubleday. Quigley, C. (1949)/1981). The Anglo-American Establishment. San Pedro CA: GSG and Associates. Scott, P. D. (1996). Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. Berkeley: University of California Press. Streeck, W. (2016). How Will Capitalism End? London: Verso. Taylor, P. M. (2003). Munitions of the Mind: A history of propaganda from the ancient world to the present day. Manchester UK: Manchester University Press. Varoufakis, Y. (2017). Adults in the Room: My battle with Europe’s deep establishment. London: The Bodley Head. Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs (2018). 10.1 million refugees and displaced persons. Watson.brown.edu/costsofwar. Retrieved June 23, 2018. Wong, C. (2017). Canada’s debt-to-householdincome ratio rises to 171 percent, StatCan says. The Star, December 14. www.thestar.com/ business/economy/2017/12/14/canadas-debtto-household-income-ratio-rises-to-171-percent-statcan-says.html. Retrieved June 23, 2018.

8 Freire’s ‘Act of Reading’: Inspiring and Emboldening Hermán S. García

Studying Paulo Freire’s, ‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’1 is challenging and quite thought-provoking. His historical avowal of ‘reading the world always precedes reading the word’2, p. 23 and vice versa is a Freirean proclamation that embodies his notion of criticity regarding the importance of reading as a human act. It obliges the pursuit of an archeological inquiry of literacy itself. The question of whether reading is an art or a science has for time immemorial been a leading interrogative. This million dollar question may never assemble a definitive response, however, it may be worthy of an instructive examination since an overmuch of studies attempted to sanction reading as an exclusive terrain of the now infamous No Child Left Behind leitmotif. Paulo Freire deeply impressed upon us a basic precept in which he undoubtedly depicted the inaccuracy of what we read unless we can firmly grasp the rhythm of our social and cultural terrain (epistemological foundation) within which our lives are situated. Actually, Freire might

have us shadow an archeological literacy centered on experience, beliefs, and habits of the mind that teachers want students and citizens to acquire; that is, an auto report of daily social, cultural, and linguistic engagements that lead to an appreciation of our own diverse, rich lives while wholeheartedly appreciating and celebrating other people’s diversity. Also, Freire would assuredly inspire and embolden us to understand and welcome our lived experiences against the printed word in the context of a continuum from childhood through adulthood vis-à-vis a reminiscent rendezvous of one’s life. Reading the world, according to Freire, requires engaging the world which successively impacts how we live in and with the world. Reading the word propels us to initiate and promote dreams, perceive creations, generate possibilities, and much more, so as to enhance the possibilities of our personal and social evolution with the world of experience against the grain of book knowledge, writ large. For instance,

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what have we read that had a transformative effect or outcome on our lives, but also swayed us or impacted us in the ways it did? Freire, through his teachings, never wanted us to separate our lived experiences (reading the world) from the texts we read or studied (reading the word), that is, books, articles, journals, or newspapers, etc. He offered to help us comprehend that both reading the world and reading the word should not be divorced from each other’s synchronous tenacities. Freire celebrated that the life we live and the work we do builds on the knowledge we use to engage the world and give meaning to life and, as much, the word we read moves us to create our critical understanding of the world. Reading, whether imagined notions of the world or perceptions of the word, provide us a more comprehensive view of life. As we learn about life from reading the world or reading the word, both necessitate literacy engagements in their most dynamic undertaking. Connecting how we experience life coalesced with what we read, perceptively leads the reader to consider various options for interpreting the world. Reasonably, it is a hermeneutic process in which meaning is concentrically inside and outside of the text and the reader. Because reading materials come in fixed arrangements with which a reader engages, the meaning must be negotiated between the written text and the reader’s experience in the world. When two people see the same object, each will perceive diverse images even though they are both viewing the same thing. Their life contexts take them to dissimilar interpretations of meaning and understanding; however, the written word potentially brings their perceptions to

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an analogous insight. Freire’s notion conveys that ‘reading always involves critical perception, interpretation, and re-writing of what is read’ (1983: 11, emphasis in original). The act of reading requires more than consuming information. It necessitates the reader to critically analyze the information she is reading and what the intention of the material might be. Freire repeatedly stated that reading is never neutral; what we read has a particular passion and direction it wants the reader to ingest and acquiesce without question. Thus, the reader must constantly be fully aware of what she is reading because the action always interacts with society, directly and indirectly. Freire insists that we move away from banking education practices to critical practices in which educators move from routine exercises of learning to answer questions to more demanding practices of learning to question answers. Paulo Freire’s essay occupies a language which is capable of disentangling both the world and the word since language itself is constituted by meaning-making symbols that we employ through the act of reading, which affect the ways in which we struggle to acquire views and indulgent, transformative ways of life itself. May Paulo Freire’s writings inspire us to share his vision of The Importance of the Act of Reading!

Notes  1  Paulo Freire, ‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’, Journal of Education Vol. 165, no. 1 (1983): 5–11. 2 Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. Critical Studies in Education Series. Westport, Connecticut and London, UK: Bergin & Garvey, 1987.

9 In Gratitude to Freire Marcella Runell Hall

I was six years old when this paper was originally delivered. I had already lived in four different homes in three different states, I had gone to five different schools and I had endured my parents divorcing, remarrying and a new sibling. My salient identities at the time were White, working class and Irish Catholic. I had also learned to read early on and I was in the beginning stages of exploring text while also learning to ‘read my world’. At that time, I was inspired by Judy Blume and the Nancy Drew franchise; gravitating to women and girls as protagonists, I was searching for the accurate, messy and often unresolved reflections of myself and others. It would be over 20 years later, as a doctoral student, that I would learn about Paulo Freire and his work, philosophies and contributions to education. But his words in this essay continue to resonate so deeply with me today, because as a parent and educator, I am continually mesmerized by witnessing myself and others decoding texts, words, letters and the semiotics of the world. I try to imagine

my daughters, who are biracial, of Irish and Caribbean ancestry, currently eight and four years old, navigating their own experiences of early literacy of both text and the world. I see the way they search for reflections of themselves, feeling sweet relief when they find images and stories that resonate with them and dismay and confusion when they do not. A gift that I received from Freire, and that is evidenced so beautifully in this essay, is that I now see all of my roles: parent, educator, administrator, friend, sister, daughter, partner, community member to be part of my ‘political practice’ as well as my spiritual practice. As Freire writes, ‘language and reality are dynamically intertwined’ (Freire, 1983), and this resonates with me because I think about my entry points into critical consciousness, much of it beginning in my early adolescence. I noted hypocrisies and omissions from trusted adults and teachers as we learned about social injustices such as apartheid in South Africa or the ‘War on Drugs’. I asked many questions, exercising my own ‘curiosity’,

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desperately trying to ‘decipher’ what I was observing regarding race and racism and to reconcile all of it with what I was observing in my community and through the media. But it was not formal education that allowed me to ask these questions and engage in this reading of my world, it was music. And in particular, in the late 1980s and early 1990s it was Hip-Hop music and culture. I was able to bear witness to other young people and adults who were creating art that addressed the questions that I was seeking answers to. It was through artists like Sister Souljah, KRS-One, and Public Enemy that I began to read my world through a more critical lens. I did not know at that time, as a young girl living in South Jersey, that I would one day end up at New York University, and later at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst as a graduate student learning, working and studying with scholars who were accessing the knowledge, symbols and ‘codifications’ present in Hip-Hop to conduct research, and eventually to write my own dissertation. Nor did I know that Paulo Freire’s work would be the cornerstone for my understanding of how

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Hip-Hop had become a critical pedagogy for me and so many in my generation. As Freire so often called for, and does so in this piece, ‘reading always involves critical perception, interpretation and re-writing what is read’ (Freire, 1983) and I attempted to answer that call by contributing my own lens and ‘way of being’ to a culture and body of work that had so generously given so much to me. I am in constant gratitude for Freire’s invitation to participate in our own liberation, and to engage in a process of consciousness raising that transforms the world. I only hope that I am able to introduce these concepts to my children and my students in ways that feel supportive and loving, as Freire’s parents and teachers did for him. And as he has done for the world.

REFERENCE Freire, P. (1983). The Importance of the Act of Reading. Journal of Education, 165(1), 5–11.

10 Of Word, World, and Being (Online) Arlo Kempf

I am a little bit older than Paulo Freire’s ‘The importance of the Act of Reading’ (1983). I was six when he addressed the Brazilian Congress of Reading in 1981, and I could not yet read. Thinking through the writing of this short reply to Freire’s seminal talk, has me, as Freire notes, ‘re-reading an essential moment in my own practice of reading’ (1983: 5, emphasis in original), in order to think about my early reading of the word. It has also provoked a reflective comparison with the experiences of my children. The first book I read on my own was a volume of the Mr. Mugs levelled book series for young readers, by Martha Kambeitz and Carol Roth. Mr Mugs books focus on a fluffy sheep dog and his adventures in a multicultural urban community. The books were aimed at children from mixed-race working class communities like mine, and were a 1970s/1980s liberal anecdote to the whiter-than-white Dick-and-Jane-type readers which had predominated in US and Canadian schools from the 1930s onward.

I don’t remember early acts or practices of reading – but instead the act of having accomplished reading. My success was quantitative; I remember picking up speed and racing through volume after volume of the short readers as if going downhill on a bicycle. Illiterate at noon and literate by 4.30pm, this was a technical accomplishment, and it didn’t look very much like Paulo’s entreaties with trees, who were ‘like persons’ to him or like his commune with context, which made up the world he first read in Recife, Brazil (1983: 6). The world I first read was formed by cement and people. I never have figured out how to read anything other than people and the things they make. My children are a little different. The world they have grown up reading is a little greener than mine was – more sky and water and rock, I think. As a flipside of these greener pastures for my kids and many like them, their early-world texts are often digital, and are seductively interactive. These worlds and words are curated by programmers using

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profit-driven algorithms, often based on the psychology of addiction. For many, the most important interface of world and word is now online, in countless engineered contexts through which much of our primary learning takes place. Words have moved. I recently dropped in to see if they were home, but I couldn’t figure out where they really lived. How do we consider Freire’s assertion of the mutuality of the word and world, and indeed the potential of one preceding the other in light of increasingly digital epistemologies at play in corporate think-spaces such as Facebook™, Google™, Instagram™, Twitter™, Snapchat™, and others which are among our most important learning environments? With unprecedented intensity and concentration, the word and the world are fusing by and within what we might call socio-commercial online spaces (often called search engines and social media/networks), which have become a central location of learning for many children and adults. Many children now learn far more in sociocommercial online spaces than in schools. Bearing in mind Freire’s linking of word and world with the very nature of being (and of being human), we may ask what it means to be online. In his later years, Freire (proudly) talked of having been a curious boy who became a curious old man. Absent in his experience (absent his being) were clickbait stories and graphics, YouTube™ spirals, and the shortterm dopamine rewards that come with digital likes and notifications. Such behaviours are indeed acts of engaged curiosity and reading. They are acts of learning and being, online. They take place in spaces designed and operated by our most important contemporary architects – the social programmerscum-engineers of our online being. These discursive producers create the structures through which learning and knowing (and thus being) online are possible. They have built the monetized online playgrounds/ padded cells whose constituent features and limitations (shapes, edges, borders) offer a

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delimited range of axiologies, epistemologies, and ontologies (i.e. specific ranges of knowing and being). On offer in these spaces are curricula (e.g. social media users provided with/navigated to, certain materials/sites), classrooms (e.g. the rooms, designs, limits, restrictions, and possibilities of certain sites), and structures/rules (e.g. the types of content, communication, and interactions possible in online socio-commercial environments). Although the routes of knowing and being may feel exploratory, they are often highly determined – following a pre-drawn algorithmic road map. Being and navigating online combine wandering and being invisibly but firmly guided. As Umaja Noble’s (2018) work illustrates, search engines use proprietary algorithms which combine the popularity of certain searches, the promotion of particular products and services, and data capture considerations in order to curate what we find. While all sources/sites should be carefully evaluated for reliability and accuracy (although this is too often not the case) a more complex problem emerges in the (pre) selected nature of the results that algorithms make easily available, as well as the order in which sources are made available by commercial search engines and within sociocommercial online spaces. While traditional libraries have intentional collections which limit selection, as well as librarians who curate library access and organization, such decisions are not typically driven by profit. Where traditional dictionaries and encyclopedias reflect the significant biases of their authors and the socio-cultural contexts from which they emerged, they are at least organized alphabetically. In the 21stcentury formation of these resources (the commercial search engine) we see the same biases present; however, the principles of organization are now kept secret and reflect the additional forces of monetization and popularity. The resulting phenomenon of filter bubbles is not an accidental bi-product, but rather a logic of information distribution that encourages profitable online behaviour

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and being by readers (cum consumers, cum widgets, cum raw material as data points) wherein readers are exposed to fewer and fewer divergent ideas and opinions. Our online worlds often shrink as they grow. While masquerading as a chance to step into a commons, performing a Google™ search is a form of entering private property – a Habermasian life-world, public sphere decline (Habermas, 1984). Similarly, our online sociocommercial spaces are essentially gated communities with their own rules, opportunities, and monetizations. The programmer/architect is an archeologist of the present, running realtime analyses of big data to understand people and groups deeply and differently in order to make money. The world’s new gathering place (this new home for learning and being where the word meets the world) is extraordinary. My son and daughter are reading many first digital worlds, all ecosystems (or Deleuzean rhizomes) in and of themselves – yet infinitely and fixedly connected (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004). At the same time, the human agentive elements of socio-identity (the biases, preferences, and invisible hatreds and blind spots of programmers and users) bleed through from the source code to the end user sitting at a computer or holding a phone. These stains are visible when Google™ searches for ‘women’ yield a pornographic inventory of objectification, and searches for ‘Black women’ in particular, offer a colonial and violent prospectus of sexualization and subjugation. All architecture is political, and socio-commercial online spaces are no exception. The objects of technological use through which we access online worlds are also an interesting site of both visible/invisible objectification and oppression – take, for example, the cell phone’s ‘hidden’ components, such as environmental degradation due to the mining of rare earth metals or the oppression that ensues when tech waste is shipped from the Global North to the Global South. The long discursive arc of these commercial online learning spaces is, so far, a dominant

one. Dominance is ­ profitable. Processes of online being can work to straighten, to whiten, to gender-define, etc. as part of cultivating capitalist subjects and subjectivities. As sites of production and reproduction, socio-­ commercial online spaces often rely upon both macro- and micro iterations of race, gender, class, ability, sexuality, coloniality, and other socio-political phenomena. Being online imprints onto being offline. An offline search for a person likely includes the pedagogy of the online algorithm – the learnings of how to be, gleaned intentionally and unintentionally from socio-commercial online spaces. These processes are of course reflexive as well; we learn how to perform (how to be) our own gender(s), race(s), sexualities, abilities, etc. As a typology, Freire’s principles of word and world apply to contemporary learning and being in socio-commercial online spaces, just as they do to Freire’s own first words and worlds. There is, however, a severity, perhaps even a discursive violence to the way word and world fuse with performativity in public constructions of self in these socio-­ commercial online spaces of learning and identity formation/expression. While my early experiences with reading may have been unfortunate in terms of me being disengaged from all but the technical aspects of reading, this disconnect may have been a quiet and accidental mitzvah from the dying days of pre-digital literacy. I learned how to read without being really read. As far as I could tell, Mr. Mugs had nothing to do with me, so the connection between word and world was tenuous (for many reasons). While there was some performance involved (I was learning to read because school insisted), I was not constituting self in a perpetual cycle of (re)writing and publishing online written and graphic bios which were personally definitive (i.e. profile/status descriptions, pictures, and updates). This near-constant and simultaneous production and performance of self is an a priori part of online being (and learning), common to many young people and

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adults who exist as carefully self-­assembled profiles on various social media/networking sites (i.e. socio-commercial online knowing and learning spaces). Of course, much online learning is critical, dialogical (if not dialectical), and even liberatory. Among the central challenges of a contemporary reading of Freire is thus recognizing the nexus of word, world and monetization, identity formation/location, and the concurrent impacts on being in the world – whether online or not. Key here is noticing and valuing what learning looks, feels, and sounds like when undertaken and facilitated apart from commercial goals: asking specifically, how we can better support and understand the separation of education from neoliberal capitalism when it comes to online learning. Attention to being in these contexts, to structure as well as to agency and identity, will necessarily guide our liberatory engagements and disengagements with online learning and being. While only half of the world’s population was predicted to have internet access in 2018 (UNESCO, 2017), our socio-commercial spaces are marching quickly toward a truly global (private) commons. As we consider how the remaining half of the human population will engage and be engaged pedagogically

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online in the coming years, the necessity of epistemic disobedience and resistance on one hand, and of the co-construction of liberatory epistemological spaces and practices of being on the other, become ever more clear. Freire’s work continues to offer primary tools with which to make our way forward – navigating world, word, identity, and community together in disruption, together in critical popular voice and agency, and together in cahoots.

REFERENCES Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2004). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Freire, P. (1983). ‘The importance of the act of reading’, Journal of Education 165 (1): 5–11. Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action. Boston: Beacon Press. Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York: NYU Press. UNESCO Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development. (2017). The state of broadband 2017: Broadband catalyzing sustainable development. UNESCO. Retrieved from: https://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-s/opb/pol/ S-POL-BROADBAND.18-2017-PDF-E.pdf.

11 The Critical Redneck Experience Paul L. Thomas

How can anybody know/How they got to be this way?1

The first time I spoke with critical scholar Joe Kincheloe, it was by phone. A few words in, Joe exclaimed, ‘You are from the South, aren’t you!’. Joe and I had traveled similar paths, his earlier and much more successful than mine, but similar none the less. The journey to critical consciousness, sprung from the contaminated soil of the South. I was in my 30s before I discovered Critical Pedagogy, and Joe served as a vital critical mentor for me in my 40s. Where did all that begin? As Paulo Freire examines in ‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’,2 my critical life was paradoxically nurtured in my home, specifically by my mother – that home and community a deeply racist one, a place of tradition and blind deference to authority (embodied by my father). In June 2017, my mother suffered a stroke. Within two weeks, my father died sitting in a

wheelchair beside my mother bereft of communication. Five months later, my mother died as well after Stage IV lung cancer was discovered and pronounced untreatable. My nephews and I were tasked with cleaning out my parents’ home, where my childhood books still sit on the crowded bookshelf: Hop on Pop; Green Eggs and Ham; One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish; Go, Dog, Go! ‘It is important to add that reading my world, always basic to me’, Freire explains, ‘did not make me grow up prematurely, a rationalist in boy’s clothing’ (1983: 7, emphasis in original). And for me, that growing up, that critical awakening, was painfully slow. But I, too, recognize: ‘It was precisely my parents who introduced me to reading the word at a certain moment in this rich experience of understanding my immediate world’ (ibid.: 7). The great paradox of my parents as the source of my critical awakening is that they had unwittingly opened the door to my recognizing and then rejecting the blind bigotry of my

THE CRITICAL REDNECK EXPERIENCE

home, my community. From reading Dr. Seuss as a child, I moved to comic books and science fiction films and novels as a teen, then to literary fiction as a young adult – William Faulkner uncritically beside Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and Alice Walker. White parents birthed me, but Black authors saved my life. Freire’s reading the world and re-reading the world rests always in my thoughts as I navigate the world with a critical consciousness that surpasses the accidents of birth but incessantly redefines who I am. I now live with the ghosts of my parents, the baggage they represent, and the bittersweet memories of people I loved and cherished as much as I struggled to understand without being distraught. Reading my life, and then re-reading that life.

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The critical life is never completed: not a destination, but a journey, a recursive journey that carries the entire journey along as the new journey is created. ‘Reading the world always precedes reading the word,’ Freire acknowledges, ‘and reading the word implies continually reading the world’ (ibid.: 10). This is my being; this is my becoming.

Notes 1  Peter Katis and Paul Mahajan, ‘Daughters of the Soho Riots’, The National A ­ lligator, April 12, 2005. https://genius.com/The-national-­d aughtersof-the-soho-riots-lyrics. Retrieved January 15, 2020. 2  Paulo Freire, ‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’, Journal of Education Vol. 165, no. 1 (1983): 5–11.

12 On Learning to Claim Text Christine E. Sleeter

In 1995, I left Wisconsin to help found California State University, Monterey Bay. I had not previously pondered differences between the California State University (CSU) and the University of California (UC) systems; differences that, I came to realize, demand a critical reading. First, since tuition in the CSU system is cheaper than in the UC system, its students are far more likely to be from working class communities, and are considerably more racially ethnically diverse than in the UC system. About one-third of CSU students are the first in their families to attend university (California State University, 2017). Much has been written about challenges of firstgeneration students, including relatively weak skills in reading, mathematics, and critical thinking (Terenzini et al., 1996). Second, while the UC system is designed to produce researchers and theorists, the CSU system is designed to produce workers. As a friend put it to me once, the UC system prepares knowledge creators and the CSU system

prepares knowledge consumers. Her observation pinpointed a troubling issue: policymakers managing ‘the competing demands of egalitarianism and competitive excellence’ (Bastedo and Gumport, 2003: 358) in a way that reproduces stratification based on race, ethnicity, and social class. After analyzing differentiated university missions in two Eastern seaboard states (Massachusetts and New York), Bastedo and Gumport (2003) concluded that who actually gets access to what, is an important question that gets asked too rarely. As they put it: ‘Well prepared students at research universities have access to a wide variety of academic programs and disciplines, while students at state college may face a situation where comprehensive coverage of the disciplines is no longer a priority’ (ibid.: 358). I came to realize that the funding structure and degree authorization for the CSU assumes knowledge consumption more than knowledge creation. PhD programs are not offered, teaching loads are high, and faculty are not expected to procure

ON LEARNING TO CLAIM TEXT

large research grants nor prioritize research. In other words, students like ours were generally expected to consume knowledge produced by their Whiter and more affluent counterparts, predicated on the assumption that most brought neither the inclination nor the advanced academic skills to critique and produce knowledge themselves. Indeed, many of our master’s degree students had been the first in their families to attend university, and most were the first in their families to attend graduate school. But my colleagues and I wanted to disrupt institutionalized patterns that afforded our students a work-oriented domesticating education (Sleeter et al., 2005). As Nguyen and Nguyen point out, the research on first-generation students has given too little attention to ‘how graduate education is structured – by dominant forms of capital – to differentially regulate the achievement of students’ (2018: 168). Freire taught us that ‘[r]eading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world’ (1983: 10). My colleagues and I asked: shouldn’t our working class, racially and ethnically diverse students learn to critically read their own world, and to create knowledge for themselves in an effort to act on it (Sleeter et al., 2005)?

SITUATING MYSELF Freire invites us to consider our work in relationship to our own childhoods, reflecting on that time when we first began to read our own world, and to connect that reading with text. I recall learning to see the pen as a tool of thought and expression – even before I actually knew how to read. When I was four or five, my mother helped me create books. I would tell her a story, she would write down my words, we would discuss the story as she read it back to me, and I would illustrate it. While the substance of my stories reflected what was relevant to a young child – the family pet, flowers in my mother’s garden, my stuffed elephant – I learned early on that

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text could represent analysis of life, and that I had the power to produce text, even before I learned to consume it. I could create a world through text, a world based on my reading of the world around me. As a daughter of a physician, I grew up having access to teachers who assumed I would become a leader, and who pushed me accordingly. One of my high school English teachers, for example, organized us into student-led groups to read and analyze novels. A high school history teacher ran his Ancient History course like a university-level Socratic seminar. In contexts such as these, I learned to analyze text, consider origins of ideas, debate ideas, and propose my own insights. While my schooling rarely afforded a political reading of the world and the word, it regularly honed my skill and comfort with textual analysis and critical thinking. Wouldn’t all students benefit from a similar kind of teaching?

TEACHING WORKING CLASS STUDENTS TO CLAIM TEXT My colleagues and I intentionally oriented the Master of Arts in Education program at California State University, Monterey Bay ‘around knowledge production in which educators from local communities, working with knowledge frameworks and theoretical traditions that have arisen within historically oppressed communities, create knowledge that is of, by, for, and about the community and its own empowerment’ (Sleeter et  al., 2005: 290). In addition to completing graduate-level courses, our students pro­ duced theses that we structured much like doctoral dissertations, although, as we explained, ‘rather than writing a traditional knowledge production thesis, our students learned to use research and personal experience to renegotiate their environment and, in that process, themselves’ (ibid.: 294). But few of our students came to us seeing

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k­ nowledge as something they could produce, and text as something they could own. For example, one day my students were discussing articles I had assigned, one of which was James Banks’ (1993) ‘The Canon Debate, Knowledge Construction, and Multicultural Education’. My intent was that they would use this article (along with others) to dig into epistemological questions about the nature of knowledge and who produces it, in preparation for mining their own experiential knowledge and writing based on their analysis. I was surprised when several students questioned why I had asked them to read what this White man had written. When I explained that Banks is Black, they wondered why he wrote like a White person. Students then talked more broadly about how they saw research: research is written in a way that sounds White and not at all like people actually speak; it has status; and it isn’t particularly useful. On the contrary, anything they would write from their own experience is certainly relevant, but does not sound educated, lacks status, and therefore could not be viewed as significant. I wish I had Freire’s ‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’ (1983) at the time to share with my students. I did not. But my colleagues and I insisted that our students begin with concerns in their own classrooms, schools, or lives, analyze those concerns, learn to gather and work with data that would help them dig deeper, read research and theory that expanded their analysis, then produce knowledge enabling the concerns to be addressed. We ‘conceptualize the action thesis as a process through which students learn to use research to transform their environments, collaborating with their communities’ (Sleeter et al., 2005: 294). And gradually they did. Examples of their work included ‘building a parent-school partnership to support literacy development in a bilingual school, working with young adult students to transform curriculum so that it responds to them, and collaborating with colleagues in a low-income school to bring computers into classroom instruction’ (ibid.: 294).

As they learned to uncover the political and epistemological positions from which theorists wrote, our students began to claim their intellectual homes. Gradually, they learned, as Freire describes it, to insert themselves into the text they read and the text they wrote. By engaging in critical conversations and approaches to claiming research, they completed significant work that was far more complex and useful than they had originally believed they were capable of. Knowing became a personal and a political act. While we did not transform a system that limits working class students’ access to critical reading and production of knowledge, by pushing against that system, we exposed flawed assumptions on which it is based.

REFERENCES Banks, J. A. (1993). The canon debate, knowledge construction, and multicultural education. Educational Researcher 22 (5), 4–14. Bastedo, M. N. & Gumport, P. J. (2003). Access to what? Mission differentiation and academic stratification in U.S. public higher education. Higher Education 46 (3), 341–359. California State University (2017). Fact Book. Long Beach, CA: Office of Public Affairs, California State University. Freire, P. (1983). The importance of the act of reading. Journal of Education 165 (1), 5–11. Nguyen, T. H. & Nguyen, B. M. D. (2018). Is the ‘first-generation student’ term useful for understanding inequality? The role of intersectionality in illuminating the implications of an accepted – yet unchallenged – term. Review of Research in Education 42, 146–176. Sleeter, C., Hughes, B., Meador, E., Whang, P., Rogers, L., Blackwell, K., Laughlin, P., & Peralta-Nash, C. (2005). Working an academically rigorous, multicultural program. Equity & Excellence in Education 38 (4), 290–299. Terenzini, P. T., Springer, L., Yaeger, P. M., Pascarella, E. T., & Nora, A. (1996). First-generation college students: Characteristics, experiences, and cognitive development. Research in Higher Education 37 (1), 1–20.

13 ‘I Am a Revolutionary!’ William Ayers

Books are call’d for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half sleep, but, in the highest sense an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay – the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or framework. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of supple and athletic minds, well-train’d, intuitive, used to depend on themselves, and not on a few coteries of writers. Walt Whitman (Whitman, 1888)

I began teaching in the mid 1960s in a small Freedom School affiliated with the Civil Rights Movement. I’d been arrested in an anti-war action and served 10 days in county jail with several activists who were finding ways to link teaching and education with deep and fundamental social change. They were following John Dewey and W. E. B. Du Bois at that point, and learning about public pedagogy from Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement. Helen Keller had

written something we passed around: ‘We can’t have education without revolution. We have tried peace education for 1,900 years and it has failed. Let us try revolution and see what it will do now’ (George, 2013). I walked out of jail and into my first teaching position, and from that day until this I’ve thought of myself as a teacher, moreover, I’ve taken teaching to be a project naturally and intimately connected with social change, love, and justice. After all, the fundamental message of the teacher is this: you can change your life – whoever you are, wherever you’ve been, whatever you’ve done, another world is possible. As students and teachers begin to see themselves as linked to one another, as tied to history and capable of collective action, that fundamental message shifts slightly, becoming broader and more generous: we must change ourselves as we come together to change the world. Teaching invites revolutions large and small – and large.

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The following year I became an organizer for the East Side Community Union in Cleveland, Ohio. The Community Union was an extension of the Southern Civil Rights Movement into the North – a grass-roots effort to organize and mobilize disenfranchised and marginalized people suffering under the yoke of White supremacy into a powerful social movement to effectively fight for their own needs and aspirations, and in so doing, transform themselves and society, and upend the known world. Our rallying cries were ‘Let the People Decide!’, ‘Build an Interracial Movement of the Poor!’, and ‘The People with the Problems are the People with the Solutions!’. My immediate task was to start a full-day preschool program for kids in our neighborhood. I was 20 years old – and remarkably unqualified. We believed then that legitimate and just social change could only succeed if it were led by those who had been pushed down and locked out, and that struggle in the interest of the most oppressed people in society held the key to fundamental transformations – internal and personal as well as social and collective – that would free everyone from the nightmare of racial capitalism and colonial occupation. We saw our political and educational work as deeply ethical work – organizing and teaching as righteousness. The Community Union lived for only a few years. It was founded in 1964, shortly after Reverend Bruce Klunder was run over by an earth-mover and killed during a Movement sit-in at the Lakeview Avenue construction site of what was planned by power to become another segregated and dysfunctional ghetto school, and gone by the time Ahmed Evans and a group of young Black nationalists engaged in a deadly shoot-out with the Cleveland police from a Lakeview Avenue apartment in 1968. In between there was struggle, hope, possibility, occasional heroism, and one of the most loving attempts to change all that’s glaringly wrong in our society.

I came of age in those few years in Cleveland, and so much of what I experienced still resonates, still grips me, and still holds lessons for freedom-fighters all these years later. I began teaching in Cleveland before Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1970) was published, and so my greatest influence at the start was Charlie Cobb, a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) volunteer and a student at Howard University, Washington, DC, who’d written a brief proposal in 1963 to build Freedom Schools in order to to re-energize and re-focus the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi (Cobb, 1963). Cobb claimed that while the Black children in the South were denied many things – decent school facilities, an honest and forward-looking curriculum, fully qualified teachers – the fundamental injury was ‘a complete absence of academic freedom, and [that] students are forced to live in an environment that is geared to squashing intellectual curiosity, and different thinking’ (ibid: 250). For Cobb and others, the busted furnace and the collapsed roof provided a precise metaphor for the broken world that White supremacy had engineered and installed. He named the classrooms of Mississippi ‘intellectual wastelands’ (ibid: 250), and he challenged himself and others ‘to fill an intellectual and creative vacuum in the lives of young Negro Mississippi, and to get them to articulate their own desires, demands and questions’ (ibid: 250). Their own desires, their own demands, their own questions – for African Americans living in semi-feudal bondage, managed and contained through a system of law and custom as well as outright terror, this was an expansive opening of the radical imagination – and a life-or-death challenge. Cobb was urging students to question the circumstances of their lives, to wonder about how they got to where they were, and to think about how they might change things if they wanted – his proposal was insurrection itself, and he knew it. He was crossing hard lines of propriety and tradition, convention and common sense, poised to break the law

‘I AM A REVOLUTIONARY!’

and overthrow a system. His proposal was designed to challenge the taken-for-granted, shake the settled, plow a deep and promising furrow toward awareness and liberation. He was proposing a curriculum of questionasking and problem-posing, and inviting Freedom School teachers to risk teaching the taboo. The schools became spaces where freedom could be enacted and where people could affirm their own humanity and experiences, building their projects on the rock of their own strengths, their own insights and wisdom: ‘If we are concerned with breaking the power structure’ (ibid: 250). Cobb wrote, ‘then we have to be concerned with building up our own institutions to replace the old, unjust, decadent ones’ (ibid: 250). His proposal was typical of the strategy and tactics of the Civil Rights Movement at its best: it articulated a radical critique of the status quo and demanded fundamental social change while simultaneously enacting on the ground a practice of participatory democracy and simple justice. People named the world as it was, even as they came together to imagine a world that could be, but was not yet; they organized themselves to live against the oppressive and unjust grain – in this spot, for this moment – in that freer, more vibrant, and robust imagined world. The 1964 Mississippi Freedom School Curriculum was the handbook I carried into my work as a preschool teacher/organizer. In the midst of our efforts in Cleveland, and in manipulative response to the massive rebellion of African Americans sweeping the country, agents of government-sponsored poverty programs appeared. Their first step was a ‘community needs assessment’ in which they surveyed neighborhood people in an attempt to ‘define problems and craft solutions’. Instead of asking about the strengths and capacities and wisdom already in the community, their ‘scientifically’ developed questionnaire looked only at deficiencies; instead of attending to problems as shared and social, they focused on individual ‘deficits’; instead of uncovering root causes and

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targeting specific structural obstacles and actual adversaries, they stopped short of collective action. Our call for community power was recast as ‘empowerment’; our demand for self-determination became ‘selfhelp’; our insistence on ‘Freedom Now!’ was re-branded as individual choice. In short, while the ‘poverty pimps’ (as Movement people called them) deployed the rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement, they shared none of its spirit – they displayed no interest whatsoever in unleashing human agency, securing justice, nor challenging the larger system which stamped bigotry and prejudice into the very fiber of law and custom. Even the best of the so-called poverty programs were broken or defective in this way. Head Start, which conservatives attacked at its inception as a communist plot, the socializing of child-rearing, and a frontal assault on family values, liberals defended as a symbol of doing something good for the poor, creating a more ‘level playing field’. The meritocratic and hierarchic realities of schools and society were never questioned, and once again, some imagined character flaw in Black or poor people was blamed for the conditions of their oppression. The first brochures explaining Head Start to parents and staff described the poor as living in ‘islands of nothingness’, and it was out of nothingness that the do-gooders would lift up the children of the poor. This is not policy that loves or supports families or children, nor is it policy that understands or builds upon assets found within actual communities. Rather, this kind of policy makes acceptance of degradation and self-denial the initial cost of participation – paint yourself pathetic and earn a pat on the head and a small charitable handout. Simultaneously, the Civil Rights Movement was evolving and transforming into the Black Freedom Movement. There was a generational shift to be sure, but there was also a growing sense that Black Liberation had an organic connection to anti-imperialist national liberation struggles

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exploding around the world from South Africa to Algeria and from Cuba to Vietnam – Malcolm X made the link concretely, beyond metaphor. The Black Arts Movement burst onto the scene at the same time, offering a fresh, revolutionary aesthetic as well as an opening to reimagine the Black struggle and to resist both complacency and cooptation. There was, as well, a sad but steadily growing recognition that the important victories of the Movement (integrating public accommodations, passing national voting rights, and civil rights legislation) had added up to neither freedom nor justice. The failure to seat the insurgent Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegates at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City in 1964, and the willingness of the Democratic Party leadership to sell out the Movement and seat instead the White supremacist ‘regular’ Democrats was pivotal – it showed many activists that any theory-of-change that relied on appealing to the consciences of good White people was corrupt and hopeless. People became clearer and stronger in their calls for justice, not optics, and for liberation, not integration. I don’t want to find my place inside your rotten society, one activist said at the time, I want to create a world where my humanity is no longer a question. When Stokely Carmichael, the charismatic and brilliant leader of SNCC, called for Black Power during the Mississippi March Against Fear in 1966, he both echoed and accelerated a sentiment that had been growing steadily within the Movement, especially among young activists, for several years. There was no sharp break or clear distinction between Civil Rights and Black Liberation, the ‘good 1960s’ vs. the ‘bad 1960s’, or the Beloved Community opposed to Black Power – Carmichael and many others embodied both. Stokely Carmichael traveled the country after the Mississippi March, meeting with Movement organizers coast-to-coast, and when he came to Cleveland, his message to us was clear: the old strategies and tactics are exhausted and something new is

in the air; freedom is not a gift from above, but an achievement of a self-activated community exercising its own agency; equality will never be won without first gaining selfdetermination for the oppressed; Black folks need to develop their own leadership; and, yes, Black is Beautiful! He argued that Black Liberation could never be based on changing White people’s minds: We need power over our own communities so that, no matter what the White man thinks, we can be safe and free. His argument to the White organizers and activists was equally clear: the best thing you can do today is to go directly to the place that generates the problem – go and organize White people against racism. Some Whites felt miserable and betrayed, and left the struggle altogether; others took the challenge to think more deeply about the dagger at the heart of the American experience, and to find a way to deepen and sustain a commitment to fundamental change. I left Cleveland and threw myself into teaching and organizing within the student movement. When Pedagogy was published in the United States and I first encountered Paulo Freire, I felt I was meeting an old friend, or a father I didn’t know I had – the pedagogy of the Black Freedom Movement was, indeed, a pedagogy of the oppressed, and the parallels between Freire’s experiences in Brazil and Cobb’s insights in Mississippi were striking. Both understood that education is never neutral and that it always has a value, a position, a politics; both approached teaching as a political, ethical, and creative act; both knew that the students were the teachers of the teacher and that unlocking the wisdom in the room was the key to a curriculum of illumination and transformation; both acknowledged as foundational the act of experiencing and knowing the world – ‘reading the world’ – as dynamic, generative, and linked to reading the word; both deployed a pedagogy of dialogue, problem-posing and question-asking (what does it mean today to be a free person living in a humane society?) that foregrounded student creativity and agency; both

‘I AM A REVOLUTIONARY!’

assumed that self-transformation is in a perpetual dance of the dialectic with changing the world. Years later on a delegation to the Bolivarian Revolution, I witnessed another iteration of what I now saw as a dialectic of liberation – a pedagogy of the oppressed and a freedom school – in the hills above Caracas. As we made our way to a literacy class late in the day along a long and winding road, someone noted that the wealthy – here and everywhere – have certain received opinions, a kind of absolute judgment about poor and working people, and yet they have never traveled this road, nor any road like it. They have never boarded this bus up into these hills, and not just the oligarchy or the wealthy – this lack of first-hand knowledge, of open investigation, of generous regard is also a condition of the everyday liberals, and even many of the radicals and armchair intellectuals whose formulations sit lifeless and stifling in a crypt of mythology about poor people. Everyone, I thought, should come and travel these roads into the hills – and not just once, but again and again – if they will ever learn anything of the real conditions of life here, surely, but more important than that, if they will ever encounter the wisdom and experience and insights embodied in every human being, even the most humble. We arrived at eight o’clock to a literacy circle already underway in a small, poorly lit classroom. And yet here in this dusky space, a light was shining: 10 people had pulled their chairs close together – a young woman maybe 19, a grandmother perhaps 65, two men in their 40s – each struggling to read. And I thought of a poem called ‘A Poor Woman Learns to Write’ by Margaret Atwood about a woman working laboriously to print her name with a stick in the dirt – a parallel to Freire’s memories of his childhood writings where ‘[t]he earth was my blackboard; sticks my chalk’. She never thought she could do it, the poet notes, not her – this writing business was for others. But she, indeed, accomplishes the task and prints

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her name, her first word so far, and she looks up and smiles. The woman in the poem – just like the students in the class – was living out a universal dialectic that embodies education at its very best: she wrote her name, she changed herself, and she altered the conditions of her life. As she wrote the word, another world became – suddenly and surprisingly – possible. Education contributes to human liberation to the extent that people reflect on their lives, and, becoming more conscious, insert themselves as subjects in history. To be a good teacher means above all to have faith in the people, to believe in the possibility that people can create and change things. The Black Freedom Movement and the Bolivarian Revolution are instantiations of that fact. SNCC organizers in Lowndes County, Alabama began to build an independent Black-led party after 1964, away from the scheming Democrats, and when, in order to appear on the ballot, they had to choose a symbol for the party, they picked a powerful image of a black panther in the wild. From then on the Lowndes County Freedom Organization was popularly called the Black Panther Party – and an enduring emblem was born. When Stokely Carmichael spoke in Oakland, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, two young nationalist organizers, adopted the panther symbol and formed a new organization: the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. White Americans finding easy comfort in nonviolence and the radical love of the civil rights movement must reckon with the unsettling fact that black people in this country achieved the rudiments of their freedom through the killing of whites. Ta-Nehisi Coates, ‘Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?’ (Coates, 2012)

The bloody Civil War was begun by Confederate traitors willing to blow up the whole house in defense of a single freedom: their professed right to own other human beings.

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That war never ended – the afterlife of slavery included the infamous Black Codes, chain gangs, segregation and redlining, Jim Crow laws, and the organized terrorism of lynching and night-rides. Now the afterlife of the afterlife abides in the serial murder of Black people by militarized police forces, the Thirteenth Amendment and mass incarceration, separate and unequal schools, disparate health outcomes, and the creation and perpetuation of ghettos through law and public policy, just to name a few atrocities. The Civil Rights Movement was one courageous response to the ongoing terror and oppression of White supremacy, Black Power and the Black Panther Party another. And as long as the nightmare continues, the resistance will express itself in new and surprising forms. An honest reckoning with history is essential – who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we headed? – but there’s no time for romantic nostalgia. Without a note of sentimentality, the Black Panther legacy is important to study and reckon with precisely because of the resonance today – here and now – of its activities and programs. And the Panthers were and are a symbol of pride, courage, and agency, as well as resistance to powerlessness, cynicism, and resignation. The Panthers’ first project was to build armed community patrols to follow the police in Oakland and document their habitual abuses – exposing and resisting an occupying and militarized police force was foundational to everything the Panthers undertook. They analyzed the role of the cops and the courts in the Black community, and called for a United Front Against Fascism. Further, their Ten Point Program, too often reduced to a narrative about feeding breakfast to kids, is built on a political base of organizing for selfdetermination, reparations, and socialism. The brilliance of the community service programs was precisely the bond between basic human rights and a revolutionary nationalist contestation with power. The revolutionary

underpinnings of their organizing offer a profoundly different reading of basic needs: 1 We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community. 2 We want full employment for our people. 3 We want an end to the robbery by the Capitalists of our Black Community. 4 We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings. 5 We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day society. 6 We want all Black men to be exempt from military service. 7 We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people. 8 We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails. 9 We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black Communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States. 10 We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. (Newton, 1980)

Anyone who can reduce this to ‘breakfast for children’ is either delusional or dishonest. These demands and the campaigns that followed – community control of the police, for example – were simply democratic petitions on the face of it, but in the context of colonial occupation and organized resistance each one took on a deeply revolutionary tone and tenor. ‘All Power to the People’, chanted the Panthers, and they meant it. They organized the community with the idea that the people have the knowledge of both what is wrong, unjust, and out of balance, as well as what is to be done to move things forward. Workers know what the factory assembly line is doing to their bodies, just as people living near a toxic waste dump in Chicago know what’s happening to them, to their neighbors, and to their children – that knowledge is not validated by power because it’s subjective, invested, and involved. Community organizing was in part a way to document people’s

‘I AM A REVOLUTIONARY!’

knowledge of their own situations, a way to socially reclaim and validate that knowledge while linking knowledge with conduct. It had to do with naming obstacles, and with understanding possibilities. It had to do with community building. It was action oriented. It was different from telling people what was good for them. And it encouraged exploring the significance of it all, and ended with a question: what are we going to do about it? It was explicitly a way to prove that we were alive and breathing at this critical moment in history. When Fred Hampton, Chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, ended rallies with a familiar chant, repeated over and over, it embraced and encouraged all of us to reach deeper and fight harder: ‘I am a revolutionary!’, ‘I am a revolutionary!’, ‘I am a revolutionary!’. The White radicals who worked with the Panthers tried to listen harder and listen first, acknowledging the wisdom in others, and mobilizing an army of allies. In a deeper sense, ally was not the right word: dismantling all the structures – law and custom, policy and politics – that produce a society of oppression and exploitation became the task at hand. Those White people who took the Panthers’ words to heart needed to find a way to make an honest contribution – not a charitable gift – to a real revolution. J. Edgar Hoover, founding director of the FBI, a vast criminal enterprise, declared that the Black Panther Party was the greatest internal threat to the system, and unleashed a massive assault on the Panthers as well as the entire Black Liberation Movement. This included the infamous Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) program, the ‘war on drugs’, the ramping up of prisons as a preferred mechanism of discipline and control, and the serial armed assaults on Panther offices nationwide as well as selective assassinations of Panther leaders, including Fred Hampton, to prevent, in Hoover’s words, the rise of a ‘Black Messiah’ (Civil Rights History Project, Dixon & Cline, 2013). The FBI and the state were not playing, and

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White activists were pushed even further – to choose between ‘wringing our hands’ and ‘begging for civility’ or fighting back, heartto-heart, shoulder-to-shoulder. The shape of US society today is based on the many elements of the assault on the Panthers, and yet, after all that, the human spirit abides – the will to struggle rises again. Body cameras and prison reform and sensitivity training and education will not end the racial nightmare – even if some reforms would be welcomed. Instead, we must face reality and courageously confront history, tell the truth, and then destroy the entire edifice of White supremacy: metaphorically speaking, it means burning down the plantation. And when the plantation is at last burned to the ground, people of European descent, or ‘those who believe they are White’, will find the easy privileges we have taken for granted disappearing, and along with them, our willful blindness and faux innocence. Also gone must be the fragile, precarious perch of superiority. White people will have to give up our accumulated, unearned advantages, and yet, stand to gain something wonderful: a fuller personhood and a moral bearing. We face an urgent challenge, then, if we are to join humanity in the enormous task of creating a just and caring world, and it begins with rejecting White supremacy – not simply despising bigotry and backwardness, but spurning as well all those despicable structures and traditions. It extends to refusing to embrace optics over justice, ‘multiculturalism’ or ‘diversity’ over an honest reckoning with reality – to becoming race traitors as we learn the loving art of solidarity in practice. The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda implored his fellow writers to stay awake and to pay attention. In ‘The Poet’s Obligation’ he urged them to become acutely aware of their sisters and brothers who are trapped in subjugation and meaninglessness, imprisoned in ignorance and despair. You must move in and out of windows, he wrote, carrying a vision of the vast oceans just beyond the bars of the prison. The poem ends with this:

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So, through me, freedom and the sea Will call in answer to the shrouded heart. (Neruda, 2001 [1962])

Let’s read this poem together as ‘The Teacher’s Obligation’. We, too, must move in and out of windows, and we, too, must build a project of radical imagination and fundamental change. As we open the doors to the prison and invite the real dragon to fly out, we offer the world a new model of education – a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation.

REFERENCES Civil Rights History Project, U. S., Dixon, E. & Cline, D. P. (2013) Elmer Dixon oral history interview conducted by David P. Cline in Seattle, Washington, -02-28. Seattle, Washington. [Video] Retrieved January 27, 2020 from the Library of Congress, https://www. loc.gov/item/afc2010039_crhp0057/. Coates, T. (2012) Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War? The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ archive/2012/02/why-do-so-few-blacksstudy-the-civil-war/308831/

Cobb, C. (December 1963) Prospectus for a Summer Freedom School Program. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Papers, 1959-1972. Sanford, NC: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1982. Reel 39, File 165, Page 75, at Education & Democracy. Retrieved January 27, 2020 from https:// w o m h i s t . a l e x a n d e r s t re e t . c o m / S N C C / doc18A.htm Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum: NY George, A. (2013) Reading Helen Keller. In Ann George, M. Elizabeth Weiser and Janet Zepernick (Eds.), Women and Rhetoric Between the Wars (p. 97). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Neruda, P. (2001 [1962]) Poet’s Obligation. In Fully empowered (Plenos poderes), translated by Alastair Reid. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pp. viii. Retrieved January 27, 2020 from https://www.ndbooks.com/ book/fully-empowered/ Newton, H. P. (1980) The Ten-Point Program (October 1966). In Huey P. Newton (Ed.), War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America (pp. 83–85, Appendix A). New York: Harlem River Press. Rretrieved January 27, 2020 from http://ouleft.org/ wp-content/uploads/Huey-WATP.pdf Whitman, W. (1888) Democratic Vistas. Democratic Vistas and Other Papers (p. 6). London: Walter Scott.

14 The Importance of Paulo Freire in the ‘Act of Reading’ Luis Huerta-Charles1

In 1981, when Paulo Freire presented his paper ‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’ as the opening keynote speech at the Brazilian Congress on Reading, the act of reading was primarily considered a mechanical and utilitarian skill. At that historical moment, Freire’s work was a pathbreaking approach within the field of literacy and reading. It was a historical context in which the dominant methods of reading considered the subject strictly as sets of skills and abilities that needed to be taught by the teacher and learned by the students. At this time in history, literacy and reading were based solely on decoding processes where children just had to learn first isolated letters, then the names and sounds of the letters, followed by how to use the letters (i.e. ‘putting them together’) in order to decodify words. It was an excessively fragmented process in which the teacher provided the information and dictated the children to repeat it back. It was the classic process of the banking education which provoked many children to fail, as the

reading process, as well as the official curriculum, was completely disconnected from the experiences and culture of working-class and marginalized children who crowded elementary public schools in Latin America. Children who were not able to learn to read and become literate in the first grade were retained. Reading was an academic area that meant success or failure within the first two grades of elementary school. Regrettably, children that were held back typically had to remain with the same teacher who used the same teaching methods that had failed the child the first time. Ferreiro and Teberosky (1979) indicated that at that time, 20% of the population between 7 and 12 years of age were not attending school. Furthermore, approximately 53% of the population only reached fourth grade. Among these children, 66% were retained in the first and second grades because they had failed to learn to read and write. Additionally, it is important to note that the majority of those retained children were

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from a low socio-economic status, workingclass families, and historically marginalized groups. As a result, retention levels soared, and children ended up abandoning school. By the time Paulo presented his work on reading in Brazil, I was starting my first year of teaching in elementary school, and the preparation I had received in my teacher education program had nothing to do with the concept of connecting children’s reading comprehension with the experiences they had had in the world. As a teacher, I was never taught that reading was a political act, or that teachers must help children to make meaning of their world and reality. I had only learned to teach them to decodify words and put letters together. The focus of my teacher preparation was on teaching methods, not on how children made meaning of the reading process within their own lives and world. Once, I asked one of my professors why my second-grade students did not comprehend what they were reading, which I had noticed in my interaction with them. In response, I was told: ‘Don’t worry, comprehension comes later when they get into fourth-grade. For now, just concentrate on teaching them to read’. As if reading had no relationship at all with comprehension! Paulo’s experiences with the oppressed peasants in Brazil, and later in Chile, demonstrated that the political dimension in education – and obviously in the teaching of reading, as well – is ever present whether we are aware of it or not. Freire’s pedagogical approach for reading stimulated other educators to search for alternative forms of teaching reading, with the purpose of helping children to acquire literacy in meaningful ways and, consequently, to eliminate the retention of marginalized children. The hope in these attempts to create alternative reading pedagogies was to reduce the high number of retained children and the number of children abandoning schools. These attempts at creating alternative pedagogies were the same sort of commitment that Freire had when he crafted his

pedagogical approach for helping adults learn how read. Adults who were not able to read in Brazil when Freire constructed his reading approach, also were not allowed to exercise their right to vote. For this reason, when Freire taught the peasants to read, they also became able to vote. Their votes were critical in democratically changing the government that exclusively served the rich. This change happened not only because the campesinos learned to read, but also because Freire set up the dialogical context that awakened them to the necessity of empowering themselves to reach new levels of conscientization in order to remake themselves (Fiori, 1971). They were able to break the culture of silence that had been imposed on them. Freire connected reading to the conscientization process, in which campesinos became more, as Freire (1996) used to mention the process of becoming complete, more human. When the peasants began to read their world through the word, they were able to understand the subtle forms that the group in power used to oppress them, denying them the possibility to become more, and the role that the government played in this oppressive dynamic. However, and this is really heartbreaking, the capitalist neoliberal system has put everything possible in place to shelve away Freire’s work. The neoliberal system has successfully suppressed Freire’s work in most teacher colleges in Latin America and the United States. Freire’s oeuvre is not included as part of the curriculum in many teacher education programs. In some countries, Freire’s books are not required readings at all; in others, decontextualized abstracts of his books are solely complementary readings. Generally speaking, prospective teachers almost never have the opportunity to read Freire’s work. Although illiteracy and retention rates have decreased through the years, we are facing a new form of illiteracy as more students learn to read as a deciphering skill but are not learning to read to understand their world and their contexts. UNESCO’s (2017) report indicated

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that 6 out of 10 students are not learning the basic knowledge they should to succeed in their education, which represents 617 million students around the world who are not learning the minimum level of competency in reading and math. With these data from UNESCO (2017), the act of reading is still viewed as separated from comprehension because students are unable to obtain information from what they have read. Teachers are, again, teaching reading without conscientization, without the commitment to help children to become more. Freire’s work must be considered anew as a fundamental part of teacher education programs, and particularly in reading methods classes, to push back against the mechanical and instrumentalist approaches, the ‘lifeless language teaching mandates’ as Torres (2018) calls them. Ultimately, I agree and align with Casey’s (2016) contention that teacher education programs must be taken away from the hands of neoliberalism and racism, in order to prepare critically conscious teachers that will teach children to read their world through the word in order to transform it into a better place for all.

Note  1  I want to thank my colleagues Dr. David Rutledge and Carolyn Raynor, both at New Mexico State University, for the invaluable comments and editing suggestions. This paper response is, in part, because of them.

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REFERENCES Casey, Z. A. (2016). A pedagogy of anticapitalist antiracism: Whiteness, neoliberalism, and resistance in education. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Ferreiro, E. and Teberosky, A. (1979). Los sistemas de escritura en el desarrollo del niño. Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores. Fiori, E. (1971). Education and conscientization. In L. Colonnese (Ed.), Conscientization for liberation (pp. 123–144). Washington, DC: Division for Latin America-United States Catholic Conference. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum. Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum. Torres, M. N. (2018). Subverting Lifeless Language Teaching Mandates with Bakhtinian Carnival Pedagogy. Paper presented at the International Bakhtin’s Roundtable on “Anthropology of theatricality: the study of the fundamental principles and basic structures of Amateur creativity in man [& women]”. April 4 & May 23, 2018, Orel, Russia. UNESCO Institute for Statistics. (2017/September). More Than One-Half of Children and Adolescents Are Not Learning Worldwide. Fact Sheet No. 46. Paris: UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS).

15 Share and Sustain: Two Steps to Paulo D’Arcy Martin

SHARE – HOME AND ABROAD In 1976, Paulo Freire spent a couple of months in Toronto. He led a summer course in the graduate programme at OISE, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, engaging in private and public dialogues with educators. There were many Latin American political exiles living in Toronto, mostly from Chile following the military coup against Salvador Allende, and I had developed close bonds with some Brazilian exiles gathered around Herbert de Souza, known as Betinho. To my surprise, Betinho was a close friend of Paulo Freire, and the two of them together formed a playful, generous and wise centre to any social gathering. It was Betinho who passed Paulo my writing about adult learning. It was exciting for me, just to sit and talk with these seasoned activists. In the early 70s, I had been active in solidarity work with the Latin American left, working with Chilean and Argentinean refugees, had travelled widely in Latin America and was committed

to student activism and organizing against the Vietnam War. But I felt an edge of discomfort in my left-wing activity. According to Lenin, revolutionary strategy should be developed by a tight-knit group of leaders, who would compose such a powerful message that masses of people would mobilize around it. But Betinho joked one day: ‘We may not be an effective vanguard, but we can be an excellent rearguard’, and he was steady in support of grassroots dialogue as the heart of revolutionary work. Paulo had staked his life on dialogue with people at the bottom of the economic and educational heap. His writing had helped me resist top-down leftism, strengthening the radical, not the sectarian, side of social justice movements. Other opinions, idolizing or demolishing Paulo’s work, were whirling around North America at that time. One radical teacher commented: We struggled continually to engage in dialogue with our students, never to lecture them. For example. Freire’s theory provided validation for our

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practice. He told us exactly what we wanted to hear. Educational dialogue, in Freire’s theoretical universe, leads directly to revolutionary praxis … Too bad it’s not that simple. (Nasaw, 1974: 33)

Or perhaps lucky for us all, it’s not that simple. Connecting those two dots of dialogue and praxis had already been an exciting journey for me, developing a language of learning with students to counter the professors and administrators who were increasingly tying the university to the emerging corporate order. It took me six years of action and reflection to distil a few pages on Paulo’s significance (Martin, 1975). It seemed important to share some of the practical tools developed by educators in Latin America, especially a group that I had met in Oruro, Bolivia, who developed a process of literacy and numeracy education that built on the knowledge of local peasants rather than talking at them. These were educators who started their contact with humble people by asking questions rather than making speeches. They drew on the intricacy of Paulo’s arguments, and were at ease with his writing style. Yet in North America, some friends and colleagues were calling Paulo’s writing ‘peculiar’ and ‘opaque’, suggesting that it contradicted his own principles about access for the culturally marginalized. I came to realize that people in my culture of origin were actually baffled, not by rhetoric or jargon, but by a prose anchored in relations rather than things. In writing that thesis, I delved into the first chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where Paulo does use some technical philosophical terms, but the flow of his argument is easy to follow: In order to have the continued opportunity to express their ‘generosity’, the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this ‘generosity’, which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source. True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. (Freire, 2011: 44)

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Here there is no jargon to impede understanding, no references alien to everyday speech. In only four sentences, Paulo traces a whole set of relations: false ­generosity – charity – true generosity – injustice – poverty – oppression. It could be said that these are the six reference points in the argument. Yet in a curious way, it is difficult to define a focus, for his argument can be restated in an equally meaningful way by starting with any one of the reference points. The argument is hard to ‘pin down’ because it simultaneously considers relations among several elements, rather than focusing attention on a single element. Each of these terms implies the others at the same time that it is distinguished from the others. A linear reading will be puzzling, but a dialectical reading will be illuminating. I found that I was comfortable in Paulo’s writing, where ‘word’ implies ‘world’ and vice versa, where reading cannot be of texts without contexts. When Paulo read my thesis, he said to Betinho and myself: ‘D’Arcy is the first North American to have understood how I think’. He was delighted that I got him, and I was excited to find that he was open to a relation of affection and respect. At a later social gathering, he asked me directly: ‘What do you want to do next with my ideas?’. I told him that I wanted to make a documentary film about my efforts in Ontario to apply his ideas, but that I lacked the funds to do it. Then I saw his tactical side. He said: People like us have little power. We have to be creative with what power we have. Recently three different film makers have asked me to record an interview with them in English, so that it could get wide circulation in Europe and North America, and I have always declined because I wasn’t confident in their values. Why don’t you interview me in English, take the pieces you need for your film, and sell the exclusive TV or film rights to some progressive broadcaster, to finance completion of your film?

It seemed a long shot, but at least I would have the anchor interview for my own film. Indeed, four months later I received a call from Hans Strobel, who was making a film

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for (West) German TV on popular education and had been told by Paulo that the only footage in the world with him speaking in English was in my hands. Hans flew to Toronto, made some useful suggestions about our own film, and handed me a cheque for several thousand Canadian dollars, enough to complete the shooting and editing of our film, Starting from Nina: The politics of learning (Martin et al., 1977). What struck me first in this experience was Paulo’s generosity, his willingness to use his own reputation to help a little group of activists in our twenties, and his nimble use of limited resources in support of his values rather than his ego. That impression was deepened when he assembled a team of six people in his Toronto apartment, four Brazilians with myself and my partner Anita Shilton to ‘discuss an invitation’ sent to him in Geneva, Switzerland, where he was on staff at the World Council of Churches and where I had first met him three years earlier. Since the revolution in Portugal in 1975 had brought down the Salazar dictatorship, it also created space for radicals in Africa, where Portugal was the last remaining colonial power. Independence in GuineaBissau was followed by a dialogue with Paulo in Portuguese to help design a de-colonizing education there (later documented in Freire, Pedagogy in Process: The letters to GuineaBissau, 1978). When a similar invitation came from the new government of São Tomé and Príncipe, two islands off the west coast of Gabon, Paulo didn’t have the strength to go himself, but undertook to choose and send a support team steeped in his ideas and practices. We secured some funds so that five of us could take a two-month leave from our jobs and take on the job, without any details on what would be involved. In the end, the team consisted of Carlos Alberto Afonso, Cleyde Afonso, Maria Nakano, Anita Shilton and myself. Our twoyear-old daughter Danielle completed the group and had her first experience of living outside the global North.

At our first meeting, Carlos informed the Minister of Information, Alda Graça, that Paulo sent her warm greetings and gave the assurance that we would work hard for two months, after which we were required for urgent work at home. Camarada Alda didn’t bat an eye, wished us a good lunch and convened the 30 staff of the ministry to decide how we would be used. When we returned in the afternoon, we were all given assignments: Carlos, an electrical engineer, was to boost the range of the radio station so that it could be properly heard in the smaller island of Príncipe; Maria and Cleyde were to develop a wall newspaper to be posted daily in the main market. Anita and I were to balance the radio news department from its colonial focus on international affairs to include the voices of non-elite local people. Our colleagues started taping and broadcasting street interviews in the style of our work at the Canadian radio programme As It Happens rather than imitating authoritative-sounding European news anchors. Each of us found a way to interpret Paulo’s perspective into our work, coaching local colleagues and shining a light on the beauty and courage of local people as they rebuilt their society just a year after the departure of the Portuguese military and administrative authorities. It was an intense and joyful chance to contribute, a gift from Paulo in the word and the work. I have tried to sustain the vision of hope and the practicality of learning, in the decades since.

SUSTAIN – THINKING UNION Returning to Canada, our little team carried the immediacy of the African project in our bones. Our Brazilian colleagues brought a new urgency to their desire for a return home, to launch what became the ‘Betinho movement against hunger and suffering’, an extraordinary mass movement which laid some of the groundwork for the rise of the Workers Party across Brazil. I moved into the

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labour movement, hired to direct the Canadian education programme for the United Steelworkers. The union’s leadership, and my mentor Michel Blondin, knew that learning should have practical outcomes that challenged social hierarchies instead of reinforcing them. Together, we built a ‘back to the locals programme’, to democratize learning at the workplace level rather than concentrate on polishing the behaviour of leaders. For example, a course already existed to equip stewards in handling grievances and disputes with management. We turned that from memorizing legal procedures into problematizing the power relations on the job, and building collective capacity to resist the arbitrary use of management power. The course aimed to develop critical consciousness, to encourage dialogue and to experiment with strategic options. Experienced activists were invited to share their knowledge in a network of ‘train the trainers’, taking a break from their industrial jobs to see themselves as facilitators rather than teachers. It was an exciting, transformational initiative, which expanded in Canada throughout the Steelworkers and gradually influenced other unions. Through the early 1980s, my union work was influenced by a group of communitybased friends and colleagues with international experience in critical pedagogy. In 1983, Rick Arnold and Bev Burke wrote A Popular Education Handbook: An educational experience taken from Central America and adapted to the Canadian context, drawing on their experiences with the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Others like Deborah Barndt in Nicaragua, Barb Thomas in Grenada, Judith Marshall in Mozambique and several of us in southern Africa had participated in activist grassroots education in a revolutionary context, and popular education discussions in Toronto were intense and practical. Inside the Steelworkers and other unions, the idea of starting from the experience of the learner has been central, and much of the language of popular education has become common. The scope for progressive thinking has

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expanded to the point where over 200,000 Canadians each year participate in courses sponsored, designed and facilitated in their unions. The stated purposes of such programmes were summarized by a group of union educators as: • Engage people in a wider collective project than just surviving and rising individually on the job; • Equip those who step forward as worker representatives to handle the varied and complex challenges in speaking truth to power, inside and beyond the workplace; • Expand the social and political perspective of workers towards critical thinking and active citizenship; and • Energize people by feeding their sprit and connecting them to ideas and people involved in the struggle for justice. (Bev Burke et al., cited in Carter and Martin, 2013: 273)

During my 40 years as a labour educator, relentless attacks from the greed of the 1% have created a defensive climate inside unions, where critical discussion can be hard to sustain. Nonetheless, Freirean education is alive and well in unions, both in Canada and the United States. Its spirit pushes back against the drift towards corporate and dogmatic thinking in social movements. Soon after 2000, five of us with experience in five different unions responded to the expressed hunger for a handbook on progressive practice, and co-authored a book in which each chapter was written and rewritten by two or more of us. The result, Education for Changing Unions (Burke et al., 2002), was voted by members of the UALE, the United Association for Labor Education, as the single most useful labour education book from 2000 to 2008. It is still in use across Canada and the United States, and has circulated internationally. The five authors continue to meet each year to debate further the issues in that book, and to reaffirm the bond of solidarity built by the effort of merging our personal worlds into a collective word. In the past decade, members of the UALE in both countries have sustained a Popular Education Working Group, with a strong

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presence in conference agendas, both plenaries and workshops. That group, of which I am a member, published in 2018 a definition of popular education that would make Paulo Freire proud. It serves as a guidepost for those of us, many of us, for whom education is an opportunity to contribute to the dignity, creativity and power of working people: Popular Education is an approach to teaching and learning that is aimed at radical transformation for social and economic justice. It begins with the experiences and issues of the learners involved rather than the knowledge of an expert teacher. Participants observe patterns in their experiences and link them to theory about global and historical trends. This process promotes critical thinking and reflective practice as learners design ways to improve their situation, try them out, evaluate, modify and try again. Popular education does not pretend to be neutral, it is openly on the side of the oppressed. It is focused on empowering a group that is engaged in progressive struggle rather than only promoting individual growth. It challenges oppression not only outside, but as it plays out inside the classroom. A popular educator strives to design and facilitate learning events that hold to these values. This process should be accessible to people of all education levels and should engage people’s minds, bodies and emotions. (www.uale.org/ groups/popular-education, 2018)

For me personally, the encounters with Paulo Freire himself, with his words and with his world, have been an anchor in my personal and professional development during a lifetime in activist adult education. I am grateful for his insistence that both text and context need to point educators towards connection with the oppressed. Paulo’s words challenge us to a lifetime commitment, undoing hierarchies of oppression through the practice of living authentically in relationship with oppressed people, building on their good

sense in achieving justice and freedom for all. This is a rich and challenging pedagogy based on careful analysis, thoughtful dialogue, hopeful spirit and raw courage. May we all measure up to the challenge Paulo offers, in words and actions.

REFERENCES Arnold, Rick and Bev Burke, A Popular Education Handbook: An educational experience taken from Central America and adapted to the Canadian context. Ottawa: Development Education Program, Canadian University Services Overseas, 1983. Burke, Bev, Jojo Geronimo, D’Arcy Martin, Barb Thomas and Carol Wall, Education for Changing Unions. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002. Carter, Sue and D’Arcy Martin, ‘Equip, Engage, Expand and Energize: Labour Movement Education’, in Building on Critical Traditions: Adult Education and Learning in Canada (pp. 270–280), eds. Tom Nesbit, Susan M. Brigham, Nancy Taber and Tara Gibb. Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing, 2013. Freire, Paulo, Pedagogy in Process: The letters to Guinea-Bissau. New York: Seabury Press, 1978. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2011. Martin, D’Arcy, Re-Appraising Freire: The potential and limits of conscientization, MA thesis in educational theory, University of Toronto, 1975. Martin, D’Arcy, Anita Shilton and Rosemary Donegan, Starting from Nina: The politics of learning [videorecording]. Toronto: Development Education Centre, 1977. Nasaw, David. ‘Reconsidering Freire’, Liberation, September/October, pp. 29–33, 1974.

SECTION II

Social Theories Paul R. Carr and Gina Thésée

INTRODUCTION Paulo Freire, Critical Pedagogy and the Quest for ‘Transformative and Emancipatory Education’ Why is (formal, normative) education so mired within anti-democratic structures, postures, frameworks and traditions, which (can) effectively constrain it from critically addressing the world’s ills (Carr and Thésée, 2019)? Is it possible for education to fulfill the immense but fundamental mission entrusted to it, to somehow lead to individual and collective emancipation? And if so, how can it, in these times of great conflict and chaos, both social and environmental, become a force leading to Freire’s notion of conscientization? How can an evolving social conscience take into account myriad

realities, words, knowledge and actions of the ‘oppressed’, those facing multi-layered discrimination, dispossession, marginalization, alienation, colonization, domination, exclusion and abuse, in effect representing the ‘wretched of the earth’? (Fanon, 2002).How can, significantly, an environmental consciousness take into account infinite realties, words, knowledge and actions against extractionary, consumerist and financial/economic/profit-based logics that threaten the health and well-being of human existence? And above all, at the beginning of the 21st century, at a time when these immense social challenges, both complex and global, are becoming increasingly difficult to target and identify, what is, and should be, the role of education? Education is always presented as the answer to the evils of the world and the key to necessary social transformations, yet,

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paradoxically, it is, concurrently, blamed as an institution of oppression, the reproduction of social inequalities and the justification of the alienation of the oppressed. Education seems to function, at the same time, as an incontrovertible lever and brake toward and against the social transformations required to make society more just, engaged, inclusive and ‘democratic’. So, what education(s) do the societies of the world need today, and how can we avoid the many traps, pitfalls and injustices embedded within it so as to facilitate meaningful social change? (Morin, 1999; Petrella, 2000). With the notion of Transformative and Emancipatory Education (TEE), we wish to humbly contribute to answering these questions, in solidarity with several critical social theoretical (plural) perspectives (feminism, anti-racism, decolonialism, Indigenism, environmentalism, etc.), without closing off the necessary discussions required to understand and engage with, and frame, the diverse cultural and educational contexts. The adjectives ‘transformative’ and ‘emancipatory’ confer on this education an aura of freedom and creativity, of positionality and criticality, of complexity and opacity, of community and solidarity, all aspects that arise in and out of rupture with a certain hegemonic vision of education that is brilliantly illustrated in what Paulo Freire describes as ‘banking education’ in his seminal book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1974). This book, published in Portuguese for some 50 years, has been translated into several languages, and is still considered today as one of the most important and influential works in education around the world. However, the educational philosophy that Freire proposes and espouses in one of his first books as well as his many subsequent writings is still poking around at the margins of formal educational contexts. Our attempt to elucidate TEE is premised on Freire’s work and philosophy, and also fully acknowledges the vibrant and voluminous contribution of several critical scholars, including Antonia Darder (2018),

Maxine Green (2003), Henry Giroux (2011), Peter McLaren (2014), Shirley Steinberg (Steinberg and Cannella, 2012) and many others on all continents. The reality is that the list is long, and we find ourselves in a most uncomfortable position in identifying a single work for others who have developed over the course of decades an overwhelming body of work that has influenced people around the world; our dear friend Joe Kincheloe (2008a, 2008b) falls squarely in this category. We would also add that it is not only about what these colleagues have written, which, in itself, is extremely invaluable but, importantly, how they have interacted with, mentored, engaged with and shared with others, especially from marginalized groups.

THE FILIATION OF TEE WITHIN FREIRE’S EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY Contrary to what some people have claimed, often to disqualify it, the educational philosophy of Paulo Freire is far from being old-fashioned, or draped in an obsolete ideology, valid only for certain socio-­ educational contexts, or connected only to the Global South, or reduced to teaching methods targeting only adult literacy (Darder et  al., 2003). In its twofold transformative and emancipatory aim, Freire’s educational philosophy is, today and more than ever, alive, current and urgent (Carr and Thésée, 2019; Gonzalez-Monteagudo, 2002). To combat the evils of the world, Freire denounces the education aimed at domestication, and proposes an education tethered to the aim of emancipation. He develops a subversive education through critical awareness and the transformation of oppressive social realities. Key pedagogical principles punctuate his theory: dialogue, praxis, theory-practice alliance, criticality, humility, radical love and conscientization. We see in his treatise, not a

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goal of education among others, but above all, more generally, an educational philosophy in action, pursuing a continuous process of transformation, one that challenges both the relation to oneself (identity), the relation to the Other (otherness and alterity), the relation to knowledge (citizenship) and the relation to the world (globality). This is what led Giroux (1983) to designate Freire’s educational thought as a ‘critical pedagogy’, and educators who feel challenged and engaged by such frameworks as ‘critical pedagogues’. Like other critical scholars/educators who advance and claim self-criticality (Kincheloe, 2008a, 2008b; Sauvé, 1997a, 1997b, 2017, 2018), we take into account these criticisms, especially by feminist, Afro-feminist and environmentalist perspectives, and even within the broad circle of critical pedagogues (Darder et  al., 2003). These broad lines sketching out critical pedagogy through its Marxist historicity, its philosophical theoretical framework of the Enlightenment, its visible lineage of almost exclusively White men, its non-inclusive language, its political nature, and so on, did not always or sufficiently explicate the social issues resulting from the intersectionality of identity factors, such as class, race, gender and sexuality. In doing so, these critical pedagogical currents would have participated in the dynamics of oppression that it denounces, thus proving ethnocentricity, Eurocentricity and machismo. These criticisms, which are also relevant and dialectical, have strongly challenged certain critical educators, allowing them to adjust the theoretical and conceptual framework of their discipline(s) in relation to various contemporary socio-educational issues, open to traditionally silenced voices and concerns. Thus, although Freirian thought offers a significant and, even, fundamental potential for transformative and emancipatory education, we also acknowledge that ‘critical pedagogy does not begin or end with the work of Paulo Freire’ (Darder et al., 2003: 20).

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The Ontological Framework or the Nature of TEE The ontological framework or the nature of TEE refers to the essence of a concept, to its very core and matrix foundational being. Ontologically, the concept of TEE is situated in a thematic trilogy with democracy and global citizenship. It is, at the same time, a condition, and an instrument as well as a goal or utopia in which democracy and global citizenship feed. Here, democracy is understood as a broad process of participation and engagement imbued within dynamic, complex and problematic power relations (Carr, 2011), and global citizenship is viewed as a fluid citizenship, taking into consideration the paradigm of ‘trans’, including trans/ national citizenship, trans/cultural, trans/disciplinary, etc. (Carr and Thésée, 2019). The three concepts, which have been incorporated into the logo and philosophy of the UNESCO Chair in Democracy, Global Citizenship and Transformative Education (DCMÉT) (see http://uqo.ca/dcmet/), are thus interrelated by the metaphor of the four elements: Air, Water, Earth, Fire. Inspired by Glissant (2010) and Pineau (2015), this metaphor is not trivial because the essential qualities of each element are illustrated in the definitions and grounding of the concepts. In this sense, democracy is symbolized by the element, Air (teleonomic finality, active utopia), global citizenship is symbolized by the element, Water (fluidity) and TEE is symbolized by the element, Earth (base). The fourth element, Fire (the required energy), symbolizes the values, principles, strategies and praxis that link the three themes into one whole, that is, ‘education to …’, TEE to democracy and global citizenship.

The Axiological Framework or the Values and Principles of TEE Driven by a desired ‘utopia’, necessary according to Freire (2007), TEE recognizes

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and values the utopian nature of its project, in the sense of an act of critical knowledge. Utopia is this place where the imaginary invites, orients and is guided by TEE. Utopia joins the cardinal values of UNESCO which, in the Education Agenda 2030, aims at living well together in societies of peace, social justice, inclusion and equity (UNESCO, 2015). Several decades ago, UNESCO recognized the value of Freire’s educational philosophy and the values it promotes by awarding him the 1986 Education for Peace Prize (UNESCO, 1986). In the footsteps of Freire and UNESCO, TEE is moving from the outset toward oppressed communities and peoples, those who traditionally live at the intersection of diverse forms of injustice, discrimination, domination, marginalization and social exclusion. In this sense, the values and principles that serve as fuel for TEE are in a constellation that is essentially in the direction of social and environmental justice as well as world peace.

the different spheres of the social, but there is also movement from within, organically from the will of a socially critical and conscious subject (and subjectivity), immersing itself in the world community. In its etymology, the ‘trans-formation’ is more than a change of form as it is also a cry to move beyond the form that eludes it in the unknown and without certainty: it requires, no more no less, a paradigm shift. In its etymology, ‘emancipation’ refers to the significant gesture by which a ‘slave’ literally removes from his/her shoulder (the Greek prefix) the hand (the Latin root ‘manu’) of the master, who wants to take possession of him as an object or to grab it (the Latin ‘cipare’) to effectively push it to the side. TEE feeds on diverse critical social perspectives in research, training, teaching/learning, communication and social activism. It integrates educational strategies of/from/in alignment with informal, non-formal or formal contexts to better energize and make educational situations relevant.

The Theoretical and Conceptual Framework of TEE: Critical Pedagogy

The Praxeological Framework or the Praxis of TEE

TEE is at the crossroads of various critical theories that fall within the framework of the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School developed by Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Habermas (Giroux, 2003). We highlight here as well critical race theory (Dei, 2013; Thésée and Carr, 2016) and various sociocritical perspectives, such as feminism (hooks, 2016, 2017), anti-racism (Dei and McDermott, 2013), anti-colonialism (Abdi, 2012), Indigenous knowledge (Battiste, 2011; Smith, 2012), media and cultural studies (Steinberg and Cannella, 2012; Steinberg and Tobin, 2015), environmentalism (Kahn, 2010; Sauvé, 1997a, 1997b, 2018; Shiva, 2005 and spiritualism (Wayne et  al., 2014). TEE emerges from critical pedagogy, and is thus conceptualized as internal acting forces, which are certainly nourished externally, in

Echoing Freirian thought (Freire, 1965), praxis is at the heart of TEE. It is conceived as a continuous process, which takes place throughout life, in all spheres of life and in all socio-educational contexts, whether informal, non-formal or formal. TEE aims, on the one hand, at the collective level, and the transformation of oppressive social realities and, on the other hand, at the individual level, the emancipation of socially oppressed people. Thus, TEE is not only concerned with and about formal educational contexts (educational institutions such as schools, training centers, universities, professional organizations) but also non-formal educational contexts (cultural and political institutions such as museums, libraries, the arts, media, sports, governments) and informal educational contexts (institutions such as the family, communities). All of these spheres and

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contexts interact at the individual and collective levels as well as the local and global levels.

The Epistemological Framework or the Driving Forces of TEE The transformational and emancipatory dynamic in question here is essentially a movement of openness, to oneself, to the Other, to knowledge and to the world, under the impulse of three types of forces: forces of expansion (development/qualitative), dilatation forces (increasing the dimensions of the circle/quantity) and extension forces (globality of meaning/hermeneutics). The opening movement has within its meaning the following: it is not a subtractive operation but rather an additive one; it is not a question of renouncing one’s culture but of plunging it into dialogue with the diversity of human cultures; it is not a question of silencing the peculiarities of our local context but of aligning it within those of the global context; it is not a question of denying one’s identity (root-identity) but of including the Other (identity-rhizomes); it is, therefore, not a question of imposing one’s culture and knowledge but of sharing them in a spirit of community of a belonging and being. The three acting forces that are intertwined in this opening are neither equal, nor proportional, nor necessarily correlated. However, we see these three forces of expansion, dilatation and extension as agonistic forces that compete together, at different rates, in varying degrees, and in different ways, concurrently. However, the openness we are discussing here does not rest on the good conscience or on what Freire (1974) calls ‘humanitarianism’ (different from humanism) tinged with voluntarism, paternalism or charity. In its critical epistemological framework, TEE opens with the essential question of ‘why?’. It is a matter of discovering what is underlying knowledge: the implicit, the unspoken, the hidden sides/curriculum/agenda, the inconsistencies, the paradoxes, the contradictions,

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the falsities, the nonsense, the hidden interests, the justification, the denied privileges, etc., which enamel the knowledge. It is also a question of reinterpreting, with the aid of a critical hermeneutic approach, the social and environmental consequences of ‘toxic knowledge’ on communities and people who are/have been traditionally oppressed. In this case, ‘knowledge’ refers to any construction of the human mind that serves to describe, classify, analyze, compare, understand, explain, qualify, quantify, control, dominate, act and transform its environment. This includes knowledge, including conceptions, preconceptions, beliefs, myths, dogmas, stereotypes, images, discourses, social representations, theories, laws, models, definitions, statistics, etc., which are widely shared or transmitted in informal, non-formal or formal contexts. ‘Toxic knowledge’ refers to all knowledge that tends to maintain, reproduce, reinforce or justify the dynamics of injustice, discrimination, violence and social exclusion. To counteract the toxic effects of knowledge on communities and individuals, the TEE critical epistemological framework requires the necessary deconstruction of knowledge. In this sense, the acting forces of TEE result in two complementary dynamics and tensions with and in relation to one other, characterized by a dynamic of ‘epistemological resistance’ based on the following pillars: (i) Refuse (say No! to toxic knowledge) and (ii) Request (deconstruct the toxic knowledge); and a dynamic of ‘epistemological resilience’ based on these pillars: (iii) Re-appropriating (rebuilding transformational and emancipatory knowledge) and (iv) Reaffirming (saying Yes to therapeutic knowledge, to individual and collective empowerment) (Thésée, 2006).

The Structural Framework or the Dimensions and Components of TEE The continuous process that TEE is organically appealing to relates to the transformation

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of fundamental relationships to oneself, to the Other, to knowledge and to the world, making it a process in four transversal dimensions because at any moment in our education (whether in informal, non-formal or formal contexts), our ‘relationships to…’ are summoned to be deconstructed, re-read, reconsidered, amplified and transformed. ‘Relationships to …’ are attitudes or dispositions of mind, heart, soul and body that precede, condition and announce the ‘relationship with…’. Long before the ‘meeting with…’, the ‘relation to…’ will have determined, often in a definite and definitive way, the possibility or not to establish the ‘relationship with…’. In other words, to make possible the ‘relationship with…’ and to take care of it, it must move upstream to allow the transformation of ‘relationships to…’. Thus, the four dimensions or ‘relationships to…’ self, the Other, knowledge and the world represent the four sites of transformation. These dimensions are inspired by Sauvé (2017), according to whom environmental education is essentially aimed at transforming the relationship between the environment and the transformation of relationships with oneself and the other. The relation to oneself concerns the construction of identity and the relationship to the other concerns the construction of otherness whereas the relation to the environment concerns the construction of the relationship to the biosphere (Sauvé, 2017). We have added a fourth dimension, ‘the relation to knowledge’, mediating between the relation to the Other and the relation to the world. This fourth dimension seems necessary to us because, with oppressive dynamics based on relations with toxic knowledge, it is logical to think that transformation and emancipation must also pass through the transformation of the relationships with knowledge, a detoxification of the spirit in a sense.

CONCLUSION In sum, TEE is a philosophical adventure, at once educational and poetic as well as social

and political, which invites us to think and rethink, imagine and reimagine, create and recreate our relationships with oneself, with the Other, with the knowledge and the world, and, in doing so, to emancipate from oppressive dynamics with an interest in transforming the oppressive social realities they generate. It is clear that we do not hold the answer to these questions; however, the realities of today’s world are so disturbing, jarring and worrisome that their problematization and transformation has become central to the reformulation of any meaningful educational changes at this time. Thus, this essay ends with this note of incompleteness, which suits the dynamic, ever changing character of a continuous process, at once dialogical, dialectical and deliberative, of a transformative and emancipatory education. However, we are resolute in our belief that Paulo Freire’s work continues to be a guiding light and a fundamental inspiration to bring about meaningful, critically-engaged TEE.

REFERENCES Abdi, A. A. (ed.) (2012). Decolonizing Philosophies of Education. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Battiste, M. (2011). Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision. Vancouver: UBC Press. Carr, P. R. (2011). Does Your Vote Count? Critical Pedagogy and Democracy. New York: Peter Lang. Carr, P. R. & Thésée, G. (2019). It’s not Education that Scares Me, It’s the Educators…. Gorham, ME: Myers Education Press. Darder, A. (2018). The Student Guide to Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Bloomsbury. Darder, A., Baltodano, M. P. & Torres, R. D. (eds) (2003, 2nd ed.). The Critical Pedagogy Reader. New York: Routledge. Dei, G. J. S. (2013). Critical Perspectives on Indigenous Research. Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes, 9(1), 27–38. Dei, G. J. S. & McDermott, M. (eds) (2013). Politics of Anti-racism Education: In Search

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of Strategies for Transformative Learning. New York: Springer. Fanon, F. (2002). Les damnés de la terre. Paris: Éditions La Découverte & Syros. Freire, P. (1974). Pédagogie des opprimés. Suivi de Conscientisation et Révolution. Paris: Maspero. Freire, P. (1965). L’Éducation, practique de la liberté. Paris: Éditions du cerf. Freire, P. (2007). Daring to Dream: Toward a Pedagogy of the Unfinished. (Organized and presented by Ana Maria Araújo Freire). (Translated by Alexandre K. Oliveira). Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Giroux, H. (1983, second edition). Theory and Resistance in Education: Towards a Pedagogy for the Opposition. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Giroux, H. A. (2011). On Critical Pedagogy. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Giroux, H. A. (2003). Critical Theory and Educational Practice. In A. Darder, M. Baltodano & R. D. Torres (eds), The Critical Pedagogy Reader (pp. 27–56). New York: Routledge. Glissant, É. (2010). La terre, le feu, l’eau et les vents. Une anthologie de la poésie du Toutmonde. Paris: Editions Galaade/Institut du Tout-monde. Gonzalez-Monteagudo, J. (2002). Les pédagogies critiques chez Paulo Freire et leur audience actuelle. Revue Pratiques de Formation/ Analyses, Université de Paris 8, France, 43, 49–65. Green, M. (2003). In Search of Critical Pedagogy. In A. Darder, M. Baltodano & R. D. Torres (eds), The Critical Pedagogy Reader (pp. 97–112). New York: Routledge. hooks, b. (2017). De la marge au centre. Théorie féministe. Paris: Cambourakis. hooks, b. (2016). Ne suis-je pas une femme? Femmes noires et féminisme. Paris: Cambourakis. Kahn, R. (2010). Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, & Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy Movement. New York: Peter Lang. Kincheloe, J. L. (2008a, 2nd ed.). Critical Pedagogy Primer. New York: Peter Lang. Kincheloe, J. L. (2008b). Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction. Dordrecht, London: Springer. McLaren, P. (2014, 6th ed.) Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the

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Foundations of Education. New York: Routledge. Morin, É. (1999). Les sept savoirs nécessaires à l’éducation du futur. Paris: UNESCO. Petrella, R. (2000). L’éducation, victime de cinq pièges. À propos de la société de la connaissance. Paris: Les Éditions Fides. Pineau, G. (ed.) (2015, 2nd ed.). De l’air! Essai sur l’écoformation. Paris: L’Harmattan. Sauvé, L. (2018, 2nd ed.). Pour une éducation relative à l’environnement. Montréal: Guérin. Sauvé, L. (2017). Introduction. In L. Sauvé, I. Orellana, C. Villemagne & B. Bader (eds), Éducation, environnement et écocitoyenneté. Repères contemporains (pp. 19–26). Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec. Sauvé, L. (1997a). L’approche critique en éducation relative à l’environnement: origines théoriques et applications à la formation des enseignants. L’éducation dans une perspective planétaire. Revue des sciences de l’éducations, 23(1), 169–187. Sauvé, L. (1997b). Pour une recherche critique en éducation relative à l’environnement. In C. Baudoux & M. Anadon (eds), La recherche en éducation, la personne et le changement social (pp. 103–122). Québec: Université Laval. Shiva, V. (2005). Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability and Peace. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Smith, L. T. (2012, 2nd ed.). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Steinberg, S. R. & Cannella G. S. (eds) (2012, 2nd ed.). Critical Qualitative Research Reader. New York: Peter Lang. Thésée, G. (2006). A Tool of Massive Erosion: Scientific Knowledge in the Neo-Colonial Enterprise. In G. J. S. Dei & A. Kempf (eds), Anti-Colonialism and Education: The Politics of Resistance (pp. 25–42). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Thésée, G. & Carr, P. R. (2016). Les mots pour le dire: l’acculturation ou la racialisation dans l’expérience scolaire de jeunes AfroCanadiens de Montréal d’origine haïtienne? Comparative and International Education / Éducation Comparée et Internationale, 45(1), 1–17.

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Tobin, K. & Steinberg, S. R. (eds) (2015, 2nd ed.). Doing Educational Research. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. UNESCO (2015). Déclaration d’Incheon et Cadre d’action pour la mise en œuvre de l’Objectif de développement durable 4. Paris: UNESCO.

UNESCO (1986). 1986: Année internationale de la Paix. Hommage à Paulo Freire. Le Courrier de l’UNESCO. No. 11. Wane, N. N., Adyanga, F. A. & IImi, A. A. (eds) (2014). Spiritual Discourse in the Academy: A Globalized Indigenous Perspective. New York: Peter Lang.

16 Critical Pedagogy and the Knowledge Wars of the 21st Century Joe L. Kincheloe

We live in nasty and perilous times. Those of us in critical pedagogy cannot help but despair as we watch the United States and its Western collaborators instigate imperial wars for geopolitical positioning and natural resources, and mega-corporations develop and spend billions of dollars to justify economic strategies that simply take money from the weakest and poorest peoples of the world, and transfer them to the richest people in North America and Europe. In this context, the politics of knowledge become a central issue in the educational and social domains of every nation in the world. The politics of knowledge firmly entrenched around the planet are characterized by a few rich individuals and transnational corporations controlling most of the ‘validated’ data we can access. Thankfully, there is a rich source of counter-data on the Internet and from several book publishers and journals – but students and other people are warned about the politicized nature of this information. Thus, many individuals are exposed

over and over again to phony rationalizations for indefensible governmental, military, financial, and social actions of power wielders in the United States and its Western allies. The Iraqi War, as merely one example, is not simply a story about a brutal and unnecessary policy, but a chronicle of the way the knowledge war operates in the 21st century. Those who wage the war employ the authority of science and media to spread a plethora of great untruths about Iraq’s danger to the world and the necessity of continuing military action against the ‘nation’. The same type of knowledge tactics were applied against Iran in 2008. The power of such knowledge work is at times overwhelming as millions of individuals in the United States and around the world have been profoundly influenced by such misleading information. Those of us in critical pedagogy find it hard to believe that such lies and misrepresentations could still have credibility years after they had been exposed, but, just as an example, over a decade after 9/11 many

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of the people in the contemporary United States still believed that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed WMDs (weapons of mass destruction), was responsible for 9/11, and had prepared to leave American cities under a mushroom cloud. Such a crazy politics of knowledge tells us that something is deeply wrong with not only the ethical behavior and sanity of power wielders, but that one of the most powerful weapons in their multidimensional and frightening arsenal is their ownership of much of the world’s knowledge. In this context, contemporary standardized educational systems contribute to the imperial task as they pass along the official verities of the regime and promote its sociopolitical and economic interests. The focus of this essay involves analyzing the ways critical pedagogy might conceptualize and enact a response to the knowledge wars being waged against peoples in North America, Australia, New Zealand and Europe, marginalized peoples living in these regions, and the most destitute peoples living around the world.

THE WEST WORKS TO GAIN MULTILEVEL SUPREMACY OVER THE REST OF THE WORLD The politics of knowledge and the contemporary knowledge wars cannot be separated from the relationship between the epistemological, ontological, the political economic, and the ideological. All four of these domains constantly interact in a synergistic manner to shape the nature of the knowledge produced by Western power wielders in the contemporary era. Dominant power brokers attempt – with a great deal of success – to regulate what people view as legitimate knowledge by utilizing a crypto-positivistic, evidencebased science that excludes complexity, context, power, multiple modes of research design, the ever changing in-process nature of the phenomena of the social world, subjugated and Indigenous knowledges from

diverse social and geographical locales, and the multiple realities perceived and constructed by different peoples at divergent historical times and cultural places. There is no way around it; the task of the critical pedagogue as teacher, researcher, and knowledge worker is profoundly complex and demanding in our proto-fascist era. I hate to use the word fascist because of the accusations of overstatement that it will evoke, but at this historical point I sense that we can no longer avoid it. The neo-liberal, market-driven, and crypto-fascist logic of the contemporary Western empire with its ‘recovered’ forms of White supremacy, patriarchy, class politics, homophobia, and fundamentalist Christian intolerance represents a new ‘fall of Western civilization’. We are all affected by the fact that as a culture ‘we have fallen and we can’t get up’, and in this context our critiques of hegemonic knowledges constitute just one aspect of a larger effort to ‘get well’, to mend our psyches that have been broken in this social descent (Sardar, 1999; Nelson, 2000). As I visit North American schools and study the curricula taught in most of them, I am reminded yet again of the preparation of young pioneers for the empire. The superiority of the European heritage, Christianity, and Western knowledges are now firmly reentrenched. The notion that we might study the knowledges or entertain the perspectives of peoples from other cultures, religions, or ideological perspectives is quickly fading like the Morning Star as the sun rises over Fallujah. Along with geopolitical, military, political economic, and other forms of power, the power of knowledge (episto-power) plays its role in reinforcing these other forms of power by placing the various peoples of North America, Europe, and the rest of the world into hierarchical categories. Poor people, diasporic individuals from the most economically depressed parts of the world, and residents of the ‘developing countries’ are positioned on these

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hierarchies as less intelligent, less civilized, and more barbaric than upper-middle class, White, Christian, and often male Westerners. The superiority of those who fall under the parasol of dominant positionality is made so obvious by educational and other social institutions that everyone knows where they fit on the status ladder. This knowing where one fits on the ladder does great harm – obviously to those who at the bottom rungs who feel inferior – but also to those at the top rungs who develop a sense of privilege and superiority (Weiler, 2004). It is the charge of critical pedagogy to throw a monkey wrench into a system of knowledge – an episteme as Foucault labeled his regime of truth – that perpetuates such perspectives and the human suffering that accompanies them.

DIVERSALITY: THE DIRE NEED FOR DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES, FOR MULTIPLE FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE EFFORT TO EXPOSE AND RESIST THE NEW EMPIRE A key task of critical pedagogy involves helping people understand the ideological and epistemological inscriptions on the ways of seeing promoted by the dominant power blocs of the West. In such work, criticalists uncover both old and new knowledges that stimulate our ethical, ideological, and pedagogical imagination to change our relationship with the world and other people. Concurrently, such critical labor facilitates the construction of a new mode of emancipation derived from our understandings of the successes and failures of the past and the present. Such an undertaking is essential to the planet’s survival at this moment in history. In the last years of the first decade of the 21st century, the hegemonic politics of knowledge and the crypto-positivistic epistemology that is its conjoined twin are destroying the world.

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As I write these words, I feel as if I’ve been magically positioned in a 1950s scifi movie in which the people of the earth mobilize to fight off their destruction. Of course, it is not the lizard people from the planet Enyon that threaten us; it is the power wielders of the West with their free market economic policies, geopolitical military actions, and the epistorays of consciousnessconstructing information that we must confront. Dominant crypto-positivist modes of these epistorays are the most difficult of the tools of hegemonic power to recognize. They travel under the cover of phrases such as ‘scientific proof’ and other high status monikers. Flying under the public radar of perception, they justify murder in the name of national security and ecological devastation in the name of economic growth. Such ‘knowledge weapons’ help deaden our ethical senses and compassion for those harmed by transnational economic scams, and Eurocentric and Americocentric ways of seeing that subvert the development of a critical consciousness. Indeed, the epistorays move us to support – under the flag of high standards – schools that obscure more than enlighten. Our critical pedagogical effort to thwart these power plays, I believe, involves engaging in a transformative multilogicality. By this, I refer to gaining the capability and the resolve to explore the world not from the Western imperial vantage point but from diverse perspectives – often standpoints forged by pain, suffering, and degradation. The imperial, neo-liberal rationalization for the construction of a planetary empire ruled by the United States and its collaborators is grotesquely disturbing to hundreds of millions of people around the world. Given the flagrance of the imperial abuses and the perversity of the Iraqi War, more and more Westerners are beginning to understand the brutality of the military violence, the material disparity, and the ecological harm that such policies and knowledges create. The empire’s neo-liberal adulation of market-driven modes of sociopolitical and educational organization

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shapes its efforts to adjust children and youth to their imperial roles as human capital and cannon fodder for the wars of geopolitical advantage and resources demanded by the needs of the imperial machine. Key to the multilogical critical pedagogy advocated here is the notion that while theoretical and knowledge frameworks help elucidate phenomena, they also work to mystify our understanding of them. This is one of the reasons that I have worked so hard to develop the concept of the bricolage delineated by Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (2000) in a critical context (Kincheloe, 2001a; Kincheloe and Berry, 2004; Kincheloe, 2005a). Bricolage involves the process of rigorously rethinking and reconceptualizing multidisciplinary research. Ethnography, textual analysis, semiotics, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, historiography, discourse analysis combined with philosophical analysis, literary analysis, aesthetic criticism, and theatrical and dramatic ways of observing and making meaning typically constitute the methodological bricolage. Employing these multiperspectival (Kellner, 1995) dynamics, bricoleurs transcend the parochial blinders of mono-disciplinary approaches and open new windows onto the world of research and knowledge production. In the contemporary domain, bricolage is usually understood to involve the process of employing these methodological strategies when the need arises in fluid research situations. In the critical articulation of the bricolage, I contend that qualitative researchers move beyond mere interdisciplinarity as it refers to research designs and methodologies, and move to a new conceptual domain. Bricoleurs employing a variety of research methodologies must also employ a variety of theoretical insights coming obviously from a deep understanding of critical theory as well as feminist theory, social theory from diverse geographical places, anti-racist theories, class theories, post-structuralism, complexity and chaos theories, queer theory, and post/ anti-colonial theories. This, of course, is a lot

to ask of critical scholars/activists, but perilous times demand great commitment. Such multidisciplinary insight and theoretical dexterity helps researchers not only gain a more rigorous (not in the positivistic sense) view of the world but also a new mode of researcher self-awareness. Critical bricoleurs understand the diverse contexts in which any knowledge producer operates. Transformative researchers struggle to uncover the insidious ways that dominant power blocs work to shape the knowledge they produce, they begin to better understand the relationship between any researcher’s ways of seeing and the social location of her personal history. As the bricoleur appreciates the ways that research is a power-inscribed activity, she abandons the quixotic quest for some naïve mode of realism. At this point, the bricoleur concentrates on the exposé of the multiple ways power harms individuals and groups and the way a knowledge producer’s location in the web of reality helps shape the production, interpretation, and consumption of data. At every space, the critical bricoleur discerns new ways that a hegemonic epistemology in league with a dominant power-soaked politics of knowledge operates to privilege the privileged and further marginalize the marginalized. In the context of the critical bricolage, the power of difference, of diverse perspectives, and of insights coming from different locales in the web of reality reveal their significance. All of these worldviews – especially when they are juxtaposed in dialogue with one another – contribute to our understanding of the world in general and the oppression that leads to human suffering in particular. Such diversal knowledges enhance our sociopolitical and educational imagination and our ability to imagine new ways of seeing and being and interacting with other people and the physical world. I believe that a multilogical critical pedagogy can lead the way to these new social, ideological, epistemological, ontological, and cognitive domains. So-called ‘primitive peoples’ were much

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more influenced by the unconscious dimension of the human mind than modern Western peoples. In many ways such Western distancing from the subconscious may lead to forms of disconnection with the world and its people that undermine the psychological and cognitive wellbeing of contemporary, highly educated people from dominant cultural backgrounds. In the engagement with diverse knowledges promoted by the critical bricolage, critical pedagogues attempt to reengage with these ancient Indigenous knowledges in the process, integrating them with political economic, sociocultural, and pedagogical insights. The outcomes can be profoundly transformative on both an individual and a social scale. Indeed, the thanocentric impulses of contemporary Western ideological orientations and actions demand a form of social psychoanalysis (Kincheloe and Pinar, 1991) that can repair the social unconsciousness of the West. Diversal knowledges – ancient Indigenous and other types – can help in this therapeutic process. As contemporary Westerners stare into what Mr. Lahey from the Canadian TV series Trailer Park Boys would call the ‘shit abyss’, there is a great need for alternative ontologies, epistemologies, cosmologies, and ideologies to which they can compare their present views of self and world. In the interaction with the diverse ways of thinking, Westerners and Western educators can begin to develop an Eros to counter the dead end Thanatos of the empire.

DIVERSALITY WITH A CRITICAL FOUNDATION In an era of imperial wars and concomitant information control to elicit support for such ‘preemptive strikes’, critical pedagogues need to develop knotholes in the centerfield fence through which teachers, students, and other individuals can view unregulated pictures of sociocultural reality. The public’s

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consciousness is shaped just as much by what is not perceived as it is by what is. This is why diversal knowledges are so important in this time and place. Critical pedagogues explore data from Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Islamic World, the oppressed in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe, and Indigenous communities around the world. In this context, we attempt to construct a political economic ecology of knowledges that lead to new ways of seeing and being. Simply in the act of attending to and learning from the insights of marginalized peoples, we operate as allies in their struggle against the oppression of Western power blocs. Such support cannot be separated from the necessity of upper-middle class, White, male Westerners to step back and examine the effects of their own immersion in such a politics of knowledge. As we understand the compelling perceptions of Indigenous peoples, we can gain new vantage points on the sentient and mysterious life force that inhabits both our being and the cosmos surrounding us. The insights that peoples from diverse cultural and historical locales in the web of reality have accessed about this life force in unconscious and other states of consciousness should be a source of fascination and study by scholars from a wide variety of academic domains, critical pedagogy being merely one of many. Yet, this often does not happen because of the crypto-positivistic stigma attached to the exploration of such yet to be understood domains. The intelligence of the earth – which may simply be a pale reflection of the intelligence of the universe – is not something that mainstream scholars are ready to discuss. The insights we may gain from connecting to such a larger cognitive force – insights often appreciated by Indigenous peoples more than Western scholars – can become one of the most important dimensions of emancipatory knowledge work of the future. This is one of the dimensions of the value of the work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1987) in their work on life as a cognitive process (see

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Kincheloe, 2004a for an expansion of the relation of this work to criticality). Thus, again and again we confront the power of difference, alterity, and diversality by pushing critical theory and critical pedagogy to a more intellectually rigorous and in turn praxiologically powerful position. A critically complex and diversal critical pedagogy is simply better equipped to confront those waging a knowledge war against the world in the 21st century. The power of diverse perspectives is, thankfully, recognized by more and more scholars who appreciate the notion that forms of cultural renewal can come from places long viewed as irrelevant and peripheral to Western power wielders. In this diversal domain, we become more capable of critically scrutinizing the process of imperial political economic, geopolitical, and epistemological globalization. In this process, criticalists also monitor the role that all levels of education play in this imperial process in order to develop more pragmatic strategies for transformative intervention. Elementary and secondary schools, as well as colleges and universities, must become ‘trading zones’ of intercultural exchange and global meeting places. This, of course, was a central goal of the Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy at McGill University, Montreal, (now freireproject.org). As cultural and epistemological crossroads, the purpose of schools in a global world would forever be transformed. The politics of knowledge would become a central dimension of any curriculum, and the contrast and comparison of different cultural perspectives on a wide array of issues would emerge as a familiar aspect of the study of any topic. In such a transformed diversal education, critical pedagogues would establish working relationships with scholars and schools around the world. Such educators would seek the help of scholars from educational institutions in developing nations who have already begun to challenge hegemonic systems of Western knowledge. The curricula that these innovative

scholars have developed by incorporating subjugated knowledges of their own and other cultures can profoundly help critical educators from all parts of the world rethink, diversalize, and revitalize existing pedagogies (Nandy, 2000; Weiler, 2004; Orelus, 2007).

THE CRITICAL BRICOLAGE VIS-À-VIS DIVERSALITY: ENHANCING AGENCY IN A SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED WORLD Such proposals represent a sea change in the everyday teaching, learning, and knowledge production of all educational institutions. The moribund status quo is no longer acceptable – not that it ever was. The bricolage in this context becomes a central research/epistemological/theoretical motif for incorporating the diversal intersections of knowledges that would be welcomed into schools of all types. The hidden positivism that insidiously shapes so much of Western curriculum, instruction, and research is remarkably uninterested in the contexts and processes of which a phenomenon is a part – dynamics that I and many other researchers find essential to the study and understanding of any topic imaginable. It should not be surprising that insight into the contexts and processes of which phenomena are a part often help explain the role that dominant power blocs play in shaping them. Thus, the dismissal of context and process is often an insidious and effective way of hiding the influence of dominant power and maintaining the status quo. A critical form of hermeneutics and textual analysis counters such crypto-positivist tactics, using context and process to undermine the easy production of universal knowledge of the reductionist tradition of research. When phenomena are viewed within the contexts and processes that have shaped both them and the consciousness of the individual observing them, a far more

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complex picture begins to emerge. An awareness of the contexts and processes in which a phenomenon takes place and the contexts and processes in which an observer of the phenomenon is located provides us profoundly divergent understandings and perspectives on the entity. In the knowledge wars of the contemporary era, such epistemological insights are ‘dangerous’, as they expose the way episto-power operates to exclude diversality from curricula and public knowledge (Clark, 2001; Marcel, 2001). Employing the bricolage vis-à-vis diversality will inevitably promote paradox where there is certainty, open-endedness where there is finality, multiple perspectives where there is one correct answer, insight into ideological and cultural inscription where there is objectivity, and defamiliarization where there is comfort and security. In a sense the type of knowledge work produced by the bricolage vis-à-vis diversality creates research narratives without endings. Closure simply can’t take place when we know that phenomena are always in process, and that as times and locales change the ways we understand them also changes. Thus, our critical knowledge work offers insights from this point in time and from this particular ideological/cultural perspective. Such a positioning of our work does not weaken it – to the contrary, it makes it stronger, more in touch with the ways the world, the mind, epistemology, and ontology operate. When we view a Western social organization for the first time, for example, from the perspective of a marginalized individual who has experienced a form of existential death at the hands of the institution, we have crawled through a new conceptual wormhole in our effort to make sense of the phenomenon in question. Such an insight destroys any notion of closure we might have had. In these situations, we have been touched by Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History in a way that forever changes us, the knowledge we generate, and the reasons we produce it in the

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first place. This is how the bricolage vis-à-vis diversality works – it refuses to allow us to be content with monological and monocultural perspectives. It places abrasive grains of epistemological sand in our pants and makes us uncomfortable with reductionism and its consequences. A key anti-hegemonic dimension of the bricolage vis-à-vis diversality is that it alerts us to the ways contexts, processes, and relationships shape both the phenomena of the world and consciousness itself. This is a powerful and life-changing insight that must always be coupled with the appreciation that humans have agency – they do not have to be pawns that passively submit to the demands of dominant power. As many critical social theorists have maintained, this agency doesn’t mean that people can just simply do what they want. These contexts, processes, and relationships – always inscribed by dominant forms of power – construct a playing field on which human agents operate. Thus, human activity is influenced by such dynamics but not determined. As individuals begin to understand this power-related and socially constructed dimension of the world, they sometimes feel like refugees in relation to the hegemonic cosmos to which they can never return. Critical pedagogy, of course, maintains that we don’t have to live like refugees, as we re-construct the world and create new, shared spaces with individuals from diverse places around the world. In any critical orientation, researchers, educators, and activists always have to be careful of inadvertently endorsing structural modes of determinism. The failure to recognize human agency in the struggle for justice and in the knowledge wars of the contemporary era is to create nihilistic forms of pedagogy and cultural work. The critical bricolage viewed in this context is literally the toolbox from which critical teachers and cultural workers draw to better understand the hegemonic mystifications of dominant power blocs in the contemporary world. While existing tools can be and are used for valuable

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effect, an evolving notion of criticality (see Kincheloe, 2008) attempts to create the most rigorous and useful forms of knowledge work and social activism possible. All critical teachers and cultural workers must become adept hermeneuts who hone their ability to make sense of the diverse and complex forces at work in divergent situations. Concurrently, they gain the ability to identify and discern the effects of where they are situated in diverse social and political frameworks. In this same interpretive context, critical bricoleurs acting on their understanding of diversality deploy their interpretive skills in the effort to make sense of the way members of dominant power blocs from race, class, gender, sexual, colonial, and religious perspectives see the world and rationalize their often oppressive actions. In previous work on race, class, and gender (Kincheloe and Steinberg, 1997), on Whiteness and racism (Kincheloe et  al., 1998), patriarchy (Kincheloe, 2001b), and dominant economic constructs (Kincheloe and Steinberg, 2007), my colleagues and I have attempted to understand not only the nature of oppression and its effects on the oppressed, but also the knowledge frameworks and cognitive/affective matrixes that shape both the consciousness and actions of members of dominant groups whose deeds often perpetuate subjugation. In this complex context, critical bricoleurs always examine such sociopolitical and pedagogical dynamics within the interaction of relationship and individuality (Steinberg, 2006). There is no universal formula for such interaction – indeed, each encounter is idiosyncratic and erratic. Although we may recognize tendencies, we cannot count on regularity or consistency in such complex encounters. We must study each situation as a unique occurrence with diverse players, divergent contexts and processes, and distinct outcomes. The critical bricolage vis-à-vis diversality presents a transformative, anti-hegemonic view zealous in its effort to address and end oppression but concurrently nuanced in its understanding

of the slippery relationship between agency and structure. Human beings do not fade away into the ice fog of power structures. The process of social construction is always a co-constructive process as individual and structure create one another. As agential beings who make our way through the ice fog, individuals who grasp the critical complex insights to power, agency, knowledge, and action delineated here, criticalists understand that they have to rethink what they are going to do the rest of their lives. Previously operating in only limited dimensions of reality, they had not been faced with the ethical and ideological decisions now placed before them in the multilogical domains they have entered. At this moment they realize that there is nothing easy about living in a critical manner, about living critical pedagogy (Faulconer and Williams, 1985; Livezey, 1988; Marcel, 2001).

THE POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE EMPIRE: THE CONTINUING CRISIS OF KNOWLEDGE Since the time of René Descartes in the 17th century, many Western knowledge producers have held up their notion of reason and research as the one pathway to enlightenment and emancipation from ignorance. In the contemporary era, the dominant imperial politics of knowledge want to recover this one universal pathway to truth via the reassertion of positivist logic. Evidence-based research has become a code word for a kind of crypto-positivism that, like a CIA operative, always maintains ‘plausible deniability’ that it is not really positivism. As referenced earlier, the decontextualizing dimensions of this crypto-positivism often works effectively to uphold the status quo, a Bush– Harper–Howard reality. These politics of knowledge become even more important in an era where privatization and corporatization of education becomes a key dimension

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of the public conversation about schooling and more and more of an actual reality. In higher education, the self-direction and independence of colleges and universities have already been compromised by corporate influences. Every day that passes witnesses new forms of dependency on corporate support and funding as governments back away from fiscal support of higher education. The fact that a pharmaceutical company pays for research on the effectiveness of particular drugs is part of the context that often shapes the nature of the knowledge that is produced. If researchers know that their multi-milliondollar corporately funded center may be closed down if they produce data at odds with the fiscal interests of the funding agency, they may find it hard not to be influenced by such pressure. Knowledge is never free and unconnected to diverse power blocs because it is always produced as part of a web of power relationships. In corporate hyperreality, these power matrixes become even more complex and interwoven into every dimension of the social order with the development of diverse knowledge technologies that disperse corporatized data everyday around the clock. Thus, the ghosts of the new and improved Western empire constantly haunt us with both cognitively directed information and affectively aimed images and representations designed to win our consent to the needs of capital and dominant power. The hobgoblins of the imperial mind are omnipresent and they have become so adept at producing hegemonic data that most individuals are unable to recognize ideologically charged information when they consume it. The 21st-century imperial politics of knowledge flies under the radar like a B-2 Spirit stealth bomber dropping epistemological ‘payloads’ on domestic and foreign targets. In the everyday life of universities, these critical insights into the politics of knowledge are still not a typical aspect of the conversation about the institutional research mission. The idea that the production and mediation

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of information in higher education is a highly politicized process demanding careful monitoring of the ideological interests involved is still unwelcome in academic circles. Most researchers, politicians, and educators still live in a state of denial about the political dimension to knowledge production and the relationship between validated information and the international purveyors of economic power. One is inseparable from the other. The sooner the politics of knowledge become a central aspect of all dimensions of research, politics, and education, the sooner we may be able to leave the global Gitmo [Guantánamo Bay] of ideological mystification in which we are all held captive (Livezey, 1988; Weiler, 2004; Smith, 2006). Academics, from Jean-Francois Lyotard’s (1979/1984) The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge to diverse contemporary analyses of the nature of knowledge production, have been talking about the crisis of knowledge for decades. Lyotard linked the flood of knowledge produced in academic institutions of the 1970s to the breakdown of the Western ‘modernist’ grand narratives. In a diverse world such narratives, Lyotard argued, had outlived their usefulness and were incapable of producing data that was not inscribed by Western epistemological traditions. While Lyotard was quite correct in his understanding of the limitations of Western knowledge work, he might not have anticipated how dramatically the crisis would intensify in the 21st century. With the expansion of the power and concentration of capital over the last couple of decades, scholarship and social movements have not kept up with the ways that power frameworks insidiously inscribe knowledge coming from diverse social locations (Weiler, 2004; Kincheloe, 2005b). Neither have those who serve as the guardians of the quality and rigor of research developed satisfactory ways of monitoring the production of knowledge under these ideological conditions. In my own experience, many editors of prestigious journals in a variety of disciplines

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have no idea what my critical colleagues and I are talking about when we make reference to the ideological conditions under which particular knowledge is produced. Such guardians of the epistemological status quo often do not understand the episto-political factors at work in their own journals. Their ideological naïveté grants insight into the ways that critical analyses of the insidious impact of dominant power on the research act are not commonly taught in research courses in the physical sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. When such issues of power and knowledge fall outside the purview of the professional awareness of scholars sufficiently prominent to edit prestigious journals, we know that a regressive, hegemonic politics of knowledge is accomplishing its goals. Those corporate advocates of privatization and empire may not be winning in Iraq, but they are certainly finding success in their preemptive strikes in the knowledge wars. The politics of imperial knowledge will continue to exacerbate the 21st-century crisis of knowledge until Western scholars, politicos, and educators begin to understand the intimacy between dominant power blocs and information as well as the cultural hegemony of monological Western epistemologies and the data they validate. Our call for diversal knowledges re-emerges in this context. Until we understand the ways that power not only validates but rank orders the knowledges produced by individuals with differing amounts of academic and cultural capital, an epistemological hegemony legitimizing a political economic hegemony will only grow more acute and inhumane. Indeed, it will perpetuate and legitimate unacceptable forms of human suffering. The alienation contemporary people experience from the physical, historical, ethical, political, ecological, cosmological, ontological, and epistemological contexts of which they are intimately embedded will also continue to deepen in this episteme. The crisis of imperial knowledge leads to harder stuff, more intense problems for more and more of the planet’s inhabitants.

THE FAILURE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE: THE POSSIBILITIES OF NEW WAYS OF SEEING After all the paradigmatic debate and discord surrounding the production of knowledge, the nature of epistemology and ontology, and the nature of research design in the social, psychological, and educational domains, many of the issues addressed here about power, justice, empire, and the sociocultural location of knowledge are simply not addressed in the 21st century. Much of the analysis involving paradigmatic typologies – positivism, post-positivism, constructivism, interpretivism, criticality, feminism, poststructuralism, and so on – have failed to adequately deal with these concerns. The effort to bring a form of crypto-positivism back to the socio-educational sciences is currently successful with the support of many Western governments and corporate interests. It will ultimately fail, however, for many reasons. One of the most surprising of these reasons is that such a recovery of positivism on many levels dismisses what future historians may see as the most important advances in 20th-century s­cience: the advent of complexity from Einstein’s relativity (see Kincheloe et  al., 1999), quantum physics, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and complexity and chaos theory and the related science of emergent properties coming from the biological and psychological work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Instead of focusing on the power of this complexity and multilogicality of scientific pursuit, contemporary crypto-positivists have re-adjusted their lens in a reductionist manner. Rather than taking a cue from the insight into complexity to be drawn from the aforementioned and much other scientific work, the crypto-positivists have concentrated on the isolation of what they believe to be fixed and intractable social, psychological, and educational phenomena. The idea that thingsin-the-world are in flux, always changing, in

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the process of becoming that is drawn from the move to complexity has been swept under the epistemological and ontological rug. Thus, a neo-mechanism has emerged that fears the recognition of epistemological, ontological, and even cosmological changes demanded by complexity and diversality. If the physical, biological, social, psychological, and educational cosmos is more like an indivisible, at-first-glance imperceptible matrix of experiences in process and ever evolving relationships then a reductionist science simply doesn’t work. Indeed, such a neo-positivist view of knowledge provides tobacco companies, pesticide manufacturers, pharmaceutical producers, standardized test makers, and all their political beneficiaries with a way of getting the answers they want from a ‘validated’ (but corrupted) science. For reductionist researchers, such words sting. The possibility of rethinking the nature of how we approach social, psychological, and educational science is a disturbing consideration for neo-positivist researchers. Obviously there are researchers who fall into the reductionist camp who are simply naïve and do not understand the epistemological, ontological, ideological, and political economic dynamics of their work. Concurrently, there are those who make conscious decisions to sell their souls to tainted money, in the process doing the bidding of their benefactors and dancing to the devil’s fiddle. As I write these words, I know I will not win the Miss Congeniality award in the world of research. I want to make clear I am not lumping all researchers who disagree with me about the complex and complicated domain of knowledge production into the categories of naïve scholars or playmates of the corporate devils. Obviously, there are brilliant, socially conscious researchers who profoundly disagree with me and go about doing first-rate research in ways very different than mine. Still, the epistemological and ideological bastardization of research practices in a variety of domains is a reality that cannot be ignored.

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In addition to the complexity-based scientific traditions I have previously referenced, numerous other researchers over the last century have laid a foundation for many of the arguments presented here about the failures of social, psychological, and educational inquiry. John Dewey’s (1916) challenge to positivism in the first decades of the 20th century with his epistemological and ontological questions about the reality of intractable and timeless truths has influenced so many researchers and educators, me included. Obviously, in a critical theoretical essay, the work of Max Horkheimer (1974), Theodor Adorno (1973), Herbert Marcuse (1955), and Walter Benjamin (1968) from the Frankfurt School from the 1920s to the 1960s is central in understanding the oppressive uses to which positivist modes of inquiry have been put. Antonio Gramsci’s (1988) work in Mussolini’s fascist prisons in the 1920s and 1930s against hegemony and his insights into the transformative role of the organic intellectual are key aspects of the critical research tradition. Of course, the anti-colonial revolutionary ideas articulated so profoundly by Frantz Fanon (1963) and Albert Memmi (1965) that so powerfully influenced the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s movement, the queer rights movement, and the challenges to reductionist scholarly knowledge these collectives inspired constitute a central thread in the development of critical knowledge work in the 21st century. Indeed, the work of those involved with the post-discourses and postcolonialism are central dimensions of the body of insights on which contemporary criticalists draw. Running this work through the filter of feminist scholars such as bell hooks (1981), Sandra Harding (1986), Gayatri Spivak (1987), Patricia Hill Collins (1991), and Vandana Shiva (1993), to name only a few, a powerful multidimensional canon of critique begins to emerge. This canon – including the previously mentioned scholars and many, many other

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critical knowledge workers around the world – have generally argued that Western reductionist sciences have rarely produced knowledge that was in the best interests of the casualties of Western colonialism and numerous other forms of racial, class-based, gender, sexual, religious, and physical ability-related oppression. These aforementioned scholars all understood from diverse cultural, theoretical, and epistemological perspectives that something was egregiously wrong with the reductionist knowledges produced by Western and Western-influenced scholars. Providing only narrow strips of decontextualized information on a topic, such knowledges often missed the larger epistemological and ideological forest for the cultural trees in front of them. In such a knowledge cosmos, great damage was and continues to be done to those in the most vulnerable situations. The consistency of such scientific damage over the decades is disconcerting, as too many scholars/researchers have failed to learn the lessons the previously mentioned knowledge producers taught. The knowledge wars never seem to end. As the knowledge wars continue, the US/ Western empire continues to fall deeper and deeper into the epistemological, ideological, ethical, cultural, sociopolitical, psychological, and pedagogical abyss. The machine metaphors of Western Cartesian– Newtonian–Baconian epistemology and ontology persist in the work of the cryptopositivists and the dead universe they promote. Individuals reared in an educational domain grounded on a thanocentric cosmology struggle to existentially survive, reaching out to fundamentalist Christianity, Judaism, Islam, New Age mysticism, or the contents of an ever growing pharmacopoeia to ‘enliven’, to bring something transcendent into their daily lives. While many of these individuals are shielded from educational experiences that would help them articulate their alienation, they intuitively sense that there is something crucial missing from the world machine metaphor

permeating the sociocultural, psychological, and political dimensions of their lived worlds. Thus, understandably, they are put off by political discourse, rigorous theological inquiry, and education as it generally exists in the contemporary era. They are searching for meaning and engaging affective experiences. Such dynamics are generally not to be found in these domains. At least fundamentalist religion provides affective stimulation in a world where the ‘experts’ too often promote deadening, thanocentric ‘expertise’. Yet at the same time this neo-Marcusean thano-virus morphs into its 21st- century configuration, we know that there is an alternative to such ways of seeing and being in the world. While by no means does criticality offer an ‘answer’ to ultimate human questions or ‘salvation’ in any sense of the term, it does provide us a different and less mad path than the one being followed and promoted by many Westerners and their dominant social institutions. Make no mistake, human beings are existentially condemned to a life without final answers and ultimate revelations of meaning – that is just part of life on earth. We have to simply get used to the uncertainty and ambiguity of the human condition. As we accept the inevitability of uncertainty and ambiguity in light of epistemological, ontological, and cosmological complexity, we can also begin to explore with the help of the critical bricolage visà-vis diversality an alternative view of the nature of the cosmos and our role in it. Grounded on a critical theoretical commitment to social justice, anti-oppressive ways of being, and new forms of connectedness and radical love, we can help set in motion an analysis of the universe not as a lifeless machine but as a living cognitive process that is changeable and ever connected to human consciousness. Most great theological traditions have at some point in their history pondered this notion of cosmological intelligence, but now it is becoming a more important dimension of

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complexity-grounded physical sciences – physics and the life sciences in particular. Here life is connected to the cognitive ingenuity embedded in the cosmos. Here creativity and historically significant work become important in an ontology of becoming. In this living universe, the inner world of consciousness is never unconnected to the physical cosmos we see around us (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984; Prigogine, 1996). Developing a variety of sociopolitical, economic, ethical, aesthetic, cognitive, and educational ways to put these ideas into action is the challenge of the 21st century – a charge central to our survival. Thus, the more we know about positivism and its contemporary hidden strain, the better able we are to get beyond a static existence and more into a dynamic and erotic becoming. In addition, such knowledge empowers us to understand that positivism is not misguided simply because it presents a deceptive picture of the physical and social worlds. As if that wasn’t enough, positivism and the culture it constructs around it are grounded on an indefensible epistemology, ontology, and cosmology – of course, I could add axiology, teleology, and ethics to this list as well. Indeed, positivism’s view of the nature of humanness and life itself is highly problematic. Mechanistic, positivistic ways of viewing the world and ourselves has led and is leading us down a primrose path to great human suffering and planetary destruction. In the 21st-century Imperial Court of Corporate Greed and Knowledge Control, criticalists must be the ones who expose the corruption and deception. As critical pedagogues we must gain the ability to look at the world anew and ask completely different questions about it – questions that expose what’s going on at diverse levels of reality and the way these events influence the lived world. It is only at this juncture that we can produce knowledges that alert the world to the understanding that ‘reality’ is not exactly what it appears to be. Crypto-positivists are trapped

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in a never-ending game of three-hand monty with its delusions of ‘normal’ ways of seeing that use the name of neutrality to conceal the machinations of power. Using our multiperspectival methodologies, we begin to reframe our windows on the world in a way that allows us not only to view diverse dimensions of reality in different ways but that also permits us to resituate the problems that confront us. As I look at the way, for example, that the United States and many of its Western allies have dealt with Iran over the last several decades, I appreciate multiple ways of seeing the web of colonial and political economic relationships that has shaped mainstream knowledge production and policies toward the nation. It is absurd to ignore this web of interactions that have led us to this particular point in diplomatic history. The ever worsening relations between the United States and Iran represent a failure of imperial ambitions, economic greed, and ways of producing knowledge that help us understand the larger dynamics at work in this situation (see Kincheloe, 2004b for an expansion of these ideas). Thus, we fall back into our crypto-positivist trap of limited ways of seeing. Critical pedagogy with its critical bricolage vis-à-vis diversality in its concern with multiple perspectives and divergent forms of power identifies the normalizing voices that ‘naturalize’ dominant perspectives and invalidate the views of the ‘other’, the marginalized. The ability of positivism to exclude a wide variety of information and experiences from consideration is one of the keys to its success as an invaluable partner to the dominant power blocs over the past couple of centuries. Cryptopositivism continues this tradition undercover and more effectively in 21st- century wars. Critical pedagogy in this unfortunate state of affairs delivers a jolt to dominant epistemologies and the empire’s politics of knowledge (Faulconer and Williams, 1987; Livezey, 1988; Pickering, 1999; Nelson, 2000).

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LOST: LOSING CONNECTION EVEN IN THE AGE OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB – OUR MISPLACED SENSE OF PURPOSE No matter how much traditional modes of science have learned about the physical world, humans are still children in the effort to understand the workings of the cosmos. In the world of physics and biology – just to mention a couple of physical scientific disciplines – there are so many things about the structure and workings of the universe as well as the nature of the life process that elude experts. The same could be said of any scientific domain, where the notion of interconnection and purpose gives way to positivism’s ontological delusion of separateness – of things-in-themselves, not things-in-connection or things-inrelationship. It takes ideological and intellectual fortitude to challenge the knowledge warriors of crypto-positivism. We know they will hit back every time with challenges to the legitimacy of one’s scholarly or cultural work. Young criticalists must prepare themselves for attacks from those who would deny them tenure, question the purpose of their pedagogy, use their work in criticality as exhibits of their potential criminality in trials and legal proceedings, and publicize their efforts in public media as dangerous challenges to community values and Western civilization itself (all of these are actual examples). Indeed, critical pedagogy is not for the faint of heart. I can’t help but find nasty humor in mainstream scholars telling criticalists to quit using provocative language (such as the kind I’m using right now), while they destroy the lives of critical scholars or stand silently by while some of the previously referenced assaults take place. But to be provocative, this is often the modus operandi of the academic bourgeoisie who many times have no problem with people destroying other people’s lives and careers as long as the demolition is

carried out with a low affect, a quiet voice, and a faint smile on one’s face. I fervently believe in the importance of education and the research mission of the university. Such pedagogy and knowledge work help shape the consciousness of people both directly and indirectly connected to educational institutions. If such work were not important, there wouldn’t be so many efforts to counter the work of criticalists. Thus, in an era of knowledge wars, the contested space of critical pedagogy and the knowledge it produces takes on a consequence greater than before. In the purposeless world of crypto-positivism, the effort to address human suffering and the power asymmetries that continue to expand or the consideration of critical notions of affective investment and radical love are quite out of place. Such commitments can be held in private, but they have no place in the objective and covert world of crypto-positivism. Critical research takes place outside the matrix of global domination and, in this locale, works to expose and respond to the dominant power wielders’ brutal operations justified under the flag of verified truth (Pickering, 1999; Smith, 2006; Monchinski, 2007). In the positivist universe, the notion of critical transformation of unacceptable social conditions is not relevant to those researchers who operate around such horror. Critical researchers have a passion for social justice in research that transcends reductionistic modes of distancing and disinterestedness. This means that we must challenge forms of knowledge that are presented to us as value-free. Concurrently, we must also challenge the removal of humanness from objectivist knowledges that are deployed in the world. I have long been fascinated by the use of the passive voice in positivistic research, for example, the Lwiindi ceremony of the people (Tonga tribe of Zambia) was observed with the natives dancing and giving thanks to the gods that provided a good harvest. In such a construction the human observer, the researcher, is erased

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in the same way a physical scientist would write in her protocols that 8.8 mls of sulfuric acid was added to 1.3 g of mixed nitroesters of nitrobenzyl alcohols. In both examples no human dimension of the research activity was present to contaminate the objective description of the Lwiindi ceremony or the chemical process. No matter how oblivious the Western researchers may have been to the Tonga people’s ways of seeing and being, they were providing an objectively true account of the harvest ritual. What many critical, postcolonial, and Indigenous researchers have of course often found in ethnographic research of this variety from every conceivable part of the world is that the original investigators had completely missed the point of the cultural practice in question. The information they provided was sometimes humorous and always offensive to the peoples under scrutiny. As Dakota Sioux singer/songwriter Floyd ‘Red Crow’ Westerman wrote in his song, ‘Here Come the Anthros’, the anthropologists flock to the reservation to study ‘their feathered freaks with funded money in their [the anthropologists’] hands’. None of the money, however, Westerman writes later in the song, ever goes to the Native peoples. The purpose of such culturally oblivious, positivist-inscribed research was not to help Indigenous peoples throw off the shackles of colonial or neocolonial bondage but to provide an objective report about them. Even in epistemological domains such as generalizability of data, the positivistic lack of purpose and the removal of humanness exhibit themselves in harmful ways. The generalizability of research involves taking that which is learned from inquiry and utilizing it in another situation. Thus, what researchers ascertain in one situation is applied to the larger population. The point in the generalization process is that which is ascertained from one population and applied to another in social, psychological, and educational science always implicates human beings in at least two different settings. The researcher

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simply can’t remove human beings from this process. In order for generalizability to be achievable, the human agents in the new situation must be just like those in the first inquiry. Given the specific contextual construction of all human actors, it appears profoundly difficult to exchange a person in the original study with a person in the larger populace. Research that takes humanness seriously cannot take on faith the interchangeability of people coming from the two sets of subjects. Thus, in this case, the removal of humanness in the name of objectivity and rigor ends up undermining the quality of the data produced (Livezey, 1988; Geelan, 1996). Such a positivist science may be incapable of adequately dealing with even the most uncomplicated dimensions of lived experience in a way that provides not only unprecedented insights into social, psychological, or educational phenomena but also useful knowledges that can improve human life. Positivism is far more comfortable exploring fragments of lived experience rather than wholes, interconnections, and meanings. The all-important scholarly act of making sense of data is more a poetic activity than a positivistic scientific one. Deriving the living meaning out of human science is a profoundly difficult task that demands exploring the micro-experiences of individuals in particular circumstances, but at the same time filtering such experiences through diverse theoretical frameworks to figure out how they might be interpreted (van Manen, 1991; Lloyd and Smith, 2006; Pinar, 2006). This process is never simple and will never yield some facile mode of certainty. Any physical or human science that is grounded on the quest for certainty must remove phenomena of the world and human beings from its design because such things-in-the-world are always in process and cannot by definition be described with final certainty. In the next moment, in the next interaction they engage, they are by definition something different. The metaphysics of positivism will always lead it astray.

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This complex, in process, poetic dimension of all research will not be discussed in the Parliament of Positivism – the gag rule has been invoked. The poetic power of the critical researcher’s imagination is a crucial dimension of difference-making research. Such creativity always stands in awe of the autopoetic dimension of the physical, biological, and social domains – the phenomenon of emergence that could be called the intelligence of the universe. Indeed, compelling critical research possesses an aesthetic dimension where researchers make use of a hermeneutic muse to help them make sense of particular situations. Artists construct their own interpretations of the world in diverse media. Such constructions can by no means be explained in any exactitude by positivist psychology or science of any kind, arising as they do from the interaction of the unconscious, a socially constructed consciousness, and a variety of other factors. Psychoanalysis can certainly grant us some insights into the process – but by no means can it produce what positivists would label validated knowledge. Thus, some of our most compelling, life-altering, and world-changing knowledges come from parts unknown. It would seem in this context that researchers and people in general who developed a critical consciousness of the world connected to an appreciation of many of the unconscious dimensions of their psyche would be best equipped to produce brilliant knowledge and accomplish great things in the world. In the warped neighborhood of positivism, however, the idea of cultivating the poetic imagination and integrated, transformative consciousness of the researcher as a key dimension of a rigorous education is viewed as idiocy. In this and scores of other ways – a few of which referenced here – crypto-positivism crushes the sociological, psychological, and pedagogical imagination. In this context, one front of the knowledge wars involves the crusade against the scientific imagination.

WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE WARS: DEALING WITH VIOLENT KNOWLEDGE WHEN ONE ESCHEWS VIOLENCE The imperial political economic knowledge wars of the contemporary era help pave the way for criminal acts by corporations and their government allies against the poorest people around the world. In this context, I’m reminded of a public debate I had with a very personable and caring economist while I was a professor in Louisiana. Because he came from a very positivistic econometric perspective, he took issue with a statement I had made about the ethical dimensions of economics and economic policy. There is no ethical dimension to economics, he argued, maintaining that one simply had no choice but to follow the universal laws of the market. ‘But what about the purpose of our studies of economics?’, I asked him. Is it simply to maximize profits of particular corporations or specific sectors of one nation’s economy, or is it to make sure that wealth is produced and then distributed in a way where everyone would benefit? My friend was perplexed at my question and answered that my query was not an economics question but a moral or a theological question. The two domains were separate in his consciousness and had nothing to do with one another. Later, my friend told me that he had been very troubled by my questions because in receiving a BA, MS, and PhD in economics he had never been confronted with or thought about such issues – and that really disturbed him. He had compartmentalized his life; he was an economist in one dimension of his life, and in another he was a compassionate man who sincerely cared about the welfare of his fellow human beings. How could it be, he asked me, that the twain never met? How could he be ‘indoctrinated’ (his word) in a way that convinced him that there were no ethical dimensions of the ‘dismal science’? One doesn’t have to be a genius to anticipate

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what I said to him. I hope I didn’t overdo it, but I gave him a treatise on the politics of knowledge and epistemology. It’s in the interests of corporate power wielders, I told him, to keep economists from thinking of these dynamics. And it’s more than coincidental, I speculated, that positivist modes of economics keep ‘facts’ and ‘values’ so neatly separate. How, we both wondered, could one obtain three academic degrees in economics and not deal with these issues? In this interaction with my friend rests a micro-manifestation of some of the macroissues dealt with in this essay. The economist was a good man but had been academically ‘reared’ in a culture where positivist assumptions were the only game in town. Economics was defined without challenge in his experience as the study of markets and profit making and he had never imagined another way of viewing the field. The idea of who was hurt by such ways of seeing was simply never raised in such a positivistic culture. How do we deal with similar circumstances in other fields such as psychology and education? Do we continue to educate scholars devoid of soul and civic courage? Do we continue to ignore the violent inscriptions on much of the knowledge that’s produced in the social, political, economic, psychological, and pedagogical domains? How do we ‘fight’ in these knowledge wars when we hate the notion of fighting? These are some of the challenges that face proponents of critical pedagogy in the last years of the first decade of the 21st century. The logic and power of capital and its willingness to hurt whoever gets in the way of quarterly profit margins never ceases to amaze me. I am even more amazed that the educational cronies of dominant power blocs are willing to destroy lives of teachers and students while subverting critique of practices that lead to injustice and human suffering to the name of objectivity and neutrality – or, even worse, doing so with their institutional mission statements saturated with the language of democracy and social justice. To all

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of those courageous critical pedagogues who expose these travesties without allies or supporters in diverse educational and social institutions, I hope you know how much many of us appreciate your unrewarded work. Many of us have felt that sense of being alone, of questioning our own sanity, as superiors in the hierarchy deem the critical work we do as a form of social pathology and an insult to the academy. This is the socio-psychological and phenomenological dimension of the knowledge wars. I hope in this dark hour that critical pedagogy has the intellectual and political facility to change the course of history. Thanks to International Journal of Critical Pedagogy for use of this article, the first article written for the inaugural issue of the Journal, shortly before Kincheloe’s death. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, Vol 1 (1) (Spring 2008) http://freire.education. mcgill.ca/ojs/public/journals/Galleys/ IJCP011.pdf©2008 International Journal of Critical Pedagogy.

REFERENCES Adorno, T. W. (1973). Negative dialectics. NY: The Seabury Press. Benjamin, W. (1968). Illuminations: Essays and reflections. NY: Pantheon. Clark, C. (2001). Surely teaching hypertext in the composition classroom qualifies as a feminist pedagogy? Kairos: A Journal for Teachers of Writing in Webbed Environments. 6, 2. Collins, P. H. (1991). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. NY: Routledge. Denzin, N. K. and Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.) (2000). Handbook of qualitative research. 2nd edition. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage. Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. NY: The Free Press. Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. NY: Grove Press. Faulconer, J. E. and R. N. Williams (1985). Temporality in human action: An alternative to positivism and historicism. American Psychologist. 40, 11, 1179–1188.

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Geelan, D. (1996). Learning to communicate: Developing as a science teacher. Australian Science Teachers Journal. 42, 1, 30–34. Gramsci, A. (1988). An Antonio Gramsci reader: Selected writings, 1916–1935. (Ed.), D. Forgacs. NY: Schocken Books. Harding, S. (1986). The science question in feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. hooks, b. (1981). Ain’t I a woman: Black women and feminism. Boston: South End Press. Horkheimer, M. (1974). Critique of instrumental reason. NY: Seabury Press. Kellner, D. (1995). Media culture: Cultural studies, identity and politics between the modern and postmodern. NY: Routledge. Kincheloe, J. L. (2001a). Describing the bricolage: Conceptualizing a new rigor in qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 7, 6, 679–692. Kincheloe, J. L. (2001b). Getting beyond the facts: Teaching social studies/social sciences in the twenty-first century. NY: Peter Lang. Kincheloe, J. L. (2004a). Into the great wide open: Introducing critical thinking. In D. Weil and J. L. Kincheloe (Eds.), Critical thinking and learning: An encyclopedia for parents and teachers. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Kincheloe, J. L. (2004b). Iran and American miseducation: Cover-ups, distortions, and omissions. In J. L. Kincheloe and S. R. Steinberg (Eds.), The miseducation of the West: How schools and the media distort our understanding of the Islamic world. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Kincheloe, J. L. (2005a). On to the next level: Continuing the conceptualization of the bricolage. Qualitative Inquiry. 11, 3, 323–350. Kincheloe, J. L. (2005b). Critical constructivism. NY: Peter Lang. Kincheloe, J. L. (2008). Critical pedagogy. 2nd ed. NY: Peter Lang. Kincheloe J. L. and K. S. Berry (2004). Rigor and complexity in educational research: Conceptualizing the bricolage. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Kincheloe, J. L. and W. F. Pinar (Eds.) (1991). Curriculum as social psychoanalysis: Essays on the significance of place. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Kincheloe, J. L. and S. R. Steinberg (1997). Changing multiculturalism. Buckingham: Open University Press. Kincheloe, J. L. and S. R. Steinberg (Eds.) (2007). Cutting class: Socioeconomic status and education. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield. Kincheloe, J. L., S. R. Steinberg, and D. J. Tippins (1999). The stigma of genius: Einstein, consciousness, and education. NY: Peter Lang. Kincheloe, J. L., S. R. Steinberg, N. M. Rodriguez, and R. E. Chennault (1998). White reign: Deploying whiteness in America. NY: St. Martin’s Press. Livezey, L. G. (1988). Women, power, and politics: Feminist theology in process perspective. Process Studies. 17, 2, 67–77. Lloyd, R. J. and S. J. Smith (2006). Motionsensing phenomenology. In K. Tobin and J. Kincheloe (Eds.), Doing educational research: A handbook. Rotterdam: Sense Publishing. Lyotard, J.-F. (1979/1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marcel, V. (2001). The constructivist debate: Bringing hermeneutics (properly) in. Paper presented at the International Studies Association 42nd Annual Convention: International relations and the new inequality: Power, wealth, and the transformation of global society at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Chicago, February 20–24. Marcuse, H. (1955). Eros and civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press. Maturana, H. R. and F. J. Varela (1987). The tree of knowledge: The biological roots of human understanding. Boston: Shambhala. Memmi, A. (1965). The colonizer and the colonized. NY: The Orion Press. Monchinski, T. (2007). The politics of education: An introduction. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Nandy, A. (2000). Recovery of indigenous knowledge and dissenting futures of the university. In S. Inayatullah and J. Gidley (Eds.), The university in transformation: Global perspectives on the future of the university. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.

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Nelson, L. H. (2000). Feminist epistemology as and in practice. Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy. 99, 2. Orelus, P. W. (2007). Education under occupation: The heavy price of living in a neocolonized and globalized world. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Pickering, J. (1999). The self is a semiotic process. Journal of Consciousness Studies. 6, 4, 31–47. Pinar, W. F. (2006). Literary study as educational research: ‘More than a pungent and corrosive school story’. In K. Tobin and J. Kincheloe (Eds.), Doing educational research: A handbook. Rotterdam: Sense Publishing. Prigogine, I. (1996). The end of certainty: Time, chaos, and the new laws of nature. NY: The Free Press. Prigogine, I. and I. Stengers (1984). Order out of chaos: Man’s new dialogue with nature. NY: Basic Books. Sardar, I. (1999). Orientalism. Buckingham, UK and Philadelphia: Open University Press.

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Shiva, V. (1993). Monocultures of the mind: Perspectives on biodiversity and biotechnology. London: Zed. Smith, D. G. (2006). Trying to teach in a season of great untruth: Globalization, empire, and the crises of pedagogy. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Spivak, G. C. (1987). In other worlds: Essays on cultural politics. NY: Methuen. Steinberg, S. R. (2006). Critical cultural studies research: Bricolage in action. In K. Tobin and J. Kincheloe (Eds.), Doing educational research: A handbook. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. van Manen, M. (1991). Researching lived experience: Human science for an action sensitive pedagogy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Weiler, H. N. (2004). Challenging the orthodoxies of knowledge: Epistemological, structural, and political implications for higher education. Retrieved from: https://web.stanford. edu/~weiler/Unesco_Paper_124.pdf

17 The Frankfurt School and Education1 Benjamin Frymer

INTRODUCTION Critical Theory, as the transdisciplinary writings of the Frankfurt School came to be labeled in late-20th-century scholarship, has made a major impact on the development of numerous fields – ranging from the humanities to the social sciences, and particularly in continental philosophy and aesthetics. Yet, curiously, there has been relatively little sustained attention to the major Frankfurt thinkers in the field of education, even in the burgeoning sub field of critical pedagogy. Although the early writings of Henry Giroux2 provided a major bridge of sorts between the work of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse and the analysis and critique of contemporary capitalist schooling (Giroux, 1983), he was one of a very few social/philosophical theorists in education to draw and build upon the insights and importance of Critical Theory for understanding and changing contemporary education. Even Paulo Freire’s discussion of the secondary

Frankfurt School figure Erich Fromm, in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1970), failed to inspire a substantial scholarship on the relationship between Critical Theory and education. This chapter nevertheless asserts the ongoing vital significance of core Frankfurt School writings, particularly pre-Habermasian Critical Theory, for thinking through contemporary capitalist education, culture, and domination. Although seminal thinkers such as Fromm, Walter Benjamin, and Leo Lowenthal wrote about ‘education’ broadly conceived and have much to contribute to thinking through modern culture and society, this chapter’s primary focus is on Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. This is not only due to their prominence in the actual Frankfurt School, but to the greater attention they gave to schooling and education more broadly; specifically to the significance of education in creating the critical and aesthetic sensibilities necessary for democratic life, to the centrality (via Marx and Lukács) of reification and alienation

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in capitalist and authoritarian culture, and to envisioning schooling as a site of resistance in countering the ideological control of advanced capitalist society. Although little space will be devoted in this chapter to the work of Benjamin, not only do his early writings contain valuable statements on schooling (and his educational writing is certainly deserving of more scholarship) but his cultural and philosophical work as a whole is a very rich source of insights into the larger spheres of ‘education’ in late capitalist societies. Founded in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt, the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), was a fairly economistic Marxist institute until its new director, Max Horkheimer, rapidly took what was to be known as the ‘Frankfurt School’ in a much more unorthodox, philosophical, and interdisciplinary direction. Assuming the directorship of the Institute in 1930, Horkheimer announced his vision in an inaugural address entitled, ‘The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research’ (Horkheimer, 1993 [1931]). For Horkheimer, the Institute’s central intellectual project was to create and support a truly ‘critical’ interdisciplinary research program conducted in the interests of emancipation. At the root of Horkheimer’s call for a renewed social philosophy was a recognition of the power of dialectical thought, both for critical understanding of contemporary society and the project of radical social change under conditions of advanced capitalism. In Horkheimer’s view (and that of the new Critical Theory as a school) dialectical philosophy and social theory, unlike positivism, would radically historicize empirical inquiry and would enable this inquiry to acquire meaning within the larger socioeconomic totality. And within normative philosophical considerations of ethics and the good life, dialectical thinking could transcend the prevailing false separation between what is and what could be. Horkheimer therefore argued that, instead of merely categorizing and describing the world, dialectical theory would make

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possible the evaluation of history and society from the standpoint of human freedom. Although the membership of the Institute varied from the pre-war 1930s to the postHolocaust 1950s, the core group is generally considered to include Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse and to extend at times to Fromm, Benjamin, Lowenthal, and later Jürgen Habermas. In this chapter, reference to post-Habermasian critical theory will be limited, but the work of such critical theorists such as Judith Butler, Axel Honneth, Stanley Aronowitz, and Nancy Fraser, just to name a few, is certainly worthy of sustained attention for continuing the Frankfurt School tradition in more recent work. Likewise, except for some attention to Henry Giroux’s early work, this chapter will not explore the major contributions of those education scholars inspired by the Frankfurt School, such as Paulo Freire, Joe Kincheloe, and Douglas Kellner.

ALIENATION AND EDUCATION: FROM MARX TO CRITICAL THEORY Although Marx did not write about culture or education extensively, his analysis of alienated labor and commodification in capitalist society along with his reformulation of Hegelian dialectics has obvious implications for understanding contemporary capitalist education and had a major impact on the Frankfurt School’s writings on education and culture. Both in his early manuscripts and later economic studies, Marx is concerned with the subject–object dialectic in history. He develops his historical materialism in opposition to Hegel’s attempt to reconcile subject and object in the sphere of consciousness instead of on the ground of human material praxis. For Marx, however, both alienation and commodity fetishism arise in capitalist society and describe an inverted form of ‘species-being’ in which human beings ultimately become dominated by the objects they produce in capitalist relations of production.

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Marx (1987) argues that the worker in capitalist society is estranged in several respects: from the product and process of labor, from other workers, and from him/herself. What is common to and underlies all these aspects of estrangement is the process whereby the laborer is transformed into a commodity, and becomes an object to be bought and sold on the market like any other commodity. The laborer not only loses him or herself in the object (product), and loses the object to the capitalist, (s)he becomes an object and exists in a condition of objectification. Alienation for Marx is not only or primarily an experience of estrangement, but a material and radically historical condition – of distorted historical being formed within the capitalist relations of production. Laborers can only enter the realm of human being and authentic community, of genuine existence and social development, by transcending the alienated labor and ownership relations of capitalism. In effect, the alienated material conditions at the heart of capitalist work and society prevent the true education and self-formation of the individual subject as well as any type of cultivation of genuine community relationships. In the masterwork of his later years, Capital (1967), Marx extends his earlier analysis of alienation to a thoroughgoing critique of the capitalist mode of production. His seminal critique of political economy proceeds through unraveling the answer to the central riddle of capitalist society – the true nature of the commodity. For Marx, commodification is another way to analyze the inverted subject–object world of capitalist society in which abstract exchange value takes precedence over concrete material use value and economic (market) relations come to dominate the whole of human and social life. In capitalist societies these economic relations are organized by the production, circulation, and exchange of objects to increase the private profit of capitalists, not to satisfy the needs and welfare of the producers. The production and exchange of these commodity-objects, an abstract historical ­

artifact of capitalist ownership, thus becomes the basis and purpose of capitalist life itself, subordinating real material needs to its workings and the benefits of the capitalist class. As a result, ‘[t]he increase in the quantity of objects is accompanied by an extension in the realm of the alien powers to which man is subjected’ (Marx, 1978: 93). As with the alienation of concrete labor in commodity production, Marx argues that the larger fetishism of commodities through the inversion of exchange value over use value operates according to the abstract, formal logic of the capitalist mode of production. Just as alienated labor constitutes the subordination of real human qualities and capacities to the objects they produce, exchange value transforms the different qualitative values and uses of unique products into quantitative rates of equivalent market value. Again, the concrete, here in the sense of specific use values that different products supply, is transformed into the abstract, in the form of exchange value. Thus, the commodity form is analyzed by Marx as the major abstraction dominating human life in capitalist society to such an extent that only objects are endowed with value. In this inverted world, human qualities are transferred to commodities and the characteristics of objects are transferred to human beings. Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism uncovers the true source of capitalist value in the autonomous power that the economy obtains over human life, including any and all attempts at education and cultural development. With this economic autonomy, abstractions dominate the relationships and exchanges that once took place in local, concrete human communities and human beings are governed by the appearances of economic categories and objects rather than governing themselves. These economic forms also appear to have a reality independently of the real human beings who have created them in history. Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism in Capital proved to be a major influence on the Hungarian thinker, Georg Lukács, and

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it was not until his publication of History and Class Consciousness in 1971 that the next major analysis of capitalist alienation would be conducted. Lukács had no access to Marx’s early writings on alienation, yet nevertheless managed to extract Marx’s concern with estrangement from his reading of Capital. According to Feenberg (1981), Lukács does this through serious reflection on Marx’s methodology and by reconstructing Marx’s metatheoretical ‘philosophy of praxis’. Feenberg argues, convincingly, that both Marx and Lukács develop a philosophy of praxis based on the goal of transcending alienation at the level of human being, or ontology, which for both is always already historical being. Lukács follows Marx in emphasizing the necessity of transcending the gap between subject and object in modern society and ontology through historical praxis, rather than philosophy itself. The subject–object split that in capitalist society had taken the form of human commodification could not, as Hegel asserted, be transcended on the level of ideas, in consciousness, or through philosophy. It required revolutionary praxis in history to transform historical/material conditions. In History and Class Consciousness (1971), Lukács transforms Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism into his own theory of reification by integrating Weber’s theory of Western rationalization into Marx’s philosophy of praxis. As with Marx, Lukács aims to uncover the inversion of ideological appearance over reality in capitalist societies through rigorous examination of the very cultural logic of capitalist life. However, Lukács generalizes Marx’s conception of fetishism beyond the economic system, using Weber to analyze this cultural logic and its ideological effects in every institution of modern society. In his massive body of work, Weber had argued that formal or instrumental rationality had assumed dominance over substantive rationality leading to irrational modes of life in which continual calculation regarding efficiency overrode the

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consideration of the ends of human actions. From science, to law, to religion, instrumental reason had transformed quality, substance, and purpose into quantity, and technical calculations for controlling society and nature. Lukács argues that contemporary capitalist societies are pervaded by a similar type of formal rationality that dominates human beings to such an extent that they lose the ability to grasp the material and historical basis of their society’s dominant cultural and institutional categories. His amalgamation of Weber’s rationalization thesis and Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism comes together in a critical analysis of the ‘reification’ of capitalist society. For Lukács, reification refers to a political-economic, scientific, and cultural phenomenon whereby relationships between historical subjects are mystified by formal rationality into the abstract appearance of those between ahistorical objects. While the capitalist economic system is ultimately the basis of this formal rationality, the reified world comes to have a relatively autonomous hold over social life, including the economy. In fact, for Lukács ‘What is customarily called the economy is nothing but the system of forms of objectivity of real life’ (1971: 152). With the development of reification he argued that not only autonomous individual reason, but also the possibility of working-class consciousness was structurally blocked without the mediation of critical theory. However, by opposing the reified world of formal rationality with a critical dialectical reason, Marxism could explode the realm of objectified appearances and transcend the gap between subject and object in revolution. Lukács was one of the primary influences on the Frankfurt School’s work on alienation, culture/education, and ideology. In the face of fascism and the post-war spread of capitalist ideology, both Horkheimer (with Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1972) and Marcuse modified Lukács into ‘endof-reason’ arguments that, if it wasn’t proclaimed already, sounded the death-knell

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of the Enlightenment project. Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964) is a particularly powerful examination of reason’s perversion into capitalist ideology. However, unlike Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Adorno, in Negative Dialectics (1966), held out hope for the dialectical negation of the negation of reason – for Marcuse in the aesthetic dimension and student revolt, and for Adorno in the critique of identity theory in Western philosophy and social theory. Building on the classical writings of Weber, the original program of Frankfurt School critical theory developed an extensive critique of capitalist institutions and culture for their pervasive ‘instrumental’ or technocratic rationality. According to the Frankfurt School, instrumental rationality had become the dominant form of reason and institutional organization in advanced capitalist societies. As such, the cultural life of these capitalist societies is controlled by technocratic, meansend considerations of efficiency and planning which undermine the very possibilities for the realization of a critical-emancipatory rationality of certain Enlightenment thought. Consequently for theorists like Marcuse (1964), the modern capitalist school/subject was largely prevented from engaging in the critical thought necessary for emancipatory action or democratic participation. Without the development of critical reason, the modern individual finds it nearly impossible to penetrate the reified symbols and ideologies of capitalist culture. Thus, the pacified and petrified capitalist subject faces a bleak fate locked in an iron cage of administrative, spiritless culture which had subordinated the pursuit of meaningful worldly pursuits to a purposeless mundane existence. Currently, this interrogation of instrumental reason has been taken up and extended by Habermas in his The Theory of Communicative Action (1984); a theory in which he similarly distinguishes between critical-rational forms of communication and those forms dominated by capitalist instrumental ‘system’ imperative.

THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL ON MODERN CULTURE The Culture Industry In their profoundly influential and signature work Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer (1972) entitled a key section of their exposition ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’. In what would become the most widely read and cited part of their major collaboration, Horkheimer and Adorno subject Hollywood and the other influential ‘culture industries’ to rigorous dialectical interrogation as they analyze and critique the development and pervasive spread of industrial capitalist culture as analogous to the development of industrial production. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that at this stage of capitalism there is no longer any such thing as ‘mass culture’, i.e. cultural forms which emerge from or reflect the concerns and creative energies of everyday people themselves. Instead culture is thoroughly commodified by an industrial-type apparatus and assumes the form of objects which come to dominate its consumers – the watchers of film, television, and theater, for example. Consumers of cultural products are reduced to a passive and objectified position in their relationship to the world of meaning, belief, and value. They become dominated by a new world of standardized objects which limit their autonomy and subjectivity even as these objects present the illusion of being freely ‘chosen’. Harkening back to Lukács (1971), Adorno and Horkheimer claim that ideological deception is itself one of the main products of the culture industry. Although this thesis veered, at times, toward a one-sided understatement of individual agency, Horkheimer and Adorno did not claim that modern capitalism had succeeded in shutting out subjectivity and reflective action, or even critical consciousness itself. In fact, this remains one of the most common misconceptions of the Frankfurt School; that

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its key thinkers had a monolithic and deterministic understanding of modern culture, symbolized by Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture industry argument. Many have argued that Adorno, in particular, generally dismissed the value and political possibility of popular culture. Yet the culture industry analysis is meant to apply to so-called ‘high culture’ as well. And Adorno’s oeuvre contains numerous works on how classical music and ‘high’ art have been just as commodified and devalued as the culture of the masses. In fact, roughly half of all Adorno’s work is on music and the fate of classical music in modernity. Thus, while the culture industry thesis represents a major line of Frankfurt School thinking on modern culture, it by no means captures the complexity and dialectical character of the School’s work on modern cultural forms and education. One only needs to casually peruse Benjamin and Adorno’s voluminous work on the dialectical fragments of modern culture, Marcuse’s aesthetic theory, or Lowenthal’s sociology of literature to be persuaded that their thought is nearly impossible to categorize or reject as simply ‘elitist’. Even the culture industry thesis itself must be contextualized within Horkheimer and Adorno’s larger dialectical project in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972).

BENJAMIN’S ‘WORK-OF-ART’ THESIS Given the perceived pessimism if not outright fatalism of Adorno’s work, in many respects Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ has far surpassed Adorno’s culture industry work in contemporary discussions of cultural politics. Benjamin and Adorno carried on a long-standing friendship and critical dialogue even though Benjamin was always a peripheral member of the Frankfurt School and a figure his contemporaries had great difficulty understanding. Adorno and Benjamin essentially came to

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opposite conclusions from their analyses of capitalist culture, especially on the place and possibility of art in a new consumer society. While Adorno saw art losing its critical potential amidst a world of circulating commodities and reified images, Benjamin believed the ‘mechanical reproduction’ of art could actually have democratizing effects. This so-called mechanical reproduction, while emptying art of its transcendent ‘aura’ and authentic meaning within traditional community, could, as in the case of photography and film, raise the political consciousness of the masses by making images of the world more accessible. Art and modern culture as a whole could potentially become more politicized and even part of the formal political process rather than held by elites above the realm of everyday life.

ADORNO: EDUCATION AFTER THE HOLOCAUST Theodor Adorno (1903–69) gave several lectures and wrote a number of significant essays on post WWII education, its role in reconstructing German society, and its critical potential, following the rise of fascism and the horrors of the Holocaust, in preventing future fascist societies and outbreaks of catastrophic violence. These lectures and essays, while sometimes overlooked in Adorno scholarship, provide essential contributions to thinking through the anti-­democratic forms and democratic possibilities of modern education and capitalist schooling. His key essays and lectures (radio addresses) in this regard are ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’ (2005[1959]), ‘The Democratization of German Universities’ (1970), ‘Taboos on the Teaching Vocation’ (2005[1965]), and ‘Education after Auschwitz’ (2005[1969]). Taken together, Adorno’s work in this set of essays constitutes the most substantial and enduring set of Frankfurt School writings on education and a crucial contribution to understanding the connections

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between schooling, domination, and democratic possibility. Following his initial thinking in the late 1950s on post WWII education and society, Adorno comes back to the problem of education in the mid-to-late 1960s, all the way up until his death in 1969. In ‘Education after Auschwitz’, Adorno argues pointedly that ‘the premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again’ (2005[1969]: 191). What, for Adorno, is the relationship between education and the form of modern ‘barbarism’ Auschwitz exemplifies? For Adorno, both the education in the school and the home must address the subjectivity of the child and the student. In order to foster crucial democratic cultural forms in capitalist societies which are structured through exploitation and hierarchies, education must work on the self, opening up crucial spaces for autonomy, critical reflection, and resistance to domination in the form of individual non-­cooperation. It must also actively strive to transform the psychological dispositions of a population which, in Freud’s sense, necessarily represses its desire for hatred and aggression of the other. Taking Freud’s argument in his Civilization and its Discontents seriously, Adorno sees the desperate need for parents, teachers, and schools to tame the psyche’s dangerous tendencies, to raise awareness of these barbaric tendencies, and turn them around in the form of alternative psychological investments. Like psychoanalysis in general, education must strive to make the unconscious conscious. Adorno argues that following the Holocaust, ‘[t]he only education that has any sense at all is an education toward critical self-reflection’ (1969: 193). This turning inward must start in early childhood in fact, right around the time children begin formal schooling. The educational system in post-war German society needs substantial reform from the earliest grades through the university level and if turned toward the fostering of autonomous, critical reflection has an essential role to play in preventing fascism and genocide. Adorno does not provide many specifics about the type of early childhood

education he envisions but later stresses the need ‘for making conscious the general subjective mechanisms without which Auschwitz would hardly have been possible’ (2005[1969]: 202). Adorno’s Freudian psychology is not spelled out but Civilization and its Discontents does not appear to be far in the background in his warning about the destruction that may result from psychological repression. In contrast, in one of the most insightful essays into Adorno’s educational thinking to date, Daniel Cho (2009) links Adorno’s concept of critical self-reflection to a critique of reification and ‘coldness’ in late capitalist societies. Cho cogently asserts that instead of predominantly calling for an inward turn toward psychological mechanisms, Adorno conceives of self-reflection as an outward turn as well; education must also entail the development of critical faculties oriented to an analysis of one’s society. Cho asserts: [W]hat is novel in Adorno’s concept of critical selfreflection is its content: in contrast to the introspective connotations the phrase possesses, critical self-reflection is, for Adorno, outwardly-oriented. The practice, in Adorno, never stops at the level of the self or the individual; rather, it becomes an expansive form of thinking that maps the self within the conditions of society as a whole. It is a type of thinking that treats the self as a particular through which the whole is mediated. (Cho, 2009: 76–7)

And this capitalist totality for Adorno (via Cho) is characterized by both reified cultural forms and a pervasive ‘coldness’ – in the self and in the interpersonal relations distorted by late capitalism. The purpose of any education worth its name is to orient the student toward a type of reflection which situates the self in a society which must be understood as a whole and transformed.

MARCUSE: AESTHETIC EDUCATION AND LIBERATION Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), like Adorno, was not an educational philosopher or theorist

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by intellectual training, and has, mistakenly, not been considered a great contributor to educational theory or practice. Nonetheless, as with Adorno, his writings are of major relevance to educators and contain a number of vital contributions to the philosophy and critical theory of education, particularly in such texts as One-Dimensional Man (1964), Eros and Civilization (1955), and in his many writings on aesthetics. More than any other member of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse envisioned the liberation of the individual in and through the emancipation of society from alienation and capitalist domination. In fact in the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse had become by far the most influential member of the Frankfurt School, and a major part of his popularity beyond academic circles stemmed from the way his philosophy of liberation articulated with 60s social movements, including the ‘free schools’ movement. Yet his particular philosophical and theoretical contributions to the study and politics of education are only just now gaining more recognition (Kellner et al., 2009). Although Marcuse did not write many essays or books focused squarely on the philosophy or theory of education, his work as a whole contains a critical theory of education which can be extracted from a number of his key works. Some of the components of this theory parallel Adorno’s revisioning of Freud and psychoanalysis (especially Eros and Civilization 1955, and An Essay on Liberation 1969), and Horkheimer’s analysis of instrumental rationality and culture (particularly his OneDimensional Man, 1964). Other aspects parallel Adorno’s writings on aesthetics and aesthetic theory (The Aesthetic Dimension, 1978). But on the whole, Marcuse explicates a critical theory of domination and liberation which builds upon Marx’s conception of alienation and formulates a new philosophy of aesthetic education for the late capitalist period (Reitz, 2000). Marcuse’s major work Eros and Civilization (1955) and his late work The Aesthetic Dimension (1978), both take up the subjective realm and the possibilities for

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transcending one-dimensional society in the body, through aesthetic sensibility, and in/ through the human imagination. Eros and Civilization (1955) is a remarkable early attempt to bring Freud and Marx’s ideas together into a critical psychoanalytic social theory of liberation from advanced capitalist repression. According to Kellner et  al., Marcuse’s early work is ‘an investigation of revolution in relation to the body, sensuality, imagination, culture, and the unconscious’ (2009: 3). They argue for a reading of the text as an ‘exploration and furtherance of Marcuse’s increasingly multidimensional theory of emancipation, through which intellectual and sensual existence should be conceptualized as two interdependent forces of resistance against what he would later describe as one-dimensional society’ (ibid.: 3). Furthermore, they stress the major importance of the text for an understanding of contemporary schooling and education. Marcuse’s critical psychoanalysis provides a corrective to the overemphasis on reason and cognition in educational philosophy and to the tendency to reproduce the Enlightenment mind–body dualism which subordinated bodily, emotional, and irrational experiences to the rule of rationality. He identifies desire and the body as major potential sites of resistance to the repression of modern capitalist schooling and society; a way to think about student resistance and emancipation as a ‘multidimensional’ set of forces and possibilities. Kellner et  al. in their introduction to Marcuse’s Challenge to Education (2009) provide an extremely valuable explication of the dialectical bases of Marcuse’s critical theory of education. They locate the roots of his theory in the possibility of grounding schooling in a critical conception of Bildung, and of the all too common foreclosure of this meaningful and emancipatory education under the one-dimensionality of advanced capitalism. According to Kellner et. al., ‘Marcuse’s critique of schooling in one-dimensional society thus can be seen as emerging from a critique of the distortion of the German concept of Bildung,

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in which education is meant to enrich the individual and culture, while transcending the present conditions of immediacy that inhibit and stifle human development’ (2009: 8). The onedimensionality of late capitalism systematically shifts the ground of education from growth and enrichment to instrumental forms of administrative and economic expediency. Moreover, ‘[o]ne-dimensional society is a social order that lacks negativity, critique, and transformative practice’ (ibid.: 8). Instead of providing students with greater spaces for resistance, critical thought and meaningful change, it imprisons them in the instrumental logic and competitive spheres of the capitalist ‘performance principle’ (ibid.: 8). This contradiction between Bildung and contemporary one-dimensional society is at the heart of both Marcuse’s critique and his vision of emancipation from repression and the ‘affluent society’ (ibid.: 9). In The Aesthetic Dimension (1978), Marcuse engages with Marxist debates on aesthetic form and practice and distinguishes his position through an emphasis on the political possibilities of aesthetic form itself as the individual confronts a genuine work of art. Marcuse states in the beginning of his work: But in contrast to orthodox Marxist aesthetics I see the political potential of art in art itself, in the aesthetic form as such. Furthermore, I argue that by virtue of its aesthetic form, art is largely autonomous vis à vis the given social relations. In its autonomy art both protests these relations, and at the same time transcends them. Thereby art subverts the dominant consciousness, the ordinary experience. (Marcuse, 1978: ix)

Marcuse here and in the remainder of the text emphasizes the emancipatory educational possibilities of the ‘aesthetic dimension’ as a realm of experience which can confront and move beyond the one-dimensionality of schools and other capitalist institutions. Drawing upon the work of Schiller and critical aesthetics, Marcuse grounds his critical philosophy of education, not in Adorno’s hopes for critical rationality, but in art’s opening up of new perceptual realms of experience.

CONCLUSION The educational philosophies and critiques of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and other members of the Frankfurt School are just beginning to be unearthed and recognized for what they could contribute to diagnosing our modern landscapes and crises. As a ‘school’ they were not only at the very forefront of fostering neo-Marxist understandings of the everyday ravages of capitalist culture and ideology, but anticipated (just to name a few) the radical post-structuralism of Foucault and the disciplinary society, the radical ecological movement and our environmental crises, the student movements of the last half century, and the resurgent authoritarianism and fascism which have brought back painful reminders of the barbarism and violence which many members of the Frankfurt School themselves barely survived, if at all. If, as Adorno insisted, ‘the premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again’ (2005[1969]: 191), we would be foolish to ignore the vital warnings the Frankfurt School sent our way.

Notes 1  Parts of this chapter are reprinted or updated from the following publication: Frymer, B. (2010) ‘The Frankfurt School and Education: Critical Theory and Youth Alienation’ in Leonardo, Z. (ed.) The Handbook of Cultural Politics and Education. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. pp. 161–74. Reprinted with permission from Brill. 2  The early work of Henry Giroux, particularly Theory and Resistance in Education (1983), marked a major point of convergence between Frankfurt School critical theory and education. Following the publication of Paul Willis’ Learning to Labor (1981), a classic ethnographic study of student ‘resistance’ to the ‘hidden curriculum’ of a workingclass high school and the smooth reproduction of class relations, Giroux began to argue for the significance of theorizing resistance in educational theory. His work in the early 1980s constituted a marked challenge to what he termed ‘reproduction theory’ in education. Reproduction theory in the sociology of education, most notably represented by Bowles and Gintis’ Schooling in Capitalist America (1976) and the work of Pierre

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Bordiueu (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990), tended to posit overly functional models of the ways schools reproduced inequality and dominant social relations. As an opening attempt at what developed into ‘critical pedagogy’, Giroux argued for the significance of more dialectical analyses of schools and students that would begin to theorize the complexity of capitalist education and the role of schooling in modes of domination. He turned to the Frankfurt School as a model of dialectical analysis for understanding such phenomena as school ideology, student subjectivity, and resistance.

REFERENCES Adorno, T. W. (2005[1959]). ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’, in Critical models: interventions and catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 295–308. Adorno, T. W. (2005[1965]). ‘Taboos on the Teaching Vocation’, in Critical models: interventions and catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 177–190. Adorno, T. W. (1966). Negative dialectics. New York, NY: Seabury Press. Adorno, T. W. (2005[1969]). ‘Education after Auschwitz’, in Critical models: interventions and catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 191–204. Adorno, T. W. (1970). ‘The Democratization of German Universities’, in Gesammelte schriften 20.1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Adorno, T. W. & Horkheimer, M. (1972). Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York, NY: Herder and Herder. Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J. C. (1990). Reproduction in education, society, and culture. 2nd edition. Newbury Park, Calif: Sage. Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America: educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. New York, NY: Basic Books. Cho, D. (2009). ‘Adorno on Education or, Can Critical Self-Reflection Prevent the Next

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Auschwitz?’. Historical Materialism, 17, 74–97. Feenberg, A. (1981). Lukács, Marx, and the sources of critical theory. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Seabury Press. Giroux, H. A. (1983). Theory and resistance in education. Westport, Conn: Bergin & Garvey. Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action. Vol. I: reason and the rationalization of society, trans. T. McCarthy. Boston, Mass: Beacon Press. Horkheimer, M. (1993 [1931]). ‘The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research’, in Between philosophy and social science: selected early writings, trans. G. F. Hunter, M. S. Kramer and J. Torpey. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, pp. 1–14. Kellner, D., Lewis, T., Pierce, C., & Cho, K. D. (eds) (2009). Marcuse’s challenge to education. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield. Lukács, G. (1971). History and class consciousness: studies in Marxist dialectics. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Marcuse, H. (1955). Eros and civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud. Boston, Mass: Beacon Press. Marcuse, H. (1964). One-dimensional man: studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Boston, Mass: Beacon Press. Marcuse, H. (1969), An Essay on Liberation. Boston, Mass: Beacon Press. Marcuse, H. (1978), The aesthetic dimension: toward a critique of Marxist aesthetics. Boston, Mass: Beacon Press. Marx, K. (1967). Capital: A critique of political economy. New York, NY: International Publishers. Marx, K. (1987). Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. Reitz, C. (2000). Art, alienation, and the humanities: a critical engagement with Herbert Marcuse. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Willis, P. (1981). Learning to labor: how working class kids get working class jobs. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

18 The Nomad, The Hybrid: Deconstructing the Notion of Subjectivity Through Freire and Rumi Soudeh Oladi

INTRODUCTION Unfolding the notion of subjectivity can provide new prisms with which to view, and so move beyond, the eroded traditional structures from which fixed understandings of the subject are derived. In this space, alternative figurations like the nomad who desires transitional subjectivities and fluid identities can function as alternatives. This chapter is a philosophical investigation that provides a platform for a conceptual conversation between the Brazilian critical pedagogue Paulo Freire and Persian poet-scholar Rumi. The philosophical teachings of Deleuze function as a conceptual bridge that generates a dialogic space for the conversation between Freire and Rumi. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) introduce us to the figure of the nomad who has given up the desire for fixity and, despite experiencing the dissonance of dislocation, embraces the multiplicity of a non-linear existence. The space where Freire, Rumi, and Deleuze meet before

going off in different directions creates possibilities for rethinking subjectivity for the critical educator. Freire’s emphasis on unfinishedness and Rumi’s focus on being ibn alwaqt or the ‘child of the present moment’ echo the Deleuzian nomad who engages with practices that involve innovation, multiplicity, difference, and connection. Using Deleuze as a conceptual bridge allows for a space that helps reinvigorate critical pedagogy with cross-cultural dialogues. To this end, Freire’s foundational work in critical pedagogy and Rumi’s Sufibased teachings are brought into conversation with Deleuze as mediator of this dialogue. The current philosophical analysis is not an arrival but a movement toward exploring the creative potential that thinking together with these intellectuals creates. To identify the language through which I read Freire and Rumi, I explore some of the more prominent works of Gilles Deleuze, a decisive figure in postmodern philosophy, and examine how he tried to dismantle modern beliefs regarding

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a number of concepts including subjectivity. In line with Deleuze’s attempts to move past essentializing of the subject, this chapter adopts a non-essentializing discourse by creating a space to revisit spiritual and critical pedagogical discourses. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) revive the nomadic subject who is in a constant state of decentring without a destination in sight. The nomad is resistant to settled patterns of thought and exclusionary visions of subjectivity – a move past the essentializing of the subject. The flux of multiple becomings as exhibited by the nomad embraces a cosmopolitan openness and allows for subjectivities to be articulated, shaped, fragmented, and even dismantled. I have adopted Deleuze’s language on nomadism and reread it in the space afforded by Freire and Rumi in order to reach ‘(im)plausible readings and interpretations’ (Semetsky, 2008: xv) that are dynamic, engaging, and constructed in interaction among these intellectuals. Like a nomadic thinker, I trace the shift from individual to social and spiritual subjectivity for the critical educator, while advancing Deleuze’s philosophical disposition as a vantage point through which the move toward a different conception of the subject is traced and the transition from being to becoming is further examined (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). The transformative nature of the nomadic life is a never-ending process of becoming, and Braidotti captures the idea of such nomadic becomings in difference: Nomadic becomings are rather the affirmation of the unalterably positive structure of difference, meant as a multiple and complex process of transformation, a flux of multiple becomings, the play of complexity, or the principle of not-One. (Braidotti, 2006a: 145)

The struggle for subjectivity as envisioned by Deleuze is manifested in the right to difference, variation, and metamorphosis (1988: 106) where the subject is a never completed project who engages creatively in new ways of

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being. The model of subjectivity developed by Deleuze is represented in relational networks with others and the environment. Since the Deleuzian subject is collectively constituted, s/he is capable of experiencing life at both the ‘metaphysical and political’ level (May, 1991: 242). Here, the nomadic subject advanced by Freire embodies the political while the nomadic being advocated by Rumi personifies the metaphysical and the spiritual. Drawing on the works of Rumi and Freire, I engage in an intellectual scaffolding that enables me to open multiple ‘leakages’ and points of entry into a non-linear space of change and becoming as related to the subject. In the following sections, I examine the nomadic subject in the works of Freire and Rumi. The dialogue that emerges leads to several manifestations of the subject as a being always in the process of becoming different (Deleuze, 1991b). The subjects that emerge from a close reading of Freire and Rumi’s works are: subject as seeker, subject as storyteller, subject as resister, subject as transformer, and subject as improviser.

THINKING TOGETHER WITH DELEUZE AND RUMI Looking at Rumi through the lens of Deleuze requires pushing the Deleuzian language in a productive direction. As such, the nomadic element in Rumi’s works is revisited in his writings particularly in the six-volume masterpiece, the Mathnawi. Rumi’s Sufi-based roots emphasize reaching higher levels of selfawareness by underlining the inner dimensions of a person’s being. Underhill (2002) points to the dominance of journey, alchemy, and love in Sufi traditions. The individual who walks this path embarks on an inner journey that is initiated by wandering and seeking (sulúk). It is in this journey that the soul experiences a transformation; one that Schimmel (1975/1993) refers to as Alchemy. Looking at Rumi through the lens of Deleuze requires pushing the Deleuzian

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language in a productive direction. In the spirit of Deleuze’s orientations toward nomadism and becoming, I work with aspects of his views that are productive in the context of Rumi’s reflections related to the subject. As an existential foundation of Sufi practices, the subject is viewed as a multidimensional and flowing entity. Rumi’s Sufi-based dispositions provide a potential point of contact between Sufi practices and the Deleuzian poststructuralist position on nomadism. To address this tension, I position my understanding of Sufism as a philosophy that is in a constant state of flux as it works to release certain nomadic qualities in pursuit of Insane-Kamil or the ‘perfect human being’: A ‘perfect human being’ who will never reach the stage of perfection and must constantly be in a state of movement and becoming. The Sufi’s journey toward becoming an Insane-Kamil is one that is accompanied with a desire to experience a complete awakening of the consciousness (Ahmed, 2008). Rumi defines the evolution of consciousness as the development of consciousness through cycles of deaths and rebirths. In each death, one is reborn into a more conscious being, marking a higher degree of realization. The Sufi understanding is such that at each level there is a death or transformation that allows for a rebirth into greater consciousness (Boni, 2010). While Rumi’s penchant for humanism is in clear contrast with the Deleuzian antihumanism, it should be pointed out that the version of humanism Rumi embraces is not one born of Western liberalism. Meanwhile, humanism in Islamic mysticism and Sufi traditions is an unattainable goal and an individual in search of it is in a perpetual state of wandering. Individuals can never reach this state, considering that it is relative, plural, diverse, and inaccessible. While for the poststructuralist this might indicate the lack of space that breeds creativity, Marks maintains that it in fact ‘allows a great deal of play to the individual – distracted, contemplative, imaginative, mystical – and thus it does create space for pure difference’ (2010: 11).

Deleuze’s nomadic subject is tangible in Rumi’s emphasis on the annihilation of our current beings and transmuting into a being that is neither fixed nor permanent – a concept known as fana (‘annihilation of the ego’) in Sufism. As already indicated, the experience of revealing the dissolved self and going beyond oneself is manifested in the notion of fana in Rumi’s writings, where the person dies in her/himself and lives in/through something else. This act of becoming is not a journey into death, but a new beginning that nurtures possibilities for an infinite existence. The dissolution of subjectivity and the ultimate death of the self ‘in order to enter qualitatively finer processes of becoming’ (Braidotti, 2006a: 261) is addressed in the writings of Rumi. Rumi’s focus on the annihilation of the ego is aimed at reaching a state of no-mind. According to Braidotti (2006b), the Deleuzian perception of death opens up new possibilities and can be experienced as ‘becoming-imperceptible’: [T]he becoming-imperceptible is the point of fusion between the self and his/her habitat, the cosmos as a whole. It marks the point of evanescence of the self and its replacement by a living nexus of multiple inter-connections that empower not the self, but the collective, not identity, but affirmative subjectivity, not consciousness, but affirmative inter-connections. (Braidotti, 2006b: 154)

The individual that Braidotti depicts as ‘suspended between the no longer and the not yet’ (2006b: 156) is the same individual Rumi encourages to enter into a space of nonexistence. The Sufi way acknowledges that it is by throwing oneself into the abyss of annihilation where Rumi states, ‘we and our existences are all nonexistences’ that one reaches a state where, ‘you are absolute Existence, appearing as annihilation’ (Chittick, 2007: 129). This provides a potential point of contact with the Deleuzian perception of the subject who does not arrive. This non-arrival is also evident in Sufi practices where the subject is in a perpetual state of motion, moving toward nothingness, since, ‘annihilation is the negation of something that never

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truly was’ (Chittick, 2007: 44). Rumi points to the state of nothingness as our exit from self-existence toward becoming self-less: If you could get rid Of yourself just once, The secret of secrets Would open to you. The face of the unknown, Hidden beyond the universe Would appear on the Mirror of your perception. (Fadiman and Frager, 1997: 244)

Chittick (1983) proclaims that Sufism encourages transcending the subjective self by gaining an in-depth knowledge of the self and describes this as ‘annulment of the self’ or fana. Rumi’s tender story about a lover’s reunion with the beloved touches on the importance of nothingness in the Sufi discourse: A certain man knocked at his beloved’s door: his friend asked: ‘Who is there?’ He answered ‘I!’ – ‘Be gone,’ said his friend, ‘tis too soon: at my table there is no place for the raw.’ How shall the raw one be cooked but in the fire of absence? What else will deliver him from hypocrisy? He turned sadly away, and for a whole year the flames of separation consumed him; Then he came back and again paced to and fro beside the house of his friend. He knocked at the door with a hundred fears and reverences, lest any disrespectful word might escape from his lips. ‘Who is there?,’ cried his friend. He answered, ‘Thou, O charmer of all hearts!’ ‘Now,’ said the friend, ‘since thou art I, come in: there is no room for two “I”s in this house.’ (Mathnawi I: 3056–63, Nicholson, 1926)

In such spaces, the ego experiences a metamorphosis and a ‘death of the self’: a going beyond ‘me’ and reaching an ‘us’. This, according to Rumi, does not equate to lack of existence but true existence. There are spaces where aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy seem to engage with spiritually. According to Bryden, ‘Deleuze’s writing

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recurrently demonstrates a commitment to the unhinging of philosophy from its complex historical affiliations with theology, so as to release it into a zone of dynamism, affirmation and becoming’ (2001: 1). This same zone exists in the works of Rumi, where similar to Deleuze’s (1989) understanding of mystical experiences, the self encounters a sudden actualization of potentialities. Rumi’s poetry exists in a field of possibilities where life is in motion as he embraces a pedagogy of potential in the limitless space that opens up before the seeker. According to Marks, in the context of Islamic mysticism: awareness of the nonexistent side of every existent thing stimulates ‘fana’, the mystical obliteration of the difference between things and God, I and thou. This idea finds a parallel in Deleuze’s argument, following Bergson (Deleuze, 1991a), that the more that perception becomes dissociated from our immediate needs, the further it opens onto the universe of images and opens us to the flow of time. The two processes, one mystical, one epistemological, are strikingly similar. (Marks, 2010: 17)

Marks argues that even though Deleuze’s philosophical goal is creativity, there is a fana-like element in his philosophy as well: I must be clear that Deleuze’s philosophical goal is not ‘fana’: it is creativity – the capacity for new perceptions, affects, and thoughts. Nevertheless, something rather like ‘fana’ takes place in the hoped-for dispersion, which Deleuze and Guattari emphasized again and again, of the usual limitations of the individual. (Marks, 2010: 17)

Rumi reveals the nomadic traits of his thoughts by stating that ‘the ends are nothing but to return to the beginnings’ (Mathnawi I: 767, Nicholson, 1926). It is in such a context that nothingness as a nomadic quality allows individuals to restlessly travel through spaces without a medium. Additionally, as an existential foundation of Sufi practices, the self is viewed as a multidimensional and flowing entity. Rumi’s poetry avoids orthodoxy and indoctrination as he promotes a pluralistic culture of endless movement and unrest. Rumi’s work is unique in that he breaks down boundaries and creates spaces where metamorphosis can

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include completeness, unity, fracture, and multiplicity all at the same time. Rumi aspires to disrupt any sense of certainty through his stories and poems toward a culture of ‘pure difference’ and otherness. To expose the lack of imagination that has too often impeded social, personal, and cultural relations, Rumi’s encourages his readers to engage in a culture of unveiling that seeks to unearth deeper layers of meaning in an effort to disrupt the appropriation of creativity and imagination:

attachment to the past and memory and her/his desire to suspend all attachment to established discourse (Braidotti, 1994: 18) is intense. To avoid subjugation, Rumi cautions against a distorted understanding of reality and distinguishes between imagination and the imaginary as he encourages individuals to move beyond the ‘imaginary trap’:

Pass beyond (external) names and look at the (underlying) qualities, so that the qualities may show you the way to the essence. The opposition (among) people takes place because of names. Peace occurs when they go to the real meaning. (Mathnawi II: 3679–80, Nicholson, 1926)

(Witness how) their peace and their war (is based) upon something imaginary, and

In his stories, Rumi (1995) attends to a form of knowledge seeking that creates a nomadic subjectivity for the critical educator; one that understands, analyses, and seeks different truths through an awareness of the qualities that prevent her or him from becoming more fully human. Rumi takes us on a journey to explore the various dimensions of our inner selves and depicts the human spirit as ‘a conscious intentionality, dynamic, open-ended, and selftranscending’ (Helminiak, 1998: 13). In such a space, the Sufi is a nomad, as s/he has no attachment to the past or any longing for the future. To become fully present in the moment necessitates unfolding and creating new dynamics. In the Sufi tradition, ibn alwaqt is about living in the now, being present, and fully surrendering to the moment: O comrade, the Sufi is the son of time present. It is not the rule of his canon to say, Tomorrow. Can it be that thou art not a true Sufi? Ready money is lost by giving credit. (Mathnawi I: 133–4, Nicholson, 1926)

Here, the unpredictable is desired and being vulnerable and entering into unknown spaces is not problematic in and of itself. To expand her/his spiritual consciousness, the Sufi/ nomad has no attachment, which makes movement easier. The Sufi/nomad has little

Within the spirit, imagined forms are as nothing – (yet) … witness an (entire) world going on (based) upon something imaginary!

(how) their pride and their shame (derives) from something imaginary. (Mathnawi I: 70–1, Nicholson, 1926)

According to Chittick (1983), the Sufi’s non-attachment can only be realized through direct engagement with the ‘World of Imagination’ or A’lame khiyal. The word khiyal or imagination represents a wide range of realities including the mental faculty, which conjures up images and ideas in the mind. In essence, the World of Imagination relates to these images and ideas both at the individual and social level, while also being linked to the ‘world’ they originate from. Thus, ‘imagination does not create the images and ideas it sees, nor does it derive them from within itself, the memory, or the mind. Rather, it receives them from a separate World of Imagination, which exists independently of the mind’ (Chittick, 1983: 248). A’lame khiyal can also be described as the twilight zone between the spiritual world and the sensible world. There, imagination takes place at both the spirit and corporeal levels and it is this very imagination that Rumi believes breeds endless creativity and pure difference. Deleuze’s conception of the transcendental imagination and Henry Corbin’s ‘imaginal’ mode of mysticism have more in common than meets the eye. According to Ramey: Deleuze’s ‘physics’ of the symbol has a strange consequence: the more symbols are understood as

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transcriptions of ‘cosmic’ dynamics, the more their spiritual aspect – the aspect of symbols that relates to spiritual transformation – becomes clear. On this point, Deleuze’s approach to the symbol (and more generally his conception of the transcendental imagination) is deeply resonant with that of Henry Corbin, who identified an ‘imaginal’ mode of mysticism where aspects of humanity and divinity enter into a creative zone of indiscernibility. (Ramey, 2012: 108)

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a ‘“Non-being”, that which is not (absent), that which is yet to be (come into being)’ (D’Souza, 2014: 13). Rumi’s portrayal of love as a trunkless tree that is open to new experiences and receptive to the unknown is similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) depiction of the rhizome as a de-centred network that grows in all directions: Love is not condescension,

For Deleuze it is important to distinguish between imagination and mere fantasy (Hickman, 2013). This is while Corbin (2013), a champion of the transformative power of imagination, argues that imagination that is driven from personal fantasies has an unreal character and is called ‘imaginary’. Meanwhile, true imagination is rooted in the imaginal realm and it is through the development of this form of imagination that individuals can overcome the ‘divorce between thinking and being’ (Corbin and Horine, 1976). While for Deleuze ‘there is no other truth than the creation of the New: creativity, emergence’ (1989: 147), Rumi’s invitation to imagine the impossible creates an opportune moment to envision subjectivities that have yet to be created. The intense self-examination advocated by Rumi empowers individuals to be honest about their intentions. Through the purification of the heart, a moral identity that identifies with justice and liberty is formed. This process also awakens a feeling of intense love or ishq and ‘provides the basic motivations in humans. The generative impulse is the desire to generate something enduring. Ishq is procreation, it is creation; it is birth’ (Zaimaran, 1985: 256). For Rumi, love never loses its nomadic quality because, ‘love gives birth to a thousand forms; the world is full of its paintings but it has no form’ (Rumi, Divan, 5057, as cited in Chittick, 1983). For Rumi, crossing the threshold of love leads to transformation and transcendence. With its potential to energize everything, love as a life force that animates is ‘The Sea of Non-Being: there the foot of the intellect is shattered’ (Mathnawi III: 4723, Nicholson, 1926). Like a nomadic existence, a being enveloped in love is indeed

Never that, nor books, nor any marking on paper, nor what people say of each other. Love is a tree with branches reaching into eternity and roots set deep in eternity, and no trunk! Have you seen it? The mind cannot. Your desiring cannot. The longing you feel for this love comes from inside you. (Rumi in Barks, 2003: 121)

There is, however, one fundamental difference between Rumi’s trunkless tree and the Deleuzian rhizome. For Deleuze, the rhizome is not rooted and the pure creativity and difference that emerges is in the central parts of the rhizome. This is while, for Rumi, the space of difference, imagination, and creativity can be found in the roots of the tree that are connected to infinity and its branches that reach out to eternity. Exploring the tapestry of subjectivities in Rumi’s stories reveals a continuous struggle between various forces that swing the pendulum of absolutes in the direction of the ‘field of possibilities’. Embracing Rumi’s vision of the Insan-e-Kamil requires that we, too, move beyond fixed notions of subjectivity for the critical educator and allow for new spaces to present themselves.

THINKING TOGETHER WITH DELEUZE AND FREIRE Critical pedagogy as a theory is grounded in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and its practices can be widely observed in the emancipatory work of Brazilian

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philosopher and educator Paulo Freire. Freire is considered the founder of popular education and the inspiration for the field of critical pedagogy (Kirylo and Boyd, 2017) and is credited with the advancement of critical pedagogical thought and practice. Freire’s writings have influenced various fields including postcolonial theory, ethnic studies, adult education, and the discourses on critical spirituality and educational activism. While thinking together with Deleuze and Rumi opens up spaces for rethinking subjectivity for the critical educator, Freire’s critical pedagogy can also be added to the mix. Freire’s emphasis on the social aspect of transformative educational practices and Deleuze’s language, which helps navigate the nomadic potential in critical pedagogy tie into the attempt to create a space that tries to mediate between these interpretations of meaningful learning and transformative education. Like a nomad, individuals flowing in these spaces are always between points in a transitional or indeterminate state. Similar to Deleuze’s depiction of the nomad, Freire views the subject as going beyond economic and social beings and transforming into nomad-subjects. Freire’s nomad-subjects are travellers in new learning landscapes and are increasingly ready to express their commitment to different paths. The ability of these individuals to self-reproduce enables them to transform and act upon life as they explore new possibilities for becoming and living otherwise (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). The propensity of the nomad-subject to disrupt established patterns of thought at a structural level and problematize traditional perceptions of identity is reflective of her/his interest in deterritorialization. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) distinguish between smooth and striated spaces: while walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures characterize striated spaces, smooth spaces are depicted as fields without conduits or channels. In such a setting, the nomadic space ‘lies between two striated spaces’ (ibid.: 409). It is in this context that

critical educators are encouraged to be spontaneous and courageous while embarking on a Freirean adventure of hope. This is while smooth spaces, liked fixed subjectivities, are constantly under the threat of being possessed, appropriated, and subjected to rules and procedures (Barnett, 2010). Contrary to Freire’s advocacy for being, Deleuze’s anti-being stance becomes a site of tension. Yet, there is a middle space where both Freire and Deleuze can meet before going off in different directions. In that space becoming has precedence over being and reality is no longer seen as ‘motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable’ (Freire, 2000: 71). Freire alludes to a natural desire for change in oppressive situations because he believes human beings essentially seek and desire transcendence (1994: 39). Deleuze (1997), meanwhile, asserts that the desire for otherness creates subjectivities that lack desire for change and transcendence. Freire emphasizes the need for poetic imagination to be pragmatically applied to social issues and informs his readers that ‘the lovelier world to which they aspired was being announced, somehow anticipated in their imagination’ (1994: 39). Similar to Deleuze and Guattari who view the subject with nomadic potential as one without a fixed subjectivity, Freire refuses to see human beings as victims of context and constantly encourages them to break with traditional notions of subjectivity. Freire (2000) considers liberation as a prerequisite for the humanization of the individual. A desire for liberation is a meeting point for Freire’s critical praxis and Deleuze’s nomadic being. The endless migration of the individual beyond subjugating knowledge and fixed subjectivities is a defining feature of a nomad-subject because ‘as nomads, subjects randomly connect signs, energy flows, data, knowledge, fantasy, objects, and other bodies in new flows of desiring production’ (Usher, 2010: 72). For the nomad-subject, outcomes cannot be anticipated and Freire’s vision of full becoming is essential in understanding how s/he is modifying or being modified by the world as

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s/he strives to construct ‘landscapes of becoming’ (Zembylas, 2007: 345). The desire for transcendence can be implied even in relation to hope: ‘hope, detached from the future, becomes only an alienated and alienating abstraction. Instead of stimulating the pilgrim, it invites him to stand still’ (Freire, 1985: 121). The pilgrim, like the nomad relishes in the creation of the new and is known for her/his bravery because to be an eternal creator and improviser requires an element of fearlessness. Freire’s emphasis on re-creation is analogous with nomadic qualities as the Brazilian educator describes ‘men and women as beings in the process of becoming – as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality’ (Freire, 2000: 84). This Freirean vision offers remedies to the restrictive discourses behind fixed subjectivities for the critical educator and helps articulate an understanding of subjectivity that is creative and engages with practices that involve complexity, innovation, multiplicity, and connection. The flexible and active flow prevalent in such spaces invites critical educators to rethink their subjectivities while simultaneously embracing the ‘uncommitted potentiality for change’ (Bateson, 2000: 505). The nomad-subject’s desire to forge new hybrid subjectivities where s/he creates and is simultaneously willing to leave her/his creations echoes Freire’s notion of unfinishedness. In Pedagogy of Freedom, Freire (1998) points out how passing through the world is not predetermined and allows for ‘making history out of possibility’: I like being human because I am involved with others in making history out of possibility, not simply resigned to fatalistic stagnation. … I like to be human because in my unfinishedness I know that I am conditioned. Yet, conscious of such conditioning, I know that I can go beyond it … (Freire, 1998: 54)

Similar to a nomad who creates innumerable subjectivities, the critical educator can enter

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‘a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise’ (Turner, 1967: 97). Existing in this realm generates a sense of wide-awakeness and empowers the nomad-subject to break with fixed notions of subjectivity and pursue her/his ‘passion for possibilities – what might be, what could be’ (Greene, 2007: 2). Here, the nomad-subject becomes a searcher and a seeker of knowledge who is not consumed by his/her past constructions and future possibilities and instead is adamant to live in the now. Disengagement is never an option for the nomad-subject as s/he overcomes submission and docility with the view that ‘to be human is to engage in relationship with others and with the world. It is to experience the world as an objective reality, independent of oneself, capable of being known’ (Freire, 1973: 4). For the nomad-learners, ‘what they perceive and enact as more active and responsible agents and as in-between dwellers [is] not only receptive to but also able to engage realms of the possible’ (Cook-Sather and Alter, 2011: 30). The nomadic qualities of critical pedagogy can keep its transformative nature from becoming sedentary. The same nomadic potential interrupts linear notions of being where the production of difference allows for the emergence of endless possibilities for subjectivity for the critical educator. In keeping with the Deleuzian nomad who is in a constant state of flux, Freire (1994) argues for an ‘ongoing being’ whose future cannot be ‘determined’ by others: [W]e are this being – a being of ongoing, curious, search, which ‘steps back’ from itself and from the life it leads – it is because we are this being, given to adventure and the ‘passion to know’, for which that freedom becomes indispensable that, constituted in the very struggle for itself, is possible only because, though we are ‘programmed’, we are nevertheless not ‘determined’. (Freire, 1994: 84, emphasis in original)

Freire’s stimulating entry into a space that breeds uncertainty is yet another nomadic characteristic of critical pedagogy. The nomad-subject’s reluctance to settle for a fixed subjectivity is manifested in the

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Freirean logic that the ‘future is a new present, and a new dream experience is forged. History does not become immobilized, does not die. On the contrary, it goes on’ (Freire, 1994: 91). Freire addresses the nomadic urgency to constantly be on the move and not settle while flowing through various planes of hope as ‘a being of ongoing, curious search’ (1994: 84). An educational space that follows this tradition is in fact a movement in constant search for the creation of the new. Freire’s nomad-subject ‘does not become the prisoner of a “circle of certainty” within which reality is also imprisoned’ (Freire, 2000: 39). To disrupt any vestige of tranquility for the nomad-subject, Freire (2000) advocates a form of knowledge seeking that emerges through invention and reinvention. Throughout this process, the nomad-subject is restless, while at the same time exuding hope and an eternal optimism for the future. This curious nomad-subject moves toward transparent instead of opaque realities and seeks to uncover aspects of her/his subjectivity that may be hidden. The nomad-subject who embraces such an outlook is willing to take risks, be open to the adventure of the spirit, and have a willingness to live in tension and contradiction (Freire, 1998). The nomadsubject is ‘creative, nonrepetitive, proliferative, unpredictable’ (Grosz, 1994: 168) and chooses how to live and tell her/his never-ending story of subjectivity. Freire and Deleuze advance spaces where ‘heterogeneity rather than conformity, fluidity rather than rigidity, and constant evo/ revo/lution and flux rather than the static’ are prevalent (Strom and Martin, 2013: 4). These spaces allow for a hybrid reinvention of subjectivity for the critical educator where ‘the very categories of “Self” and “Other” emerge as fluid and negotiable’ (Bhabha, 1994: 56). To dismantle barriers to inequality and engage in a culture of audacious and nomadic hope, the nomad-subject exhibits ‘the ability to take action when there is little evidence that doing so will produce a

positive outcome’ (Generett and Hicks, 2004: 192). The nomadic characteristics in critical pedagogy have the potential to keep its transformative nature from becoming sedentary or static. It is in this field of possibilities that the creative forces give birth to infinite and boundless creations of subjectivity for the critical educator. In his writings, Freire references ‘narration sickness’ (2000: 71) where teachers offer the sole narrative in learning spaces, and describes this act as a destructive feature of submissive learning environments. A nomadic learning space, as advocated by Freire, would not be bereft of narratives because nomadsubjects are in perpetual movement and in the process of creating new stories as creators of new realities. Freire’s emphasis on humans as uncompleted beings is also reflective of the nomadic nature of critical pedagogy: ‘Within history, in concrete, objective contexts, both humanization and dehumanization are possibilities for a person as an uncompleted being conscious of their incompletion’ (2000: 43). The kind of humanization Freire envisions is something that needs to be constantly pursued as ‘the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion’ (2000: 47). Freire addresses the issue of human completion in a nuanced way; as part of an individual’s ability to create, challenge, and constantly recreate structures of meaning. Such an emancipatory journey empowers critical educators and leads to a dynamic understanding of consciousness and subjectivity. Freire’s emphasis that critical educators need to be empowered agents of history and conscious of their being echoes this very point. According to Freire, the ongoing transformative process of becoming as part of a move toward ‘liberation is a thus a childbirth and a painful one’ (2000: 25) but one where the creation and emergence of a new being helps individuals to constantly leap forward toward the great unknown. In this context one can argue for a Freirean-inspired (2000) utopian vision as a practice of freedom, driven by critical curiosity, and rooted in a broader project that

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seeks to illuminate and guide critical educators toward a humanized future (Portelli and Oladi, 2017).

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If you are not one of those who have an illumined heart, be awake (keep vigil), be a seeker of the illumined heart, and always struggle with your fleshly soul. (Mathnawi III: 1224, Nicholson, 1926)

SUBJECTIVITY FOR THE CRITICAL EDUCATOR: FREIRE AND RUMI The parallels between Freire’s concept of conscientization and Rumi’s notion of moral and spiritual education can be found in the desire for completeness (Elias, 1976) or to be Insan-e-Kamil. Embarking on this journey would allow the critical educators to develop certain characteristics that are closely aligned with nomadic qualities such as ‘compassion, integrity, commitment to the process, nonattachment to outcome, [and] interconnectedness’ (Alario, 2012). As such the critical educator becomes a storyteller and a seeker of new narratives who believes outer change requires inner transformation. Compassion and love are transformative forces for this individual, as s/he moves beyond a fixed notion of subjectivity into a creative and imaginal zone that allows for new subjectivities to emerge. Inspired by Rumi’s moral and spiritual teachings and Freire’s praxis of critical consciousness, I have generated five possible subjectivities for the critical educator:

The Critical Educator as Seeker This individual is a human-in-progress who possesses an ‘anxious heart’ who is connected to the ‘Tree of Immortality’ in the quest for different levels of spirituality and activism. Like a nomad, the critical educator as seeker is a wanderer enveloped by the spirit of love; an individual engaged in a pedagogy of potential striving to expand her/ his understanding of the world both without and within. Although, this search may prove to be challenging, this individual has but one mission:

The critical educator as seeker engages in different forms of activism outside the learning environment. For this individual, the ‘I’ only exists in spaces where ‘we’ is possible. S/he works to unlock the inner teacher through spiritual and moral development in order to live authentically in the here and now. S/he also emerges as a critical educator and spiritual guide, teaching with renewed vigour in a space of no-judgement while also being a lifelong learner.

The Critical Educator as Storyteller Rumi inspires the critical educator as storyteller to tell stories of pain, resistance, and change. The storyteller reignites hope by introducing learners to individuals or movements that have transformed their lives and their society. Through storytelling, this individual fosters a culture that allows for the envisioning of different subjectivities. Inspired by Rumi’s teachings, the critical educator as storyteller imparts spiritual wisdom that surpasses the intellect and engenders a counterhegemonic space that raises one’s awareness of social injustices. Through the very act of sharing stories, s/he engages in the awakening of individuals at the spiritual, cultural, and societal level and creates a medium for learners to experience critical awareness in order to emerge with new insight and understanding. The critical educator as storyteller strives for spaces where a sense of collective consciousness is nurtured through educational practices. In this milieu, consciousness, agency, and collective subjectivities are developed in an effort to problematize the structural and cultural constraints that reinforce hegemonic discourses. This individual is a tireless advocate for social justice as s/he tells stories of how to

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construct alternative subjectivities based on principles of love and critical consciousness. The Freirean-inspired pedagogy invites the critical educator as storyteller to create counterdiscourses through the act of storytelling. The critical educator as storyteller also expresses a great desire for a community where individuals can practise compassion. Here, Freire’s notion of armed love provides an authentic liberatory praxis where passionate activism is ‘the fighting love of those convinced of the right and the duty to fight, to denounce, and to announce’ (1998: 41).

demands intense self-reflection. The spirit of resistance is alive in the critical educator as resister as s/he works to foster a mutually humanizing discourse where the suffering of all people, particularly the marginalized and disadvantaged, can be acknowledged and potentially alleviated. The coupling of resistance and love can lead to a transformative praxis for this individual as s/he seeks alternate smooth spaces in search of new subjectivities as opposed to striated spaces. This individual never overlooks her/his role as resister as s/he challenges stereotypes and embraces alternatives ways of being.

The Critical Educator as Resister

The Critical Educator as Transformer

The critical educator as resister challenges stereotypes and creates alternatives as s/he promotes collective resistance among various social actors. Through a pedagogy of resistance, this individual problematizes the instrumentalism of education. S/he is like a nomad, in search of free spaces for a mode of creative thinking that is equally a form of resistance. By engaging in critical resistance against fixed subjectivities, the critical educator as resister partakes in multidimensional forms of struggle in an effort to envision the yet unimagined life. Through the construction of alternative modes of subjectivity, this individual is difficult to locate, and much like a nomad, nearly impossible to defeat. By establishing local contexts of resistance, s/he works to activate the collective memories of influential social and spiritual formations toward effective forms of resistance. S/he engages in activities that create a sense of compassion and love in what Garavan (2012) calls ‘integral social care and compassionate activism’. The critical educator as resister is ‘the true intellectual, who always finds the courage to seek the truth beyond ego or fixed notions of the nature of things, […] always walking a compassionate path’ (hooks, 2009: 186). In the space of resistance, s/he is also vulnerable and feels the suffering of those s/he is trying to help. This individual is profoundly committed to a vision of justice that

The critical educator as transformer seeks to create alternative futures by transforming the present. This individual systematically challenges the power hierarchies and promotes transformation at the personal and societal levels. For the transformer, embracing social action is accompanied by a commitment to transformation and agency at the personal level. In this context, deliberate transformation is accompanied by a vision of change where becoming has precedence over being. Like a nomad, the critical educator as transformer evades spaces that are stripped of their transformative power and embarks on a process of transformation alongside the learners. While it is essential to engage in action that transform structural inequalities and power relations through challenging practices, transforming subjectivities never loses its ­ significance for this individual. Although transforming the inherent inequalities in society is a priority for the critical educator as transformer, so is a soul-searching that leads to greater awareness of the self and character development. The critical educator as transformer is engaged in an ongoing struggle to enact a philosophy of intense self-reflection that gives her/him the power to be a not-knower. S/he advances a collaborative process where gaining self-knowledge

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and transforming the consciousness is in line with transforming the world. Through this developmental process, the critical educator as transformer envisions alternative futures by transforming the present. S/he aspires to challenge binaries and hierarchies in order to experience a rhizomatic existence. Here, rhizomatics is a mode of thinking that disturbs and disrupts hegemonic, linear, and fixed modes of subjectivity.

The Critical Educator as Improviser The critical educator as improviser celebrates the nomadic learner as s/he experiments with pedagogies that could lead nowhere or perhaps to transformation, wisdom, hope, and limitless possibilities. This individual engages in a fluid and flexible wandering as s/he transcends from being to becoming. In this state, wandering in a constant state of inbetweenness embodies a restlessness that leads to creativity, continuous change, and ‘pure difference’. The tension that exists between sedentary spaces and nomadic ones leads to a resistance to assimilation where motion is valued over fixation for the critical educator as improviser. The unexpectedness intrinsic to nomadic spaces and the ability to function without a commanding centre sets in motion the production of innovative flows for this individual. Such nomadic spaces are characterized by a penchant for decentralism and imagining alternative ways of being. The critical educator as improviser is a catalyst for transformation and exterior to the traditional structures upon which fixed subjectivities are derived from. Like a nomad, this individual is ‘resistance on the move’ and functions in a field of possibilities where s/he strives to be Insane-Kamil. The actions of this individual are multidimensional and uncoded and her/his greatest accomplishment is to encourage invention: invention of new spaces, invention of imaginal discourses, invention of possibilities for resistance, and invention of new subjectivities. Finding traces of nomadic-subject in the works of Freire and Rumi has offered

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possibilities as I imagined ‘points of entry’ before the arrival. Having outlined potential subjectivities for the critical educator, it would be worthwhile to consider how this vision could be put into educational practice. Capitalizing on Deleuze’s argument that the self, ‘changes in nature as it expands its connections’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 8) allows for the construction of creative alternatives for subjectivities. In this context, critical educators become engaged in a learning journey that incites them to bring something to life as they explore multiplicity and otherness in the educational sphere. This is an antidote to the ‘arborescent thought’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) that encourages the individualization of the learning experience and nurtures a linear and divided space devoid of multiplicity and complexity. In the Freirean ‘adventure of hope’, critical educators resist the individualization metanarrative and engage in the possible disruption of stereotypical subjectivities. The distinctive nature of nomadic consciousness allows for subjectivities, values, and aspirations to be shaped and reshaped in vibrant spaces. Envisioning reflective and creative learning spaces in a state of constant flux allows critical educators to continuously practise their existence and redefine their subjectivities. Such emancipatory visions of education refuse to alienate difference and blindly advocate for a pedagogy that is fragmented and disconnected. The inbetween space mediates a form of praxis where critical educators are mindful of their spiritual, moral, and social dimensions, as they cultivate a conscientious awareness of the complexities of the social world and their place in it. Ultimately, the creative force that is released enables identities to be negotiated in an inbetween space that is decentred and thrives in the realm of unpredictability. In this space, beneath the struggle for subjectivity, there is a no-man’s land that allows for ‘negotiated’, ‘mediated’, and ‘imagined’ ways of being in the world. My objective in this chapter has been to present a space where a tapestry of subjectivities has the ability to

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endlessly connect to any point and always function in a middle milieu without a beginning or an end; like Rumi’s na-koja-abad (a place that is no place) and Deleuze’s no-man’s land, these subjectivities are in a place that is nowhere. The nomadic narrative of subjectivity is a rejection of the dystopia that renounces the possibility of dreams, the need for selfreflection, and a desire for social justice.

REFERENCES Ahmed, S. (2008). What is Sufism? Forum Philosophicum, 13(2), 229–246. Alario, C. (2012). How I became a ‘Spiritual Activist’. Spirituality & Health [blog post] Retrieved June 10, 2017 from http:// spiritualityhealth.com/blog/celia-alario/how-ibecame-spiritual-activist Barks, C. (2003). Rumi: The book of love: Poems of ecstasy and longing. California: HarperCollins. Barnett, C. (2010). Publics and markets: What’s wrong with neoliberalism? In S. J. Smith, R. Pain, S. A. Marston, & J. P. J. Jones III (eds), The SAGE handbook of social geographies, 269–296. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bateson, G. (2000). Steps to ecology of mind: Ecology and flexibility in urban civilization. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. London and New York: Psychology Press. Boni, L. J. (2010). The Sufi journey towards nondual self-realization. Master’s thesis. University of Lethbridge, School of Health Sciences, Lethbridge, Atlanta. Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic subjects: Embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Braidotti, R. (2006a). Transpositions: On nomadic ethics. Cambridge: Polity. Braidotti, R. (2006b). The ethics of becomingimperceptible. In C. V. Boundas (ed.), Deleuze and philosophy, 133–159. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bryden, M. (ed.) (2001). Deleuze and religion. New York: Routledge.

Chittick, W. C. (1983). The Sufi path of love: The spiritual teachings of Rumi. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Chittick, W. C. (2007). Sufism: A beginner’s guide. Oxford: Oneworld. Cook-Sather, A., & Alter, Z. (2011). What is and what can be: How a liminal position can change learning and teaching in higher education. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 42(1), 37–53. Corbin, H. (2013). Creative imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi. London: Routledge. Corbin, H., & Horine, R. (1976). Mundus imaginalis, or, the imaginary and the imaginal. Ipswich, UK: Golgonooza Press. Deleuze, G. (1988). Foucault. Trans. by S. Hand. Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The timeimage. Trans. by H. Tomlinson & R. Galeta. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1991a). Bergsonism. Trans. by H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam. New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. (1991b). Empiricism and subjectivity: An essay on Hume’s theory of human nature. Trans. and introduction by C. V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1997). Immanence: A life… Theory, Culture & Society, 14(2), 3–7. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Trans. and foreword by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis and London: The University of Minnesota Press. D’Souza, R. (2014). What can activist scholars learn from Rumi? Philosophy East and West, 64(1), 1–24. Elias, J. (1976). Paulo Freire: Religious educator. Religious Education, LXXI(1), 40–56. Fadiman, J., & Frager, R. (Eds.). (1997). Essential Sufism. California: HarperOne. Freire, P. (1973). Education for critical consciousness. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (1985). The politics of education: Culture, power, and liberation. Trans. by D. Macedo; introduction by H. A. Giroux. Newport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Freire, P. (1994). Pedagogy of hope: Reliving ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ New York: Continuum.

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Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Trans. by P. Clarke; foreword by D. Macedo; introduction by S. Aronowitz. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury. Garavan, M. (2012). Compassionate activism: An exploration of integral social care. Bern: Peter Lang, AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften. Generett, G. G., & Hicks, M. A. (2004). Beyond reflective competency: Teaching for audacious hope-in-action. Journal of Transformative Education, 2(3), 187–203. Greene, M. (2007). Beyond incomprehensibility. Retrieved February 07, 2013 from www. maxinegreene.org/library/works-by-maxinegreene/articles Grosz, E. A. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Helminiak, D. A. (1998). Religion and the human sciences: An approach via spirituality. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hickman, S. C. (2013). Deleuze’s anti-Platonism. Retrieved November 04, 2017 from http:// socialecologies.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/ deleuzes-anti-platonism-part-1/ hooks, b. (2009). Belonging: A culture of place. New York: Routledge. Kirylo, J. D., & Boyd, D. (2017). Paulo Freire: His faith, spirituality, and theology. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Marks, L. U. (2010). Enfoldment and infinity: An Islamic genealogy of new media art. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. May, L. (1991). Metaphysical guilt and moral taint. In L. May & S. Hoffman (eds), Collective responsibility: Five decades of debate in theoretical and applied ethics, 239–254. Lanham, MD: Roman & Littlefield.

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Nicholson, R.A. (1926). The Mathnawi of Jalalu’din Rumi, Books I and II. Cambridge, England: E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Trust. Portelli, J. P., & Oladi, S. (2017). The impact of neoliberalism on teacher education. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 63(4), 378–392. Ramey, J. (2012). The hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and spiritual ordeal. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rumi, J. (1995). The Essential Rumi. Trans. by C. Barks with J. Moyne. San Francisco: Harper. Schimmel, A. (1975/1993). Mystical dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Semetsky, I. (ed.) (2008). Nomadic education: Variations on a theme by Deleuze and Guattari. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Strom, K. J., & Martin, A. D. (2013). Putting philosophy to work in the classroom: Using rhizomatics to deterritorialize neoliberal thought and practice. Studying Teacher Education, 9(3), 219–235. Turner, V. (1967). The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Underhill, E. (2002). Mysticism: A study in the nature and development of spiritual consciousness. New York: Dover Publications. Usher, R. (2010). Riding the lines of flight. European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults, 1(1–2), 67–78. Zaimaran, M. (1985). A comparative study and critique of philosophical and educational essentialism. Doctoral dissertation. University of Massachusetts Amherst. Retrieved January 20, 2014 from https://scholarworks.umass. edu/dissertations_1/4056 Zembylas, M. (2007). Risks and pleasures: A Deleuzo-Guattarian pedagogy of desire in education. British Educational Research Journal, 33(3), 331–347.

19 The Reader, the Text, the Restraints: A Cultural History of the Art(s) of Reading Philip M. Anderson

WORLD AT WAR After a hundred years of cultural evolution, progressive educational policy has ground to a halt during the first two decades of the 21st century. One rationalization cites a war declared since shortly after September 11, 2001, and subsequent expenditures of trillions of dollars fighting the global war on terror (Filkins, 2008). Historically and culturally, wartime curricula tend to be efficiently functional, punitively regimented, explicitly patriotic, and limited in financial resources as well as educational scope. The educational and social goals of personal and cognitive growth for students are treated as secondary to serving the country and, correspondingly, the needs of the military/industrial complex. Additionally, under the pretext of global economic warfare, business interests have dominated the school curriculum as never before. Increasingly, billionaire governors and multi-billionaire big city mayors, and even Presidents, have instituted a new

austerity regarding both public policy and public spending. Studies and subsequent policies conducted through the lens of business rationales now determine social and educational services, usually by the reduction of resources under the rubric of efficiency. These free market ideologues see the world through a Social Darwinian lens, with winners (them) and losers (everyone else, but especially those with different value systems). The business-centric policy model in vogue demands economic research, and the most influential educational policy books published since 2001 have been written by economists (Harris, 2011). The work of these economists provides the basic rationale promoting ‘value-added education’ (VAE) which undergirds the student and teacher standardized testing movement of the past two decades. VAE policy seeks to link teacher evaluation strictly to student test scores. From 2009–16, employees of Silicon Valley pioneer and multi-billionaire Bill Gates and his Gates Foundation served in

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President Barack Obama’s U.S. Department of Education, promoting teacher and student testing driven by VAE as a pillar of the Race to the Top reform initiative (Gates, 2013). In response, questions about the VAE approach as policy were raised in a letter to the White House as early as October 2009 by the National Academies’ Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, Board on Testing and Assessment (Haertel, 2009). Much of this change of educational policy has been accomplished outside the normal democratic process. Parents, professionals, and teacher organizations have been left out of the policy and pedagogy discussion, and a veritable civil war is being conducted against teaching professionals and their unions. Charter schools and voucher systems are being established and funded by hedge-fund managers and their ilk as an alternative to public education and its attendant democratic goals. As have most presidential candidates in the United States since 1980, current and hopeful elected officials are building their political campaigns on educational ‘reform’, seeking to undermine school law and teacher professionalism. Control of schools has shifted from citizendriven local school boards to gubernatorial and mayoral control of both budget and policies. The centerpiece of 21st-century reactionary reform, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) originated with state officials asking business councils what they believe students should know and be able to do upon high school graduation. The state-sponsored reform curricula were then constructed formally and logically in response to those goals, tossing out a century of developmental and social psychological research as well as professionally established and validated curriculum and pedagogy. The standardized test has regained prominence, having been re-established as the central component of the ‘No Child Left Behind’ educational law, the 2002 re-branding of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). These now increasingly high

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stakes tests are ideologically constructed around the limitations of the wartime curriculum, in some cases restricted to essential mathematics and literal comprehension of text as minimum standards. Disturbingly, these common core/core knowledge tests promote an anti-pedagogy stance in which ‘proficient’ test scores are authorized to justify any sort of method. The ends justify the means, however limited, anti-humanistic, or oppressive. Citizen revolt against common core testing has been significant, but the resolution in a majority of states has been a simple re-branding of the common core as Next Generation Learning Standards, with the Congress finally passing the toothless Every Student Succeeds Act, effectively removing federal oversight of states (U.S. Department of Education, 2015). The political war is also a cover for the cultural war in which the New Right intends the total destruction of liberal, humanistic, and progressive modes of thought, critical participatory action, and democratic educational rationales. Revolutionary thinkers on the Left are treated as treasonous, and liberal tendencies are represented as dangerous to the common good. In schools, revolutionary pedagogy, such as Paulo Freire’s ‘education as the practice of freedom’, articulated first in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970: 69) is ignored, vilified, or even outlawed by educational authorities – see Rochester (2003) for a representative New Right critique of critical pedagogy and schooling. Democratic goals for the education of the citizenry, even that centerpiece of progressive schooling, ‘civics’, have been pushed aside for elemental and limiting skills instruction and punishment-focused testing. All of the elements of the ‘culture of silence’ that Freire argued was the goal of oppressive education have been overtaking US educational practice and goals. The key observation about the role of language and thought in democratic education lies in Freire’s argument about generative

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themes and critical pedagogy in Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Consistent with the liberating purpose of dialogical education, the object of the investigation is not men (as if men were anatomical fragments), but rather the thought-language with which men refer to reality, the levels at which they perceive that reality, and their view of the world, in which their generative themes are found. (Freire, 1970: 86)

In opposition to this democratic goal, the New Right ideology seeks to limit both content and form (and even behavior) in citizens’ reading and writing, as well as the sociopsycholinguistic development of students, regardless of the communicative or performative medium. In restrictive and controlling times, history becomes propaganda as nationalism trumps humanism; citizenship education centers on responsibilities rather than individual rights; students are represented, and treated, as either workers or soldiers; science and technology are fused together; and the arts are either narrowly patriotic or censored, but mostly neglected as non-essential. Applying wartime logic to the literacy and literature curricula, official policy replaces the developmental richness, and joys, of reading and responding to literature with ‘fact-based’, text-centered, efficient, and ‘correct’ comprehension of non-fiction informational text. At the root of the fight for democracy and humanistic education are these competing visions of the nature and practice of literacy. The culture of silence promoted by the New Right intends to eliminate paths of thought allowing or encouraging what democratic thinkers see as a necessary language of critique (Giroux, 1983; Shor, 1992). The extended implications of Freire’s praxis can be found in the interpretations of Giroux (1988) and Darder (2017), and Donaldo Macedo’s groundbreaking work in critical literacy (Freire and Macedo, 1987). At the classroom level, this philosophical grounding has been followed by what has been deemed the New Literacies, with a focus on social

learning and new media, popularly illustrated in the work of Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel (2011; McLaren & Lankshear, 1994). The New Literacies movement accounts for social learning within evolving technologies, and stands as a necessary corrective to the failures, or simple exclusion from schools, of media education since the 1960s. However, the New Literacies view of the history of literacy practices, like many recent pedagogy and curriculum models, bypasses the central century-long argument about the nature of language and literacy in the sociolinguistic and cognitive development of children and adolescents within advanced industrial and post-industrial societies. Even critical participation in social media can be detrimental to social growth if it promotes only social realism as a political condition. A literacy curriculum must include literature and allow for the explicit forms of aesthetic thought necessary to humanism. Humanism is a precondition of democratic living according to both John Dewey and Paulo Freire. Brian Street (2003) recognized the theoretical problem with the New Literacies at the beginning of this century. Little in the way of satisfactory theorizing has been produced since, with most of the pedagogical practice, as Street pointed out in 2003, focusing on naturalistic assumptions of cognitive growth through language use in a variety of media. In the research that has been accomplished, the general need for a multiple strand theory is now recognized. However, the search for new literacy theories ignores the available complex theories and established practices that have been submerged by the ideological attacks on democratic schooling, and creativity and the arts in general, beginning in the 1980s. There is a clear reciprocal connection between the cognitive-developmental sociopsycholinguistic growth of children and adolescents and the socio-political aims of critical pedagogy, but neither approach, nor its practices, guarantees the other will be accomplished. The explicit ideology, and the

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concomitant theories, need to be articulated for coherent theory and practice. Any number of developmental approaches are anti-progressive pedagogically, especially those from behavioral and cognitive science models, while a number of critical literacy approaches assume the adult learner, rather than the child or adolescent, as a precondition for the pedagogy. Many current approaches to literacy development and literary reading undermine, or even eliminate, the arts and humanities elements of human learning and growth. An alarming number of thinkers at both ends of the political continuum do not recognize the arts and the aesthetic, the poetic in language or the literary work of art, as essential elements in human growth and social thought. The current school culture war began 20 years before 9/11. One of the central tenets of this cultural war is an attack on the literary reading of children and adolescents and an assault on progressive views of the literature curriculum necessary to democratic schooling. The stakes of the past 40 years have been lost in current political debate and covered over by the cultural distractions of the New Media. Those who cannot learn from the past are condemned to repeat it, as a number of insightful thinkers of various stripes have reminded us. An historical review of the Reagan Revolution is a necessary starting point for recapturing Ariadne’s thread to lead us out of the labyrinth.

THE EDUCATION REPORTS OF THE 1980S While the wartime curriculum accounts for many limitations of current policy and practice, its rationale and implementation actually disguise the fundamental assault on the public schools of the past 40 years. There was another war declared at the dawn of the 1980s that defines and promotes the crisis of schooling to this day. This culture war, epitomized in the United States today by President

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Trump’s Twitter and political rally pronouncements, originates with the presidential election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The reactionary element of the Reagan Revolution in the following decades rejected the liberal progressive regulations and civil rights legislation enacted in the 1960s. Older reactionaries, such as President Reagan himself, sought to eradicate all social change since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s progressive reforms reaching back to 1932, including Social Security. Notably, Reagan ran on a campaign promise to close, even before it officially opened, the newly established cabinet-level Department of Education. He chose the first Secretary of Education, Terrel Bell of Utah, to oversee the destruction of the department. Ultimately, and unfortunately, the Department of Education instead became the home base for attacks on US public education, a process superintended by Bell and an 18-member National Commission on Excellence in Education (NCEE). In time, throughout the Reagan and Bush 41 years (1981–93), the department became a haven for neo-cons such as William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, and Chester Finn, as well as Christian conservatives such as Gary Bauer, all of whom served assistant secretary appointments within the department. The first salvo, the 1983 NCEE report, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, opened with a charge of treason against public school officials, professors and teachers: ‘If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war’ (Gardner, 1983). And so, here begins the war metaphor that carries through the ensuing cultural feuds. A Nation at Risk became the blueprint for destroying progressive educational policy and its practitioners. Numerous conservative writers hitched their wagons to the reactionary reform movement and the subsequent amalgam of books, reports, and polemical writings evolved into

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the defining assumptions still operating officially and unofficially today. Beyond the US progressive tradition, the New Right conservatives were resisting what they came to call, ‘foreign ideology’. Revolutionary pedagogues, such as Paulo Freire, were especially suspect. At the heart of progressive revolution being introduced to US schools at that time, in the published writing of Freire and his followers, was the subject of literacy and the teacher’s role in promoting dialogical critical discourse into classrooms. Much of the Reagan-era conservative reform movement promoted a nationalist agenda with American culture at the center. The phrase, ‘what every American needs to know’, first popularized in E. D. Hirsch’s (1987) Cultural Literacy, became a precondition of curricular discussion. Reading and literacy arguments from the New Right played out within those patriotic categories, which also masqueraded a number of limiting and controlling pedagogies. All these years later, the literacy curriculum remains the frontline battlefield in the culture wars. Conservatives initially appeared to focus on policies, positions, and diatribes regarding early reading, playing out the endless fight over the role of phonics within the reading curriculum for children. While that tussle generated reams of loud argument everywhere from Congress to the local newspaper, regressive proposals for the adolescent literature curriculum were quietly turning back the clock on literary studies and literary reading. Three prevailing policy trends in the 1980s reports disclose the nature of the shift in the curriculum: 1 the separation of literature from writing; 2 curriculum design premised on selection of texts rather than teaching methodology or reading practice; and 3 restricting literature to an interdisciplinary humanities core with an emphasis on cultural knowledge.

The cumulative effect was that the definition of literacy, and even the definition of literature, changed dramatically in the 1980s. Over

the next several decades these assumptions about curriculum and assessment in literature study took over official policy, while classroom pedagogy was ignored or reduced to an afterthought. Tellingly, the general anti-­ pedagogy discourse replaces the educational category of ‘curriculum and instruction’ with ‘curriculum and assessment’, eliminating teaching from the equation. And, most disturbingly, many of the progressive reactions of the past several decades, though in political opposition, assume that the curricular imperatives the conservatives have specified. The most widely quoted and influential reports in the 1980s, representing a range of ideologies, included A Place Called School (Goodlad, 1984), High School (Boyer, 1983), and The Paideia Program (Adler, 1983). The efforts of Reagan’s second Secretary of Education, William Bennett, as official representative of the federal initiative, shaped the curriculum debate (What Works, 1987). Various professional organization reports such as The Humanities in Precollegiate Education, the Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (Ladner, 1984), and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development’s Redefining General Education in the American High School (Roberts and Cawelti, 1984) factored into the discussion. A frequently quoted book within the reform movement was Horace’s Compromise (1985), by Theodore Sizer, a member of the Paideia Group but also part of another reform faction, The Study of American High Schools. While Sizer’s ideas on the secondary school literature curriculum can be found in the various Paideia Group reports, his ultimate contribution is ‘essential’ schooling, embodied by the slogan: ‘Less is More’. Essentialism’s continuing influence can be seen in everything from budget to curriculum to pedagogy to standardized testing in current policy. What is most pertinent here regarding the literature curriculum depicted in 1980s school reports is how each one starts by ignoring six decades of research and practice regarding adolescent reading. The rise

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of new publishing categories such as Young Adult (YA) literature, or student-centered, experiential reading pedagogies and curriculum developed since the 1930s (and amplified during the 1960s), were discounted in favor of a text-centered, adult-focused cultural heritage model. Eventually, an anti-pedagogy, or pseudo-pedagogy, developed, legitimated as ‘cultural literacy’, which came to define the rationale for the retrogressive practice. Pedagogically, what is most striking is the separation of literature from language study and the treatment of literature as cultural information rather than aesthetic experience. Regarding the study and reading of literature, all of the 1980s education reports, despite their specific political stances, could have been written by the same committee. John Goodlad, in A Place Called School, sought to include ‘humankind’s disciplined ways of knowing’ as the core of the school’s curriculum (1984: 336). He cites as his model the 1945 Harvard report, General Education in a Free Society, a report that advocates a humanities approach, separating literature out from the integrated English curriculum and into the domain of cultural studies. The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development report also appears to plant its roots in the Harvard report, separating literature study from language skills and putting it into cultural studies (Roberts and Cawelti, 1984: 8). Mortimer Adler’s Paideia Group promoted a cultural heritage approach to reading, even including a list of culturally approved readings in the Appendix to the Paideia Program (1983). Adler, of course, was the originator, with Robert Maynard Hutchins, of the Great Books curriculum, whose ideology even reaches children through their Junior Great Books. Fellow Paideia Group member, Theodore Sizer, in Horace’s Compromise, would abolish English as a subject altogether, replacing it with ‘Inquiry and Expression’ and ‘Cultural Studies’ (1985: 132). Ernest Boyer’s High School puts English language skills at the center of the

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curriculum, placing emphasis on the teaching of composition (1983: 90–1). He stands as anti-textbook and, though not proposing a national Great Books curriculum, decries the lack of ‘great literature’ in the schools. He then endorses a cultural heritage curriculum while referencing mostly adult c­ lassics written before 1900 (ibid.: 312, 95–7). Boyer speaks specifically of a required core: ‘All students, through a study of literature, should discover our common literary heritage’. Additionally, while he thinks students should ‘learn about the power and beauty of the written word’, he articulates it as ‘learn about’, rather than ‘experience’ (ibid.: 303). The National Society for the Study of Education (NSSE) Yearbook, Part II, The Humanities in Precollegiate Education, places literature study emphatically in the cultural heritage category, with chapters on both cultural literacy and the Paideia proposal (Ladner, 1984). Remarkably, Part I of the 1984 NSSE Yearbook, Becoming Readers in a Complex Society, stresses the socio-psycholinguistic and developmental models of reading, including response-centered literature study (Purves and Niles, 1984). Crucially, the two volumes of the 1984 NSSE Yearbook appear as antidotes to one another, highlighting the disparity between reading scholars’ and researchers’ policy recommendations and those of the national political reports. In the end, contrary to professional practice and writing, most of the conservative and neocon reform reports seem to endorse the primary worth of literature study as a historical record of cultural beliefs, or as an instiller of moral character. And, while those goals seem ‘commonsense’, and were promoted as democratic, the ideology of these reports is almost fatally damaging to progressive education. As Berliner and Biddle demonstrate in The Manufactured Crisis (1996), and Gresson et  al. argue in Measured Lies (1997), the reform reports were never about improving education, but re-engineering US social

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policy. While the basic school reports look innocuous on the surface, many other writings of the time promoted a racist or nativist agenda tied to ‘what every American needs to know’ (Hirsch, Cultural Literacy, 1987; Cheney, American Memory, 1987) or ersatz tests of nationalist historical knowledge that seemed to ‘prove’ the failure of US schools (Ravitch and Finn, What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?, 1988). Also, there seems little doubt that the current historically high segregation of US schooling, and the repressive current high stakes testing policies, are emphatically affected by neo-eugenics writing such as The Bell Curve (1994). Penned by the Heritage Foundation’s Charles Murray and Harvard’s animal researcher and Skinnerian psychologist, Richard Herrnstein, this volume sought to demonstrate that certain ‘races’ were superior, on average, to others based on IQ testing. President Donald Trump, a professed Social Darwinist (who frequently mentions IQ as a standard), presently encourages a popular acceptance of these biases.

HIGH CULTURE AND CULTURAL LITERACY The socio-cultural rationale for literature study in schools found in these 1980s reports was originally established by the arguments of Matthew Arnold, a 19th-century English author and teacher employed as one of Her Majesty’s School Inspectors. Arnold argued the purpose of literature study was initiation into, and furtherance of, high culture, exemplifying the best writings and ideas of western civilization. His rationale, articulated in the classic Culture and Anarchy (1869), reasoned that the new industrialized world, seemingly less informed by the old morality of religion, needed to find new means to promote social and ethical standards. As his title Culture and Anarchy suggests, civilization itself was at stake. Arnold was clear about the political consequences

of culture: ‘culture begets a dissatisfaction which is of the highest possible value in stemming the common tide of men’s thoughts in a wealthy and industrial society’ (1869: 52). Culture and Anarchy, as one might expect, devolves into an attack on democracy in its closing arguments; tellingly, the argument also appears to culturally legitimate western neo-colonial expansion of the late 19th century. Arthur Applebee, in Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English, contends that Arnold’s position found favor in the United States, and, ‘in a very real sense, educational opportunities were extended because schooling with its attendant “culture” was seen as a new agent of social control’ (1974: 23). The political position of the high-culture argument subordinates individual needs to the larger requirements and interests of society, while the interests of society emanate from the elites. The United States’ original canon of highcultural texts for secondary school literature study originated with the National Conference on Uniform Entrance Requirements in English, beginning in 1874, aimed at common content for college entrance examinations. The College Entrance Examination Board assumed these lists after 1900 and maintained them until the 1930s. While college entrance examinations shifted toward the modern ‘scientific’ Scholastic Aptitude Test for college admissions after 1930, the notion of high culture, reinforced by school anthologies in American and British literature, maintained the canon for college-bound adolescent readers. Only one of the 1980s neo-con and conservative reform volumes actually pretends to address the adolescent reading pedagogy question. Hirsch, in an influential 1983 American Scholar article endorsed enthusiastically by then Secretary of Education, William Bennett, became the standard bearer of ‘cultural literacy’. Cultural literacy, as a method, is predicated on memorizing a prodigious store of cultural information as a prerequisite to reading literature. Hirsch, in the

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pages of The English Journal, defines cultural literacy as: the idea that literate people have a stock of shared background information which enables them to communicate effectively through reading, writing and speaking…. It is a census of cultural and natural information that is often alluded to without explanation in serious talks, books, and articles. (Hirsch, 1985: 47)

Hirsch’s subsequent book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, provides exactly such specific information, in convenient list form. Profits from this 1987 book, now past its 30th printing, are funneled through the Core Knowledge Foundation, which currently provides curriculum and resources and manages its own school network to promote its overall goals. Evaluation in this model involves a standardized demonstration of literary knowledge, defined as cultural information. Cultural literacy represents an atomized, de-contextualized, philosophically vulgarized neo-Arnoldian view of literature study. Hirsch, an English professor, makes a case for the approach as a reflection of ‘prior knowledge’ research from cognitive science, but he clearly has no interest in developmental psychology nor socio-psycholinguistics. He reveals his operant behavioral science assumptions by comparing the developing human brain to a computer hard drive where information is stored and retrieved. Antipedagogically, the list of cultural knowledge is presented as a prerequisite to reading, as a necessary prior knowledge which must be memorized before the act of reading for comprehension or, in behavioral terms, ‘recall’. This parallels the discredited ‘correct grammar must be learned before students will be allowed to write’ approach to composition. Cultural literacy, as a self-contradictory school practice, sets formal conditions of knowledge as prerequisites to pursuing naturalistic language skills and expression. The cultural literacy approach, like the older cultural heritage model it apes, sees

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methodology as a moot point, since memorizing the cultural content of the text is the focus of learning. The cultural literacy rationale discounts or simplifies the developmental and socio-psychological goals of learning and development and, further, its general educational argument engenders a moral imperative. It appears to represent a variation on 19th-century memorization of extracts from a text (meant to ‘exercise’ the brain) as the school’s goal for students, ignoring the students’ experience of reading the text. While the methodological problems of cultural literacy are of paramount concern to teachers, the philosophical basis of the cultural literacy model is also suspect. Methodologically, the cultural literacy approach is a reaction against experiential reading and developmental notions of language and cognitive development. Broadly, all these 1980s reactionary efforts seek to replace the aesthetic experience of literary reading with the accumulation of cultural information. The role of aesthetics in literature, and the human arts within the culture itself, is ignored. A memorable exchange about this larger question occurred at the University of Chicago in 1934. The college had famously established a required reading list, modestly branded The Great Books of the Western World. Invited by Thornton Wilder, Gertrude Stein was scheduled to speak at Chicago and, as part of her visit, was entertained by the Great Books’ founders, Mortimer Adler and the University of Chicago’s President, Robert Maynard Hutchins. After, the two explained the Great Books curriculum and method to Stein, as reported by Wilder biographer, Linda Simon: Gertrude was upset … because all [the books and discussion] dealt with ‘sociological or government ideas’. … As she became more excited, she focused on Adler, and began lecturing him on what she thought were truly great ideas…. ‘On the contrary, Miss Stein,’ Adler told her, ‘there is more on one page of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations than in all of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Statistics tell more than poetry’.

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‘Nonsense, young man,’ she replied, … ‘There is more on one page of Paradise Lost than in all of the Wealth of Nations!’. (Simon, 1979: 106–7)

The record of this exchange remains as clear evidence of the anti-literary function of the Great Books. Adler’s insistence that ‘statistics tell more than poetry’, could be the mantra of reactionary efforts to transform the school curriculum, K–16, and beyond. The current core curriculum state standards show minimal interest in literature or literary reading as an art. The adolescent reader and the reader’s agency are missing from the current testable common core curriculum goals. The overwhelming western focus and Caucasian male bias in the authors selected for the Great Books curriculum is politically worrisome, but the cultural assassination at the center of the Great Books as a replacement for literary study is anti-human at its core. Adler subsequently went to the trouble of writing a best-selling volume entitled, How to Read a Book (1940), which outlined the ‘proper’ approach to reductively analyzing and comprehending a book. The method lacks any sense of literary response or aesthetic consideration, or human emotion, as part and parcel of reading literature. And, significantly, Adler goes to great lengths here, and in other books, to attack John Dewey’s educational philosophy as well as psychological constructions of pedagogy and curriculum. He rails against experiential learning in particular, especially student-centered responses to texts. The philosopher Suzanne Langer, one of the few American philosophers outside of John Dewey to focus on the educational ­curriculum, wisely observed in Feeling and Form: Literature is one of the great arts, and is more widely taught and studied than any other, yet its artistic character is more often avowed than really discerned and respected. [Ironically, she argues,] [t] he reason why literature is a standard academic pursuit lies in the very fact that one can treat it as something else than art. (Langer, 1953: 208)

Everything about the Great Books and the cultural literacy prospective offers evidence of that statement’s veracity.

THE ART(S) OF READING AND DEMOCRACY The history of literacy represents a small part of the evolution of humans. Though we have evidence of symbols and signs made by prehistoric humans, the actual period of written symbols roughly noted as alphabetic is only several thousand years (Manguel, 1996). The age of the mass-printed book, McLuhan’s Gutenberg galaxy, dates roughly from ad 1450 to the present, barely a half-millennium (1962). During that time, up until the dawn of modern nation states, social and cultural laws demanded the withholding of even simple literacy from the lower socio-­economic classes. In the modern industrial age of the past several centuries, the literacy now required by the working classes has been a controlled and limited literacy. Literacy necessary to do work has been prized over, and mostly to the exclusion of, other purposes and forms of literate behavior. As the influential British sociologist, Raymond Williams has observed: [T]he ruling class decided to teach working people to read but not to write. It was argued that if they could read they could understand new kinds of instructions, and moreover, they could read the Bible for moral improvement. They did not need writing, however, since they would have no orders or instructions or lessons to communicate. (Williams, 1975: 131; see also 1965)

Further, since the 17th century, the Protestant tradition required basic literacy for reading the vernacular-language Bible. The Bible literacy of the US Puritan tradition, dating to the so-called Old Deluder Law of 1647 was necessary to salvation among these Christian dissenters, while not including general literacy as a goal. This cultural choice marked the beginning of controlled literacy in the United

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States, a tradition that still holds today. That tradition has been carried through the cultural heritage model of Matthew Arnold in the 1870s, the cultural literacy model of the 1980s, and the current Neo-Puritanism. (In our Orwellian Age, the conservatives are now trying to co-opt ‘Neo-Puritanism’ as a label for liberal and progressive social justice philosophies and policies; the connection to the original Puritans is retained in this work.) Most literacy schemes for schools, only sometimes including an articulated curriculum, remain controlled curriculum and anti-pedagogy, primarily serving as a means for limiting literacy. Ominously, the 21st-century conservatively constructed literacy curriculum is not merely defining or shaping the cultural thrust of literature but trying to enforce one sort of literacy in place of other possibilities. Current repressive policy explicitly rejects student experience in favor of the authority of the text. Literacy education has become as ‘abstinence only’ as sex education. Thankfully, as Raymond Williams has noted: ‘There is no way to teach a man to read the Bible which does not also allow him to read the radical press’ (1975: 131). Controlled literacy seems a futile effort, unless the planners include censorship as a key component of the model. In fact, most of the current state standards movement is tied to the ideology of core knowledge, a limiting structure of knowledge. Core knowledge is a self-contradictory restrictive construct, again, a ‘less is more’ proposition. Moreover, in 21st-century Neo-Puritan, wartime America, efficiency dictates resources only for cultural content and textual information. So, the cultural literacy model holds sway over literature, justified because the art(s) of literary reading are constructed as non-essential. In democracies, there exists a set of reciprocal cultural interests that center on the individual and the pursuit of happiness. This evolutionary goal constructs reading as part of human development: linguistic, cognitive, and emotive as well as political and social,

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and cultural. Books are also made to be read for pleasure, a fraught word in Puritaninflected America. In a humanistic and democratic world, books are frequently read out of personal interests and perceived need. Selfselection, and self-interest, takes its rightful place alongside required, common readings in a democratic system of schooling. And, as many writers have insisted, the personal is a necessary condition for freedom. Ray Bradbury presents the definitive post-WWII argument in Fahrenheit 451 (1953), one of the eternal texts about the role of literature in society. Accordingly, in the introduction to the 60th anniversary edition of Bradbury’s classic, the author Neil Gaiman addresses the central problem with essentialist and Puritan systems of reading: If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right. If they tell you that that is all the story is about, they are very definitely wrong. (2013: xii)

In the end, ‘one-best-way’ is a restrictive ideological construct. Multiple approaches and multiple meanings define the educational needs of the developing human, and human experience is at the center of education and growth. Less is not more, but simply not enough. Out of multiple meanings comes the need, and pleasure, of the Freirean dialogical model of learning. Historically, the cultural goal of producing individual, proactive humans had gained currency along with democratic ideals. The progressive idea of reading as experience evolves directly from John Dewey’s writings on experiential education, work that defines democratic processes of schooling. The range of literacy, and the range of response to literature, is defined by the political stance of the school system within the culture. The Neo-Puritan reactionary core knowledge curriculum and limited assessment policy places students outside knowledge, fashioning students as passive consumers in a punitive, restrictive system.

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During the 1930s, the Progressive Education Association (PEA) promoted Dewey’s notions of experiential learning which subsequently transformed reading instruction. The highlight of that effort was a PEA-commissioned book, Louise Rosenblatt’s Literature as Exploration (1938). Now in its 5th edition, published by the Modern Language Association (1995), Literature as Exploration articulates the principles of democratic practice when applied to reading, in particular, literary texts. The argument for literary reading as the participatory engagement of the reader became a prime component of democratic schooling and citizenship. Rosenblatt’s theory, supported by extensive research in the field on developing readers, the social and psychological invention of adolescence, and the rise of public and school libraries, redefined the questions surrounding reading literature in schools. Rosenblatt’s later development of what became the transactional model of reading in The Reader, the Text, the Poem (1978) summarizes supporting socio-psycholinguistic research, clearly distinguishing between an efferent reading stance associated with getting information from a text and an aesthetic reading stance focused on entering into the world of the text. The pedagogy of the transactional model is a marker of its intent, both for the curriculum decisions and the classroom teacher’s actions (see ‘What Facts Does this Poem Teach You?’, Rosenblatt, 1980). Developmentally, both stances of reading, seen as a complementary continuum of experience, are necessary for the development of literacy. Literacy is an essential construct of education when the developing child and adolescent engages a range of reading stances with both vicarious and life experiences. This democratic vision of the literature curriculum has been the object of conservative derision over the decades. The reaction to democratic reading practice starts as early as the 1920s with the New Humanists, centered on Irving Babbitt (1924), who blamed the child-centered Romantic philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau for the decline of

western civilization. Adler and Hutchins’ Great Books curriculum was promoted as a direct reaction to progressive schooling ideas. Democratic goals were upended once again by the Sputnik Crisis of 1958, reinforced by the National Defense Education Act. The Cold War social shift of patriotic fervor that followed sent young people to Vietnam and middle-class folks to building bomb shelters, while schools sought to find and train gifted scientists for national defense. Ultimately, the humanistic revolution of the 1960s served as a reaction against that repressive time. The latest revival of the democratic, comprehensive approach to literacy, the root of sophisticated research pursued in the second half of the 20th century, was instigated in 1966 when scholars from the United States, the UK, and commonwealth nations convened at what became known as the Dartmouth Conference. North Americans were introduced to the work of the great British language researcher James Britton and his Institute of Education colleagues at the University of London. Central to their work, for pedagogical purposes, was the notion of language play and the importance of drama and oral language performance for language development, particularly in elementary classrooms. Significantly, this ‘language in the classroom’ approach reconnected oral and written language instruction in schools, improving reading and writing pedagogy and student language performance in all social classes. As reported in books summarizing that work, such as Language and Learning (Britton, 1970), Language, The Learner and the School (Barnes et  al., 1971), and The Development of Writing Abilities, (11–18) (Britton et. al, 1975), the researchers and their pedagogical colleagues at the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE) developed new comprehensive language curricula and multimodal literacy pedagogies that returned reading and writing to reciprocal practice in schools. The reconnection of the oral and the textual brought the naturalistic development of language back to the center of the curriculum. The students’

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experience was a center point of the pedagogy. The curriculum moved beyond schoolbased formalism and connected the world of children and adolescents to the work of school and society. This progressive political element worked against social class-biased formalism in the post-war period (1946–66), when English language schooling intended to supplant the students’ oral language skills and habits, rather than draw on the sophisticated grammar in use the students had learned as toddlers before even attending school. School practice assumed that the oral language skills of the students were inherently deficient and interfered with learning to write and speak ‘correctly’. In those days, one could still hear professionals insisting that the study of Latin, available in most public schools, was necessary to literacy development. Furthermore, the traditional, official trends in the post-war period privileged reading over writing, with very little attention to actual writing. Even the SAT’s writing measure, Test of Standard Written English, was a multiple-choice grammar and usage test. The social assumption was the same that had been applied to the working classes since the beginning of universal literacy in the industrial revolution. Workers needed to read instructions, but it was not necessary for them to respond in writing or to publish their thoughts in a way that could organize the workers. James Britton and colleagues shifted the pedagogical task to the reciprocal relationship between reading and writing, especially in a developmental context, shifting agency from the text to the learner, re-thinking and expanding the task of writing with ‘correct’ grammar to an emphasis on audience and purpose of the writing determined by personal and social expectations. This functional approach to language produced pedagogies that expanded and defined the notions of common language skills in a free society. Writing across the curriculum, writing as process, treating plays as drama and performance rather than treating them as reading

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texts, reading books for pleasure, all limited or absent in the traditional curriculum, became commonsense and expected categories of language instruction. At the elementary - and middle school level, the revolution also centered on the use of children’s and young adult literature as an essential part of reading instruction. The official formal model still emphasized basal readers: controlled, scientifically constructed texts based on assumptions of difficulty with ‘comprehension’ questions. Children’s literature was seen as a pleasant diversion, but not the focus of instruction. The British model brought children’s and young adult literature into the curricular mainstream. In the years since, it has been reported that sales of children’s and young adult books carry the costs of producing and selling the adult books for many publishers today, reflecting the grand transformation of children’s, and their parents’, reading interests. One of the unintended consequences of the economic growth of children’s and young adult books is that some of the best authors since the Victorian period are writing children’s and young adult literature. J. K. Rowling’s already immortal Harry Potter series could not find a US publisher for years. A progressive educational publisher, Scholastic, published Harry Potter and has seen its fortunes rise right along with Rowling’s. A company committed to powerful reading for kids now has the economic resources to promote the value of literary reading for all. Importantly, as a sign of cultural significance, the second-generation CEO of Scholastic, Dick Robinson, received the 2017 National Book Award Foundation’s ‘Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community’ (Maher, 2017). Looking back at the socio-psycholinguistic work of James Britton in Language and Learning and the collaboratively published, The Development of Writing of Writing Abilities (11–18), the reader finds that one of the key components to holistic language development is what this research calls the poetic function. This function is the aesthetic

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mode of language and thinking that Suzanne Langer is concerned with in her philosophical work on the arts. This is the aesthetic mode that Louise Rosenblatt requires for democratic reading. James Britton and colleagues distinguished between transactional writing aimed at communicating information and poetic writing aimed at creating a representation of experience. Both stances, in reciprocal relation to one another, are necessary for comprehensive literacy instruction, and linguistic and cognitive growth. A myriad of language and literacy theoreticians and researchers are connected to Britton and Rosenblatt’s work both in time and ideas. Freire’s Brazilian exiled fellow-traveler, Augusto Boal, developed his theories of democratic theater in the same philosophical context, the theory reported in Theatre of the Oppressed (1979) and the pedagogy in Games for Actors and Non-Actors (1992). That work informed and was informed by Dorothy Heathcote’s work in England, which affected the expansion of language play and drama in the classroom promoted by James Britton and colleagues’ school praxis (Wagner, 1999). Her work with prisoners shaped Daniel Fader’s work with incarcerated youth which inspired Hooked on Books (1968), which transformed literacy practice in the United States. Connections between Britton’s notion of ‘expressive discourse’ and Lev Vygotsky’s ‘inner speech’ undergird much of the progressive language practice as it developed during those times (Britton, 1976; Vygotsky, 1962, 1978). The pioneering work by D. W. Winnicott (Playing and Reality, 1971) influenced both role-playing and the artistic play necessary to the larger linguistic and cultural goals.

NEO-PURITAN ANTI-PEDAGOGY AND MULTIMODAL DEMOCRATIC LITERACY The response to this triumph of educational theory and practice in our current reactionary era is to remove all of those elements from

the current classroom. Reactionaries accomplish this abstinence through neglect, open hostility, and restricted high stakes common core testing. And, censorship lies both in content and in method. The common core test favors only one variety of reading. The latest high stakes tests tied to the Common Core State Standards Initiatives (2009) overtly promote ‘text-based comprehension of information’ over literary response. Here are the Key Shifts in English Language Arts highlighted on the CCSS Initiative official website (italics here indicate underlining in original text): 1 Regular practice with complex texts and their academic language. 2 Reading, writing, and speaking grounded in evidence from texts, both literary and informational. 3 Building knowledge through content-rich nonfiction. (CCSS, 2009)

Moreover, so even the casual reader cannot miss the shift in stance regarding school practice, the authors provide an explanation under #2: Frequently, forms of writing in K–12 have drawn heavily from student experience and opinion, which alone will not prepare students for the demands of college, career, and life…. Rather than asking students questions they can answer solely from their prior knowledge and experience, the standards call for students to answer questions that depend on their having read the texts with care. (CCSS, 2009)

Neglecting, or even demonizing, student experience is a direct assault on progressive pedagogy, the distinguishing feature of which is integrating students’ experiences into their schooling. Abstinence-only, the CCSS says, no life experience from the students is necessary. This stance quickly morphs into no experience with reading and writing, but gathering information about reading and writing, which is tested with criteria other than reading and writing. The 1980s policy romance of US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher combined and concentrated conservative political fronts, directly attacking

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the Anglo-American progressive education and its evolution in the 1960s. By the 1980s, the key professional group for English teaching in the UK, the NATE, was not even invited to the table when Margaret Thatcher’s government ‘reformed’ the state-sponsored curriculum. And, not insignificantly, Thatcher’s rise to power came through her work attacking the progressive curriculum in her role as the UK Minister of Education, where she paved the way for the reactionary change in school policies that marked her time in the Prime Minister’s office. The anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, antiexperience conservatives are now in charge. The recent victories of populist elected leaders in various Christian-majority countries look very much like the victories of the religious right in Muslim-majority countries. In the United States, 2017 saw the appointment of a Secretary of Education, another billionaire, whose own education, and that of her children, is limited to attending private schools affiliated with her conservative religion. It is unlikely she will promote multiple literacies as a goal of schooling. Unsurprisingly, she is an advocate for, and beneficiary of, privatizing the public system, or at least vouchering its financing. But in the end, it is the NeoPuritanism that is of greater concern. The literalist, text-focused philosophy of Neo-Puritanism has consequences well beyond school practice. The very same argument informs the current wrangle over the appointment of federal judges. The ultimate example of the anti-progressive, ‘literalist/ originalist’ and ‘textualist’ movement in the United States dwells in a recent appointment to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch. Replacing the most infamous of the originalist and textualist justices, Antonin Scalia, Gorsuch recently spoke to the conservative Federalist Society, proclaiming his appointment as a victory for the influential group working to pack the federal courts with its acolytes (Blake, 2017). The judicial philosophy of The Federalist Society, and its larger and more influential

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fellow traveler, The Heritage Society, can be summarized thusly: Federalist Society luminaries will tell us judicial review does not need knowledge or guidance assembled from legal precedent, legislative history, social science, natural science, or data science. Judicial review requires only the inert words captured in a small, fixed, and dated set of canonical ‘founding’ texts. (Schwartz, 2017)

And, so, limited text-focused reading is more that limiting access to knowledge for students; it becomes a rationale for the legal oppression of US citizens. In the most progressive schools, many of them serving the leadership and managerial socio-economic classes, the rich multimodal literacy curriculum remains intact, but only through the efforts of the teaching professionals and the students’ parents. Increasing pressure on even those teachers and parents to focus on the common core curriculum standards or New Generation Learning Standards continues, while the less powerful citizens’ children are reduced to studying for the common core tests as the full extent of their learning experience in schools. This effect extends to many of the new charter schools, most of whom trumpet their allegiance to the notion of a common core. The common core, with its abstinence-only focus, remains the political measure of success and takes precedence over other humanistic and social intentions of education. In the end, the multimedia universe we inhabit demands an expansion of literacy that still accounts for the humanistic complexity of individual and social learning. The technical rationality currently informing most schoolbased educational technology negates aesthetic form and experience in favor of reductive a curriculum and pedagogy. Regardless of the delivery system, the Neo-Puritan literalist and textual literacy teaches the bare minimum. Given the complexities of multimedia literacy now shaping our planet, reducing education to a simple, inadequate text-based literacy is a threat to democracy as never before.

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REFERENCES Adler, M. J. (1940). How to read a book: The art of getting a liberal education. New York: Simon & Schuster. Adler, M. J. (Ed.). (1983). The Paideia program: An educational syllabus (Essays by the Paideia Group). (Preface and Introduction by M. J. Adler). New York: Macmillan. Applebee, A. N. (1974). Tradition and reform in the teaching of English: A history. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Arnold, M. (1869/2009). Culture and anarchy. J. Garnett (Ed.). Oxford University Press. Babbitt, I. (1924/1979). Democracy and leadership (3rd ed.). (Foreword by R. Kirk). University Park, IL: Liberty Fund, Inc. Barnes, D., Britton, J., Rosen, H., & the London Association for the Teaching of English. (1971). Language, the learner and the school. Baltimore, MD: Penguin. Bennett, W., & U.S. Department of Education (Eds.). (1987). What works: Research about teaching and learning (2nd ed.). (Foreword by W. Bennett, Secretary of Education; Introduction by C. Finn, Jr.). Department of Education, Washington, DC. 1987. Berliner, D. C., & Biddle, B. J. (1996). The manufactured crisis: Myths, fraud and the attack on America’s public schools. New York: Addison-Wesley. Blake, A. (2017, February 1). Neil Gorsuch, Antonin Scalia and originalism, explained. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/01/­ neil-gorsuch-antonin-scalia-and-originalismexplained/?nid&utm_term=.fe9be30094f9 Boal, A. (1979). Theatre of the oppressed. London: Pluto Press. Boal, A. (1992). Games for actors and nonactors. London: Routledge. Boyer, E. L. (1983). High school: A report on secondary education in America. New York: Harper & Row. Bradbury, R. (1953/2013). Fahrenheit 451 (60th Anniversary ed. Introduction by N. Gaiman). New York: Simon & Schuster. Britton, J. (1970). Language and learning. Baltimore, MD: Penguin. Britton, J. (1976). Language and the nature of learning: An individual perspective. In J. Squire (Ed.), The teaching of English: 76th

yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part I (pp. 1–37). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Britton, J., Burgess, T., Martin, N., McLeod, A., & Rosen, H. (1975). The development of writing abilities (11–18). New York: Macmillan. Cheney, L. V. (1987). American memory: A report on the humanities in the nation’s public schools. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Humanities. Common Core State Standards Initiatives. (2009). Key shifts in language arts. http:// www.corestandards.org/other-resources/ key-shifts-in-english-language-arts/ Accessed April 27, 2019. Darder, A. (2017). Reinventing Paulo Freire: A pedagogy of love (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Fader, D. N., & McNeil, E. B. (1968). Hooked on books. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Filkins, D. (2008). The forever war: Dispatches from the war on terror. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Freire, P. (1970/1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word & the world. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey Publishers. Gardner, D., & National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983). A nation at risk: The imperative for educational reform. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education. https://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html Gates, B. (2013, January 17). Tools for evaluating teaching. gatesnotes: The Blog of Bill Gates. https://www.gatesnotes.com/ books/value-added-measures-in-education Giroux, H. A. (1983). Theory and resistance in education: A pedagogy for the opposition. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey. Giroux, H. A. (1988). Teachers as intellectuals: Towards a critical pedagogy of learning. (Introduction by P. Freire; Foreword by P. McLaren). Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Goodlad, J. I. (1984). A place called school: Prospects for the future. New York: McGrawHill Book Company. Gresson, A. D., Kincheloe, J. L., & Steinberg, S. R. (Eds.). (1997). Measured lies: The bell curve examined. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Haertel, E. H. (October 5, 2009). Letter report to the U.S. Department of Education on the

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Race to the Top Fund. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://www.nap. edu/read/12780/chapter/1 Harris, D. N. (2011). Value-added measures in education: What every educator needs to know. (Foreword by R. Weingarten). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvard University, Report of the Harvard Committee (1945). General education in a free society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Herrnstein, R. J., & Murray, C. (1994). The bell curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life. New York: Free Press. Hirsch, E. D., Jr. (1983). Cultural literacy. The American Scholar (52)2: 159–169. Hirsch, E. D., Jr. (1985, October). Cultural literacy’ doesn’t mean ‘core curriculum. The English Journal (74)6: 47–49. Hirsch, E. D., Jr. (1987). Cultural literacy: What every American needs to know. New York: Random House. Ladner, B. (Ed.). (1984). The humanities in precollegiate education: Eighty-third yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Langer, S. K. (1953). Feeling and form. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2011). New literacies: Everyday practices and social learning (3rd ed.). Maidenhead: Open University Press. Maher, J. (2017, September 21). Robinson named winner of NBF’s Literarian Award. PublishersWeekly. https://www.publishers weekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrensindustry-news/article/74824-robinsonnamed-winner-of-nbf-s-literarian-award. html Manguel, A. (1996). A history of reading. New York: Viking Penguin. McLaren, P. L., & Lankshear, C. (Eds.). (1994). Politics of liberation: Paths from Freire. London and New York: Routledge. McLuhan, M. (1962/2011). The Gutenberg galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Purves, A., & Niles, O. (Eds.). (1984). Becoming readers in a complex society: Eighty-third yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part I. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Ravitch, D., & Finn, Jr., C. F. (1988). What do our 17-year-olds know? A report on the first national assessment of history and literature. New York: Harper & Row/Perennial Library. Roberts, A. D., & Cawelti, G. (1984). Redefining general education in the American high school. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Rochester, M. (2003, Fall). Critical demagogues: What happens when ideology and teaching mix. Education Next (3)4: 77–82. https:// www.educationnext.org/criticaldemagogues/ Rosenblatt, L. M. (1938/1995). Literature as exploration (5th ed.). (Foreword by W. Booth). New York: Modern Language Association of America. Rosenblatt, L. M. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Rosenblatt, L. (1980 April). What facts does this poem teach you? Language Arts 57(4): 386–394. Schwartz, P. (2017, November 20). Neil Gorsuch victory lap speech at the Federalist Society: Some correctives. Huffington Post. https:// w w w . h u ff i n g t o n p o s t . c o m / e n t r y / n e i l gorsuch-victory-lap-speech-at-the-federalistsociety_us_5a12cb80e4b0e6450602ecbc. Accessed April 27, 2019. Shor, I. (1992). Cultural wars: School and society in the conservative restoration. (Foreword by P. Freire). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Simon, L. (1979). Thornton Wilder: His world. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Sizer, T. R. (1985). Horace’s compromise: The dilemma of the American high school. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Street, B. (2003). What’s ‘new’ in New Literacy Studies: Critical approaches to literacy in theory and practice. Current Issues in Comparative Education. (5)2, 77–91. https:// www.tc.columbia.edu/cice/pdf/25734_5_2_ Street.pdf. Accessed April 27, 2019. U.S. Department of Education (2015). Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). https://www. ed.gov/essa?src=rn Vygotsky L. S. (1930–1935/1978). Mind in society: Development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Vygotsky L. S. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wagner, B. J. (1999). Dorothy Heathcote: Drama as a learning medium. (Revised, Subsequent Edition). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

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20 Deleuzeguattarian Concepts for a Becoming Critical Pedagogy Rodney Handelsman

[C]ritical pedagogy issues a challenge to scholars and social activists to push the boundaries of knowledge, to go to new epistemological places, and to employ the insights gained for the larger social good. (Kincheloe, 2008b: 10) It is always a question of freeing life wherever it is imprisoned, or of tempting it into an uncertain combat. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 171).

AN EVOLVING CRITICAL PEDAGOGY Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1970/2005) inspired critical movements and works that have proliferated under the sign of critical pedagogy. Critical ­pedagogy1 emerged in the 1980s as Freire’s revolutionary philosophy was reformulated in light of the material and ideological landscape of schools, initially in the United States (Giroux, 1981, 1983b) and Canada (McLaren, 1980, 2015). It has developed as a means to overcome oppression and combat a neoliberal paradigm that has taken hold and

reshaped the welfare and educational policies and arrangements in capitalist countries since at least the 1980s2 (Giroux and Giroux, 2006; Harvey, 2005). In this context, critical pedagogy rejects any reduction of teaching and learning to a neutral process of knowledge transmission, or one that takes place without reference to history, social context, or the operation of power. Instead, it invites an understanding of schools as important sites of struggle (political, ideological, material, etc.) that are both: (1) implicated in producing various social and educational inequalities; and; (2) hold the promise of key public spaces in which to develop the democratic sensibilities and skills necessary to name, resist, and transform practices that produce inequality and the multiple forms of oppression that press upon us, our schools, our words and worlds. Work taking place within ‘the big tent’ (Lather, 1998) of critical pedagogy offers ‘both a language of critique and possibility’ (Giroux and Giroux, 2006: 22) that has taken root, and been elaborated, within

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multiple social, political, and educational contexts (see this Volume). For critical pedagogy to enhance its character as a relevant and revolutionary force, it must perceive and contend with the complexity that characterizes contemporary social and educational arrangements – with their attendant inequalities – amidst rapid technological, migratory, and ecological changes that mark the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century. These challenges demand as ever an expansion of the theoretical and practical tools at our disposal to think, feel, and fight, as we forge new solidarities and create new realities. This chapter introduces Deleuze and Guattari (henceforth DG3) as key thinkers in an (as yet?) becoming critical pedagogy: a critical pedagogy that can help us to not only survive but flourish4 differently, as we discover ‘new ways of being human’ (Kincheloe, 2008b: 250). Over the past decade scholarship that draws upon DG has proliferated in a variety of disciplines, including education.5 My exploration of deleuzeguattarian concepts for critical education continues a tradition of critical pedagogy that provides expanding conceptual and methodological tools, which relay between social theory and power-inscribed, context-specific, practice.6 DG’s concepts of difference can be marshalled to develop ‘new ways of seeing and being … and learn from divergent modes of relating to difference’ (Kincheloe, 2008a: 2). As such they may prove indispensable to critical pedagogies of the 21st century that seek to overcome the forces (historical, political, educational, epistemological, etc.) that produce oppressions, educational and social inequities, and unprecedented ecological upheavals. I acknowledge that this chapter won’t and can’t – due to limitations of space and the author – convey the breadth or depth of DG’s oeuvre. Instead it shoots off in multiple ­directions – rhizomatically – with no hope of following these lines back into a single easily grasped vector or tree (DG, 1987). I consider bits and pieces of their work in the hope of

evoking new thoughts, feelings, and collaborations relevant to an ongoing critical pedagogical praxis. The sections explore: (1) the immanent ontological coordinates of DG’s philosophy with which they trouble linear notions of time and affirm the material as well as the non-material (linguistic and asemiotic, affective) dimensions of life’s unfolding; (2) key concepts of difference that DG forge to combat fascism, mutating Capitalism, and dogmatic images of thought; and (3) what these concepts may imply for our conceptualization of critical consciousness, schools, educational practice, and political composition. Engaging in their work risks perceiving what escapes thought and feeling what escapes consciousness, as we enact critical pedagogies anew.

DG’S ONTOLOGICAL COORDINATES: DIFFERENCE, DURATION, AND POSSIBILITY The ontological coordinates of DG’s work bewilder common notions of our spatial and temporal universe and open up new modes of building out critical pedagogies from a complex ontology.7 DG’s work can be thought of as an effort to develop a philosophy of life worthy of the life’s multidimensionality, movement, creativity, intensities, and possibilities. What follows is a sketch of the ontological coordinates within which DG fashion an array of concepts of difference that help map out this complex territory and create new grounds, new cartographies, for becoming critical pedagogies.

From Traditional Ontology to Immanence, Difference, and Affirmation Traditional ontology rests upon notions of essential identities and presupposes a conceptual stability that is fit to then describe what is ‘out there’ and waiting to be

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discovered by us. Perhaps since Plato, in the West, we are used to thinking in terms of essences, and bounded identities. And we often take for granted that the human mind enjoys a (transcendent) status within this traditional ontology that makes possible our questions about ‘reality out there’ and epistemological questions about how best to discover its nature and characteristics. In contrast to traditional ontology, DG embrace a Spinozist8 philosophy of immanence to render an ontology of difference. Rejecting transcendence in all its forms, immanence is a philosophy of being that asserts that there is only one substance of existence. There is only one ‘being’ and all forms and attributes of the substance of the universe are expressions of this univocal ontological substance (May, 2005). The ontological ‘substance’ of their univocal reality is made up of difference: ‘Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given’ (Deleuze, 1994: 222). The concept of difference – developed by Deleuze (1994) and utilized by DG (1972/1977, 1987) – is fundamentally different from traditional notions of difference. For DG, difference is not defined as something characteristic of one identity in relation to another, or one identity in relation to an imagined standard image (or ‘ideal form’) of that identity. That is, difference is not defined through lack (DG, 1972/1977). Instead, DG render difference in positive terms; difference as affirmation9 with no ‘necessary connection with the negative or with negation’ (Patton, 2000: 31). DG’s theorization of difference is part of an overall project to reinvent critique as a process of creation (rather than negation) and in that sense DG’s work can be understood to function as a positivity (Allan, 2007b). Casting difference as a positivity stuns ‘thinking as usual’, and pushes us to attend to objects as much as thoughts, as emergent aspects of a world characterized by ‘an active process of differentiation in which the becoming-something is itself constitutive’ (Robinson and Tormey, 2007: 131, italics in

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original). Because DG render difference as a positivity within an immanent ontology, there is no hierarchy of existence conferred upon the stuff of the universe – mountains, humans, dirt, words, feelings, thoughts, fractals, black holes – all share the same ontological status within a single ontological plane.10 If difference is not a characteristic that depends upon lack, and if it is not a ‘thing’, it might be better understood as a process of expression. Perhaps akin in origami to how a piece of paper folds and unfolds to express different figures (May, 2005): to express in different modes. In this analogy, the figures (objects, subjectivity, etc.) are expressions, and immanent to (not transcendent of) the piece of paper, that is, a single ontological plane comprised of difference. Thinking with DG, being itself is not a static state, but rather a process of becoming (Hardt, 1995) and ongoing (un/re)folding that comprises a single reality that is nonetheless ‘on the move’. Because DG’s theorizations of immanence and difference are processual, a given entity – the state, a person, a pack of wolves, a flower, a gesture, a broken nose – ‘exists primarily as a process rather than a thing’ (Robinson, 2010: para. 3). To understand how our present emerges (or is actualized) we must consider the temporal dimension of DG’s ontological coordinates: duration. Duration for DG allows for the present to be actualized (as an expression of difference) based on ‘the principle of the positive movement of being’ (Hardt, 1995: 112–13). If difference is a process or ‘force of differentiation and elaboration’, then ‘[d]uration is the “field” in which difference lives and plays itself out’ (Grosz, 2005: 4). For DG, duration is required in order for immanence to be born. Drawing upon Bergsonian notions of duration, DG lead us to rethink our sense of time as usual. As Deleuze writes: The past and the present do not denote two successive moments, but two elements which coexist: One is the present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which does not cease to be but through which all presents pass. (Deleuze, 1991: 59)

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The temporal field is rendered such that past and present are not two successive (linear) moments but rather are two (non-linear) elements that co-exist. This coextensive, nonlinear sense of time encompasses a virtual field that is made up of difference as well as the actualized present that we encounter in everyday experience. The virtual ontological past is nevertheless as real as that which it actualizes as the present (May, 2005; May & Semetsky, 2008; Semetsky, 2017). With duration, DG invite us to trace how the present is always interconnected with an ontological past that continues to exist (virtually) and to exceed as well as adhere to that which is actualized in the present. Semetsky suggests that virtual tendencies become embodied or actualized ‘in the guise of new objects, experiences, and states of affairs’ (2009: 448) and thus, the everyday identities we encounter in the present are not limited to what they appear: ‘coiled up’ in each is the virtual difference of which they are an expression. May (2005) uses genes as an example to illustrate how the virtual exceeds what is actualized even as it adheres to and is embodied in specific – but not determined or necessary – forms. Information contained by genes can be viewed as part of a virtual past: containing data produced in constellations of time amidst multiple relations and interactions with effects at various scales (geologic, species, individual, sub-individual, etc.). As coded information it exists and is real, but in a different form from biological entities that are actualized in the present. Information encoded in genes cannot simply be read under a microscope and ‘viewed’ as a series of discrete bits of compressible datum. Rather it is our genes’ unfolding and complex expression and suppression that takes place in a process of interaction with myriad variables and relations of force that is a key component of generating a specific living being (May, 2005). In this sense, our ­becoming – as a critical educator no less than as an embryo – draws upon an ontological past that exceeds and is expressed as an actualized and not-determined present.

If coiled up in the ‘identities’ we encounter in the present is a virtual past that is distinct but inseparable from the ‘present’ that we experience in everyday life, then we begin to sense how virtual possibilities exceed what is actualized: ‘[w]hat is striving to become the actual is that which is in virtu, only waiting for conditions in real experience to come forward’ (Semetsky, 2009: 449). This implies that there is always a greater potential for transformation of the present than it may appear (May, 2005). By positing a reality that is fundamentally brimming with virtual possibilities of actualization we add an ontological dimension to Freirian ‘hope’ (Freire and Freire, 2004) that exceeds the individual or collective will of people. Becoming is a process that applies to human and non-human components of reality and it is necessarily uncertain and indeterminate. These ontological coordinates imply (posthuman) hope insofar as the unfolding actualized present is comprised of unknown virtual possibilities that await particular relations, arrangements, or forces, in order to become actualized, or unfold differently. In addition to understanding present reality as immanently emergent and processual, DG’s ontological coordinates foreground the relational character of reality (objects as much as concepts). That is, for DG relations are external and ontologically prior to their terms, ‘thereby invalidating the whole dualistic split expressed in the logical copula “is.” Instead, it is the conjunction “and” itself an in-between relation that is ontologically basic’ (Semetsky, 2017: 426). This relational ontology foregrounds the dynamic sets of relations that presuppose and compose entities of various kinds: that is, a given entity may be understood as an assemblage11 (DeLanda, 2006; DG, 1987). This complexity is not a gateway to postmodern relativism. For DG, the present is actualized in the context of power and specific competing forces. Bodies of all kinds – biological, geologic, chemical, institutional, political, social, etc. – do not emerge arbitrarily, but as the product of forces entering into relations

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together. For them – with Nietzsche – a body is defined by a ‘relation between dominant and dominated forces [and] [e]very relationship of force constitutes a body’ (Deleuze, 2006: 39). It is this relational and dynamic assembly – through unequal forces – that characterizes the actualization of the present.12 Thus, the un/re/ folding of the world is understood to be fundamentally power-inscribed and contingent (Grossberg, 2010) without recourse to totalizing or atomizing reductionism (DeLanda, 2006). This resonates with critical pedagogy’s insistence upon the contextual nature of education and the importance of an analysis of power that rejects both essentialism and deterministic notions of either base or superstructure (see Giroux, 1983b; Kincheloe, 2008b; McLaren, 1987). DG invite us to explore a human-non-human world of process, relations, and dis/connections, that exceeds our usual perception. One consequence that opens up by indexing the relational present with duration and understanding bodies of all kinds to be the product of unequal forces, is that it pushes us to trouble the ways we perceive and experience particular modes of subjective time (t). Here we can make a distinction between ‘ontological time’ (T) – which can be thought of as encompassing all time – and ‘subjective time’ (t) which refers to specific experience and perceptions of time that individual humans encounter as the present is actualized. Although our experiences of time are themselves constructed in connection with particular codes (genetic, linguistic), habits, and relations of force, we often take for granted (or ‘naturalize’) our sense of time and assume it to be universal (ontological; large ‘T’) Time, rather than a specific expression through experience of subjective (small ‘t’) time (even as t is a dimension of T). As Konik argues, our taken-for-granted sense of time (t) amounts to ‘the failure to perceive time as something political’ (2015: 113) as well as historical.13 DG encourage us to trace behaviours, habits, language, and social and material arrangements through time and in

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their complexity. This multidimensional analytical field can be put to work to help make conspicuous particular kinds of (majoritarian14) time – for instance neoliberal time or developmental time – that have dominated our perception, bent us toward rigid beliefs regarding continual progress and advancement, hold and move our bodies along particular paths, and shape the logic and practices within our educational institutions. DG (1994) fabricate concepts as a means to sense and remake ourselves/our worlds. For them philosophy is not a route to answer a question about what exists ‘out there’ but is a means to disturb our taken-for-granted concepts, categories, and habits of mind and body. Their ontological coordinates underscore the unknowable possibilities at each turn, to be discovered in the practice of new images of thought, relations, and actions. This ontological thrust pushes further critical pedagogy’s language of critique and possibility as we explore how to articulate our bodies (individual, politic) to test out the unknown virtual ‘potential’ that awaits the right conditions to manifest. As Read suggests, we can become revolutionary as we: grasp this potential underlying the present, the virtual underlying the actual. The virtual is always already present in every labour, in every action. Politics is no longer a struggle over this world, even of its contradictions, but a production of new worlds. Another world is always possible. (Read, 2010: 100)

This dovetails with critical pedagogy’s insistence that the unfolding of history implies change, and that liberation from oppressive forces can not only be a goal but must be a part of a process of ushering in ‘a radically different world’ (McLaren, 2002: 186).

CONCEPTS OF DIFFERENCE AND STRATEGIC ADVERSARIES If what humans can perceive – human consciousness – is only a subtracted portion of the

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ontological vibrancy in which we emerge (Massumi, 2002), then to push the limits of our perception, consciousness,15 and avenues of engagement with the world, requires new concepts. DG defined philosophy as ‘the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts’ (1994: 2). Their concepts and theorizations can be thought of as a tool box16 filled with ‘device[s] you can fight with’ where theory does not totalize but rather, if it works, multiplies and is ‘by nature opposed to power’ (Deleuze, 2004: 208). Fabricating concepts and developing theory are not trivial matters of creating a fiction or merely developing abstractions. Rather, they constitute theoretical and practical dimensions of political work: of praxis.17 For new concepts to ‘work’ they ‘must relate to our problems, to our history, and, above all, to our becomings’ (DG, 1994: 27). DG fabricate an array of concepts of difference that can be put to work within critical pedagogies’ political and pragmatic horizons of inquiry and action. In the process they can help us to sense and act in our world as part of a process of creating a new one.18 DG’s work is too often taken up in the educational field without recognition of their concern with the operations of power. As a result their work can be rendered blunt – or not ‘dangerous enough’ (Wallin, 2012: 148). We can contribute to an evolving critical pedagogy by wielding the concepts that DG forged in light of several powerful ‘strategic adversaries’ that they targeted and sought to overcome or become otherwise to. These adversaries include: fascism, mutating Capitalism, and dogmatic images of thought, that penetrate our being, hinder our perceptions, and constrain the enactment of new lines of becoming.

Assembling Desire Against Fascism DG fashion and use concepts – of desire, machines,19 desiring-machines, or ­assemblages – as new (analytical, pragmatic) devices to ‘bring the fight’ to their ‘strategic’ adversaries. Foucault (1977) suggested that

‘the major enemy, the strategic adversary’ of DG’s first volume of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia series was fascism: And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini – which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively – but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us. (Foucault, 1977: xiii)

Referring to the German masses that followed Hitler, DG insist that ‘the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for’ (1972/1977: 38, italics in original). Whereas Freirian-inspired critical pedagogy looks to critical consciousness to counter and transform dangerous ideologies, false beliefs, misplaced commitments, and relations of oppressions of all kinds, DG suggest that recourse to the conscious minds (or higher consciousness) of people alone, is an approach doomed to fail,20 if it is not augmented by an account of the movements and marshalling of desire (Buchanan, 2014). Desire is a slippery concept that exceeds the individual and leaks into and beyond what we might normally think of as human desires – usually conceived as a human drive to attain pleasure or overcome a lack of some kind. DG instead conceptualize desire as a positivity, desires as animating forces that create connections and bodies of various kinds (biological, human, institutional, political, social), as they traverse mental and material21 dimensions of reality. ‘[D]esire is present wherever something flows and runs, carrying along with it interested subjects – but also drunken or slumbering subjects’ (DG, 1972/1977:105). For DG, ideology does not mobilize desire as much as desire mobilizes power blocs. For them the expressions of ideology, motivation, and actions are functions of desire which is itself a ‘process of production’ (DG, 1987: 154).

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DG posit desire as a device by which we might fathom and disrupt the organization of power22 and the personal psychological and mass conditions that fascism depends upon in order to flourish. For them, desire flows, disrupts, delays, and infuses the psychic and material infrastructure and ‘thereby organizes power … organizes the system of repression’ (Deleuze, 2004: 264). DG describe this ‘desiring-production’ (1972/1977: 9) as intimately related to social production: ‘There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiringmachines that inhabit them on a small scale’ (DG, 1972/1977: 340). Exploring connections of how power is organized at personal and mass scales to induce human suffering, Buchanan points to the continual consumption of petrochemical products as an example of directed desires that work against our interests; as ‘we contribute to the reproduction of a global situation that literally and figuratively locks us all into a situation of actual servitude’ (2014: 11); a servitude that takes on ecological as well as military dimensions. To understand these dynamics, we can wield DG’s concept of desire to help us recognize existing, and articulate new kinds of, connections as part of an evolving critical pedagogy that is ‘especially concerned with the complex relationship connecting individuals, groups, and power’ (Kincheloe, 2012: 178), and look out out for how it is we enter into relations for our own servitude. An important inroad for critical pedagogues to combat what Foucault described as ‘the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior’ (1977: xiii) is to use DG’s concepts to explore the ‘affective dynamics at work in the production of selfhood’ (Kincheloe, 2012: 171). DG’s initial theorization of desire has multiplied as the links among mass and psychological dynamics have developed through what is sometimes referred to as the ‘affective turn’ (Clough, 2008: 1). Affect has been conceptualized ‘as pre-individual bodily forces

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augmenting or diminishing a body’s capacity to act’ (Clough, 2008: 1; Massumi, 1987a) and the affective turn includes efforts to ‘critically engage those technologies that are making it possible to grasp and to manipulate the imperceptible dynamism of affect’ (Clough, 2008: 1–2). The concept of affect provokes us to consider, among other things, the role of ‘human passions’ as a determining force in politics (Crociani-Windland and Hoggett, 2012). In this context, human feelings can be understood to encompass affect and emotion. Affect includes the more somatic component of feelings at the level of experience, and works to shut down or enhance a body’s capacity to act. Emotion here is shorthand for the cognitive component of feelings as they undergo qualification and are expressed at a more discursive level (Crociani-Windland and Hoggett, 2012). As desire flows ‘within a biological, social, and historical field where we are equally immersed or with which we communicate’ (DG, 1972/1977: 293), we can use the concept of affect to probe desire’s flow within the field of education (Kenway and Youdell, 2011) and as a key dimension of the production of our existential territories (Guattari, 1989/2008). Along these lines, DG provoke us to conceive of, feel, and follow the forces that produce our own ‘taste for a job well done, each one in [our] own place’ (1972/1977: 347). As educators or students, from where do these tastes arise? What are they expressive of? To where do they carry us? Questions of desire, flow, and intensity can be used to marvel at arrangements we encounter in our everyday lives. My desire to pose a question in a classroom; feelings about grading my students; the relief of prostrating on a yoga mat or submitting to instructions, the way my body might heat up when a student ‘disrupts’ ‘my’ classroom. We must follow these flows of affect to discover the desiring-machines they are composed with – the microfascisms they might imply – and how we articulate our bodies with these machines, or as parts of these machines, and perhaps get carried away by them, or carry away others.

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These aren’t frivolous inquiries. Everywhere we are linked to, and coordinated with, the violent forces of repression, oppression, and ecological destruction (Guattari, 1989/2008) and we can look to our own dynamic subjectivity, forces beyond consciousness – the affective winds that blow through us – for clues as to how this plays out. The rise of neofascism in Western democracies and new forms of captivating politicotainment, no less than violent extremism of various kinds, can scarcely be confronted without appreciating the affective forces that produce them. Dangerous beliefs (e.g. white or religious supremacy) must be challenged not only at the level of rationale or content of propositional statements, but also in terms of the intensity of feeling with which beliefs are held, expressed, or resisted (DeLanda, 2006): the affective dimension that animates our bodies and body politic. As DG deploy their concept of desire to transgress analytical distinctions between psychological repression and social oppression they provide new openings to consider how our own capacities (individually, collectively) to be affected – and importantly to affect other (individual or social) bodies – play out and might yet play out (Hardt, 2015). Since we are both subject to, and participants in, the operation of power – as expressed in the personal repressions, social oppressions, and ecological disruptions that we face – intervention anywhere is potentially connected to movements and blockages at more or less distant proximities. The affective dimensions of our praxis are always already physical and mental, individual and collective: they are always at hand.

Updated Critique of Capitalism and the Affective Plane DG marshal their concepts of desire, desiringmachines, or assemblages, to put forward an updated critique of mutating Capitalism: arguably another ‘strategic adversary’ of

their collective work (DG, 1972/1977, 1987, 1994): Except in ideology, there has never been a humane … capitalism. Capitalism is defined by a cruelty having no parallel in the primitive system of cruelty, and by a terror having no parallel in the despotic regime of terror. (DG, 1972/1977: 373)

DG describe how Capitalism thrives by dint of its forever expanding interior limits, as it reduces qualitative differences between things (people, tastes, objects) into quanta for market exchange. Undoing the Capitalist machine(s) is no simple matter. With Marx they acknowledge that capitalists extract profit from labour at the expense of workers, and they recognize that this plays out within Integrated World Capitalism – particularly at the expense of the global south at the periphery – however, they insist that this aspect of Capitalism does not explain its endurance. To do that, we must confront the desire that conditions profit extraction and pre-conscious class interest. Along these lines DG insist that the libidinal potency of social arrangements is apparent everywhere23 and that ultimately there is ‘no distinction in nature between political economy and libidinal economy’ (DG, 1972/1977: 381). Therefore, the tiny libidinal investments in the capitalist system that accrue must be accounted for: even ‘a small-time capitalist, with no great profits or hopes, fully maintains the entirety of his libidinal investments: the libido investing the great flow [of capital]’ (DG, 1972/1977: 347). As part of their critique, DG build upon and sometimes ‘play with’ Marx24 as they use their concept of desire to foreground affective dimensions of how Capitalism functions and mutates. For example, DG modify Marx’s theory of surplus value as they describe how surplus labour can be increasingly produced in the absence of traditional human labour through (passive) acts of consumption: ‘[I]t is as though human alienation through surplus labor were replaced by a generalized “machinic enslavement”, such that one may furnish surplus-value without doing any work (children, the retired, the unemployed, television viewers, etc.)’ (DG,

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1987: 492). This takes place as the result of ‘a complex qualitative process’ that brings into play new modes of communication, production (technological, semiotic), industries of entertainment, and the capture, or directing, of human attention, to produce particular ‘ways of perceiving and feeling’ (ibid.: 492). DG’s concerns were prescient given the subsequent emergence of new technologies, social media, and a largely privately owned World Wide Web.25 DG’s concepts can help us contend with electronic, sensory, and algorithmic architectures that compete to capture and direct our attention, feelings (affects, emotions), and habits of mind and body. At stake is the degree to which our orientations and subjectivities are transformed into quasi products to be exchanged or capital to be accrued. The expanding interior limits of mutating Capitalism emerges at a nexus of ongoing relations that involve material and nonmaterial resources, create financial debt, direct human attention, and produce a strange kind of atomized-mass ‘enslavement’. The proximity of human faces to smartphones is but one expression of this complex affective process and passive production of surplus labour. As surplus labour takes on new forms of consumption, labour itself is undergoing constant transformations that suggest a need to develop new solidarities in addition to traditional labour organizing.26 Multiplying DG’s theoretical interventions, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (2009, 2011) has used DG’s ideas to better understand contemporary forms of labour and work in the functioning of mutating capital. Berardi (2009) contends that the nature of work has increasingly captured the language, desire, and creativity of workers in the process of adding value to capital in Western capitalist countries. In the process, the reach of capital has penetrated and stratified not only classes of people, but the most intimate aspects of our subjectivity. Berardi (2009, 2011) uses the term ‘semiocapitalism’ to refer to new capacities of Capitalism to capture human creativity and components of identity into emerging forms of capitalist production. Semiocapital implies a production of ‘psychic stimulation’

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more than material goods: ‘[t]he mental environment is saturated by signs that create a sort of continuous excitation, a permanent electrocution’ (Berardi, 2011: 73), which shapes and deterritorializes the individual and collective mind. As our capacities for creativity, meaning, and expression become captured in the psychic imaginary and material arrangements of a competitive marketplace, notions of self become inseparable from branding and ongoing and never-ending modulations of (professional or ‘consumer’) development in order to realize our potential as a (marketized) human. If the ‘extraction of surplus value … include[s] the capture of affects, desires, and emotional energies’ (Carlin, 2017: 404), and the production of capital is increasingly related to the production of ‘psychic stimulation’ and formation of (inadequate) worker identities, then we are badly in need of new concepts to grasp and fight the affective dimensions of contemporary workings and the power of Capitalism. DG’s concepts of desire and affect provide new tools to work against contemporary capitalist arrangements and mutations. They can help us to explore how our capture as consumers or workers by capital is not a process that occurs just ‘out there’ in the boardrooms of ‘capitalists’, but is also an intimate process that depends upon our own mind/body’s receptivity to be affected by and become an extension of capital. DG underscore the importance of renewed critique and concept creation to capture and break through the ways capital adjusts, transforms, ‘employs’, and ensnares us as labourconsumers. For them, politics is emergent, contingent, relational, and turns on questions of desire and affect that traverse inherited dualisms of thought.27 If politics turns on questions of desire and affect, then DG’s updated critique of Capitalism can provoke new kinds of ‘political thinking in order to confront the unforeseeable of new knowledge, new techniques and new political facts’ (Pellejero, 2010: 102). In the age of big data, AI, and use of algorithmic techniques to gauge, anticipate, create, amplify, and direct

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human desires, we are confronted with rapidly mutating, new, frightful, and sometimes bizarre (Bridle, 2017) manifestations of capital’s enthralling techniques and our libidinal ensnarement. In this context, DG invite us to tune in to how our ‘interests’ are carried away by, or follow, desire (Buchanan, 2014) and explore our affective articulation with emergent technologies and (as) products of Capitalism.28 DG’s work might yet be marshalled in a becoming critical pedagogy to provoke a new ‘revolutionary subjectivity’ that can grasp ‘that point of rupture where, precisely, political economy and libidinal economy are one and the same’ (Deleuze, 2004: 199, italics in original). These deleuzeguattarian conceptual tools might prove indispensable to critical pedagogies establishing new grounds from which to produce subjectivities, and forge collective relations, outside of capital’s logic and movements.

Dogmatic Image of Thought: From Enlightenment Subject to Posthuman An evolving criticality is concerned with the operation of power and the ways it works to produce the social order and human subjectivity (Kincheloe, 2012). DG’s relational ontology, and their concepts of difference – such as assemblage (see endnote 11) or their machinic concept of desire – foreground how entities of various kinds are presupposed, and composed, by heterogenous relations (material, linguistic, affective, etc.) that are ‘on the move’. This necessarily troubles a ‘dogmatic image of thought’ wherein what we think of serves as a representation of essentially stable and bounded identities ‘out there’. It is this ‘dogmatic image of thought’ that makes possible the Enlightenment conception of a bounded unitary human subject that might count as a third strategic adversary of DG’s work. This stable and ‘universal’ Enlightenment subject undergirds much of traditional political thought and continues to lurk amidst Freirian-inspired critical pedagogies.

DG add a variety of components – biological, non-human, technological, mental, ecological – to an understanding of how human subjects (bodies as much as subjectivities) are produced (Guattari, 1989/2008). The relational – or what Braidotti (2013b) and others refer to as posthuman – subject that DG put forward invites an exploration of how our (individual/collective) capacities are maintained, restricted, or catalysed by any number of relations that we enter into, create, or break free from. The impact of these changing relations are often apparent in moments of personal crisis or transformation – falling in love, death of a loved one, learning to ride a bike, sustaining an injury, giving birth, ingesting psychedelics, etc. Our emergent subjectivity (existential territory) is in a constant state of flux – (de)composition or (de)territorialisation – that depends upon various material and nonmaterial relations that are disrupted, sustained, or created over time. By considering the assemblage of powerinscribed relations that produce our bodies, delimit the exercise of their capacities, and produce a sense of self which interacts with processes of our becoming, DG augment our notions of the human subject and provide critical tools to develop ‘a socio-individual imagination’ that reconstitutes ‘the individual outside the boundaries of abstract individualism’ (Kincheloe, 2012: 177). Their reworking of our sense of the human subject – as a dynamic product of relations and forces – is an important move to make in order to better apprehend how particular subjectivities are produced, and to set the stage to choregraph political composition within complex and rapid technological, media, social, ecological, economic, and political changes that are underway in the 21st century. Within the humanist tradition, Freire grasped the dynamic nature of ‘being’ as an engaged human subject as one of ‘becoming’ ‘in order for us as human beings to be, we need to become…. We are precisely because we are becoming’ (2016:16). Personal and

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ongoing change was a necessary characteristic of Freirian political engagement and pedagogy. DG extend notions of becoming as they provide a language to describe the movements, flows, disruptions, that propel this process and which necessarily exceed a traditional image of the individual human subject. This process of becoming plays out across their Spinozist ontological plane and thus pushes us to return the image of human to a non-transcendent location within reality’s unfolding. Rather than acting upon the world to transform it (Freire, 1970/2005), we are ontologically and already a part of an actively becoming world. This flattening of the ontological plane is an important move in the context of considering human and nonhuman elements of a given state of affairs, and reconsidering individual, and populations of, humans within, and as a part of, ecological and technological dynamics. DG bump the record of humanism that plays in the background of much of Freirian-inspired critical pedagogy. In the disorientation that may arise, new refrains and possibilities are born. DG’s posthuman (as opposed to an Enlightenment or postmodern/partial) subject emerges as a veritable ‘terminal’ of forces – or ‘vectors of subjectification’ as Guattari calls them (1989/2008) – which isn’t a space of compromise as much as a territory of paradox or if necessary, conflict. A posthuman subject is not necessarily passive or constituted by arbitrary forces. Nor does it have the unlimited capacity of a bounded rational Cartesian subject to act decisively to effect change. It’s always in between and on the move. We can experiment with how our (individual/collective) capacities change, or are expressed differently, as we alter (diminish, enhance) some relations, end others, or forge new ones (Hardt, 2015). This is a territory of ongoing exploration and experimentation to discover the possibilities to be affected and to affect other bodies, which is to say, to discover our capacity (individual, collective, earthly) to become otherwise (Grosz, 2005; Semetsky, 2013). DG are always on

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the search to learn from radical breaks from power (e.g. the ungovernability of madness) but only as a starting point from which to forge new connections that make new passions and actions possible, and as part of a militancy with a potentially collective character (Seem, 1977). Embracing a posthuman subject is not the same as being anti-human (Braidotti, 2013b). Rather, it is a move to de-centre the human subject that is sanctioned by tradition but which has proved inadequate and dangerous in the context of how humans relate to ‘others’, difference, themselves, the planet (Braidotti, 2016). This shift in perspective is necessary to enhance our capacities to conceive of and respond to unprecedented ecological transformation induced by humans.29 These upheavals are undergirded by the image of (transcendent, bounded) humans as separate from nature which is understood to be passive and of value as a function of its use by humans. By recasting the human subject, we can develop further the long-overdue (Kahn, 2010; McLaren and Houston, 2004) ecological dimension of critical pedagogy.30 A posthuman subject pushes us to reconsider emergent human bodies, groups, and subjectivities, amidst, and as part of, rapid ecological and technological changes that shape how we and other species emerge, interact, flee, and disappear in the Anthropocene.31 DG’s immanent ontological plane is a corrective to western siloed thought as it undermines Descartes’s Cogito (‘I think therefore I am’) and confers equal ontological status to human and non-human components of life’s expression. The categorical distinctions between human life (anthropos) and the life of other living beings (bios) are radically traversed as the posthuman becomes embodied while being simultaneously structured ‘as a composite assemblage of human, non-organic, machinic and other elements’ (Braidotti, 2013a, 2016: 19). DG’s relational and immanent conceptualizing of the subject affirms the interconnectedness of humans and prods us to

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discover new territories of analytical and political exploration and insight that flow beyond a stable or strictly bounded individual human subject (Banerji and Paranjape, 2016; Braidotti, 2016). Unencumbered (or less encumbered)32 by the dogmatic image of thought – where what we think of represents a universe of stable entities, including the bounded human subject – we can more freely experiment (analytically, affectively, practically) in ways that were previously unthinkable. We may also find ourselves, consequently, less constrained by the modes of political composition that image implied. In this context, becoming critical pedagogies may develop to correct the anthropocentrism (and andropocentrism) that is implicated in deleterious ecological and social disruptions of the 20th and 21st centuries (Braidotti, 2013b; DG, 1987; Guattari, 1989/2008).

BECOMING CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES Posthuman Implications for Critical Consciousness Bringing to bear affective, biological, technological, ecological, social, and political relations into our conceptualization of a human subject requires of us to ‘think again and to think harder about the status of human subjectivity’ (Braidotti, 2016: 13). We need not abandon ‘critical pedagogy’s celebration of self-realization’ (Kincheloe, 2012: 177), but rather hold this celebration ‘lightly’ and with curiosity. A relational human subject multiplies our sense of the dimensions and forces that contribute to, or catalyse, our development as critically conscious human subjects and collectivities. It pushes us to expand notions of critical consciousness since the mind ‘is not limited to the selfconscious Cogito, but is also excessive and includes the unconscious, affective, dimension’ (Semetsky, 2009: 450). As we explore the affective dimension at work and

expressed by our capacities to think and act it becomes clear that understanding is not enough: experimentation is called for. Critical consciousness becomes less a stable state at which we arrive and see the world ‘as it really is’, and more an affective mode of being/ becoming that tests out the openings and escape routes as we create new grounds from which to become outside of the imperatives of our strategic enemies. In the process we contribute to a critical pedagogy that seeks to create ‘new forms of self-realization and social collaboration’ (Kincheloe, 2012: 177). Both personal and social transformation involves intensive affective experiences that imply specific forms of learning and self and social realization. Attending to the affective intensities of our changing capacities – and the types of learning they comprise – is a critical area of development within becoming critical pedagogies. Without recognition of these dimensions of critical learning and transformation, educators will remain mystified by the fact that student transformations tend to occur outside of school walls. Similarly, we will be baffled by the emergence of leaders who ride affective forces into office as we ignore the affective impact of their words and actions. By taking seriously the intensity and directionality of affective components of our educational and political compositions, we can discover new ways to conceive of critical consciousness and political action. MacDonald (2017) explores a systems approach to consider Freirian learning circles where critical consciousness is conceptualized as a threshold that is crossed as an emergent property of particular collective arrangements of humans in affective dialogical communication. This posthuman, systems approach recasts critical consciousness as ‘the practice of bringing immanent epistemologies into awareness’ (MacDonald, 2017: 213). These are promising and important directions for further inquiry and theorization as we experiment toward configurations that produce posthuman affective critical consciousness to transform the world.

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Control Society and the Standardization of Desire If the three ages of the concept are the encyclopedia, pedagogy, and commercial professional training, only the second can safeguard us from falling from the heights of the first into the disaster of the third. (DG, 1994:12)

During his lifetime, Deleuze (1995) perceived that the closed disciplinary physical spaces of schools, factories, or prisons, were in the midst of a frightful transformation: from a disciplinary society to a control society: ‘One can envisage education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated from the workspace as another closed site, but both disappearing’ (Deleuze, 1995: 175). In a control society, physical territories of discipline give way to new forms of modular control:33 ‘frightful continual training … continual monitoring of worker-schoolkids or bureaucrat-students’ (ibid.: 175). Packaged as school reform, control-based systems leave no one ‘alone for long’ and signify the dismantling rather than the reform of the school system (Deleuze, 1995). Elements of this shift over the past several decades include the shaping of ‘learning’ as a means to adapt to fluctuating market demand for financialized skills and/or knowledge. Transformations toward a control society take the form of ‘continuous assessment, … “business” being brought into education at every level’ (Deleuze, 1995: 182). In a control society we are produced as subjects in interminable debt (figuratively and literally), where ‘life-long learning’ becomes the never completed but urgent means by which students/teachers attempt to secure human capital enhancement. These trends might be expressed in the prioritization of our grades, CVs, or social media posts (branding), and at the expense of cultivating our own curiosity, citizen-subjectivities or political capacities. The analysis of ongoing modular control represents an important area of study for critical pedagogues committed to enhancing the capacity of public educational spaces to

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foster democratic citizen-subjects. The deterritorialization of such spaces undermines our capacity to produce citizen (compared to consumer) subjectivities and thus, undercuts our capacities to elude capture by capital. We are just beginning to come to terms with radical shifts toward a control society taking place within and beyond traditional educational institutions. Indicators of these shifts include massive open online courses, endless professional development or credentialing and constantly adjusted performance metrics that reflect ‘a brave new world of continuous education and motivation’ (Savat and Thompson, 2015: 273). The rise of the audit culture within the academy as much as public schools is another aspect of these frightful developments of control within education (Allan, 2007a; Savat and Thompson, 2015; Webb, 2012). Schools, like other social institutions, presume an image of ‘how life ought to go’ (Wallin, 2014: 136) and in the process are part of assemblages that make certain organizational, student, teacher, group, ‘formations “thinkable” in education’ (ibid.: 136). In the current moment of standardization and incessant assessment coupled with expectations of a never-ending process of learning and adjustment in response to the demands of market needs in a competitive economic landscape, we can see how standardized education presupposes a certain homogenization of desire (Wallin, 2014). It is here that critical pedagogies seeking to grapple with the force and complexity of these changes must remain alert to the kinds of subjects (students, teachers, administrators) that we are preparing within the current plateau of capitalism.34 Are we inadvertently preparing subjects amenable and endlessly adaptable to the exigencies of capital? Is the very meaning and feeling of a ‘job well done’ the result of interests that were carried away by the desiring-machines of capital against our own class or ecological interests? DG’s concepts can help us fight multiple adversaries as we consider desire, (neo)fascism, capital, dogmatic images of thought,

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subject formation, and educational institutions in the 21st century. Becoming critical pedagogies must forge new connections and experiment to discover the conditions that allow and affirm teachers and students becoming outside of market logics, as individual subjects, networks, swarms, as part of a-people-yet-to-come (Carlin and Wallin, 2014; DG, 1987).

WHAT IS IT THAT A BODY IS CAPABLE OF? As many of us teachers might have had occasion to experience, planned (critical) learning in a classroom of a standardized education system is just one fart away from relative chaos or illumination as the case may be. It won’t do to reduce things to a complexity in the fuel of an oversimplified binary stand-off between neoliberalism/financialization and its opposite (transformative resistance). The kind of critical pedagogy that DG provoke is necessarily one that becomes attuned with affective realities and undermines selfconfident pronouncements and prescriptions. It invites us to take up our usual perceptions with a sense of suspicion and possibility as we augment the revolutionary education envisioned by Freire, by fashioning and sharpening new tools with which we might fight: read, feel, affect, and be affected through, the word and world. Walking into a classroom, we can immediately pick up on the atmosphere. We can fine-tune our awareness for the affective winds and expressions that sweep and threaten to sweep through a student/teacher(’s) learning body and participate in bodymind learning (Semetsky, 2013). Deleuzeguattarian complexity demands that I probe and experiment with my usual thoughts, feelings, and actions to discover the ways that I articulate with flows of desire that enhance or shut down my, and my students’, capacities to become and to flourish within a posthuman ethics. We can conceive

of our pedagogy and schools less as solutions to problems and more as contingent and specific embodiments of the problematic field that is the education assemblage (Handelsman, forthcoming). Within it we can create and test out what it is that a (student, teacher, school, planet) body is capable of. Not through control, but through an enhanced capacity to be affected and affect: through strategy perhaps, but within a larger process of experimentation. The collective enactment of a 21st-­century politics against neofascism and mutating Capitalism, is an existential necessity (Kincheloe et al., 2017), even as the politics of division gains traction and one of solidarity appears increasingly fraught. ‘The left’ appears profoundly divided in the face of powerful white-supremacist, colonialist, and capitalist forces, and seems vulnerable to division as an identitarian politics threatens to police ‘others’ where relations of solidarity might otherwise be forged.35 How can we enact politics without producing a demeaned ‘other’ that we must obliterate? In what ways is our politics susceptible to, or complicit with, contemporary forms of (neo)fascism? How shall we pursue justice without proceeding in a manner that recuperates difference into the same (Lather, 1998)? These challenges can be understood as practical in nature as much as they might be philosophical. How might we cultivate thought and subjectivities that forge ever new connections with ‘others’ as part of a politics that ‘does not repose on identity… [but] rides difference?’ (Massumi, 1987b, p. xii). Can we exchange the weapons of shame with new tools of political assemblage without losing sight of our strategic adversaries? To meet the theoretical, material, strategic, and existential challenges that humans face in the first quarter of the 21st century, critical pedagogies need to grapple with difference and complexity (Kahn, 2010; Kincheloe, 2005, 2008b; Kincheloe and Berry, 2004), consider our status as emergent ecological beings, and cultivate the conditions and educational

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arrangements to produce ‘a-people-yetto-come’ (Carlin and Wallin, 2014). This requires that we treat inherited concepts and habits of thought and body with suspicion, and affirm the possibilities of producing our own subjectivities outside of Capitalist forces that reduce the living – and what a life might do – to interchangeable quanta for market exchange. Thinking with DG requires us to be on the move as we recast experience as an opportunity to discover/create and test out possibilities that are not yet actualized but whose virtual potentials are real, and whose becoming we might yet usher in. Numerous scholars have warned against considering the work of DG as a viable source of insight to guide political composition or struggle36 (Buchanan and Thoburn, 2008). And it is true that DG disorient and resist offering a new model to replace an old one. However, their work is less a failure to serve as a wellspring from which to compose political responses, and more an invitation to escape the dogmatic images of thought (bounded human subject, fixed intelligence, etc.) that animate educational arrangements and shape our habits of mind and body toward market capture and a homogenization of desire. Instead they invite the assembling of new grounds from which to create new forms of subjectivity, connection, and collaboration. An invitation to escape through creation provides no guarantees as to what might emerge but suggests a number of possible and simultaneous steps we might take: (1) exercise our imaginations and experiment with our bodies to conceive of and invite the virtual tendencies that await specific conditions to actualize; (2) shake up the ‘solid’ and taken-for-granted cognitive-sociopolitical individual that lurks behind our theories and actions into something more fluid, dynamic, and emergent;37 (3) reconsider material, as well as nonmaterial (semiotic/discursive and asemiotic, e.g. affective) forces that produce bodies and shape thinking and (critical) consciousness; (4) reconceptualize difference

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and desire as a positivity (not defined by lack) and explore how traditional and fixed notions (e.g.s. intelligence, individual) become multiplicities of possibility; (5) consider the composition of various bodies as the result of dominated and dominating forces and trace the map of forces that direct our desires against our interests; (6) experiment with the possibilities and capacities that are at hand for one (individual, collective, ecosystem) to become differently, and otherwise to the dominant image of how it is that a life will go. My purpose in introducing some of DG’s mobile concepts of difference is not to produce Deleuzian or Guattarian acolytes, but rather to experiment as we think with them, as a means to extend and provoke new analytical, sensory, practical, ethical, and political avenues of critical engagement. Deleuze and Guattari invite us to experiment with what it feels and looks like to become otherwise to the current plateau of capitalism, and to discover through practice what it is that one (a person, school, community, movement, species, planet) is capable of.

Notes 1  Giroux (1983c) initially coined the term critical pedagogy in his reading of Freire’s work with and against thinkers from the Frankfurt School (Giroux, 1983a) and within the context of schooling in America.  2  Neoliberalism proffers notions of meritocracy, hyper-individualism, and competition while prescribing the takeover of previously publicly owned institutions by private corporations. 3  I use the sign, DG, to highlight the central place of the collaborative works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and also to connote that these works are difficult to reduce to either author (i.e. > Deleuze + Guattari). As they described: ‘The two of us wrote… together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd’ (1987: 3). Biographical descriptions of Deleuze and Guattari are available (Beckman, 2017; Dosse, 2010; Genosko, 2009), including ones that reference their pedagogical practices (Savat and Thompson, 2015). I draw upon a selection of their collaborative and individual works, as

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well as a few of the many who have taken up, improvised, translated, and plugged these works into the field of education and elsewhere. I hope this provides an accessible, if idiosyncratic, introduction to a few of their concepts and possible implications for critical pedagogy.  4  Grant calls upon schools ‘to bring about flourishing lives for students’ (2012: 910) as part of a robust conception of social justice that goes well beyond equitable access or outcomes within a standardized educational system. Flourishing implies both risk and possibility even as what it might mean or look like depends upon the particular context, people, or ecosystem in which it arises. We can probe our own sense of what is for our own flourishing or withering as a heuristic to guide intuitive pedagogies of affirmation and what they may look or feel like. In the process we can discover the arrangements we wish to enact, or conversely flee from. As a teacher working within marginal school locations, it is clear that pedagogies for student and teacher flourishing are needed to escape failure-producing school machines (Handelsman, forthcoming).  5  Concepts produced or inspired by DG are ploughing the educational field and proliferating in educational theory (Masny, 2013; Morss, 2000; St. Pierre, 2004), curriculum studies (Gough, 2017), teacher education (Allan, 2004), treatments of specific schools’ subjects (Semetsky and Masny, 2013), classrooms (de Freitas, 2012), alternative school locations, programmes, and policy (Tuck, 2008; Youdell, 2011, 2015). They are also making mischief of educational research orthodoxies (Masny, 2015; Mazzei and McCoy, 2010; St. Pierre, 2011). These developments have led educators, and educational theorists to engage in novel ways with issues that remain under-­ investigated within critical pedagogy, including, issues of disability (Feely, 2016; Goodley, 2007) and ecological concerns (Greenhalgh-Spencer, 2014).  6  This chapter emerged as a response to the following lines of inquiry: If DG were key figures in critical pedagogy, how might this be so? What practical tools might we fashion as critical pedagogues by following pathways on the map of their invitational and often confounding bodies of work? 7  As Kincheloe described: ‘[o]n the landscape of complexity, I am lost … if I do not possess an epistemological and ontological map to help me understand the nature of the territory I am exploring’ (2005: 333). 8  Key concepts that emerge from Deleuzian reworkings of Spinoza, Bergson, and Nietzsche are those of difference, duration, and affirmation.

Discussions of each can be found in the works of Hardt (1995) and May (2005). The potential of these concepts to contribute to the work of critical pedagogues remains a critical field for further exploration and experimentation.  9  Affirmation shouldn’t be misunderstood here as one part of a polar opposition (Hardt, 1995), or somehow eliding the darker aspects of our world. DG’s philosophy of life does not shy away from any aspect of life’s experience, it ‘critically includes death, decay, extermination, hopelessness and madness’ (Cole, 2013 : 56) in its push to sense and apprehend the real.  10  DG (1987) use their notion of difference to avoid recuperating what is different into the same, or in their words, reducing anarchy and unity to the same. We are pushed to apprehend both simultaneously, and as part of a strange unity that encompasses singularity and multiplicity: ‘not the unity of the One, but a much stranger unity that applies only to the multiple’ (DG, 1987: 158).  11  Fashioned by DG, developed by others (DeLanda, 2006, 2016), and now being put to work within the field of critical education (Youdell, 2011), an assemblage helps us to think of the diverse elements (material, semiotic, asemiotic, affective, etc.) that enter into productive relations together to produce a given entity or state of affairs. Assemblages are not static wholes, but ‘passional’ emergent entities undergoing constant flux and subject to changes at various speeds depending upon the simultaneous ‘co-functioning’ of its ‘many heterogenous terms’ or components (DG, 1987: 399).   The concept of assemblage underscores the temporal instability of its own emergence: an assemblage exists for a time and is historically contingent (Grossberg, 2010). It is composed of heterogenous components ‘as a productive property of the interaction of open systems’ (Marcus and Saka, 2006: 103), that contribute to its historical (de)composition and mutation. Analyses of assemblages lend themselves to ‘delineating the becoming of new social and cultural formations’ (ibid.: 103) and as such can be understood as an important theoretical response to the limitations of structural analysis to account for change (Sewell, 1992) while remaining always concerned with questions of power (Buchanan, 2015; Fox and Alldred, 2018).  12  The formation of bodies can be understood as a power-inscribed event. Along these lines, Bignall describes DG’s view of existence as ‘order emerging from an immanent field of virtual difference that becomes organised through various events of actualisation’ (2008: 130).

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 13  Following Marx, history is viewed as contingent and not determined. It is not merely a linear set of events that necessarily culminate in progress or graduation from one kind of society to another, but instead is understood as discontinuous and ‘made up of ruptures and limits, breaks and transformations’ (Buchanan, 2008: 93). Questions of pro/regress always depend upon the specific normative criteria and vantage point from which we consider qualitative and quantitative differences among places and epochs that can be contradictory to, or paradoxical with, other ruptures.  14  DG’s works undermined ‘majoritarian’ power and domination of all kinds as they troubled any ‘constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure’ by which (minoritarian) others might be judged, defined, or otherwise limited (1987: 105). They use ‘the average adult-whiteheterosexual-European-male-speaking a standard language’ as an example of a majoritarian power that dominates as ‘he appears twice, once in the constant and again in the variable from which the constant is extracted’ (DG, 1987: 105).  15  DG’s pursuit of ‘nomad thought’ within a complex ontology led them to look to the margins of social formations to discover minoritarian becomings or nomadic movements that become otherwise to – and potentially liberated from – majoritarian and capitalist domination. This resonates with the development of bricolage within critical pedagogy as a means to transgress inherited siloed thinking, enact critical research, and pursue marginalized practices through the development of transgressive conceptual tools (Kincheloe, 2005; Kincheloe and Berry, 2004; Kincheloe et al., 2017; Semetsky, 2013).  16  ‘Yes, that’s what a theory is, exactly like a tool box … A theory has to be used, it has to work’ (Deleuze, 2004: 208).  17  As soon as a theory (that ‘works’) is developed it encounters ‘a wall, and a praxis is needed to break through’ (Deleuze, 2004: 206). Theory and praxis are dimensions of action: ‘There is only action, the action of theory, the action of praxis, in the relations of relays and networks’ (ibid.: 207).  18  How we describe and understand the world is always already philosophical, theoretical, and political. If it is the case that the world as we have come to know it, and ourselves included, are as much products of practice and theory, then it is the case that by putting different theories to work, we necessarily change the world (St. Pierre, 2011).  19  Machines are among DG’s mobile concepts that can be ‘situated at the level of the individual, the society, the state, the pre-individual, among groups and between people, and across these

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various realms’ (May, 2005: 122). This kind of ‘ontological mobility’ allows it to move outside the ‘dogmatic image of political thought’ of the state, institution, and ‘pre-given’ individual (ibid.: 124). Importantly, machines are not technical mechanisms that can be dismantled and reassembled and function the same way. To be machinic is to imply mutation, linking up with different machines, ongoing evolutions.  20  DG suggest that revolutionary formations will fail if they don’t account for desire and acquire ‘at least as much force as these coercive machines have for producing breaks and mobilizing flows’ (1972/1977: 293).  21  The materialism practised by DG refuses to subordinate ‘the corporeal to the mental world’ but importantly can be understood as ‘an exaltation of being with respect to both realms’ (Hardt, 1995: 114).  22  See Bignall (2008) for helpful discussion of the development of the concepts of desire and power for the purpose of forging an explicitly poststructuralist theory of agency.  23  Its expression takes form in ‘the way a bureaucrat fondles his[sic] records, a judge administers justice, a businessman[sic] causes money to circulate, the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat…. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused’ (DG, 1972/1977: 293).  24  While DG reject essentialist or deterministic strains of Marxism they retain a commitment to – an albeit reconceptualized – project of ­emancipation in light of the failures of Marxist state-­building in the 20th century (Jain, 2010).  25  A key threshold for experimentation is how to dis/ engage with or repurpose the current corporate infrastructure of communications development and ownership to harness the material and libidinal infrastructure of social media toward democratic and revolutionary ends.  26  The power of traditional labour to confront capital by disrupting or withholding labour from an alienating process of value production has generally diminished in the post WWII era in Western capitalist societies, in part due to the advent of technological interventions, that have affirmed the place of capital, but also due to the outsourcing of manual labour to the periphery as cognitive labour has increased in the centre (Berardi, 2009).  27  DG construct dualisms, such as the rhizome and the tree (1987), in order to push thinking to the limit. They view dualisms as ‘an entirely necessary enemy, the furniture we are forever rearranging’ (1987: 21) as they ‘invoke one dualism only in order to challenge another … to arrive at a process that challenges all models’ (ibid.: 20).

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 28  We might look to what our bodies feel and do as we articulate with: the thrill of a purchase, following (‘investing in’) millionaires who play professional sports or vie for political office, the taste for a job well done within the school-toprison pipeline, ‘surfing the net’, etc. As students or teachers we might also explore the affective forces that shape the frequency with which we exit the territory of our classroom through virtual portals of desire such as socially networked phones or computers.  29  Over the past 540 million years there have been five mass extinction events prior to humans currently ushering in a sixth (Ripple et  al., 2017). These planetary changes include unprecedented human-induced loss of life and life-supporting systems (IPBES, 2019).  30  Freire’s revolutionary pedagogy did take on an eco-humanist thrust in his final reflections, although he retained the humanist dualisms of human/animal and human/nature (Kahn, 2010).  31  The term Anthropocene denotes the current geological epoch that is characterized by the central role of the human species in changing the planet’s geological and ecological characteristics (Crutzen, 2002). 32  A pronoun still has its uses, perhaps as DG suggested, we can use ‘I’ in the same way that we say ‘the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 3).  33  Deleuze recognized the disciplinary nature of social formations that led schools and prisons to be different as a matter of degree rather than kind: ‘It’s not only prisoners who are treated like children, but children who are treated like prisoners’ (Deleuze, 2004: 209). Control society can be understood as emerging ‘alongside’ disciplinary formations amidst a process of the former displacing the latter.  34  These changes cannot be separated from broader economic changes toward an increasingly precarious labour force or the positioning of students (from kindergarten to post graduate) less as learners and increasingly as consumers that are simultaneously subject to the machinations of ongoing (human) capital development.  35  This shows up in the temperament of identarian politics with its focus upon ‘calling each other out’ or ‘in’.  36  Critiques are wide ranging (Garo, 2008) and include: (1) their work belongs to specific historical moment (post May 1968 France) that has since passed and whose relevance is questionable; (2) it doesn’t offer a clear perspective or alternative to psychoanalytic or Marxist f­ormations of ­intellectual engagement and political militancy even

as DG reject these as outmoded and impractical; (3) their work renders ‘inoperable any possibility of collective action’ in part due to their assertion that everything is political, and focusing on desire and flows at the heart of their analyses (Garo, 2008: 62). Gur-Ze’ev (2005) also rejects the work of DG in order to articulate a critical pedagogy that seeks to resuscitate the Enlightenment subject as a basis for protecting notions of justice and rationality in the process of human betterment (175–77).  37  The intensity with which we bump the humanist record of critical pedagogy with the posthumanist elbow of DG, will no doubt effect the risks, complications, and possibilities for thought and action that can emerge within the education assemblage and as we engage with and reterritorialize critical pedagogies anew.

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Kincheloe, J. L. (2005). On to the next level: Continuing the conceptualization of the bricolage. Qualitative Inquiry, 11(3), 323–350. Kincheloe, J. L. (2008a). An Introduction to IJCP. The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 1(1), 1–3. Retrieved January 21, 2020 from http://freireproject.org/wp-content/ journals/TIJCP/Vol1No1/44-34-1-PB.pdf Kincheloe, J. L. (2008b). Knowledge and critical pedagogy: An introduction (Vol. 1). Netherlands: Springer. Kincheloe, J. L. (2012). Critical pedagogy for the twenty-first century: Evolution for survival. In M. Nikolakaki (Ed.), Critical pedagogy in the new dark ages: Challenges and possibilities (Counterpoints: Studies in the postmodern theory of education series, Vol. 422) (pp. 147–183). New York: Peter Lang. Kincheloe, J. L., & Berry, K. S. (2004). Rigour and complexity in educational research: Conceptualizing the bricolage. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Kincheloe, J. L., McLaren, P., Steinberg, S. R., & Monzó, L. D. (2017). Critical pedagogy and qualitative research: Advancing the bricolage. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (5th ed., pp. 195–213). Sage. Konik, A. (2015). The politics of time: Deleuze, duration and alter-globalisation. South African Journal of Philosophy = Suid-Afrikaanse Tydskrif vir Wysbegeerte, 34(1), 107–127. Lather, P. (1998). Critical pedagogy and its complicities: A praxis of stuck places. Educational Theory, 48(4), 487–497. MacDonald, M. B. (2017). Sounding the sacred headwaters: Applied ecomusicology as a critical pedagogy of music. The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 8(1). Retrieved January 21, 2020 from http://libjournal. uncg.edu/ijcp/article/view/1043 Marcus, G. E., & Saka, E. (2006). Assemblage. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(2-3), 101–106. Masny, D. (2013). Cartographies of becoming in education: A Deleuze-Guattari perspective. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Masny, D. (2015). Problematizing qualitative educational research: Reading observations and interviews through rhizoanalysis and multiple literacies. Reconceptualizing

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21 Specters of Critical Pedagogy: Must We Die in Order to Survive? Antonio Garcia

NOTES FROM THE MARGINS We’re living in a period when, in order to endure its legitimacy, the Left has had to abandon the notion of revolution. So what’s left after the possibility of a radical transformation of society has been written off? What’s left, for the Left, are practices of resistance, practices of critique and of civil disobedience. In other words, it’s a strictly negative vocation…. [moreover] there’s a great dignity in criticizing things and that you’re kind of stupid if you actually propose something … If you propose something on the Left today … you get critiqued by everybody because they are great at critiquing things. (Michael Hardt, 2009: 135)

There is no great thought, opinion, or theory that has not at its initial reveal risked the vulnerability of dismissal, incredulity, and deep criticism. Freire said: Intellectuals who memorize everything, reading for hours on end, slaves to the text, fearful of taking a risk, speaking as if they were reciting from memory, fail to make any concrete connections with the world, the country, or the local community. They repeat what has been read with

precision but rarely teaching anything of personal value. (Freire, 2001: 34)

As an academic theorist and philosopher, I am always confronted with a ‘tradition’ where I am expected to follow certain disciplinary traditions, theses, and so forth (Cusset, 2008: 194; Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 13–14; Giroux, 1988: 146). There is a deep value placed on using the most radical and resistance oriented language and framing to appear as a champion for the oppressed, marginalized, and dispossessed of society. To consider a philosopher that would propose a viewpoint in opposition or in tension with anything outside of the domain of Marxism and critiquing neoliberalism runs the risk of being accused of heresy. Eagleton illuminates: ‘To be inside and outside a position at the same time – to occupy a territory while loitering skeptically on the boundary – is often where the most intensely creative ideas stem from’ (2003: 40). In the spirit of a true pedagogical practice, I personally proceed first and foremost with an evaluation of the

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evidentiary and conceptual material available, then endorse as a matter of summary conclusive judgment. However, there is no objectivity that is not in some degree limited by the need for subjective consideration, as Dostoevsky (2004) suggests in Notes from the Underground. And, by the same token, subjective evaluations – those that first prioritize the life world of the individual contra a universal master narrative (see Lyotard, 1984) – should acknowledge the limitation of such a foregrounding that dismisses or disavows the objective empirical reality at present. There is little to nothing I have found in the world that is totally banal in its effect, regardless of its moral position of good and evil. There is always-already a dialectical issue that we must place in our evaluations of trajectories, be they research, choosing friends and relationships, choosing a job, and so on. With all propositions of revolution and progress, I frame the dialectical consideration within the dimensions of (1) possibility and (2) consequence. That is, without absolute universal totality – as an actual empirical reality – that presupposes all individuals to be of equal nature across mind, body, and spirit/consciousness, the universal exception (Žižek, 2014) will always be in effect: when one group progresses in their own ideological auspices, then another group(s) bears a subsequent consequence (or reversal) to their own ideological position and desire. For example, the legalization of gay marriage in the United States was a progressive advancement for the LGBTQ community; however, it can be conceptualized as having the obverse enactment (i.e., the consequential) to those that are more conservative. Accordingly, I believe the judgment of progress and consequence is not conducted with an objective ambivalence but rather always-already from the position of a moral authority – a predicating ideological ontology – that is enacted at the conscious and unconscious level that elevates one to a feeling of superiority (or having special knowledge over another).

This is ideology par excellence (Althusser, 2008; Žižek, 1989). We often hear, for example, radical engagements legitimated by the assumption that one is on the ‘right side of history’. Castro infamously stated, ‘Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me’ (2008: 105). In general, critical pedagogues claim to not be dogmatists, yet there seems to be a prophetic emphasis in their words and actions. In critiquing Peter McLaren, for example, Ellison writes that ‘the problem with utopic visions is the ease with which they lend themselves to dogmatism and ideology’ (2009: 327). Perhaps this is rightly so, as Paulo Freire said: ‘A society in a permanent state of revolution cannot manage without a permanent prophetic vision’ (1985: xvii). That we attempt good works does not omit us from the culpability of moral superiority and authority. In Fugitive Days, Bill Ayers provides an example of this culpability when Diana’s father says, ‘When you say you’re not a better person than any other, beware lest that becomes its own superior stance, with you a new kind of crème de la crème [emerges]’ (2003: 95). Is the harsh realization that critical pedagogy may itself be ideologically blinded and proffering the very thing it seeks to eliminate? Was this not the thesis of Ellsworth’s article, ‘Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering? Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy’, in which she points out that critical pedagogy ‘strategies such as student empowerment and dialogue give the illusion of equality while in fact leaving the authoritarian nature of the teacher/student relationship intact’ (1992: 98). Žižek explains: Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves to support our ‘reality’ itself: an ‘illusion’ which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel … The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel. (Žižek, 1989: 45)

SPECTERS OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: MUST WE DIE IN ORDER TO SURVIVE?

At the end of Blindness, Saramago writes, ‘I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see’ (1997: 326). When I critique critical pedagogy and explore the practice of learning to die in order to survive, it should be in consideration, complicating, and critically reflecting on that which has run its course of relevance, utility (and power-as-influence), and risks falling into anachronistic despair. In contrast, I support the conceptual spirit of critical pedagogy as a pedagogy to come;1 that is, a pedagogy always-already relegated to the reality of the present, but not without the fantastical idealism (e.g., imaginarium) to move in fluid directions of tomorrow – a concept that can never truly be realized because when tomorrow comes it is no longer tomorrow, but today – that provokes anxiety in its invitation of the unknown-unknown (i.e., the beyond). Critical pedagogy should be a fluid embrace of the Becoming and the coming into.2

SPECTERS OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY He had a strange sense of being haunted, a feeling that shades of his imagination were stepping out into the real world, that destiny was acquiring the slow, fatal logic of a dream. ‘Now I know what a ghost is’, he thought. ‘Unfinished business, that’s what’. (Salman Rushdie, 2008: 554)

In the opening of The Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote, ‘A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies’ (1988: 54). Such an ominous and sinister tone conjures images of the ghost of Banquo in Macbeth (Shakespeare, 2009), the three spirits of Christmas past, present, and future in A Christmas Carol (Dickens, 1991), and the Dementors of Harry Potter and the Prisoner

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of Azkaban (Rowling, 1999). The specters we find in literature and folk tales tend to hold the position of tragic sage totems providing foreshadowing because they have been cursed, imprisoned, or held back from ascendance to the next plane of Being because of a life that was incomplete in some quasi-ontological way (Zamora 2005). Žižek explains: ‘From within the symbolic order, specters, apparitions, the “living dead”, and so on signal the unsettled (symbolic) accounts’ (2005: 193). The specters are caught in a mediating realm – the ‘sutured’ space, an ontological moat connecting and protecting the two realms – where the world of mortal flesh and symbolic registry, and the transcendental spiritual worlds meet. When Derrida (1994) spoke of specters of Marx, he spoke of specters in the plural. Who are the specters of critical pedagogy and what do we owe them, if anything? The discourses that have emerged under the tutelage of critical pedagogy are noble, but it is still riddled with legitimate critiques and deadlocks. Critical pedagogy emerged and created its own structures of discourse and institutional power; however, the educational system it sought to transform created its own institutional discourse in the guise of neoliberalism. What do we do with the ghosts of critical pedagogy in the face of ‘failure’? Critical pedagogy runs the risk of not moving on and letting the dead (ideas) lie in their own time; it risks anachronistic despair – right approach, but wrong time – as Postman (1979) suggests. Does not the thesis of Weekend at Bernie’s (Kotcheff, dir., 1989) give us pause to consider the possibility that we are making a ‘spectacle of the specter’; that is, even though we know it’s dead, we treat it like it’s still alive so that we benefit from its presence. In the midst of entertaining critical pedagogy, we have to wrestle with the specters that still haunt us, one(s) that loom(s) in our dreams of ‘utopian raptures’ rescuing us from a ‘civilization of discontents’ (Freud, 1989). History has shown us that the most of the

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benevolent inventions of Man have caused the most catastrophic events. Therefore, we must critically reflect on our ideological benevolence in which, as Žižek (1989) warns, ‘an excessive commitment to Good may in itself become the greatest Evil: real Evil is any kind of fanatical dogmatism, especially that exerted in the name of the supreme Good’ (1989: 27). And, as Nietzsche (1989) questioned, ‘How much blood and cruelty lie at the bottom of all “good things”?’ (ibid.: 62).

LEARNING TO FAIL AND THE LEAP OF FAITH What lies beyond involves a Leap of Faith, faith in lost Causes, Causes that, from within the space of skeptical wisdom, cannot but appear as crazy. And the present book speaks from within this Leap of Faith – but why? The problem, of course, is that in a time of crisis and ruptures, skeptical empirical wisdom itself, constrained to the horizon of the dominant form of common sense, cannot provide the answers, so one must risk a Leap of Faith. (Žižek, 2008: 2)

The constellation of today’s critical pedagogy represents a religio-ideological injunction; that is, it requires a leap of faith in the midst of failure. Before we can learn to die we must first learn to fail, as Beckett wrote, ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ (1996: 89). Therefore, critical pedagogy should be framed not necessarily as a failed pedagogical practice but a practice of failing in the Beckettian sense. Žižek explains: At its most radical, theory is a theory of failed practice … an examination of these failures confronts us with the problem of fidelity: how to redeem the emancipatory potential of these failures through avoiding the twin trap of nostalgic attachment to the past and all-too-slick accommodation to ‘new circumstances’. (Žižek, 2008: 3)

We can think about the story of Niels Bohr, the famous physicist, in which a visitor comes to his house and notices a horseshoe

hanging on the door. The visitor knows that Bohr is not superstitious and asks him why he has it. Bohr replies, ‘I’m not superstitious and I don’t believe in it, but I hear that even if you don’t believe in it, it still works’ (Žižek, 2006b: 330). Does this apply to our faith in part to Marxist theory but more specifically to critical pedagogy? Even though we might not know if it works, we believe in it nonetheless as a matter of faith? Why does critical pedagogy encounter such resistance in being implemented in the K12 public schools of the United States? Despite public schools being funded by the state, they are not neutral and objective but highly ideological (Althusser, 2008) and balkanized (Higgins and Abowitz, 2011) with the curriculum and overarching goals (Apple, 2004; Giroux, 1983; Kliebard, 2004; Pinar, 2004). The schools are ideological battlegrounds that have tended to cater more toward a ‘conservative’ and perennialist position. Rorty suggests that ‘our system of local school boards means that precollege teachers cannot, in the classroom, move very far from the local consensus’ (1989: 199). Schools that have an unapologetic and identified ideological position, especially religious schools, as Postman believes, have ‘no school crisis … [because] there is a transcendent, spiritual idea that gives purpose and clarity to learning’ (1995: 4). But owing to the larger picture of education (theory, philosophy, and pedagogy) and ‘progressive reform’, Ravitch charges, ‘radicals have long dismissed the schools as a tool of the capitalist economy which distracts attention from the need for fundamental change’ (1977: 4). Radical and resistance oriented discourses about education have, in Hofstadter’s view, ‘been left to us by men whose names command our respect [and] is to a remarkable degree a literature of acid criticism and bitter complaint’ (1966: 301). Despite such particular critiques, Freire encourages keeping the faith because ‘it is a fundamental error to state that education is simply an instrument for the production of the dominant ideology, as it is an error

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to consider it no more than an instrument for unmasking that ideology’ (2001: 87). A solution falls empty without a problem. When observing individuals with depression and extreme anxiety, one symptomatic feature that compounds and tortures the individual is the catastrophizing effect (Sullivan et  al., 2001). Žižek observes, ‘A favoured exercise of intellectuals throughout the twentieth century … was the urge to “catastrophize” the situation: whatever the actual situation, it had to be denounced as “catastrophic”, and the better it appeared, the more it solicited this exercise’ (Žižek and Daly, 2004: 48). We can apply Newton’s third law – for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction – in that a ‘true’ or ‘perceived’ act of aggression, threat, or catastrophe may derive as a resulting consequence a reaction proportionally related to its degree. In other words, the higher the degree of catastrophe, the higher the degree of response that posits that the responsive force must be in conjunction and equal to it in order to, in theory, be able to resist it. One problem with critical pedagogy and critical discourses is the presupposition that its discourse and conceptual solutions are the theoretical and pedagogical laxative through which the ‘constipated crisis’ (Garcia, 2014) can be overcome with critical consciousness as the resulting peristaltic rush. Adler (1939) wrote, ‘Crisis is a turning point. In pneumonia, it is the point at which the patient gets better or worse. But the recent crisis in education is different. Things can’t get worse. They can only get better’ (unpaginated). Hope has the fantastical power to keep us progressing – taking leaps of faith – even in the ‘nightmare that is the present’ (Pinar, 2004) that relegates us to ‘prisoners of hope in desperate times … [in which we] must try to speak our fallible truths, expose the vicious lies, and bear our imperfect witness’ (West, 1997: xii). But we must also consider that, possibly, ‘hope is a bad thing. It means you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain

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illusions. It’s a sort of spiritual clap’ (Miller, 1961: 3). What plagues us as Leftists, as critical pedagogy scholars, and as cosmopolitan citizens is that we have been sadly disappointed with a revolutionary dream constantly deferred; that our disappointment and clinging to the revolutionary spirit and specter of revolution is nothing more than a symptom of something not yet recognized, not yet wanting to be acknowledged (i.e., a disavowing fetish). At this point, ‘[r]evolution seems an unlikely scenario. The end really is nigh for revolutionary socialism’ (Mann, 2013: 92). Dean points out, ‘Capitalism is more revolutionary than the left has ever been’ (2009: 9). The logic of capital has a recursive reproductive quality where even ‘if someone found a way of overcoming capitalism, then some corporation would doubtlessly buy the copyright and the distribution rights’ (Critchley, 2008: 98). ‘Terms like “revolution”, or, more especially “crisis”’, about which Balibar draws concern, ‘have become trivialized in the extreme’ (1991: 156). In order to examine critical pedagogy for the tensions within and superseding Marxism, we need to proceed with caution and take to heart Balibar’s observation, ‘if Marxism is going somewhere, it can only be towards its own destruction’ (1991: 154). Since critical pedagogy is rooted in Marxism, does it stand to reason that it may also be marching toward its own destruction or irrelevance in education? Revolution for critical pedagogy is not impossible, but it must confront its hagiographic and dogmatic affinity for Marxist idealism that may be the real obstacle in Leftist education (e.g., Ravitch, 1977), not capitalism. Badiou approaches with a sensible consideration that ‘in itself, the economy is neither good nor bad; it is the place of no value. It simply runs more or less well’ (2001: 31). Capitalism is no more evil than it is good; it simply is. The originating point and truth most crucial to any system, capitalism or otherwise, created by mankind as such is that it is always-already vulnerable to the corruption and co-option of power that

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inevitably runs the vulnerability and risk of a kratocracy. Still, revolution should not be reduced to this or that, but rather understood, thus: [F]or the state, revolution is never anything more than an intervening period … For a politics of emancipation, the enemy that is to be feared most is not repression at the hands of the established order. It is the interiority of nihilism, and the unbounded cruelty that can come with its emptiness. (Badiou, 2010: 31)

However, we should not overlook Arendt’s caution that ‘the most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution’ (1970: 70). Before we can critique the world, we must first know it and our limitations of knowing such an organic and malleable world. Giroux explains: The concept of critical theory refers to the nature of self-conscious critique and to the need to develop a discourse of social transformation and emancipation that does not cling dogmatically to its own doctrinal assumptions … [it] calls for the necessity of ongoing critique, one in which the claims of any theory must be confronted with the distinction between the world it examines and portrays, and the world as it actually exists. (Giroux, 1983: 8)

Despite Giroux’s assertion here, critical pedagogy as a matter of theoretical consideration has been criticized as running the risk of operating within its own symbolic order and ideological fantasy (Biesta, 2005; Bowers, 1991; Ellison, 2009; Ellsworth, 1992; Garcia, 2014; Žižek, 1989). Self-conscious critique is limited by the distinction between believing and knowing that requires more faith than evidence to construct reality (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Searle, 1995; Žižek, 1989, 2008). The beauty of critical pedagogy’s heritage is its grounding as a pedagogical stance that, as Kincheloe points out, ‘is always evolving, changing in light of both new theoretical insights and new problems and social circumstance’ (2004: 49). We should, therefore, remain reflective of our positions, theories, and practices. Postman says, ‘Education

is a culture’s answer to the questions of a particular era. The hazard of “holding” an educational philosophy is that you may be caught with a bag full of right answers to the wrong era’ (1979: 16). Is critical pedagogy caught in a similar anachronistic trap? If so, what can emerging scholars do? Derrida asks, ‘if the specter is always animated by a spirit, one wonders who would dare to speak of a spirit of Marx, or more serious still, of a spirit of Marxism’ (1994: 2). If Marxism is inevitably en route to its own destruction as Balibar (1991) observes, then what theoretical foundations do we pursue in place of, or complementary to, Marxism, as it relates to the foundational past of critical pedagogy and future constellations? Critical pedagogy has always had critiques, but it is not the goal of this chapter to mince fantastical ideas that remain in ‘infinence deadlock’ (Garcia, 2018) – a perpetual back and forth of equal and opposite force and trajectory that results in no winning over or surrendering to. Many of the critiques are fashioned around critiquing the ideological precepts that become thematic markers across many prominent ‘theorists’ of critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy has the academic allure, I would call it ‘intellectual seduction’, of theoretical masturbation and orgiastic incest that fuels a cult of personality. To some degree this critique is warranted as there is a disjuncture, hypocritical stance, and irony for those that call themselves critical pedagogy theorists. However, it is somewhat unfair to be so simply reductionist since, as McLaren points out, ‘critical pedagogy is checkered with tensions and conflicts and mired with contradictions and should in no way be seen as a unified discipline’ (2005: 51). We will not do ourselves any favors in the legitimacy, relevancy, or advancement of critical pedagogy as an educational theory by shying away from harsh criticism. It is through recognizing and moving through our darkest elements and shortcomings that we even stand the chance to be better and daringly authentic with humbleness and humility.

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Biesta provides a poignant cautionary criticism that is worth quoting in length here: Critical Pedagogy has to be self-critical. Of course critical educationalists would be the first to agree that to be critical precisely means to be self-critical. Yet I believe that critical pedagogy needs to be selfcritical in a more radical sense. In the end, the only consistent way forward – and here I am interested both in theoretical and pedagogical and political consistency – is by a perpetual challenge of all claims to authority, including the claims to authority of Critical Pedagogy itself. This implies that such a challenge cannot be put in the name of some superior knowledge or privileged vision. Critical Pedagogy cannot claim, in other words, that it holds the truth. It can only proceed, so I want to suggest, on the basis of a fundamental ignorance. Such ignorance is neither naïveté nor skepticism. It just is an ignorance that does not claim to know how the future be or will have to be. It is an ignorance that does not simply show the way, but issues an invitation to set out on the journey. It is an ignorance that does not say what to think of it, but only asks ‘What do you about it?’ It is an ignorance, in short, that makes room for the possibility of disclosure, an ignorance that does not want to know and does not claim to know what or who the student will be or ought to be – and in precisely this respect I believe it is an educational and emancipatory ignorance. (Biesta, 2005: 152)

Critical theory and pedagogy aim to break open the foreclosed regulation of the symbolic world, which it ascribes to the ideology of capitalism that is stained by the dialectic (Althusser, 2008; Freire, 2013; Giroux, 1983; Horkheimer and Adorno, 2007; McLaren, 2005; Žižek, 1989). This aim is what we call ‘critical consciousness’; however, critical consciousness is not a totalizing transcendence that raises the individual to a level of being able to see or know what others cannot, as Biesta (2005) suggests. In place of a transcendental idea structured like a hierarchy that is contra Marxist configurations (e.g., base/superstructure), perhaps we should consider critical pedagogy and subsequent ontoepistemological positions beyond the dialectic that reduces positions to master/ slave, oppressed/oppressor, for/against, and either/or. Reynolds and Webber conjure the rhizomatic spirit of Deleuze and Guattari to

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assert that ‘curriculum theory moves when in multiplicities and lines of flight, not in dualisms or either/ors. Curriculum theory IS not this or that – defining it leads to this or that’ (2009: 2–3, emphasis in original).

MORE HUMAN THAN HUMAN Between man and other animals there are various differences, some intellectual, some emotional. One of the chief emotional differences is that some human desires, unlike those of animals, are essentially boundless and incapable of complete satisfaction. (Bertrand Russell, 1996: 1) Humans paint every available surface with so much fucking death and misery, it’s amazing that humans survive humanity. (Henry Rollins, 2009: 60)

If the life world of human experience that is painted across Marxist oriented discourses seems to always be plagued by imbalance, inequalities, and hierarchies that are attributed to the logic of capitalism, then we must ask if there was truly such a time that existed before capitalism in which the world was absent of such things? In addition, we should question if the world after capitalism – be it a communist tomorrow or an entirely new ‘system’ that has yet to be born and named – will be better or worse. That such judgment of better or worse is always obliged to pose ‘Better for whom?’. In such sense we cannot escape the initial base of inquiry of the dialectic that also implicates a universal exception; that is, we know who is doing better by the very fact that we know who those are that are doing worse. Yet, even in this mode of initial postulation (i.e., better/worse), we are theoretically and philosophically impoverished in an either/or totality axiom, if we cling to the dialectic. It is not just constellations (e.g., Garcia, 2018) or intersectionality (e.g., Crenshaw, 2014) that should be considered but the unique fractalization of each individual’s life world that is as vast an infinitely recursive as the universe itself (see Mandelbrot, 1983; Novak, 2004).

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Throughout most histories and cultures around the world, there has been a great practice of belief that there is the physical/ material world and a more mystical realm where higher beings (e.g., God(s)) reign and originate. Among ‘belief’ (e.g., organization religions, Indigenous totemism, sectarian cults, etc.) there tends to be the idea of (1) transcendence to a higher plane of consciousness (e.g., ‘eastern’ religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism) and (2) ascendance to another world beyond ours (e.g., ‘western’ religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). This is not to imply a dialectical or dichotomous relationship that simplifies belief so easily. However, even if we were to pose the essential question of what human beings are in this comparison among beliefs (e.g., Coward, 2008; Ward, 1998), we would still be confronted with (1) addressing the possibilities and understanding on the level of (medical and social) science and (2) within metaphysical considerations that result in also accepting that our capacity to know and understand is still with magnificent limitations. Thus, we are obliged to keep in close conceptual question our epistemology in several distinct propositions: (1) known-knowns or things that we know that we know; (2) known-unknowns or things that we know that we do not know yet; (3) unknown-knowns or things that reside at the level of the unconscious; and (4) unknown-unknowns or things that we do not know that we do not know because they lie so far ahead in what we can simply call ‘the beyond’ (see Rumsfeld, 2002; Žižek, 2008). For philosophers and intellectuals, the idea of transcendence is intimately associated with Kant and enlightenment (see Kant, 2001), which melds the conceptual field of our primary physical world and the ‘other’ world beyond ours, so we have but this material world at present to embolden (i.e., transcendental enlightenment) or leave to static primal practice of subjugation among differing groups. Within the theoretico-philosophical axioms proposed and negotiated across a

vast diverse body of projects and works, the Frankfurt School social theorists tend to hold firmly that humanity (and the project/ practice of being human) is incomplete or compromised by the logic of capitalism. For example, Fromm explains: The process of history is the process by which man develops his specifically human qualities, his powers of love and understanding; and once he has achieved full humanity he can return to the lost unity between himself and the world. This new unity, however, is different from the preconscious one which existed before history began. It is the at-onement of man with himself, with nature, and with his fellow man, based on the fact that man has given birth to himself in the historical process. (Fromm, 2004: 53)

Mary Midgley says, ‘The trouble with him [mankind] is, of course, that he [mankind] comes half-finished’ (2002: 274). Resonating with the sentiment of an incomplete humanity, Midgley proposes that ‘man is innately programmed in such a way that he needs a culture to complete him. Culture is not an alternative or replacement for instinct, but its outgrowth and supplement’ (2002: 274). G. K. Chesterton said, ‘There is no equality in nature; also there is no inequality in nature’ (2001: 105). The idea of equality, as it pertains to humanity, is fundamentally a human concept, much like time, that problematizes the ratio and distribution of resources within the logic of capitalism where such unequal representation or distribution must be not just an issue of dominance but also a presupposed victimization. The physical world and universe is structured by mathematics and patterns (e.g., fractals, the Fibonacci sequence, etc.); however, the nature of being human has rarely found an essential common ground beyond the basic universal biology of the human body. It is important to reflect on the idea of human nature because it is the dividing line between the empirical reality and fantasy sustained by an infinite and enduring ‘hope’ of the human; even this situating can be highly debatable. Nonetheless, a proper critique of critical pedagogy must question

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its imprisonment to hope as a buttressing ideology that sustains its fantasy of a better tomorrow. As Fromm famously asserts, ‘Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve and from which he cannot escape’ (1990: 40). Human nature has always tended to represent a parallax gap (see Žižek, 2006a) in philosophy, religion, and consequently education. The parallax gap is ‘the confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral common ground is possible’ (Žižek, 2006a: 4). The empirical reality of humanity has demonstrated not only the irrationality of humans but also the paradoxical nature of humanity’s progress. Marcuse laments ‘the fact that the destruction of life (human and animal) has progressed with the progress of civilization, that cruelty and hatred and the scientific extermination of men have increased in relation to the real possibility of the elimination of oppression’ (1955/1966: 86). Badiou echoes a similar lamentation as Marcuse in that Man ‘has shown himself to be the most wily of animals, the most patient, the most obstinately dedicated to the cruel desires of his own power’ (2001: 59). It is perhaps Freud’s classic work on Civilization and Its Discontents that best calls into question any ‘hope’ for humanity: The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity to work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to torture and to kill him … Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion? (Freud, 1989: 68–69)

Although we may want to believe that humanity is innately good, but the dark ideological magic of capital sours it; it is perhaps the opposite. Have we not conducted enough experiments (e.g., the Milgram experiment,

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the Stanford Prison Experiment, MKUltra) and witnessed history to know that we are all monsters but most have been domesticated in the open while others lie dormant waiting to be let loose?

CRITIQUE OF DIALECTIC Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic feature of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making darkness conscious. (Carl Jung, 1983: 265–6)

Although the dialectic is most often discussed in critical theory in reference to Hegel (1977, 2005), the general concept goes as far back as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle as a matter of logic and argumentation. The dialectic of biological and intellectual life functions as a conceptualization that two things are in equal and opposite relation with one another, and function based on symbiosis. For example, we know what hot feels like because of its dialectical relation to cold. However, if we borrow conceptually from the second law of thermodynamics, we see that there is not a fluid balance exchange in which both (hot and cold) can be origin points. Rather, to put it in simple terms, cold is the origin point from which heat will rise and return to (Bent, 1965). This origin point holds a special priority in the relationship as the point of ultimate return and origin. For example, let us think about counseling psychology in which we use – among many approaches – dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) (Linehan, 1993) to frame and distinguish the behaviors and thoughts that affect those with mental health issues. Through structured exercises and a philosophical approach, the goal of DBT is to help the client/patient distinguish those behaviors and thoughts that are causing problems in order to help them reduce the escalations of depression, emotional anguish, anger, etc. In doing

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so, the client/patient will hopefully recognize that they are not stuck in a particular state or innately imprisoned in a constant state of crisis (e.g., catastrophizing). With the second law of thermodynamics and DBT there is conceptually one mode (state of B/being) from which all things rise (i.e., generate) and return to (degenerate). The dialectic is useful, but my consideration of it and critical pedagogy here is predicated on a much more complicated ‘constellation’ that obliges us to call into question and conceptualize ‘origin points’ as subjective positionings that assume a ‘moral authority’ and messianic stance (Bowers, 1991) of what constitutes the ‘right side’ of the dialectic to be on. It is useful to look at Schopenhauer’s proposal of suffering as a conceptual origin point, which is influenced by eastern philosophies, especially Buddhism: If suffering is not the first and immediate object of our life, then our existence is the most inexpedient and inappropriate thing in the world. For it is absurd to assume that the infinite pain, which everywhere abounds in the world and springs from the want and misery essential to life, could be purposeless and purely accidental. Our susceptibility to pain is well-nigh infinite; but that to pleasure has narrow limits. It is true that each separate piece of misfortune seems to an exception, but misfortune in general is the rule. (Schopenhauer, 2010: 1)

Schopenhauer suggests a reversal of the conventional ideal of life. That is, if we speak pedagogically, we learn what we want by knowing what we do not want. Therefore, enlightenment is not gained by the inexperience and absence of challenges, especially at their worst and most torturous. Rather, it is through the suffering that we may come to truly know and appreciate not suffering. Even in Genesis God began in the darkness and then created light. God did not begin in the light to only later encounter the absence of it in darkness.3 In this example, much like Schopenhauer’s proposal, it is the dark side (e.g., suffering) of the dialectic, not the light side (e.g., not suffering), that is the origin point. In Dracula Untold (Shore, dir., 2014),

Vlad seeks out the vampire in the mountain in order to become a vampire and have supernatural strength to defend his kingdom. Again, we see the dark side of the dialectic implicated when the vampire says to Vlad, ‘Sometimes the world no longer needs a hero. Sometimes what it needs is a monster’. I am not suggesting that the ‘dark side’ of the dialectic is always the predicate to the other side, as Schopenhauer suggests with a kind of dialectical transcendence. Whereas we know the second law of thermodynamics holds true, we cannot say the same for the dialectic. Although we may be able to judge one side over another, we are always-already in a subjective life world that holds a moral, ethical, and ideological influence that inoculates us with a plague of fantasies that structures our desires (Žižek, 1989).

IF WE ARE TO SURVIVE, WE MUST FIRST LEARN TO DIE Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception. (Carl Sagan, 2006: 196)

People fear death, a death, any death as a fear of that which has a zero-sum finality to their life, work, and family. Of course, death is treated culturally in various ways and the manner of death usually ushers a question of judgment (overtly or covertly) – ‘How did they die?’ – by the living. It is always curious how people are seemingly obligated by social etiquette and cultural codes to give respect to the dead. This most puzzling response can be observed, for example, where a family member has passed from cancer; someone, however, who was considered to be a miserable person who always spoke harshly and degradingly to everyone. The event of death has the ability to erase and distort the person one was with an artificial nostalgia that can hide one’s monstrosity. This process of disavowing the monstrosity or more disturbing parts of a dead person’s life as a place for a

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more benevolent caricature draws parallels with the treatment of history, especially in the spirited Leftists that espouse critical pedagogy, desire a communist tomorrow as the solution to the world’s impoverished spirit, and break the world into dialectical halves between the oppressed and oppressor (e.g., Badiou, 2010; Dean, 2009; Kachur, 2012; Malott, 2017; McLaren, 2000). Learning to die and welcoming death opens up the possibility to transcend stuck positions and the risk of anachronism. Plato says, ‘Those who practice philosophy in the right way are in training for dying and they fear death least of all men’ (1997: 59). Philosophers are not adrenaline junkies or death-defying stuntmen like Evel Knievel. Rather, philosophers prepare for that which may possibly only be acquired by the very real process of death itself. Plato explains: Many men, at the death of their lovers, wives or sons, were willing to go to the underworld, driven by the hope of seeing there those for whose company they longed, and being with them. Will then a true lover of wisdom, who has a similar hope and knows that he will never find it to any extent except in Hades, be resentful of dying and not gladly undertake the journey thither? One must surely think so, my friend, if he is a true philosopher, for he is firmly convinced that he will not find pure knowledge anywhere except there. And if this is so, then, as I said just now, would it not be highly unreasonable for such a man to fear death? (Plato, 1997: 59)

Death in Plato’s discussion is not a finite nothingness, but an opening into another world (i.e., Hades). If the only way to achieve a certain wisdom is to die, then the philosopher must leap to their death in order to crossover into the other realm where such knowledge or wisdom is to be found. This is the premise of the movie Flatliners (Schumacher, dir., 1990), where five medical students attempt near death experiences to see what lies on the other side and encounter paranormal consequences from their experiments. If death in its biological or metaphorical sense was an issue of singular finitude, then

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why fear and disavow it? For Baudrillard, ‘The power of the state is based on the management of life as the objective afterlife. In this, it is more powerful than the Church, since the abstract of power of the state is increased not by an imaginary beyond, but by the imaginary of life itself’ (1993: 144, emphasis in original). Here, the ‘crossing over’ or transcendence is regulated on the uncertainty of what the ‘afterlife’ is. Therefore, such anxiety over the uncertainty of what happens after death has the possibility to reduce people to cling to an ideological enslavement (e.g., Plato’s cave) in which life is lived within the confines of the ‘symbolic order’ (Lacan, 1991). Montaigne supports Plato’s position that philosophy is learning to die: We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practise death is to practise freedom. A man who has learned to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die gives us freedom from subjection and constraint. (Montaigne, 2004: 24)

For those that reject this regulation and possible consequential subjugation, life takes on a more fluid ideal. Anaïs Nin conceptualizes life as a ‘process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death’ (1964: 20). The idea of death that Nin points to here is not just the fear of living but also the fluidity of life that requires one to die many deaths. In such a sense, death is reduced to a plateau that one must move beyond to continue living. There are those among us that have succumbed to a staticity and continue in the world embodying a kind of intellectual Cotard’s syndrome.4 If we are to survive in the sense of advancing our own organic intellectualism, ontoepistemological place, and ‘relevancy’ then we must learn to die. Such a death would acknowledge that we have reached a plateau (or understanding of our limitations) with certain ideas, especially as they concern notions of resisting the ideological state apparatuses

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(see Althusser, 2008). Such a death would foreclose the irrationality of hope, as Cornel West explains, which ‘is not the same as optimism. Optimism adopts the role of the spectator who surveys the evidence in order to infer that things are going to get better’ (1997: xii). If we were to take West’s differentiation here between hope and optimism, would we really derive evidence that critical pedagogy is thriving in K12 public schools and not just among the publishing orgies of academics? Would this expose the fetishist disavowal that ‘we know very well that this will happen at some point, but nevertheless cannot bring ourselves to really believe that it will’ (Žižek, 2010: x). Such a death would force us to confront the fantasy elements that structure our desires. That is, the traumatic nightmare when our fantasies no longer structure our realities: ‘They do not know it, but they are doing it’ [Marx] … What they do not know is that their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion, by a fetishistic inversion. What they overlook, what they misrecognize, is not the reality but the illusion which is structuring their reality, their real social activity. They know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they do not know. The illusion is therefore double: it consists in overlooking the illusion which is structuring our real, effective relationship to reality. And this overlooked, unconscious illusion is what may be called the ideological fantasy. (Žižek, 1989: 32, italics in original)

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus famously states, ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy’ (1991: 3). We normally understand suicide as an act of killing oneself. However, there is the literal and metaphorical suicidal act – killing one’s self – that in simple terms is an act to end the coordinates and current constellation of one’s current circumstance. In this way, death is volitional and self-inflicted. When one commits ‘career suicide’ it involves knowingly engaging in an act of presenting ideas that would end one’s career or acceptance. But if we must die in

order to survive, this is a suicidal act that requires a leap of faith that carries with it the rupture of symbolic coordinates in order to invite a transcendental moment toward the beyond. Do we not see the metaphorical death and rebirth in ‘born-again’ Christians, which invite a death to their current life in order to rise like the phoenix from the ashes? In Vanilla Sky (Crowe, dir., 2001) David Aames (played by Tom Cruise) is in a cryogenic sleep chamber, but he does not know it until particular ruptures in his perceived reality begin to happen. He is eventually told of the simulation dream world that he is in due to his cryogenic sleep in the real world. The only way he can wake from his cryogenic sleep is to commit suicide in the dream world by jumping from a building. Before he makes his leap of faith to return to the real world, he says, ‘I want to live a real life. I don’t want to dream any longer’. In City of Angels (Silberling, dir., 1998), the angel, Seth (played by Nicolas Cage), falls in love with a mortal woman, Dr. Maggie Rice (played by Meg Ryan), but Seth cannot be with her or engage in the human experience since he is not human. By chance Seth meets Nathaniel Messinger (played by Dennis Franz) in the hospital where Maggie is a doctor. Messinger is able to feel Seth’s presence when Seth is in cloaking mode as an angel. Messinger was an angel once upon a time that became human. When Seth learns of this and inquires about how this is possible, Messinger tells him: You choose … [t]o fall to Earth. You take the plunge, the tumble, the dive. You jump off a bridge. Leap out a window. You just make up your mind to do it and you do it. You wake up all smelly, and aching from head to toe. So it’s all real confusing and painful, but very, very good.

In concluding my thoughts, we should look at the transcendental possibility of learning to die that requires a certain suicide at times, as we take a leap of faith to continue failing in the best way possible, which will hopefully reveal tomorrow and the day after as a little better than the day before.

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Notes 1  It is with honor, respect, and remembrance of my dear friend Dennis Carlson that I use this conceptual framing. Dennis passed away before our collaboration of thoughts could be compiled and published. I now have the opportunity to share some of what we started. In addition, I owe tremendous gratitude to not only Dennis but also to Kristopher Holland with whom I have collaborated over 10 years to work through some of the critiques laid out as ‘the specters of critical pedagogy’. Lastly, I owe thanks to David Gabbard, Justin Twiddy, Jeff Patterson, and Alphonse Reinhardt for their support in helping talk through this chapter and encouraging me to publish it. To these amazing friends and colleagues, I pay inexhaustible respect and appreciation for their friendship and intellectual prowess.  2  I would like to thank my cherished friend and philosopher, Stephanie Koziej, for her emphasis on ‘fluidity’ that has influenced me across my life, music, and philosophy.  3  Genesis 1: 1–4 (KJV). 1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.  4  Cotard’s syndrome is often referred to as the ‘walking dead’ disorder or ‘delusion of negation’ because people with the disorder deny their ‘own existence or the existence of the external world … Schizophrenics who exhibit Cotard’s syndrome may make statements such as “I’m dead” or “I’m not here or anywhere”’ (Noll, 2007:108).

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Critchley, S. (2008). Infinitely demanding: Ethics of commitment, politics of resistance. New York: Verso. Crowe, C. (Director). (2001). Vanilla Sky [Motion Picture]. United States: Paramount Pictures. Cusset, F. (2008). French theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. transformed the intellectual life of the United States. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Dean, J. (2009). Democracy and other neoliberal fantasies: Communicative capitalism and left politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Deleuze, G. & Parnet, C. (2002). Dialogues. New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx. New York: Routledge. Dickens, C. (1991). A Christmas carol. Mineola, NY: Dover. Dostoevsky, F. (2004). Notes from the Underground: Part I: Underground. In G. Marino (Ed.), Basic writings of existentialism (pp. 193–230). New York: The Modern Library. Eagleton, T. (2003). After theory. New York: Basic Books. Ellison, S. (2009). On the poverty of philosophy: The metaphysics of McLaren’s ‘revolutionary critical pedagogy’. Educational Theory, 59(3), 327–351. Ellsworth, E. (1992). Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. In C. Luke & J. Gore (Eds.), Feminisms and critical pedagogy (pp. 90–119). New York: Routledge. Freire, P. (1985). The politics of education: Culture, power, and liberation. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Freire, P. (2001). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy and civic courage. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Freire, P. (2013). Education for critical consciousness. New York: Bloomsbury. Freud, S. (1989). Civilization and its discontents. New York: W.W. Norton. Fromm, E. (1990). Man for himself: An inquiry into the psychology of ethics. New York: Henry Holt/Owl. Fromm, E. (2004). Marx’s concept of man. New York: Continuum. Garcia, A. (2014). The eclipse of education in the end times: Exploring Žižekian notions of

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psychoanalysis. J.-A. Miller (Ed.). New York: W.W. Norton. Linehan, M. M. (1993). Cognitive-behavioral treatment of borderline personality disorder. New York: The Guilford Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Malott, C. (2017). In defense of communism: Against critical pedagogy, capitalism, and Trump. Critical Education 8(1), 1–24 Mandelbrot, B. B. (1983). The fractal geometry of nature. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company. Mann, M. (2013). The end may be nigh, but for whom? In I. Wallerstein, R. Collins, M. Mann, G. Derluguian, & C. Calhoun (Eds.), Does capitalism have a future? (pp. 71–98). New York: Oxford University Press. Marcuse, H. (1955/1966). Eros and civilization. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Marcuse, H. (2007). Remarks on a redefinition of culture. In A. Feenberg & W. Leiss. (Eds.), The essential Marcuse: Selected writings of philosopher and social critic Herbert Marcuse (pp. 13–31). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Marx, K. (1988). The communist manifesto. New York: W.W. Norton. McLaren, P. (2000). Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the pedagogy of revolution. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. McLaren, P. (2005). Capitalists and conquerors: A critical pedagogy against empire. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Midgley, M. (2002). Beast and man: The roots of human nature. New York: Routledge. Miller, H. (1961). The cosmological eye. New York: New Directions. Montaigne, M. de (2004). The essays: A selection. New York: Penguin Books. Nietzsche, F. (1989). On the genealogy of morals and Ecce homo. New York: Vintage. Nin, A. (1964). D. H. Lawrence: An unprofessional study. Chicago: Swallow Press. Noll, R. (2007). The encyclopedia of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. New York: Facts on File Inc. Novak, M. M. (2004). Thinking in patterns: Fractals and related phenomena in nature. River Edge, NJ: World Scientific Publishing. Pinar, W. F. (2004). What is curriculum theory? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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Sullivan, M. J., Thorn, B., Haythornthwaite, J. A., Keefe, F., Martin, M., Bradley, L. A., & Lefebvre, J. C. (2001). Theoretical perspectives on the relation between catastrophizing and pain. Clinical Journal of Pain, 17(1), 52–64. Ward, K. (1998). Religion and human nature. New York: Oxford University Press. West, C. (1997). Restoring hope: Conversations on the future of black America. K. S. Sealey (Ed.).Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Zamora, L. (2005). Magical romance/magical realism: Ghosts in U.S. and Latin American fiction. In L. P. Zamora & W. B. Faris (Eds.), Magical realism: Theory, history, community (pp. 497–550). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Žižek, S. (1989). The sublime object of ideology. New York: Verso.

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22 Critical Pedagogy Beyond the Human Nathan Snaza

As Elizabeth Ellsworth noted three decades ago, critical pedagogy’s most enduring goals  – ‘critical democracy, individual freedom, social justice, and social change’ – ‘operate at a high level of abstraction’ (1989: 300). For those of us in classrooms at the P–12 or university levels, or working in nonschool sites of educational praxis, the difficulty of critical pedagogy is to think and live together in such a way that these goals don’t ‘give the illusion of equality while in fact leaving the authoritarian nature of the teacher/ student relationship intact’ (ibid.: 306). This means, as Ellsworth notes in considerable detail, shifting our focus from abstractions that often serve as an alibi for teachers to insist on a single vision of rational deliberation as ‘critical’ politics toward attention to, and entanglement with, the concrete, historically specific, and difficult problems that appear in a particular time and place among particular groups of participants. My goal in this chapter is to suggest that the concrete and the abstract are, in fact, crucially

linked and that in order to pursue critical pedagogy as an ethos – as opposed to a particular set of strategies or methods – we have to expand our abstract sense of what politics and participation mean in order to better attune to the specific relations in any given milieu. In particular, I am going to suggest that a multiplicity of theoretical currents in social thought today – feminist new materialisms, queer inhumanisms, posthumanisms, object-oriented ontology (OOO), affect theory, and nonanthropocentric ecologies – offer concepts and frameworks for thinking critical pedagogy – and political encounter more generally – beyond the human. This requires a recalibration of critical pedagogy’s conception of politics – no longer understood as scenes of merely human deliberation and action – as well as its concept of the human. While one set of motivations for these recalibrations comes from an impulse to draw nonhuman actors into accounts of what counts as politics – increasingly taking place on an earth damaged to the point where innumerable species, ecosystems, and

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even ‘human’ societies face extinction – this impulse is also about addressing and redressing the histories of Western imperial conquest in modernity. Colonial settlement, the racialized slave trade, and capitalist economies have coalesced to make a highly particular version of the human – Sylvia Wynter (2003) calls this ‘Man’ – seem as if it were simply the human as such, with horrific results politically and ecologically. Critical pedagogy, ultimately, has to re-write its commitments to ‘humanization’ (Freire, 2000) in order to valorize local, multiple, and even experimental forms of performing the human. Picking up on Paulo Freire’s claim in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that ‘while the problem of humanization has always, from an axiological point of view, been humankind’s central problem, it now [because of the dehumanizing logics of colonialism and capitalism] takes on the character of an inescapable concern’ (2000: 43), most critical pedagogues have anchored their projects in relation to an ideal of what it means to be a fully humanized human being.1 As Ellsworth’s article details, this means that critical pedagogy’s aims have often been articulated using language like ‘human agency’, ‘human betterment’, and ‘common human interests’ (1989: 307). While this ‘human’ has often been rhetorically pitched as the highest possible level of abstraction and communion – and thus an antidote to racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and other political mechanisms of dividing humans along axes of hierarchized relation2 – it is crucial today to understand how that ‘human’, when left untheorized as simply an assumed category whose self-evidence is apparent, functions as a powerful colonial logic. That is, commitment to a supposedly universal and abstract humanity is entirely amenable to logics of capitalist, colonialist, racist, (hetero) sexist, and ableist politics. Against, this, I will affirm Wynter’s argument that: the struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western

bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves. (Wynter, 2003: 260)

Critical pedagogy, then, has to move from a belief that there is a single thing called ‘the human’ toward the decolonial affirmation of multiple ways of performing the human. This demand that critical pedagogy move beyond the Western version of human called ‘Man’ has, as some of us well know, been sounded before. Sandy Grande’s (2004) Red Pedagogy offers a sustained critique of the ways that critical pedagogy’s concepts and discourses relied upon Western colonialist assumptions about the human and its (non-) relations to the rest of the world. Tracking the ‘deep structures of colonialist consciousness’ (ibid.: 69), Grande offers five beliefs that structure this manner of thinking, all of which tend to be imported into mainstream – or, to use her term, whitestream – critical pedagogies. They are: ‘1. Belief in progress as change and change as progress’; ‘2. Belief in the effective separateness of faith and reason’; ‘3. Belief in the essential quality of the universe and of “reality” as impersonal, secular, material, mechanistic, and relativistic’; ‘4. Subscription to ontological individualism’; and ‘5. Belief in human beings as separate from and superior to the rest of nature’ (ibid.: 69). These five core assumptions drive the curricular and pedagogical goals of both (settler) colonialist schools and most ‘critical’ interventions into schooling. That is, what Grande’s Indigenous critique of critical pedagogy enables us to understand is that critical pedagogy often functions entirely within a horizon of Western humanism that is the political, ontological, and epistemological motor of imperialism. Grande’s critique, and decolonial knowledge more generally, also offers crucial ways of conceptualizing critical pedagogy differently. At the center of these is an ontological postulation of the human as part of a mangle

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of relations called ‘land’. As Glen Sean Coulthard puts it: Indigenous struggles against capitalist imperialism are best understood as struggles oriented around the question of land – struggles not only for land, but also deeply informed by what the land as a mode of reciprocal relationship (which is itself informed by place-based practices and associated forms of knowledge) ought to teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, nondominating, and nonexploitative way. (Coulthard, 2014: 60, italics in original)

Land here includes the human – ‘we are as much a part of the land as any other element’ (ibid.: 61) – and the human is therefore in a position of learning from the land. That is, instead of an imperialist dichotomy between the human as a separate, rational agent and ‘nature’ as a passive background for human action, land is agential. Land teaches. This is why Tuck and McKenzie can write that ‘decolonization is not just something the humans (may) do; it is (primarily) something that the land does on its own behalf’ (2015: 71).3 While Indigenous struggles and pedagogies formulate this decolonizing movement in relation to land, I will now track how various theoretical frameworks offer a set of concepts and axioms that can be usefully constellated. The reason to begin with Indigenous critique is that it refuses any separation between ontological claims about how entities relate – and, in a move very much congruent with work in feminist materialisms, how entities emerge only in relation – and political struggle to decolonize and dismantle the (settler) colonialist state. While some of the theories I track here are less explicit about, or even unconcerned with, their investments in that political project, I would argue that it is, in fact, the most crucial way to thinking these critiques of ‘humanism’ in relation. That is, the movement happening today in social and political theory ‘beyond the human’ is best understood, even if individual thinkers do not position their projects as such, as part of decolonial struggle. Critical pedagogy, I

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might propose, comes to be the way of naming any struggle to decolonize being human away from Man and its (settler colonial4) nation-state-based politics.

POSTHUMANISMS As John Weaver and I argued in the introduction to Posthumanism and Educational Research (Snaza and Weaver, 2014), there is no single discourse called ‘posthumanism’. Instead, as it has come to be used in the humanities, social sciences, and even in physical and biological sciences, this word refers to any way of thinking that does not take ‘Man’ as the measure (ibid.: 3). Posthumanism in this broad sense critiques Man and affirms other ways of being and relating to others in politics. Although this risks a certain reductiveness, I would like to define posthumanism for the purposes of this chapter as those theories that re-write the human using ideas emerging in cybernetics and informatics. As N. Katherine Hayles notes in How We Became Posthuman, this version of posthumanism, or more specifically, of ‘the posthuman’, opens onto both a dystopian and a utopian imagination of futurity: If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival. (Hayles, 1999: 5)

This ‘dream’ emerges for Hayles in the wake of the Macy Conferences on cybernetics between 1943 and 1954. These conferences, which brought together thinkers from across a range of disciplines, sought to construct ‘a theory of communication and control

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applying equally to animals, humans, and machines’ (ibid.: 7). While these conferences led to important advances in encryption, robotics, and Artificial Intelligence, ‘the result of this breathtaking enterprise was nothing less than a new way of looking at human beings. Henceforth, humans were to be seen primarily as information-processing entities who are essentially similar to intelligent machines’ (ibid.: 7). Cary Wolfe, in What is Posthumanism?, writes: [P]osthumanism names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore, a historical development that points toward the necessity of new theoretical paradigms (but also thrusts them upon us), a new mode of thought that comes after the cultural repressions and fantasies, the philosophical protocols and evasions, of humanism as a historically specific phenomenon. (Wolfe, 2009: xv–xvi)

Understanding the human as an entity on a continuum with machines and (other) animals – instead of a being set apart from these by an ontological rupture – was also a crucial part of feminist biologist Donna Haraway’s work from the 1980s forward. In ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, originally published in 1985, Haraway argued that the human/animal, animal/machine, and physical/non-physical boundaries have broken down and that these breakdowns enable new modes of identity and politics. Drawing on feminist and decolonial theories, and science fiction writing, Haraway queries whether ‘we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man’ (1991: 173).5 At stake, for her, is a rejection of dualisms as well as ‘universal, totalizing theory’ (ibid.: 181). Instead of positing a single vision into which politics must (forcefully) collate us, Haraway insists on ‘both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories’ (ibid.: 181). A cyborg politics, then, is messy, contradictory, shifting, and always attentive to the specific asymmetries of power operative in a particular milieu.

As the essays gathered by Jack Halberstam and Ira Livingston in Posthuman Bodies (1995) make clear, this version of posthumanism resonated persistently in feminist and queer politics, especially in the wake of theories of gender performance (Butler, 1993, 2004) and the AIDS crisis. Ranging across sexual acts, forms of family and community production, technological prostheses, and medical/psychiatric disciplines, Halberstam and Livingston propose that the posthuman ‘queries and queers the ways that the options are articulated and policed’ (1995: 19). They reject ‘authentic culture or an organic community’ in favor of ‘multiple visibilities’ (ibid.: 18). Importantly, they tie this to various struggles undertaken by those whose humanity has always been in question during imperialist modernity: ‘The posthuman marks a solidarity between disenchanted liberal subjects and those who were always-already disenchanted, those who seek to betray identities that legitimize or de-legitimize them at too high a cost’ (ibid.: 9). Put differently, the posthuman in this version is powerfully constellated with projects that have called attention to Western humanism’s violences and exclusions.

QUEER INHUMANISMS AND BLACK FEMINIST THEORIES OF THE HUMAN Despite Halberstam and Livingston’s intervention (in one of the first books to use the word ‘posthuman’ in its title no less!), ‘an uneven attention to race and related axes of dehumanization persists in many’ posthumanisms (Luciano and Chen, 2015: 194). As the contributors to the special issue of GLQ entitled ‘Queer Inhumanisms’ make very clear, the theoretical and political impulse to decenter the human operates very differently for subjects whose humanity has always been in question than for those who have easily gained recognition as Man. At stake is, as Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen outline in their introduction the GLQ special issue, how

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a certain positing of ‘the human’ risks collapsing it with what Wynter calls Man, a collapse that ends up factoring out the politics of dehumanization that have been the constant concern of feminist, anti-racist, decolonial, and queer theorists (Chen, 2013; Deckha, 2012; Russell and Semenko, 2016). They write:

Weheliye notes that ‘humans create race for the benefit of some and the detriment of other humans’ (2014: 26). Weheliye calls this creation racialization (the production of race through ‘racializing assemblages’ that simultaneously produce Man’s constitutive outsides). He writes:

If we accept the framing of the nonhuman turn as a move ‘beyond’ the merely human concerns of identity and alterity, we overlook how the very possibility of making a distinction between the human and non-human has, historically, been constructed by the kind of actions and processes that we have named dehumanization. (195)

If racialization is understood not as a biological or cultural descriptor but as a conglomerate of sociopolitical relations that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans, then blackness designates a changing system of unequal power structures that apportion and delimit which humans can lay claim to full human status and which humans cannot. (Weheliye, 2014: 3)

Against this overlooking, they propose ‘inhuman’ because it ‘points to the violence that the category of the human contains within itself’ (ibid.: 196). To unpack this violence, we could turn to Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity, which argues that the human is only legible in relation to the production of ‘constitutive outsides’ that function as its points of differentiation (1993: 8). Drawing on Wynter’s writings, Butler argues that ‘If there are norms of recognition by which the “human” is constituted, and these norms encode operations of power, then it follows that the contest over the future of the “human” will be a contest over the power that works in and through such norms’ (2004: 13). Because ‘the category of the “human” retains within itself the workings of the power differential of race as part of its historicisty’ in addition to the differential of gender/sexuality (2004: 13), what we need is a theory of the human as a site of contestation that is linked not only with questions of human/animal/ machine relations and imbrications, but also of the intra-human differentiations of dehumanization that mark our ongoing experience in the wake of modernity. Exploring how Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter offer theories of the human that diagnose precisely how such dehumanizations mark ‘the human’ as a category of Western colonialist logic, Alexander

That is, race – like gender, sexuality, and ability – is not an ontological given so much as a ‘system’ that is inescapably linked to the production of both unmarked ‘humans’ and marked not-quite-humans. In his contribution to the ‘Queer Inhumanisms’ issue, Tavia Nyong’o (2015) draws on precisely this black-studies critique to argue that: [c]olluding with … liberalism, posthumanist theory has tended to present the decentering of the human as both salutary and largely innocent of history. Up until the present time, we are told in one version of this philosophical fable, we have incorrectly centered the human. Now we can, and must, correct this error, if only (paradoxically) to save ourselves. It is in anticipation of such tales that black studies has repeatedly asked: have we ever been human? (Nyong’o, 2015: 266)

This question loops around to the title of Luciano and Chen’s introduction to the issue: ‘Has the Queer Ever Been Human?’ While there are many different viewpoints offered within the queer, black studies, and decolonial projects of moving away from or ‘beyond’ the unmarked human – Wynter’s Man – that anchored colonialist modernity, they share a commitment to asking about human entanglements with nonhumans in relation to the politics of dehumanization (or animalization, objectification, thingification). To my mind, this offers critical pedagogy a doubled set of

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tactics: seeking out ways of challenging the violence attending the human’s policing by Man, and seeking out ways of attuning to relations among humans and nonhumans that don’t prop up visions of conquest, resource extraction, settlement, and what Mick Smith (2011) calls ‘ecological sovereignty’ (a concept that re-writes land as ‘property’).

FEMINIST NEW MATERIALISMS, OBJECT-ORIENTED ONTOLOGY, AND AFFECT THEORY The theoretical currents of feminist new materialisms, object-oriented ontology (OOO), and affect theory are similar in that they foreground the power of objects and things to act. This focus takes place against the background of modernist sciences (themselves inextricable from the capitalist and colonialist practices of settlement and conquest, as Wynter [2003] has shown), which often positioned the human as an agent (imbued with rationality) operating in a passive world. Taking up what science studies scholar Bruno Latour has called ‘thingpower’, Jane Bennett calls for ‘detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies’ (2010: ix). In their introduction to New Materialisms, Coole and Frost write that this current takes shape in the wake of decades of work in the social sciences and humanities which foregrounded the social, cultural, and linguistic construction of reality. They claim that ‘the dominant constructivist orientation to social analysis is inadequate for thinking about matter, materiality, and politics in ways that do justice to the contemporary context of biopolitics and global political economy’ (2010: 6). Instead, they propose new materialisms that ‘give materiality its due, alert to the myriad ways in which matter is both selfconstituting and invested with – and reconfigured by – intersubjective interventions that

have their own quotient of materiality’ (ibid.: 7). New materialisms, to put this schematically, look to work in physics, chemistry, and biology in order to account for nonhuman agency in ways that open toward new ways of imagining feminist and queer politics. Drawing extensively on work in the physical and biological sciences, new materialist thinkers foreground how all things have some capacity to act. Mel Chen (2013) turns to what linguists call the ‘animacy scale’ to conceptualize this: agency and aliveness are not all-ornothing attributes, but spectra. Chen insists that ‘stones and other inanimates definitively occupy a scalar position (near zero) on the animacy hierarchy and they are not excluded from it altogether and are not treated as animacy’s binary opposite’ (2013: 5, italics in original). The concept of animacy gives Chen a way of linking feminist new materialisms, affect theory, queer theory, and critical theories of race in order to ‘refuse to categorize humans, animals, and objects as so very cleanly distinct from one another’ (ibid.: 19). In Chen’s account, dehumanization, thingification, reification, and objectification cannot be understood apart from assumptions about animacy, for they all presume and require complex acts of sorting those with agency from those without (or with less). Indeed, their book opens onto a politics that would pull the rug out from under these dehumanizing processes by refusing to regard things and objects as somehow outside of politics, or merely subject to human action. If things and objects are full participants in worlding and in politics, then dehumanization’s forces are radically diminished. Feminist and queer particle physicist Karen Barad’s (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway proposes that most modern theories of science, and thus political action, presume that entities exist as discrete entities which enter into relation. Using Niels Bohr’s experiments in physics as a point of departure, Barad rejects this view and proposes instead that everything is intra-active: things come into being as isolatable only through entanglement, and

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only appear as such in specific materialsemiotic configurations she calls ‘apparatuses’ (which may include lab equipment or concepts – such as ‘the human’). This leads to a profound re-writing of agency and ontology: ‘Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world. The universe is agential intra-activity in its becoming’ (Barad, 2007: 141). Despite the complexity of Barad’s terminology, we can parse this claim as having two crucial axioms that will have important consequences for critical pedagogy. First, agency is always a product of specific material conditions of relation, not something that one can ‘have’ (thus, we have to reject a politics of ‘empowerment’ as based on mistaken ontological presuppositions). Second, although she does not draw this out, this view connects work in contemporary physics directly with the claims by Indigenous scholars that land itself decolonizes: this movement is part of what Barad calls the world in its becoming. I will return to this resonance below to discuss the political and pedagogical implications of a critical pedagogy no longer oriented around ‘the’ human. What emerges in feminist new materialisms is a way of seeing all entities as emergent only in relation to a host of other entities, where the relations are generative and even constitutive. This marks a point of continuity with work in affect theory, and a point of divergence from OOO. I will sketch this latter point quickly before drawing out new materialisms’ resonance with affect theory in more detail. OOO, sometimes called speculative realism, asserts that objects are radically independent and that objects should all be valued equally (theirs is a ‘flat ontology’ [Bogost, 2012]. Inaugurated by Graham Harman’s (2002) re-reading of a hammer in Heidegger’s Being and Time, OOO tries to speculate about the existence of objects and things entirely apart from any human way of relating to them. While this project shares a certain family resemblance with new materialisms, OOO theorists often posit objects as existing in a ‘withdrawn’ register, entirely

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apart from any relations. Harman calls objects ‘vacuum sealed’ (2002: 288–96). Thus, while OOO has produced some extremely provocative arguments, this rejection of relation has also prompted a number of responses from feminists (especially in Behar’s 2016 edited volume, Object-Oriented Feminism; see also Bennett, 2015; Sheldon, 2015) charging it with repeating a masculinist – and, I might add Man-centered – fetishization of rigid borders (one that may be true of certain versions of cybernetic posthumanism that prioritize ‘autopoeisis’ as well6). The heuristic move of bracketing relation can enable objects to appear in their alienness to be sure, but I find a flat ontology of separate and nonrelational things to be far less attractive to educational thought and practice than one which foregrounds the historical, political, and relational emergence of entities in constant intra-action. Affect theory offers a vocabulary for describing and attending to the means of this relationality. As Gregg and Seigworth put it: ‘Affect … is the name we give to those forces – visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us toward movement’ (2010: 1). Affect, especially in its post-Spinoza mode influenced by the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, refers to any body’s capacities to affect or be affected by another. Scholars working in this field (Clough, 2007) draw on psychology, neuroscience, trauma studies, philosophy, and chemistry in order to construct ways of thinking about relations among bodies that are material without having to have recourse to consciousness. That is, affect theory offers another means of understanding agency as not simply human. While some affect theorists parse affect – as the nonconscious being affected which stimulated corporeal response before awareness – from emotion (Massumi, 2002; Protevi, 2009), others use ‘affect’ in a way that includes emotions (Ahmed, 2015; Boler, 1999; Brennan, 2004; Deckha, 2012). While

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I would agree that there are projects or problems that benefit from distinguishing the two, my own sense is that critical pedagogy benefits from using affect in both ways, sometimes foregrounding the work of emotions in scenes of politics and learning (a move that has crucial benefits in discussions of racism, sexism, and gendered oppression), and sometimes foregrounding our bodies’ capacities to be affected by things that we seldom attend to (light, smells, the circulation of pheromones, the tactile experience of spaces). It seems to me that affect theory joins a stream of anthropology ‘beyond the human’ in offering new ways to think about communication that don’t presume it only happens among humans. In Eduardo Kohn’s pathbreaking study How Forests Think (2013), he draws on Charles Peirce’s semiotics in order to ‘decolonize language’. Through very careful analysis of fieldwork among the Runa in upper Ecuador, work that attends to the complex entanglements of human and nonhuman actors in the forest, Kohn argues that ‘life is constitutively semiotic’ (2013: 9). When read in relation to affect theory, this allows me to offer that we might come to see politics as including any scene of touching among bodies that move, touching that always necessarily includes some aspect of semiosis.

GATHERING THREADS: CRITICAL PEDAGOGY BEYOND THE HUMAN I would like to gather together some of the lessons I take from various currents of contemporary theory in order to suggest how they offer a constellation which might guide critical pedagogy beyond the human. I will cluster these ideas to suggest that critical pedagogy may benefit from holding open the questions of what constitutes a ‘human’ person, and what constitutes a scene of politics. If early work in critical pedagogy sometimes seemed to take the human for granted, the work in feminist, queer, anti-racist, and

decolonial studies cautions us that this often allowed for a highly particular idea of the human to stand in for the human as such. This logic meant that many people – due to their race, geography, ability status, sexuality, and gender – were consigned to notquite-human or inhuman status. Critical pedagogy beyond the human takes this as its starting point, and adds a set of questions about what it even means to see the ‘human’ as a bounded entity. We might note that most of our bodies are made up of molecules – carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, etc. – that have circulated on earth in other forms long before our births. Or we might consider how human life – even of an individual – is impossible without the agency of trillions of microorganisms on and inside our bodies. These findings from the sciences would seem to point strongly toward the necessity of thinking of the human, as many Indigenous scholars would see it, as part of land. Not only are we land, then, but we are also less liberal, rational individuals than complex conglomerations of systems which operate at different scales and with different temporalities (Frost, 2016). As Elizabeth Grosz argues, ‘we need to understand the body, not as an organism or entity in itself, but as a system, or series of open-ended systems, functioning within other huge systems it cannot control, through which it can access and acquire its abilities and capacities’ (2004: 3). On this view, what critical pedagogues have long taken to be simply ‘agency’ – human agency – is a subset of a much wider, more dispersed field of agencies. Indeed, human agency is something like a belated after-effect of nonhuman agencies. This does not mean that human agency doesn’t matter and cannot be directed toward important political work, but it means that we have to be more humble about our capacities in relation to a world teeming with agentic matter and systems with which we are entangled in an ongoing becoming. This way of thinking also pushes against the conflation of critical pedagogy with rational analysis and deliberation. As the title

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of Ellsworth’s essay beautifully proposes, we have to reckon with how we feel in order to understand politics. Indeed, feminists and scholars studying race have repeatedly argued that the dismissal or downplaying of emotion in thought and political action serves the project of propping up a disinterested, masculinist concept of the ‘human’ in relation to which women and racialized people are dehumanized (Boler, 1999; Emdin, 2016; hooks, 1992; Wanzo, 2015). As Megan Watkins (2010) argues, education takes place through the accumulation of affects across time: how learning feels to us determines the mood of a classroom. Given the ways that discourses of ‘safe spaces’ have re-emerged on college campuses in the United States in the past few years, we need to remember Ellsworth’s admonishment that ‘acting as if our classroom were a safe space in which democratic dialogue was possible and happening did not make it so’ (1989: 315). Shifting our focus from rational discussion and enabling student ‘voice’ toward thinking about what feelings we bring to the classroom and what feelings our interactions there produce, might offer critical pedagogy a more practical way of conceptualizing the work of liberatory education. We also have to remember that these feelings, or affects, are not just the result of intrahuman interactions but are influenced by nonhuman agencies. Sara Ahmed’s (2006) powerful work on ‘orientation’ can help us see how particular spaces differentiate feelings and possibilities for movement according to race, sexuality, gender, and ability. She thus conceptualizes whiteness and heterosexuality as not attributes of an individual and his/her identity per se, so much as effects of affective orientation in space. In fact, her book Queer Phenomenology presents the possibility that we might think of whiteness and heterosexuality as forms of repetitive stress injury which might be diminished were we to transform social and physical space. This same book calls us to think about the ‘conditions of arrival’ of any actor to a

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scene. This idea allowed Debbie Sonu and me (Snaza and Sonu, 2016) to think about how practices of policing school borders with guards and metal detectors are not finally separate from the education taking place in schools but rather function as an affective lesson itself, one that cannot be understood apart from racialization and the production of inequalities. Shifting toward politics, the preceding paragraphs already offer a first insight: that critical pedagogy has propped up an overly narrow sense of what political action means and of what participation entails. Rational discussion, ideology critique, and forms of action that pressure institutions to change policies are not unimportant by any means, but they also come to seem like a fraction of the larger field we might call the political. Work informed by affect theory that tracks ‘microaggressions’ alerts us to the political work done by body language, word choice, and even silences. More importantly, tracking affects means that everything that happens below (at a nonconscious level), alongside, and around discussion and deliberation is also political. This more expansive view cannot exclude nonhumans, nor can it exclude all the human agents whose labor is materially entangled with a scene of instruction. For instance, in any given classroom, the lights, chairs, whiteboard, markers, walls, pipes, and so on exert an affective force on the scene. A first, and in some ways straightforwardly Marxist, move is to have us consider what forms of exploitation of labor and land (as ‘resources’) must take place for the scene to appear as it does. That is, a phenomenological approach attentive to nonhuman affects must be supplemented by a way of asking, with Ahmed (2006), about the conditions of arrival of the space itself, its design, its maintenance. As part of the stunning Black Lives Matter activism on US college campuses between 2015 and the present, many students thought along these lines to call public attention to how slavery as a system and the material labor

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of slave bodies literally made the spaces in which their learning transpires. We might ask: what does ‘liberatory’ education feel like on a campus that could not exist without slavery? What does it meant to attend to this material presence and its haunting affects? (Gordon, 1997; Young, 2006). Once we begin to see how any scene of education is not isolated and self-contained, we have to ask, without being able to know in advance what the answer would be: who is part of our polity? This means considering how our actions, feelings, and lives are connected with humans and nonhumans who are not ‘teachers’ and ‘students’ in the present scene.7 It means asking questions about the ecological effects and affects of our daily lives, and considering our complicities with extraction, pollution, and pernicious neocolonial logics of globalized inequality production. It also means that we have to begin to find ways of feeling and talking about nonhuman actors as participants in politics. Jane Bennett, drawing on John Dewey, argues that the task for a materialist politics beyond the human is ‘to devise new procedures, technologies, and regimes of perception that enable us to consult nonhumans more closely, or to listen and respond more carefully to their outbreaks, objections, testimonies, and propositions’ (2010: 108). This leads me to the question of temporality and how Man’s conflation of progress and change (one of the aspects of the colonialist worldview that Grande outlines) props up political action as action that is addressed toward the (colonialist) nation-state. In Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics (2005), he thinks about what it means to foster publics that have a political investment in their own subordinate status in relation to a supposedly neutral ‘public’. Through studies of radical AIDS activism and queer movements to publicize sexuality as political, he hits on the problems that emerge when such alternative counterpublics become ‘social movements’: ‘they acquire agency in relation to the state. They enter the temporality of politics and adapt themselves to the performatives of rational-critical discourse. For

many counterpublics, to do so is to cede the original hope of transforming not just policy but the space of public life itself’ (Warner, 2005: 124). Thus, critical pedagogy in its traditional (humanist) mode might be said to too easily adapt itself to the state and what Nyong’o calls ‘the pedagogic temporality of the nation state’ (2009: 162). Against this temporality of progress, we might learn from materialists, posthumanists, and Indigenous scholars to reject the new, the progressive, the easy sense of a futurity grounded on hope (Coulthard, 2014). Such scholars would remind us that colonialism, slavery, ‘primitive accumulation’, and settler colonial theft of land are not in the ‘past’ but are ongoing facts of the present, facts that structure our spaces, our institutions, our nonconscious corporeal responses to the world and each other. This caution has to be reflexively applied to this very essay: as much as a rhetoric of the ‘new’ populates writings on politics, research, and systems beyond the human, this rhetoric belies the crucial fact that critical pedagogy is not seeking to construct a new world so much as recalibrating our attentions and attunements to this world, to the thick webs of entanglement which structure every aspect of our lives but which humanist education has indoctrinated us not to notice (Boler beautifully calls this ‘inscribed habits of inattention’ [1999: 16]). As Ahmed insists, ‘we should avoid establishing a new terrain by clearing the ground of what has come before us. And we might not be quite so willing to deposit our hope in the category of “the new”’ (2008: 36). Without fetishizing the new, we have to seek out pedagogical encounters that aren’t oriented toward a stable imagination of a ‘better’ future so much as driven by attention to who and what is entangled, how we arrived, and what possibilities for action and living together emerge from that messy entanglement. Grosz writes: Political activism has addressed itself primarily to a reconfiguring of the past and a form of justice in the present that redresses or rectifies the harms of

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the past. It needs to be augmented with those dreams of the future that make its projects endless, unattainable, ongoing experiments rather than solutions. (Grosz, 2004: 14)

This, then, is where I would situate a critical, decolonial education beyond the human: experiments with performing the human in as many ways as possible in complex relations to a host of other agencies and entities that are entangled with us. It is a critical pedagogy that never seeks unification or totalization but instead is driven by a desire for experimentation, dispersal, refusal, and ephemeral modes of being and belonging.

Notes  1  Bell and Russell have argued that ‘poststructuralism, as it is taken up within critical pedagogy, tends to reinforce rather than subvert deepseated humanist assumptions about animals and nature by taking for granted the “borders”… that define nature as devalued Other’ (2000: 189).  2  Russell writes: ‘I remain intrigued by who retains membership in the “and so forth” category. Who does not quite make it into the lists of those silenced Others deserving to be heard?’ (2005: 434). There are no easy answers here, except to say that my list in-text is incomplete, and open to reconfiguration/extension.  3  See also Simpson’s ‘Land as Pedagogy’, where she argues that we need ‘not just striving for land-based pedagogies. The land must once again become pedagogy’ (2014: 14). 4  Tuck and Yang write: ‘Settler colonialism [practiced throughout the Americas] is different from other forms of colonialism in that settlers come with the intention of making a new home on the land, a homemaking that insists on settler sovereignty over all things in their new domain … Within settler colonialism, the most important concern is land/water/air/subterranean earth’ (2012: 5).  5  Russell notes that ‘even though Haraway’s (1991) ideas about “situated knowledges” and “partial perspectives” have gained considerable currency in feminist poststructuralist approaches to education, there has been surprisingly little engagement with the desire expressed in that article and in her other writings for “learning to converse”

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(p. 201) with the world beyond humans’ (Russell, 2005: 434).  6  For critiques of autopoeisis, see Shaviro (2014) and Haraway (2016).  7  This includes thinking about the nonhuman animals who are directly involved in life in schools, mostly on the condition that they are dead. See Pedersen (2009) and Truman (2016).

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Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. New York: Routledge. Chen, M. Y. (2013). Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Clough, P. (with J. Halley), Eds. (2007). The affective turn: Theorizing the social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Coole, D. & Frost, S., Eds. (2010). New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Coulthard, G. S. (2014). Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deckha, M. (2012). Toward a postcolonial, posthumanist feminist theory: Centralizing race and culture in feminist work on nonhuman animals. Hypatia 27(3): 527–545. Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering?: Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review 59(3): 297–324. Emdin, C. (2016). For white folks who teach in the hood…and the rest of y’all too: Reality pedagogy and urban education. Boston: Beacon Press. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Frost, S. (2016). Biocultural creatures: Toward a new theory of the human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gordon, A. F. (1997). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Grande, S. (2004). Red pedagogy: Native American social and political thought. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Gregg, M. & Seigworth, G. J., Eds. (2010). The affect theory reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grosz, E. (2004). The nick of time: Politics, evolution, and the untimely. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Halberstam, J. & Livingston, I., Eds. (1995). Posthuman bodies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Harman, G. (2002). Tool-Being: Heidegger and the metaphysics of objects. Chicago: Open Court. Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. New York: University of Chicago Press. hooks, b. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. Boston: South End Press. Kohn, E. (2013). How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Luciano, D. & Chen, M. Y. (2015). Introduction: Has the queer ever been human? GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21(2–3): 183–207. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nyong’o, T. (2009). The amalgamation waltz: Race, performance, and the ruses of memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nyong’o, T. (2015). Little monsters: Race, sovereignty, and queer inhumanism in Beasts of the Southern Wild. GLQ 21(2–3): 249–272. Pedersen, H. (2009). Animals in schools: Processes and strategies in human-animal education. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Protevi, J. (2009). Political affect: Connecting the social and the somatic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Russell, C. L. (2005). ‘Whoever does not write is written’: The role of ‘nature’ in post–post approaches to environmental education research. Environmental Education Research 11(4): 433–443. Russell, C. & Semenko, K. (2016). We take ‘cow’ as a compliment: Fattening humane, environmental, and social justice education. In E. Cameron & C. Russell (Eds.), The fat pedagogy reader: Challenging weight-based oppression through critical education (pp. 211–220). New York: Peter Lang. Shaviro, S. (2014). The universe of things: On speculative realism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sheldon, R. (2015). Form/matter/chora: Objectoriented ontology and feminist new materialism. In R. Grusin (Ed.), The nonhuman turn (pp. 193–222). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Simpson, L. B. (2014). Land as pedagogy: ­Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3(3): 1–25. Smith, M. (2011). Against ecological sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Snaza, N. & Sonu, D. (2016). Bodies, borders, and the politics of attention. In N. Snaza, D. Sonu, S. E. Truman, & Z. Zaliwska (Eds.), Pedagogical matters: New materialisms and curriculum studies (pp. 29–42). New York: Peter Lang. Snaza, N. & Weaver, J. A., Eds. (2014). Posthumanism and educational research. New York: Routledge. Truman, S. E. (2016). School sucks for nonhuman animals. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 13(1): 38–40. Tuck, E. & McKenzie, M. (2015). Place in research. New York: Routledge. Tuck, E. & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1(1): 1–40.

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Wanzo, R. (2015). The deadly fight over feelings. Feminist Studies 41(1): 226–231. Warner, M. (2005). Publics and counterpublics. New York: Zone Books. Watkins, M. (2010). Desiring recognition, accumulating affect. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds), The affect theory reader (pp. 269–285). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Weheliye, A. (2014). Habeas viscus: Racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wolfe, C. (2009). What is posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – an argument. CR: The New Centennial Review 3(3): 257–337. Young, H. B. (2006). Haunting capital: Memory, text, and the black diasporic body. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth University Press.

23 Intersecting Critical Pedagogies to Counter Coloniality C a t h r y n Te a s l e y a n d A l a n a B u t l e r

Influential critical analyses of the material and cultural legacies of colonialism have come to serve as catalysts for counter-hegemonic thought and mobilisations against racism, inequity and what has been referred to as coloniality (Mignolo, 2002, 2007; Quijano, 2007, 2014), or the enduring and constantly evolving racist, classist and sexist effects of (neo)colonial modes of domination, oppression and epistemic injustice (see also Battiste, 2013; Santos, 2014/2017 or Torres Santomé, 2017). Within the field of education, a growing number of public intellectuals1 have committed to transforming education into a more just endeavour by steadily incorporating anti-colonial, postcolonial or decolonial perspectives into their critical pedagogical praxis of researching, writing, teaching and mobilising. This heterogeneous assemblage of educators, whose origins and identities may or may not stem from historically (and, in some cases, recently) colonised peoples around the world, has traditionally found inspiration in a corpus

of European social theory rooted primarily in the cultural Marxism of Antonio Gramsci (1971/1999) and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (Horkheimer, 1982), a point of reference which is also present in another important source: the liberation pedagogy of Brazilian theorist and educator Paulo Freire (1970). Beyond these sources, critical educationists have further drawn from radical and intersectional feminism;2 critical race theory (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Taylor, 2017); and post-structural theory, including Michel Foucault’s (1969/1972) genealogical analysis of power, or queer theory, as developed, for example, by Judith Butler (1990). What is often missing from such perspectives, however – as many postcolonial3 and (especially) decolonial4 scholars have pointed out – are voices whose cultural and epistemological frames of reference are not necessarily located in, generated from, or centred on life in ‘the West’. This is why Indian decolonial feminist scholar Chandra T. Mohanty wrote the following about ‘the commodification and

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domestication of Third World people in the academy’ (2003: 217): The sort of difference that is acknowledged and engaged has fundamental significance for the decolonization of educational practices. Similarly, the point is not simply that one should have a voice; the more crucial question concerns the sort of voice one comes to have as the result of one’s location, both as an individual and as part of collectives. (Mohanty, 2003: 216)

It is why Ochy Curiel (2007) researches the perspectives of critical Black (and Black lesbian) feminists from her native Dominican Republic and other Latin American countries. It is why Argentine feminist María Lugones (2008) finds ‘coloniality’ more revealing than ‘intersectionality’ for analysing the marginalisation of othered voices within feminist studies – voices that do not meet the White, Western/Northern, hetero-normative, Englishspeaking standard that affords greater access to a broad academic readership. It is also why Portuguese decolonial scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014/2017) calls for a ‘sociology of absences’ for, as he points out, the resounding perspectivial and epistemological absences in dominant research and development, in the mass media, in history books and in textbooks, do not occur on their own; they are actively produced. True to Freire’s (1970) project of conscientização (critical consciousness-raising), more and more critical scholars and educators today are consequently contemplating social and epistemic injustices from subaltern5 standpoints emerging from the Global South and its diaspora,6 as well as from the so-called Fourth World (Manuel and Polsuns, 1974) in the Global North,7 in which a disproportionately high percentage of Indigenous, Black and Brown people8 find themselves merely subsisting within otherwise wealthy countries. These perspectives highlight the need to re-situate, nuance and challenge the Eurocentric premises and applications of critical theory within the sphere of education. In this chapter we argue that such efforts have

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generally enriched and strengthened rather than detracted from the transformative potential of what some authors refer to as critical pedagogy,9 while others prefer the term critical education.10 Aided by the alternative standpoints described herein, we examine coloniality for its imbrications around the world in local, global and glocal social relations and educational policies and realities, and the role critical pedagogy/education can play in countering its ongoing dehumanising effects.

CONTESTING COLONIALITY: SEMINAL WORKS Before embarking on that task, however, some preliminary clarifications are in order concerning the focus on coloniality and the terminology used to represent the struggles against it. Some readers may at first question the relevance of addressing issues related to colonialism per se if, as social geographer Joanne Sharp (2009) rightly asserts, by the mid 20th century, there were virtually no peoples or places left in the world to ‘discover’ or ‘conquer’ by sheer, external, imperial force. Nonetheless, the military, political and settler invasions and occupations of territories and peoples through de jure (legally and administratively legitimised) colonisation came to a formal end in the 1960s, having ostensibly been abolished as such by the United Nations (UN) Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples of 1960.11 The fact remains, however, that while officially sanctioned forms of colonialism no longer enjoy legitimacy – although exceptions to this rule do exist12 – other more tacit and insidious neocolonial means, such as coloniality, live on. Coloniality transcends colonialism to the extent that it embodies and propagates the multifarious (cultural, economic and political) legacies of historic colonial rule. As defined by Aníbal Quijano, coloniality:

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[…] is one of the constitutive and specific elements of the world pattern of capitalist power. It is founded on the imposition of a racial/ethnic classification of the world population as a cornerstone of said pattern of power and operates in each of the material and subjective planes, arenas and dimensions of everyday life and on a social scale. (Quijano, 2014: 67)13

We argue that tackling coloniality through education constitutes an essential undertaking in the struggle to promote anti-racist, antisexist, cross-cultural and socio-­economic justice throughout the world. And there are at least three overlapping epistemological approaches to denouncing and resisting the racism, classism, sexism and other forms of oppression and violence so inherent to the universalist aspirations of the Western/modern project of coloniality; these three approaches include anti-colonial, postcolonial and decolonial currents of analysis. Such strategies of resistance are explored in this chapter, especially at the points where they converge through educational and scholarly pursuits. And while it would prove futile to attempt to draw any clear and solid epistemological boundaries between these three currents (because they coincide in so many ways, as we shall see), some distinctions can indeed be identified. Another aim, then, is to shed light on why and how the various prefixes (anti-, post- and de-) came into existence in the first place, and to identify the convergences and divergences among them in order to forge a critical pedagogical praxis capable of countering the neocolonial forces of racism, neoliberal capitalism and patriarchy so characteristic of the dominant world-system (Wallerstein, 2009) of our times.

Anti-Colonial Studies The first of the three major currents mentioned above is largely composed of anticolonial theories and projects, which are conveyed through a body of literature initially produced under de jure colonialism and

apartheid, mostly by African, Afro-Caribbean and African American intellectuals and activists who were strongly influenced by Marxism and critical theory. Classic works from this line of thought include Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery (1944/1994); Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le Colonialisme (1950 [Discourse on Colonialism, 2000]); Frantz Fanon’s Peau Noir, Masques Blancs (1952 [Black Skin, White Masks, 2007]) as well as his Les Damnés de la Terre (1961 [The Wretched of the Earth, 1963]); or Albert Memmi’s Portrait du Colonisé précédé du Colonisateur (1957 [The Colonizer and the Colonized, 1991]); among various other foundational texts.14 These lucid analysts of the devastating and lasting psychological, socio-cultural, economic and political effects of the racist institutions of slavery and colonialism influenced Paulo Freire’s ground-breaking reflections on education in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). In this text – which serves as a cornerstone of critical pedagogy – he refers to Memmi’s term surenchère colonisatrice (1957: 25) or the ‘colonized mentality’ (as cited in Freire, 1970: 49), as one that is echoed in Fanon’s (1961) observations on the mental obstacles to resisting colonialism. Freire writes: Submerged in reality, the oppressed cannot perceive clearly the ‘order’ which serves the interests of the oppressors whose image they have internalized. […] Self-depreciation is another characteristic of the oppressed, which derives from their internalization of the opinion the oppressors hold of them. (Freire, 1970: 62–3)

Decades earlier, Afro-Caribbean statesman and historian Eric Williams (1944/1994) presented one of the most revealing critical analyses of how the slave trade actually died out, Williams finding it to be much more a question of economics than of social justice: The commercial capitalism of the eighteenth century developed the wealth of Europe by means of slavery and monopoly. But in so doing it helped to create the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century, which turned round and destroyed the

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power of commercial capitalism, slavery, and all its works. […] Even the great mass movements, and the antislavery mass movement was one of the greatest of these, show a curious affinity with the rise and development of new interests and the necessity of the destruction of the old. (Williams, 1944/1994: 210–11)

Overall, these inspirational thinkers from both the Global South and the racialised and colonised North put into much needed perspective the lasting damage to the other largest part of humanity caused by colonialism. As Frantz Fanon (1952, 1961) famously argued, colonialism cast people into two totalising and racialised categories: that of the colonisers, whose humanity would always be fully recognised by the powers that be, and that of the colonised, whose humanity would never be fully recognised by those same powers, nor even by many of the colonised themselves. Such was, and in so many ways still is, the depth of the damage.

Postcolonial Studies A second current pertains to postcolonial viewpoints, the majority of which are advanced by diasporic cultural studies scholars with ethnic origins or ties to countries once colonised (primarily, but not only) by the British Empire. These theorists tend to reside and work in the Global North, write in English and draw from postmodern and post-structural theory. They are generally focussed on destabilising essentialised and biased conceptualisations of identity and subjectivity, and aim to promote the idea that cultural/ethnic/racial hybridity, as well as cross-culturally filtered forms of interpretation and representation, are tantamount to the human condition. They consider these epistemological and ontological perspectives to be a key part of forging antiracist, inclusive and cohesive social organisation, and while their emphasis remains on a cultural plane of analysis, structural injustices work their way in through their intersection with racism, ethnocentrism and sexism.15

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Some noteworthy examples of the postcolonial corpus can be found, for instance, in Palestinian scholar Edward Said’s magistral works, the two most influential of which are Orientalism (1978/2003) and Culture and Imperialism (1993). Said’s short definition of Orientalism reads as ‘a Western [discursive] style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (1978/2003: 3), and as a means of securing and prolonging Western superiority (that is, coloniality) vis-à-vis the Arab and Muslim world after de jure colonialism faded. To counter the onesided depictions and truisms of Orientalists, Said recommended applying ‘contrapuntal analysis’ (1993: 18) consisting not in replacing one grand narrative with another supposedly more accurate and inclusive one, but in forging counternarratives that challenge and disrupt the hegemony of such representations, much as a musical movement in counterpoint juxtaposes two melodies, this duality affecting the quality and impact of the overall movement. The postcolonial was also forcefully conveyed in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s highly influential essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988), in which she critiqued Western poststructural theorists such as Foucault or Deleuze for their de-contextualised representations of epistemic violence associated with subaltern others whose historical/geographical/cultural situatedness, social class, gender and subjectivities were systematically distorted or overlooked in their analyses. Spivak noted: ‘If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow’ (1988: 287). In a now classic study of cultural hybridity, interpretation and representation, Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994) resonates with both Spivak and Said when referring to Fanon’s ability to unmask Western modernity itself as a racist colonial project: [A]s much as he writes in ‘The fact of Blackness’ about the temporality of modernity within which the figure of the ‘human’ comes to be authorized[,]

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[i]t is Fanon’s temporality of emergence – his sense of the belatedness of the black man – that does not simply make the question of ontology inappropriate for black identity, but somehow impossible for the very understanding of humanity in the world of modernity. (Spivak, 1994: 236–7, emphases in original)

In other words, given that the modern concept itself of ontology – on being – was advanced from an understanding of humanity that excluded Black and Brown people, Fanon questioned and even rejected its potential for making sense of human existence.

Decolonial Studies A third current comprises decolonial perspectives and mobilisations that promote alternatives to Western and modern universalist moulds for knowing, being and power relations among peoples and with nature (Grosfoguel, 2013; Mignolo, 2002, 2007; Quijano, 2007, 2014). According to South African scholar Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2016), decoloniality, as well as a ‘critical decolonial ethics of liberation’ (2016: xvi), differ from postcolonial perspectives in that the former dig further back through history to contextualise today’s racial injustices and coloniality. For instance, from the 15th century onwards, Europeans came to invade and occupy distant lands in unprecedented ways, and to oppress the peoples of those lands. Those were the times of Columbus’ invasion of the Americas and the onset of the slave trade. Postcolonial writers, on the other hand, tend to focus more on the British imperial footprint across the globe. Moreover, while postcolonial scholars prioritise denouncing metanarratives and ideological dogma, ‘decoloniality seeks to attain a decolonized and de-imperialized world in which new pluriversal humanity is possible. Postcolonialism is part of a “critique of modernity within modernity”’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2016: 49). Honduran decolonial feminist Breny Mendoza (2016) has also noted that postcolonial scholarship has not been as receptive

to intersectional and anti-colonial feminist thought as have salient decolonial thinkers such as Argentine theorists María Lugones (2008) or Walter Mignolo (2002, 2007), who have drawn on the early border thinking of Chicana lesbian writer Gloria Anzaldúa (1987/1999). Anzaldúa’s work represents an intellectual and poetic contemplation on the hybridity of cultural identities and how they may constitute invisible borders. Foregrounding her work is a response to Eurocentric hegemonic norms and a critique of coloniality with its vast domination of geographic, epistemic and psychological space. Another decolonial scholar, Ramón Grosfoguel (2013), of Puerto Rican origins, has also approached Western patriarchy and domination through the critical lens of coloniality, depicting four ‘genocides/epistemicides’ of modernity that started in the 16th century and include the cruel and fatal persecution of powerful women (North and South) through witch-hunts, as well as the systematic dehumanisation and oppression of three additional collectives: the Iberian Muslim and Jewish populations who were brutally repressed and banished during and after the Spanish Catholic monarchs’ conquest of the al-Ándalus in the 15th century; Indigenous peoples around the world who have suffered sweeping genocide campaigns; and the mass enslavement and displacement of African peoples. These tremendously violent historical undertakings in turn led to the epistemic and material privileging of ‘Western Man’ (Grosfoguel, 2013: 86) and his structures of power and knowledge. That said, most of these Southern theorists find inspiration in the prolific and illuminating (albeit rarely translated) works of Argentine-Mexican decolonial philosopher Enrique Dussel. He defines his ‘ethics of liberation’ (see, e.g., Dussel, 2013a, 2013b) as ‘transmodern’ (2013a) in nature because it offers an alternative to the falsely universal extension of Eurocentric modern epistemological and ontological thought, values and practices to peoples who, from the very

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start, were excluded from or oppressed by that same project of modernity. Dussel thus suggests that by uncovering the ‘pluriverse’ (2013b) of human conditions, many alternative paths towards ‘transmodernity’ can be forged. In fact, many other decolonial theorists have emerged from Latin American and/ or Indigenous experiences with, and analyses of, (neo)colonial occupation, exploitation, extraction and ‘development’ (see e.g., Doxtater, 2004; Escobar, 2011, 2018; Shiva, 1997; Smith, 1999; Ticona Alejo et al., 2011; Tuck and Yang, 2012). While their gaze extends back to the birth of the modern age in 1492, they highlight the ongoing significance of apprehending that historical turning point in order to decolonise its lasting effects on the structures and operations of power and knowing in today’s world.16 In her now classic Decolonizing Method­ ologies (1999), New Zealand researcher of Maori descent Linda Tuhiwai Smith presents a critique of Western research methodologies and, in particular, research practices that harm Indigenous populations through extraction and misrepresentation. She argues that many social science disciplines, such as anthropology, are grounded in relations between the coloniser and the colonised. These unequal relations of power shape the research products and relegate the colonised subject to the margins. In a similar but broader sense, Indian decolonial scientist and ecofeminist Vandana Shiva (1997) has advanced the notion of ‘biopiracy’ or the neocolonial extraction and seizure of both local knowledge and natural resources under the banner of scientific investigation and ‘development’. Analysing the situation of Indigenous nations subject to US cultural, political, legal and economic impositions, anthropologist Audra Simpson (2014) problematises the notion of postcoloniality as she argues that existing governance and treaties serve to re-colonise Indigenous people through everyday activities and structural constraints. The treaty represents codified European dominance over the Indigenous other, who is

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situated both historically and presently. The legitimacy of such treaty arrangements is seldom questioned, and their legality is affirmed by the logics of technical rationality. Simpson (2014) notes that global Indigenous populations face similar challenges related to the legality of land seizure within (neo)colonial frameworks that legitimise such practices. Simpson’s perspectives run parallel to those of Indigenous scholar Eve Tuck, who understands decolonisation as something much more than the mere decolonisation of discourse, which represents the ‘metaphorisation’ of decolonial work (Tuck and Yang, 2012). That is, by focussing primarily on the North American context of settler colonialism – where the colonisers arrived to stay, and have long occupied Indigenous lands – Tuck and colleagues denounce the fact that much of socalled decolonial scholarship evades the main objective of decolonisation in the context of settler colonialism: that of repatriation of Indigenous land and life. We will address this perspective in greater detail in the next section, where we explore the ways in which many critical researchers and practitioners of education are responding to these injustices through their own intellectual work.

ANTI-COLONIAL, POSTCOLONIAL AND DECOLONIAL THEORY IN EDUCATIONAL STUDIES The destiny of a people is intricately bound to the way its children are educated. Education is the transmission of cultural DNA from one generation to the next. It shapes the language and pathways of thinking, the contours of character and values, the social skills and creative potential of the individual. It determines the productive skills of a people. (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1996: 404)

Scholars in the field of education studies have engaged with anti-colonial, postcolonial and decolonial theories through problematics related to intersectional identity, alterity, recognition, representation and power, and the

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equitable redistribution of social goods (social and epistemic justice). These general themes are addressed through scholarship on Indigenous knowledge systems; African Indigenous thought; research on democracy and citizenship; diasporic, migrant, subordinated and/or racialised others; and on the neocolonial dynamics of power and oppression (domination, occupation, exploitation, discrimination, subordination, exclusion) vis-à-vis resistance, transformation and emancipation through education. Coloniality being transversal in nature, and education being an interdisciplinary field, scholars aiming to reveal, denounce, intercede and counteract the ongoing violence produced by coloniality strive to integrate history, political theory, philosophy, sociology, economics, linguistics, literary studies and lived experience in their analyses. This section will focus on two major areas influenced by anti-/post/ de/colonial theory in education: epistemic justice for subaltern peoples and decolonising critical pedagogy/education.

frameworks in schooling. She observes that efforts in the past three decades to increase the population of Indigenous students in postsecondary or tertiary education are nonetheless counterbalanced by the ideology that undergirds most Western post-secondary curricula: the fact that Eurocentric knowledges are considered universal and essential for everyone. This ‘cognitive assimilation’, as Battiste (2013: 136) terms it, is implicitly fostered throughout the West by its canon of scholarly literature. For Battiste, then, to decolonise education is to restore Indigenous (epistemic and ontological) ecologies. Elaine Coburn (2016), feminist scholar specialising in international studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, contends that Indigenous studies and scholarship remain segregated through divisions of academic labour in most institutions. The scholarly fields of study that constitute ‘ethnic studies’, ‘gender studies’ and ‘Indigenous studies’ are spatially and ideologically marginalised from mainstream academic discourses. Attending to the colonial history of Canada and its role in the dispossession of its First Peoples, Coburn (2016) cites the work Epistemic Justice and Indigenous, of Indigenous scholars, observing that coloDiasporic or Racialised ‘Others’ in nial relationships of superiority and inferiorEducation ity shape contemporary discourses around Indigenous scholars in educational studies Indigenous relationships with systems of regard colonialism as a violent form of oppreseducation, justice, social services and health. sion that has led to both biological and culShe also asserts that many Indigenous people tural genocide on a global scale. For them, are able to resist through resilient practices decolonising education has the moral and that include reclaiming language, history and practical obligation of acknowledging historitraditions denied under (settler) colonialism cal injustices while simultaneously re-­ and residential schooling. examining current systems of power and Sherene Razack (1998/2000) is a postcothought in order to foreground Indigenous lonial feminist educational researcher and epistemologies. For instance, Marie Battiste activist of West Indian descent who examines (2013), education scholar from the Potlotek the relationship between White-settler coloFirst Nation in Nova Scotia, Canada, asserts nialism and Indigenous peoples within the that we must dismantle the historical inequicontext of legal institutions. Razack (2002) ties perpetuated through education that firmly implicates racism and the legacy of resulted in the systemic discrimination against colonialism as causes of Indigenous deaths Indigenous peoples. This long-standing form within custody, as well as the disproportionof injustice is grounded in the transmission of ate number of Indigenous people incarcercollective imperialist and colonial cognitive ated. Paralleling Fanon’s (1952: 6) powerful

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ontological image of the symbolic zone de non-être (zone of non-being) inhabited by the colonised Black body, Razack further maintains that colonial relationships, which are perpetuated through educational systems, are inscribed on the body itself, the Indigenous or racialised body being marked as less human or bestial, while the White-settler bodies represent order and civility. In her more recent work, Razack (2016) has addressed the national crisis around murdered and missing Aboriginal women. As noted earlier, Eve Tuck has honed in on the ongoing violence and multiple manifestations of settler colonialism. Apart from the genocide, epistemicide and ecological disaster tied not only to the White settlers’ historical massacre, dehumanisation, enslavement, displacement and containment of Indigenous peoples, but to the more recent practices of mass sterilisation, criminalisation, subordination and marginalisation – all of which are inextricably linked to the overarching usurpation, occupation and spoliation of Indigenous lands – Tuck and colleagues further expose settler-colonial operations within the field of education, among other fields and spheres of daily life. In reference to educational scholarship, Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández (2013) claim that: even as multiple responses have evolved to counter how curriculum continues to enforce colonization and racism, these responses become refracted and adjusted to be absorbed by the whitestream […] White curriculum scholars re-occupy the ‘spaces’ opened by responses to racism and colonization in the curriculum, such as multiculturalism and critical race theory, absorbing the knowledge, but once again displacing the [Indigenous] bodies out to the margins. (Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013: 73)

This appropriation of decolonial space and discourse by non-Indigenous scholars of education is, once again, a form of colonisation. By this view, the analysis put forth in this very chapter is not exempt from potentially contributing to that process, for as Tuck and Yang contend, ‘the decolonial desires of White, non-White, immigrant, postcolonial,

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and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism’ (2012: 1). Our attempts to decolonise schools, methods and minds, then, can serve as mere metaphors of decolonisation if in the process they marginalise Indigenous scholars and educators and evade the much more unsettling end-goal of decolonising Indigenous lands and lives. Tuck and Yang (2012) acknowledge that there is no easy solution to this ‘incommensurability’, their aim solely being to alert non-Indigenous scholars and educators such as ourselves17 to the possible effects of our respective positionalities and purposes in settler-colonial dynamics, and to advance the cause of Indigenous land and way-of-life decolonisation. Non-Indigenous, diasporic or long-standing subaltern peoples also face ongoing injustices from the legacies of colonialism and actualities of coloniality. Decolonial scholar Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (2014) maintains that education, despite its role in the reproduction of multiple forms of oppression, can also allow students to deconstruct historical relations of power that contribute to systemic violence. Andreotti (2014; Andreotti et al., 2015) has been inspired by Spivak’s (2004) and Santos’ (2014/2017) critiques of collective complicity in the West towards epistemic injustice, as manifested in discursive knowledge production that privileges Eurocentrism. She presents a series of discursive and epistemological frames and questions that may offer a solution to the issue of this complicity in educational studies. We need to decentre our subjectivities in order to expand our conceptualisation of educational thought beyond normative ideologies. The analysis laid out in Andreotti et al. (2015) in their cartography of the ‘violence of modernity’ in higher education focusses on interpretations and practices of decolonisation – as classified into ‘soft-reform space’, ‘radicalreform space’ and ‘beyond-reform space’ – this last space resonating with Dussel’s (2013a) realm of the ‘pluriversal’.

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While not explicitly situated in educational studies, Himani Bannerji (2002, 2011) presents a Marxist-feminist discursive analysis of the language used to reify social relations under the coloniser/colonised binary. Bannerji (2002) argues that embedded in the language referring to immigrants and racialised or ‘visible’ minorities is the encoding of an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ that influences political, social and economic relations of power. This set of colonial social relations has shaped the formation of many nation-states. John Porter has identified this as a ‘vertical mosaic’. In a vertical mosaic, colonised societies position each ethnic group as occupying a place within the hierarchy, the top representing those who are closest to the British or French colonisers. This vertical mosaic has structured ethnic group stratification by influencing the distribution of social status, power and prestige (Porter, 1965/2016). In educational studies, these theories are highly relevant because of the historical and current marginalisation of non-European and Indigenous scholarship. This vertical mosaic influences who may lay claim to citizenship rights, access resources in order to achieve social mobility, and achieve socio-economic and political power. Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe (2014, 2016) contemplates the Western influences in African universities and speculates on the implications of decolonisation. He argues against the contemporary neoliberal frame for higher learning in which university students are regarded as consumers or clients, and acknowledges that the Eurocentric canon present in most global universities tends to normalise colonialism and colonial relationships. Mbembe (2016) asserts that Western epistemologies promote a mind and body dualism that differs from African and other Indigenous thought about the interdependence of all living things. Scientific paradigms that arise out of Western epistemologies foreclose alternative methodologies and invalidate other ways of knowing. Further ontological and epistemological lines of analysis of difference in social

organisation and interpretation, pursued as a means of countering the colonial order of life today, can be found in the work of George J. Sefa Dei (2010, 2011), a critical sociologist of education of Ghanaian descent who is based in Canada and has written prolifically from anti- and decolonial perspectives. He, too, argues that because colonialism is entrenched in quotidian social relationships, drawing from Indigenous philosophies to challenge Descartes’s mind-body dualism represents an important way of countering the oppressive effects of modern thought. By proposing an anti-racist ‘trialectic’ space for ‘dialogic encounter’ where learners of diverse cultural and racial backgrounds can ‘openly work with the body, mind, and spirit/soul interface in critical dialogues about their education’ (Dei and McDermott, 2014: 3), Dei hopes to open up a more just epistemic space. He also discusses the challenges of claiming African Indigeneity as an act of resistance in the face of ongoing colonial efforts that seek to erase or marginalise African history. As other researchers reviewed in this section have argued, Dei (2011) finds that Indigenous and racialised scholars in the area of educational studies are marginalised by coloniser/colonised relationships in global contexts. Epistemic justice would emerge from methodologies and literature that value their knowledge. Philosophical issues around social cohesion, representation and justice have long occupied a central place in critical pedagogical discourse. Turkish-born American political philosopher Seyla Benhabib (1999) – while not directly addressing coloniality per se – addresses a series of notions around belonging, socio-cultural cohesion and equity, which are also essential crosscurricular concerns to researchers of coloniality in education. Benhabib (1999) situates culture and cultural difference within hegemonic power relations as a symbolic form of identity marker which peoples of varying ethnic identities may organise around to assert power or struggle for recognition. Given that

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such a struggle necessarily involves the challenge of redistribution of societal resources as well, and resonating with Nancy Fraser’s work,18 Benhabib (1999, 2002) contends that, in order to maximise representation and wellbeing within a (modern) polity, recognition of the particular needs and rights of culturally marginalised populations depends on the just redistribution of social goods, and vice versa. However, in her analysis of multiculturalism as a social and political philosophy, Benhabib (1999) raises questions about the legitimacy of assigning lasting or reified group-based cultural identity categories, and draws on Spivak’s (1985/1995) concept of ‘strategic essentialism’ to account for social and political circumstances that may allow individuals to claim allegiance with a particular cultural category, albeit for collective gain. At the same time, however, Benhabib (2002) – and here is where her theory, while aligning more closely with decolonial scholarship, still cannot be considered as such – takes issue with universalism when used to silence or oppress cultural groups who are either in need of or demand particular forms of recognition in order to attain equitable wellbeing within a polity. She thus questions the interpretation and application in France of laïcité, or the secular public sphere. Since 1989, laïcité has served to justify banning the use in public institutions of the Islamic (or culturally customary) veil by female students of North African, Arab, Asian and Muslim descent, thus projecting laïcité beyond its relevance to the secular institution of public schooling itself and onto the othered, racialised, subaltern body. This restricts rather than upholds these women’s human right to religious freedom. In what may at first seem to be a parallel line of argument, Franco-Algerian Indigène and political activist/writer Houria Bouteldja (2016) also sees this ban as responding much more to Islamophobia than to upholding laïcité. But unlike Benhabib, whose answer to this particular manifestation of coloniality is ‘a pluralistically enlightened ethical universalism’ (2002: 36) grounded in the

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episteme of modern democratic thought, Bouteldja aligns much more with Dussel’s (2013b) call to transcend modern thinking by developing the notion of the pluriverse: Bouteldja questions integration, inclusion and social cohesion under coloniality and calls for strategic alliances among subaltern peoples worldwide in order to collectively overcome the racist and gendered cultural/material violence so deeply ingrained in the transnational and neocolonial political economy of modernity with its overarching institutions, such as neoliberal capitalist democracy. Her aim is to forge alternative approaches to the common good through what she calls ‘revolutionary love’. Much as Mohanty in 2003 called for working with White women feminists from wealthy Western countries (the ‘One-Third World’) against the ongoing exploitation and subordination of all women – but especially of the ‘Two-Thirds World’ (poor, Black and Brown) women from the Global South – as perpetuated by ‘capitalist commodity culture and citizenship’ (Mohanty, 2003: 196), Bouteldja calls for working with the White Western ‘Other’ to achieve dignity and emancipation for ‘Us’ (the subaltern): ‘Dignity is […] our capacity to love ourselves and to love that Other […] Dignity? It’s as simple as revolutionary love’ (Bouteldja, 2016:126).

Decolonising Critical Pedagogy and Education Considering that Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) represents a cornerstone of the fields of critical pedagogy and critical education (along with key influences from critical theory, Gramsci (1971/1999) and Marxist analysis), it would be safe to say that critical pedagogy/education has been informed right from the start, if only indirectly through Freire, by the anti-colonial thought of Frantz Fanon (1952, 1961) and Albert Memmi (1957), among others. That said, Tuck and Yang (2012) assert that Freire’s more abstract categories of

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‘oppressor/oppressed’ diluted Fanon’s focus on the colonisers and the colonised, for, as Fanon himself noted: ‘Decolonization never takes place unnoticed’ (cited in Tuck and Yang, 2012: 36). In a complementary line of argument, critical decolonial scholar Catherine Walsh (2013, 2017), who has been based in Ecuador for more than 20 years and at one time worked closely with Freire, has been developing ethical, critical and dignifying forms of resistance to Eurocentric, racist, classist and sexist coloniality through pedagogy. She believes that very-other worlds are best supported through a decolonial pedagogy that we ‘feel-think’ (2017: 43). She points to the Fanon-Freire connection in education, noting that, ‘[b]y advancing a decolonising attitude and a decolonising humanism (Maldonado, 2009: 305), Fanon happened to turn the sociogenic [highlighted by Freire] into a decolonial pedagogy’ (Walsh, 2013: 45).19 These are powerful arguments. None­ theless, Fanon was not an educationist; Freire was. Freire’s early critical engagement with anti-colonial cultural perspectives represented an initial attempt at nuancing the more prominent influences in his pedagogical thought from critical theory and liberation theology. This process in Freire’s thinking at minimum served to introduce decolonial influences into the field of education studies, and to lay the foundations that guide critical pedagogy/education away from absorbing the legacies of coloniality. Freire (1970, 2013) argued that educators can improve the human condition by counteracting the effects of oppression through dialogue, conscientisation (critical reflection) and action. Although he drew from Frankfurt School critical theorists such as Herbert Marcuse (1969), who defended the ideals of radical social change and liberation for the oppressed, at the heart of Freire’s (1970, 2013) pedagogical theory and practice was a struggle for justice for and with the oppressed of his native Brazil, a former colony of Portugal. Freire rejected what he

called the ‘banking’ model of education, which was and still is – now more than ever!20 – oriented towards the transmission of standardised information from teachers to students, as if such information could be objectively absorbed and stored in each student’s brain equally, only to be accumulated and equally retransmitted later ‘with interest’, just as an economic investment can yield gains at a future date. Freire claimed that critical reflection on practice involves a dynamic between ‘doing’ and ‘reflecting on doing’, and that educators following these principles must examine critically the conditions and causes of oppression. Importantly, he also argued that the purpose of education was not to integrate the oppressed into the structures of oppression, but to transform the oppressive structure itself (Freire, 1970, 2013), an idea that has also been expressed, as we have seen, by Dussel (2013a), Bouteldja (2016), Andreotti et  al. (2015), Dei (2011) and a growing number of other researchers. During Freire’s political exile from Brazil and his academic career in the United States, his ideas were rapidly absorbed by critical educators coming from marginalised backgrounds, especially in terms of race, ethnicity or social class. For instance, North American critical educational researcher Henry Giroux (1988, 2011) was highly influenced by direct contact with Freire early in his academic career. For Giroux, Freire’s pedagogy spoke better than anyone else’s to Giroux’s working-class background. He thus attributes his commitment to critical pedagogy to Freire, and has long argued that a political framework that examines power, systemic cultural violence and social justice should shape education in the United States. Other wellknown researchers and educators of critical pedagogy (McLaren and Kincheloe, 2007) and critical education (Apple and Au, 2014; Apple and Buras, 2006) recognise Freire’s influence in their own work. For instance, Apple and Buras note: ‘Paulo Freire (1993) early understood the liberating potential of

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viewing the world from the vantage point of those living on the margins’ (2006: 31). Nonetheless, it is in bell hooks’ and Antonia Darder’s publications that Freirean thought comes to be ‘translated’ in ways that make it highly relevant to the Fourth World within the North/West, and to anti-racist education. African American critical educator and feminist writer bell hooks dedicates a chapter to Freire in Teaching to Transgress, in which she writes: ‘There was this one sentence of Freire’s that became a revolutionary mantra for me: “We cannot enter the struggle as objects in order later to become subjects”’ (1994: 46). She thus notes that teachers and students have possibilities within the educational structure to creatively resist the hegemonic control of institutional power, finding love (like Freire and Bouteldja) to be a crucial part of the practice of freedom. Resistance is an idea that Puerto Rican-American critical pedagogy scholar Antonia Darder also takes up in her anti-racist decolonial writing, including her book Freire and Education, where she conceives of Freire’s teaching critical literacy – that of ‘reading the word and the world’ (2015: 103) – as a decolonising practice. She, too, encourages educators and public intellectuals to ‘launch a liberatory pedagogy of love, anchored in an ongoing commitment to our collective emancipation’ (ibid.: 170). The links between anti-racist, critical and anti-/post/de/colonial pedagogies, then, constitute a space for action. Alastair Bonnett (2000) asserts that the term ‘anti-racism’ is a 20th-century creation that did not appear in regular usage until the 1960s, and we would add that that period coincided with the end of formal colonial structures and the rise of anti-racist leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X or Angela Davis in the United States. Soon thereafter, in the 1970s, the Combahee River Collective was founded by African American queer feminists (Taylor, 2017) who drew from the writings of Angela Davis (1981), bell hooks (1981), Audre Lorde (1984) and other Black and Brown feminists, their work eventually coalescing into what

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is predominantly referred to today as the intersectional analysis of multiple, interconnecting and mutually constituting forms of oppression (Carastathis, 2016; Collins and Bilge, 2016; Crenshaw, 1989; Ng, 1993). As noted earlier, decolonial feminists from the Global South have found inspiration in intersectional thought, although some are currently debating its epistemological viability for the pluriverse (Lugones, 2008; Mendoza, 2016). For instance, María Lugones (2010) and others (see Carastathis, 2016) argue that intersectionality emerged from, and focussed primarily on racialised women of the Global North, which has limited its representability of the plight of the greater majority of subaltern Black, Brown and Indigenous women across the globe. They also contend that the transformative potential of intersectional analysis is disappearing thanks to the White establishment’s appropriation and selective deployment of this conceptual tool. In fact, Indigenous decolonial educationist Sandy Grande takes issue with post-­structural ‘whitestream’ feminism in general, asserting that colonialism itself has been more damaging to Indigenous women than patriarchy, and that ‘feminist pedagogies that merely assert the equality of female power and desire are accomplices to the projects of colonialism and global capitalism’ (2003: 346). Within critical pedagogy and education, however, other anti-racist decolonial scholars, such as Haitian critical pedagogue Pierre Orelus (2013) – who analyses his own and others’ experiences with ‘linguoracism’ (see also Orelus et al., 2016) – find intersectionality to be a powerful analytical tool. What all of these scholars are concerned with is the degree to which racist, Eurocentric and patriarchal practices of dehumanisation have been integral to the formation of structural (economic and institutional) discrimination towards Black and Brown peoples. Decolonial thought on the notion of White discomfort, in Michalinos Zembylas’ words, ‘opens up a realm that situates the pedagogisation of White discomfort within

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the broader decolonising project of disrupting White colonial structures and practices’ (2018: 88). And while anti-/decolonial scholar George Sefa Dei (2000) argues that anti-racism interrogates and seeks to rupture the social power, privilege and dominance accruing to Whiteness, Barbados-born postcolonial educational researcher Cameron McCarthy (2013) draws on the work of Stuart Hall (1992, 1996) to refer to racial identity as a form of contextual performance that is historically, geographically and culturally situated, and suggests that curricular reforms in education that purport to address diversity are achieved within the confines of a technical rationality that isolates knowledge into siloed disciplines, while ‘diversity’ and ‘difference’ have been appropriated to fit neoliberal ends (see also Dimitriadis and McCarthy, 2001; McCarthy and Kenway, 2014). And in Spain, Galizan critical educationist Jurjo Torres Santomé provides a very detailed and eye-opening analysis of what he terms the construction of neoliberal and ‘neocolonial/ colonised’ personalities today (2017: 92). We also find the anti-racist pedagogical work of African American critical education scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings (2014) to be highly relevant to combating coloniality despite her not identifying directly with anti-/ post/decolonial studies per se. Several decades ago, she articulated an educational approach termed ‘culturally relevant pedagogy’ which, when effectively developed and employed in everyday teaching practices in schools, becomes cultural competence in teachers. For Ladson-Billings (2014), this refers to the idea that teachers learn to appreciate and value their students’ and their families’ cultures. Several scholars have extended her work, but it remains informed by critical pedagogy.

CONCLUSION The majority of perspectives presented in this chapter converge to form a clear and

resounding message: that the global project of decolonising education must begin with epistemic justice that decentres Eurocentric hegemonic power relationships by valuing the knowledge production of racialised and Indigenous others (Andreotti et  al., 2015; Emeagwali and Dei, 2014; Mbembe, 2016; Quijano, 2014). Pedagogical goals must also align with non-Eurocentric practices in ways that demonstrate an ethic of care and respect for cultural differences, and an ethic of decolonial emancipation and love, in keeping with Freire, Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Dussel, Bouteldja, hooks, Darder and others. Tuck and Yang’s ‘ethic of incommensurability’ (2012: 1), on the other hand, represents a formidable challenge as a demand for restorative justice, one that nonetheless offers a necessary compass not only to the ‘unfree’, to use Dussel’s (2013a) term, but to the rest of us as well, in undoing a violently imposed historic dispossession. Both authors of these pages are researchers and teacher educators who live to a great extent in diaspora. We strive to decolonise our own thinking and praxis, as well as that produced within the field of critical pedagogy on both sides of the Atlantic. Author bell hooks once wrote about ‘radical openness’ asserting that ‘[t]he will to keep an open mind is the safeguard against any form of doctrinaire thinking’ (2003: 110). This represents another important aim, as does problematising what is taken for granted in education, such as (neo)colonial forms of violence that have become banal – ‘the new normal’: de facto racial segregation through neoliberal education policy (school choice and privatisation schemes) and racist containment through urban planning (Shahjahan, 2011; Torres Santomé, 2017; Tuck and Yang, 2012, Tuck and GaztambideFernández, 2013); growing Islamophobia in the West (Benhabib, 2002; Bouteldja, 2016; Kincheloe et  al., 2010); intensification of meritocratic controls and competition at all levels of education (Apple and Au, 2014; McCarthy and Kenway, 2014); and ongoing

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cultural and epistemic closure and violence (Andreotti, 2014; Battiste, 2013; Coburn, 2016; Dei, 2011; Orelus, 2013; Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013). In keeping with the scholars reviewed in this chapter, we too stand behind the recognition and reaffirmation of cultural difference vis-à-vis the norm/universalism that silences and excludes, and therefore oppresses. We support a healthy dose of strategic essentialism (Spivak, 1988) or ‘identity politics’ inasmuch as they work to dignify and emancipate, and facilitate respect for one’s own difference and therefore for others’ as well. We thus encourage fellow educators to engage critically and dialogically not only with students’ diverse histories and identities but with those of other educators and community members as well, for even the transversal nature of domination and oppression under neoliberal capitalism is inevitably conditioned by coloniality. These are some ways in which we as critical educators can work towards what Dussel has referred to as ‘Freire’s transmodern pedagogy of liberation, by practising “dialogism” – the discursive action of the community of subjects in its struggle for liberation – as a method that allows the unfree to practice their freedom’ (2013a: 318). This is a major goal, as is developing Said’s (1993) contrapuntal analysis, Santos’ (2014/2017) sociology of absences and Mohanty’s cultures of dissent, which ‘must work to create pedagogies of dissent rather than pedagogies of accommodation’ (2003: 217). Intra- and intercultural dialogue informed by such strategies, as well as radical openness (hooks, 2003), revolutionary love (Bouteldja, 2016), radical love (Darder, 2014; hooks, 1994), and forging more equitable projects for collective wellbeing – for example, Sumak Kawsay projects (meaning ‘Good Living’ in Quechua) in Bolivia, Ecuador or Peru (Escobar, 2018) – will help shed light on the intersectional operations of coloniality (racism, sexism, classism, epistemicide, occupation, extraction, subordination and exclusion), and take

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all of us that much closer to the pluriverse of coexistence and interdependence.

Notes  1  Public intellectuals are understood here in the terms proposed by Patricia Hill Collins (2012) or Henry Giroux (1988) as writers, researchers, educators at all levels, cultural workers and mobilisers who reflect in critical ways on social justice and coexistence, thus aiming to influence a broad public through their writings, lectures, debates, teachings, creations and mobilisations. We perceive the knowledge they produce as neither objective nor universally applicable, for it is always subjectively, geographically and socio-­ culturally situated and embodied – this in keeping with Patricia Hill Collins’ (2012) description of the public intellectual.  2  Especially Collins and Bilge (2016), Crenshaw (1989), Davis (1981), hooks (1981) and Taylor (2017).  3  See, e.g., Bhabha (1994), Chibber (2013), Dimitriadis and McCarthy (2001), Hall (1992, 1996), McCarthy et al. (2005), Said (1978/2003, 1993), Sharp (2009), Spivak (1988, 2004) or Young (2001).  4  See, e.g. Andreotti (2014), Andreotti et al. (2015), Curiel (2007), Dei and McDermott (2014), Dussel (1977/1985, 2013a, 2013b), Grosfoguel (2013), Lugones (2008), Maldonado-Torres (2007), Mendoza (2016), Mignolo (2002, 2007), Mohanty (2003), Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2016), Orelus et  al. (2016), Quijano (2007, 2014), Santos (2014), Smith (1999).  5  In keeping with Spivak’s (1988, 2004) usage of the term ‘subaltern’ (originally advanced by Gramsci, 1971/1999), it refers here to peoples who are perceived through the (neo)colonial gaze as subordinate or inferior others, or as outsiders whose alterity is thus dehumanised to various degrees.  6  The Global South transcends the geographical dimension to include the symbolic realm of subaltern existence under domination, which mostly occurs in the poorer countries of the southern hemisphere, but does also occur in wealthy countries, especially where Indigenous, immigrant and historically minoritised peoples and nations are concerned. For more information see Santos (2014) or Sharp (2009).  7  The Global North extends to rich countries located in the southern hemisphere as well, such as Australia or New Zealand. On the various forms of coloniality experienced by Indigenous peoples,

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see Andreotti (2014), Andreotti et  al. (2015), Escobar (2011, 2018), Shiva (1997), Smith (1999), Ticona Alejo (2011), Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández (2013), Tuck and Yang (2012), Walsh (2013, 2017) or Zinn (1980).  8  This term has been gaining ascendency in English-language discourse devoted to antiracism. See, e.g., Collins and Bilge (2016), or the on-line campaign ‘Black and Brown People Vote’ (B&BPV) for the 2016 elections in the United States, available at: https://www.in diegogo.com/projects/black-and-brown-peoplevote#/ (accessed 6 October, 2019).  9  See Bartolomé (2007), Darder (2015), Darder et al. (2016, 2017), Giroux (1988, 2011), Kincheloe (2008), McLaren & Kincheloe (2007), Orelus & Brock (2015).  10  See Apple et al. (2011), Apple and Buras (2006), Apple and Au (2014), Dei (2011) or Dei and McDermott (2014).  11  See the United Nations Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, at http://legal.un.org/avl/ha/dicc/dicc. html (retrieved 12/11/2017).  12  For example, the lands originally allocated by the British Empire to the Palestinian people under UN Resolution 181 of 1947 have since been steadily encroached upon by Israeli settlers protected by the Israeli military.  13  This and all subsequent translations of Spanish or Portuguese citations are by Cathryn Teasley. The original citation reads in Spanish as follows: ‘[…] uno de los elementos constitutivos y específicos del patrón mundial de poder capitalista. Se funda en la imposición de una clasificación racial/étnica de la población del mundo como piedra angular de dicho patrón de poder y opera en cada uno de los planos, ámbitos y dimensiones, materiales y subjetivos, de la existencia cotidiana y a escala social’.  14  See for instance: W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Africa in Battle Against Colonialism, Racialism, Imperialism (1960); Amílcar Cabral’s (1970) National Liberation and Culture; Chinweizu’s (1975) seldom cited The West and the Rest of Us; or Ngu gi wa Thiong’o’s (1986) Decolonizing the Mind.  15  See Chibber (2013) or Young (2001) for critical overviews of this scholarship. See also Dimitriadis and McCarthy (2001), Escobar (2011), Hall (1992, 1996), Kumar (2006), McCarthy (2013) or McCarthy et al. (2005, 2014).  16  Other decolonial authors coming from fields beyond that of education would include: Maldonado-Torres (2007), Mohanty (2003), Santos (2014) or wa Thiong’o (1986), among many others.

 17  Cathryn Teasley is a Californian of Anglo-Italian extract who has been living in the Galizan Autonomous Community of Spain since 1991, where she works as Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of A Coruña. Alana Butler is an African Canadian Assistant Professor at Queen’s University who is currently residing in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.  18  See Fraser (2010) for an overview of her own work on recognition, redistribution and representation.  19  This is a translation of the following citation published in the Spanish: ‘Al avanzar una “actitud decolonizadora” y un “humanismo decolonizador” (Maldonado, 2009: 305), Fanon hace de la sociogenia una suerte de pedagogía decolonial […]’  20  The recently elected extreme-right President of Brazil, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, has publically condemned, and is attempting to censor, all of Paulo Freire’s scholarship in Brazil (Otras Voces en Educación, 2018).

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24 Locating Black Life within Colonial Modernity: Decolonial Notes Marlon Simmons

For some time now, the decolonial question has been on the pens of certain scholars (Césaire, 1972; Davies, 2008; Fanon, 1963). Within these sensibilities, Blackness endured a precarious relationship with modernity, one lived and made durable through particular sociomaterial enactments, well calcified by way of colonization. Drawing from this relationship, I am curious about how a sociomaterial history of Blackness might contribute to understanding the contemporaneity of Black life, sovereignty, land, and the role of language regarding place. My purpose in writing is to sift through the flotsam of modernity, to understand how emergent relationships within Black life come to make possible sociomaterialized theoretical enactments through the everyday tensions that have typified these relationships. Put another way, I am interested in the circumstances through which Black life comes together, remains whole, although sometimes fragile under historical pressures, to produce public forces constitutive of knowledge, subjectivities, and multiple modes of identification

which come to be organized through a digitized politics of relations in material forms. I am curious about the doing of Black life, how acts of love come to be formed (Freire, 1970), how connections with place come to be, and what social networks are formed, dissolved, or made sustainable. How might we come to know forms of Black life as outside the circumscription of Western exceptionalism? At the same time, what do these relationships mean for decolonial enactments? My aim is to understand how to come into conscientization (Freire, 1970, 1985) for the decolonized future, one that tends to the intertextual historical encounters of colonial modernity; an encounter which encumbers the African-Indigeneity of the Diaspora. My concern here is with making sense of the relational experiences of decolonial life, as these experiences have been cryptically shaped and embodied through histories of memory embedded within the African-Diaspora and plantation geographies of enslavement. With this sentiment, my pedagogic hope

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(Freire, 2011) imbues a particular writing cognizant of what places are made possible through colonial modernity, as they come to be racially underpinned through the sociomateriality and epistemic disjunctures of the African Diaspora, simultaneously culminating in a peopling that disrupts the Manichean confines of what it means to be human. Writing through these epistemological curiosities (Freire, 2005), I share some notes I see as necessary for decolonial sense making.

WAYS OF KNOWING THE DECOLONIAL QUESTION As a starting point one might begin to imagine how decolonial as an interpretive framework can offer different peoples a place to make sense of their historical and daily experiences. Imagining how decolonization as a practice, as a way of being, as a way of becoming human helps us to understand ­present-day experiences of Black life through its civil and cultural enactments, can be a complex undertaking. How might decolonization help with reading, tracing, and comprehending coloniality within the concomitant conditions of globalization in ways that we can undo dominant forms of performing citizenship? At the same time, if we are thinking about decolonization as a way of knowing our relational experiences, we ought to be cognizant about how particular forms of knowledge come to be made intelligible within Western educational institutions. How and what fields of knowledge are endowed with privilege and installed with discursive authority? In what ways do we become privileged and simultaneously complicit through these disciplinary educational institutions within the current epoch of globalization? How do we become interspersed within educational institutions of late modernity and simultaneously benefit materially from these vantage points? Given these corollaries, one of the concerns here is with writing from, with, through,

out, and against the academy, that is to say, the tensions of having to write back or be located through some academic or interpretive position, the tensions with experiencing the disciplinary force of having to belong to a particular intellectual genre or tradition. Beyond these tensions are the disciplinary edicts in which the educator becomes accorded and installed through the hallways of institutions with intellectual precedence. Yet these intellectual genres or traditions from which we eloquently write are neither ahistorical, apolitical, neutral, nor innocent. Rather, they come with their own ethical concerns, entangled and bound with discursive currency, represented and positioned through the corridors of educational institutions, as well as the public, with discursive capital. As educators, working ethically to undo these entanglements could be an impossibility. It becomes a meaningful learning task when educators implicate the self by thinking about the ways in which we benefit through this epistemic privileging. I have long spent time working through some of the epistemological questions immanent within decolonial thought to get a sense of the ethics, politics, and implications of doing this work. In particular, and with coming to write this piece, I have had to work through the what and how of the ways in which I enter into decolonization. What sort of mindset and orientation of thought are organizing my decolonization process? In doing so, I think about where and how knowledge resides. What are the ways in which knowledge becomes taxonomized through dissimilar geographic locations? What can we know from differently placed spatiotemporal locations regarding the human, community, and ecological spheres? In thinking through these seemingly mundane questions, I trouble the self, my location as a reservoir for knowing, with the focus on what it means to conceptualize decoloniality through self as method. Yet in coming to name these moments, I recognize the flux, temporality, the uncertainty, and the incommensurability of coming to know; at the same time, I also

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recognize the pedagogical necessity of making sense of the controversies, contradictions, intersections, and imbrications of these historical conversations. To think about decolonial as a way of doing citizenship involves probing historical forms of knowledge systems and unearthing the masked nexus with such conjunctures of religion, race, gender, sexuality, and ablebodied, linguistic and techno-bio-diverse ways of belonging to our planet, as well as the concomitant production of modes of inclusion and exclusion within particular public spheres. It involves making sense of how these constructs of knowledge – through intergenerational memory constituted through land, time, and space relations – and embodiment of knowledge become documented, recovered, and put into practice differently by citizens through variant methods and dynamic processes of immersing and engaging the self with digital technology. Of interest is the making sense of dominant productions of knowledge, as governed through institutional forms of education, and reimagining public spaces for teaching and learning (Giroux, 2011; Kincheloe, 2010). The aim is not necessarily with dismantling educational institutions in the immediate, but rather with undoing systems of knowing about the ways in which dominant knowledge becomes constituted; how particular ways of teaching and learning come to be experienced as the imposition of a determining set of values. I should also mention, with this discussion I am less interested in furnishing or operating calmly in an epistemological system that has historically negated particular peoples from being human and simultaneously expositing certain peoples as being the preferred human. I am more concerned with finding possibilities for understanding different ways of being detached from the tacit practices of complying and rewriting the hegemonic canon of knowledge as installed by Western systems. Instead, might we think of decolonization as a creative force, a creative set of processes that reconsiders

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rewriting the dominant worldviews that have come to govern how we experience what it means to be human, what it means to be a citizen as organized by the nation-state in late modernity (Abdi, 2013; Dei, 2017; Escobar, 2007; Grosfoguel, 2007; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Mignolo, 2014; Quijano, 2007). In probing the swarm of disciplinary discursive strategies embedded within the trope of citizenship we might turn to digital technologies (Browne, 2015) – to consider how digital technologies could help with reimaging the disciplinary terms and conditions of knowing and performing citizenship as installed through the many channels of educational institutions (Freire, 2005, 2001). In that, the nation-state citizen becomes a product of discourses that over time has fossilized and been made to appear as some natural way of being human. Perhaps by unmasking the variegated performativities of citizenship, we can bring to the surface some of the dominant preconditions through which what it means to be human are made possible. Such knowledge is necessary for coming into the different practices of decolonization. Yet in order for citizenship to be made valid by the nationstate, it is always already purposed within a discursive code of conduct. The concern here with decolonization is with knowing how and what sensibilities are made possible when particular technological attachments become cultural signifiers encoded within everyday practices to shape and situate citizenship in the public sphere (Browne, 2015). What aspects of disciplinary forms of power become uncovered through the differential operations of technology? I am suggesting that decolonial ways of knowing allow for an underwriting which interprets how sensibilities of being human come to avow and congruently disavow negotiations within colonial modernity, through embodied polities of the archetype abject human, that of Blackness. Decolonial ways of knowing involve forms of thinking of the world which are relational, constitutive, dialectically contoured through place,

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peoples, and incommensurabilities of becoming (Freire and Macedo, 2001; Freire, 2005). It encompasses historical engagements with Euro-Enlightenment-knowledge constructs that come to situate the sociomaterial terms and conditions of the human within the continuous hegemonic production of colonial modernity. Decolonial ways of knowing involve working through difference; they involve coming to write and dialogue through acts of love, with the pedagogic hope of transformative possibilities to undo hegemonic sociomaterial, incommensurable structures and procedures within colonial public spheres (Freire, 2001, 2011, 1970). In a sense, decolonization concerns understanding how power, questions of belonging, Euro-Enlightenment-knowledge epistemes, and sensibilities of being human come to be enacted and simultaneously circumscribed through the spatial procedures of colonial modernity (Mignolo, 2015). If as a placeholder we were to draw from the sensibility that knowledge becomes socially created through ensuing relationships of practice, as well as what Wynter and Scott (2000) call for – a re-historicization through ethnohistories – then such knowledge becomes provisional for different social imaginaries of being human. What then are the underpinning values and assumptions with one’s situated knowledge, and how do these politically laden enactments become embedded within and inform decolonial approaches? We also need to be cognizant of how such situated knowledge as experienced through historical forms of oppression becomes placed within institutions, simultaneously forming scaffolded relations with ongoing educational typologies (Freire, 1970).

BLACK LIFE, KNOWLEDGE, AND THE TEXT Throughout history, the textbook has played a particular role in determining the qualitative conditions regarding Black life. Textbooks

have been installed institutionally within educational settings, as well as public settings such as libraries and museums, in ways that congeal the past and present to shape narratives of Black life. How is Black life enacted, lived, and made to be remembered through the temporalities of the textbook? What are the ways in which Black life remembers or comes to know the self through the assemblage of Atlantic enslavement as textualized and organized through language, artifacts, and digitized print? How does such a historical assemblage become thought of and tacitly interpreted through Enlightenment narratives? Textbooks give us certain relations with knowing, with remembering Black life, with the becoming of Black life, and how Black life comes to be, giving rise to present questions concerning the role of memory regarding belonging in the context of the nation-state (Freire and Macedo, 2001). In terms of the text, Black life has been written and rewritten in ways that have honed the diminution of belonging outside of Middle Passage coloniality (Wright, 2015). Notably, the archived presence of Black belonging as inscribed through cities, museums, public spaces, stamps, and libraries has in some ways methodically been concealed within state-imbued Euro-Enlightenment epistemes of modernity (Ferreira da Silva, 2015; Lowe, 2015). The result here is the representation of Black life through absence and different frames of inferiority, promulgating limiting conditions onto what it means for Black life to be responsible for their very said humanness. Though colonization set out to portray unbecoming systems of relations regarding what it means to be Black, Black life yielded discernible schemas of sensibilities to think about the colonial forays that bound their determining terms and conditions (Wynter, 2003; Wynter & McKittrick, 2015). These sensibilities congealed to spatially form epistemological Diasporas, and through time became transoceanically sedimented within different Black communities (Wynter, 1997,

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1995a, 1995b). Traversing across geographies and augured through decolonial, anticolonial, antiracism, postcolonial, and cultural studies, within undergraduate and graduate programs in educational research and social inquiry, these epistemological Diasporas could provide sensibilities to think about Black life, futurities of Black life, as well as the becoming and unbecoming of Black life. Such sensibilities ought to be interwoven with a politics that speaks to the Black self in relation to the historical present and shared ways of knowing Middle Passage cartographies. Insofar as Black life emerged from Atlantic enslavement through colonial modernity, it comes to be materialized through multiple instantiations with the world. In that, Black life is very much embedded with global overtones, as augured through a sociogenesis (Fanon, 1967; Wynter, 2001) that configures the social and the material relations of the becoming of Black life in which they are entwined. Black life as inchoate to plantation geographies (McKittrick, 2006), has historically been interconnected to Indigeneity, indentured labourers from Asia, and African peoples through colonizer ­ governmentality (Lowe, 2015; Scott, 1995). Enmeshed in these complex histories are material relations of violence as contoured through resistance narratives, social death, memory, grief, dispossession of land, mourning, hauntings, disenfranchisement – all propertized into ritual enclaves of modernity (Mbembe, 2017). While these enclaves distributed possibilities for becoming through encoded cultural beliefs, Black life imprinted multiplicities of formations to survive colonial apparatuses of civility, citizenship, sovereignty, and being human in these emergent geographies. I am also concerned with what I refer to as the typology of Black life, which I suggest speaks to the spatial, the temporal, and relational interactions as they come to materialize through difference, race, historical memory, place, peoples, and communities, and are made durable through a multiplicity of sensibilities (McDermott & Simmons, 2013).

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At the same time, one must remain mindful of ethical considerations: there exists a particular proclivity to reduce Black life to a singular homogenous read that essentializes belonging to sameness. I am more concerned with the folding and unfolding of Black life in response to existing political entanglements as enabled through their situated environments, be it secured, unstable, or volatile. Underpinning my thinking is the sensibility of conceptually tracing the what, how, and where of Black life, its relatedness and synchronized enactments. This triad presents a complexity of having to unravel how this ongoing relatedness within Black life becomes performed and made durable through particular conditions. Relatedness can also open decolonial approaches to the untold interconnected practices of Black life. It allows for a reading of Black realities to understand social, political, and economic enablement as governed through congeries of indeterminacy, one that notes the distributive effects, sites of attachment, modes of interest, and points of passage, where the becoming of Black life is enacted. As the realities of Black life come to be reshaped through a host of experiences, belonging for Black life as situated through different forms of ontology, variably becomes re-contoured and re-bound, materializing in a sense through different relations distributed through its own politics, its own articulations (Brand, 2001). How then do these politics and articulations, which embody reservoirs of Black life (Mbembe, 2017), become embedded within institutional texts and made durable in contemporary educational settings? How might we imagine what it means to teach and learn through these sensibilities as they become enacted within contemporary classrooms? What I am suggesting is that the Middle Passage, as immanent to the African Diaspora, has provided particular sources for Black life, wherein which, ways of knowing, belonging, cultural enactments, and social growth have come to materialize without some formal articulation or recall of these

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historic-specific sources (Wright, 2015). What emerged though, through different spatial and temporal periodizations of history (Nimako and Willemsen, 2011; Wright, 2015), were theories as peopled through resistance movements regarding Black life, with specific instances to certain geographies, with distinctive characteristics to the territory of the colonial Middle Passage. These resistance movements enmesh the epistemological conduits of theoretical sensibilities embedded within decolonial approaches. Black life drew upon decolonial sensibilities which yielded a peopling, spirituality, modes of thinking, acculturation, and socialities, all curated through communities as vested to ancestral geographies and survival of Middle Passage journeys (Wright, 2015). These communities have found new positionalities within the contemporaneous spheres of existing Euromodernity. Through these positionalities, memories of the Middle Passage became inscribed within Black life, producing histories and resulting in sociomaterial enactments such as images, performances, oral narratives, language, and variant cultural expressions (Iton, 2008; Sharpe, 2016; Wright, 2015; Wynter, 1992). My interest here is with making salient the relationships with Black life and these sociomaterial enactments, and how such relations come to organize the needs of Black peoples in particular instantiations inclusive of possibilities and perils (Simmons, 2011, 2010). What are the experiences of Black life in the present nation-state context, as these experiences draw from knowledge of what it means to be Black through histories of disenfranchisement? What I am suggesting is that Black life always already experiences their worlds through the interstices of the past as traced through events that become implicitly experienced within their governing public spheres. Thus, Black life becomes determined and conditioned through different sets of relations allowing for interconnectivities to the present. We might think through the obligatory points of the Middle Passage to get a sense

of the determining conditions of how Black life comes to understand the self in its contemporaneity – that is, to think of the Middle Passage as being preserved and made durable in the present in ways that actualize Black life. You might say the Middle Passage has all but left us suddenly and quietly, but if we were to think of the historical present of Black life, we begin to notice the folding of regions with vestiges to the Middle Passage (Wright, 2015). For Black life to make claim to these incommensurable practices, as such, involves wittingly or unwittingly being endowed with cultural attachments yielded through Diaspora and modernity alike, with simultaneous recognition of its abject subjectivity within canonized historiographies. Since the colonization of time, the ubiquity of Black life has been concerning. Emerging from this ubiquity were theoretical constructs which responded to the sociomaterial worlds of Black life. For when cultures emerging from the Middle Passage come to recognize forays of subjugation in its continuity, they are then forced to look within themselves, their histories, different ways of being, and modes of resistance and survival, to form inextricable nodes of knowledge and practices that can be situated as theory. Such knowledge and practices specific to particular cultures, time periods, geographies, and generations like the decolonial and anticolonial struggles of the Civil Rights movement and the Haitian Revolution (James, 1993), give us variant ways to understand the situated experiences of Black life and offer possibilities for change that can translate into some material good. For Black lives to compartmentalize or fragment their social realities from historical situatedness might not culminate into some clean extrication from the cryptic assemblages of Atlantic enslavement and Middle Passage determinants. In the everyday context, Black life endures historical colonial texts and digitized images that have formed edicts onto how they come to be and know their existing places within private and social

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settings, as well as public and institutional contexts (Browne, 2015). The upshot is often experienced, I think, through intergenerational modes of communication, as these modes become mediated through tensions of synchronic and diachronic forms of dialogue. In that, given the location of the African Diaspora, Black life comes to know the present as distinct from historical connections, while Black life through other Diasporic loci comes to know the self through particular characteristics of a historical present. Such are the complex entangled incommensurabilites concerning the being of Black life. But yet, the claim to some existence as distinct, disjoint, separate from colonial histories that posit abject modes of being on to Black life, is in and of itself constituted through enactments of remembering relational experiences as immanent to the African Diaspora. A possible outcome for Black peoples, then, is to rewrite their situatedness within particular public spheres to ontologize in some way their modes of being within their existing sociomaterial realities. In a sense, these enactments encompass oral narratives as sedimented within the African Diaspora through language, culture, place, and difference. Faced with these enactments, Black life, well augured within its heterogeneity, undertook a series of transfigurations as accorded through Diasporic conduits of the Middle Passage.

DECOLONIAL THINKING AS A FIELD OF KNOWLEDGE Perhaps we ought to think about how decolonial thought as a field of knowledge has been installed within particular institutions and concomitantly endowed with limiting epistemological plausiblity. To be cognizant about how we make intelligible the vagaries whereby decolonial thought comes to be necessitated in our contemporary epoch or the sociomaterial configurations within

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educational settings. I think collectively in a reflexive manner; some of the necessary decolonial work is with making salient the collaborative roles of educators, social justice activists, subaltern peoples, and the wretched of the earth (Fanon, 1963) in constructing decolonial sensibilities. I am also troubling the politics of knowledge, its location and myriad signals, as well as the varied processes involved in how particular forms of knowledge become embodied and positioned as legitimate and simultaneously institutionalized as ‘Truth’ systems. To me this dialogue also allows for a conscientization of our different subjectivities and relational experiences (Freire, 1970, 1985, 2001, 2005). It allows us to come into decolonial dispositions. In doing so, we can reflexively situate our thoughts in existing public sphere environments, to delineate historical and contemporary gaps with theory and practice concerning decolonial thought, being mindful that coloniality has a particular interest in a thinking that conjures oppression as static, fixed in time, linear, measurable, discontinuous, and remedied through particular state apparatuses inclusive of public sphere conversations, laws, and ad hoc committees. Often coloniality has been reduced to something mythic, as operating in the past, resulting in synchronic markers installed within current conversations about historical oppression. What we have here is a periodization of history that comes to make sense of itself through the governing instantiation of experiences, one which operates by way of discursively re-signifying its terms and conditions to safeguard its own transmission; it is a sociomaterial performative, discursively imbued to typify a practice of knowing which epistemologically guarantees its being. What decolonial approaches give us are ways of knowing the complex and interwoven textualities in which they were fashioned and emerged, with the diachronic capacity of making sense of the sociomaterial spheres that they relentlessly strive to intercede. One of the challenges for those of us willing to

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engage in decolonial work is to recognize the embodied histories immanent within the different decolonial locations, and how such histories come to be determined and represented in the present. At the same time, we also need to recognize how decolonial thinking as a field of knowledge comes to be installed and given particular currency in educational institutions, with the epistemological concern being, – what counts as knowledge? We ought to be cautious, and think of decolonial sensibilities as socially, historically, culturally, and politically situated, embodied and undertaken through a peopling within a particular context for a particular purpose. Such sensibilities demand dignity, respect, and love, which can yield knowledge credence within the canonized project of thought (Freire, 1970). Decolonial thinking has also troubled the politics of knowledge, institutionalized locations of knowledge, its signification practices, as well the varied processes involved in how particular ways of knowing become embodied, endowed, and positioned as singular hegemonic conduits of knowing. Our ways of coming to know have been historically apportioned, compartmentalized, and accessed through textual disjunctures of positivism, post-positivism, and certain theories. Within variant academic communities, and in particular decolonial communities, different forms of epistemic resistance have met these spatiotemporal moments of alternative discursive traditions bringing us, I think, to the place of evidence of knowledge as a particular site of contestation within educational research (Denzin, 2011; Kincheloe, 2010). My thinking on this historical debate on evidence is, in a sense, evidence that speaks to questions of measurability, repeated-verified tests and strategies resulting in a sum relational, rational objective fact that simultaneously purports reliability and validity, which work to organize and inscribe particular institutions and policymakers. Regarding decolonial sensibilities, how then do we posit measurability and repeated-verified tests or strategies onto data that is not readily

accessible or retrievable? How do we posit measurability and verified ways of knowing onto the incommensurability of memory? Hence, in the everyday moment, doing decolonial work involves disentangling from the governing colonial complexity, to instead build creative places in which fruitful dialogue might emerge, giving rise to different acts of love (Freire, 1970). We also need to be cautious when taking into consideration how the interests of the market can unwittingly produce and reproduce the terms and conditions of oppressive educational thought within institutional settings. Institutionalized education that has to meet the interests of markets often results in competition and scaffolding relations of power regarding epistemological content. As Freire (2005) and Freire and Macedo (2001) invite, how might we then take up a social imaginary as imbued through conscientization, which draws on historical narratives to open alternative possibilities that allow one to make sense of cryptic colonial discourses present within the text, classrooms, institutions, and contemporary public spheres? Let us take the example of language and the construction of Canada as a nation-state to make sense of how colonial contours of language come to legitimize enactments of belonging and citizenry, and the ways in which language comes to distribute modes of currency, simultaneously installing social capital for particular peoples – to think about civic participation and which language becomes delegitimized and what particular cultures, peoples, and relational ways of knowing become excluded. I think we also have to be concerned with contemporary questions concerning civic participation, public and private engagements, and what or how decision-making factors come into being regarding decolonial thought, education, and teaching and learning practices as governed within classroom settings. I am suggesting that in taking up a pedagogy of hope (Freire, 2011), decolonial approaches can be a place for social action and educational change.

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BLACK LIFE AND LANDSCAPES OF RELATIONS Often enough, Black life remains embodied through certain polities of relations (Glissant, 2010) in which Black peoples come to participate or take up particular performatives or desires materializing into this hegemonic corporeality of sport, dance, music, fashion, apparel, technology, institutional knowledge, and fixed roles in the media (Iton, 2008; Weheliye, 2002). Inasmuch, these mediating materials come to participate within Black life in generative ways, reflective of community, social stratification, scaffold relations, socialization practices, and oppression and power. Thinking of Black life in this sense allows for a reading that can help with tracing how Black life becomes materially entangled and encumbered through nodal points having diverging and converging forms of variance. My point is that these performatives or desires, as taxonomized through the interests of the market, work to form a cognitive registry, wherein Black life becomes, or is made to be, productive through race-based edicts of plantation geographies which govern the corporeality of Blackness. One might say that to couple Black life through a material positionality unwittingly brings disembodied meanings. What I am trying to do, though, is to bring a type of relational thinking, to say that Black life becomes constituted and is made contingent in complex socialities, wherein which particular artifacts and certain materials come to act as signifiers or meaning-making processes embedded with its own politics, ontologies, and epistemological upbringing. Decolonial thought threads through these sensibilities to make sense of the conditioning of Black life in terms of people and the material as they appear in the quotidian context. The hermeneutic challenge here is with marking and identifying these everyday interactions that are historically signified through colonial vestiges, and how such coloniality comes to fashion Black life. Another challenge for the writing of

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decolonial sense making is with noting the knowledge production schemata and how such schemata become installed within institutional settings. I want to insist that decolonial sensibilities embody the human through a series of knowledge, ethics, values, and cultural beliefs that link onto constellations of material signifiers circumscribing the human within their governing public sphere. To say survival and resistance were integral experiences to people who have been enslaved or oppressed is an understatement to say the least. Having said that, part and parcel of decolonial thinking is with denoting how the situated processes of resistance, ensuing socializing formations, and organizing principles become generative of ways of knowing (Cabral, 2016; Nkrumah, 1970; wa Thiong’o, 1986), which simultaneously become inscribed into heuristic perspectives counterhegemonic to colonial narratives which flood everyday Black life. We ought to be mindful of how this deluge flows through institutions, public memory, and a multiplicity of texts to set in place an arrangement of thought that works to ontologically negate Black life. At the heart of the matter here is the question of power, more so the hidden circuitous performative of power (Foucault, 1980), how narratives come to be written, and what stories of Black life are told through such a performative. How does power come into play when Blackness negotiates their place within cities, institutions, local communities, and the manner in which the terms and conditions of these negotiations come to materialize in particular enactments of demeanor, movement, authorship, and the problematization of everyday concerns of Black life as underpinned through racial classificatory systems. This brings me to the crux of my concerns with Black life and the necessity for decolonization in the context of colonial modernity. Here, I am worried about how Black people assemble and make wholesome the chunks and remnants of the Diaspora which constitute their becoming; how at times within their relational experiences they tacitly mark

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moments as being codified through race, to in turn have this said racial codification transform into a typification that opens a fluid heterogeneous assemblage with linkage to power and self-determination (Davies, 2008; Foster, 2007; Gilroy, 1993; Hall, 2007; Small, 2018; Stephens, 2005; Walcott, 2014). I imagine some sensibilities of decolonial thought are always already empirically grounded within the corporeality of resistance – sensibilities which are contextual, distributive, interwoven with imbrications, relational, incomplete, and contestable. So, consolidation of decolonial thinking as reduced to a singular sealed panacea is less the interest here. Rather, decolonial thinking is unswerving with its politics; it demands social justice and institutionalized enablement of its epistemological recognition involving dissimilar modes of probing. I would be remiss not to say that as emerging through geographically specific social movements, decolonial thinking encompasses a scope of ways of knowing, practices, processes, communicative exchanges, materials, and technologies that traverse through multiple loci. I should also follow up with the idea that this scope is produced by way of events, cultural difference, becoming, resistance, and through a particular set of relations that are made cohesive across variant encumbering, contradictions, and indeterminacy. This, though, is the potential of decolonial thought, the capacity to attend to contingent collations as sequenced through ontological difference, while insisting on civic responsiveness to the experiences immanent to Black life. Decolonial thought is more so concerned with the composition of context and power, emergent relational experiences, and the provisionality of resistance that continuously works through the material orderings constituted by difference and epistemological disjunctures. Black life has an abundance of ontologies, ensconced with colonial entanglements, situated ethics, and political desires historically interwoven through past, present, and

future. These spatiotemporal junctures hint at the capacity of Black life to synthesize with continuity – Diasporic memory as contemporaneously lived. Being interpellated through multiple heritages puts Blackness in a dialogue with its compound life forms, at local and global moments. Here we have diverging and converging social interactions enmeshed through intergenerational memory of Black life. From Black forms of life being governed through histories of disenfranchisement, abject subjectivities and political alienation, we can be attuned to such a traversal, to note how Blackness and the ensuing assemblage of relations come to identify with a sense of self, and make anew life forms amidst the debasing narratives neatly tucked away within the historiographies of colonial modernity. Sociocultural and political alienation of Blackness have this way of presenting themselves in a manner where negation of Black life becomes quotidian, putting in place an attitude, a way of being, one of compliance to hegemonic narratives, that divests from the Black self. To help in dispensing with these narratives, I suggest the following questions: how are nation-state formations of belonging being rendered, and what are the ongoing assumptions, attributes, and qualities being engendered in collective or individualized arrays that are specific to particular cultural histories? What forms of belonging continue to be imagined through particular cultural articulations and gestures? Given the contextual histories, what regulatory, discursive, and material mechanisms were actively deployed to distribute such alienating articulations of Blackness? There is an implicit way in which the hue of the corporeal is conceptualized, made certain, accepted, and becomes an instrument of understanding Black life. Yet hue, as a cognitive instrument, brings forth a materiality that constitutes a mode of subjectification, whereby Black corporeality simultaneously expresses and transmits forms of governmentality onto the self, giving rise to decolonial knowledge where Blackness, as a

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cognitive tool, circumvents the limitations and conditions of possibility for meaning making. What I am suggesting here is that there exists an ontological alterity, historically conditioned through Black life, which, when strategically deployed as a technology of self (Foucault, 1997), can materialize the becoming of Blackness, as well as promote the fashioning of decolonial notes. This also brings us to one of the challenges of decolonial work, that is, having the capacity to form community through certain arrays of leadership, which invites thinking differently about self-determination in the context of sovereignty. I am imagining such decolonial work involves courage concomitant with an ethical and political logic that offers alternative ways of understanding what it means to be human as governed (Mignolo, 2015, 2014) within Black life. Inevitably for Black life, decolonization concerns itself with being human, or should I say working to free the human of the fixed colonial readings producing Blackness. In that, enactments of being human are already codifed through Eurocentric edicts of modernity (Wynter, 2003). Such a reading has been well critiqued by numerous scholars from postcolonial theory, anticolonial frameworks, Black feminist theory, cultural studies, Black studies, queer studies, and decolonial thought. These fields of thought have done well to broach the temporal estrangement which coloniality offers when reading contemporary political landscapes. Prompting discontinuous histories, this temporal estrangement has put into place myriad generational shifts in terms of viewpoints regarding colonization. With recasting Black Life through place, space, and time, through technological embodiment, through difference, decolonial sensitivities invite formations of belonging that make sense of being through the interwoven-ness of power, resilience, and knowledge production. It offers possibilities for different peoples to reimagine and redesign their futures through dialogue and different acts of love (Freire, 1970).

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Freire, P. (2011). Pedagogy of hope: Reliving pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (2005). Teachers as cultural workers: Letters to those who dare teach. Cambridge, MA: Westview. Freire, P. (2001). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Freire, P. (1985). The politics of education: Culture, power and liberation. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. & Macedo, D. (2001). Literacy: Reading the word and the world. London: Routledge. Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Giroux, H. A. (2011). On critical pedagogy. New York: Continuum. Glissant, E. (2010). Poetics of relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Grosfoguel, R. (2007). The epistemic decolonial turn. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 211–223. Hall, S. (2007). The global, the local, and the return of ethnicity. In S. Hall, D. Held, D. Hubert, & K. Thompson (Eds.), Modernity: An introduction to modern societies (pp. 623–629). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Iton, R. (2008). In search of the black fantastic: Politics and popular culture in the post-civil rights era. Oxford: Oxford University Press. James, C. L. R. (1993). American civilization. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Kincheloe, J. L. (2010). Knowledge and critical pedagogy: An introduction. Cham: Springer. Lowe, L. (2015). The intimacies of four continents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being: Contributions to the development of a concept. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 240–270. Mbembe, A. (2017). Critique of black reason. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McDermott, M., & Simmons, M. (2013). Embodiment and the spatialization of race. In G. J. S. Dei & M. Lordan (eds.), Contemporary issues in the sociology of race and ethnicity: A critical reader (pp. 153–168). New York: Peter Lang.

McKittrick, K. (2006). Demonic grounds: Black women and the cartographies of struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mignolo, W. D. (2015). Sylvia Wynter: What does it mean to be human? In K. McKittrick (Ed.), Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis (pp. 106–123). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mignolo, W. D. (2014). Further thoughts on (de)coloniality. In S. Broeck & C. Junker (Eds.), Postcoloniality–decoloniality–black critique: Joints and fissures (pp. 21–51). New York: Campus Verlag. Nimako, K. & Willemsen, G. (2011). The Dutch Atlantic: Slavery, abolition and emancipation. London: Pluto Press. Nkrumah, K. (1970). Consciencism: Philosophy and ideology for decolonization. New York: Modern Reader. Quijano, A. (2007). Coloniality and modernity/ rationality. Cultural Studies, 21(2), 168–178. Scott, D. (1995). Colonial governmentality. Social Text, 43, 191–220. Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: On blackness and being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Simmons, M. (2011). The race to modernity: Understanding culture through the Diasporicself. In N. Wane, A. Kempf, & M. Simmons (Eds.), The politics of cultural knowledge (pp. 37–50). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Simmons, M. (2010). Concerning modernity, the Caribbean Diaspora and embodied alienation: Dialoguing with Fanon to approach an anticolonial politic. In G. J. S. Dei & M. Simmons (Eds.), Fanon and education: Thinking through pedagogical possibilities (pp. 171–189). New York: Peter Lang. Small, S. (2018). Theorizing visibility and vulnerability in Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41(6), 1182–1197. Stephens, M. (2005). Black empire: The masculine global imaginary of Caribbean intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Walcott, R. (2014). The problem of the human: Black ontologies and the ‘coloniality of our being’. In S. Broeck & C. Junker (Eds.), Postcoloniality–decoloniality–black critique: Joints and fissures (pp. 93–105). New York: Campus Verlag.

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wa Thiong’o, N. (1986). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. Oxford: James Currey. Nairobi: EAEP. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Weheliye, A. G. (2002). ‘Feenin’: Posthuman voices in contemporary black popular music. Social Text, 20(2:71), Summer, 21–47. Wright, M. M. (2015). Physics of blackness: Beyond the middle passage epistemology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – an argument. The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337. Wynter, S. (2001). Towards the sociogenic principle: Fanon, identity, the puzzle of conscious experience, and what it is like to be ‘black’. In M. F. Durán-Cogan & A. Gómez-Moriana (Eds.), National identities and socio-political changes in Latin America (pp. 30–66). New York: Routledge. Wynter, S. (1997). Columbus, the ocean blue, and ‘fables that stir the mind’: To reinvent the study of letters. In B. Cowan & J. Humphries (Eds.), Poetics of the Americas: Race,

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founding and textuality (pp. 141–163). Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University. Wynter, S. (1995a). 1492: A new world view. In V. L. Hyatt & R. Nettleford (Eds.), Race, discourse, and the origin of the Americas (pp. 5– 57). Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute. Wynter, S. (1995b). The pope must have been drunk, the king of Castile a madman: Culture as actuality, and the Caribbean rethinking of modernity. In A. Ruprecht & C. Taiana (Eds.), The reordering of culture: Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada in the hood (pp. 17– 41). Ottawa: Carleton University Press. Wynter, S. (1992). Rethinking ‘aesthetics’: Notes towards a deciphering practice. In M. Cham, (Ed.), Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema (pp. 237–279). New Jersey: Africa World Press. Wynter, S. & Mc Kittrick, K. (2015). Unparalleled catastrophe for our species? Or, to give humanness a different future: Conversations. In K. McKittrick (Ed.), Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis (pp. 9–89). Durham: Duke University Press. Wynter, S. & Scott, D. (2000). The re-enchantment of humanism: An interview with Sylvia Wynter. Small Axe, 8 (September), 119–207.

25 Critical Pedagogy and Difference P e t e r P e r i c l e s Tr i f o n a s

The emancipatory impetus of critical pedagogy has risen-up to protect the agency of the subject against what is tantamount to a willful regimentation of a correspondence theory of truth grounding the practice of education; embodying a reaction against the ideological interests of pedagogies that serve to bolster the already well-wrought fetters of social inequality by reproducing already existing power differentials in dominant and marginalized forms of knowledge. Critical pedagogy relates to and originates from within the material domain of discriminatory educational practices constituted by the cultural politics of an exclusionary agenda tending toward the disequalization of subjectivities. Difference in relation to an ‘acceptable norms’ of identity is accorded a pejorative connotation vis-à-vis highly arbitrary criteria of judgment that are based on the problematic categories and their representation, for example, race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and religion. The conscious disenfranchisement of alternate subjectivities

is therefore a reductionistic societal production. Difference comes to be measured in relation to cultural ordinances of aspect conceived as a narrowly defined and fixedly ‘qualitative’ measuring of personal or group ‘characteristics’. The singularity thus subsumed under the overarching structure of a single ‘controlling culture’ has been a key factor for theories of subjectivity attempting to explain the social interpellation of the individual into ‘subject’ (Althusser, 1971). The question of difference thus comes to be elided with the question of the effects of a dominant ideology upon what is selfhood. The liberatory hope of theorizing a critical pedagogy has resided in enabling the subject to free itself of complicity with the onerous symptoms of a false consciousness grounded in representations of diversity and authenticity. And by so doing, the selfhood of subjectivity would be allowed – or at least it would be given the opportunity – to self-consciously reinscribe the meaning of itself in the difference of a newly achieved

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awareness of being-in-the-world. To realize such a thing as ‘a nascent disciplinary trajectory within education that has its roots in Marxian analyses of class’ (McLaren, 1994: 319), critical pedagogy has crafted its methodological arsenal from a selective mixture of first generation Frankfurt School critical theory, Antonio Gramsci’s idea of hegemony resistance to ideology, and Paulo Freire’s dialogic process of conscientization. By questioning the ground of epistemological discourses and the material conditions of cultural objects and practices, it focuses upon contextualizing the basis of the possibilities for social change to bring about a more equitable ‘new-world-picture’ through the renewed agency of the subject. Because the term ‘critical pedagogy’ possesses obvious semantic connotations associated with conceptual analysis, the early interpretations of it were taken to imply a method of pedagogy used to involve students in overtly critical exercises. The adjective ‘critical’ within ‘critical pedagogy’ refers to ‘critical theory’, the Marxist philosophical tract, upon which, its theoretico-methodological ends are founded. Critical theorists, such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, have argued that subjects should strive for social and intellectual emancipation from the circumstance of political and economic domination enshrined by the powers-that-be. Critical pedagogy emulates the urgency of this core Marxian tenet by seeking to maximize the subject’s capacity for a revolutionary move to such a state of freedom through deconstructive/ reconstructive exercises that clarify ideology, and exude the potential for an interpretative plurality within hegemonic discourses by an illumination of the conditions of the oppressive power of the educational institution. The idea of a de-reification of power through a negative critique, or ‘negative dialectics’, aims at de-subjectifying the false consciousness strangling the singularity of self. A deconstruction of the narrative shell of subjective identity is a fundamental step to emancipation from the hegemony of ideology infusing

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the site of pedagogy. A counter-hegemonic practice that is well versed in the nuances of negative critique is the intellectual instrument for a sustained resistance to the imposition of meaning from ideologically overdetermined sources outside the self. To liberate subjectivity, in this sense, does not mean to deny self-identity, but to assert independence and control over the homeostatic effects of ideology that enslave the subject to a living-through of the interests and desires of the system. Much of the canon of critical pedagogy can be traced to the writings of the Brazilian philosopher of education Paulo Freire (1970). The premise was to acknowledge an ethic of heterogeneity in knowledge and power structures that would foster an appreciation for otherness and difference through concentrating upon the contextual formation and dependence of human understandings relative to the effects of ideology. Freire (1970) maintained that educational systems should foster an ability for autonomous thought and independent action; encouraging educational institutions to rethink the oppressive structural and conceptual elements of pedagogical practice, thereby allowing students to actively take part in the development of their own personalized systems of logic to deal with the knowledge claims thrust upon them. Freire (1970) advocated teaching-learning environments that would be conducive to critical reflection on the representation and curricular content and representation by teachers and students. Hence, cultivating the ability of a collective multiplicity to fervently realize the legitimacy of ontological and epistemological differences in an assembly of subjective singularities by not subscribing to the oppressive structural arrangements of institutions that were often organized according to austere doctrines of manipulation and hierarchization a priori to the heterogeneity of knowledge and experience. Freire (1970) theorized open and non-coercive dialogical teaching and learning environments aimed at motivating an exchange of perspectives and resisting appropriation for the emancipation of the subject from hegemonic

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constructs. A familiarization with and recognition of the multiplicity of difference for the enrichment of society overall is crucial to the outcomes of a ‘critical’ pedagogy. Defusing the discursive logic of an enforced unity of identity through either visible or invisible means of discipline, training, and correction to ‘normalize’ subjectivity (see Foucault, 1977). Developing in classrooms teaching-learning situations that are responsive to the essential reflexivity of such a ‘critical literacy’ for selfliberation is a crucial undertaking. Dialogue becomes transformational by encouraging students to relay personal experiences, so as to incite thought and discussion upon their own discourse and that of others, through which could be actualized, provisional but intelligibly framed, arguments that are not governed solely by ideological schemata (Freire and Faundez, 1989); therefore dislocating the logic of oppression that culls forth a reification of subjectivity. The radical of ethics of critical pedagogy go beyond the oppositional schemata of a binary thinking and protects the inherent differences of subjective identity against the consensus and consistency of a dominant discourse. For Freire (1970), reality is not ‘concrete’ or ‘static’, but a relentless enmeshing of the contextual factors reshaping its construction in the conscious and unconscious axiology of the subject’s perception. Admittedly, interpretations of experience are troublesome if qualified by the justifiability of each claim to knowledge as a contingent language of possibility and not as a dictatorial language of a master/slave dialectic. Criticism as an intellectual resource broadens knowledge through dialogic constructions of the differences of experience stemming from deconstructive/reconstructive exercises designed to synthesize the subject’s return to self, or conscientization (Freire, 1970). Employing critical discourse to question and to challenge the assumptions of the self and of the other, students can gravitate toward fresh understandings and can circumvent the need to reproduce institutionally endorsed

ideologies. Students engage in a purposive dialogy to uncover more options for themselves as equal members of society and to develop the skill or breadth of a more penetrating insight of the cultural remnants of past myths, through which, the knowledge gained from institutionalized systems of teachinglearning is augmented. It may be said that critical pedagogy has risen from within a socio-cultural milieu that has been insensitive to the reality of the global condition in which a multiplicity of differences simply exist. On one level, the subjects of contemporary societies are characterized in terms of this ‘world of difference’ where individuals are considered to be identities constructed from an unceasing exposure to a diverse array of images, discourses, and codes, etc. On another level, the heterogeneity of identity is exemplified in communities of otherness and multiplicity that is inhabited by individuals who further embellish the singular differences of subjectivity in complex affiliations integrating an endless combination of gender, class, race, ethnic, sexuality, ability, and other orientations. This abundance of the constituent markers of identity, mapped both with, in, on, and through the ‘fringes’ of society, is not always acknowledged or given freedom of expression within school systems; moreover, educational institutions are inclined to enforce subscription to prefabricated norms and authorized policies of self-representation. In this case, individual freedoms and rights are predisposed to the ‘governmentality’ of prescriptive knowledge structures regulated through the juridical strategies of supposedly democratic systems that exclude participants because of inherent or inherited differences to the common system. It becomes crucial to question the ‘commonizing rituals’ through which the arrangement of schooling structures or educational systems reproduce intellectual or behavioral expectations without showing sensitivity to the knowledge students hold in relation to personalized subcodes of meaning-making

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and forms of discourse production. Students are seen as being forced to comply with the commodification of knowledge. Intellectual potential is aimed at the possibility of producing a predesignated ‘cultural capital’ so as to ensure success within the hegemony of the school order. Michael Apple (1990) and Pierre Bourdieu (1984) have persuasively argued that a dominant culture both overtly and covertly transmits a code of value structures within the practical implementation of curricular discourses as educational programs, therefore endorsing certain knowledges and behaviors facilitating the reproduction of the mean, by championing its superiority over other forms of understanding to thereby create a hierarchy of identities based upon ideological conformity. Individuals from groups of lowered social status entering the school systems are at an obvious disadvantage from the beginning of the educational process due to a relatively limited exposure of dominant forms of cultural knowledge (Apple, 1992). In short, the reasoning subordinated groups bring to the traditional school setting are not supported by the cultural hegemony of an ideological ordering of school syllabi and curricula. And an individual’s class, gender, racial identity, ethnicity, sexual preference, ability, and so on can work against the attainment of optimum educational benefits from participation in a schooling system that does not embrace forms of knowledge subscribed to within non-dominant world views. Because societies are amalgams of populations and peoples embodying multiple multiplicities of difference, such a phenomenon in the educational enterprise is destructive due to the fact that it fails to offer an effective form of pedagogy for a great portion of groups represented within and representing society. School systems often exhibit little appreciation for and sensitivity to the potentially divergent interests of lowered or marginalized status groups. Privileging the multiplicity of difference in educational contexts brings attention to the need to supersede pedagogical theories that locate knowledge within exclusionary totalizations and

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ideals of subjectivity rooted in hegemonic ideology. Individual differences are celebrated when the existence of subjective identities relative to group membership are critically engaged and whole-heartedly endorsed. As Kanpol states: ‘Of course what must be established within schools are personal struggles that are not only separate and different – by race, class, or gender – given their discursive nature, but also intimately connected by their commonalities’ (1992: 220). Critical pedagogy values an ethos of intersubjectivity within the diaspora of communities of difference. The mien of educational practices that pervade the intellectual and ethical environment of the subject should inculcate an empathy for and not a tolerance of otherness through critical reflection upon the cultural sites of discourse production. To illuminate a rhizome of existing realities, critical pedagogy attends to facilitate this analytic exploration of perspectives by way of on-going dialogues with an other. Through open and challenging interchange, meanings of differences are more likely to be negotiated, apprehended, and then woven into interpersonal schemata or codes of meaning-making to stretch individual understanding of alternative ‘possible worlds’. For the reconstructive phase of this genre of intercommunicative learning to take place, the subjective authorities of the student and of the teacher must be reinstated within the institutional scene of teachinglearning to identify content that is relevant to the personal experiences of both, and that is not encased in the educational agendas of modulated syllabi handed down through preplanned and prepackaged curricula. Toward this end, critical pedagogy does not indicate ‘clear-cut’ or ‘definitive’ learning outcomes per se, but yields to the interpretative interests of individuals from which to realize the central logic of the structuring of concepts that are presented in areas of study superseding the confines offered by a given ‘dominantgroup’ reading. Michael Apple (1990) has highlighted the indoctrinating power of educational

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institutions by pointing to the tactic of distributing to school systems ready-made instructional packages that bypass any critical role the teacher or student might play in selecting materials for the teaching-learning process. This common practice makes teachers and students appear as mono-dimensional cogs, lost in a tangled lattice of intra-institutional paraphernalia. Actors without agency, fit only to be governed by managerial organizers external to the reality of the classroom environment. The trend toward pedagogical accountability or excellence in education has re-instated standardized syllabi and measurable curricular outcomes of learningteaching that enforce student and teacher conformity for meeting the technocratic goal of producing workers capable of sustaining the commercial productivity of ‘sustainable economies’. Such approaches to a ‘back-tobasics’ education have become mainstream and tend to undermine the socio-political interests of marginalized groups because the competitive edge of the pedagogy secures the teaching-learning of knowledge as a form of ‘cultural capital’ worth having by rewarding its reproduction (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). This drives the disequalization of the opportunity to education while claiming its reduction through the provisioning of an equal access to education provided to all. Critical pedagogy enacts a transformation through dialogue by working to activate in individual subjects the potential of their natural abilities to counter domination. It looks forward to an emancipation of the self from the need for interiorizing such a ‘rote-learning’ of the system’s teachings. Henry Giroux – a theorist who has offered the most systematic theoretical and practicable outline of the parameters and merits of critical pedagogy after Freire – accents the educational importance of unveiling the oppressive element of institutional knowledges. He too advocates a pedagogical sense of reflexivity situated within experiential frameworks for an education more suited to introspections of subjectivity that teachers

can draw upon to heighten students’ awareness of self as a vital source of informational logic to motivate critical thinking in direct relation to the communicative act of teachinglearning. Giroux (1992) envisions a more equitable institutionalization of education for crossing the boundaries of culture, the egalitarian premises of which would assist all students in the formulation of truly original ideas and would protect their democratic right to voice opinions without having to hide under a veil of commonality to suppress tacit knowledges. This process of ‘applied reasoning’ or ‘critical thinking’ can be, as Blatz notes, ‘understood as the deliberate pursuit of well supported beliefs, decisions, plans, and actions’ (1989: 107). The ‘genuineness’ of these pursuits is displayed in the accountability of actions to the aspect of logic constructing one’s own subjective understandings as influenced by race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and so on. By expanding the capability to elaborate upon or to amplify a unique voice or analytic perspective with which to add to the classroom presentation, previously ‘subordinated’ or marginalized group understandings and perceptions are given the opportunity in theory to be realized in full. Critical pedagogy, as a result, teaches students to be open-minded to an acceptance of a variety of differing viewpoints, including their own, by affirming knowledge through a problematizing of its discursive possibilities and material conditions. As Peter McLaren suggests, ‘Critical pedagogy is positioned irreverently against a pedantic cult of singularity in which moral authority and theoretical assurance are arrived at unproblematically without regard to the repressed narratives and suffering of the historically disenfranchised’ (1988: 73). What is the point of trying to reproduce the efficient inculcation and manageable consumption of a content of selfmirroring knowledges? The faith in method cannot eradicate the dissent or resistance. Knowledge does not reside in the materiality of ‘real-world’ resources or commodities so as to be given out, ‘consumed’, and

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verily reproduced for the socio-cultural or politico-economic benefit of the subject, but is an entity requiring the painstaking rigors of involved intellection – an understanding that stems from a highly personalized grounding of experience and interpretation. The democratic goal of critical pedagogy is to empower students with the ability to think and act reflectively as individual subjects of a society or a culture who have formed a conscious self-awareness of the meanings of their multiple affiliations of difference and the significance of their worldly transactions with an other. That a platform for the creative exchange of student experiences must be maintained within the practicable components of a theory of learning is vital. As Giroux explains: [S]tudents have experiences and you can’t deny that these experiences are relevant to the learning process even though you might say that these experiences are limited, raw, unfruitful or whatever. Students have memories, families, religions, feelings, languages and cultures that give them a distinctive voice. We can critically engage that experience and we can move beyond it. But we can’t deny it (Giroux, 1988d: 99).

The unevenness of experience alters subjectivity through the repetition of difference and of changes in the states of relation of the subject to it, that in turn, influences the modality of ‘cognitive’ or ‘intellectual’ stances the subject ascribes to its ‘rationality’. Subjectivity changes just as the experience of the subject changes over space and time to affect memory and understanding. A teaching ethic of difference welcoming heterogeneity within the scene of teaching and learning would foster an appreciation for otherness by concentrating upon the contextual dependency of human knowledge. Critical pedagogy aspires to elevate the consciousness of students to the inter- and intra-translatability of these ‘living-changes’, so as to inspire the self-confidence to actively question concepts and themes set in relation to an ever expanding difference and multiplicity of understandings. This does not imply that teachers are stripped of the ‘right to voice’:

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Indeed, the pedagogical struggle is lessened without such resources. However, teachers and students must find forms within which a single discourse does not become the locus of certainty and certification. Rather, teachers must find ways of creating a space for mutual engagement of lived difference that does not require the silencing of a multiplicity of voices by a single dominant discourse; at the same time, teachers must develop forms of pedagogy informed by a substantive ethic that contests racism, sexism, and class exploitation as ideologies and social practices that disrupt and devalue public life. (Giroux and Simon, 1988: 16)

Discourse serves as the medium from which students practice the critical power to interrogate concepts for the sake of learning more about the self, while keeping in mind the exploitation or alienation that may arise when knowledge claims are taken to be absolute and not interpretations to be enriched by the creative adding of the difference of experience to a rational possibility. To this end, teachers work together with students to appreciate otherness and to simultaneously bridge the discursive abyss of the translatability of difference through patient re-reading and selfcritical rationality (see Stanley, 1992). Critical pedagogy engages the need to develop a sensitivity for alterity over a willful submission to the castigation of cultural metanarratives. It allows us to reflect on the institutional and knowledge structures of educational programs within the difference of everyday conditions that house the living ethical realm of student aspirations. Critical pedagogy attempts to rethink pedagogical methods for the purpose of empowering students with the intellectual capabilities that are demanded for the engenderment of a confident self-expression of subjective identity, cognizant of the value of otherness and the multiplicy of difference.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Althusser, L. (1971) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster London: New Left Books. Apple, M. W. (1990) Ideology and Curriculum (2nd ed.). Routledge: New York.

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Apple, M. W. (1992). ‘Education, culture, and class power: Basil Bernstein and the neomarxist sociology of education’. Educational Theory, 42 (2): 1–27 Blatz, C. V. (1989). ‘Contextualism and critical thinking: Programmatic investigations’. Educational Theory, 39 (2): 107–119. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J.-C. (1977). Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, trans. R. Nice. London: Sage. Foucault, M. (1977/1973). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1980). Knowledge/Power, trans. C. Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. M. B. Rames. New York: Seabury Press. Freire, P. and Faundez, A. (1989). Learning to Question: A Pedagogy of Liberation. New York: Continuum. Giroux, H. A. (1987). ‘Critical literacy and student experience: Donald Graves’ approach to literacy’. Language Arts, 64 (2): 175–181. Giroux, H. A. (1988a). Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Giroux, H. A. (1988b). ‘Postmodernism and the discourse of educational criticism’. Journal of Education, 170 (3): 5–30. Giroux, H. A. (1988c). ‘Border pedagogy in the age of postmodernism’. Journal of Education, 170 (3): 162–181.

Giroux, H. A. (1988d). ‘The hope of radical education: A conversation with Henry Giroux’. Journal of Education, 170 (2): 91–101. Giroux, H. A. (1990). ‘The politics of postmodernism’. Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 1 (1): 5–38. Giroux, H. A. (1992). Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education. New York: Routledge. Giroux, H. A. & McLaren, P. (1992). ‘Writing from the margins: Geographies of identity, pedagogy, and power’. Journal of Education, 174 (1): 7–29. Giroux, H. A. and Simon, R. I. (1988). ‘Schooling, popular culture, and a pedagogy of possibility’. Journal of Education, 170 (1): 9–26. Kanpol, B. (1992). ‘Postmodernism in education revisited: Similarities within differences and the democratic imaginary’. Educational Theory, 42 (2): 217–230. Kaplan, L. D. (1991). ‘Teaching intellectual autonomy: The failure of the critical thinking movement’. Educational Theory, 41 (4): 361–370. McLaren, P. (1988). ‘Schooling the postmodern body: Critical pedagogy and the politics of enfleshment’. Journal of Education, 170 (3): 53–83. McLaren, P. (1991). ‘Critical pedagogy, postcolonial politics and redemptive remembrance’. In Fortieth Yearbook of the National Reading Conference Ohio: The National Reading Conference, Inc., 33–48. McLaren, P. (1994). ‘Critical pedagogy, political agency, and the pragmatics of justice: The case of Lyotard’. Educational Theory, 44 (3): 319–340. Stanley, W. B. (1992). Curriculum for Utopia: Social Reconstructionism and Critical Pedagogy in the Postmodern Era. New York: State University of New York Press.

26 Critical Pedagogy Imperiled as Neoliberalism, Marketization, and Audit Culture Become the Academy Marc Spooner

What role might education and critical pedagogy have in a society in which the social has been individualized … and education is reduced to either a private affair or a kind of algorithmic mode of regulation in which everything is reduced to a desired and standardized outcome? (Giroux, 2018: 211) Pedagogy is not some recipe that can be imposed on all classrooms. On the contrary, it must always be contextually defined, allowing it to respond specifically to the conditions, formations, and problems that arise in various sites in which education takes place. (Giroux, 2018: 213)

The university as a potential, albeit contested, site of transformative learning1 and empowerment, where critical and creative thinking are fostered and honed, where orthodoxy and systems of illegitimate power and authority may be exposed, interrogated, and challenged, is under the growing threat of extinction. Indeed, it is a matter of utmost concern for all members of the academy – and civil society itself – that the transformative hope of unfettered inquiry, which is ultimately the academy’s raison d’être, is

being eviscerated as it undergoes profound market-oriented and New Public Management (NPM) restructurings the globe over. Increasingly weakened and surveilled, higher education has been – at best – slowly yet steadily drifting away from its aspirational ideals. At worst, it has taken an active and alarmingly hasty role in diligently working towards its own disempowerment. The university is now at risk of becoming merely an entrepreneurial training centre for knowledge workers, replete with standardized curricula, standardized syllabi, and standardized outcomes testing. Readers brave enough to peruse their institutions’ increasingly glossy and corporate ‘Annual Reports’ will have noted how senior administrators now revel in marginalizing critical pedagogy, displacing the teacher-­ bricoleur, and replacing faculty with precariously employed de facto edutechnicians. As the confluence of neoliberalism, managerialism, and a pervasive audit culture actively reshapes campuses and entire societies, at stake is nothing less than what it

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means to be a student, to be a scholar, to be educated, and to be an agential participant in a democracy. With the global shift towards neoliberalism, NPM, and administrative ‘accountability’ regimes, it is difficult to find any university, anywhere, that is untouched by the merger of these inextricably linked, interdependent, and mutually reinforcing developments (Spooner, 2018). The subjugation of universities to neoliberal market ideologies has meant that academics – for centuries conceived as valued, indispensable partners in higher education – are now conditioned to think of themselves as employees complete with a corporate brand to be managed and sold globally to studentcustomers (Ward, 2012). This chapter examines the profound changes to universities brought on by neoliberalism and NPM – changes that have led to a disturbing homogeneity among universities everywhere. Chief among the changes reviewed are academic capitalism (Rhoades and Slaughter, 2004; Slaughter, 2014) and its concomitant branding and ranking fetishization as well as the spread of audit culture throughout institutions of higher learning. The chapter then examines three recent developments as a result of these changes that threaten critical pedagogical practices; these include (1) national teaching excellence framework (TEF)-type evaluations, (2) entrance and exit exams (standardized testing comes to higher education), and (3) outcomes-based teaching. It concludes with a call for us, as academics, to resist and denounce any attempt to control, depoliticize, or neutralize the higher education teaching and learning experience.

NEOLIBERALISM AND NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT The term ‘neoliberalism’ is employed to describe a wide variety of phenomena – diminishing its precision as well as utility – but in its present usage:

at neoliberalism’s theoretical core is a rearticulation and reconfiguration of the eighteenth and nineteenth century liberalist argument that market exchange captures an essential and basic truth about human nature and the creation and maintenance of social order (Dean, 1999:159; Harvey, 2005). As such, it should become the model for conducting and managing a host of activities that were previously deemed ‘outside of’ or ‘above’ the intrusion of the marketplace.… This new ‘greater good’ was seen as being brought about not through cooperation and the governmental leveling mechanisms of the past but through the selfinterested activities of actors each working independently and unknowingly … empowered consumers-citizens and taxpayers whose desires and self-interest would lead them to demand low costs, accountability and transparency from all of those who provided them with products and services, including the state. (Ward, 2012: 2–3)

Neoliberalism seeks to roll back the state, offload costs to the individual, and impose market principles on every aspect of the public sector, including universities; it is the ideological framework, or ‘playbook’, from which administrators carrying out NPM reorganizations continually consult to justify their ‘reforms’. NPM is taken to generally consist of: (a) the adoption of private-sector management practices, (b) the introduction of market-style incentives and disincentives, (c) imposing a customer orientation coupled with consumer choice and branding, (d) devolving budget functions while maintaining tight control through auditing and oversight, (e) outsourcing labour with casual, temporary staff (a-e: Ward, 2012), (f) unbundling the public sector into units organized by product, and, (g) emphasizing greater output performance measures and controls (Lapsley, 2009; Lorenz, 2012). By their very nature, these NPM reforms and auditing procedures are toxic to collegial governance, academic freedom, and local faculty and disciplinary authority. As Shore and Wright explain: One of the main casualties of this process is the ethos that previously sustained the traditional public university. Collegiality and professional trust are fast being replaced by competition, ­surveillance

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and managerialism. These are defining features of what we have elsewhere termed the rise of ‘audit culture’ in higher education. More importantly, neoliberalisation has produced an erosion of academic freedom and the substitution of the idea of higher education as a public good with the notion that a university degree is a private investment in one’s personal career. (Shore and Wright, 2016: 49)

RANKINGS, AND BRANDING AND THE HOMOGENIZATION OF UNIVERSITIES GLOBALLY As neoliberalism and NPM march on in lockstep, universities around the world have begun to converge and resemble one another through at least three powerful homogenizing processes: (a) coercive, (b) mimetic, and (c) normative isomorphism (Lewis, 2013; Parker, 2011). Coercive isomorphism occurs when organizations are compelled to participate in similar assessment and ranking exercises via external force applied through the state or influential funder. Public universities, dependent as they are on centralized funding and state-controlled branches of government, are the most susceptible; the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) – formerly the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) – is the longest-standing example. The RAE/REF was imposed on the UK’s university system in 1986 by the Thatcher government. The UK government’s auditing of universities has predictably not stopped with research; its ‘mission creep’ now includes teaching under the newly imposed TEF. Mimetic isomorphism operates when administrators and scholars all compete to mimic organizations perceived to be the most desirable or successful. As global university rankings are published and promulgated (i.e., the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, Quacquarelli Symonds [QS], Scopus, the Shanghai Jiao Tong, etc.), most universities seek to emulate the practices of those occupying the top rank (Marginson, 2014). Normative isomorphism

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occurs when we are all similarly trained and participate and share in the same overlapping networks, leading to cultural rules and expectations that ‘become reified as organisation members’ own social reality’ (Parker, 2011: 435). Whether the university is motivated by state financial incentive/disincentive, auditing requirements, ranking and branding ambitions, or some combination thereof, the coercive effects are similar as higher education institutions are all competing in the same global marketplace under academic capitalism (Rhoades and Slaughter, 2004; Slaughter, 2014). For instance, in one study examining nationally imposed performancebased university research funding systems, Hicks (2012) found that, contrary to what one might assume, it was not so much the size of the direct government funding that created the powerful incentives but rather the competition for prestige. Indeed, Wright et al. similarly report that, ‘it takes very little money to achieve big changes in the university sector’ (2014: 29). Going even further, according to Marginson, ‘ranking has become a form of regulation as powerful in shaping practical university behaviours as the requirements of states’ (2014: 46). In the competition to attract tuition dollars, universities throughout the world are re-fashioning themselves to better compete in national and international ranking exercises.

AUDIT CULTURE AND GOVERNMENTALITY Hallonsten elaborates on the process by which audit culture works in tandem with academic capitalism: As academic capitalism spreads, universities abandon traditional meritocratic and collegial governance to hunt money, prestige and a stronger brand…. Academic capitalism runs counter to these ideals, subsuming achievement in research and teaching to attainment of economic goals and

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quantitatively oriented (and shallow) performance assessments and rankings. Academic self-­ regulation and vocational autonomy are replaced with external control by audit and management. The individual’s struggle for recognition in science is colonized by university managers, who use the achievements of scientists and students to accumulate capital (economic, symbolic and cultural, in Bourdieu’s terms), and thus increase the visibility of their university. (Hallonsten, 2016: 7)

Technologies of governance (Davies and Bansel, 2010; Shore and Wright, 2000) are enforced through a litany of regulatory and surveillance apparatuses and reinforced by an evergrowing body of incentive and disincentive mechanisms. What is unique (and troubling) about audit culture as manifested in higher education is that such governance regimes are often external to the programme, unit, or discipline with which rests the traditional collegial authority. As such, they are explicitly employed to challenge a given body of scholars’ traditional right to determine what is of value, what counts, and what is legitimate and desirable. State auditors, quality assessment bodies, and/or university central administrations themselves are increasingly demanding data with which they can judge individual, department, faculty, and institutional performance. Too often, such judgements are made by managers who lack the disciplinary expertise to make meaningfully qualified assessments. Under this regime, value can only be determined by accountancy: academics are governed by numbers, incentives, disincentives, and competitive benchmarking (Shore and Wright, 2015). Examples of the misapplied use of accountancy occur any time the quality of research or teaching, as traditionally assessed by collegial review, is judged by management criteria that is based on limited, quantitative numerical proxies used as poor representations of the actual research and teaching. Such proxies include generalskills standardized tests via entrance and exit exams, discipline-specific standardized tests, and/or other such examination frameworks; two current examples of these are the TEF in the UK, and the entrance and exit

exams being piloted by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario in Canada. It is not only the case that the reductive nature of these tests and measurements is a managerial practice that is coercive per se, but also that the very reporting systems used to provide the resulting data have the power to guide and change our behaviours in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For example, in a 2010 article on academic workers, Bronwyn Davies and Peter Bansel explain the mechanisms by which audit culture coerces and constricts scholars: Audit technologies standardize and regularise expert knowledges so that they can be used to classify and diagnose populations of workers and the potential risks in managing them. Discourses of efficiency and quality, for example, regularise academic practice, narrowly defining values and successes in order to render them measurable. Academics are persuaded to teach the same way, complete the same forms, make applications to the same funding bodies, make links with industry – in short to reproduce the same practices in order to re/organise themselves to fit the template of best practice as this is defined by management. (Davies and Bansel, 2010: 7)

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, BRICOLAGE VERSUS PAINT-BY-NUMBERS ­ EDU-TECHNIQUES The art of critical pedagogy is akin to the researcher-as-bricoleur, where the bricoleur’s method is an interactive emergent construction, ‘which changes and takes new forms as different tools, methods, and techniques of representation and interpretation [teaching and learning] are added to the puzzle’ (Denzin and Lincoln, 2018: 11). To be clear, in this usage, the terms ‘teacher-bricoleur’ and ‘teaching as bricolage’ are not meant in the pejorative ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ sense, but rather in their parallel meaning in research, where they are employed to describe the process of creatively optimizing the unique and diverse resources at hand; in this case, the ever changing body of learners and the

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unique passions and experiences they bring to the classroom community. Here the teaching and learning process resembles the interpretive bricoleur who ‘understands that research [teaching/learning] is an interactive process shaped by one’s personal history, biography, gender, social class, race, and ethnicity and those of the people in the setting’ (ibid.: 12). As Kincheloe et al. (2018) highlight, teachers and students are researchers. They elaborate: A central aspect of critical teacher research involves studying with students. Freire argues that all teachers need to engage in a constant dialogue with students, a dialogue that questions existing knowledge and problematizes the traditional power relations that have served to marginalize specific groups and individuals…. teachers listen carefully to what students have to say about their communities and the problems that confront them…. This enables the teacher to construct pedagogies that engage the impassioned spirit of the students in ways that move them to learn what they do not know and to identify what they want to know. (Kincheloe et al., 2018: 241 italics in original)

A university education ought to equip students with the capability of responding to an increasingly changing world, where they will be called upon to contribute as fully engaged, critical and creative citizens2. It is the university’s role to ensure that students acquire the ability to participate in established systems and community structures, and be given the opportunity to question and debate these established systems and structures. However, even more importantly, students must also be provided with the opportunity to challenge and change systems that reproduce injustice. Indeed, educators would do well to consider Grande’s cautionary words: ‘While there is nothing inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary about theory, it is one of our primary responsibilities as educators to link the lived experience of theorizing to the processes of self-discovery and social transformation’ (2004: 3). Instead, audit culture renders academics as auditable subjects, willing us to conform to its own (ideological) notions of what counts as teaching and scholarship. For the

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purposes of control, it continuously defaults to what can be easily quantified, tabulated, standardized, and comparably benchmarked, relentlessly steering the academy away from critical pedagogies (Kincheloe et  al., 2018) and towards superficial learning and the instrumentalist ideals of the workforce. Raaper highlights ‘neoliberal higher education policy discourses [that] promote “entrepreneurial citizens” for the competitive global economy. By addressing students as consumers, students are expected to act as “private investors” who seek a financial return in the form of enhanced employability skills’ (2018: 2). One can hardly blame students for adopting a consumer outlook to higher education; the need to acquire private-sectorsanctioned skills that lead to employment is a near-imperative given the increasingly heavy debt loads with which society burdens them. As Peter McLaren insightfully posits: Many students facing higher tuition rates and dismal prospects for decent employment are sometimes less likely to want a critical education that more deeply nests them in oppositional environments. On many occasions, what they seek is a more pragmatic and instrumental return on their investment – a job with a secure future. This is not to say that students are less likely to join groups that foment opposition to the neoliberal state, as the Sanders campaign (modelled less on Marx’s concept of socialism than a watered-down version of European social democracy) tellingly brought to light, but that universities have now been so insinuated into the neoliberal corporatocracy and business models of leadership, with their increasing demands for a politics of economic austerity and debt generation, that they are now naturalized as part of the subsector of the economy. After all, economic inequality and insecurity are endemic to capitalism, and the embourgeoisement of the academy teaches its students that a university degree is perceived as one of the few remaining chances for economic advancement. The focus for too many of our students becomes getting prepared for the capitalist world rather than viewing university life as an opportunity to be part of the struggle to bring an alternative social universe into being. (McLaren, 2018: 289–90)

A cursory examination of developments in Canada, the UK, and the United States reveals at least three threats to critical pedagogy in

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higher education as governments, states, and university administrators demand to manage what gets taught, how it gets taught, and how it gets measured. As the full arsenal of audit technologies and externally determined and tested criteria are brought to bear upon professors, courses, programmes, and university degree experiences, the traditional university – a site of transformational learning, where diverse ideas can be debated and sites of illegitimate power and authority contested – slips away. In its place rises the managerial university, with its focus on domestication, employability, and entrepreneurship.

AUDIT CULTURE THREATS TO PROFESSIONAL AUTONOMY, COLLEGIALITY, AND CRITICAL PEDAGOGY There are three separate yet interlocking developments that scholars everywhere should be critically monitoring. They all threaten professional autonomy, collegiality, and critical pedagogy; they all need to be confronted, named for what they really are, and resisted. They are (1) TEFs, (2) entrance and exit exams, and (3) outcomes-based approaches to university teaching. Each is an attempt to extend audit culture’s reach beyond university research and into the classroom itself. It is especially important for new faculty to become aware of how we are being governed. For many new scholars, this is their only normal. Only from a position of awareness, can new and seasoned scholars alike begin to envisage, or revisit, their own as well as their collective deprogramming and de-institutionalization.

TEF-TYPE EVALUATION FRAMEWORKS Nationally imposed teaching evaluations, such as the UK’s TEF (an exercise similar to

the UK’s REF but for measuring and rating university teaching), rank universities; in the UK’s case with three ‘scores’ (no doubt influenced by the Olympics): Bronze, Silver, or Gold (Teaching Excellence, 2017: 26). Participation in the TEF for Years 1 (2016/17) and 2 (2017/18) has been voluntary, however, beginning with Year 3 (2018/19), it will be mandatory. At stake, beyond reputation, will be the amount universities may charge in tuition fees based on the ratings achieved; specifically 50% of inflation increase for a ‘Silver’ rating and 100% of inflation for a ‘Gold’ rating. In this simplistic conception of evaluation, three aspects of teaching excellence are assessed as measured by: (a) Teaching Quality, (b) Learning Environment, and (c) Student Outcomes and Learning Gain (Teaching Excellence, 2017: 24). Table 2 of the TEF assessment criteria for Student Outcomes and Learning Gain is divided into two sub-categories: Employability and Transferable Skills (SO2) and Positive Outcomes for All (SO3). Tellingly, the criterion for Employability and Transferable Skills (SO2) is defined as ‘Students acquire knowledge, skills and attributes that are valued by employers and that enhance their personal and/or professional lives’ (ibid.: 26). Of greater concern, the government framework specification document for the TEF (Teaching Excellence, 2017: 24) alarmingly states that new measures for ‘Learning Gain’ are currently being developed. Being considered are standardized tests of either ­general-skills and/or discipline-specific skills (McGrath et  al., 2015: 31–3). Adoption of either a general-skills or a discipline-specific skills standardized test to measure and reflect student learning is clearly an affront to our traditional right to determine what is of value, what counts, and what is legitimate and desirable in terms of course and programme content and student learning. Much has been written, and as covered in my previous work (see, for example,

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Spooner, 2018), on the manner in which REF-styled, so-called accountability frameworks and performance indicators pervert the very object they set out to measure through quantification and enforced targeting. Such simple-minded practices inevitably lead to gaming, cheating, ‘teaching to the test’, and generally not seeing the forest for the trees. By unduly focussing on narrow, atomized targets, they lose sight of the true end goals of education. One need ‘look no further than the mass high-stakes testing craze that has all but strangled sound pedagogy in so many public education districts within the United States and beyond’ (Spooner, 2018: 903).

ENTRANCE AND EXIT EXAMS Just as the UK is implementing the TEF, Canada’s most populous province, Ontario, has piloted its own general-skills entrance and exit exams through the ominously Foucauldian-sounding ‘Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario’ (HEQCO). HEQCO cites a ‘concern that today’s postsecondary graduates are lacking critical employability skills’, and has adopted a computerized test of literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving, created by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Educational Testing Service (ETS). These tests were administered to incoming university students as well as to a different cohort of graduating students. The initial pilot for this latest exercise in bureaucratic regime-building began in the Fall of 2017. HEQCO is not shy about its ultimate aspirations for these tests; President and CEO, Harvey Weingarten states: ‘The initial goal is that colleges and universities use these results as instruments for quality enhancement … If the pilots prove successful, this could become standard practice in Ontario and beyond’ (HEQCO, 2016). Once again, to the degree that externally determined and tested criteria are imposed

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upon courses, programmes, and university degree experiences, traditional collegial authority and autonomy are undermined. How grossly inadequate standardized tests developed by either ETS or OECD and promoted by HEQCO and others can be compared to a degree programme’s existing course and programme requirements, each determined and assessed by expert professionals and subject-matter specialists, is a question that perplexes? A standard four-year undergraduate experience likely includes 20-40 expert ‘-second opinions-’ diagnosed by a wide variety of professors with a diversity of knowledge, teaching styles, and assessment strategies. Why would any unit/programme submit to a one-size-fits-all, quantified, outof-context test administered via computer at the behest of an external body with little or no disciplinary and programme knowledge? Truly, it boggles the mind.

OUTCOMES-BASED APPROACHES TO HIGHER EDUCATION Tam highlights that the ‘vogue of outcomesbased approaches to higher education’ (2014: 159) grew out of the audit or assessment movement of the 1980s in the United States ‘with government calls to examine the effectiveness of funds invested in public institutions of higher education’ (ibid.: 159). Outcomes-based higher education is often described as student-centred; however, to the degree that outcomes-based targets are externally measured, they become a fixed and two-dimensional roadmap that fails to represent the actual terrain that needs to be surveyed. Such rudimentary maps leave no room for exploring sites of interest that the learning community finds relevant and significant. (Tam, 2014). These schemes become a form of paint-by-numbers education where knowledge goals are exchanged and tested like consumer goods. Tam states, ‘the outcomes-based approach [is] considered to

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offer benefits including clarity, flexibility, comparison and portability’ (2014: 163); however, even these so-identified benefits also serve externally imposed standards-based accountability initiatives, leading to the standardization and homogenization of courses within programmes and between universities. The limitations Tam identifies include legitimacy where ‘outcome statements tend to break down holistic conceptions of learning, and reduce them to learning abilities or changes in behavior that are specific, observable and measurable’ (2014: 165); fractionation where ‘assessment for outcomes could become too focused on the student’s acquisition of skills and knowledge that other more important developmental outcomes over time are ignored’ (ibid.: 165); and serendipity where ‘outcomes-based approaches are criticized for their constrained serendipity which presumes that all of the valued and important ways that a learner can construct meaning in the context of a particular discipline or ability are known in advance’ (ibid.: 165). Many see ‘stated outcomes’ for every class as a beneficial teaching technique. In practice, such outcomes merely serve to standardize every lesson. They move the teacher away from the role of bricoleur, and towards that of a functionary adhering to a timetable of predetermined educational destinations. Such an approach is antithetical to the process of critical pedagogy as so wonderfully described by Joe Kincheloe: Freire argued that [T]eachers uncover materials and generative themes based on their emerging knowledge of students and their sociocultural backgrounds. Teachers come to understand the ways students perceive themselves and their interrelationships with other people and their social reality. This information is essential to the critical pedagogical act as it helps teachers understand how they make sense of schooling and their lived worlds. With these understandings in mind, critical teachers come to know what and how students make meaning. This enables teachers to construct pedagogies that engage the impassioned spirit of students in ways that moves them to learn what they don’t know and to identify what they want to know. (Kincheloe, 2008: 20)

The contrast is striking when compared to Bagnall’s caution and critique of outcomesbased education, as referenced by Tam: [O]utcomes-based education is in fact constraining and limiting; trivial and mechanical; inflexible and conservative with too much emphasis on attribution and consequence; promoting egoistic maximization of individual self-interests; and not as empowering to both the students and educators Outcomes-based approach to quality as it claims because it dehumanizes students as resources to be enhanced and promotes dependence of the learners on the educators. (Tam, 2014: 165–6)

Audit culture imperils critical and imaginative possibilities – the wonder and wander – inherent in teaching and research. In practice, accountancy and its methods are end-runs that allow states, outside organizations, or university administrations to bypass academic freedom, often without direct confrontation. As in an airport (or perhaps an industrial farm) we experience a banal herding of our teacher- and student-‘selves’ as we funnel through metric corrals, jog along performance walkways, and are bundled through X-ray scanners. Even when outside agencies and administrator-managers are not overtly limiting academic freedom through such direct interventions, audit culture acts as an official timekeeper, a stopwatch that leaves little or no time to follow rewarding paths or survey new aspects and areas of interest. Audit culture’s imposition of its own tunnel vision onto our research findings and teaching methods means it cannot do anything else but distort and distend the data that it so stridently claims to measure; inevitably, reliance on ‘outcomes’ and ‘outputs’ produces a bent and wobbling ‘fun-house mirror’ representation of real education. The dire consequences of audit culture for the academy include the usurping of disciplinary accountability (Brenneis et  al., 2005), the displacement of local/departmental collegial authority (Stensaker and Harvey, 2011), and the negating of faculty expertise and autonomy. Academic freedom is limited to the degree by which the arbiter of standards

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for academic work is no longer ‘the collective academic staff in the institution and in the academic discipline within which the scholar works’ (Turk, 2014: 15). Teaching goals and outcomes must be determined by knowledgeable individual faculty members, programme committees, and university-wide senate approval processes. To leave them to external review bodies with little to no disciplinary knowledge is the educational version of letting the tail wag the dog.

CONCLUSION Given the profound and deleterious changes to university functioning brought on by neoliberalism, NPM, and audit culture, what can be done? Whatever our discipline may be, I would posit that in our present moment, this is the question we must answer, as scholars and educators. First, we need to make ourselves aware of the dangerous changes to higher education that are now underway; changes that run counter to the academy’s mission. These include externally imposed TEF, preand post-degree programme tests, and the push towards o­utcomes-based approaches to teaching. In a similar manner to how other accountability measures have been researched and found to have profound and distorting effects on scholarship, we must theorize these current changes to teaching. Next, we must resist attempts to constrict our research and teaching through misleading performance measures and corrosive benchmarking. To the extent that it is possible, it is incumbent on us as scholars to call out audit culture’s false promises, to reassert our academic freedom, and to get on with the critical pedagogy and transformational learning our world so desperately needs. To effectively confront the forces that threaten the academy, we need to reinvigorate our engagement with the broader labour movement and our own local and national

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representation. We need to reach out and strengthen solidarities with traditionally underrepresented campus workers; as Gill insightfully and rightfully reminds us, there is a need for ‘ a much expanded understanding of precarity – one that acknowledges the multiple forms of insecurity, precariousness and dispossession within the academy’ (2018: 209–10). Moreover, for the sake of our individual and organizational well-being, we should renarrativize concepts like ‘quality’, ‘accountability’, ‘efficiency’, ‘professionalism’, and ‘productivity’ (Lincoln, 2018; Shore and Wright, 2000). We need to view our own and our colleagues’ teaching from broad and long-term perspectives that go well beyond post-term teaching evaluations; teaching/ learning spans an entire lifetime and therefore should be evaluated longitudinally. We must stridently reassert our expertise and professionalism by reclaiming and defending our traditional disciplinary and collegial authority to judge what is of quality, determine what is of importance, and set out the manner in which it should be taught and assessed. Last, we do well to keep in mind that ‘the competitive forces encouraged by these new managerial systems … are highly seductive in recruiting our behaviour through their systems of reward and punishment’ (Shore, 2008: 291). In seeking to resist audit culture, it is crucial for us to assert our traditional right to act cohesively, as a body of scholars. Top-down systems of managerial control can only be effectively and safely contested – avoiding the potential for harmful individual penalties – if we act collectively.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to acknowledge the generous assistance of my friend and editor, Evan Thornton in reading various drafts of this chapter. I’d like to thank Shirley Steinberg

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for this opportunity and for being so patient. I dedicate this chapter to the life, work, and memory of Joe Kincheloe.

Notes  1  From O’Sullivan: ‘Transformative learning involves experiencing a deep, structural shift in the basic premises of thought, feelings, and actions. It is a shift of consciousness that dramatically and irreversibly alters our way of being in the world. Such a shift involves our understanding of ourselves and our self-locations; our relationships with other humans and with the natural world; our understanding of relations of power in interlocking structures of class, race and gender; our body awareness, our visions of alternative approaches to living; and our sense of possibilities for social justice and peace and personal joy’ (2002: 11).  2  To clarify: I am referring to small ‘c’ citizens as in a participant in a democracy; not a legal definition of who constitutes a capital ‘C’ Citizen designation which is a legal and exclusionary concept that attempts to immorally classify some humans as legal and some as illegal.

REFERENCES Brenneis, D., Shore, C., & Wright, S. (2005). Getting the measure of academia: Universities and the politics of accountability. Anthropology in Action, 12(1), 1–10. Davies, B., & Bansel, P. (2010). Governmentality and academic work: Shaping the hearts and minds of academic workers. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 26(3), 5–20. Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2018). Introduction: The discipline and practice of qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research, 5th Ed. (pp. 1–35). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Gill, R. (2018). Beyond individualism: The psychosocial life of the neoliberal university. In M. Spooner & J. McNinch (Eds.), Dissident knowledge in higher education (pp. 193– 216). Regina, SK: University of Regina Press. Giroux, H. (2018). Coda: Pedagogy, civil rights, and the project of insurrectional democracy. In N. K. Denzin & M. D. Giardina (Eds.),

Qualitative inquiry in the public sphere (pp. 211–215). New York: Routledge. Grande, S. (2004). Red pedagogy: Native American social and political thought. Toronto: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Hallonsten, O. (2016, October 6). Corporate culture has no place in academia. Nature News. http://www.nature.com/news/ corporate-culture-has-no-place-in-academia-1.20724 Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO). (2016). A Canadian first: Assessing core skills in postsecondary students. (News release, 27 September). http://www. heqco.ca/en-CA/About%20Us/News% 20Releases/Pages/Summary.aspx?link=112 Hicks, D. (2012). Performance-based university research funding systems. Research Policy, 41(2), 251–261. Kincheloe, J. L. (2008). Critical pedagogy primer (2nd ed.). New York: Peter Lang. Kincheloe, J. L., McLaren, P., Steinberg, S. R., & Monzó, L. D. (2018). Critical pedagogy and qualitative research: Advancing the bricolage. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research, 5th Ed. (pp. 235–260). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lapsley, I. (2009). New Public Management: The cruellest invention of the human spirit? Abacus, 45(1), 1–21. Lewis, J. M. (2013). Academic governance: Disciplines and policy. New York: Routledge. Lincoln, Y. S. (2018). A dangerous accountability: Neoliberalism’s veer toward accountancy in higher education. In M. Spooner & J. McNinch (Eds.), Dissident knowledge in higher education (pp. 3–20). Regina, SK: University of Regina Press. Lorenz, C. (2012). If you’re so smart, why are you under surveillance? Universities, neoliberalism, and New Public Management. Critical Inquiry, 38(3), 599–629. McGrath, C. H., Guerin, B., Harte, E., Frearson, M., & Manville, C. (2015). Learning gain in higher education. Cambridge, UK: HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England)/Rand. https://www.rand.org/pubs/ research_reports/RR996.html McLaren, P. (2018). Afterword: The defenestration of democracy. In M. Spooner & J. McNinch (Eds.), Dissident knowledge in higher

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education (pp. 253–300). Regina, SK: University of Regina Press. Marginson, S. (2014). University rankings and social science. European Journal of Education, 49(1), 45–59. O’Sullivan, E. (2002). The project and vision of transformative education: Integral transformative learning. In E. O’Sullivan, A. Morrell, & M. A. O’Connor (Eds.), Expanding the boundaries of transformative learning: Essays on theory and praxis (pp. 1–12). New York: Palgrave. Parker, L. (2011). University corporatisation: Driving redefinition. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 22(4), 434–450. Raaper, R. (2018). Students as consumers? A counter perspective from student assessment as a disciplinary technology. Teaching in Higher Education. DOI: 10.1080/ 13562517.2018.1456421. Rhoades, G., & Slaughter, S. (2004). Academic capitalism in the new economy: Challenges and choices. American Academic, 1(1), 37–59. Shore, C. (2008). Audit culture and illiberal governance: Universities and the politics of accountability. Anthropological Theory, 8(3), 278–298. Shore, C., & Wright, S. (2000). Coercive accountability: The rise of the audit culture in higher education. In M. Strathern (Ed.), Audit cultures: Anthropological studies in accountability, ethics, and the academy (pp. 57–89). New York: Routledge. Shore, C., & Wright, S. (2015). Audit culture revisited: Rankings, ratings, and the reassembling of society. Current Anthropology, 56(3), 421–444. Shore, C., & Wright, S. (2016). Neoliberalisation and the ‘death of the public university’. Anthropologists in/of the Neoliberal Academy, 5(1), 46–50. Slaughter, S. (2014). Foreword. In B. Cantwell & I. Kauppinen (Eds.), Academic capitalism in

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the age of globalization (pp. vii–x). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Spooner, M. (2018). Qualitative research and global audit culture: The politics of productivity, accountability, and possibility. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research, 5th Ed. (pp. 894–914). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Stensaker, B., & Harvey, L. (2011). Accountability: Understandings and challenges. In B. Stensaker & L. Harvey (Eds.), Accountability in higher education: Global perspectives on trust and power (pp. 7–22). New York: Routledge. Tam, M. (2014). Outcomes-based approach to quality assessment and curriculum improvement in higher education. Quality Assurance in Education, 22(2), 158–168. Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework (TEF) (October, 2017). The Higher Education Funding Council for England, Department for Education. https://assets. publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/658490/Teaching_Excellence_and_Student_Outcomes_Framework_Specification. pdf Turk, J. L. (2014). Introduction. In J. L. Turk (Ed.), Academic freedom in conflict: The struggle over free speech rights in the university (pp. 11–20). Toronto: Lorimer. Ward, S. C. (2012). Neoliberalism and the global restructuring of knowledge and education. New York: Routledge. Wright, S., Curtis, B., Lucas, L., & Robertson, S. (2014). Research assessment systems and their impacts on academic work in New Zealand, the UK and Denmark. Summative working paper for URGE Work Package 5. Working Papers in University Reform, no. 24. Copenhagen Danish School of Education, Aarhus University. http://edu.au.dk/fileadmin/edu/Forskning/URGE/WP_24.pdf

27 Critical Pedagogy: Negotiating the Nuances of Implementation Jane McLean

THEORETICAL CONTEXT The theoretical work of Michel Foucault, Chris Weedon, Judith Butler, and many others has participated in the ongoing constitution of my subjectivication as a critical pedagogue, producing the ‘I’ of my narrative discourse. I, as the active agent involved in that production, have engaged in performative work, defined by Butler, as any ‘discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names’ (1993: 13). To acknowledge the subjectiveness of theory positions me in at least three theoretical fields – critical, feminist, and poststructuralist. Theorists located among these three fields recognize that theory is never totally objective and always serves an agenda. As well, theory is not stagnant or fixed, but always in the process of becoming something else as it responds to new situations. Social transformation achieved through the realignment of power relations operates as a key concept linking critical, feminist,

and poststructuralists’ thinking. An understanding of how and why power/knowledge relations should and can be readjusted in educational policies and practices also informs the field of critical pedagogy. These theories, when invited to shape pedagogical practices, all seek to address political, social, economic, and cultural inequities. All three fields focus on power relations, albeit from different, but not unconnected, perspectives. Critical theorists tend to examine economic/ power relations and the impact on class struggles; feminist theorists put more emphasis on gender/power relations and the impact on women’s lives; and poststructuralist theorists focus more on discourse/power relations and the impact on subjectivities or identities. All three fields have been justly critiqued and astutely questioned by critical race and Indigenous scholars for their almost complete elision of race-ethnicity/power relations. Such critiques highlight the necessity of working with all social justice theoretical paradigms while engaging in critical praxis.

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They also help explain why for me personally feminist influences remain strongest in my pedagogical thinking and practice. Currently, although certainly not historically, feminist theorizing welcomes a multiplicity of voices. Lorraine Code (2000) highlights this contemporary inclusionary feminist perspective: No feminist at the beginning of the twenty-first century would speak of a single, essential ‘women’s experience’, for race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, age, and ability are just a few of the myriad differences between/among women that have become focal points for analysis. Thus feminists have moved to develop theoretical tools for examining points of convergence and divergence in women’s lives; for acknowledging the boundaries of commonality and specificity, while recognizing that there is no pure, untainted, unmediated, or generic experience. (Code, 2000: xx)

Weiler (2001) suggests feminist theorists engage in a critical appropriation of male theorists’ conceptual frameworks for feminist analyses, problematizing the use of, but not necessarily rejecting outright, the many useful ideas that can be re-imagined beyond their patriarchal origins and applied to feminist research. In my efforts to engage in critical pedagogy, I remain vigilant in my awareness of the limitations of applying White-male theoretical constructs to my feminist work, but not blinded to their usefulness in achieving political goals. At no point should critical pedagogues overlook the social reality that globally, patriarchy is thriving. Men, White males in particular, throughout the world continue to dominate and control the spheres of politics, the economy, education, high and popular culture, communication, and mass media. Women of all ages, positioned variously and differently along the constructed axes of sexuality, race, ethnicity, ability, and other identity markers, continue to be disadvantaged, exploited, and violated in multiple material and symbolic ways. The struggle for equity and gender justice is nowhere near complete, but critical pedagogies, enacted by educators with strong and diverse social justice theoretical frameworks, can work to

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achieve the necessary transformations that will continue to shape a more equitable world. Classic critical theory remains strongly associated with the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, both White Euro-males, who examined how cultural texts are permeated with what they called bourgeois ideologies – the ideas, beliefs, and values of the ruling class – for the purposes of legitimizing ruling class domination and presenting its norms and values as natural, just, and universal. A Marxist critique foregrounds and highlights these ideologies, exposing them as inequitable, oppressive, and in need of transformation. Both Marx and Engels saw cultural texts as vehicles with the potential to stir the proletariats to recognize their oppression and resist. An indispensable method of Marxist criticism involves analysis of how texts advance class ideologies and reproduce or perpetuate class hierarchies. Marxist theory forced me to recognize how privileged is my position in today’s world, a recognition that every critical educator must achieve and openly acknowledge. As an educated, middle-class, White, non-dis-abled, English-speaking, heterosexual cisgender woman living in North America, I have tremendous cultural capital at my disposal, and this privilege dramatically reduces my risks of engaging in potentially dangerous subversive pedagogical practices. Marxist theory made me interrogate for the first time my implication in perpetuating and supporting oppressive institutional practices – such as unproblematically teaching the White Western Canon in English literature classes, using standardized tests as a way to sort, separate, and privilege certain students, and streaming students according to ‘ability’, a coded word for class and/or race. Without the insights of traditional Marxist theory, I would still be blaming victims for their failure, rather than examining how various structural and systemic institutional inequities create failure as a necessary part of maintaining and preserving a classed, raced, and gendered hierarchy. Critical pedagogy,

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informed in part by Marxist theory, teaches educators to ask the following: how often do schools reproduce the myth of failure as an individual flaw, rather than as an institutional imperative? How often have I, the privileged White teacher, participated in reproducing this myth? How do I avoid this reproduction when I am working within and for the institution, partially but powerfully shaped by its discourses? As educators read and become familiar with critical theories, if they are open to the ideologies of social justice, the basic tenets of these theories will begin to inform and enter their pedagogical practices. In so doing, daily experiences in the classroom will change, and these shifts will position educators to reflect on their lived realities, a process that will then reinform the theoretical concepts guiding their practice. This ongoing negotiation and tension between theory and practice is called critical praxis: Narratives of the self … involve looking back at the past through the lens of the present.… the purpose of self-narratives is to extract meaning from experience rather than to depict experience exactly as it was lived. (Bochner, 2000: 270)

CONSTRUCTING CRITICAL SELF AND PRAXIS First Step of the Journey I firmly believe that a catalytic event triggers the transformation of a teacher into a critical pedagogue. Something happens that resonates with the individual, an event that might highlight the person’s unearned privilege in a new and unavoidable light, or perhaps expose a marginalized person’s unendurable oppression in a way not previously experienced. I cannot speak for others in terms of what led them to take up a critical pedagogical position, but I know exactly how it happened to me. After teaching for 20 years from what I now recognize and acknowledge as an oppressive

mainstream position that harmed many students (intentionality is irrelevant), I took my first university critical studies course in 2000. Specifically, while taking this course, I learned about hegemony, a concept originally detailed by Italian political philosopher, Antonio Gramsci. I have read several variations defining hegemony, but one of the clearest can be found in Brookfield’s The Power of Critical Theory: ‘Hegemony is the process by which we learn to embrace enthusiastically a system of beliefs and practices that end up harming us and working to support the interests of others who have power over us’ (2005: 93). A hegemonic culture is ‘successful in persuading people to “consent” to their own oppression and exploitation’ (ibid.: 93). I was a 43-year-old privileged individual who had never had to endure any sort of overt discrimination, never suffered physical deprivation, never experienced marginalization of any significance, and my mind was blown when I started reading about the hegemonic structures at play in my life, society, culture, institutions, and systems. Not only did I now realize I was a tool used to support hegemonic practice, but also I understood that many of my internalized beliefs and practices were oppressing me, despite my apparent position of power and privilege. As a teacher, I had often grumbled about certain edicts passed by nameless authority figures who controlled teachers’ and students’ daily lives in the classroom. I frequently wondered aloud at staff meetings why teachers were viewed as less ‘professional’ than doctors and lawyers. I got irritated when, after earning a four-year Bachelor of Education degree and completing several years of teaching experience, I was still being mandated to teach in a certain way, to use only certain texts, to administer tests that I knew were unfair but had no way to express how or why I knew that. For many years, I shut my mouth and did my job because I believed the system, despite its flaws, was just the way it was, and I could do nothing to change it. Learning about hegemony completely transformed my

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: NEGOTIATING THE NUANCES OF IMPLEMENTATION

thinking, making me realize that institutional discourses work hard to maintain a powerful position by convincing teachers like me that they cannot change the system, so they should just go along with the practices, even if they believe/know they are harmful. At the same time that I was learning about hegemony and its role in maintaining and reproducing dominant discourses, I was also learning about critical race theory, post colonial theory, feminisms, Marxism, poststructuralism, and queer theory. Each of these critical theories intersected in significant ways, with all of them citing hegemonic ideologies discursively circulated by dominant groups as being responsible for the maintenance of social inequities. The more I learned, the more appalled I was at my teaching practices, and I vowed to begin implementing critical changes whenever and however I could. I would take on the role of critical educator – asking questions, disrupting the taken-for-granted assumptions that shaped classroom routines and curricula – and transform students’ lives in hopes they, too, would take up more critically informed practices.

A Narrative Turn The good intentions of hard-working people who ran residential schools in Canada are often overlooked. (Canadian Senator Lynn Beyak, 2017)

Good intentions do not excuse harmful actions. I took a course one summer called ‘Teaching the Exceptional Student’. It explored pedagogical philosophy and practices that teachers might draw upon when faced with students ranging in cognitive abilities. The individuals taking the course were all practicing teachers from all subject and grade levels. They were stereotypically representative of the New Brunswick teaching population: 85% female and 100% visibly White. One day, we were divided into groups of three and instructed to devise a short lesson plan that would engage students who were on the high-functioning level of

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the academic spectrum. Each group would then share the lesson plan with the others in the class, thus achieving one of the favorite goals of teacher education courses – providing teachers with concrete, usable material to take back into their classroom. As we sat in comfortably padded chairs in the large, air-conditioned room, surrounded by tables filled with coffee, juices, and snacks, we listened to the lesson plans each group had so carefully designed. Three White female teachers stood up to present their lesson. They had decided to plan a challenging lesson where students would research a topic and then learn about parliamentary debate procedures by doing a debate on the topic. The particular topic they selected as a high-level, debatable issue was ‘The Pros and Cons of Slavery’. They did not qualify the use of the term ‘slavery’; I am quite sure they assumed everyone in the room would understand they were referring to the United States’ historical episode of White people’s enslavement of African peoples. I shifted in my seat and looked around at the other teachers. No one seemed to be reacting. No one seemed to be ready to say anything. Was I really the only one who had a swift and visceral reaction to this horrific idea? The three teachers began to talk about the outcomes such a debate would meet in the Social Studies curriculum. I barely heard what they were saying as my mind was racing, still trying to grasp that they were actually discussing the positive impact of enslaving human beings and NO ONE was objecting. After about two minutes, I found my voice, and I quietly, but firmly, interrupted the group. I asked a number of questions, including whether the teachers in this room would ever consider asking students to debate the pros and cons of Hitler’s Final Solution. I asked if they would ever ask students to debate the pros and cons of sex-trafficking and sexual enslavement. I asked if anyone could actually justify teaching students that the present-day economic prosperity enjoyed by a certain sector of the United States population as a result of enslaving human beings, a practice that

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resulted in the deaths of millions of Africans, could be regarded as one of the positives of slavery. I finished my comments by asking everyone in the room to reflect on the immense White privilege and historical ignorance that would allow any educator to believe that such a topic was suitable in any way. I then left the class as I was too emotional to remain. I returned to the classroom the next day. I had printed off a few academic articles about White privilege and White racism, including Peggy McIntosh’s classic ‘White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack’ (1988). I offered these articles to the professor and asked that she provide photocopies for everyone in the course. I spoke privately to the three teachers whose presentation I had disrupted and challenged. They were all experiencing the guilt, shame, and disequilibrium that generally accompanies a critical pedagogical moment such as this. Phenomenologists refer to these incidents as ‘Ah-ha’ moments. We talked for about 20 minutes. I will never know whether other teachers in that room were thinking the same thoughts as I was that day. Based on their body language and silent voices, I suspect they were not. Like the three teachers presenting at the front of the room, these educators had perhaps never been asked or forced to examine their racial identity, their White privilege, their unearned power. I have no way of knowing whether any of them read the articles I brought to class that day; I have no way of knowing whether any of them internalized the critical perspective I offered that day. I do know that I responded as I did because of the critical knowledges I had internalized and because of the continuous reflection I do as a critical pedagogue. I do not pretend that I have all the answers (as a poststructuralist, I don’t presume answers exist), nor do I suggest that critical theory is a panacea for all social injustices. But I do believe that what I did that day is what educators should be ready and willing and prepared to do every day, both in the classroom and in their social world. Question, challenge, disrupt, resist.

Critical Literacies Invariably, when I ask practicing teachers – whether those taking graduate courses from me at the University of New Brunswick or those I meet socially – what they think is meant by the term ‘critical literacy’, I first get a puzzled look, followed by a definition that isn’t really a definition. Quite often, I hear that critical literacy is, you know, literacy that teaches kids to be critical. Clearly, one cannot define something using the same words of the term. As I continue to seek clarification, most of the teachers take up the discourse of Bloom’s Taxonomy (because it is still taught in teacher education courses as the dominant paradigm explaining cognitive development). These teachers believe critical literacy involves teaching students to read using the skills of analysis. When I press further, they suggest analysis means the ability to take a whole apart and see the individual components that have made it whole. A very, very few teachers will mention that they have heard that critical literacy involves questioning, perhaps asking questions about media or ‘stuff like that’. They are then quick to go on to say they don’t have time to teach about media; they teach Social Studies or Math or Science, and they have too many curricula outcomes to meet as it is, and bringing media into the classroom is really a waste of time, anyway. Despite The Role of Critical Literacy (Atlantic Canada English Language Arts Curriculum, 1998) being part of the mandated English Language Arts Curriculum Guide since 1998 in Atlantic Canada, the vast majority of teachers with whom I have conversed with over the years have no idea what critical literacy is or what it might look like in the classroom. This statement is founded solely on my own experience and my judgments of that experience.

A Never-ending Journey In no way do I want to trivialize the process of becoming a critical educator or make it

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: NEGOTIATING THE NUANCES OF IMPLEMENTATION

sound as if a singular epiphanic moment changed my practice overnight. My journey has been just that – an almost 20-year journey at this point, with no end in sight. Living a critically positioned life is exhausting, often dispiriting, but also exhilarating and inspiring. Critical practices, once taken up, cannot easily be put aside. I can no more leave my position of criticality than I can escape the privileges that accompany my Whiteness. Living as a critical educator can be tiresome to others; I have been told I am annoying and not much fun to be around. Many of my colleagues and acquaintances do not understand why I ask so many questions, why I don’t just let things be. The more privileged the individual, the easier it is to continue to live in a non-critical world. For privileged people, maintaining the current inequitable status quo advantages them, so why would they want to disrupt practices, systems, and institutions in ways that would make their lives less comfortable? But when I realized the harm I was doing to students by unquestioningly accepting and taking up the dominant educational deficit discourses that claim Black people, people of color, people with dis-abled bodies, and people from working/lower-income classes are not capable of achieving high educational possibilities, and worse, do not deserve those possibilities, I was sick both physically and emotionally. I could no longer ignore the harm I was perpetrating and reproducing, and while I could not undo the past, I could begin to prevent further harm. Through critical pedagogy, I hoped to develop teaching activities and a classroom environment that would assist students in addressing issues of inequity, social justice, and oppression beyond the confines of the school. Every time I read a book or article about critical pedagogy, I encountered various definitions, ranging from the simply stated, ‘Critical pedagogy is the term used to describe what emerges when critical theory encounters education’ (Kincheloe and Steinberg, 1997: 42), to much longer and

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more theoretically delineated explanations. For newcomers to the field, an educator would do well to consider Milner’s succinct descriptor: Critical pedagogy has been defined as a form of instruction, which rejects oppression, combats injustice, gives voice to marginalized people, fights the maintaining of the status quo; and critical pedagogy encourages instruction that promotes radical action in the classroom and beyond. (Milner, 2003: 199)

Milner, and others, stresses that this form of teaching ‘begins with mental understandings and alterations’ (2003: 199). Unfortunately, many academics writing about critical pedagogy have not necessarily attempted to put into practice the theoretical conceptualizations that make up the field of critical theory, leaving gaps in the understanding and practicality of moving from theory to practice. Ellsworth (1989), who criticizes these gaps, suggested that research on critical pedagogy failed to provide a bridge from theory to practice, resulting in an educational discourse that left practicing and pre-service teachers without substantive practical knowledge to implement critical pedagogy in a real classroom. While I do not disagree with Ellsworth’s conclusions, to be fair, she was writing during the early phases of critical pedagogy, and educators have paid attention to her critique and worked to make the changes necessary to facilitate deeper understanding of the intersection of theory and practice. Critical pedagogy is not so much implemented as it is enacted by the performing critical educator. No guide or script accompanies the process. But it must begin with the teacher being discursively reconstituted by critical discourses and then enacting those discourses in her approach to curriculum and in her pedagogical practices. I cannot begin to document the hundreds of changes I have made in my daily practices as I began to enact critical pedagogy almost 20 years ago. My efforts were conscious, deliberate, and reflective. Frequently, I engaged in what might be described as subversive activity in order to effect curricula

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shifts or assessment practices. I did not ask permission when I made certain changes, preferring instead to create the disruption and then explain it using critical discourses to justify the necessity of the disruption. I must emphasize: I was already a permanent contract teacher with a solid reputation both in the school community and the broader community. I was making these changes from a position of power and privilege. As Atwood tells us in The Handmaid’s Tale, ‘Context is all’ (1985: 144). The power relationships would be dramatically different for a new teacher, or for a teacher already discursively constructed as part of a marginalized group. I am not suggesting that only privileged teachers can enact critical pedagogy, but I am stressing that taking it up can be dangerous and may lead to the dismissal of a teacher who is not protected as well as I was.

Creating a Space for Critical Pedagogy As I continued to engage in critical praxis in my English courses, I started to imagine a new course that I could offer, one less restricted by provincial curricular outcomes. The New Brunswick Department of Education allows teachers to develop what is called a ‘locally developed option’ and teach it for a maximum of three years, after which the course must be re-submitted for approval. Over the course of a few months, I developed a critically informed feminist-based course I called Women, Media, and Culture (henceforth referred to as WMC). My goal was to offer a course that would be student-driven in terms of topics and research, but keeping within the broad areas of women’s issues, media representations, and cultural discourses surrounding women. When I filled out the application for the Locally Developed Course, I used terms such as feminism, poststructuralism, social constructions, power/knowledge relationships, patriarchy, hegemony, and discursive power, as well as the term critical praxis to describe the

pedagogical paradigm in which the course would be contextualized. The course was approved, and it was offered to Grade 12 students for the first time in September, 2001. Thirty-three young women squeezed into my classroom on the first day. I didn’t have enough desks and chairs, nor room for any even if I had had them, so four or five of them sat on the broad ledge close to the windows for the entire semester. And so it began. WMC is now in its 16th year in the high school where I started it, as well as offered in seven other high schools throughout the province. The teachers who offer it were all Master’s students of mine at the University of New Brunswick, and I served as a mentor and critical colleague as they began their journey into critical pedagogy. The stories I tell throughout this chapter all occurred in the WMC classes over the past 15 years.

CRITICAL TRANSFORMATIVE PEDAGOGY A Story of Subversion [I]f I’m ever able to set this down, in any form, even in the form of one voice to another, it will be a reconstruction then too, at yet another remove. It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes that can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, halfcolors, too many. (Atwood, 1985: 168)

In our rural area, the traditional practice of the annual beauty pageant still thrives. Young girls, usually seniors, who are also disproportionately White, thin, blonde, and perky, vie for the title of Miss Beauty Contest in what is a combination popularity contest and reinforcement of a physical appearance that fits a narrow, media-constructed ideal. Feminist discourses generally critique the beauty pageant as a harmful form of female

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: NEGOTIATING THE NUANCES OF IMPLEMENTATION

objectification; a tool used to promote competition, rather than solidarity, between females; a glorification of a White normalized standard of beauty; and a reinforcement of the patriarchal notion that females should be valued first and foremost for physical appearance. In the early pre-feminist years of my career, I actually served as one of the judges on occasion. Like many other non-critical people in this small town, I saw no harm in this activity. As I learned about feminist perspectives, I began to understand just how problematic the practice was, and I became aware of issues that I had not previously noted. For instance, the young participants openly and e­ nthusiastically supported each other on stage and in the public eye. But behind the scenes, small cliques developed and mean behavior, such as rumor spreading, isolating the ‘less-than-standard’ pretty/thin contestants, and gossiping, was happening. I was made aware of these behaviors when a few of the contestants who were being victimized by the more powerful girls shared with me privately some of the incidents. I also started listening to members of the audience in a different way while the pageant was underway, filtering those comments now through feminist lenses. I was shocked and horrified as I heard audience members dissect each contestant who did not perfectly meet the societal definition of female beauty and body shape. In 2002, I knew this practice had to be disrupted in order to begin a critical conversation about it. While my ultimate goal would be an end to the pageant entirely, I knew that would not happen easily. I would be content to do something just to get people, especially the young women who dreamed of being part of this tradition, to start thinking about it from different perspectives. I had spent some time in the WMC class discussing pageants using feminist discourses. We had also finished a unit of study using Jean Kilbourne’s book Deadly Persuasion (1999), an examination of advertising and the female body. I asked students to reflect on how Kilbourne’s

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ideas might intersect with the practice of participating in a beauty pageant. Further, I asked them to consider how we might go about challenging this sexist tradition. Most of the students now viewed the pageant as sexist and troubling, even the girls who desperately wished still to participate in it. These girls experienced tremendous dissonance as they struggled to align their emerging understanding of feminist conceptualizations of female objectification with their emotional desire and longing to be part of the spectacle. I spent many an hour after school having serious conversations with these young women, offering advice, trying to help them work through the contradictory feelings they were experiencing. As we engaged in class discussions about the complexity of the pageant practice, several young women kept coming back to two key arguments: first, participation in the event built confidence, and, second, it was fun. Several also reiterated that there was tremendous family pressure, especially from mothers, to participate. They did not know if they could resist and defy their parents’ demands to become contestants, even if they really wanted to withdraw. My goal during these class conversations was to work hard at providing space for all voices to be heard and to encourage those who were reluctant to speak to find alternate ways to make their thoughts known. A critical educator must always be aware of the oppressive imposition of critical theories on students, as that is an abuse of power and authority. While some students eagerly take up critical discourses and begin to enact critical practices with enthusiasm, others are reticent and much slower to begin the paradigm shift. A few will never shift positions, in part, because the current dominant discourses shaping their subjectivity are too powerful, and, at this point in time, and perhaps never, they are not ready or able to challenge them. For some, critical discourses do not resonate with them emotionally, intellectually, or ethically. The journey is never the same for any two individuals.

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I kept reminding myself I was 40 years old before I took up feminist and other critical discourses, so if a 17 year old isn’t there yet, that is fine with me. My role is to expose all my students (not just the ones taking WMC) to the concepts and arguments of critical discourses in the hope that someday they will be ready to take them up and engage with them in an active fashion. A simple strategy that works well when trying to include all students’ voices is a suggestion/question box. I placed one in my classroom years ago, and when students enter the class, they all know they will be given a small piece of paper which they leave in the box upon exit. Most of the time, students do ask questions, but sometimes they just write encouraging comments or observations about the day’s class. But this is certainly a private method for giving quieter students an opportunity to express their opinions in a safe way. Regarding the pageant, the majority of the comments left day after day supported our class taking some sort of action to begin a school-wide conversation about this practice. While not everyone stated they would actually participate in whatever action we decided upon, over 95% of the students said they would verbally support whatever action we took. As it turned out, circumstances arose that made our course of action obvious. One day, three girls in the WMC class came in and told the class that the pageant organizer, a community member, not a staff member, had phoned them personally the night before and urged them to become contestants. One of the girls who had been called said she asked the organizer why she had picked her. The woman said she had been flipping through last year’s yearbook and was just randomly calling girls in hope that they would be interested. Hearing that information resulted in a dead silence in the room as everyone processed what was happening. The three girls who had been called were, without exception, physically stunning and widely popular among the ‘in’ crowd. Even the few girls

who maintained that the pageant was more about fun and personality than about appearance were shocked into an undeniable realization. The girls who had not been phoned were upset. They did not want to participate, but they understood how exclusionary the organizer’s method was. It was time to do something. A small group of WMC students, five females and two males, and I, attended the next after-school meeting for the pageant contestants. We hoped to be given the opportunity to ask questions in an effort to raise critical awareness around the sexist practice of objectifying and judging women based on physical beauty. We particularly wanted some answers about the organizer’s decision to call certain girls and pressure them to enter the pageant. While our demeanor would be respectful and calm, I certainly anticipated that the organizer would see this as a personal attack on her. I explained to the students before going to the meeting, that she was as much a product of patriarchal and sexist discourses as everyone else, and she believed she was organizing a positive experience for young women. Our objective was to ask questions respectfully that would challenge those discourses and highlight perspectives that had been overlooked. The meeting was underway when we arrived. We took seats quietly and waited for an opportunity to speak. At one point, the organizer was explaining to the contestants how important their role as Miss Beauty Contest would be since they were regarded as the ‘youth representative’ for the town. They would be required to attend many public civic functions and be the ‘voice’ of the town’s youth. One of the male WMC students raised his hand and politely asked why the youth representative had to be the reigning Miss Beauty Contest Who had decided this was a primary role, and wasn’t it discriminatory that males didn’t have the opportunity to serve as the town’s youth voice. The organizer did not have an answer, other than to say that was the way it had always been done.

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: NEGOTIATING THE NUANCES OF IMPLEMENTATION

This first question opened the door, and now we asked about phoning particular girls. By the looks on the faces of the contestants in the room, few of them were aware that the organizer had done this. Evidently, she had only phoned the three in the WMC class. They were, without a doubt, the three most attractive and popular young women in Grade 12 that year, and the organizer wanted them to participate. They were not interested in the least, in part, I hope, because of the critical feminist discourses now circulating as part of their subjectivity. Students pressed the organizer to explain how she came to phone these three in particular, and she struggled. How could she admit that she was using stereotypical beauty criteria to encourage girls to enter what she repeatedly defended as a personality and talent event designed to select a youth representative for the town. She eventually admitted to using the yearbook to select these students. The WMC students quietly left the meeting. They had achieved their goal of questioning and disrupting a taken-for-granted practice that they now understood in a more complex way as harmful to women. The pageant went ahead that year, but with an all-time low number of contestants. Three of them chose, as their talent, to speak about feminist concerns about impossible beauty standards for women and of their intent to use their position, if selected, to talk to young girls about resisting those standards. I probably don’t need to mention these contestants did not win. This happened in 2002, and since then, the pageant, although still an annual event, has changed. Fewer girls participate, and those that do, work hard to reduce the mean behaviors of the past and create a teambuilding camaraderie. Three years ago, a gender-fluid male-designated WMC student entered the pageant. No written rule existed excluding males from the contest, so the organizer could not deny him entry. He performed femininity flawlessly and highlighted for this small town Judith Butler’s notion of gender performance in a way no textbook

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could ever convey or explain. I attended the pageant that year, braced for audience backlash and prepared to confront it if necessary. To my pleasant surprise, there was none. No booing, no heckling, no silences after his appearances. Instead, polite applause and some exchanges of looks, but no overt negative reactions. Small steps, small changes. Hard work, brave work. Critical pedagogy isn’t about eliminating practices that are racist, sexist, heterosexist, and so on, although it would be wonderful if that were possible. But it is about creating contexts where questions are asked about everyday, taken-for-granted ideas and practices. It is about seeing the gaps and the absences in the classroom, in the textbooks, in the curriculum, and asking why. It is about respecting conflicting ideologies, but learning how to challenge them at the same time. It is about recognizing that some ideologies are harmful, oppressive, and dangerous, and to be complicit in reproducing and sustaining these ideologies is no longer tenable. Critical pedagogy demands action, recognizing that action is risky and cannot always happen immediately or be taken up by everyone. A new teacher without a permanent contract would want to think long and hard about how, or if, they might enact critical pedagogy. Countless strategies and practices can be taken up that will offer students ways to shift perspectives without being overtly disruptive or entering dangerous territories that may result in dismissal. A fired teacher cannot help change the world. I have told a lengthy story about a specific action my students and I engaged in somewhat successfully. But I performed dozens of daily mini-interventions in the classroom which collectively contributed to transformations in my teaching and in my students’ critical understandings of the world. For example, my practices included: • Extending readings of literary texts beyond formalist theories (New Criticism and Reader Response) and into critical readings informed by feminist, poststructuralist, queer, postcolonial,

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critical race, and Indigenous theories in Grade 11 and 12 English courses Modeling for students how to read for gaps by asking who/what is not represented and why Discussing the nexus of power/knowledge circulating in discursive practices and texts: who gets to speak? Who gets to know? What/whose knowledge is taught? What/whose knowledge is excised? Reading not just the word, but the world in an effort to recognize privilege, oppression, marginalization, exclusion, erasure, and asking how these positions/conditions intersect with equity and social justice at the individual, societal, institutional, and systemic levels Examining the way texts are produced by and work to reproduce ideologies and identities Working at seeing the ‘self’ as a discursively produced text with multiple identities and positions which are contextually constituted Modeling and practicing with students ways to read resistantly by asking questions such as: who constructed this text? What are the producer’s values and beliefs? How do we know? For whom is the text constructed? To whom is it addressed? What is the text trying to do to the reader/viewer/ listener? How does it do it? Should the messages be contested, resisted, accepted, rejected? Why?

Beyond the Humanities In writing this chapter, my audience is high school teachers, specifically teachers of what have been historically called the Humanities – courses such as Language Arts, Social Studies, History, and World Issues. My own teaching context has always been located in this constructed world of language and written/visual texts. Engaging critical theories within these subject areas is certainly easier than incorporating them into STEM curricula, but the task is not impossible. When I first started offering in-service sessions for the high school staff about critical pedagogy, the math and science teachers were quick to tell me that such practices were not only unnecessary in their classrooms, but also too difficult to work into the curriculum if it were necessary. My first response was to ask

them which female scientists and mathematicians they included in their curriculum, notwithstanding Marie Curie. Then I asked whether they incorporated critical Indigenous mathematics methods in their classrooms. Did they ask students to investigate Aboriginal creation stories to place alongside evolutionary theories? Had they considered what impact it might have on encouraging young women to enter STEM fields if they learned about the contributions of women like Hypatia, Sophie Germain, Ada Lovelace, Mary G. Ross, Alice Ball, Mae Jemison, the list could go on for pages. A two-second Google search will bring up the names and accomplishments of hundreds of women, White, Black, Indigenous, who have broken barriers and pushed the boundaries for females in traditionally male fields like engineering and astrophysics. Invariably, the teachers of whom I ask these questions either dismiss my questions outright or tell me they barely have time to cover the curriculum now, without having to incorporate ‘non-essential’ add-ons. However, a few of them show interest in how they might extend their curriculum, and they attend the in-service sessions. One step at a time. I also challenge math teachers to consider why so much of the material used in class, including test items, focuses on solving problems related to money, spending, profit, and interest rates. While these problems are asking students to practice specific mathematical formulas, they also contribute to the hidden curriculum by which ideological work is covertly carried out. In this case, capitalism, consumerism, and neoliberal economics are presented unproblematically as acceptable practices. Furthermore, especially at the elementary level, math word problems have historically reproduced distinct gender and class stereotypes, a pattern that is slowly, but too slowly, beginning to change. For example: John earns 10 cents for every paper he delivers on his route. He delivers 12 papers every day for five days. How much money does John earn in five days?

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: NEGOTIATING THE NUANCES OF IMPLEMENTATION

Sally has $12.00. She spends $2.00 on a dress and $3.00 on a blanket for her doll. How much money does Sally spend altogether?

Such examples perpetuate traditional roles for males and females, as well as endorse capitalism, consumerism, and a middle-class life style. While these may be simplistic word problems on the surface, I would argue they are more complex than one thinks. A critical educator would not use such questions, or, if mandated to do so, would engage students in questioning the roles assigned to John and Sally and what this suggests about what girls and boys are expected to do. The 2016 publication of Margot Lee Shetterly’s book Hidden Figures, recently made into a box office hit film, aptly highlights the invisibility of groups who fall outside of the White, hetero, male, privileged center. Few North Americans knew the story of the West Computing Group comprised of brilliant Black female mathematicians working in a segregated building at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia. Yet their work helped achieve NASA’s space goals. Most people know about John Glenn, but too few know about Katherine Johnson, the Black ‘computer’ who calculated the ‘go/no go’ trajectory for Glenn’s earth re-entry. Why is that? When STEM area teachers ask me about critical pedagogy, I work hard at helping them first to review the curricular texts they use and examine both the overt and hidden curriculums from the perspective of power, ideology, and hegemony. I then work with them to ask the critical questions employed by feminists, critical race theorists, queer theorists, Marxists, and Indigenous theorists to see what has been elided. I emphasize that these critical tasks will not take away significant classroom time from meeting the mandated outcomes for their courses; instead, asking students to engage in these tasks will enrich, broaden, and deepen their ability to understand the intersections between school subjects and the world in which we live.

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The Risks in Taking up Critical Pedagogy Teachers who take up critical pedagogy must be prepared for certain issues that may create tension in multiple spaces, often simultaneously. Critical pedagogy is designed to disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions and challenge teachers and students to question what has traditionally been regarded as the norm and seek ways to open it to difference and multiplicity. An educator who is prepared to do this has already moved through the journey of critical personal self-reflection and understands that ‘addressing the effects of White­ ness [and other privileged identity positions] is a necessary aspect of addressing world view’ (Marx, 2004: 32). Critical educators are willing and ready to take on what Ohito calls a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ (2016: 457), a process requiring ‘that individuals step outside of their comfort zones and recognize what and how one has been taught to see (or not to see)’ (Ohito, 2016: 458, citing Zembylas and Boler, 2002). It is one task to challenge oneself to question and disrupt the status quo power positions of Whiteness, Christianity, heterosexuality, and patriarchy, but it is quite another step in the process to ask students to begin this journey. However, critical theories recognize that ‘classrooms are sites of cultural and social re-production and therefore cultural and social hierarchies must be carefully examined for the ways inequality and injustice are produced and perpetuated within the curriculum, the classroom, and the school’ (Ohito, 2016: 455, citing Oyler, 2011). The tensions emerging from such examinations may create substantial affective anxiety among students, and critical educators must prepare for this. To offer clarity and example, I will address some of the tensions I have experienced in three of these spaces. Because of the linearity of language, I must speak about each space separately, but it is important that teachers understand the tensions emerge in all three in what are often chaotic intersecting moments. My teasing out of the spaces is artificially contrived.

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Within the Classroom We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. (Atwood, 1985: 70)

Some students will resist being asked to consider multiple perspectives and engaging in the constant questioning of commonplace beliefs and values that are in line with their own comfortable, and unacknowledged privileged, discursive positioning. For example, students who have been raised in narrowly constructed religious environments which reduce the world’s events and ways of being to a simplistic ‘God’s will’ may strongly resent having this paradigm questioned or disrupted. Fundamental religious worldviews are generally patriarchal, misogynous, and structured around a rigid hierarchical power scheme. However, it is impossible to predict student reactions. Some of the students I least expected to embrace critical theories because of family religious background became the most transformed activists. Several young women raised in this type of environment have reported to me that critical theories gave them a language to describe and explain how they had been feeling about what they now understood as religious dogma working to oppress and silence certain groups, in particular women and members of the LGBTQ2I community. While they may have experienced a sense of release in having secular concepts, such as hegemony, aid them in understanding the oppressive aspects of religious doctrine, they struggled to reconcile that understanding with the material reality of going home and trying to talk to parents and grandparents about their new worldview. Students with such a powerful internalized ideological position are more likely to become silent, ignore, or withdraw when confronted with something like the discussion of queer theory when examining a literary text or looking for gaps in a popular film or television show. They will perhaps experience an uncomfortable disequilibrium for which they are unprepared, and critical educators, as respectful and caring role models, must be ready to deal with this discomfort.

Another tension sure to be felt by teacher and students will be the potential for less success on standardized tests, especially those in the Language Arts area. Critical pedagogy encourages students to take up multiple positions, to ask what is missing in a text and why, to look at text through different, often conflicting, theoretical lenses, all critical strategies which eschew the kind of singular, reductionist responses allowed for in a multiple-choice-type question. Critically informed students will recognize the falsely constructed binaries embedded in true/false questions and work to deconstruct them. They will be equipped to see the biases built into the questions and work to challenge and resist them, rather than simply answer the questions. Such critical reading strategies work against these students as they will potentially be paralyzed by the pressure of having to make a single choice. Again, my experience has been that most critical students do not score well on these tests overall. Part of the ethical decision-making a critical educator must consider is the impact lower scores may have on the academic future of students. I cannot say how an educator may work at resolving this tension; for each teacher, a different approach may work. But there is no question that critical pedagogical practices work to disadvantage students in terms of standardized tests because teaching to the test, a standard practice in mainstream classrooms, is no longer a viable option. Again, this is an unsettling aspect of engaging in critical pedagogy, as no definitive answers are offered, nor is a single template of action possible. Because I am limited by space, I will address one final element of tension that emerges within the critical classroom. Critical educators must be prepared in advance to cope with strong feelings of anger, guilt, shame, resentment, denial, fear, sadness, and hopelessness, to name a few, that students will experience along their critical journey. Because privileged students are generally unaware of their unearned privilege, and very few, if any, will see themselves

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as racist, thanks to the ideological workings of hegemony, they respond with deeply felt emotional conflict and upheaval when their racism or misogyny or heterosexism is exposed. An exceptionally skilled educator who has experienced similar emotional discomfort will be required to help students as they struggle with their affective responses to understanding their role and participation in oppressive actions. This process takes time, often much more time than offered/available in a one-semester high school course. While some students are, indeed, emotionally and cognitively ready to work through these sites of discomfort, others are not, and a few may never be. Admitting one’s oppressing actions and attitudes is difficult, especially when one has seen themselves as a nondiscriminatory individual. Wrapping one’s head around the notion of unearned privilege that has benefitted one’s life every day takes time. It also takes a caring, approachable, non­-judgmental, but critically honest, teacher to help students start this journey. Facing this privilege, acknowledging its harm, and implementing strategies for change must begin in the critical classroom. Coddling students of privilege because their worldviews have been disrupted is not acceptable. Not every student in the class will be positioned in such privileged bodies. Marginalized, or Othered, students will be upset and angry at the denial they witness by their more privileged counterparts. They will get frustrated and perhaps resentful, rightly so. It takes an incredibly devoted and committed critical educator to navigate such emotional complexity, to listen carefully, to demonstrate respect and compassion, but at the same time, to push students past these minefields and emerge with a stronger understanding of each other and self. This is where I found poststructuralist notions of constructed subjectivities most useful. Moving students to a position where they can grapple with the concepts of power, ideology, and hegemony, and begin to understand the notion of discursively constituted subjectivities

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may help them recognize that harmful and oppressive discourses can be dismantled and reconstructed in ways that will transform subjectivities and work towards increased social justice. While this is a lovely theoretical statement, it does not change the material reality that critical educators must be aware of the emotional and cognitive ruptures that will quite likely become part of the classroom terrain located within a critical paradigm.

Within the School Critical educators are frequently viewed as troublemakers by other, more mainstream, traditional teachers and administrators. While Ohito specifically addresses the impact of ‘White talk’ in her study, I would argue that when educators take up ‘critical talk’, they are met by collegial reactions which ‘derail[ing] the conversation, evade[ing] questions, dismiss[ing] counter arguments, withdraw[ing] from the discussion, remain[ing] silent, interrupt[ing] speakers and topics, and collude[ing] with each other in creating a “culture of niceness” that makes it very difficult’ to read the dominant world (2016: 457). Because we encourage students to ask questions, to challenge hegemonic practices, and to find what is missing or erased and how that may be harmful to self and others, critical educators find themselves being accused of disrupting the learning environment and creating unnecessary problems. Several years ago, the New Brunswick Department of Education made it mandatory for every public school to play ‘O Canada’ in the morning over a PA system. Prior to this, playing the anthem was a local schoolbased decision; some schools played it daily, while others played it only on commemorative occasions, such as Remembrance Day. The decision to impose daily playing at all schools was not made without a context. A critical educator in the southern part of the province, noting the increasing diversity of his school’s population, particularly a

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growing number of students identifying as Jehovah’s Witnesses, decided to stop playing the anthem at the school where he was part of the administrative team. Along with citing respect for a range of religious beliefs, he also alluded to hidden curricular practices, specifically the use of a national anthem to inculcate concepts of blind nationalism and patriotism among the youngest, most vulnerable minds. He sent a notice home to parents explaining the decision, and he believed it was a non-issue. Parents reacted, the media was contacted, and suddenly a polemic debate erupted. Long story short: the educator has since left the field of education entirely; the province made daily playing of the anthem mandatory in all schools; and hegemony remained firmly in place. While I am not unhappy identifying as a Canadian, I am not proud of Canada’s history, in particular, the White Anglo-European treatment of First Nations’ peoples, the original inhabitants of this land. Nor am I proud of the Acadian expulsion, the World War II Japanese-Canadian internment camps, or the still-present racism that continues to reside as part of the post-9/11 culture of fear of others in which we exist today. Officially, Canadians pride themselves on their multiculturalist policies and façade of fairness and equality, but a genealogical search into the past quickly reveals repeated examples of serious oppression and harm to people perceived as different from the White, Christian, Anglo norm. In the September the new policy came into place, I entered my classroom with no intention of standing at attention while the anthem played that day or any day in the future. As the music started that morning, every student in my class automatically stood up. I began to ask my questions: where did this new policy come from? Why are you standing? What does the anthem mean to you? Why? How can we think about the political and cultural objectives of a national anthem in different ways? For several days, I spent class time discussing this new policy which translated into the bodily practice of forcing students to stand at attention

for approximately two minutes every day. We talked about hegemony, compliance, passivity, and how to resist these forces should one desire to do so. We talked about patriotism and war and who actually serves in wars and who manages to avoid the front lines. I made it clear that standing in my classroom was optional. No one should feel pressured to comply. Students then shared our discussions with other students. Those students asked their homeroom teachers about the policy and if they could choose to remain seated if they felt it was in line with their beliefs. While a few teachers embraced the critical learning opportunity these students presented and embarked on similar conversations as I had, the majority of teachers were angry with me and my students. They demanded the administration do something. They were not open to viewing the practice through multiple lenses, and they felt offended as Canadians that some of us would not stand as a display of our nationalistic pride. Their outrage demonstrated the power of ideological hegemony all too clearly for many of my students. An administrator met with me, and I explained the critical position I was asking students to consider. I asked what consequences would result if we continued to act in non-compliance with the policy, and I was told nothing would be done. However, I would have to continue to discuss my position with colleagues and any parents who might question my pedagogical practices. I informed the administration that I was more than happy to continue to encourage people to think and act more critically. Students from my critically informed classroom often carried their developing critical perspectives into other teachers’ classrooms, asking challenging questions about particular pedagogical practices (testing, deadlines, length and choice of assignments) and curricular material (absence of women, people of color, LGBTQ2I contributions to the world, eco-literacy, and other gaps they now noticed). One student almost imploded when she looked at a 2014 Family Living textbook in class which defined marriage

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exclusively as a heterosexual union of a man and woman. She demanded to be transferred out of the class after the teacher flatly refused to even discuss the possibility of other types of marital unions. This is in a country where same-sex marriage has been legal since 2005, and the provincial education act includes numerous articles protecting the rights of the LGBTQ2I community. Young women I have taught have become more aware of language in general, but more specifically in its use in the classroom, in textbooks, and in extra-curricular activities. Coaches in our area still routinely accuse slower moving male athletes of ‘running like a girl’, or ‘throwing like a girl’ – expressions that should have disappeared decades ago, but persist because those who use them have power and authority, and it is risky to challenge that, especially when the adult/child, teacher/student, coach/ player binaries are in place. However, many of the girls I teach, and some of the boys, now routinely call out coaches on sexist or homophobic comments. Critical pedagogy helps create a language of resistance and challenge that offers agency for the less powerful. Sitting in the cafeteria at lunchtime with friends, female students from my classes would now speak out when they heard a sexist, racist, or homophobic joke. Many recognized that such jokes had always made them uncomfortable, or worse, had gone unrecognized as offensive because of their own privilege, but they had learned to either laugh along or remain silent. Now they understood the hegemonic power at play and practiced strategies in the classroom to talk back to such harmful discourses. Even though they often received a smart comeback from the joke-teller or disdainful looks from others in the group, they persevered, knowing that every time they spoke out, not only were they developing political voice and presence, but also some of those who heard their objections might come to shift their positions as well. It would take time, energy, courage, and action, but these students felt transformed by engaging in anti-oppressive practices, even small steps such as these.

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Beyond the School Because students in the WMC class submitted weekly journals and were encouraged to record incidents and conversations that occurred outside of the school space, I collected, over a 10-year period, a plethora of material about the myriad ways critical pedagogy spills out into other domains. Once again, while many students wrote about exciting events that they viewed as transformation in their social justice action commitment and in developing their sense of voice and agency, serious conflicts and tensions also emerged, requiring careful and reflective navigation by both students and me. Repeatedly, students would write about trying to discuss with their immediate and extended families issues such as racism, sexism, and heteronormative sexism. Many were devastated by the reactions with which their critical views were met, especially those expressed by beloved grandparents. So many students wrote with anguish that they had no idea their family members were so racist, in particular against First Nations people, but also Blacks and Middle-Eastern groups. Several students realized, upon reflection, that they had heard racist and (hetero)sexist comments all their lives, but until now, had never really stopped to listen or ask family members why they held such views. Now they were taking up these conversations, and their critically informed views caused family disruption and upheaval. Many were flatly told to stop talking such nonsense about inequitable power relations and oppression, to get those foolish ideas out of their head. In effect, the authoritative adults in their lives used the standard hegemonic strategy: the world is this way, always has been, and always will be. You can’t change it, so stop trying. I recall one female student’s anger at her family after she spent the American Thanksgiving with her relatives in the United States. All the men were sitting in the living room watching football, and all the women were in the kitchen preparing snacks, beverages, and the big meal.

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The men kept yelling at the women to bring more food, more beer, and so on. Sue (pseudonym) purposely sat in the living room with the men, and after listening to them shout comments at her mother, grandmother, and aunts, she spoke out, asking them why they couldn’t get up and get their own food and beer. Her uncle told her women have a job and it is in the kitchen and in the bed, and he suggested she go join the other women and be helpful. When Sue spoke back using feminist discourses about equality, respect, independence, and power, she was immediately and harshly shouted down by all the men in the room, culminating with her father declaring with disgust that she had become a ‘femi-nazi’ because of the stupid course she was taking at school. Sue felt embarrassed, overpowered, and angry. She left the room in tears and stayed in a bedroom for the remainder of the evening. At one point, her mother came in to check on her, and she suggested Sue come out and apologize to her male relatives. Sue used her journal to vent about the incident, and I spent time with her after school that week, helping her work through this emotional event. Sue’s story is one of the hundreds I could tell about the intersection of the critical classroom and the broader community. Over the years, several of the events the WMC class hosted or organized were publicly attacked via letters written to the editor of the town’s local newspaper. Our challenge of the Miss Beauty Contest pageant was perceived as an effort to destroy valued traditions, and members of the public sent letters to the school and local paper chastising the students for their troublemaking. I personally was the target of some of the public letters in which I was attacked for my feminist views and critical pedagogical practices. Each semester that I taught WMC, students constructed a large wall collage in an effort to educate other students about the impact of advertising on women’s, as well as mens’, self-image and self-esteem. In particular, the deliberate connections ads create between male power and female passivity,

with images of violence and sex intersecting, disturbed students. They believed passionately that this was one of the most important projects of the course, and students looked forward to creating their class collage each term. The posters contained cut-out images of various ads from commonplace popular magazines, mostly fashion, and were accompanied with a bulleted list of critical readings of how the images work on the consumer’s mind. Once the display was hung on a public wall in the school common area, students from the class volunteered time during lunch hour to be around the collage to answer questions or engage in conversation with interested students. This is exactly the sort of critical activism that critical pedagogy seeks to elicit in students. Overall, the display was met with enthusiasm and lively discussion among students and staff. However, it did not meet the approval of many parents who happened to see it while visiting the school. On at least two occasions, our project was criticized as ‘inappropriate’ and ‘pornographic’ in letters to the editor. Both times, I contacted the authors of the letters and invited them to engage in a conversation with the students during one of our classes. I never got a response from either of them.

THOUGHTS ABOUT THE FUTURE OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY It didn’t happen that way either. I’m not sure how it happened; not exactly. All I can hope for is a reconstruction. (Atwood, 1985: 330)

I am not trying to describe a bleak picture for potential critical educators, nor discourage them from engaging in critical pedagogy. Rather, I am attempting to highlight the complexities and multiple directions such practices may take the educator and students. Often, critical pedagogy is written about in a highly theoretical and perhaps utopic discourse, emphasizing the excitement of transforming students into critical, questioning,

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active subjects. Many educators enthusiastically internalize simple slogans such as Paulo Freire’s ‘Reading the world, and reading the word’, and bell hooks’ ‘teaching to transgress’, only to realize that the material reality of implementing critical practices is neither utopic nor simple. Educators must be aware of the risks, of the potential for material harm, of the emotional exhaustion that imbues this pedagogical environment. While the joy of witnessing celebratory events, assisting students in taking on agency and voice, and participating in transformational moments cannot be denied, neither can the potential for conflict, tension, and risk. On a practical level, more qualitative research, in particular long-term studies, needs to be done in classrooms where teachers are implementing critical pedagogies. School policies and practices need to be written and performed through a critically informed lens using critical discourses which educators, students, and parents are comfortable working in because appropriate in-­service and professional development has been offered to the entire school community. Much work remains in order to make space for, and take up on a daily basis, critical pedagogies at all levels and across all disciplines in schools. If my stories can, in some way, add to the conversation about the daily practices of critical pedagogy and deepen educators understanding of what it can look like both in theory and practice, I will gladly and freely share them and offer a small contribution to the field.

REFERENCES Atlantic Canada English Language Arts Curriculum (High School). (1998). New Brunswick Department of Education Curriculum Development Branch. https://www2.gnb.ca/content/dam/gnb/Departments/ed/pdf/K12/ curric/English/EnglishLanguageArts-HighSchool.pdf Accessed July 30, 2017. Atwood, M. (1985). The handmaid’s tale. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.

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Bochner, A. P. (2000). Criteria against ourselves. Qualitative Inquiry, 6(2), 266–272. Brookfield, S. D. (2005). The power of critical theory: Liberating adult learning and teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of ‘sex’. London: Routledge. Code, L. (Ed.) (2000). Encyclopedia of feminist theories. London: Routledge. Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the oppressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, 59(3), 297–324. Freire, P. (1985). Reading the world and reading the word: An interview with Paulo Freire. Language Arts, 62(1), 15–21. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge. Kilbourne, J. (1999). Deadly persuasion: Why women and girls must fight the addictive power of advertising. New York: The Free Press. Kincheloe, J. L. & Steinberg, S. R. (1997). Changing multiculturalisms. Buckingham: Open University Press. Marx, S. (2004). Regarding whiteness: Exploring and intervening in the effects of white racism in teacher education. Equity & Excellence in Education, 37(1), 31–43. McIntosh, P. (1988). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/mcintosh.pdf . Accessed July 30, 2017. Milner, H. R. (2003). Reflection, racial competence, and critical pedagogy: How do we prepare pre-service teachers to pose tough questions? Race Ethnicity and Education, 6(2), 193–208. Ohito, E. O. (2016). Making the emperor’s new clothes visible in anti-racist teacher education: Enacting a pedagogy of discomfort with white preservice teachers. Equity & Excellence in Education, 49(4), 454–467. Shetterly, Margot Lee. (2016). Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race. New York: William Morrow. Weiler, K. (Ed.). (2001). Feminist engagements: Reading, resisting, and revisioning male theorists in education and cultural studies. New York: Routledge.

28 Critical Pedagogies of Compassion1 Michalinos Zembylas

In a landmark essay published in 1996 under the title ‘Compassion: The Basic Social Emotion’, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum suggests that a sensible call for education in (Western) schools should be the study of narratives of suffering. As she advises, ‘public education at every level should cultivate the ability to imagine the experiences of others and to participate in their sufferings’ (1996: 50). The suggestion that education should cultivate compassion for the suffering of others raises a number of issues about the forms that compassion should take in schools to promote solidarity with others, especially distant others who suffer (Chouliaraki, 2010, 2012). These issues concern the sense of compassion that education can cultivate among Western students (e.g. US or European students who are privileged or less privileged to various degrees) toward any distant sufferer, that is, someone who suffers far away (e.g. individuals in South African shanties, Syrian refugees stuck in a refugee camp in Turkey, or asylum seekers enclosed in an Australian detention camp).

Particularly, the focal issue of concern is whether imagining the lives of others who suffer moves students to become agentive participants (rather than spectators) by engaging in meaningful action. Despite the increasing number of publications in the last few years on the role of education in cultivating compassion (e.g. see Gibbs, 2017; Jalongo, 2014; Peterson, 2017; Pinson et  al., 2010), more work is needed to theorize the link between compassion and pedagogies in praxis, particularly whether and how pedagogues can really teach specific political dispositions (e.g. altruism, solidarity) and compassionate action. A number of landmark works from vastly different disciplinary and epistemological traditions attests to the importance of paying attention to compassion as a response to suffering (e.g. Berlant, 2004; Chouliaraki, 2014; Nussbaum, 1996, 2001; Spelman, 1997). Although coming from different disciplines, these works ‘variously stress the importance and ubiquity of personal narratives of suffering in eliciting compassion’ (Woodward, 2004: 63).

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However, it has also been argued that narratives of suffering may lead to moralization of education by removing emotion from the call to action and by framing the conversation according to simplistic and essentialist moral categories such as that of good versus evil (Chouliaraki, 2012). This moralization takes place by resorting to a sentimental discourse of suffering that evokes pity for the sufferers rather than compassionate action (Boltanski, 1999; Geras, 1999; Cohen, 2001), leading students to voyeurism and passivity (Zembylas, 2008, 2013, 2016). This chapter joins these debates and aims to accomplish two things. First, it analyzes the emotional consequences of what Boltanski (1999) calls the current ‘crisis of pity’, that is, the crisis of a particular conception of politics of compassion, where the justification for action takes place in the name of a sentimental discourse of suffering. Drawing on this issue of feminist theories as well as theories situated in political science, media, and cultural studies, I suggest that a politics of compassion is both necessary and valuable, albeit situated in practices that attend to the needs of vulnerable people who are suffering and address structural inequalities. Second, the chapter explores the conditions within which the emotion of compassion in the classroom can be translated into critical pedagogies that inspire protest at injustice, or are transmuted into compassionate action that radicalizes solidarity and does not enact some of the same violent practices that it attempts to overcome. This analysis differentiates various modes of action and engagement and thus suggests that not just any action is good action. Pedagogies of compassion also need to be strategic in the sense that they have to function strategically – at the right time, manner, and space – if they are going to create openings which might eventually disrupt the emotional roots of pity and sentimentality – an admittedly long-term and difficult task. In general, my analysis in this chapter foregrounds what I call critical pedagogies of compassion. Pedagogies of compassion are critical in that they aim to transform students

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and teachers as well as the schools and the communities that they serve, by identifying and challenging sentimentalist and moralistic discourses that often obscure inequality and injustice. This is not a proposition for a new form of critical pedagogy, but rather a call to recognize in existing critical pedagogies the need to explicitly interrogate pity and cultivate critical compassion.

THE ‘CRISIS OF PITY’: THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT Ancient and modern Western philosophers – For example, the Stoics, Aristotle, Hume, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Arendt to name a few – engaged in unending debates about the meaning and nature of compassion as an emotion as well as a social and political construct (Nussbaum, 2001). In her comprehensive review of these philosophical works, Nussbaum suggests three key cognitive elements of judgment that are considered necessary for the development of compassionate emotions. First, there is the judgment of the size (i.e. serious or not) of suffering of another; second, there is the judgment that the person does not deserve the suffering; and, third, there is the judgment of one’s own vulnerability of being in the other’s position. While Nussbaum’s analysis is undoubtedly valuable, her narrowly cognitivist framework has been critiqued that it underestimates the cultural politics of compassion and assumes a unitary view of the spectator and the innocent sufferer – a view which cannot properly grasp the ambivalence that is often involved in compassionate emotions (Hoggett, 2006). Most importantly, however, Nussbaum uses the terms pity and compassion interchangeably to refer to participation in the suffering of others, while theorists in political science (e.g. Whitebrook, 2002), feminist studies (e.g. Porter, 2006), media and communication studies (e.g. Chouliaraki, 2012), and cultural studies (e.g. Berlant, 2004) make a

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crucial theoretical distinction, one that has significant political consequences. That is, pity denotes the feeling of empathetic identification with the sufferer, while compassion refers to the feeling accompanied by action. Also, pity requires an object whereas compassion requires a subject; the object of pity is the innocent victim, without subjectivity, however, compassion does not necessarily require innocence (Hoggett, 2006). ‘In compassion’, writes Hoggett, ‘the other is tolerated in his or her otherness – someone with flaws, lacking in some or many virtues, willful but also still suffering, still to some extent a victim of fate or injustice’ (2006: 156). Thus, while the object of pity exists primarily within an imaginary realm that sentimentalizes the other, compassion requires action that shows patience and tolerance in practice. Consequently, pity and compassion do not necessarily go together, although many scholars may use them interchangeably (Whitebrook, 2002). Furthermore, there is an asymmetry between the spectator and the sufferer that complicates the decision to engage in compassionate action; this asymmetry is not only an existential one, but also a political and social condition (Woodward, 2004). Contrary to compassion, pity retains the asymmetry between the spectator and the sufferer and downplays the existing power differentials and inequalities (Boltanski, 1999; Chouliaraki, 2014). While it is true that being concerned about the other who suffers has indeed enabled partially, but significantly, the alleviation of suffering among large populations in modern times, it has simultaneously established a dominant discourse of pity – of feeling sorry about those who suffer without necessarily taking action to alleviate the structural conditions and effects of suffering (Chouliaraki, 2012). This ‘crisis of pity’, which is grounded in discourses of universal morality and moralization, resorts to a sentimental-oriented discourse of ­suffering – a language of indignation or guilt that blames the perpetrators or a language of sentimentalism that evokes feelings of appreciation for the

benefactors (Boltanski, 1999; Chouliaraki, 2012, 2014). Berlant (1998) acknowledges the tensions and contradictions of sentimentality in narratives of suffering and asserts that the sentimental framing of suffering wrongly presumes that such suffering is universal. Thus, suffering, which is in part an effect of socioeconomic relations of violence and poverty, is problematically assumed to be alleviated by empathetic identification and generosity, namely, pity, a feeling which does not lead to any action. As Woodward also explains, the experience of being moved by these sentimental scenes of suffering, whose ostensible purpose is to awaken us to redress injustice, works instead to return us to a private world far removed from the public sphere. Hence, in a crippling contradiction […] the result of such empathetic identification is not the impulse to action but rather a ‘passive’ posture. […] The genre of the sentimental narrative itself is morally bankrupt. (Woodward, 2004: 71)

Similarly, Spelman (1997) emphasizes the importance of recognizing the structures of injustice and oppression. Writing from a feminist perspective, Spelman alludes to the dangers of empathetic feelings confined to the individual and argues that such feelings ‘may reinforce the very patterns of economic and political subordination responsible for such suffering’ (1997: 7) such as the subordination of women and other minorities. The over-representation and overvaluation of suffering fixes others as the sufferer-victims, as those who can overcome their suffering only when the rest of the world feels moved enough to empathize with their suffering. In her contribution to this debate, Nelson (2004) discusses Hannah Arendt’s tone of reporting the trial of Adolf Eichmann and takes on issues of sympathy, suffering, and politics. As Nelson observes, for Arendt the overwhelming character of human suffering – Arendt repeatedly characterizes suffering and the emotion it stimulates as boundless – threatens to destroy our capacity to think. For this reason, in her account on Eichmann’s trial, Arendt sought to hold back the overwhelming

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emotions stimulated by narratives of suffering in the trial. Nelson, therefore, makes a point that is valuable for the purposes of this chapter, namely, how teachers and students in Western societies must find ways to take up a critical stance toward suffering. This stance does not imply a blind and emotion-less distance from suffering, just as it does not mean to be overwhelmed by emotion; both of these stances will not help our capacity to think and perhaps take action that eventually makes a difference. Finally, in her recent books on the politics of pity in relation to humanitarianism, Chouliaraki (2012, 2014) shows how media and communication frame suffering within a politics of pity that both reflects and reproduces an inadequacy insofar as it establishes a superficial and sentimental relationship between the spectator and the sufferer. Through various examples from contemporary terrorist and humanitarian disasters, Chouliaraki demonstrates that the post-humanitarian sensibility needs to break with the emotional repertoire of pity, because such a repertoire ignores the complex emotional experiences of suffering and puts aside those structural inequalities that are responsible for suffering in the first place. The politicization of pity is precisely the danger that needs to be tackled, if pedagogues are going to decipher effectively students’ sentimental responses to images and narratives of suffering in the contemporary world. The following section, then, highlights more explicitly the emotional complexities involved in pedagogical efforts to engage students with stories of suffering – both students who are privileged and those who may be less privileged to various degrees.

COMPASSION FATIGUE, DESENSITIZATION, AND SELF-VICTIMIZATION There is no question that teaching about narratives of suffering provokes at times strong emotional reactions in the classroom (e.g.

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Berlak, 2004; Boler, 1999; Martusewicz, 2001; Razack 2007; Zembylas, 2008, 2015, 2016). These researchers highlight how and why students’ feelings block, defuse, and distract from their engagement with suffering. In general, the absence of certain emotional dynamics in a classroom has negative consequences in cultivating compassion and building solidarity with those who suffer. Teachers have to find ways to overcome various challenges – for example, discourses of egocentricity or narcissism; feelings of discomfort or shock – in order to reach their students, who may have variable responses to stories of suffering. Importantly, teachers need to establish trust in the classroom, develop strong relationships and enact compassionate understanding in every possible manner. In what follows, the chapter briefly summarizes three types of student responses in the classroom; the discussion focuses on the emotional challenges that arise for students to recognize histories of injustice and oppression and move from feelings of pity toward critical compassion. Understanding these possible responses is necessary, if teachers and students are going to find ways to move beyond a politics of pity toward a politics of compassion and actionoriented solidarity.

Compassion Fatigue Compassion fatigue is a condition of spectator indifference towards the suffering of others as a result of compassion overload (Moeller, 1999; Tester, 2002). Compassion fatigue has been defined as ‘becoming so used to the spectacle of dreadful events, misery or suffering that we stop noticing them’ (Tester, 2002: 13). Studies in the media, for example, show that overload of information and images on suffering increase the distance between spectators and sufferers (Cohen, 2001; Höijer, 2004; Tester, 2002). This distance creates fatigue manifested in the suspicion for the sentimental-oriented discourse which often accompanies representations of suffering

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(Vestergaard, 2008). Possibly, then, the overload of images of suffering may bring the opposite results in the classroom. In particular, there are two risks that need further attention in the context of pedagogy: the ‘bystander’ effect and the ‘boomerang’ effect. The ‘bystander’ effect refers to the individual’s indifference to acting on suffering as a reaction to the overwhelming negative emotions that instill a sense of powerlessness (Cohen, 2001). Undoubtedly, witnessing human suffering lays a moral demand upon spectators, which cannot always be satisfied through direct action (Vestergaard, 2008). For example, the privileged student who witnesses narratives or images of suffering from a distance (e.g. in the context of a poor developing country) may get the impression that the situation is inalterable and inevitable. In a classroom that harbors pity and inaction, the students detach themselves from the reality of suffering, suspend compassionate action, and engage in passive empathy (Boler, 1999; Schertz, 2007; Zembylas, 2008, 2016). The ‘boomerang’ effect refers to the individual’s indignation toward those who try to purposely instill guilt or shame and may end up undermining action to alleviate suffering (Boltanksi, 1999; Cohen, 2001). For example, if students are bombarded with material teaching them that failure to act about the other who suffers amounts to moral complicity and the perpetuation of human suffering, then this logic may bounce back and students may adopt an angry, reactionary approach. Becoming angry at those who try to instill guilt in them, students attempt to justify through their anger why they have no moral or political commitment to act, and thus the whole effort to engage students in action through guilt or shame becomes a boomerang.

Desensitization Desensitization, just like compassion fatigue, is a condition of indifference manifested through an unwillingness to engage in compassionate

action either as a self-protective mechanism or as a refusal to be concerned for the suffererother through some measure of emotional identification (Seu, 2003). For example, bourgeois students as spectators of marginalized others’ suffering may be irritated by some horrible scenes they see in the media, but somehow they become unwilling to engage with the consequences of suffering and injustice. What is intriguing in this case is how ‘a profoundly emotional message ends up generating an absence of emotions’ (Seu, 2003: 186). Desensitization may take different forms and involve a range of emotions, yet the bottom line is that it disengages students from the discomforting implications of suffering events (Boler, 1999). The spectating student may initially feel shocked and disturbed by the frequently televised images of a traumatic event and may even be evoked to feel pity, but the repeating scenes of suffering fix the event in a few images and produce a decontextualized view on injustice (Kaplan, 2005). For example, as Kaplan writes, the visuality of suffering in catastrophic events – such as the repetitive images of planes crashing into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 in the United States – is often translated in such melodramatic or sensationalized ways that these events hardly seem real. The result is that students reduce the meaning of such events in a few superficial or exaggerated phrases and end up feeling an absence of compassionate emotions. But it is not just shock events that may lead to indifference; teaching about empathy and compassion through positive images may also lead to desensitization (Zembylas, 2008). Positive images are those images which focus on the sufferer’s agency and dignity rather than on images of the sufferer as a victim (Chouliaraki, 2010); rather than the logic of complicity, the moralizing function of positive images is grounded in ‘the sufferer’s gratitude for the (imagined) alleviation of her suffering by a benefactor and the benefactor’s respective empathy toward the grateful sufferer’ (Chouliaraki, 2010: 112).

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The danger when the student-as-spectator renders sufferers as objects of generosity is to misrecognize the real problems behind suffering and the power asymmetries. Rather than enabling compassionate action, this misrecognition trivializes suffering and runs the risk of apathy, that is, of refusing to engage in action on the grounds that it may be unnecessary (Chouliaraki, 2012, 2014).

Self-Victimization A final challenge comes from the emotional resistance of those students who feel they are victims themselves (e.g. students who are marginalized at various degrees) and entails feelings of indignation, self-pity, and resentment for paying attention to the suffering of others. This echoes Chouliaraki’s (2012, 2014) concern about the danger of Western audiences becoming increasingly preoccupied with their own self-pity rather than the suffering of others. This tendency for selfpity may be a reaction against unjust treatment, but attachment to one’s own (perceived or real) suffering prevents the development of solidarity with others who also suffer (Brown, 1995). For Brown, there is a paralyzing tendency inflecting the logic of attachment to one’s own suffering; a preoccupation with one’s own misery forces subaltern subjects to get stuck in a present with no hope and a future that puts one’s own misery before everything. When self-pity becomes the focus of suffering in a classroom, this happens at the risk of widening the gap between students and others, potentially cultivating the perception of the other as a threat or articulating a discourse of egocentricity (Vestergaard, 2008) or cultural narcissism (Chouliaraki, 2012). Through self-victimization, students disengage from compassionate action toward all those who suffer for whatever reasons. As Chouliaraki (2012) notes, self-pity holds the suffering of the other at a distance; indeed, students may feel uneasy when they are confronted by signs

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of their own vulnerability, and this is enough to make them want to refrain from recognizing the suffering of others.

EDUCATION AND THE POLITICS OF COMPASSION The inadequacy of the discourse of pity is essentially an inadequacy to activate public action that alleviates suffering in the world (Boltanski, 1999). What is needed, therefore, according to Chouliaraki, is a break with pity ‘in favor of a potentially effective activism of  effortless immediacy’ (2010: 109). In so doing, it is important to abandon the appeal to suffering or pity on the basis of universal morals and suggest a politics of compassion, that is an account and a process which both recognizes the politicization of compassion and leads toward working for changing the structures which create suffering. This part of the chapter, then, attempts to delineate some of the conditions that are needed to prepare the ground for activating action in schools. For this reason, three elements which seem valuable to the formulation of a politics of compassion are proposed. These elements are neither the only ones nor the best ones; yet, they are important components in the effort to take into consideration possible reactions – such as the varied student responses illustrated in the previous section – in the process of how compassion is politicized both in society and in schools. First of all, a politics of compassion that takes into consideration the possible dangers of compassion fatigue, desensitization, and self-victimization has to begin from acknowledging common human vulnerability and its influence in inspiring meaningful actions that avoid presumptuous paternalism (Butler, 2004, 2016; Porter, 2006; Whitebrook, 2002). The recognition of one’s own vulnerability can constitute a powerful point of departure for developing compassion and solidarity with the other’s vulnerability (Butler, 2004).

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As Butler asserts: ‘Each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies […]. We cannot […] will away this vulnerability. We must attend to it’ (2004: 29). Butler’s description of the vulnerable body and self refers to the way we perform and are performed upon, and part of what we fear in the other is a projection of our own selves. Hence, Butler suggests that recognition of our own vulnerability opens up the potential for recognition of all humanity as vulnerable. Vulnerability may, therefore, be a more appropriate term than suffering to ground the political applications of compassion, because the focus is not merely on the alleviation of material suffering and hence a slide from compassion to benevolence and sentimentality (Porter, 2006; Whitebrook, 2002). Suggesting this epistemological shift of focus does not imply, however, that a narrative which focuses on the alleviation of material suffering will necessarily result in a slide into sentimentality. Undoubtedly, the political applications of compassion cannot be completely separated from questions of material suffering. Thus, it needs to be acknowledged that while the move away from suffering may be theoretically useful, the shift to a narrative of common human vulnerability is not completely unproblematic. The idea of common vulnerability enables us – teachers and students in the classroom, for instance – to explore how we might move beyond dichotomies that single out the self or the other as victims and therefore as deserving someone else’s pity (Zembylas, 2014). That is, the idea of common vulnerability puts into perspective the notion of all of us as vulnerable rather than the individual-other who needs our compassion. This notion addresses the concerns of students, for example, who seem to be stuck in self-victimization claims and refuse to acknowledge that others also suffer. Although the idea of common vulnerability does not guarantee any departure from such claims, it opens some space to problematize moralistic positioning. In addition,

the notion of common vulnerability attacks a major emotional ideology grounded in the view that it is natural or normal to be fearful of the other, especially if it involves racial differences. This is one of the most common and pernicious emotional ideologies underlying resistance (especially among White, middleclass students) to identifying with the other. However, if vulnerability concerns everyone and yet compassion is assigned differently (i.e. students think that some deserve compassion while others do not), then it is important to explore what it would take for students to begin imagining themselves as objects of lesser compassion in an unsuspected vulnerable moment. Through addressing this issue in ways that do not reify stereotypes or promote essentialism, it is possible to respond to some of the desensitization concerns outlined earlier, because the dichotomies between ‘we’ and ‘they’ will become meaningless and unproductive. Second, compassion serves to reinforce a strong connection between the personal and the political and accentuates the inter-­personal and the inter-relational (Whitebrook, 2002). Empathetic identification with the plight of others, then, is not a sentimental recognition of potential sameness – you are in pain and so am I, so we both suffer the same – but a realization of our own common humanity, while acknowledging asymmetries of suffering, inequality, and injustice (Zembylas, 2014). A discourse of vulnerability neither eschews questions of material suffering nor obscures issues of inequality and injustice; on the contrary, it highlights both the symmetries and the asymmetries of vulnerability. That is, although the experience of vulnerability may be more or less universal, the discourse of common vulnerability raises important critical questions such as ‘vulnerable to what?’ and ‘to whom?’ in order to dismiss the possibility of sliding into a sentimental recognition of potential sameness – which is exactly what a politics of compassion ardently seeks to avoid. Without this double realization – that is, we are all vulnerable but not in the same

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manner – our actions run the danger of being a form of charity and condescension toward those who are systematically and institutionally oppressed (Bunch, 2002). If properly recognized in schools, this double realization can potentially address both the concern about the desensitization of students and that of their self-victimization, because the distance between spectator and sufferer will not be taken for granted anymore, but rather its multiple complexities will be acknowledged and interrogated. In a sense, then, the kind of compassion that is explored here requires a simultaneous identification and dis-identification with the suffering of the other. The simultaneous recognition of symmetry and asymmetry with the other removes the arrogance of claiming that we know and feel their pain and suffering. This emotional ambivalence of simultaneous identification and dis-identification is needed to focus attention on the suffering of the other but not becoming too identified with it – a point raised earlier in Nelson’s (2004) reading of Arendt’s reporting on Eichmann’s trial. Students who already endure forms of suffering, of course, do not need a pedagogy to enlighten them on how to dis-identify with their own suffering. This does not imply, however, that pedagogies which interrogate pity and encourage critical compassion are not for them; on the contrary, the critical awareness that others are vulnerable too is important in the struggle for action-oriented solidarity and the avoidance of egocentricity and cultural narcissism. Finally, the third element of a politics of compassion is attentiveness to how the ethics of compassion questions injustice and inequality. In particular, an important component of a politics of compassion that is critical and justice oriented is how it deals with anger at injustice (Hoggett, 2006). A politics of compassion does not intentionally seek to cause anger, however, but rather encourages students and teachers to develop a critical analysis of anger, as it is likely that they will experience such feelings when they

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begin questioning long-held assumptions and beliefs about other people and social events (Zembylas, 2007). Anger may call attention to demands for recognition, but also emphasize inequalities (Holmes, 2004) and injustices at the civic level (Silber, 2011). Anger at injustice can be a positive and powerful source of personal and political insight in education (Lorde, 1984) because it helps to move teachers and students out of a cycle of self-pity, blame, or guilt and into a mode of action that somehow responds to injustice. For example, civic anger can be promoted in the classroom as a form of cultivating individual and collective political consciousness and social resistance to injustices in the students’ community, although anger is not inevitably emancipatory (Zembylas, 2010). However, recognizing the positive power of anger and its link to the struggle against injustice in one’s own community is valuable if teachers want to promote options for action that may change the conditions of others’ vulnerability. The pedagogical challenge for critical pedagogues is how to encourage students to become active participants with a nuanced understanding of the emotional complexities involved in histories of injustice and oppression.

TOWARD CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES OF COMPASSION A number of scholars have already noted the importance of promoting various aspects of teaching for/with compassion, both in the context of teaching (e.g. Jalongo, 2014; Peterson, 2017; Zembylas, 2015) and that of teacher education (e.g. Conklin, 2008; Whang and Nash, 2005). These efforts are united in their call for retrieving the language of compassion in education, although there are differences in their theoretical grounding of compassion. The idea proposed in this chapter emphasizes the emotional complexities of a vision that is construed as advocacy

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for critical, strategic, and action-oriented pedagogies of compassion. The value of this idea lies in its analytical implication, namely that the link between students’ compassion and action cannot be determined without an investigation of the differential emotional ways in which compassion is assigned inside and outside the classroom. It has been pointed out that what many existing pedagogical approaches seem to lack is a nuanced understanding of the emotional complexities involved in histories of injustice and oppression (e.g. Boler, 1999; Jansen, 2009; Zembylas, 2015). The main argument by these scholars is that while critical theory in education has not entirely ignored emotions, attention to them has been insufficient. Critical pedagogies of compassion, then – in the plural, because there are potentially many possible manifestations of such pedagogies – are not new forms of critical pedagogies. Rather, they are existing critical pedagogies which pay explicit attention to the emotional complexities of the narratives of suffering that enter the classroom and interrogate in particular the trappings of narratives of pity. Drawn from many theoretical streams (Darder et  al., 2003) but influenced greatly by the Freirean paradigm (e.g. Freire, 2000, 2001, 2005), critical pedagogies seek to expose and undo hegemonic values and taken-for-granted conceptions of truth that privilege the oppressor and perpetuate domination and social injustice (Darder et  al., 2003). A central aim of critical pedagogies, then, is to engage teachers and students in a critical, dialectical examination of how power relations (particularly connected to the construction of knowledge) operate in schools and society and create or sustain hegemonic structures, and to equip teachers and students with the language of critique and the rhetoric of empowerment to become transformative agents who recognize, challenge, and transform injustice and inequitable social structures. As critical pedagogies, critical pedagogies of compassion engage in the critical interrogation of power relations

and aim at subverting patterns of subordination. However, critical pedagogies of compassion mark a valuable intervention in the broad domain of critical pedagogy by focusing more specifically on identifying and challenging the emotional investments and emotion-informed ideologies that underlie possible responses toward suffering – by students and teachers alike – and seeking to make a concrete difference in sufferers’ lives (Zembylas, 2013). First of all, what distinguishes critical pedagogies of compassion is their emphasis on compassion to critique emotional ideologies and engage students in action-oriented solidarity and altruism. For example, an emotional ideology that invests in characterizing any expression of anger as inappropriate (including expressions of anger at social injustices) is unlikely to establish pedagogical opportunities for compassionate action against individuals or structures that humiliate or take advantage of fellow human beings. However, critical pedagogies of compassion offer an alternative vision of agency for students because they want to reclaim altruism by inspiring small-scale actions of solidarity that constitute students as active participants of community life. An example of this would be to investigate what it means for underprivileged students to have their neighborhood school close down and to examine possible actions that could be taken to convince decision-makers to change their plans. One small-scale action could be to learn how to express civic anger through participation in peaceful community protests. Problem-posing and critical praxis are essential aspects of critical pedagogies (DuncanAndrade and Morrell, 2008; Freire, 2000, 2001, 2005; McLaren, 2003), so a specific focus on actions that challenge the emotional investments and emotion-informed ideologies that underlie possible responses toward suffering is an important element of critical pedagogies of compassion. Hence, it is valuable to start from actions that respond to local problems within one’s own community and

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cultivate specific political dispositions to action and then gradually move to initiatives of solidarity for others suffering far away (e.g. see Pinson et al., 2010). Needless to say, not just any action is ‘good’ action; that is, an important component of critical pedagogy of compassion is to help teachers and students differentiate various modes of action and engagement. Thus, any actions of solidarity need to be constantly evaluated for their effectiveness to break patterns of subordination. If these actions are simply repeated over time under the assumption that they are doing good anyway, then the dangers outlined earlier (e.g. desensitization) are imminent. Furthermore, as noted in the previous section of the chapter, attentiveness to common human vulnerability is an important component of critical pedagogies of compassion. Attentiveness to vulnerability resonates well with investment in humility and curiosity, another essential aspect of critical pedagogies in general (SooHoo, 2015). Students are enabled to establish and maintain this attentiveness, when they begin to question and challenge arguments based on binaries like us/them, citizen/foreigner, friends/enemies, and good/evil, a stereotyping of groups considered to be more or less ‘grievable’ (see Butler, 2004, 2016). For example, students will learn compassion when they start asking critical questions and gradually engage in actions which challenge the taken-forgranted policy in many countries of keeping asylum seekers in remote detention camps (Zembylas, 2010, 2014). These questions could include the following: do asylum seekers have equal rights or not? Is each and every human being viewed as an individual with a history and identity that require respect? If yes, what can be done to show solidarity to the suffering of these fellow human beings? Once again, it is important to start with small actions of solidarity such as sending gifts, writing protest letters, and volunteering for non-governmental organizations that offer practical or legal help to asylum seekers (Porter, 2006). Clearly, writing letters does

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not truly alleviate suffering in any obvious manner, but it is a step toward helping; these are smaller gestures that may help lead students to becoming critical thinkers who continue to take action throughout their lives. Solidarity does not become radicalized from one day to the next; the intensification of solidarity comes gradually based on empathy, a community of engaged citizens and the constant interrogation of various modes of action and engagement for their effectiveness to fight injustice and subordination (see Barber, 1984). Critical compassion is even further cultivated, if students begin to understand the conditions (structural inequalities, poverty, globalization, etc.) that give rise to suffering and acknowledge some sort of human connection between themselves and others, specifically what it might mean for one to encounter vulnerabilities that students themselves might experience. But mere understanding is not enough, as literature on critical pedagogy points out (Darder et al., 2004; Giroux, 1988); students will become more susceptible to affective transformation when they enact compassionate action early on in their lives (e.g. from kindergarten; see Jalongo, 2014), such as becoming more patient and tolerant with peers who do not grasp a difficult concept in language or mathematics. As they grow up, children are offered opportunities to enact more complex manifestations of compassion that include action to alleviate the suffering of people who experience difficult times such as the asylum seekers enclosed in a detention camp. Thus, Nussbaum’s suggestion that a student ‘must take the person’s ill as affecting her own flourishing [and] must make herself vulnerable in the person of another’ (2001: 317) is merely the beginning. What needs to follow the acknowledgment of common humanity and vulnerability is taking action that dismisses essentialized categories of victims and benefactors and highlights instead the impact of solidarity on reducing everyday inequalities (Zembylas, 2014, 2016). Recognizing the emotional

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complexities of structural inequalities is necessary but not sufficient; what distinguishes critical pedagogies of compassion is that they push students to go beyond that and engage in actions that show solidarity and altruism in practice. Taking a step back to reflect once again on what makes critical pedagogies of compassion distinct and valuable, one has to acknowledge the multiple ways in which compassion is assigned differently as it relates to issues of identity and structures of inequality. Although there has not been any explicit research examining the ways in which identities of students and of sufferers come into play in the politics of compassion, it has been acknowledged in the literature that people of color and poor people are more often blamed for trauma and tragedy that occurs in their life (see Berlant, 2004). Pity for these groups is often informed by this blaming, and consequently structural inequalities are obscured. Blame develops as a result of performance, power, and othering; that is, blame is ideological and therefore it is important to interrogate the emotional ideologies in which blaming is grounded. Critical pedagogues, then, need to address a number of provocative issues in order to reach their students and move them beyond deficit perspectives and cultural narcissism (e.g. see Nieto and Bode, 2012). These issues concern the roots and consequences of blaming individuals rather than structural inequalities and the ways in which vulnerability is assigned or read differently by/for people. Some individuals and groups are clearly more vulnerable than others due to societal structural inequalities and this is something that needs to be constantly kept in mind. For example, two people can experience chronic illness. The person without health care will be vulnerable in a way that is different from someone who has health insurance. By suggesting that it is important for students to engage in action, what is meant is that they need to work actively to address structural inequality, which is the foundation of much

suffering. Recognizing, therefore, that compassion is assigned differently as it relates to issues of identity and structures of inequality and interrogating why this is so, is a valuable component of critical pedagogies of compassion. The recognition of the multiple ways in which compassion is assigned differently is clearly relevant to the issue of the simultaneous identification and dis-identification with the suffering of the other that has been raised earlier. While students (especially those who are privileged) become knowledgeable about other people’s lives – including issues they have not had to endure, such as sexual slavery, seeking asylum, starvation, torture, or having a missile hit a marketplace (Porter, 2006) – they also become mindful of how it is impossible to claim that they fully know and feel others’ pain. Attentiveness to the issue of simultaneous identification and dis-identification with the suffering of the other involves cultivating in students the ability to acknowledge the symmetries and asymmetries of suffering. For example, this means that there are limitations to how far a privileged individual in a Western society can actually participate in the suffering of a poor underprivileged individual living in the favelas of Brazil or the shanty towns of South Africa. However, the purpose of critical pedagogies of compassion – even if full identification with the suffering of the other is impossible – is to create pedagogical spaces in which teachers and students in privileged societies can take some action and offer an alternative option over that of pity and sentimentality. These spaces include analyzing, for example, how particular ideologies (e.g. nationalism, racism) are accompanied by certain emotional investments that might prevent identification with the sufferer-other or encourage identification only with certain sufferer-others who are perceived as similar (Zembylas, 2015). It is important, therefore, to reiterate that stories of suffering must indeed be heard in schools; however, the conditions of hearing them must also be interrogated so that the possibilities for compassion fatigue,

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desensitization, and self-victimization are minimized as much as possible. This is undoubtedly a daunting task for teachers; it’s not easy to create learning environments in which students learn to hear the other’s suffering and respond to this suffering with compassion and care. Possible responses can easily lead to emotions of pity for those who suffer or feelings of apathy and indifference. These feelings disengage students from the mode of care and compassionate action. However, attentiveness to the different ideas suggested here provides responses to some of the emotional challenges that have been identified. While this attention is critically important, it is also helpful to keep in mind that this approach is far from universal. Teaching for/with compassion in critical, strategic, and action-oriented ways has the potential to enrich possibilities for solidarity with suffering-others; yet such practice would necessitate that teachers establish trust in the classroom, develop strong relationships with and among students, and enact compassionate understanding in every possible manner.

Note 1  This is a revised version of the article ‘The “crisis of pity” and the radicalization of solidarity: Towards critical pedagogies of compassion’ published in Educational Studies: A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association 49(6), 2013, 504–521.

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Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (2001). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy and civic courage. Maryland, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Freire, P. (2005). Education for critical consciousness. New York: Continuum. Geras, N. (1999). The contract of mutual indifference: Political philosophy after the Holocaust. London: Verso. Gibbs, P. (Ed.). (2017). The pedagogy of compassion at the heart of higher education. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Giroux, H. A. (1988). Teachers as intellectuals: Toward a critical pedagogy of learning. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Hoggett, P. (2006). Pity, compassion, solidarity. In S. Clarke, P. Hoggett, & S. Thompson (Eds.), Emotion, politics and society (pp. 145–161). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Höijer, B. (2004). The discourse of global compassion: The audience and media reporting of human suffering. Media, Culture and Society, 26(4), 513–531. Holmes, M. (2004). Feeling beyond rules: Politicizing the sociology of emotion and anger in feminist politics. European Journal of Social Theory, 7(2), 209–227. Jalongo, M. R. (Ed.). (2014). Teaching compassion: Humane education in early childhood. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Jansen, J. D. (2009). Knowledge in the blood: Confronting race and the apartheid past. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kaplan, E. A. (2005). Trauma culture: The politics of terror and loss in media and literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press. Martusewicz, R. A. (2001). Seeking passage: Post-structuralism, pedagogy, ethics. New York: Teachers College Press. McLaren, P. (2003). Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education, 4th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Moeller, S. D. (1999). Compassion fatigue: How the media sell disease, famine, war, and death. London: Routledge. Nelson, D. (2004). Suffering and thinking: The scandal of tone in Eichmann in Jerusalem. In L. Berlant (Ed.), Compassion: The culture and

politics of an emotion (pp. 219–242). New York: Routledge. Nieto, S. & Bode, P. (2012). Affirming diversity: The sociopolitical context of multicultural education, 6th ed. Boston: Pearson. Nussbaum, M. (1996). Compassion: The basic social emotion. Social Philosophy and Policy, 13(1), 27–58. Nussbaum, M. C. (2001). Upheavals of thought: The intelligence of emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peterson, A. (2017). Compassion and education: Cultivating compassionate children, schools and communities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan Pinson, H., Arnot, M., & Candappa, M. (2010). Education, asylum and the ‘non-citizen’ child: The politics of compassion and belonging. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Porter, E. (2006). Can politics practice compassion? Hypatia, 21(4), 97–123. Razack, S. H. (2007). Stealing the pain of others: Reflections on Canadian humanitarian responses. The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 29(4), 375–394. Schertz, M. (2007). Avoiding ‘passive empathy’ with philosophy for children. Journal of Moral Education, 3(2), 185–198. Seu, B. I. (2003). ‘Your stomach makes you feel that you don’t want to know anything about it’: Desensitization, defence mechanism and rhetoric in response to human rights abuses. Journal of Human Rights, 2(2), 183–196. Silber, I. F. (2011). Emotions as regime of justification?: The case of civic anger. European Journal of Social Theory, 14(3), 301–320. SooHoo, S. (2015). Humility within critical pedagogy. In B. J. Porfilio & D. R. Ford, (Eds.), Leaders in critical pedagogy: ­Narratives for understanding and solidarity (pp. 225–233). The Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Spelman, E. V. (1997). Fruits of sorrow: Framing our attention to suffering. Boston: Beacon Press. Tester, K. (2002). Compassion, morality and the media. Buckingham: Open University Press. Vestergaard, A. (2008). Humanitarian branding and the media: The case of Amnesty International. Journal of Language and Politics, 7(3), 471–493.

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Whang, P. A. & Nash, C. (2005). Reclaiming compassion: Getting to the heart and soul of teacher education. Journal of Peace Education, 2(1), 79–92. Whitebrook, M. (2002). Compassion as a political virtue. Political Studies, 50(3), 529–544. Woodward, K. (2004). Calculating compassion. In L. Berlant (Ed.), Compassion: The culture and politics of an emotion (pp. 59–86). New York: Routledge. Zembylas, M. (2007). Mobilizing anger for social justice in education: The politicization of the emotions in education. Teaching Education, 18(1), 15–28. Zembylas, M. (2008). Trauma, justice and the politics of emotion: The violence of sentimentality in education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 29(1), 1–17. Zembylas, M. (2010). Agamben’s theory of biopower and immigrants/refugees/asylum

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seekers: Discourses of citizenship and the  implications for curriculum theorizing. ­Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 26(2), 31–45. Zembylas, M. (2013). Critical pedagogy and emotion: Working through troubled knowledge in posttraumatic societies. Critical Studies in Education, 54(2), 176–189. Zembylas, M. (2014). Theorizing ‘difficult knowledge’ in the aftermath of the ‘affective turn’: Implications for curriculum and pedagogy in handling traumatic representations. Curriculum Inquiry, 44(3), 390–412. Zembylas, M. (2015). Emotion and traumatic conflict: Reclaiming healing in education. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zembylas, M. (2016). Toward a critical-­ sentimental orientation in human rights education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 48(11), 1151–1167.

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SECTION III

Key Figures in Critical Pedagogy Gregory Martin

No authoritative or definitive account exists of key figures and their seminal works in the critical pedagogy movement. Any such attempt would, of course, be a reification of the critical pedagogy movement as a comprehensive theory and practice. As an ongoing global phenomenon, critical pedagogy has never been a wholly singular, linear or backward-looking project. Any backward-looking considerations have focused on respecting and learning from the many precedents, breakthroughs and critiques that have animated the ‘must do’ of critical pedagogy and propelled the movement forward (Steinberg, 2007: ix). Here, looking back from the present is informed by the movement’s capacity to engage in a simultaneous process of critique, learning and renewal (Kincheloe, 2007). The dogmatism and sectarianism of certain elements of the militant vanguard or revolutionary left is not a strong force in the critical pedagogy movement. Indeed, such a

stance goes against the grain of open and constructive dialogue that takes place between the different, if not sometimes opposing tendencies, in this ‘big tent’ movement (Lather, 1998: 487). Critical pedagogy, in all its conceptual–spatial–temporal entanglements and enactments, is always in motion. In this context, dogma and cults of personality are very much incompatible with the movement’s promotion of an open and inclusive ‘criticality’ that is so generative for its praxis (Kincheloe, 2007: 18). Nonetheless, some figures in the critical pedagogy movement have achieved considerable influence, if not celebrity status. Consider Paulo Freire, who has sold millions of books, including most famously, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970/1993), which established him as an educational icon. Countless articles and books have been written on Freire, and his work is venerated by liberals and radicals alike, despite his rejection

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of transmission models of ‘banking education’, the commodification of ideas and the hero worship of political leaders (McLaren, 2000). Similarly, other figures in the critical pedagogy movement have achieved celebrity status, such as bell hooks, even if they have not actively sought it. What matters for the critical pedagogy movement, though, is the substance of their ideas which have resonated around the world. For example, influential in his own right, Graham Smith reminds us of how Freire’s work informed his thinking about Kaupapa M¯aori as a form of praxis: When I first read Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed it made absolute sense to me. I only had to read it once and I got it, because for everything he said I had a practical example from Aotearoa. It fitted; it described exactly the sorts of things we were engaging with. His use of the term ‘praxis’ to refer to the inseparability of action and analysis made sense for our struggle here in New Zealand. The co-option of his words into my own work has been quite deliberate. (Smith et  al., 2012: 12)

Clearly, the contributions of such key figures have been collectively generative for the praxis of critical pedagogy. However, it is important not to minimise, if not overlook and render invisible, the disruptive mix of theory and practice that characterises the critical pedagogy movement as a whole (Darder et al., 2003; Kincheloe, 2007; Orelus and Brock, 2014). Indeed, the mettle of the critical pedagogy movement has been crafted, forged and demonstrated through its common pool of eclectic resources and a continual process of critique and reworking that has informed place-based praxis, as initiated and enacted by those most impacted by injustice, across the globe. As will be evident in this section of the Handbook, critical pedagogy is, therefore, an umbrella term for a broad range of approaches and standpoints that have emerged in response to unjust laws, policies, issues and practices. Despite sometimes profound political differences, critical pedagogy has always been about the process of

instantiating social change through critique of domination, power or the ‘status quo’, collective learning and the enactment of ‘alternatives’ through different paradigms  for action, e.g. ­prefigurative politics. For better and worse, the arrival of the internet and new digital technologies have changed the way that many critical pedagogues are working to disrupt the public sphere of capitalist production as well as the ongoing violence of colonialism, patriarchy, speciesism and ecological destruction. Increasingly, academics, teachers and other activists and public intellectuals, whether they self-identify as ‘critical pedagogues’ or not, are using social media as a platform to share experiences, to build connections and to learn from and inspire others to engage in intentional, scaled action. What also matters here is that despite some misconceptions, the critical pedagogy movement extends outside of school classrooms and academia, and indeed, can be instigated and/or harnessed to disrupt, re-enchant and rework what happens within those institutionalised spaces of learning. Unfortunately, aided and abetted by new digital technologies, including automation, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, simultaneous processes of disruption are underway within educational institutions, which threaten to shrink the pedagogical possibilities for re-imaging education and its possibilities for social change (Sellar and Hogan, 2019). For example, neoliberal ideologies of ‘personalised learning’, under the guise of technological empowerment and progress, threaten to delimit the role of educators as well as the objective and scope of possibilities for pedagogy (Hallman, 2018: 1; Sellar and Hogan, 2019). Within what is being heralded as ‘next-generation’ teaching and learning, venture capital and large corporations such as Pearson are creating and monetising data, technology and services that offer to ‘empower’ end-users, whether this is employees undertaking workplace training or students completing a traditional qualification or alternative credential, like

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never before (Sellar and Hogan, 2019: 1, 7). Witness the roll out of data warehouses, educational data mining and learning analytics, dashboards and ‘self-service’ data visualisation tools that are marketed to assure education providers that ‘end-users’, no matter what their learning needs, background or context, will receive differentiated, tailored or ‘customised’ content and learning activities at scale and in a cost-efficient way. Bolstered by considerable hype, the unfolding ‘educational revolution’ in personalised learning promises to improve student engagement and institutional outcomes which are increasingly important for market, regulatory and quality assurance purposes (Sellar and Hogan, 2019: 5, see also Selwyn, 2016). Despite the marketing of technologically enhanced personalised learning as a democratic and inclusive alternative to top-down, ‘one-size-fits-all’ education, Selwyn (2016), Hallman (2018), Sellar and Hogan (2019) and others remind us that technology is never neutral and that such developments have potentially negative consequences for teachers, pedagogy and knowledge production. As form of research and practice, the critical pedagogy movement must respond urgently to such new threats, challenges and opportunities. If the critical pedagogy movement is, as Kincheloe (2007) put it, to continue ‘to matter’ then it cannot afford to draw upon a select set of ideas, resort to formulas or focus on the same set of problems (ibid.:  10). Kincheloe was a self-professed ‘“vehement critic” of the critical tradition’ and was always quick to point constructively to its silences and shortcomings (ibid.: 9). With this in mind, a concern for this section was not with ensuring an authoritative or comprehensive representation of key ­figures. This would be to assume that the critical pedagogy movement is relatively stable, uniform and able to be distilled, once and for all, down to a few key ‘founders’ and/or their successors, who, taken together, would be representative of its different traditions and approaches. Critical pedagogy’s diverse

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embodiments have never operated within disciplinary boxes or neat political ­containers. A key feature and strength of the critical pedagogy movement is its unruly relationality and its refusal of dogma and formulas which opens up the possibility for it to be continually ‘made and remade’ (Freire, 1970/1993: 30). Consequently, this section of the Handbook should not be interpreted as an exhaustive list of key figures or concepts in the critical pedagogy movement. Rather than reduce the critical pedagogy movement to a set of static characters and ideas, key thinkers and their contributions are considered in relation to how their work has instigated, reimagined or offers to rework the pedagogical possibilities for praxis.

REFERENCES Darder, A., Baltodano, M. P. & Torres, R. D. (2003). The Critical Pedagogy Reader. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Freire, P. (1970/1993). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin Books. Hallman, H. L. (2018). Personalized learning through 1:1 technology initiatives: Implications for teachers and teaching in neoliberal times. Teaching Education, 1–20. DOI: 10.1080/10476210.2018.1466874. Kincheloe, J. (2007). Critical pedagogy in the twenty-first century: Evolution for survival. In P. McLaren & J. L. Kincheloe (Eds.), Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (pp. 9–42). New York: Peter Lang. Lather, P. (1998). Critical pedagogy and its complicities: A praxis of stuck places. Educational Theory, 48(4), 487–497. McLaren, P. (2000). Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Orelus, P. W. & Brock, R. (Eds.). (2014). Interrogating Critical Pedagogy: The Voices of Educators of Color in the Movement. New York: Routledge. Sellar, S. & Hogan, A. (2019). Pearson 2025: Transforming Teaching and Privatising Education Data. Education International. Retrieved

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from https://issuu.com/educationinternational/ docs/2019_ei_gr_essay_pearson2025_eng_24 Selwyn, N. (2016). Is Technology Good for Education? Malden, MA: Polity Press. Smith, G. H., Hoskins, T. K. & Jones, A. (2012). Interview: Kaupapa M¯aori: The dangers of

domestication. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 47(2), 10–20. Steinberg, S. (2007). Where are we now? In P. McLaren & J. L. Kincheloe (Eds.), Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (pp. ix–x). New York: Peter Lang.

29 Meeting the Critical Pedagogues: A North America Context (Paulo Freire and Beyond) James D. Kirylo

With Paulo Freire the notion of critical pedagogy as we understand it today emerged … Indeed, all work in critical pedagogy after him has to reference his work. (Kincheloe, 2008a:163–4)

One of the most important educators the world has seen in the last 50 years, Paulo Freire (1921–97) is that rare human being whose thought has stood the test of time. To state this in another way relative to the sentiment in the epigraph, McLaren (2000) characterizes Freire as the ‘inaugural protagonist’ of critical pedagogy, propelling him on a worldwide-influence stage. In that light and for the purposes of this chapter, a slice of the world that will be discussed with respect to Freirean-influenced critical pedagogues is limited to a North American context. And even more specifically, the highlighted pedagogues are those who emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s and can largely be considered the central pioneering agents to introduce and foster critical pedagogy in North America. But before a discussion on these notable figures, let us

explore the work of Freire, succinctly capturing critical elements of his thought.

CRITICAL ELEMENTS OF FREIRE’S THOUGHT While in exile in Chile it was the publication of Freire’s landmark 1968 work Pedagogía del Oprimido that placed him on the proverbial map. Later published in English, in 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has been translated into over a dozen different languages, with 30 editions in print, and over a million copies sold, and the book has drawn and continues to draw an eclectic readership from a host of people from around the world. Freire went on to publish a variety of other books, numerous articles, and was tireless in traveling the world over in spreading a message of love, justice, and truth.1 Pedagogy of the Oppressed explores multiple themes related to the exploitive nature

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of political, social, religious, and educational systems that summarily marginalize groups of people. In addition to ‘denouncing’ oppressive structures, Freire simultaneously ‘announces’ ways in which the oppressed can be moved to a place of critical consciousness through processes that promote a democratizing climate. In sum – although not ­withstanding his numerous later brilliant works – Pedagogy of the Oppressed is perhaps the best and most concise presentation of the critical aspects of Freire’s philosophy, particularly relative to his making the distinction between the concept of a banking approach to education and a problem-­posing approach and making clear between the notion of humanization and dehumanization (Roberts, 2000). The antithesis of a banking approach to education (devoid of the learner’s cultural– socio–historical reality and anti-dialogically driven) is what Freire characterizes as a problem-posing education. In this approach, the driving assumptions are that people are viewed as conscious beings who are unfinished, but yet are in the process of becoming; liberation occurs through cognitive acts as opposed to the transfer of information (Freire, 1990). A problem-posing approach unfolds in a dialogical setting, which is not to say that dialogue is simply a ‘conversation’ or a mere sharing of ideas. Rather, embedded in the element of dialogue is criticality in problematizing the existential reality of the subject, a process in which students are presented with problems relative to their relationship with the world, leading them to be challenged yet prompted to respond to that challenge within a context of other interrelated problems (Freire, 1990, 1985). Dialogue and the notion of praxis (the dialectical interweaving of theory and practice) cultivates Freire’s concept of conscientização (conscientization) which is an unfolding process that is filtered through a contextual framework that intersects the psychological–political–theological–social milieu in the awakening of critical awareness (Freire,

1994). The idea of conscientization is not static or formulaic, but rather is situated in historical spaces and times, implying that the process is not a blueprint to indicate how it unfolds for every individual regardless of their society, location, and era (Freire, 1994; Roberts, 2000). Freire was aware that he had many ‘followers’ which prompted him to clarify that his literacy program, his critical analysis, and suggested action to confront oppressive forces was not something that was driven by a fixed process. Rather, he argued, ‘In order to follow me it is essential not to follow me!’ (Freire and Faundez, 1989: 30). In other words, what Freire fundamentally suggests is critical thought, just action, and a discerning imagination that dares to dream, while at the same time contextually considers cultural, historical, social, economic, and educational realities within each of our individual efforts to reinventing the intent of a Freireaninspired praxis.

A GENERAL WORD ABOUT THE HIGHLIGHTED CRITICAL PEDAGOGUES To the above end, therefore, the following 14 North American critical pedagogues have been in some way either influenced by Paulo Freire or have traversed in a parallel praxisspace as he did. They indeed come from a variety of backgrounds with respect to race, gender, ethnicity, and various North American geographic areas. How each pedagogue uniquely lives in that tension of confronting injustice and struggle while concurrently fostering a pedagogy that is humanizing is naturally influenced by their individual experiential reality, the conceptual thought that enlightened them, the circumstances that surrounded them, and the conviction that drove them. Throughout North America (indeed, the world), there are, of course, hundreds of well-known and not-so-well-known critical

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pedagogues from across a variety of disciplines and experiences who have significantly contributed to critical thought and action. In that light, therefore, the 14 critical pedagogues highlighted here simply – yet profoundly – well-represent the tireless, dedicated efforts of numerous others who are working toward making a more just and right world. Moreover, and perhaps it goes without being said, the highlighting of these critical pedagogues simply reflects a brief overview of who each is, with hopes to inspire and to not only serve as a springboard to engage us in dialogue about pivotal concepts related to justice, equality, and opportunity, but also to hopefully lead us to further explore deeper into the thought of some extraordinary people.

Michael Apple (1942–) Shaped by his youth, growing up in poverty, Apple drew from his lived experiences and those of his time as a teacher in an urban setting, concretely realizing, as Jonathan Kozol (1991) describes, the ‘savage inequalities’ in education. Moreover, as a graduate student at Columbia University, the disconnect between student background and experiences with the curriculum became more crystallized. Those collective experiences thrust him into his life’s work toward examining the relationship between culture and power and the fostering of justice and equity in education, particularly with respect to the poor and marginalized (Apple, 2012; Nganga and Kambutu, 2013). Although ‘officially’ retired, for over 40 years, Apple was a Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with numerous influential published books and articles to his name. Apple argues that education is a political enterprise and not a neutral affair, working to advance the privileged and those in power. In other words, education in the United States is inherently unjust, igniting a ‘them v. us’ dynamic as opposed to the cultivation of the

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common good. In addition, with an emphasis on a Eurocentric curricula, knowledge and curricula from non-European traditions are viewed as having inferior epistemological value – all of which serves the interests of privileged groups and, conversely, has a disempowering impact on historically marginalized peoples (Apple, 2000; Nganga and Kambutu, 2013). Indeed, as Apple (2000) suggests, when it comes to the making of curricula and policies, the exploration of such questions should be, critically: what counts as legitimate knowledge? What knowledge is of most worth? Whose knowledge is of most worth? (ibid.: 44). The exploration of these and other questions is a constant that is examined through a critical lens, through activism, and is aware of power dynamics, how domination works, and how exploitation happens (Apple, 1996). And then, as Apple puts it, ‘part of the task of the critical scholar/activist in education is to make public the success in contesting the unequal policies, curricula, pedagogy and evaluation’ (2011: 29).

Stanley Aronowitz (1933–) Aronowitz is a writer, professor, political activist, and cultural critic, focusing his efforts to promote a more just world. Since 1983, he has taught at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology, not to mention numerous other academic posts. Early on in his work, Aronowitz was aware not only of the inherent power of education but also its inherent political nature, and this influenced the direction of his first book, Education Under Siege: The Conservative, Liberal and Radical Debate over Schooling (1985). Written with Henry Giroux, this text explores educational policy, school funding, and ultimately how a conservative ideology delivered through a corporate model of education has an ultimate aim to privatize. The book goes on to argue that until progressives present a viable school reform effort that will

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captivate the interest of the public, the corporatization of education will continue – as it seems to continue up to this day (Morley, 2013). Aronowitz’s subsequent works continued to examine the ill-directed corporate model of education, railing against a K–12 testcentric schooling environment and the inequitable funding of schools that are still leaving the historically marginalized from enjoying full educational opportunity and participation. Moreover, as he relates in his work, The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning (2000), Aronowitz objects to the movement toward fostering a higher education system that has moved in the direction of becoming ‘training centers’ as opposed to being institutions of higher learning, where the liberal arts is a critical aspect to the course of study, and where critical thought is fostered in order to critique political systems, inequities, and unjust practices. Resonating with Freire’s thought, Aronowitz’s work is much about the fostering of consciousness-raising, where the learner becomes a subject of the world, in an educational climate that cultivates a problemposing approach to education, where we are ultimately in the process of becoming. In addition to being the founding editor of the journal Social Text, Aronowitz is the author of numerous publications and has written introductions and prefaces for books on Paulo Freire or for Freire himself.

Lilia Bartolomé (1957–) Growing up in a barrio in southeastern San Diego, in a bilingual and bicultural family – her mother from Mexico, her father with roots in the Philippines – Lilia Bartolomé was greatly shaped by her experiences as a youth; experiences which provided her with a critical lens in examining linguistics, ethnicity, and marginalization as a Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of

Massachusetts Boston (Szecsi, 2013). As Bartolomé puts it, My love of literacy and learning helped to produce a proud Mexicana/Chicana who was serious about her commitment to her community … Life has taught me that solidarity must extend beyond one’s particular ethnic group to various groups who share – even more than skin color – past and current experiences of subordination and oppression. (Bartolomé, 2011: 58)

Weaving in the critical thought of Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, and Gloria Anzaldúa, among others, has harnessed influential forces in channeling the direction of her multicultural work. And in the context of recognizing the low achievement/graduation rate of Latino students in the United States, Bartolomé’s efforts notably examine this troubling happening. She argues for a bilingual education in which students learn in their native language, prompting a more advantageous academic and psychological environment that will positively impact growth. Imbued with loving and respect, a schooling environment that is mindful of cultural and linguistic differences, in which the background knowledge of students is tapped into, and their lived reality recognized, aids greatly in students developing their voice, self-concept, and cultural identity. Rejecting the idea that education is a technocratic endeavor that is driven by uncritical methodologies, Bartolomé argues for an emancipatory and humanizing pedagogical approach that is culturally and linguistically responsive and democratically facilitated (Bartolomé, 1998, 2008a; Szecsi, 2013). An important aspect to Bartolomé’s work is naturally associated to the reformation of teacher programs where teacher candidates are overwhelmingly White middle-class women who for many – consciously or not – bring discriminatory ideologies which work further to disenfranchise the marginalized. Consequently, Bartolomé argues that teacher education programs must infuse in their programs an environment whereby teacher candidates closely examine their ideological

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leanings, and where necessary work to identify in practice and thought a counterhegemonic way of being that is ideologically clear and ethical, and one that is guided by courage and solidarity with minority groups (Bartolomé, 2003, 2004 2008b; Szecsi, 2013).

Deborah Britzman (1952–) It was during Britzman’s experience as a high school English teacher that she made the shocking discovery that many of her students could not read. Reading Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed had an influential impact on Britzman, particularly with the linking of the psychological, social, educational, and economic, and the notion of reading the word and reading the world. And while she worked to assist her students on a practical level, she was also prompted back to school to conduct graduate work not only studying literacy and anthropology, but also drawn to psychoanalysis. Particularly with respect to the latter, the trajectory of her work changed from school teacher to professor and psychoanalyst (Britzman, 2009a; Beckers and Hannula, 2013). The uniqueness of Britzman’s expression of critical pedagogy is a psychoanalytical approach which draws from the Frankfurt School, critical theory, feminist theory, and queer theory examining the complex world of the classroom setting. In this examination, she critically explores the interfacing of culture, emotions, societal influences, diverse backgrounds, histories, and myths, which is happening beneath the daily happenings in classroom life (Beckers and Hannula, 2013). In other words, the lives of students are situated within a larger school context, which therefore enmeshes a conflictive internal– external dynamic in search of understanding self and others. This dynamic can naturally cause struggle; for on the one hand, the pursuit toward personal development is a constructive thing, but on the other hand, it can be fraught with resistance because it may

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require an examination of painful experiences (Britzman, 1998, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2011). In that light, therefore, it is critical for teacher education programs to include a meaningful component of study in which human complexity is explored, in which the expanding of the imagination is fostered, and personal development is encouraged (Beckers and Hannula, 2013). In turn, classrooms ought to be spaces where students are encouraged to ontologically explore and epistemologically examine in an environment that fosters the affective aspects of being and the building of relationships (Britzman, 1998, 2003, 2009b). In the final analysis, Britzman makes clear that a teacher is one who is in the never-ending process of becoming, while realizing that this process is aware of complexity when it comes to life, to teaching.

Antonia Darder (1952–) Darder’s experience, living in poverty during the first quarter-century of her life and as a Latina, has uniquely informed her passionate, courageous, and committed activism and perceptive scholarship (Pickett, 2013). In her fervent effort to foster the humanization of humanity through the enduring lens of hope, she takes seriously what Freire (2005) characterizes as an ‘armed loved’, meaning that it is a ‘fighting love of those convinced of the right and the duty to fight, to denounce, and to announce. It is this form of love that is indispensable to the progressive educator and that we must all learn’ (ibid.: 74). Darder (2002) would describe the latter as a ‘pedagogy of love’ which consists of a political commitment to social justice and the breaking of an exploitive, capitalist system. In her book Culture and Power in the Classroom: A Critical Foundation for Bicultural Education (1991), Darder makes clear that educators engage in the dialectical interweaving of reflection and action

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(praxis), which greatly assists in examining one’s belief system, ways of thinking, and constructive action on behalf of one’s diverse student population. In other words, engaging in the dynamic of authentic praxis facilitates a process in which one can be thoughtful in viewing privilege, oppression, and hegemonic forces. The 2012 edition of that same text expounds further Darder’s thought, particularly in a test-centric school environment, which has worked to narrow the curriculum and has worked to limit schooling opportunities, particularly for historically disenfranchised populations of students. Indeed, Darder – realizing that education is a political enterprise – urges educators to be more politically astute and to become more involved in the political process. Another fundamental aspect of Darder’s work relative to critical pedagogy, is that she realizes the importance of Freire’s focus on class and economics as a significant aspect that greatly plays into facilitating oppressive systems and marginalization, but equally so she also argues that racism and sexism – aside from class and economics – are factors that contribute to systems of disenfranchisement (Darder, 1998; Pickett, 2013). In other words, critical pedagogy falls short if it does not take into account critical race theory. Darder currently holds the Leavey Presidential Chair of Ethics and Moral Leadership at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, and is Professor Emerita of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Michelle Fine (1952–) The daughter of Jewish immigrants and growing up in New York, Fine learned early on from her parents’ traditional relationship where her mother stayed at home and her father went out to work. That is, she saw in this dynamic that a woman’s role in the house was subordinate in nature, which led

her to reflect that it was from this observation that her feminism commenced (MacKay, 2010). And it was later, when Fine was taking a class on women’s studies at Penn State, that she experienced a crystallizing moment that enabled her to make sense of her thinking, experiences, and her own family dynamics as a youth, all of which thrust her into a career as a feminist psychologist and a social justice activist, particularly relative to women’s rights (MacKay, 2010). Currently, Fine is a Distinguished Professor of Critical Psychology, Women’s Studies, American Studies, and Urban Education at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. As a researcher, though having a keen interest in quantitative methodologies, much of her approach to research utilizes a mixedmethods approach, with an intersecting of participatory action research (PAR) that incorporates a social-action-orientated, nonhierarchical, community-based methodology. This approach cultivates a participatory space in which psychology provides a frame in a collaborative effort to work with marginalized youth, women prisoners, high school drop-outs, and youth sexuality in which hierarchies and sources of knowledge are critically examined (MacKay, 2010). In one of her latest work’s, Just Research in Contentious Times: Widening the Methodological Imagination (2018), Fine, drawing from the thoughts of Audre Lorde, Maxine Greene, Gloria Anzaldúa, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others, looks to challenge our methodological imaginations in the effort to collaborate with communities. As one of the originators of PAR, this book examines how to integrate queer studies, critical race, postcolonial, and feminist studies, and what it takes to utilize research to inform policy and practice. In a time where we are witnessing a rise in hate crimes, the increasing presence of White nationalism, a rise in inequality, and corporate greed, Fine argues ‘for critical public

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science undertaken with and by communities and movements as a strategy for building critical consciousness, achieving local knowledges and forging surprising solidarities’ (2018: xiii). In short, Fine sees PAR as ‘a humble tool in contemporary movements for justice and democracy’ (ibid.: xiii). Whether it is themes related to education policy, prison reform, the school drop-out rate, critical race theory, feminist psychology, Muslim American youth, the LGBTQ community, or whether it is to be called up to appear as an expert witness in gender or race discrimination education cases, a common thread throughout Fine’s 20 books and plethora of articles is one that bends the arc toward justice.

Henry Giroux (1943–) It was through Giroux’s teacher education program and early on as a teacher in Baltimore that he came in contact with Paulo Freire’s work (and Howard Zinn), providing a triggering moment, which rooted the trajectory of his life’s work. In the spirit of social justice work and the thought of critical theory, Giroux’s work possesses an autobiographical tone to it, particularly evolving from his working-class upbringing, resulting in over 60 books and hundreds of articles (Barto and Bedford, 2013). His first book, Ideology, Culture, and the Process of Schooling (1981) was published while he was at Boston University. Provoking and insightful, the book critically examines the flawed character of positivist rationality and its deterministic, dualistic nature, and calls for a radical pedagogy in which critical theory is linked to social action, freedom, and reconstruction. Despite the influence of this book and other critical works, Giroux was denied tenure, led by John Silber, the President of Boston University, who saw Giroux’s work as too radical and was apparently threatened by Giroux’s thought and intellectual capacities.

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It was during this difficult time of his denial of tenure that Giroux met Freire for the first time. As Giroux puts it, I am convinced that had it not been for him and Donaldo Macedo, a linguist, translator, and a friend of both of ours, I might not have stayed in the field of education. Paulo’s and Donaldo’s passion for education and their profound humanity convinced me that education was not a job like any other, but a crucial site of struggle, and that whatever risks had to be taken were well worth it. (Giroux, 2010a: para 10)

The trajectory of Giroux’s life work has been one that looks to resist the industrialization of education in which teachers have been turned into functionaries, as technicians playing out a semi-robotic role in which the curriculum is pre-packaged, and standardization and testing is front and center of practice. This very real scenario is opposed to the notion of viewing teachers as public intellectuals, critical thinkers, and as those having a critical voice in pedagogical and curricula direction (Giroux, 2010b, 1988). Moreover, the lived experiences of students and cultural context play a significant part in informing curricula, suggesting that the hidden curriculum must be deconstructed, which works to cultivate democratic spaces and civic engagement among students and teachers (Giroux, 2001, 2011). Finally, Giroux’s work, particularly with respect to students of color and low-income students, also critically works to call out the school-to-prison pipeline, policies and practices that parallel prisons, the negation of critical thought and opportunities, and the defunding of education (including higher education), all working to dismantle the public square and the furthering of the common good (Barto and Bedford, 2013). Currently, Giroux is the Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada.

Myles Horton (1905–90) Theologically trained under the guidance of Reinhold Niebuhr, the prominent social-­ progressive theologian, Horton was an

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educator and social activist and was involved with labor unions, antipoverty programs, and was especially a leading figure during the civil rights movement. Through the cofounding of the Highlander Folk School (later called the Highlander Research and Education Center and located in Monteagle, Tennessee), he taught and worked with civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy, James Bevel, and others. Under the leadership of Horton, Highlander developed an effective literacy program during the 1950s, which not only focused on the mechanics of literacy, but also had as its principal objective to facilitate an approach that encouraged African Americans to take their just and rightful place in participating in a d­ emocratic society, including the registration to vote. While coming from two different continents and cultural contexts, Paulo Freire and Horton, nevertheless, possessed critical commonalities and interests, resulting in the publication of their book, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change (1990), which is an autobiographical account of the diverse experiences of Freire and Horton with reflections and analysis of authentic freedom, democratic living, and a liberating education. Horton’s adult education work focused on a grassroots effort where community members were involved in a dialogical process where comradery was fostered, democratic spaces were valued, and responsibility was shared. He fully understood the role education played in the building of society, and was keenly aware that economics played a significant part in containing or liberating systems of schooling, thus pushing citizens to collectively ask themselves to critically consider the kind of education system they desired for its people (Loder-Jackson, 2013). Freirean in spirit and practice, the work of Myles Horton is arguably underappreciated in the circles of critical pedagogy and perhaps should be more critically revisited in terms of what he can teach critical pedagogues.

bell hooks (1952–) Born Gloria Jean Watkins, bell hooks is widely known by her pen name, derived from the names of her maternal great-grandmother. The lower case spelling of her name is utilized in order to draw attention to the substance of her writing and thought as opposed to who she is. hooks is a writer, teacher, feminist, and social activist, and her work critically examines themes related to race, class, gender, and oppression. Her thought has been influenced by, among others, the work of Sojourner Truth, Paulo Freire, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Erich Fromm, Lorraine Hansberry, Thich Nhat Hanh, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. While hooks has taught at various universities, she is currently Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies at Berea College, Kentucky (bell hooks Institute; Kirylo, 2011). Although growing up in the segregated South, hooks’ educational experience during her elementary school years was fruitful as she was mentored by encouraging Black teachers. It was during her high school experience, however, when she was enrolled at an integrated high school that she was subjected to racist White teachers, sparking an acute awareness of injustice, but certainly not deterring her from moving forward to receive an education, all the way to being awarded a PhD in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz (Wisneski, 2013). While her first book in 1978, And There We Wept: Poems, was written under the pen name bell hooks, it was her 1981 work, Ain’t I A Woman? Black Women and Feminism, that garnered much attention. And though she had written that text at 19 years old, the book is a brilliant exposé of feminist thought (Wisneski, 2013). Indeed, since that book, hooks, who is a prolific writer and an insightful thinker, has gone on to publish over 30 books on themes related to feminist theory, race, gender, sexuality, culture, and class. hooks’ efforts logically underscore the point that the work must be one that not only

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looks to eradicate sexist exploitation, oppression, and sexism, but it also must be an effort that is not devoid of a conversation linked to ethnicity, race, and class. Particularly with the latter, hooks makes clear that to better understand the class struggle and to facilitate an effort to the building of a community, we must engage the diverse affected voices along class, racial, and gender lines (hooks, 2000a, 2000b; Wisneski, 2013). In her work, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994), hooks particularly draws from Freire’s concept of conscientization, coupled with the Buddhist thought of Thich Nhat Hanh and others, whereby she incorporates a blend of critical pedagogies in what she characterizes as an ‘engaged pedagogy’ that allows for democratic spaces to constructively share knowledge. Indeed, it is also in Teaching to Transgress that while hooks acknowledges that Freire has had a significant influence on her thinking, it nevertheless did not stop her calling him out with respect to the sexist language he incorporated in his early work. To that critique, Freire received it with grace and as an important learning moment, which prompted hooks’ further admiration for Freire’s work in that he was keenly aware that his thought was not above reproach and he had still much to learn.

Joe L. Kincheloe (1950–2008) Kincheloe, along with Shirley Steinberg, founded The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy housed at McGill University, and in addition to his teaching positions at various universities, he lectured in many parts of the world. Kincheloe was a teacher, social justice activist, and the author/co-author/editor/ co-editor of countless articles, book chapters, and books. Drawing from the constructivist psychology of Lev Vygotsky, the democratic philosophy of John Dewey, and a wide range of traditions is what framed Kincheloe’s varied methodological approach in the way he

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conducts his work. In what he describes as bricolage, this approach links self-reflection, self-critical awareness, and personal history between what a researcher sees and observes and the social spaces in which he or she finds her-/himself (Fischetti and Dlamini, 2013). Moreover, as one who richly contributed to our understanding of constructivism, multicultural education, and curriculum theory and making, Kincheloe constructed a cognitive theory that focused on what is characterized as a critical post-formal educational psychology, which keenly examines power relationships that impact our understanding of cognitive theory and psychology. Realizing the importance of contextualization in our efforts to find meaning, the notion of a liberatory psychology of possibility aids in a critical hermeneutic and a historical epistemological process which naturally links to learning (Kincheloe, 2008b; Fischetti and Dlamini, 2013). Working in the spirit of Freire’s ‘radical love’, Kincheloe described himself as a ‘vehement critique’ who saw critical pedagogy as an approach in which students are enabled to become subjects of the world, whereby growth in consciousness and awareness is cultivated to call out the various forces that work to oppress and to name structures that exert domination. In the final analysis, this approach works to set us free in the critical effort to question and challenge power structures that are unjust (Kincheloe, 2008b).

Donaldo Macedo (1950–) One of Paulo Freire’s closest collaborators, Donaldo Macedo, a Cape Verdean immigrant from West Africa, is Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Education at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Macedo has not only worked on translating and editing numerous texts by Freire, he has also written several books and articles with him. Moreover, since the death of Freire, Macedo has worked very closely with his widow, Ana Maria ‘Nita’ Araújo Freire.

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In their work, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (1987), Freire and Macedo further discuss the implications of Freire’s problemposing approach to education, which is one that facilitates a democratic learning climate where student voice is encouraged and valued. At the same time, however, this democratic setting is not one that is dictated by a laissez-faire environment, where the educator is one who abandons her sense of authority; in fact, that would be irresponsible and would ultimately serve the purposes of the dominant power structure. On the contrary, a responsible educator has some kind of purpose, an objective or direction as to how the learning environment ought to unfold, which is necessarily one where the learner participates as subject, whereby the pedagogical direction lies in the political, epistemological, and pedagogical presentation of the problem (Freire and Macedo, 1987). Moreover, in order for the teacher to explore reality with the students, she must take every measure to remove any obstacle that potentially prevents students from critically analyzing that reality, which implies that the teacher is professionally competent, is desirous of study, and takes her pedagogical practice seriously (Freire, 1987). In that light, teachers are cultural workers and radical educators who, in their desire to better understand the discourse of resistance, are better equipped to provide their students with the pedagogical structures to make possible their emancipation (Freire and Macedo, 1987; Freire, 2005). In his book Dancing with Bigotry (coauthored with Lilia Bartolomé) (1999), Macedo critically discusses the political nature of language and its place in multicultural education, arguing that the teaching of tolerance necessitates caution in not reinforcing a paternalistic viewpoint that simply espouses just getting along, as opposed to cultivating an environment of cultural awareness and mutual cultural respect. And perhaps even more relevant today than in recent history, Macedo denounces racism and xenophobia, which is quite acute in various

parts of the world and particularly magnified in the United States under the Trump administration. To be sure, in the highlighted texts above, along with still others, Macedo’s work in examining language, culture, media, and socio-political power has significantly contributed to our understanding of critical pedagogy, which he views as ‘a state of becoming, a way of being in the world and with the world – a never ending process that involves struggle and pain but also hope and joy shaped and maintained by a humanizing pedagogy’ (Macedo, 2006: 394).

Peter McLaren (1948–) McLaren, who is originally from Canada, taught in an elementary school in Toronto’s Jane-Finch Corridor. It was this five-year experience at this inner-city school setting in which he observed over-crowded classrooms, minimal curricula resources, and a lack of programs that were sensitive to the needs of students, leading him to the writing of his first book, Cries from The Corridor (1980). And while at the time, McLaren was not intimately aware of the notion of critical pedagogy and the work of Freire and others, through Cries from the Corridor, he knew he had ‘an important story to tell of the lives and struggles of children’ (McLaren, 1998: xiv). Indeed, the book became a bestseller and raised the national consciousness regarding school reform in Canada. That text later framed the foundation for his book, Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (1998), now in its 6th edition. In Life in Schools, McLaren denounces a capitalistic system that works to exploit and one that has gripped public education in the United States; he further challenges progressives to critically consider their praxis. Thus, he explores the origins of critical pedagogy and its core beliefs, examining the role of schools in society, questioning who the

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purveyors of knowledge are, and whether schools can be places of social transformation in dismantling systematic hegemony. Indeed, in this work, McLaren looks to announce a more just and right world in which the cultivation of the humanization of humanity is at work (Smith and Rodriguez, 2013). McLaren’s book Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution (2000) is the most translated of all his works in which he brilliantly discusses these two revolutionaries. And while they were contemporaries and possessed some common ideals, Guevara and Freire – through a revolutionary critical pedagogy – took two different paths in confronting a capitalist system that works to exploit and dehumanize. While in more recent times, McLaren’s work explores the foundational place of spirituality and liberation theology relative to critical pedagogy (as highlighted in his book, Pedagogy of Insurrection: From Resurrection to Revolution, 2015), over the trajectory of his career, his thought has been framed in Marxist humanism, which not only draws from the earlier writings of Marx and Engels and their examination of false consciousness, alienation, and historical materialism, but also the dialectics of Hegel (Smith and Rodriguez, 2013). Since the publication of his first book, McLaren has been the author/co-author/ editor/co-editor of some 40 books and monographs. Currently, he is Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies Co-Director, The Paulo Freire Democratic Project, and International Ambassador for Global Ethics and Social Justice, Attallah College of Educational Studies at Chapman University.

Ira Shor (1945–) It was during Shor’s formative years in the 1950s and 1960s, growing up in a workingclass setting in the South Bronx, that his politics and lens on the world took shape. As a youth, he observed inequities in schools

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regarding resources, curricula, and opportunities, clearing marking class division. While he participated in civil rights and antiwar movements and was richly inspired by the work of Kurt Vonnegut, it was the work of Freire that had a clarifying impact on his thinking. Currently, Shor is Professor Emeritus at the City University of New York Graduate Center Programs in English and in Urban Education. In his practice as a professor of rhetoric and composition, Shor aims for authentic classroom settings in which the dialectical interweaving of theory and practice is explored and in which critical thinking is cultivated in order to realize and subvert hegemonic, authoritarian, teacher-centered systems (Reilly, 2013). Shor’s book Critical Teaching and Everyday Life (1980) was a result of his teaching of literacy for open admission students at City University in New York in the 1970s, becoming the first book-length treatment of a Freirean-inspired approach to teaching in a North American context. The publication of that book prompted a pleasing response from Freire, sharing in a letter to Shor that he was thankful for the ‘beautiful words’ and that wanted to meet (Shor, 2011). Their meeting lead to the publication of A Pedagogy for Liberation: Dialogues on Transforming Education (1987), which was the first collaborated ‘talking’ book that Freire published. In that book, Shor and Freire discuss a variety of themes that intersected the role of culture and politics and how to work toward more liberating, dialogical, empowering classroom settings. As Reilly (2013) accentuates, Shor carries a certain contagious enthusiasm about his work, simply, but profoundly staying close to his roots at the City University of New York for over four decades, in which he relishes that his ‘classes are diverse in ethnicity, age, and majors, requiring me to learn each class’s profile and offering one of the few multi-racial “contact zones” to test critical learning in our society’ (2006: 30).

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Shor continues to be involved with protest movements and resistance efforts, pushing back on neoliberalism and injustice, in addition to contributing numerous published works.

Shirley R. Steinberg (1952–) Along with her late husband, Joe Kincheloe, Steinberg founded The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy where she serves as the Executive Director (www.freireproject.org/). In addition, she is the founding editor of Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education, and the Editor in Chief of The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy. Steinberg takes to heart the term ‘critical’ and its association to pedagogy, making clear that teacher candidates enrolled in education programs must be immersed in an educative environment that cultivates a deeper understanding of the connection between theory and practice. For example, when it comes to our understanding of multicultural education, it ought to be one that can be penned as critical multiculturalism, whereby educators foster a deeply reflective pedagogical approach that realizes the critical roles of power, knowledge, identity, and the trajectory of emancipatory practices (Kincheloe et al., 1997; Larson, 2013). Kinderculture is a concept that is introduced in her popular book Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood (2011), where the text critically examines the current neoliberal education model that is bent on consumerism and the commodification of the very young as opposed to a system that is developmentally appropriate, culturally responsive, and constructive. In another book, Media Literacy: A Reader (Macedo and Steinberg, 2007), the text is a powerful work that emphasizes awareness when it comes to the media in all its shapes and forms in how it may influence us socially, culturally, politically, and in other ways. Therefore, being media literate is one way to provide agency

in discerning what is or is not being conveyed by the media, and how we can become participants, collaborators, and agents of change in a media-inundated world. To be sure, through her scholarship and activism, Steinberg’s commitment to justice and a more loving world is evident. As Larson puts it, ‘Steinberg’s scholarship is ultimately based on an exploration of culture, social issues, and education, provoking consideration of how educators teach, communicate, and critically reflect upon their work so that the learner and educator move toward a deeper understanding of self in the collective movement toward a more liberated world’ (2013: 119). The author of numerous books and articles, Steinberg is currently Werklund Research Professor of Critical Youth Studies at the University of Calgary.

CONCLUSION Critical pedagogy is informed by multiple voices, historical circumstances, new theoretical insights, challenges, and social situations, making the notion of critical pedagogy an ever evolving process of becoming as a concept of understanding and action (Kincheloe, 2008c). To put it differently, Critical pedagogy is an empowering way of thinking and acting, fostering decisive agency that does not take a position of neutrality in its contextual examination of the various forces that impact the human condition. And, in particular, when repressive forces are at work dehumanizing, oppressing, and marginalizing people, critical pedagogues are those who emerge as powerful humanizing agents to resist and call for a more just, right, and democratic world. (Kirylo, 2013: xiv–xv)

In this chapter, beginning with a discussion on Paulo Freire, the highlighted critical pedagogues, to reiterate, are a small representation of a plethora of known and unknown critical pedagogues. It is through each of their unique efforts that we see the remaking or the reinvention of Freire’s work in the

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unwavering efforts toward the cultivation of humanizing humanity. And while the pedagogues emphasized here hail from a North American context, it certainly – if not obviously – does not suggest that their influence is limited to that context, but, rather, also extends to other parts of the world. Conversely, the thousands of critical pedagogues in other parts of the world (many of whom are referenced in this Handbook) are clearly having an influence on the North American continent. To be sure, in the collective, people of justice, people who resist, are framed by a vision that embraces an inclusive, tolerant, more loving community that passionately calls for a more democratic citizenship. Freire puts it this way, Citizenship implies freedom – to work, to eat, to dress, to wear shoes, to sleep in a house, to support oneself and one’s family, to love, to be angry, to cry, to protest, to support, to move, to participate in this or that religion, this or that party, to educate oneself and one’s family, to swim regardless in what ocean of one’s country. Citizenship is not obtained by chance: it is a construction that, never finished, demands we fight for it. It demands commitment, political clarity, coherence, decision. (Freire, 2005: 161)

As Freire suggests, being in the world implies equal opportunity to participate in its movement, which is a central idea in the construct of critical pedagogy. That is, as Macedo argues, the concept of critical pedagogy is a continuous unfolding process of becoming, where we are active participants, that not only includes an ongoing process of encountering pain and struggle, but also a space that is comprised of ‘hope and joy shaped and maintained by a humanizing pedagogy’ (2006: 394). Particularly in light of the times where we find ourselves with a Trump cult following in the United States, and in which its intolerant ideology has disturbingly gained validating momentum in other parts of the world, Steinberg reminds us that an aspect of critical pedagogy provides for us a certain pass to be angry, an anger that calls out ‘uses of power and at injustices through the violations

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of human rights’ (2007: ix). Moreover, Freire emphasizes that our denunciation of injustice should be framed within what he calls an ‘armed love’ (2005: 74). And where intolerance is at play, where economic injustice is evident, where violations of human rights are occurring, where equal access and opportunity have been subverted, and where freedoms have been violated, critical educators should not only examine the impact this has on students and society as a whole, but they should also announce it with an honorable anger and with what Darder characterizes as a ‘pedagogy of love’ (2002: 30). In the final analysis, whether it is the work of those critical pedagogues highlighted here or the work of others, we must all actively remain immersed in our communities, our realities, and where injustice is perpetrated we need to resist and work toward a more just, right, and loving world.

Note 1  It must be mentioned that Paulo’s widow, Ana Maria ‘Nita’ Araújo Freire (1933–), was instrumental in having Paulo revisit his earlier works in order to ‘reinvent them’ through the luxury of the lens of hindsight and a different historical context (Macedo, 2001). Indeed, an intellectual, an accomplished scholar, a critical pedagogue in her own right, and with her own publications (e.g., Chronicles of Love: My Life with Paulo Freire (2001); Paulo Freire: Uma História de Vida [Paulo Freire: A History of Life] (2006)), Nita richly provided detailed footnotes to several of Paulo’s later works and has been a steadfast force in promoting the work and legacy of Paulo (Kirylo, 2011).

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International Studies in Sociology of Education, 21(1), 21–31. Apple, M. W. (2012). Can education change society? New York: Routledge. Aronowitz, S. (2000). The knowledge factory: Dismantling the corporate university and creating true higher learning. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Aronowitz, S., & Giroux, H. A. (1985). Education under siege: The conservative, liberal and radical debate over schooling. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey. Bartolomé, L. I. (1998). The misteaching of academic discourses: The politics of language in the classroom. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Bartolomé, L. I. (2003). Democratizing Latino education: A perspective on elementary education. In V. I. Kloosterman (Ed.), Latino students in American schools: Historical and contemporary views (pp. 33–46). Westport, CT: Praeger. Bartolomé, L. I. (2004). Critical pedagogy and teacher education: Radicalizing prospective teachers. Teacher Education Quarterly, 31(1), 97–122. Bartolomé, L. I. (2008a). Authentic cariño and respect in minority education: The political and ideological dimensions of love. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 1(1), 1–10. Bartolomé, L. I. (2008b). Ideologies in education: Unmasking the trap of teacher neutrality. New York: Peter Lang. Bartolomé, L. I. (2011). Literacy as comida: Learning to read with Mexican novelas. In M. de la Luz Reyes (Ed.), Words were all we had: Becoming biliterate against the odds (pp. 49–59). New York: Teacher College Press. Barto, M., & Bedford, A. W. (2013). Henry Giroux: Man on fire. In J. D. Kirylo (Ed.), A critical pedagogy of resistance: 34 pedagogues we need to know (pp. 61–64). Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Beckers, G., & Hannula, A. (2013). Deborah Britzman: Critical thinker, researcher, psychoanalyst. In J. D. Kirylo (Ed.), A critical pedagogy of resistance: 34 pedagogues we need to know (pp. 13–16). Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense. Britzman, D. P. (1998). Lost subjects, contested objects: Toward a psychoanalytic inquiry of learning. New York: State University of New York Press.

Britzman, D. P. (2003). After-Education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and psychoanalytic histories of learning. New York: State University of New York Press. Britzman, D. P. (2006). Novel education: Psychoanalytic studies of learning and not learning. New York: Peter Lang. Britzman, D. (2007). Teacher education as uneven development: Toward a psychology of uncertainty. International Journal of Leadership in Education: Theory and Practice, 10(1), 1–12. Britzman, D. (2009a). Deborah Britzman on Freire and psychoanalysis. Interview by Grüzel Aziz. [Video file]. Retrieved from http://vimeo.com/31747556 Britzman, D. P. (2009b). The very thought of education: Psychoanalysis and the impossible professions. New York: State University of New York Press. Britzman, D. P. (2011). Freud and education. New York: Routledge. Darder, A. (1991). Culture and power in the classroom: A critical foundation for bicultural education. New York: Bergin & Garvey. Darder, A. (1998). Teaching as an act of love: In memory of Paulo Freire. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, CA, April 13–17. Retrieved from ERIC database (ED426154). Darder, A. (2002). Reinventing Paulo Freire: A pedagogy of love. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Darder, A. (2012). Culture and power in the classroom: Educational foundations for the schooling of bicultural students. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Fine, M. (2018). Just research in contentious times: Widening the methodological imagination. New York: Teachers College Press. Fischetti, J. C., & Dlamini, B. T. (2013). Joe L. Kincheloe: With liberty and justice for all. In J. D. Kirylo (Ed.), A critical pedagogy of resistance: 34 pedagogues we need to know (pp. 85–88). Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Freire, A. M. A. (2001). Chronicles of love: My life with Paulo Freire. New York: Peter Lang. Freire, A. M. A. (2006). Paulo Freire: Uma história de vida (Paulo Freire: a history of life). São Paolo, Brazil: Villa das Letras Editora.

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Freire, P. (1985). The politics of education: Culture, power, and liberation. New York: Bergin & Garvey. Freire, P. (1987). Letter to North-American teachers (C. Hunter, Trans.). In I. Shor (Ed.), Freire for the classroom: A sourcebook for liberatory teaching (pp. 211–214). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Freire, P. (1990). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (1994). Education for critical consciousness. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (2005). Teachers as cultural workers: Letters to those who dare teach (expanded edition). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Freire, P., & Faundez, A. (1989). Learning to question: A pedagogy of liberation. New York: Continuum. Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word and the world. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey. Giroux, H. A. (1981). Ideology, culture, and the process of schooling. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Giroux, H. A. (1988). Teachers as intellectuals: Toward a critical pedagogy of learning. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Giroux, H. A. (2001). Theory and resistance in education: Towards a pedagogy for the opposition. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Giroux, H. A. (2010a, October 17). Lessons from Paulo Freire. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 3–4. Retrieved from http:// chronicle.com/article/Lessons–From–Paulo Freire/124910?key=TDh2cwI5ayUXbs Giroux, H. A. (2010b). In defense of public school teachers in a time of crisis. Fightback TCNJ! Retrieved from http://archive.truthout.org/ in-defense-public-school-teachers-a-timecrisis58567 Giroux, H. A. (2011). On critical pedagogy. New York: Continuum. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge. hooks, b. (2000a). Feminism is for everybody: Passionate politics. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. hooks, b. (2000b). Where we stand: Class matters. New York: Routledge.

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hooks, b. (n.d.) bell hooks Institute. Retrieved from https://bell-hooksinstitute.squarespace. com/welcome. Horton, M., & Freire, P. (1990). (Bell, B., Gaventa, J., & Peters, J., eds.). We make the road by walking: Conversations on education and social change. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Kincheloe, J. L. (2008a, Spring–Summer). Afterword: Ten short years – Acting on Freire’s requests. Journal of Thought, 43(1–2), 163–171. Kincheloe J. L. (2008b). Knowledge and critical pedagogy: An introduction. New York: Springer Science + Business Media. Kincheloe, J. L. (2008c). Critical pedagogy (2nd ed.). Peter Lang Primer. New York: Peter Lang. Kincheloe, J. L., Steinberg, S. R., & Gresson, A. D. (Eds.) (1997). Measured lies: The bell curve examined. Palgrave Macmillan. Kirylo, J. D. (2011). Paulo Freire: The man from Recife. New York: Peter Lang. Kirylo, J. D. (Ed.) (2013). A critical pedagogy of resistance: 34 pedagogues we need to know. Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Kozol, J. (1991). Savage inequalities. New York: Crown Publishers. Larson, A. E. (2013). Shirley Steinberg: Unwavering commitment to social justice. In J. D. Kirylo (Ed.), A critical pedagogy of resistance: 34 pedagogues we need to know (pp. 117–120). Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Loder-Jackson, T. L. (2013). Myles Horton: The critical relevance of his work in the 21st century. In J. D. Kirylo (Ed.), A critical pedagogy of resistance: 34 pedagogues we need to know (pp. 77–80). Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Macedo, D. (2001). Introduction. In A. M. A. Freire (Ed.), Chronicles of love: My life with Paulo Freire (pp. 1–9). New York: Peter Lang. Macedo, D. (2006). Literacies of power: What Americans are not allowed to know. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Macedo, D., & Bartolomé, L. I. (1999). Dancing with bigotry: Beyond the politics of tolerance. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Macedo, D., & Steinberg, S. R. (Eds.). (2007). Media literacy: A reader. New York: Peter Lang.

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MacKay, J. (2010). Profile of Michelle Fine. In A. Rutherford (Ed.), Psychology’s Feminist Voices Multimedia Internet Archive. Retrieved from www.feministvoices.com/michellefine/ McLaren, P. (1980). Cries from the corridor. Slingsby, York: Methuen. McLaren, P. (1998). Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education (3rd ed.). New York: Longman. McLaren, P. (2000). Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the pedagogy of revolution. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. McLaren, P. (2015). Pedagogy of insurrection: From resurrection to revolution. New York: Peter Lang. Morley, G. (2013). Stanley Aronowitz: Intellectual and cultural critic. In J. D. Kirylo (Ed.), A critical pedagogy of resistance: 34 pedagogues we need to know (pp. 5–8). Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Nganga, L., & Kambutu, J. (2013). Michael Apple: A modern day critical pedagogue. In J. D. Kirylo (Ed.), A critical pedagogy of resistance: 34 pedagogues we need to know (pp. 1–4). Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Pickett, L. (2013). Antonia Darder: A passionate, courageous, and committed critical pedagogue. In J. D. Kirylo (Ed.), A critical pedagogy of resistance: 34 pedagogues we need to know (pp. 25–28). Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Reilly, C. (2013). Ira Shor: Shoring up pedagogy, politics, and possibilities for educational empowerment. In J. D. Kirylo (Ed.), A critical pedagogy of resistance: 34 pedagogues we need to know (pp. 113–116). Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers.

Roberts, P. (2000). Education, literacy, and humanization: Exploring the work of Paulo Freire. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Shor, I. (1980). Critical teaching and everyday life. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Shor, I. (2006, Winter). Wars, lies, and pedagogy: Teaching in fearful times. Radical Teacher, 77, 30–35. Shor, I. (2011). In J. D. Kirylo (Ed.), Paulo Freire: The man from Recife (pp. 266–267). New York: Peter Lang. Shor, I., & Freire, P. (1987). A pedagogy for liberation: Dialogues on transforming education. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Smith, M. D., & Rodriguez, A. (2013). Peter McLaren: A Marxist humanist professor and critical scholar. In J. D. Kirylo (Ed.), A critical pedagogy of resistance: 34 pedagogues we need to know (pp. 101–104). Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Steinberg, S. R. (2007). Preface: Where are we now? In P. McLaren & J. L. Kincheloe (Eds.), Critical pedagogy: Where are we now? (pp. ix–x). New York: Peter Lang. Steinberg, S. R. (Ed.). (2011). Kinderculture: The corporate construction of childhood (3rd ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Szecsi, T. (2013). Lilia Bartolomé: Calling attention to the ideological clarity of teachers. In J. D. Kirylo (Ed.), A critical pedagogy of resistance: 34 pedagogues we need to know (pp. 9–12). Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Wisneski, D. B. (2013). bell hooks: Scholar, cultural critic, feminist, and teacher. In J. D. Kirylo (Ed.), A critical pedagogy of resistance: 34 pedagogues we need to know (pp. 73–76). Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers.

30 Gramscian Critical Pedagogy: A Holistic and Social Genre Approach R o b e r t F. C a r l e y

In the introduction to The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today (2013) Razmig Keucheyan describes the task of critical theory. He states that [a] new critical theory is a theory, not merely an analysis or interpretation. It not only reflects on what is, by describing past or present social reality in the manner of empirical social science; it also raises the issue of what is desirable. (Keucheyan, 2013: 4, my emphasis)

The aim of critical pedagogy must be similar. It has to effectively describe and provide room for reflection about the social world and its expressive political and cultural forms. It has to provide a basis to analyze culture, society, and politics but, most importantly, it has to construct places to which theory may go subsequent to analysis – theory must be directed, through analysis, toward ‘what is desirable’. Recently, Mary Breunig (2011) conducted a qualitative analysis of critical pedagogical practices. Noting that the conception and practice of critical pedagogy was not at all

homogenous in her literature review, Breunig discusses the early influence of the new left and the intellectual influence of the Frankfurt School on a range of later thinkers. She describes the emergence, in the 1980s and the 1990s of scholars like Henry Giroux, Roger Simon, Michael Apple, and Peter McLaren alongside the early feminist critical pedagogy of Caroline Shrewsbury, bell hooks, and Kathleen Weiler, and how their work was focused on addressing and challenging both the institutional framework and traditional and substantive curricular content (e.g. canons, genres) across disciplines in the liberal arts. Interview data from the study demonstrated that instructors were more likely to teach about the idea of critical pedagogy or the social construction of knowledge (constructivism). Substantively, the ideas that critical pedagogy addresses focus on ideologies, institutional roles, exploitation, and oppression (with explicit attention paid to race, class, and gender). The social construction of knowledge was often oriented toward the collective practice of

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consciousness raising and active reflection on the institutional role (as a logic of ends) in framing and producing knowledge. The ‘practice’ of critical pedagogy overlapped and also varied across participants. Breunig states that [o]verall, the results from my study point to the need for critical pedagogy to work toward better explication and communication of its social justice orientation, alongside its constructivist orientation. There may still be some work that needs to be done to encourage educators to recognize that critical pedagogical praxis must go beyond a set of teaching techniques and attend to the political, social, and economic factors that have conspired to marginalize people in the first place…. (Breunig, 2011:12)

The goal of introducing a Gramscian critical analysis for critical pedagogy addresses, precisely, the critical question or issue that emerges from Breunig’s study – critical pedagogy as praxis. She demonstrates that the fluidity in interpretations and approaches in critical pedagogy is valuable and certainly necessary. This chapter will merely provide analytical guidelines for an approach to critical pedagogy through Gramsci’s ideas. The central idea is to provide a holistic framework, and that students actively engage in constructivism as a way for critical thought to shift into a critical lens that transcends pedagogical limitations. After briefly discussing the focus of this chapter, I will then provide a brief literature review and then discuss what I mean by a Gramscian critical analysis for critical pedagogy. I will move into specific guidelines which include political economy, discussion of analysis, and methods of analysis. I will introduce the idea of ‘social genre’ as a way to construct a substantive approach to critical pedagogy; not a specific approach but as a way to think about the act of constructing knowledge with student participation.

GRAMSCIAN CRITICAL ANALYSIS This chapter uses Gramsci’s ideas to propose some methodological guidelines for analysis;

a Gramscian Critical Analysis. More specifically, in this chapter, I propose a method for critical analysis that locates students within social and political problematics which must be addressed discursively or, more pointedly, through interpretive strategies for reading and discussion. By linking interpretive practices to political and social forces (which are, in turn, mediated textually and discursively) students find themselves engaging texts as limitations and potentialities for rendering or producing effective meanings and meaning communities. From this position, students would engage in the possibilities, horizons, and desires (the latter, the canalization of politics and action) which are grounded in a working out of conditions of possibility based in a broad interpretive framework, encounters or an engagement with possibilities and limitations presented through a ‘textual and discursive field’, and imagining, still, alternative trajectories to realize a society otherwise.

ANTONIO GRAMSCI AND CRITICAL PEDAGOGY STUDIES The approaches and methods that enable a realistic departure point to both imagine and achieve social worlds that are more broadly democratic, egalitarian, and beneficial to so many who, collectively, are victims of accumulation by dispossession (to coin a term from David Harvey) depend upon considering what others have contributed to the study of Gramsci’s role in critical pedagogy. I want to begin by framing the idea of a Gramscian critical pedagogy contributing to Keucheyan’s claim, cited above, with regard to the goals of a critical theory. Further, the central claim of this chapter and related methodological approach is, following Keucheyan, echoed in the literature on Gramsci and critical pedagogy. Both D. W. Livingstone in his studies of working-class learning and political education (1983, 2002) and Jerrold L. Kachur (2002) have pointed toward a Gramscian-based

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pedagogy’s goals as nothing short of the restructuring of social reality. Kachur states, citing Livingstone, that ‘three ingredients are required to restructure social reality: an understanding of actually existing society, a vision of the future, and a strategy linking “what is” to “what ought to be”’ (2002: 307). In fact, in the literature on Gramsci and pedagogy, a critical wave emerges from the critique of Entwistle’s (1979) and Hirsch’s (1996) interpretations and uses of Gramsci’s work to produce, as Henry Giroux – a significant contributor to this critical wave – notes, ‘a rationale for conservative pedagogical practices as part of their attempt to redefine the relationship between schooling and society, and intellectuals and their social responsibilities’ (Giroux, 2002: 48). The critical wave in Gramsci scholarship is focused on a holistic approach to pedagogy that is centered upon Gramsci’s elaboration of hegemony (Aronowitz, 2002; Borg et al., 2002; Monasta, 2002). Resultantly, Gramscian-based research in critical pedagogy focuses on the political nature of education with express attention paid to institutional formations and constitutive relations. The most important work is concerned with ‘the centrality of politics and power in our understanding of how schools work’ (McLaren, 1994: 167). This includes the traditions of adult education especially as a post-World War II phenomenon – with special regard focused on the social function, political and policy basis, as well as the potential for introducing worker empowerment through more radical approaches to pedagogy (Livingstone, 1983, 2002; English and Mayo, 2012). This kind of work is also present in the culturalist perspective that informs early British cultural studies, the Birmingham School: Raymond Williams’ work on adult education, as well as Paul Willis’ Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (1977). Since the concept of hegemony relies upon other of Gramsci’s concepts to describe the dynamics associated with the state’s attempts

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to exercise authority through both public and private institutions and, also, since education was, at the time of Gramsci’s writing, and is still – more or less – predominantly a state institution, certain concepts are foregrounded, more than others, in a critical pedagogical approach. These concepts are hegemony, historical bloc, common sense, culture, and intellectuals. They include reference to conceptions of the state, civil and political society, institutions, practices, and power. Recently, Michael Apple (2006, 2012) has relied on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony specifically as it pertains to how international social movements that are focused on education intervene in hegemonic relations to disrupt both authority and consensus and negotiate reforms. Like Livingstone, Apple’s focus is on relations, practices, and institutions that specify the nature of how power is exercised through education and where and how spaces open or may open to offer potentially transformative political relations and pedagogical practices. Apple has made repeated use of the concept of hegemony, historical blocs, as well as power blocs in society, senso commune (common sense), and organic intellectuals in his work on curriculum, teaching, and the role that social movements play in introducing and attempting to foment conditions (or forces) that enable new relations. Henry Giroux, whose contributions to critical pedagogy come from the fields of cultural studies with a specific focus on youth culture and subcultures, has added several examples of analysis and important conceptual frameworks that come from his reading of Gramsci. Most expressly, Giroux’s focus on the dynamics of culture and, also, the role that institutions play in determining the interaction between culture and power help to demonstrate how hegemony works upon culture within the boundaries of contemporary society. In the ‘culturalist’ line in early cultural studies – a line that connects the work of E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall – Giroux understands culture as a site or space that includes a broad array of

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informality, traditions, objects, institutions, and practices and introduces the potential for social transformation. Following Gramsci’s conception of the organic intellectual, Giroux looks at the role of cultural workers that stand in-between various public and private institutional locations (e.g. schools, but also, the cinema, youth centers, and other spaces) and have the ­ability to mediate the connection between cultural practices and institutions by introducing forms of ‘public pedagogy’ (Giroux 1988, 2003). He connects the concept of public pedagogy to an interpretation of Gramsci’s category of ‘organic intellectual’ which he describes as a ‘transformative intellectual’. Most significant to what I am proposing in this chapter, Giroux’s ‘transformative intellectual’ engages in a pedagogy of transformation connecting subjects of relations of domination and exploitation to theories, concepts, and practices focused on contesting unjust relations. Recently, Peter Mayo has stated that the transformative intellectual, ‘in short … would be organic with regard to movements for social justice-oriented social change; intellectuals influencing the emergence of a set of more socially just relations, prefiguring a new form of society’ (2015: 1128). Giroux’s attention to the commodification of everyday life has positioned him as an important critic of neoliberalism’s role in stifling or appropriating intellectual creativity and abrogating critique through a posture of cynicism (Giroux, 2001). This cynical posture is due in part to the totality of neoliberal relations. In The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-IndustrialAcademic Complex (2007) Giroux, echoing the most significant political work of Herbert Marcuse after 1964, analyzes how cultural production often supplements the discourse of the military-industrial complex. He investigates this relationship in the framework of neoliberal economic thinking in Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics beyond the Age of Greed (Giroux, 2008). Both of these later books employ similar and very important

critical analyses, again, in the framework of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and most closely to the work of Herbert Marcuse. Giroux, however, continues the tradition of looking for potential practices that are counterhegemonic to both the military-industrial complex and neoliberalism. The strongest focus on Gramsci’s role in critical pedagogy is attributable to Peter Mayo who, in the main, is concerned with Gramsci’s contributions to adult education. He (with Carmel Borg and the late Joseph Buttigieg) produced Gramsci and Education (2002) which gathers together commentators on critical pedagogy who are avowed scholars of Gramsci and Marxism, in their own right, and who can offer a holistic approach to thinking about pedagogy through Gramsci’s corpus. More recently, Mayo edited Gramsci and Educational Thought (2010) which drew important contemporary contributions from the fields of linguistics – especially Peter Ives (2010), social work, and political science. Mayo has also written a singleauthored comparative study of Paulo Freire and Gramsci (1999). Mayo’s most sustained contribution to using a Gramscian approach to critical pedagogy is his attention to ‘holism’: to the central aspects of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. In a recent review of Gramsci’s contributions to critical pedagogy, Mayo states that [f]or Gramsci, education, viewed in its broader context, incorporates activities carried across the whole spectrum of ‘civil society’. In Gramscian terms, this refers to the complex of ideological institutions buttressing the state (separations between a state’s civil and political society, and the ideological and the repressive, are provided by Gramsci for heuristic purposes). (Mayo, 2015: 1122)

This quotation becomes the departure point for what I will be proposing as ‘Gramscian Critical Pedagogy’. One way to realize a pedagogical project that seeks to re-envision and restructure the relations, institutions, and practices that comprise our social reality is to embark on an analysis of the key relations in contemporary civil society which, today, find

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their expression in neoliberalism. Gramsci’s concepts, taken together, provide a necessary heuristic – a series of methodological guidelines for a critical pedagogy. These concepts must find their way into the neoliberal framework so that students may discover the means by which to analyze contradictions in the rhetoric and narratives that comprise the neoliberal moment. As Breunig notes above, critical pedagogy is not merely a series of techniques or the direct communication of injustices to students. It also doesn’t merely ‘involve’ students. Rather, students need to be brought into their current reality with those who are in the position of instruction so that both may realize (a collective may realize the way) that it is possible to engage in transformative work and, also, that it is an extremely difficult yet a long-term and persistent effort. As Keucheyan has maintained, although description and explanation are necessary without one having their own vision of what is desirable, without the Gramscian heuristic, pedagogy is simply normative (even if it contains critical inflections). As this review has demonstrated, Giroux’s concept, ‘transformative intellectual’, signals a constellation of relations that include a pedagogical orientation toward multiple sites that a movement may have the capacity to canalize all at once and that an intellectual may play a persistent (pedagogical) role in focusing and directing political activity. Livingstone (1983, 2002), Apple (2006, 2012), and Mayo’s empirical focus on adult and workers’ education is helpful in many respects; in particular, it shows how powerful the forces arrayed against critical education and critical subjects are, while, at the same time, demonstrating that it is a possible and viable project; that it can work even under extraordinary opposition and curricular and substantive cooptation. Despite extraordinary opposition, as Giroux’s work demonstrates, there are opportunities where counterhegemonic frameworks can develop, however briefly or extensively.

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GUIDELINES FOR A GRAMSCIAN CRITICAL ANALYSIS Political Economy: Analysis of the Situation (of Forces) Gramscian Critical Analysis begins with determining the arrangement (the levels and strength) of what Gramsci describes as ‘forces’ which are represented through the presence and organizational levels of different formal political parties as well as organizations not directly internal to the polity (e.g. social movements, trade unions, occupational ‘groups’ – which may be affiliated directly with an industry or group of industries – lobbying firms, ethnic or religious groups, ­ economic and financial interest groups such as roundtables, as well as informal ‘defense’ groups like the Arditi del Popolo – ‘people’s’ antifascist defense groups, often comprised of veterans, socialists, communists, and others who defended their cities against Mussolini’s fascists squads). Political forces, like these, must be identified, analyzed, and most importantly, the relations between these groups, society, and the polity must be determined through analysis. The determination of the interrelations of political forces produces a mapping of power relations – a particularly useful heuristic for political groups and organizations engaged in class struggle. Without a critical theoretical context for understanding political power, however, these relationships appear detached from the societal and economic contexts to and in which these groups and organizations must respond. Gramsci advances two principles with regard to understanding political forces in society. He frames these principles by noting that analysis, in this context, must pose the problem of political forces in society within the broader theoretical framework of the relationship between structure and superstructure. He states that [i]t is the problem of the relations between structure and superstructure which must be accurately posed and resolved if the forces which are active in

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the history of a particular period are to be correctly analyzed, and the relation between them determined. Two principles must orient the discussion: 1. that no society sets itself tasks for whose accomplishment the necessary and sufficient conditions do not either already exist or are not at least beginning to emerge and develop; 2. that no society breaks down and can be replaced until it has first developed all the forms of life which are implicit in its internal relations. (Gramsci, 1971: 177)

Derived from Karl Marx’s Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (1857), these principles follow from Gramsci’s discussion of the relationship between nation states within the context of international power (Gramsci, 1971: 176). Here, Gramsci is arguing, similarly to Rosa Luxemburg (1909) and V. I. Lenin (1914) before him, that the constraint that assists the analysis of the relationship between the social structure (determined by the developmental level of the economy which includes the technical level of industrial production and, also, the degree, scope, and complexity of the social division of labor) and the superstructure (which contains all the institutions and groups that express, politically and culturally, the level of complexity that is dependent on industry and occupations including a robust and complex legal structure to enshrine, enforce, and expand rights) is how advanced or nascent are the economic forces – technical, industrial, skill levels, and occupational diversity – and how, necessarily, the public and private institutions must act to maintain and ensure present and continued development. This is precisely what Gramsci means when he states that ‘no society breaks down and can be replaced until it has first developed all the forms of life which are implicit in its internal relations’ (Gramsci, 1971: 175–176). The conditions of possibility to push beyond the limitations to democratic civil society require that the juridical categories are fully developed along with societal categories – maximized through rights and privileges granted both legally and formally (Lenin, 1914, 1916). In short, Gramsci is offering a political economic frame in which analysis can take place.

Here is the constraint that critical pedagogy first encounters: political economy represents the limits (and, implicitly the potential) for imagining the world, imagining a world otherwise, and making that dynamic intelligible. The act of evoking a picture of the world that is at once empirically grounded and politically and socially determined and, at the same time, pointing beyond that picture toward imagining new ways of being in the world; intimating and connecting desires to something intelligible that is possible within but exists outside of the present moment. Martin Heidegger used the term ‘worlding’ to describe an opening; ways of being-in-the world otherwise but, also, being in time and history. Though he attributed ‘worlding’ to artworks, here it is a necessary component of a critical pedagogy (Heidegger, 1927, 1971). Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is dependent, in part, upon political economy as a form of analysis. This is clear from Gramsci’s discussion of the relations and levels of force (1971: 180–2). Above, I describe the analysis of social and political forces as a ‘heuristic’. Establishing hegemonic forces, though necessary for a Gramscian Critical Analysis, is sufficient to the substantive or contentbased aspects of the class where this method is applied. Although Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is a political theory that describes the process of revolutionary change attributed to the political party, Gramsci leaves room, in his Notebooks (1971), for methods designed for political analysis and political activities or opportunities to be used for the analysis of (historical) texts – this point will be central to the next two sections of the chapter.

Concrete Situation/Concrete Analysis: Key Concepts A concrete situation hones the hegemonic process into an active and operative context where power is manifest organizationally (generally) and politically (specifically). The analyst identifies the societal and

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civil (private) dynamics through which political and economic power are and have been operative. This, of course, implies a concern with the relationship between society and political and economic power. Gramsci frames this relationship with the term ‘effective reality’. In order to understand effective reality, which is the combination of economic, social, and political forces that pose an immediate constraint to the present (conjuncture), any political analysis must concern itself with questions pertaining to the contents of that reality. Political insights, denotatively, mark the passage from analysis to an operative political subjectivity directed toward achieving a societal transformation through the characteristics of political science: organizational and administrative capacity that enables the development of a plan, strategies, and the collective will to implement the program tactically. A concrete situation and the effective reality that determines it is not as high-order a concept as hegemony or as intensively specified as a conjuncture (which I will discuss in the following section). The identification of a concrete situation within effective reality depends upon the presence of other concepts that help to identify, categorize, and connect the social and political forces that have brought us up to our contemporary moment. Essential concepts and categories from Gramsci’s thought that help us to better understand the active and operative context of power, and have been up to the moment of analysis, are the following: Historical Bloc: Locates and frames a concrete situation. Entails an analysis of the extent and degree of the specific cultural, economic, and political integration in a specified timeframe. The strength (extent and degree) of a bloc depends upon an organic connection between the majority of people and intellectuals in all strata of civil and political society. It explains the specific way that hegemonic domination is present in a national or international context. It is the specific arrangement of class fractions, how they relate socially and politically to the mode of production, and the specific expression of their class domination.

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An example of an historical bloc may entail identifying nations that deploy similar neoliberal policies and the history of how this bloc developed in a somewhat (explaining the degree and extent) united manner. Integral State (degree of): ‘political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armor of coercion’. Political society marks the state’s coercive power. Civil society represents the degree of societal consensus; it marks ‘terrain upon which social classes compete for social and political leadership or hegemony over other social classes’ (Gramsci, 1971: 262–3). The concept of integral state identifies the state as relational. It takes a strategic posture toward the integration of fractions of the capitalist class and a coercive position toward fractions of the working class. This dynamic marks a dialectical position of the state toward civil society mediated through politics (strategy and coercion). As such, the state acts upon a political terrain, which Gramsci – discussing Machiavelli – describes as effective political reality, to maintain hegemonic domination and also experiences counterhegemonic contest. The relative degree of ‘integration’ is the expansiveness and effectiveness of its strategy toward fractions of the capitalist class to promote a broad consensus in civil society. A descriptive example, here, might focus on the period prior to neoliberalism, beginning after World War II when industrial and publicservice workers enjoyed collective bargaining on a broader basis, the aggregate wage grew in step with aggregate profits, consumer debt was low and well managed, and the state exhibited an ideology and policy platform of social stability and limited growth that included working Americans as an indispensable aspect of economic progress. Intellectuals (organic and traditional): All intellec­ tuals are organic to – they emerge within institutional frameworks – private and public organizations. An organic intellectual is a fundamental social actor who legitimates, explains, and justifies the presence of the emergent institutions (whether it is a firm, hedge-fund, political party, social movement) in which they are active; that they have a hand in producing. Traditional intellectuals were organic to institutions that emerged in past times. They are also significant societal actors in that by forming relationships to new institutions – and the intellectuals organic to them, they help legitimate the continuity of the social and political shifts or transformations as a normal progression. In short, they draw a connection between their own institutional position and new institutional positions (an example, here, would be Dick Armey writing a book and speaking on the US

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Tea Party as a form of political expression fundamental to American history and polity. Armey, an old establishment Republican, effectively normalizes a new conservative political tendency). Briefly, the array of institutional forms that have made use of relatively inexpensive digital technologies and online networks to generate and distribute media in enormous quantity alongside of alternative nonamateur media across the political spectrum as well as cable media and traditional media are important in this category. Renate Holub has extended Gramsci’s category of the intellectual to address aspects of these developments (Holub, 1992). More recently, Kate Crehan (2016) uses Gramsci’s discussion of intellectuals to help clarify the role of both the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements after the economic and financial crisis of 2008. Ideology (predominant and ‘historically organic’): The expressive form of hegemony or the domination of the capitalist class. Gramsci, however, takes the definition of ideology beyond the classical Marxist or Marx and Engels’ definition as an instrument of the bourgeois rule and, also, as the expression of the complex of superstructures. Historically, organic ideology signifies the expressive forms of legitimation, explanations, and justifications that mobilize classes within the framework of an organization necessary to contemporary society. Placed alongside the definition of intellectuals, above, organizations mark sites where ideologies embedded in institutional frameworks that serve a contemporary purpose (either private or political) are articulated either within or against the framework of hegemony, i.e. the dominant ideology. Ideology remains an expressive form. As such, subtle changes in the various discourses that comprise the various ideologies suggest movement. Identifying shifts as well as actors (intellectuals) remains an important analytical tool. Transformism (Transformismo) and Passive Revolution: effectively describe how hegemony absorbs seemingly contending political forces into the state exemplified by the Italian Risorgimento. For our purpose, transformism explains how seemingly progressive forces in mainstream politics exhibit a hollow rhetoric of equality, on the one hand, while advancing a neoliberal agenda (which works against many forms of equality) on the other. Transformism, however, describes the period leading up to the Italian state formation. First, individual figures in opposition to the state are absorbed into political forces by being positioned within the state and then, later, groups and organizations. Transformism is an important

concept because it marks a distinction between political transformation and economic and social change. Passive Revolution is the full theoretical elaboration of transformism. Similar to Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), passive revolution involves a ruling class group that wishes to dominate but not lead. It involves a popular sentiment for change, including mobilizations, but no mass participation on the part of individuals or groups. In short, passive revolution may pertain to a rearrangement in which class fraction articulates a program of domination, however, maintaining hegemony for fractions of the dominant class.

Although many other concepts can assist in the concrete analyses of concrete situations, these concepts help determine that the target for analysis is moving. Concretization does not imply stolidity. Rather, as Gramsci states when he describes the relationship between the party and the analysis of a concrete situation, ‘One bases oneself on effective reality, but what is effective reality? Is it something static and immobile, or is it not rather a relation of forces in continuous motion and shift of equilibrium?’ (Gramsci, 1971: 172). The concepts above move from a macro-historical analytical frame through to mezzo- and micro-political forces including discursive expressions of political ideals embedded in states, institutions, and organizations. Taken together, these concepts determine what is active and operative in a framework of analysis; what, in short, comprises the social reality under question.

Conjuncture: Identifying Conditions of Possibility; Establishing Social Genres The concept of the conjuncture in Gramsci’s work is complex and requires some unpacking. The previous section established ‘concretization’ by defining and describing its importance in relation to analysis and contexts. Conjunctures represent political opportunities which emerge out of short-term circumstantial responses to societal problems. Conjunctures provide opportunities for groups to raise consciousness, organize,

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mobilize, and combine (make coalitions). Gramsci gives us two important insights with regard to conjunctures. The first relates to ‘concrete situations’. Gramsci states that the most important observation to be made about any concrete analysis of the relations of force is the following: that such analyses cannot and must not be ends in themselves … but acquire significance only if they serve to justify a particular practical activity, or initiative of will. They reveal the points of least resistance, at which the force of will can be most fruitfully applied…. The great Powers have been great precisely because they were at all times prepared to intervene effectively in favorable international conjunctures – which were precisely favorable because there was the concrete possibility of effectively intervening in them. (Gramsci, 1971: 185)

The connection between a concrete analysis of power – determining actors (groups and individuals) that determine and direct societal forces – and a conjuncture is, plainly, that any concrete analysis implies that the analyst has a political goal, effective organizational capacity, the capability to mobilize the group they represent and allied groups, and can identify the conditions of possibility once they emerge. The emergence of conditions of possibility mark the ‘conjuncture’. As such, Gramsci defines ‘conjuncture’ as the set of circumstances which determine the market in a given phase, provided that these are conceived of as being in movement, i.e. as constituting a process of ever-changing combinations, a process which is the economic cycle … In Italian the meaning of ‘favorable or unfavorable economic situation (occasione)’ remains attached to the word ‘conjuncture’. Difference between ‘situation’ and ‘conjuncture’: the conjuncture is the set of immediate and ephemeral characteristics of the economic situation … Study of the conjuncture is thus more closely linked to immediate politics, to ‘tactics’ and agitation, while the ‘situation’ relates to ‘strategy’ and propaganda, etc. (Gramsci, 1971: 177, n.79)

An analysis of the ‘conjuncture’ makes recourse to the intelligible categories like occupational strata and the social division of labor, the level of technological and industrial development, forms of economic investment, the development of various interest-bearing

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capitals to generate private wealth, the extent of societal institutions and their relationship to the development of private factors (everything from public and private investments into scientific research to the forms and locations of vocational training), etc. These are some of the most significant (if ‘refractory’) categories that mark how diversified and active the market is at a particular moment in time (e.g. within the framework of a production cycle for aggregate industries). Since all of these categories are social and reactive upon the market within capitalism, they are constantly in movement. Branches of industry may be challenged by internal and external competitive forms which effect other categories, for example, occupations and education. The key to understanding a conjuncture is that there will be political justifications to conceal social problems in the short term. These justifications may take the form of concrete policies that act upon the conditions determining the market in a given phase (e.g. creating opportunities for retraining for new jobs) or just merely ideological proclamations. Understanding and differentiating these patterns as they pertain to the forces extant within a given conjuncture allows for groups (that are already organized on the terrain of politics) to agitate and act. Conjunctures draw attention to the temporal and variable nature of societies. Despite limitations on options or what would comprise rationally informed approaches to act in the world, a conjuncture identifies the possibilities to mount an effective challenge – to realize one’s criticism – through asserting alternatives into what is both normative, and also problematic, if faltering, for many. We can identify texts that give expression to serious constraints that protagonists or others face and begin to combine and group these texts which may express constraints through vastly different cultural codes but that get at a similar larger idea, a constellation of forces that challenge actors’ expectations for their immediate present and future. Conjunctures, in short, posit the conditions through which

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it becomes more than merely possible but, rather, necessary to begin to think otherwise about the world. The analysis of groups of texts gives rise to patterns. Determining the historical context in which a cultural artifact is produced allows for the identification of patterns – a sociological insight which can be deployed for the purposes of interpretation. Context requires further textual grounding in interdisciplinary sources that analyze political and social forces and the varied cultural forms of expression. Cultural expression is suggestive. It has the unique ability to produce the logical outcomes of policy and societal changes that may or may not take on critical ideological dimensions while, at the same time, positing new communities, new struggles, and trans-valuations of existing societal, policy-based, ideological, and cultural frameworks. This is where critical interventions into existing genres or the location or construction of new genres plays an important role for critical pedagogy. I want to propose the establishment of a conjuncture as an act of critical pedagogy. I’d like to suggest social genres as a practice of critical pedagogy. I define social genres as groupings of various texts that pertain to a contemporary social problem; a problem with pronounced effects which can be discerned across various representational media (i.e. texts). An example of a social genre would be neoliberalism. The social genre, then, would be a classification of a group of texts that are indicative of constraints or limitations to actions, practices, and discourses (even if framed affirmatively).

SOCIAL GENRE Social genre is a term borrowed from linguistic-based educational approaches ­ (Bruce, 2010); the goal of this approach is, in many ways, opposite to the approach that I am proposing here. According to Ian Bruce’s review of the term’s usage, ‘social genres’ are

constructs that teach conventional usage of any specific textual form, highlighting their intended ‘social purpose’ (e.g. editorials, postcards, research articles, etc.) (Bruce, 2010: 155). For the purposes of a critical approach, social genre indicates the ideological as well as a variety of cultural expressions describing current institutional forms and relations, societal relations and identities, and occupational roles. Taking contemporary expressive ideology or ideologies as central articulation points, social genres compile texts that dramatize social limitations and contradictions which both circumscribe and help us to understand the group and individual relational elements, in this context, through the expression of a wide range of experiences. In short, texts that dramatize the experiences that lie outside of the symbolic range of an ideology or express the limitations expressed (often affirmatively and positively) by an ideology comprise the content of a social genre. Social genres are groups of texts that express a social problem as a contradiction and limitation through a set of texts that explore it as completely as possible.

ANALYSIS: EXPLAINING HEGEMONY/ IDENTIFYING CATEGORIES In order to organize the narrative, it becomes important within the framework of a social genre to establish a range of texts that are constitutive of a situation. As indicated above in the discussion of a concrete analysis and concrete situation, a situation hones the hegemonic process into an active and operative context where power is manifest organizationally (generally) and politically (specifically). The political economic narrative, above, frames neoliberalism ideologically. It demonstrates that neoliberal capitalism is characterized by high levels of market volatility, which brings along with it broad and sweeping societal consequences effecting basic needs like housing. In the

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case of neoliberalism one might look at responses to neoliberalism. Political responses may encompass policybased responses to societal consequences. This would identify institutional actors in the state as well as experts who would be attached to both the state and private industry. Political responses also encompass the role of political parties, labor unions, and social movements. The latter have emerged very strongly as significant actors; protest activity has steadily increased across the neoliberal period beginning in the 1980s (Bailey, 2016). The latter also unify political responses with societal responses. Finally, it is also possible to compile cultural responses to neoliberalism. This might entail textual expressions (e.g. film and novels) that dramatize the social effects of neoliberalism on individuals and groups or that exaggerate the ideological foundations of neoliberalism through near-future or alternate near-future narratives. Compiling responses to neoliberalism hones the hegemonic process by putting actors into play (e.g. intellectuals, class fractions, social movements, cultural collectives, etc.) within the framework of neoliberalism and demonstrates the range of effective challenges or actual and proposed responses to the problems that neoliberalism gives rise to (transformism and passive revolution). Finally, a focus on the roles of political actors, which should represent both private and public actors, demonstrates the degree of state integration, the durability of the neoliberal hegemonic project, and the levels of consensus, contestation, and coercion that persist within the framework of neoliberal hegemony (integral state). The elements of a social genre are represented through the guidelines for the interpretations of various, included, texts. In the case of neoliberalism, the division between classes is a core structuring point for the narrative. The integration of specific private class fractions (especially corporate and finance) into the state through various means that represent both an elite group of political

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actors and the construction of a base through Christian Evangelicalism poses the political expression of class division and a solution to it. The period prior to globalization where there was a different relationship between classes dramatizes the shift that neoliberalism introduces regarding class relationships. The societal changes, which can be represented through descriptive statistics and demonstrate the changes in the accumulation and circulation of wealth and debt, are also indispensable. Dramatizing these elements calls for narratives that exhibit the effects of this shift. However, any narrative must be placed in relationship to categorical markers from Gramsci’s thought, described above, that show the process by which power operates by making sense of constraints, demonstrating the configuration and expression of the current society so that it is possible to understand what is real, possible, and ideological, or what is wishful thinking.

DRAMATIZING THE CONJUNCTURE Conjunctures inaugurate the discourses of possibilities. They dramatize the role of actors not simply within the expressive limits of the textual frameworks that represent them but, rather, within the framework of the political, social, and economic conditions that though present in the text are interpreted through a broad hegemonic framework and, also, the concrete analysis of the impact of those conditions upon actors represented in the text. More pointedly, however, a narrative protagonist marks both an orienting point through which to dramatize possibilities and constraints encountered within the articulation of a conjuncture as well as a nodal connection to both class, and other, collectives as well as a connection between student experiences, recognition of broader collective experience (i.e. class consciousness and consciousness raising), and the economic, socially, and historically embedded aspects of expressive or dramatic

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qualities. It is centrally important that the protagonist or actor in a text be connected to contemporaneous social narratives (to allow students to see precisely what is being dramatized is an example of neoliberal relations that they or others that they know may have experienced or experience) and to groups (class, race, gender, sexuality, disability, etc.).

CONCLUSION: FROM TEXTS TO ACTS There are two concluding points that I want to make, reiterating issues raised in the introduction. Effective critical pedagogy is a dialogic process that generates a patterned and open discourse, a discourse that is necessarily framed within the formal aspects of a class in the context of the university (or other) classroom. As such, critical pedagogy, like critical theory, depends upon the persistent generation of inquiry and ideas that are empirically or factually grounded, but rather than merely explaining facts or evidence, must raise the issue of what is desirable. In order to do that effectively in the framework of pedagogy it is necessary to suggest and outline a process through which to approach the dialogic practice of engaging within a broader theoretical discourse. The conjuncture raises the issue of what is desirable as a necessary and complete component of a holistic Gramscian critical pedagogy. It demonstrates what is possible, what is not, and why. As Breunig’s (2011) study notes, critical pedagogy must go beyond constructions and practices to attend to its praxiological goals, addressing the economic, political, and social processes that marginalize the groups to which critical pedagogy is directed. However, and as Breunig’s study implies, the practices of a critical pedagogy directly benefit the goals of its social justice orientation, specifically the question or concern with how a critical pedagogy may be transported beyond the classroom as a conscious aspect of students’ orientation to the world. I believe that by

demonstrating to students that an ­analytical framework can help them situate the world as knowable, bring it close to them, and lastly, allow them to not only orient themselves within the world but, most importantly, to do so with a critical lens so that in orienting themselves they may understand, also, how they may orient the world through collective action. After all, a social justice orientation is good if it can be taught, but better if it can be instilled in the conscious lives of a generation that can unite against racism, sexism, and economic exploitation.

REFERENCES Apple, M W (2006) Educating the ‘Right’ Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality. New York and London: Routledge. Apple, M W (2012) Can Education Change Society? New York and London: Routledge. Aronowitz, S (2002) ‘Gramsci’s theory of education: Schooling and beyond’. In: Borg C, Buttigieg J A, Mayo P (eds) Gramsci and Education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 109–121. Bailey, D J (2016) ‘Hard evidence: This is the Age of Dissent – and there’s much more to come’. The Conversation. 11 January, 2016. Available at: https://theconversation.com/ hard-evidence-this-is-the-age-of-dissentand-theres-much-more-to-come-52871 (Accessed 22 June 2016). Borg, C, J Buttigieg, and P Mayo (eds) (2002) Gramsci and Education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Breunig, M (2011) ‘Problematizing critical pedagogy’. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 3(3) 2–23. Bruce, I (2010) ‘Textual and discoursal resources used in the essay genre in sociology and English’. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 9(3) 153–166. Crehan, K (2016) Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. English, L and P Mayo (2012) Learning with Adults: A Critical Pedagogical Introduction. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

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Entwistle, H (1979) Antonio Gramsci: Conservative Schooling for Radical Politics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Giroux, H A (1988) Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters Who Dare Teach. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Giroux, H A (2001) Public Spaces/Private Lives: Beyond the Culture of Cynicism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Giroux, H A (2002) ‘Rethinking cultural politics and radical pedagogy in the work of Antonio Gramsci’. In: Borg C, Buttigieg J A, Mayo P (eds) Gramsci and Education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 41–65. Giroux, H A (2003) ‘Public pedagogy and the politics of resistance: Notes on a critical theory of educational struggle’. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 35(1) 5–16. Giroux, H A (2007) The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Giroux, H A (2008) Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics beyond the Age of Greed. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Gramsci, A (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Translated and edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers. Heidegger, M (1927) Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper, 1962. Heidegger, M (1977) ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. In: David Farrell Krell (ed), tr. Albert Hofstadter, Basic Writings. New York: Harper and Row, 1977, 143–187. Hirsch, E D (1996) The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them. New York: Doubleday. Holub, R (1992) Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Ives, P (2010) ‘Global English, hegemony and education: Lessons from Gramsci’. In: Mayo, P (ed.) Gramsci and Educational Thought. Oxford and New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 78–99. Kachur, J L (2002) ‘The postmodern prince: Gramsci and anonymous intellectual practice’. In: Borg, C, Buttigieg J A, Mayo P (eds) Gramsci and Education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 307–330.

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Keucheyan, R (2013) The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today. London: Verso. Lenin, V I (1914) ‘The Right of Nations to SelfDetermination’. In: Trachtenberg, A (Ed), tr. Moissaye J. Olgin Collected Works of V. I. Lenin, Volume 20. New York: International Press, 393–454. Lenin, V I (1916) ‘The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/ lenin/works/1916/jan/x01.htm (Accessed 9 December 2016). Livingstone, D W (1983) Class, Ideologies and Educational Futures. London and Philadelphia: Falmer Press. Livingstone, D W (2002) Working and Learning in the Information Age: A Profile of Canadians. Ottawa: Canadian Policy Research Networks. Luxemburg, R (1909) The National Question, Chapter 1: ‘The Right of Nations to SelfDetermination’. Available at: https://www. marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1909/ national-question/ch01.htm (Accessed 9 December 2016). Marx, K (1852) The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers. Marx, K (1857) 1968 ‘Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’. In Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Selected Works. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 181–185. Mayo, P (1999) Gramsci, Freire and Adult Education. London: Zed Books. Mayo, P (ed.) (2010) Gramsci and Educational Thought. Oxford and New York: WileyBlackwell. Mayo, P (2015) ‘Antonio Gramsci’s impact on critical pedagogy’. Critical Sociology, 41(7–8) 1121–1136. McLaren, P (1994) Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (2nd ed.). New York: Longman. Monasta, A (2002) ‘Antonio Gramsci: The message and the images’. In Borg, C, Buttigieg, J A, Mayo P (eds.) Gramsci and Education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 67–87. Willis, P (1977) Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Farnborough, Hants: Saxon House, Teakfield.

31 Still Teaching to Transgress: Reflecting on Critical Pedagogy with bell hooks S t e p h a n i e Tr o u t m a n

No education is politically neutral. (hooks, 1994: 170) trans·gres·sion /trans’ɡreSHən/ noun an act that goes against a law, rule, or code of conduct; an offense. Ex: ‘I’ll be keeping an eye out for further transgressions’. (Oxford Dictionary)

BELL HOOKS AND ME As a self-described ‘accidemic’ (Troutman et al., 2018) or one who is deeply committed to knowledge acquisition and knowledge production in an organic or Gramscian sense, but ends up in the (western) academy living life as a professor, the work of bell hooks is a meaningful tome on multiple levels. From my first encounter with her work, Teaching to Transgress, as a Black single mother and firstgeneration graduate student at Penn State, I knew my perspective would be forever

changed and influenced by her amazing ideas and creative intellect. Many Black women specifically, and women of color more generally, both in and outside of academic spaces, feel as I do about the contributions of Dr. bell hooks. As I eagerly consumed the books of bell hooks and began using her work to inform and anchor some of my own academic direction and practice, it never occurred to me that I might someday meet her – let alone develop a friendship with her. After a promising-turned-disappointing experience on the academic job market in 2011, I settled for a visiting position in a small rural college. To my shock and amazement, bell hooks was a Distinguished Professor at this school. I assumed she worked from afar and was not in regular residence there. My assumption was promptly corrected when I arrived for a campus visit and saw that I was scheduled to meet with her (at her home!) that morning, after coffee. If death by fangirling was a real thing, it would have happened to me right then and there. I promptly changed

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my clothes. I was so nervous and excited, but she was calm and welcoming, and as she hugged me, we had an immediate connection. She often refers to this meeting as ‘love at first sight’. This was most certainly a major perk of the job I was grateful to have but felt I was forced to settle for. During my two years in that space, bell hooks quickly moved from being my colleague and mentor to becoming a great friend. I met her family when they visited, I accompanied her to speaking and teaching gigs, we traveled and connected with other Black feminist scholars and artists. These moments and experiences deepened me personally and professionally – in ways too numerous to recall. We discussed, analyzed, and critiqued movies, travel, family, our institution – and the academy at large. We shared reading material, and I recall us debating ideas raised in texts like Melissa Harris-Perry’s Sister Citizen (2011) and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2012). We endlessly bickered about Spike Lee’s oeuvre and enjoyed long discussions of the work of artists Betye, Alyson, and Lezley Saar. Intellectual stimulation of a political, aesthetic, and creative variety was always on the menu. Beyond our shared interests was a mutual commitment to feminism and truth-telling and to a belief in the transformative potential of education to make a better more feminist and equitable personal life, community, and world. Our shared love of learning and education (not schooling) was and is urgent – and forms the basis for our continued friendship. At the heart of our intergenerational, feminist sisterhood of sorts is a shared knowledge that education at its best is about truth, connection, and critiques made in the spirit of love with an end goal of liberation.

SITUATING BELL HOOKS IN CRITICAL PEDAGOGY In the inter- and multi-disciplinary educational field of critical pedagogy, the scholars are many, though not each of these

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contributing figures – theorists, practitioners, and pedagogues – are equally explored or recognized. While the voices of the critical pedagogy movement have shifted to reflect a wider, more diverse representation of scholars over the past decade (see Orelus and Brock, 2015), one of the earliest, most salient voices of Black women in the theorizing, practice, and scholarship of critical pedagogy is that of Dr. bell hooks. Like her ongoing work, her legacy attends to examinations of the contours of teaching, learning, and loving, deep within the confines of community as defined by and through intellectual engagements, political commitments, and spiritual practice. hooks’s critical pedagogy work is rooted in a distinct, feminist ethos that distinguishes it from earlier works in the field – such that she is credited with challenging Paulo Freire himself (renowned as the ‘father’ of critical pedagogy) to expand his ideas about gender and the role of feminist practice in relation to critical pedagogy. Uniquely, the body of scholarship that bell hooks has created is positioned in (and between) both critical pedagogy and feminist pedagogy. In fact, one might argue that bell hooks is responsible for mapping the location where feminist pedagogy and critical pedagogy intersect.

TEACHING TO TRANSGRESS AND THE BELL HOOKS TEACHING TRILOGY bell hooks’s seminal work in the field of critical pedagogy is her 1994 book, Teaching to Transgress. Most scholars, students, teachers, and educational practitioners hail Teaching to Transgress as one of the most definitive books on critical pedagogy because of its significant global impact on the enterprise of teaching and learning for freedom and liberation; it also hailed as a top academic text for its impact and influence across multiple fields and disciplines – among them women and gender studies, race and ethnic studies, education, and many more. My own encounter with Teaching to Transgress was as a graduate student at Penn State in

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2006. The way hooks passionately argued for critical thinking, experiential learning, political critique, and the power of education was both healing salve and a game-changer for me. I was a first-generation college (and at that time doctoral) student; a welfare-class, Black single mother who, despite being ‘gifted’, felt abused, undervalued, and often despised by and in school settings. Teaching to Transgress affirmed my belonging in academic space and assured me that no matter how difficult it would be to navigate the social dimensions (racism, classism, sexism) of the academy, I would not be broken by it. This helped me to embrace my positionality and to begin approaching my own classroom spaces as sites of untold potential and community. In Teaching to Transgress, hooks argues against the banking model of education and challenges systems of domination within schools and classrooms. hooks calls for the re-thinking of schools and educational settings because she believes that ‘the classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility’ (hooks, 1994: 195). Functioning as somewhat of a hybrid homage and companion to Freire’s (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Teaching to Transgress also positions feminist politics and spirituality as critical components in the movement for liberation and social transformation. hooks challenges the system of education and schooling not only on political and ideological grounds, but also in regard to the roles played by students and teachers in the (academic) classroom setting, stating,

The continued relevance of Teaching to Transgress lies within its prescient ability to forecast the ongoing tension between corporatized, banking models of teaching and learning in relation liberatory models and progressive concerns in education and schooling. It is this continued relevance that nearly a decade later spawned hooks’s follow-up critical pedagogy book, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003) and ultimately a third book (making her teaching series a trilogy spanning almost 15 years), Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom, in 2010. Though the later books are less popular than Teaching to Transgress, they offer a great deal of important insights and ideas about ways to engage in critical pedagogy across all spaces of learning, not just schools and other academic settings, and communicated through stories of experience and honest appraisals of flawed social institutions and their negative effects. In my own practice, I’ve found it helpful to pair Teaching to Transgress with Teaching Critical Thinking as a way for graduate students to have the deep and rich theoretical experience that the former has to offer, while also being able to access the brief but poignant lessons in the latter, as something tangible for their own teaching practice. While Teaching Critical Thinking orients them to reflect on their own positionality within their schooling and academic experiences, Teaching to Transgress helps them to fight dominator culture and oppressive regimes within the classrooms (and spaces) that they are tasked with creating as educational leaders. As hooks reminds us,

we must continually remind students in the classroom that expression of different opinions and dissenting ideas affirms the intellectual process. We should forcefully explain that our role is not to teach them to think as we do but rather to teach them, by example, the importance of taking a stance that is rooted in rigorous engagement with the full range of ideas about a topic. (hooks,1994: 182)

all of us in the academy and in the culture as a whole are called to renew our minds if we are to transform educational institutions – and society – so that the way we live, teach, and work can reflect our joy in cultural diversity, our passion for justice, and our love of freedom. (hooks, 1994: 14)

This particular guidance from hooks is a gem and a cornerstone upon which critical pedagogy can be realized within schooling environments.

Interestingly, it is the middle book of the trilogy, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003) that in my opinion offers the best of both worlds (theory and practice) and is the most cosmopolitan of the trilogy in scope, reach, and accessibility. For these reasons,

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I often teach this book as a standalone text. In this book, hooks theorizes mostly through narrative and story-telling and by sharing reflections and observations collected across a variety of educational spaces and contexts. This book moves toward an ethos of community grounded in an ethics of justice and humanity that seeks to embrace all forms of personhood. In the text, hooks challenges us to remember and resist, dominator culture [that] has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community. (hooks, 2003: 197)

This is just one example of many, in which hooks communicates her vision of critical pedagogy as an enterprise that has potential beyond the classroom and outside of schools; that has the power to help enable us to transgress in social settings and environments. This transgression, hooks believes, will provide us with tools and resources needed for liberation, justice, and social transformation. hooks intimates, my hope emerges from those places of struggle where I witness individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them. Educating is a vocation rooted in hopefulness. As teachers we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know. (hooks, 2003: 14)

Fifteen years after its original publication, Teaching Community is enjoying renewed interest, circulating as an important part of hooks’s legacy in a vibrant afterlife on social media, in the form of websites, Instagram posts, memes, blog entries, and Pinterest posts. One could claim that it is this middle text of hooks’s teaching trilogy that offers answers alongside critique. However, the trilogy’s headliner, Teaching to Transgress, remains the canonical work in which critical pedagogy meets Black

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feminist thought for a profound encounter that endures. The book, which is 25 years old in 2019, is among the most notable and influential books on critical pedagogy ever written. It is a tour de force that challenges traditional conceptions and models of teaching and learning, student–teacher power relations, and racial and gender dynamics at the intersection of teaching, learning, education, and schooling. Heavily inspired and influenced by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and hooks’s own friendship and comradery with Paulo Freire himself, Teaching to Transgress is the book that places hooks solidly among the scholars of critical pedagogy. In 2014, The New School celebrated the 20th anniversary of the publication of Teaching to Transgress with a scholarly residency honoring hooks, entitled ‘Transgressions’, which featured a weeklong series of engagements all focused on commemorating, updating, and extending the work of this book. These events were free and open to the public and were widely attended (standing room only), and have enjoyed thousands of viewings on YouTube. In the opening event of this series, ‘Teaching to Transgress Today: Theory and Practice In and Outside the Classroom’, Princeton Professor Imani Perry offered a reflection on the significance of bell hooks and her work; Perry stated that upon meeting hooks, Her voice sounded like home to me…. She had the sense of play and poetry and grace in her presence that I took to be my inheritance. It was different because she was free … free in a distinctive way that I came to understand as particularly feminist, intellectual and Black all at once. (Perry, 2014)

I interpret this account by Perry as indicative of the ways in which bell hooks lives and models through her living, an ethic of critical pedagogy. Similar to Perry, I too have been exposed to and inspired by this side of bell hooks. Perry went on to outline three crucial aspects of bell hooks’s call to transgress that continue to resonate:

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1 Leftist politics (beyond liberal Left) including a deep critique of capitalism in service of radical vision to undo our adherence to patriarchy 2 Attention to the emotional lives of people and emotional wellbeing through commitment to self-care 3 Recognition and engagement in spiritual work as critical to refusing binaries of mind/body, reason/ emotion, intellect/affect.

Perry’s lecture set the stage for a robust reconsideration and appreciation of bell hooks’s scholarly legacy – broadly, and on a more specific level, the continued vitality of Teaching to Transgress as a text. The three aforementioned aspects outlined by Perry constitute the signaling of a critical pedagogy lifestyle or praxis which should be of particular interest as we attempt to educate, grow, and struggle for freedom within contested domains of community and society against an environment heavily influenced by geopolitical issues. This feminist, critical pedagogy lifestyle is the legacy of bell hooks. Given the assault on public education, Perry’s second observation resonates and takes us back to the text, wherein hooks states that ‘teachers must be actively involved, committed to a process of selfactualization that promotes their own wellbeing if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students’ (Perry, 2014: 17). This perhaps may be the most important tenet of a critical pedagogical praxis, as it recognizes that authenticity requires us to ‘practice what we preach’ (or in this context, profess) as a way to model and build relationships that prioritize our optimal wellbeing as we strive for freedom and liberation. As bell’s former colleague at Berea College and as her friend and (sometimes) collaborator, I had the pleasure of speaking to her about critical pedagogy now – in the postObama era, at a time when critical pedagogy feels both more important than ever and more under siege than it did even just a decade ago. What does it mean to celebrate Teaching to Transgress, 25 years later in an environment of conservative values, amoral policies, and

widespread vitriolic attacks on social justice and democracy? A transcript of our conversation follows in the next section.

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY Q&A WITH BELL HOOKS Q: Define critical pedagogy. Has the definition changed for you over the years? If so, how and why? A:  Critical pedagogy is deeply defined by its relation to students and to the idea of the student – not just teaching facts and ideas but promoting a way of being in the world that is centered on critical thinking. I think critical pedagogy has evolved because people have become more aware of the dominator system and cultures of social [US] institutions … especially in academia. Q: What do you feel are the most beneficial aspects of adopting a critical pedagogy approach to teaching and learning? A: It is still the best way for those who are disenfranchised in dominant culture to construct liberatory subcultures. It offers much needed alternatives. Q:  What can critical pedagogy tell us about our world outside or beyond the confines of the classroom? A:  Critical pedagogy is the only aspect of teaching and learning that is invested in really looking at ideas that circulate in public discourse and ideas that circulate in academe and how they combine to shape our real-life circumstances. Q:  In what ways do you feel colleges and universities have embraced or rejected critical pedagogies? A: Overall, I’d say that critical pedagogy is under assault; what’s fascinating, is that books like Dark Money [by Jane Mayer, 2016] and other research show how conservative wealth made direct interventions into academe to rid the space of the critical thinking of dissident voices. Wealth as antieverything [progressive] predates Trump. Still, there are those in the academy who are more open to critical pedagogy … individual professors and protest-oriented and marginalized students.

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Q:  What lesson/s do schooling and public education still need to learn from critical pedagogy? A: To promote self-actualization that enables people to discover who they are and find their voice. Q:  How is critical pedagogy embodied or expressed in your non-education works? Where/how do you see it informing your work as a cultural critic? A: I embrace a radical perspective in all that I write; it’s always indicative of critical pedagogy. Visionary feminist theorizing embodies the best of critical pedagogy because it is the only standpoint that addresses intersectionality. Q:  Does critical pedagogy influence in any way your Buddhist–Christian spirituality – how so? A: It makes me smart enough to combine the two! [laughs] It helps me think critically about which parts are useful and compatible … how certain aspects of one practice enhance the other belief system. It gives me ways to analyze and make choices that promote spiritual wellbeing because as I said before – critical pedagogy is a way of life. Q:  In what ways do you think critical pedagogy could radically transform how we think or view education in this current cultural moment – in today’s [2017] political context? A: Well, we need a more organized body of critical pedagogy in order to form an inroad into current political thought. We need it in order to open more progressive discourse. Q:  Who were the most imaginative critical thinkers/philosophers/teachers in your life? A: Generally, no teachers I had engaged with promoting radicalization. But I was definitely influenced by Paolo Freire and his work … of course. And later on I learned a lot from Cornel West. Q:  Tell me in retrospect about your relationship with Paulo Freire. A: I think about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X – and they were incredibly young … they both were in the process of an evolution of consciousness that one can only begin to see taking place at the time when they died. But in Freire, who lived much longer, you could see it! Even as an elderly man he was still undergoing changes and transformations – especially around gender, sexism, and concepts like that. It’s funny for me to remember when I first met him [Freire] because they tried to keep him away from me at [UC]

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Santa Cruz. They tried to ban me from the discussion group. But he invited my voice and wanted to answer my critiques. Q:  Twenty-plus years later, ‘Teaching to Transgress’ is still widely taught and highly influential in college and university classrooms across several disciplines – Gender and Women’s Studies, Education, Ethnic Studies, and so forth; how does that make you feel? A:  Well, I feel good about that … but sometimes I experience deep despair when I re-read and reflect on the book. Who did we [writers, practitioners/pedagogues, and theorists of critical pedagogy] educate for critical consciousness? Where are those students now? Did we reach far enough? I’m filled with a mixture of sadness and hope. Hope is cultivated in the spirit and the academy is limiting to spiritual work, but it’s a good place for theory and I see in theory a location for healing … theory can be radical and life-affirming. Mostly when I think about the longevity of Teaching to Transgress and its message, I find myself awaiting the fulfillment of the promise of critical pedagogy on a large scale because it has not yet been fully realized.

EPILOGUE Since the 20th (now almost 25th) anniversary of the debut of Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks continues to do the work of feminist praxis and ethics. Her more recent work actualizes a rich and extensive application of a variety of critical pedagogy strategies and techniques that center dialogue, community building, and active engagement with multiple cultural forms. In her continued writing practice (in multiple outlets) her scholarship mobilizes critical pedagogy techniques to help understand popular culture from Beyonce’s ‘Lemonade’ to the Amazon Prime show, Transparent. She has extended her critique to encompass acclaimed and lauded films, such as Beasts of the Southern Wild and 12 Years a Slave. In her residencies at The New School, she has engaged in dialogue with public scholars, creators, journalists, and celebrities alike, including Melissa Harris-Perry, Charles Blow, Janet Mock, Gloria Steinem, Cornel West, and

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Laverne Cox. hooks published, ‘Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In’ (hooks, 2013), her critical response to Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg’s best-selling women in the workplace manifesto, Lean In, online at The Feminist Wire website (October 28, 2013). hooks gave the keynote address at the National Women’s Studies Association’s annual conference in November 2014, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. hooks was among the Black feminist scholars whose work was honored and highlighted in a 2016 special issue of Meridians journal (15:1), dedicated to the scholarship and activism of social change. The article devoted to hooks, titled ‘Lessons in Transgression: #Blackgirlsmatter and the Feminist Classroom’ (Troutman and Jiménez, 2016), combines hooks’s teaching trilogy with her residency work (namely her public dialogues) at The New School, to situate her influence in contemporary classrooms and in the lives of Black womxn students and feminist teachers. Intergenerational in its approach, this article also contains a lesson plan for hooks’s work in high school and college/university settings. The authors, both teachers, situate themselves in the continuum of hooks’s powerful work and legacy to create a piece that truly explores the transformative potential of combining critical pedagogy and feminist praxis. hooks continues to be sought after as a speaker, and has appeared for two years in a row at the Tucson Festival of Books, in honor and celebration of All About Love: New Visions (2000) and its legacy and continued influence on a new generation of writers and scholars. In addition to her appearance at the Festival, hooks participated in multiple public conversations on topics ranging from Buddhism/Buddhist Studies to contemporary films like Get Out and I Am Not Your Negro. These critical community dialogues were well attended by folks of all backgrounds and ages: a testament to the powerful legacy of her work and to her status as a revered and wise elder. To date, her most recent book, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue (co-authored by the late scholar and theorist, Stuart Hall) was published in 2017. The work

of bell hooks remains a vital force and was the subject of a 2019 New York Times article by Min Jin Lee, entitled ‘In Praise of bell hooks’, in which she chronicles her own journey as a student of bell hooks and as a feminist, woman of color fiction writer deeply indebted to the scholarly and intellectual legacy of bell hooks and her work. More recently, hooks founded the bell hooks Institute (the ‘bhi’ for short) in Berea, Kentucky in collaboration with Berea College, where she holds the post of Distinguished Professor. The bell hooks Institute is home to artifacts from bell’s life, as well as her papers, artworks she has collected, and other archives. More importantly, perhaps, is the role of the bell hooks Institute as an active space of critical pedagogy centered around critical and cross-cutting community dialogue; it is a site for scholarly gatherings, intellectual curiosity, and experiential sharing. Some of its more notable visitors have included Cornel West, Emma Watson, and Buddhist practitioners and other artists and writers, as bell advances her commitment to promoting gatherings that prioritize trans identity/ies, the celebration of free, radical, queer men and women, and pays homage to the sacred and spiritual in spaces of promise and political transformation. The bell hooks Institute as an extension of critical pedagogy and as a site for its application and advancement is rooted in a justicecentered ethic of love. As hooks (2010) reminds us in Teaching Critical Thinking, ‘to engage in the practice of love as the foundation of all social movements for self-determination is the only way we can create a world that domination and dominator thinking cannot destroy. Anytime we do the work of love we are doing the work of ending domination’ (hooks, 2010: 195).

REFERENCES Alexander, Michelle. (2012) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press.

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Freire, Paulo. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury Press. Harris-Perry, Melissa V. (2011) Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes and Black Women in America. Princeton, NJ: Yale University Press. hooks, bell. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. hooks, bell. (2000) All About Love: New Visions. New York: Routledge. hooks, bell. (2003) Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Routledge. hooks, bell. (2010) Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. New York: Routledge. hooks, bell. (October 28, 2013) Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In. the feminist wire. https:// thefeministwire.com/2013/10/17973/ hooks, bell & Hall, Stuart. (2017) Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue. New York: Routledge. Lee, Min Jin. (2019) ‘In Praise of bell hooks’. New York Times. February 28. https://www.

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nytimes.com/2019/02/28/books/bell-hooksmin-jin-lee-aint-i-a-woman.html Mayer, Jane. (2016) Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Radical Right. New York: Anchor Press. Orelus, Pierre W. & Brock, Rochelle. (2015) Interrogating Critical Pedagogy: The Voices of Educators of Color in the Movement. New York: Routledge. Perry, Imani. (2014) Lecture. ‘Teaching to Transgress Today: Theory and Practice In and Outside the Classroom’. The New School bell hooks Residency. Troutman, Stephanie & Jiménez, Ileana. (2016) ‘Lessons in Transgression: #BlackGirlsMatter and the Feminist Classroom’. Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, 15(1), 7–39. Troutman, Stephanie, Glover, Crystal P., & Jenkins, Toby S. (2018) Culture, Community, and Educational Success: Reimagining the Invisible Knapsack. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

32 Ivan Illich and Liberation Theology Samuel D. Rocha and Martha Sañudo

INTRODUCTION Who was Ivan Illich? It is easy enough to confuse him with the protagonist of Leo Tolstoy’s novella, The Death of Ivan Ilych. Unlike Tolstoy’s Ilych, however, Ivan Illich’s life was not ‘most simple and ordinary and most terrible’ (Tolstoy, 1909: 10). The latter may be the subject of some debate among his critics, but ‘most simple and ordinary’ is a phrase that no one would apply to the life of Ivan Illich. Austrian by birth in 1926, he was educated in Rome, Florence, and Salzburg, ordained a Roman Catholic priest and made a Monsignor by age 28, and appointed Vice Rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico by age 30. The bulk of Illich’s intellectual reputation stems from his years in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he ran a language school, CIF (Centro Intercultural de Formación) and then CIDOC (Centro Intercultural de Documentación), from 1961 to 1976. His 1971 book, Deschooling Society,

was of particular and provocative significance to educational discourse. This period of time coincides with the articulation of Liberation Theology in Latin America by Gustavo Gutiérrez (2002) in A Theology of Liberation and, more broadly, with the enthusiasm for deeper change brought about in the Catholic Church by the councils of Medellin and Puebla in 1968 and 1979, respectively. These councils attempted not only to continue the momentum started in the Second Vatican Council in 1964, but took them a step ahead in bringing the Christian message of salvation into people’s daily reality, particularly by emphasizing the political vocation of Christians to alleviate poverty and work for social justice. Theologians in this tradition include Paulo Freire (who is often cited as the founder of the Anglophone tradition of ‘critical pedagogy’) and he, along with many other theologians, gathered at Illich’s language school in Cuernavaca during these years. Illich’s relationship to the Liberation Theologians was historical and collegial but

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his theological ideas remained rooted in his Thomistic training under Jacques Maritain. For this reason, this chapter’s focus will be more on Illich while allowing Liberation Theology to contextualize his ideas. The ideal chapter for a more fully liberationist theologian would be Freire. However, Illich’s ecclesial priesthood seems to invite more overt theological comparisons, and perhaps for good reason. After Illich voluntarily closed his center in Cuernavaca in 1976, he went on to work as an independent scholar and educator for another three decades, writing many of his most original works. One can find many useful historical and biographical accounts of Illich’s work. Recent ones include articles by Rosa Bruno-Jofré and Jon Igelmo Zaldívar (2012) and a recent book by Todd Hartch (2015), along with the CBC interviews by David Cayley (1992). An even wider variety of ­historical and religious accounts of Liberation Theology exist as well, including a number of critiques. In this chapter, by contrast, we will consider the philosophical significance of Illich life and thought through a periodic overview in relation to his most popular educational book, Deschooling Society (1971), concluding with parting thoughts on his somewhat difficult relationship to Liberation Theology and critical pedagogy.

BEFORE DESCHOOLING After completing his graduate studies and being ordained to the Roman Catholic priesthood in 1950, Illich left Europe for Princeton University to study the alchemical works of the 13th-century Dominican Bishop and Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church, Albert Magnus. Soon after his arrival in New Jersey, Illich discovered, and fell in love with, the first wave of Puerto Rican immigrants settling into the northern Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights in New York City. He left his scholastic work behind and

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requested to be transferred to do pastoral work in Washington Heights; his request was eventually accepted. His support of the emerging Puerto Rican community in New York City was such that by 1956 he was made Vice Rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico and moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico. It was there that Illich first confronted the realities of schooling in Latin America. It was also there where Illich began to think through these issues by dialoguing with radical educational theorist Everett Reimer. Reimer’s book, School is Dead: An essay on alternatives in Education, was also published in 1971, to somewhat less acclaim than Illich’s Deschooling Society. This very brief and partial biographical progression carries important clues about Illich, offering us insight into the trajectory and motivations behind his trenchant critiques of schooling and modern institutions. It especially clarifies the negative point that, initially, Illich’s interests were not primarily focused on, or related to, educational or institutional questions in any direct sense. It may be the case that one can find an oblique or implied relation to education and schooling in Illich’s early studies, but it is not controversial to assert that his early interest in crystallography and alchemy, along with studies in Thomistic theology and philosophy, does not bear any immediate association or application to schools or society. This negative point also reveals the more positive reality that Illich’s interest in education, like his affection for the Puerto Rican community, emerged from his personal encounter and communion with people. In the Americas – from Washington Heights to San Juan – Illich found a new passion that would eventually replace his academic interests and even his public ministry as a priest. A similarly noteworthy point from this short biographical account is that Illich did not bring his intellectual pursuits from Europe to bear on the social challenges he encountered in Latin America – his initial personal motivation was to conduct archival

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studies. That is, he did not export himself from his native Europe as a colonial missionary or an intellectual philanthropist to Latin America. To the contrary, Illich’s response to the social demands of the Americas forced him to exchange his scholastic studies for the administrative tasks of vice rectorship and, after he was dismissed, took him to the task of operating a language school in Cuernavaca, Mexico. In other words, Illich’s European intellectual formation served him well in many ways, but it did not predetermine or even significantly inform the signature social critique he became known for. His more scholarly and historical works would emerge later, after Cuernavaca. His social criticism was built from the ground up after contact with the social realities of the Americas. This account of his formative studies being detached from his pastoral work in the Americas explains many of the paradoxes of his work, including his somewhat tense and even disinterested attitude toward Liberation Theology and other movements in Latin America during that time, including the pedagogical work of Paulo Freire. Illich was neither an insider, in the sense of being a Latin American by birth and education, nor an outsider, by fully accepting his new life in Latin America which allowed him to sternly criticize outsiders’ naive ‘good intentions’ and desire to impose modern myths of development from industrialized countries into Latin America. This might help us to understand both the negative and positive terms of what one might consider his particular relation to critical pedagogy to be within the radical pedagogical ideas of his time. This also suggests the degree to which Illich’s thought, perhaps more than anyone else, remains enigmatic and largely misunderstood or ignored within educational discourse in his own time to this very day. There is also an important theological insight we can take from this account of Illich’s newfound passion for the Americas during his years as a young priest. His sudden change of direction from Princeton to

Washington Heights to San Juan, bears all the marks of a profound experience of spiritual conversion. That is, Illich’s transition from exegetical studies to pastoral involvement to educational administration was not merely a result of new, redirected interests. The Puerto Rican Catholic community was not an interesting anthropological or sociological phenomenon for Illich to study. He was not a social scientist. Rather, his encounter and communion with people and their social problems transformed Illich as a person and as a priest. It was nothing short of a religious conversion. Moreover, Illich was not so much transformed through the renewal of his mind; he was transformed through the renewal of being-with the people of the Americas. This transformative theme of personal conversion can be readily found within the tenor and rhetoric of Illich’s works. However, if one forgets his personal experience of conversion, one can easily mistake his works for an abrasive and detached evangelicalism. For instance, in ‘To Hell with Good Intentions’, his provocative address to the Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects (CIASP) in Cuernavaca, Mexico on April 20, 1968, Illich’s rhetoric is in the prophetic, hyperbolic style of a jeremiad. He implores and convicts his audience: I am here to suggest that you voluntarily renounce exercising the power which being an American gives you. I am here to entreat you to freely, consciously and humbly give up the legal right you have to impose your benevolence on Mexico. I am here to challenge you to recognize your inability, your powerlessness and your incapacity to do the ‘good’ which you intended to do. (Illich, 1968: para. 34)

This prophetic passage is not only reminiscent of the Old Testament prophets, it is also deeply Pauline, calling these altruistic volunteers from the United States to ‘recognize your inability, your powerlessness’, to ‘voluntarily renounce’, and ‘give up’ ‘freely, consciously and humbly’ (ibid.: para. 34). The fire and brimstone – Illich uses the word hell theologically – of this speech is remarkable in many ways, but its general

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critique can be read in fuller detail in his 1967 essay, ‘The Seamy Side of Charity’, first published in America magazine, also addressing the concrete missionary effort to aid Latin America by the Catholic Church in the United States and Canada. In this essay, Illich’s strong words were not only directed outwardly toward the United States through a critique of secular social development initiatives, rather, we find Illich as a vocal critic of the charitable initiatives of the Roman Catholic Church. As we will see, this puts Illich’s critical voice in concert with the spirit of Liberation Theology of Latin American during this time but in a somewhat idiosyncratic and even dissonant way. His essay ‘The Vanishing Clergyman’, first published in The Critic of Chicago in 1967, delves further into his internal critique of the state of the Roman Church, specifically, the state of the Catholic priesthood. Here the prophetic rhetoric carries the additional aspect of being deeply futuristic, with Illich rhetorically foreseeing a number of radical changes in the future Catholic Church’s organizational composition from pastoral clergy to theological instruction and beyond. It is also notable that in this essay Illich constantly groups together philanthropic organizations with multinational corporations like General Motors and Chase Bank. Instead of making demands or placing explicit critiques, Illich works in an aggressive yet oblique way through suggestion and prediction. To many, Illich’s future church was a hyperbolic expression of his desire for ecclesial destruction, but in many respects it was a return to a simpler ideal, not so different from other notable reformists, like Francis of Assisi. Both of the aforementioned essays were later published in his 1969 collection, Celebration of Awareness, that in many ways preceded and prepared his readership for Deschooling Society in 1971. This book, like all of his works of social criticism, began as separate essays and speeches. Today’s explosion of digital think-piece literature, blogs, and other essayistic popular and journalistic

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outlets would find Illich’s style extremely accessible. His chief concern in these works was to communicate as broadly as possible. This tone, when added to the specific content of Deschooling Society, firmly places Illich into the category of ‘critical pedagogy’, and in what follows we will outline why by looking to the text that is most commonly placed within that tradition’s canon.

DESCHOOLING Few books are so fortunate to be able to convey in their very title a provocative, newfangled worldview. With Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society it seems that the title says it all. So why read the whole book? Moreover, ask anyone to read a book with ‘deschooling’ in its title and you will often find a receptive mind with a cheeky facial expression. How enticing to know that someone a long time ago in 1971 has already attempted to rock the boat of a recurrently loathed institution! However, just as an auspicious title has its rewards, so it has its downfalls. In this case the drawback has been that many believe to know the content of Illich’s book, by just interpreting its title. Many progressive minded educators and concerned scholars around the globe will recognize the existence of Illich’s book, but know little more than its title. What is interpreted by its title varies, but most likely it would be something such as ‘that schools have to be eliminated’, ‘that schools are part of the social problem instead of being its solution’, ‘that schools prevent social advancement’, ‘that schools require a reform’, etc. Yet, the book contradicts these quick interpretations and offers many relevant considerations to today’s pedagogical discussions. Deschooling Society is divided into seven chapters, and in most editions (and there have indeed been many and in many languages) it is around 100 pages. The first chapter, ‘Why  the  School Must Be Disestablished’,

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sets the context of the whole enterprise. Firstly, it tells you what it means by ‘schooled’, which mainly refers to a person’s participation in an institution, which, either surreptitiously or straightforwardly, forces that person to confuse an institutional process with what are real human values and human ends. Thus, Illich drastically asserts that through attending school a pupil confuses: teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is ‘schooled’ to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question. (Illich, 1971: 1)

The problem with ‘schooling’, for Illich, is thus set clearly from the very start. ‘Schooling’ is undesirable because it means the institutionalization of values (which is in itself controversial), left in the hands of technocrats accustomed to diagnose and control processes, with no entrusted concern for the promotion of creativity and personal inter­ actions that would lead to people’s autonomy and liberation. This opening chapter also states several times that what happens in schools must be taken as a paradigm of what happens in other institutions. Among the more succinct summaries is this line, ‘Not only education but social reality itself has been schooled’ (ibid.: 2). School was a perfect example for Illich in his time because nation-states in the 60s were pushing the political agenda of ‘universal education’ (ibid.: xix) as a panacea of all social problems. The claim, popular at the time and still very much in use by contemporary politicians, was that education would solve the gap of social and economic inequalities. This declaration was, and still is, seldom

an invitation to think together how we can bring about education for all and particularly for the unprivileged, but rather functions as a discussion about how much money should be poured into the institutions that manage education. Illich’s focus of criticism is the institutionalization of values by a bureaucracy that monopolizes and manipulates the social imagination and sets standards of what is to be socially expected and appreciated. Therefore, to follow Illich’s argument thoroughly means to be an axiomatic critic of every single institution, not only of schools. Governments, churches, hospitals, NGOs, clubs, whatever association of humans there is that creates a language and an environment in which humans lose the distinction between processes and ends, must be held suspect according to Illich. This chapter also discloses the alternative that Illich has in mind to the ‘schooled’ society. That is, in this book there is no question that education is a value, since learning new information or skills allows humans to display more fully their potential. Later on, (see, for instance, his 1973 book Tools for Conviviality) Illich would question the extreme weight society puts into learning and education and looks into the historicity of this overestimated value of education. But in this book, his interest is in showing that the institution of schooling is an inefficient and sometimes pernicious way of packaging education. What alternatives can we think of? In this chapter Illich briefly depicts two ­alternatives that he develops later in his chapter 6, ‘Learning Webs’, matching skilled teachers with people wanting to learn a skill and fostering the creativity of people gathered around one common interest. In chapter 2, entitled ‘Phenomenology of School’, with philosophical purity, Illich tells us that instead of theorizing and arguing over what a school is or searching into the history of the school system, he will describe how the school appears a phenomenon. His description of a school is as follows: ‘the agespecific, teacher-related process of requiring

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full-time attendance at an obligatory curriculum’ (1971: 25–6). The chapter, then, is an analysis of the premises contained in this definition. Regarding the concept of ‘agespecific’, Illich asserts that we have become accustomed to the idea that ‘children go to school’, but he immediately reminds us that the category of childhood didn’t exist until the 19th century and its development is tied within the development of industrialization and the institutionalization of education. In other words, he suggests that children were made for school and schools were made for the newly invented child. Contrasting the belief that children need to be schooled, he asserts that all ages need education and we must question the imposition made to infants of meekly obeying a school teacher. With respect to the relationship between teachers and pupils, Illich affirms that most of what we have actually learned can be tracked to experiences outside of the schooling system and learnt often in spite of the teachers; so why insist that learning must be done through teaching? About full-time attendance, Illich notes that teachers spend so much time with infants that they end up playing many more roles than educators; they become custodians, preachers, and therapists. The fault with playing so many roles, Illich argues, is that the authoritative figure of the teacher becomes ubiquitous: Under the authoritative eye of the teacher, several orders of value collapse into one. The distinctions between morality, legality, and personal worth are blurred and eventually eliminated. Each transgression is made to be felt as a multiple offense. The offender is expected to feel that he has broken a rule, that he has behaved immorally, and that he has let himself down. A pupil who adroitly obtains assistance on an exam is told that he is an outlaw, morally corrupt, and personally worthless. (Illich, 1971: 32)

Finally, about an obligatory curriculum, Illich shows that the content taught in school is so removed from real life that it creates a ‘primitive, magical and deadly serious’ (ibid.: 32) environment that prevents pupils from understanding how what is learned can be of use to real adult life.

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In chapter 3, ‘The Ritualization of Pro­ gress’, Illich outlines a remarkable characterization of the rituals inside and around schooling, that allows the perpetration of prejudice and discrimination even by the best teachers. To Illich, the school system: performs the threefold function common to powerful churches throughout history. It is simultaneously the repository of society’s myth, the institutionalization of the myth’s contradictions, and the locus of the ritual which reproduces and veils the disparities between myth and reality. (Illich, 1971: 37)

Phrases like the one quoted make the reader wonder what will remain standing after Illich has done away with so many of our accepted beliefs. Illich illustrates how we have created myths of the need of schools, of the possibility of measuring the unmeasurable, of believing we have a formula for learning difficulties, of progress, of class and equality, etc. According to Illich, we have then ritualized these myths to such extent that it is impossible to stand outside their scope to challenge them; we are enslaved to believe that outside the school system there is no salvation. We are trapped in the schooling system and its rituals hide the ways in which we are indoctrinated into their system. In chapter 4, ‘The Institutional Spectrum’, Illich attempts to soften the fears of the reader who may suspect that indeed nothing will remain standing. In this analysis, Illich confesses that some institutions are worse than others. An Illichian spectrum is something to be discerned; in this discernment, hope for the survival of institutions enters the scene. He tells us that on the right extreme of the spectrum is the ‘manipulative institutions’, whereas on the left extreme, we can place the ‘convivial institutions’ (1971: 54). The manipulative institutions sell their clients the idea that they are being helped or protected in return for their money, freedom, and even their lives. These institutions, such as the military, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and orphan asylums ‘provide their clients with the destructive self-image of the psychotic, the overaged, or the waif, and provide a rationale

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for the existence of entire professions’ (ibid.: 54). ‘Convivial institutions’ such as subway lines, public markets, parks, etc., are institutions used without us having to be convinced in advance of their advantages. We need rules, Illich claims, to protect these institutions, but not rules that manipulate our desire to consume them or participate in them. The former institutions are addictive: the latter ones are liberating. Now, the spectrum means that there is a continuum: institutions can develop practices that takes them from the left or from the right to the center, or to the opposite extreme from which one may have naively considered that they belonged. Take the case of the highway system that Illich mentions. It would seem that the highway system belonged to the left spectrum as a convivial institution, but Illich points out that since it is a system that privileges private cars, it becomes the paragon of what right-wing thinkers’ claim: the need for individuality, speed, and fashion. Schooling has similarly deceiving elements; it appears to be a system open to anyone, but actually it is open only to those with either credentials to teach or in need of instruction. This leads Illich to conclude that: [s]chools are not only to the right of highways and cars; they belong near the extreme of the institutional spectrum occupied by total asylums. Even the producers of body counts kill only bodies. By making men abdicate the responsibility for their own growth, school leads many to a kind of ­spiritual suicide. (Illich, 1971: 60)

Chapter 5, ‘Irrational Consistencies’, consists of a short seven-page essay that Illich delivered at a meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York on February 6, 1971. Its inclusion breaks the flow of the book and repeats with different analogies and allusions, ideas that are hinted in the previous four chapters. He points out to educational researchers that little will be gained for education by elaborating novel programs and innovative packaging of the same product: an institutionalized process of instruction. His call is for a radical movement to deschool society and start research on alternative structures to

create environments in which each person can define themselves ‘by learning and by contributing in the learning of others’ (ibid.: 71). In chapter 6, ‘Learning Webs’, Illich presents unambiguously what he sees as alternative to the schooling system. What is at stake is essentially a social upheaval: ‘a new style of educational relationship between man and his environment’ (ibid.: 72). The emphasis, Illich asserts, must shift from teaching to facilitating self-motivated learning. This would imply the overturn of deeply rooted ways of organizing society: no imposed curriculum, no certifications of completion of studies, no imposed definition of progress. Here one becomes aware of Illich’s ambitious scheme: deschooling amounts to a political revolution more incisive than any other known so far. Deschooling aims at destroying the grip that the market economy has on all of us: capitalists, communists, Indigenous cooperatives alike. By proposing a different social arrangement, Illich believes that we will be able to successfully oppose the contemporary belief that we all are consumers in a world of commodities. His proposal is to liberate humans from these clutches, freeing them to search for the autonomy and growth each one desires. The different social arrangements that Illich proposes are encompassed in proposing four webs for facilitating learning: the first to allocate educational objects throughout communities (i.e., objects that can be manipulated by anyone wanting to understand their inner mechanisms or logic). These objects can be in any public or private space, ensuring of course free access to anyone, and may include activities and games alluring people passing by to understand their inner workings. The second web of learning is to interconnect specifically skilled people with people desiring to acquire those specific skills. Illich seems to foresee the possibilities of webpages, Facebook, and blogs that would bring people with common interests of learning and passing skills together. The third web is a wide variety of clubs where learning happens peer to peer.

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The fourth web of learning is to bring back the figure of a master, a true leader of knowledge, that may create a master–disciple relationship that is mutually rewarding and an end in itself. These four webs of learning include administrative, technological, and legal arrangements of a totally different character than ones of the schooling system. After the Internet, YouTube, TED Talks, Coursera, MOOCs, Makerspaces, etc., one can say that Illich was a prophet of the democratization of education present today, but, as we will see, he was not naïve about the extent to which ‘the system’ is able to gobble up any challenge to its unsatisfied consumerist stomach. In the final chapter, ‘Rebirth of Epimethean Man’, Illich retells the myth of Prometheus, preferring the virtues of Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus, who married Pandora. This mythic storywork bears out the distinction between the Epimethean uncertainty of hope (trust in the goodness of nature experienced as a gift) and the Promethean certainty of expectation (reliance on results which are planned and controlled by man). He closes the chapter and the book searching for a name: ‘We need a name for those who value hope above expectations. We need a name for those who love people more than products … We need a name for those who love the earth on which we can meet the other’ (Illich, 1971: 115–16). Illich ends this search in homiletic fashion: ‘I suggest that these brothers and sisters be called Epimethean men’ (ibid.: 116). In final analysis, Deschooling Society is nothing short of a call for personal and social conversion and transformation from expectation to hope, from greed to generosity, from cynicism to love for the person, the earth, and each other.

AFTER DESCHOOLING After the publication of Deschooling Society in 1971, Illich published a short follow-up essay titled ‘After Deschooling, What?’ in 1973. This essay first appeared as a pamphlet

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distributed by the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative (WRPC), was republished as a book with an introduction by Ian Lister, and was later published by Harper & Row in 1973 under the same title, along with nine essays by educational scholars like Neil Postman, Maxine Greene, and Herbert Gintis. Many of these essays are fiercely and even personally critical of Illich and dismissive of his idea of deschooling. Greene’s ­contribution, ‘And It Still Is News’, is notably cavalier about Illich’s popular ideas. Others, by contrast, are enthusiastic but nonetheless cautious. It is unfortunate that most of the scholars and intellectuals in the follow-up to Deschooling Society so poorly understood Illich’s original proposal and appear to have not read his titular essay of the collection either. In ‘After Deschooling, What?’, Illich cautions using the term ‘deschooling’ as an empty slogan, added to the heap of slogans and other empty rhetoric well known within educational discourse. To avoid this, he suggests a new concept of learning that closely resembles many of the critiques made by Paulo Freire. Illich also critiques the notion of ‘free schooling’, charging it as another form of elitism and echoing in this case many of the critiques of constructivism made by Hannah Arendt in her 1954 essay, ‘The Crisis of Education’ (Arendt, 2006). After this follow-up publication, Illich wrote nothing in English about education until 1976, the same year in which he closed his own school in Cuernavaca. He did, however, publish Diálogo in Spanish in 1975 with Paulo Freire. In this book, Freire and Illich both critically analyze their respective concepts of ‘deschooling’ and ‘conscientization’. (For Frierian scholars, it is notable that Freire has no issue with using the Spanish term ‘conscientización’ in this text, a term that many Anglophone scholars gnostically insist cannot be translated from Portuguese.) In 1976, the WRPC published two essays, one written by Illich and another he co-authored with Etienne Verne, under the title Imprisoned in the Global Classroom.

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In  this slim volume, Illich does not merely warn against the overdetermination of deschooling; he aggressively attacks the embrace of deschooling by industry and describes this as ‘a most dangerous and wellconcealed trap’ (1976: 12) for deschooling. He continues by asserting that ‘[a]s an embodiment of schooling, a permanent education policy will never be anything but a trap for any plan for deschooling society’ (ibid.: 13). Illich again echoes Arendt’s 1954 essay, critiquing all efforts to extend education into adulthood as forms of ‘puerilization’ (ibid.: 14) for adults to make them more docile and malleable by the interests of the powerful. In this critique we find Illich making a classic argument familiar to critical pedagogues. Illich’s work continued into the 1980s and the themes of education reappeared often, but not under the terms of a pet term – deschooling, or otherwise. In 1988, he published with Barry Sanders ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, where they argue: Our efforts to understand the effect that parchment and seal, ink and pen had on worldview eight hundred years ago led us to the discovery of a paradox: literacy is threatened as much by modern education as by modern communication – and yet, adverse as the side effects of compulsory literacy have been for most of our contemporaries, literacy is still the only bulwark against the dis­ solution of language into ‘information systems’. (Sanders and Illich, 1988: Back cover)

This study and its argument does not so much develop Illich’s deschooling work of the 1970s as it goes deeper into historical roots of the problems that Illich outlined a decade earlier. This particular theme is repeated by Illich’s 1993 In the Vineyard of  the Text, a commentary on Hugh of St.  Victor’s 1128 Didascalicon, a text that Illich claims to be the first book written on the subject of reading. This interest in a recovery of lost arts of literacy is not only of historical interest to Illich, he refers to them as a way to better diagnose the present threats he sees in modern technology and society at large. While he does not overly

rely on his term deschooling, and even expresses his doubts of its value, Illich’s thought continued to develop and renew itself until he passed away at the age of 76 in December of 2002.

CONCLUSION Liberation is a thread that knits Illich with the philosophical (see Enrique Dussel) and theological movements of Latin America. Liberation Theology and the notion of critical pedagogy that was coined by Anglophone readers of Freire can be seen through a common idea of liberation that is recognizable both in the historical period and in the actual ideas of Illich’s life and thought. This refers to the liberation of a person’s spirit not only from the chains of a system, an institution, or an ideology, but also the liberation that allows a mind to positively engage with a social conception of justice broadly conceived. For instance, taking on board the known distinction of Isaiah Berlin of negative freedom (liberation from) and positive freedom (liberation for), Illich’s work reminds us that liberating a person from schooling is only the first step on the way to engaging people with the real question of what it would mean to be a truly free person in today’s society. There is no Illichian freedom without social justice in this formulation, and thus the discussion of ideas geared toward unmasking social injustices, in any setting, not only in pedagogy, must inevitably lead us to questioning how are we to best organize society to diminish this injustice. These ideas may not be rooted in the exact same theological tradition that was born in Medellin and Puebla, but its deeper roots reflect the common idea of social justice that grew out of Catholic social teaching from the 19th century forward. While this has not been the most well-known tradition within social justice efforts in critical pedagogy and the secular field of educational research, its

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relative absence is historic and anachronistic for an approach that often prides itself on contextualized and historicized knowledge. For Illich, this work was never to be done on the strength of strong words or durable institutions alone. First and foremost, his life and thought was conceived in the flux of social relations in and between Europe and the Americas. These ideas were lived through his vocation and shown through the marks of his deep and dynamic conversion into a deeper and deeper search for the moral and spiritual significance that so many then and now feel to be desperately missing. This anchored his social criticism and distinguished his approach from all the others of his time. We have been unable to mention the many languages Illich spoke or the full variety of his works that studied labor and city planning, critiqued urbanism and technology, analyzed the economy of gender, and satirized modern professions, healthcare, and more. Suffice it to say that among all the eligible ouvres of radical thought during this period, there may be none as unique and direct in its intellectual, political, and spiritual powers.

REFERENCES Arendt, H. (2006). The crisis in education. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Between past and future (pp.170–193). London: Penguin. (Originally published in 1954) Bruno-Jofré, R., & Zaldívar, J. I. (2012). Ivan Illich’s late critique of deschooling society: ‘I  was largely barking up the wrong tree’. ­Educational Theory, 62(5), 574–592. Cayley, D. (1992). Ivan Illich in conversation. Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press Ltd. Freire, P., & Illich, I. (1975). Diálogo: análisis critico de la ‘desescolarizacion’ y ‘concientizacion’ en la conyuntura actual del sistema

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educativo. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Búsgueda. Gutiérrez, G. (2002). A theology of liberation: History, politics, and salvation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. (Originally published in 1973) Hartch, T. (2015). The prophet of Cuernavaca: Ivan Illich and the crisis of the west. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Hugh of St. Victor (1961). The Didascalicon of  Hugh of St. Victor: A medieval guide to the  arts (J. Taylor, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. (Original work ­ published in 1128) Illich, I. (1968, April 20). To hell with good intentions. An address presented at the Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Retrieved November 21, 2019 from http://www.uvm.edu/~jashman/ CDAE195_ESCI375/To%20Hell%20with%20 Good%20Intentions.pdf Illich, I. (1969). Celebration of awareness. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company. Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Illich, I. (1973). After deschooling, what? In A. Gartner, C. Greer, & F. Riessman (Eds.), After deschooling, what? (pp. 1–28). New York, NY: Harper & Row. Illich, I. (1973). Tools for conviviality. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Illich, I. (1993). In the vineyard of the text: A  commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon. ­Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Illich, I., & Verne, E. (1976). Imprisoned in the global classroom. London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative. Reimer, E. (1971). School is dead: An essay on alternatives in education. Harmondsworth, London: Penguin. Sander, B., & Illich, I. (1988). ABC: Alphabetization of the popular mind. New York, NY: Marion Boyars Publishers. Tolstoy, L. (1909). The death of Ivan Ilych. New York, NY: H. Wolff. (Original work published in 1886) Retrieved October 25, 2019 from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1. c080984238&view=1up&seq=10

33 From South African Black Theology and Freire to ‘Teaching for Resistance’: The Work of Basil Moore Robert Hattam

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AS TRAVELING THEORY I would like to suggest another way to go forward towards a new economy of power relations, a way which is more empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and which implies more relations between theory and practice. It consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point. (Foucault, 1982a: 210–11)

I understand critical pedagogy as a transnational educational social movement that brings together concerns for pedagogy with a commitment to more socially just societies. All of us who advocate for the project of critical pedagogy, encounter a version of critical pedagogy ‘thanks to the nature, the assumptions and the professions of some people, but also thanks to a number of accidental circumstances such as the specific nature of the local milieu, friends and so on’ (Havel, 1986: 85). In my case, this occurred through an introduction to the writings of Paulo Freire, and

meeting Basil Moore. Of course, we read and interpret texts from the massive critical pedagogy archive, but then our interpretations of those texts, and what we do with them in our practice, are most often reliant on the communities in which we work, and especially on our teachers; those teachers who live and teach amongst us, in our time and place. As such, critical pedagogy can be considered, borrowing from Said, as a ‘traveling theory’: Like people and schools of criticism, ideas and theories travel – from person to person, from situation to situation, from one period to another. Cultural and intellectual life are usually nourished and often sustained by this circulation of ideas, and whether it takes the form of acknowledged or unconscious influence, creative borrowing, or wholesale appropriation, the movement of ideas and theories from one place to another is both a fact of life and a usefully enabling condition of intellectual activity. (Said, 1983: 226)

Critical pedagogy travels ‘from person to person, from situation to situation, from one period to another’, and ‘from one culture to

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another’ (ibid.: 226). This movement ‘necessarily involves processes of representation and institutionalization’ (ibid.: 226) that are ‘different from those at the point of origin’ (ibid.: 226). Critical pedagogy encounters conditions of acceptance and/or resistance, making possible its introduction or toleration. The fully or partly accommodated theory [of critical pedagogy] is always to ‘some extent transformed by its new uses, its new position in a new time and place’ (ibid.: 227). Said (1983) also warns us of the too easy reflex of proclaiming that ‘all borrowings and interpretations are misreadings and misinterpretations’ (ibid.: 236). Such a view means that no theory could ever be passed on from one generation to another and therefore all traditions would be untranslatable. Applying this idea of ‘traveling theory’ to critical pedagogy thus rejects the view that transmission of practice lineages involves a ‘slavish copying’ and also rejects a view of translation as a series of misreadings and misinterpretations. Instead, and from the outset, I want to work from the assumption that critical pedagogy can only be understood as a traveling theory involved in a creative process that attends to changing historical circumstances, and often in a different place. In this chapter I pay homage to one of my teachers of critical pedagogy, Basil Moore. The chapter will describe some of Basil’s biography and briefly introduce what I call his critical sensibility, which I experienced as ways of ‘reading the world and the word’ (Freire, 1985a). By way of a very brief introduction though, my first encounter with Basil was in a Master’s of Education programme in the late 1980s. I had heard about him and had fortuitously been taught by his friend and colleague Colin Collins, as my Sociology lecturer during my preparation for teaching. Colin had introduced me to Freire’s (1972a) book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I learned that both Basil and Colin were South African anti-apartheid activists, both ex-priests and living in exile, and in Basil’s case, because he had been banned by the South African

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government at the time. I entered Basil’s programme being convinced that I was a progressive teacher. I can remember especially the first of Basil’s lectures. I was being forced into the back of my seat with the power of Basil’s oratory. It wasn’t that he actually shouted but the power of his words and his argument was a very visceral experience. His analysis of the ways that social structures produce our everyday reality was always very compelling. I can also remember that I was deeply depressed for about four months in the first year of that programme. Basil had seriously unsettled my sense of satisfaction with my own teaching. My own credentials as a progressive teacher were being seriously questioned and hence my own identity as a teacher was on the line. In thinking back about those feelings of deep dissatisfaction, many years after, I have concluded that such feelings provided me with a space to work out what I was going to do with the realisation that there is no outside of the way power works. I was one of those teachers who desperately wanted to believe that I was in some power free zone, that everything I did was inherently good because I believed my intentions were good. But then of course, it is not that simple, is it? Anyway, as a consequence of working with Basil that year, it was clear to me that we are all implicated in the way our society works; we are all responsible in some way for poverty, or the oppression of Indigenous people, and so on; and we can’t let ourselves off the hook because we’re good people. As a teacher I was implicated in the reproductive functioning of schooling. Coming from a working-class background I always knew that, but then, how you actually interrupt that process in meaningful ways is easier said than done. I guess Basil threw out a challenge to all of his students: what are you going to do about it? The chapter has four sections. After this introduction, the second section is a portrait, or lightly edited extract, from an interview I conducted with Basil about a decade ago. The section provides an account of Basil’s

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notion of a liberation Black theology for a post-apartheid South Africa. On drafting portraits as a textual strategy in academic writing, I draw on Marcus’ (1998) argument for innovation in the poetic dimension of research practice. ‘Poetics’ here refers to a site for innovation and critique about ethnographic writing. Marcus argues for ‘messy texts’ (1998: 198) or polyvocal or polyphonic texts, or put simply, ‘saying more by letting “others” say it’ (ibid.: 36); one of the experiments in messy polyvocal texts is the use of portraits (Santaro et  al., 2001; Smyth et al., 2004; Smyth and McInerney, 2013). The third section outlines very briefly an account of Basil’s development of his version of ‘teaching for resistance’ in Adelaide, South Australia, in the 1980–90s. This section too has been drafted out of an interview transcript. I conclude the chapter by proposing that Basil might be understood to be a liminal servant, to borrow from McLaren (1988), whose key work has been the transmission of a critical sensibility that I argue allows us to think about what is central for critical pedagogy as traveling theory that works across time and place.

LIBERATION THEOLOGY FOR A POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA (FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH BASIL) Basil: I suppose my politico-intellectual journey starts about 1961 when I was elected the National President of the National Union of Students (NUSAS) in South Africa that advocated universal franchise. The NUSAS was very largely a White English speaking organisation, because the Afrikaaner Whites were in a separate pro-nationalist student movement, and Black students were involved in the youth movements of the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan African Congress. At the time, I was training for the Ministry and being funded by the Methodist Church. In 1967, I was studying

for a doctorate and at the same time I was appointed Chaplain to Rhodes University, Grahamstown. Along with Colin Collins and others, we formed the University Christian Movement (UCM), a non-racial organisation that was also radically ecumenical and included Protestant and Catholic members. In 1967, we decided to hold the very first conference of the UCM in Grahamstown, and because we wanted it to be non-racial, we had to find a place where everybody could live together. At the same time, as the NUSAS were meeting, the University wasn’t allowed to accommodate the Black students, so they had to go to the township. As a consequence, Steve Biko led a walkout of the Black ­students from the NUSAS and they moved across to the UCM gathering. So suddenly, all the Black students who’d come to the NUSAS joined up with us and became part of the UCM, and that brought Steve Biko in. Then I was appointed President of the UCM, which was intended to be ecumenical, and I suppose a fairly liberal progressive humanitarian organisation. But the government then banned the ANC and the Pan African Congress. So the Black students all move across to the UCM, because it’s the only place they can actually meet. And so suddenly I find myself President of what I expected to be a sort of White liberal Christian organisation and find I’m actually National Secretary of a Black majority organisation who have not got a liberal progressive agenda at all. Their agenda is liberation politics. And for a couple of years, the UCM tried to juggle the sort of liberal, humanitarian, existential stuff, mostly focused on universities. But increasingly the UCM became a more activist oriented organisation and developed a political project around three themes: literacy, public health and Black theology. By way of an example, the literacy programme evolved in response to the huge levels of illiteracy in the African population. And if you were going to look for an adult literacy theorist who was going to give a liberation orientation there was really

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nowhere to go other than Paulo Freire. In which case, literacy education is not just a skills approach; it had to be integral to our liberation struggle. At around the same time some of us attended a conference of the UCM formed in the United States. Our colleagues in the United States were also involved in advancing a liberal humanist theology, but their project was also being shifted by the Black Power movement people and we got to meet James Cone (1970, 1974, 1997), who introduced us to the notion of Black theology, which provoked us to develop our own South African version. We started writing papers on Black theology, which we understood in terms of a hermeneutics of suspicion and retrieval. A key defining proposition for such a hermeneutics is the idea that authoritative interpretations of biblical scriptures are read through the eyes of the ruling elite; whilst a hermeneutics of suspicion reads the scriptures through the experiences of the oppressed. Sabelo Ntwasa and I start writing papers and running workshops around South Africa on Black theology and inviting others to contribute to a collection of essays titled Essays in Black Theology in 1971 in South Africa which is immediately banned, of course. It was banned in its own right. This was republished as Black Theology: South African Voice as a second edition, in London in 1973.1 *** Hattam: What follows is a brief explanation on Black theology. Basil explains Black theology as ‘a situational theology’ and against the ‘classical theological method of the West’ (Moore, 1973: 5). Re-reading this work just recently, I was struck by the reading practices of his hermeneutics of suspicion and noted this set of practices could easily be adopted for reading texts other than biblical texts and provides some contours for understanding critical literacy that is more broadly understood. To briefly rehearse Basil’s account here: traditional theology, as Biblical Studies, focused entirely on

exegesis of texts, ‘history and doctrine of the early ecumenical councils and creeds, the Trinitarian and Christological debates of the third and fifth Centuries and on through Augustine, the reformation, the CounterReformation, the Council of Trent, St. Thomas Aquinas, Papal encyclicals and modern theologies’ (ibid.: 5). For Basil, this meant being ‘irrelevant’, because such a theology has scarcely considered the real-life problems of the people whom he was supposed be serving as a ‘qualified priest’ (ibid.: 5). ‘Black theology seeks to cut across this classically arid detachment. It begins with the people – specific people, in a specific situation and with specific problems to face’ (ibid.: 6). In apartheid South Africa, ‘it starts with Black people facing the strangling problems of oppression, fear, hunger, insult and dehumanisation. It tries to understand as clearly as possible who these people are, what their life experiences are, and the nature and cause of their suffering’ (ibid.: 6). *** Basil resumes: But the shift away from a liberal Christian humanist project meant that church support for the UCM started to wane. Also, Steve Biko formed a Black caucus, which eventually split with the UCM to form a Black student organisation, the South African Student Organisation (SASO). The UCM then shifted the literacy programme, the public health programme and Black theology within SASO, and essentially become defunct. Then I went on to become Director of the African Independent Churches Association (AICA), an association of syncretistic Zionist-type Christian organisations. Most of their leaders were illiterate so it was felt that what they wanted was a leadership training programme which included a major thrust on literacy, and because of my involvement in adult literacy within the UCM, they thought I’d be great as the Director. AICA couldn’t afford a seminary, so we had to develop all these materials, and in seven languages, so there were seven of us who

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developed this programme. Then the Methodist Church decided to defrock me and I think that action removed the slight protection I had from being a member of a church. Around this time, Colin Collins who is a Catholic priest friend who helped form the UCM, travels overseas to meet and learn from Paulo Freire in order to help us develop our literacy programme. And whilst Colin is overseas, the leaders of the UCM (including Justice Moloto, Sabelo Ntwasa, myself and also Barney Pityana and Steve Biko, who were ex-UCM members and active in SASO)2 are placed under house arrest and banned under the Suppression of Communism Act (Houston, 1997; Goddard, 2016). I was working for the AICA, and the police walked into my office and just read out this screed of restrictions that included things like not being allowed to attend a gathering (and three people constituted a gathering), so I could never be in the company of more than one person at a time, other than my own immediate family. So if ever I was out with my wife, I could never talk to anybody else. It also meant everything that I had written was banned. So all of the AICA materials were banned, which brought the whole AICA programme to its knees, especially the whole literacy programme and all the materials. I’ve never found out what happened to those materials. This means that the AICA can’t afford to keep paying me because I can’t be involved in any educational activity. These restrictions make it very difficult to find employment, and to earn any kind of money. I’m banned from any educational activity. So I couldn’t even take my kids to school, and they’re tiny at this stage; you have to walk them on to the property, so the pre-school where my eldest child attends, I can’t take him because of this restriction. Eventually I got a job selling second-hand cars and unfortunately people wouldn’t come one at a time, so I had to give that one away. I was under house arrest which meant that I was only allowed out of the house during daylight hours, but during night hours I

had to be in my house. I lived like this for about five years, until we eventually decided that we had to leave the country. I successfully applied for Irish citizenship because my grandparents had come from Ireland and eventually they let us leave and we lived in London for two years. Amnesty International paid for the flights. The Student Christian Movement in England appointed me as the Organising Secretary, and they gave us a house and an income, and we stuck it out for two years, but we couldn’t stand the cold and eventually found the politics of the Student Christian Movement just impossible. This led to finding work as a Religious Education lecturer at the Adelaide College of Advanced Education (ACAE) in Adelaide.

FROM BLACK THEOLOGY TO TEACHING FOR RESISTANCE (FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH BASIL) Basil: We found England unendurable. I mean it had been bad enough in London, you know, going to work in the dark in winter and coming home in the dark and never seeing daylight except for your luncheon break. After living in South Africa, we just couldn’t handle it. And so we looked around. Where the hell are we going to go from here? Eventually we discovered Australia, and not only did we discover Australia, but we also discovered that Australia had assisted passage at that time. So we applied for and got assisted passage to come out to Australia. We paid ten pounds for the six of us to come over and when we arrived I took up a job at the ACAE. My job involved teaching Religion Studies, to train teachers for this new subject to be taught at both primary and secondary school levels. But religion studies never really took off in the state-school system at all and so our student numbers gradually dwindled and so we had to diversify. I suppose I was the most expendable one and started becoming

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involved with the emerging field of curriculum studies. To begin with I was tutoring in large curriculum studies courses. Eventually some of us developed a Curriculum Leadership Master’s degree that was very much informed by a critical curriculum studies archive that had been developing globally for a few decades. At this time, criticality is very much informed by either neo-Marxism and the Frankfurt School and especially Jürgen Habermas and this takes me to social justice discourses. Once I got to Adelaide, I had a very strong need not to be a South African exile, and hence to be doing something that seemed to me to be worthwhile in Australia. At first that involved just pouring myself into Religious Education (RE) at the College, but then RE, as a core part of the curriculum, faded from South Australian schools. It was never going to be implemented, there were no longer any students interested in studying RE. So I shifted from RE to Education Studies and then into Curriculum Studies. As I get into Curriculum Studies, I translate my South African suspicion of liberal individualism and liberal humanism, and I try to understand the curriculum from a more liberationist perspective which is what then attracts me to critical theory (and in the same way as Freire made us think about adult literacy, not as a set of skills, but as an emancipatory process). So I tried to think of the curriculum in the same terms and as I became more involved with research again, the need to understand research, I gravitated towards action research. I attempted some critique of local social justice policies which for me sort of were conservative and liberal humanist. Liberal humanism has some kind of fascination with the weak and the suffering and devises social justice policies that are shaped around a victim construction (Moore, 1993b). But we needed to have social justice policies which were emancipatory, liberatory (Starr, 1991). Then that gets carried over I suppose eventually into thinking about pedagogy, or for me,

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teaching for resistance. Again, once you get past seeing social justice in terms of caring for the weak, but as enabling resistance – it was that kind of motif that I tried to take over into pedagogy. Theoretically I think I was reasonably successful with that. But practically I don’t think I got very far. I mean we did write up our research (Education for Social Justice Research Group, 1994), we did do research around that topic, but you know the research and the theoretical stuff was interesting but I think the actual classroom stuff has a hell of a long way to go, or had a hell of a long way to go then and probably still has. For me, resistance, you see, could be about emancipation, could be about liberation in a way that I thought that philanthropy never could. I was involved with the local teachers union and helped develop an anti-racist policy and I was doing the odd lecture on racism and teaching about racism, but I didn’t offer any courses in it. The same is true for social justice – I didn’t offer any courses on that theme, but it becomes central in my own thinking about the curriculum. I was especially impressed with the South American liberation theology for their work on social justice including especially Paulo Freire (1972a, 1972b, 1974), Wren (1977) and Gustavo Gutiérrez (1973). I began to look much more closely at social justice policy and I wrote a set of papers on the local education and social justice policy and it began to strike me that what you had here was a sort of victim construction (Moore, 1993b). The way social justice was being articulated really was how the powerful were brutalising innocent victims. And it struck me then that if you construct the whole process of oppression that way, any rational response that one makes, once you’ve constructed a victim, is to offer help. So there is a help-and-rescue mentality, and hence social justice becomes framed up as charity work. And these themes have already been developed in South African Black theology. South African anti-apartheid

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struggle certainly did not construct Black Africans as the poor suffering innocents. For Biko (1971) and the South African Black consciousness movement, a part of the struggle was getting free of an internalised apartheid ideology. Perhaps this notion was put most powerfully by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) in Decolonising the Mind. And these themes are also developed by Freire (Collins, 1972, 1974; Magaziner, 2010: 128) and Fanon (1967), whose work informed the South African anti-apartheid liberation movements. It is important to remember here that the South African apartheid government imposed a strict form of censorship and we did not have access to critical ideas and hence were very isolated intellectually. Having said that we knew about the Black consciousness movement in the United States. So my emerging theories of social justice, as a key word for curriculum studies, were being informed by resistance struggle in South Africa and especially the Black consciousness movement. At this time also, the dominance of the neo-Marxist critique was crumbling and ideology critique that foregrounded class struggle was now being contested by feminism and anti-racism and post-colonial variations. We were all trying to work out how to think class, gender, race and Empire as a complex matrix of oppressions, variously manifesting in different places and times. From my side, I started to develop a teaching for resistance approach. In effect, I was attempting to translate what I had learned about South African Black struggle into some insights for thinking about critical pedagogy in South Australia. The key idea for the teaching for resistance approach, informed by our rethinking of social justice, rejected the focusing on the bad things that are happening to people, and instead shifted the focus to examining the resistances that people are enacting. Where resistance is going on you understand that oppression is going on. You do not look for the oppression-suffering linkage, but instead for a resistance-oppression linkage.

BASIL MOORE: THE LIMINAL SERVANT When I think about Basil as my teacher I am drawn to McLaren’s (1988) imagining of the teacher as liminal servant. He borrows the term ‘liminal servant’ from Holmes’ (1978) description of the priest. The concept of liminality can be traced to the anthropological literature, and especially to van Gennep (1960) and Turner (1974). Liminality refers to a social state in which the participants are ‘betwixt and between’, literally and temporarily removed from the social structure that is ‘maintained and sanctioned by power and authority’ (McLaren, 1988: 165–6). This idea of liminality is used anthropologically to explain the rites of passage in some cultures, in which the ritual subjects pass through a period of ‘ambiguity, a sort of social limbo’ (Turner, 1974: 57). Liminality infers being liberated from the normative constraints incumbent upon occupying a social station, being a member of ‘some corporate group such as a family, lineage, clan, tribe, or nation, or of affiliation with some pervasive social category such as class, caste, sex- or age- division’ (ibid.: 75). In the liminal, ‘the past is momentarily negated, suspended, or abrogated, and the future has not yet begun. There is an instant of pure potentiality when everything trembles in the balance’ (ibid.: 75). For Turner, this liminal state occurs, ‘where people can be subverted from their duties and rights into an atmosphere of communitas’ (ibid.: 76). Communitas is a modality of human relatedness, only possible outside of the normative structure, in which ‘people see, understand, and act towards one another as essentially “an unmediated relationship between historical, idiosyncratic, concrete individuals”’ (ibid.: 76–7). For Turner, liminality and the resultant communitas is a form of human experience that is outside of the subject of the social sciences, understood simply in terms of ‘people playing roles and maintaining or achieving status’ (ibid.: 77). The full human capacity is not defined in terms of

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egoistic strivings. Liminality and communitas are suggestive of an alternative conception of what it means to be human, one in which human relationships are freely chosen and are non-transactional, ‘in the sense that people do not necessarily initiate action towards one another in the expectation of a reaction that satisfies their interests’ (ibid.: 77). McLaren’s imagining of the teacher as liminal servant invokes what was central to Basil’s teaching – a working of a dialectic between pedagogy and politics: pedagogy is political and politics is pedagogical. McLaren’s liminal servant ‘releases symbols and narratives’ of the ‘marginalised, vanquished and disaffected’ (1988: 171) or those ‘subjugated knowledges’ (Foucault, 1980: 81) that speak back to the ‘false harmony that [appears to] exist between the subject and the social order’ (McLaren, 1988: 171). These ‘dangerous memories’ are ‘more than a form of cultural dissonance’ but are also a ‘call for a new narrative through which a qualitatively better world can be imagined and struggled for’ (ibid.: 171). Drawing on Said again, Basil’s task was ‘to unearth the forgotten, to make connections that were denied [and] to cite alternative courses of action’ (1994: 17). The liminal servant contests the illusion of autonomy and self-determination and reveals instead how subjectivity gets constructed and legitimated through discourses that are distorted by inequality and asymmetrical relations of power and privilege. The liminal servant aims to cultivate an ‘alter-ideology’ or a ‘form of pedagogical surrealism’ that ‘attacks the familiar’ and perturbs those commonplace perspectives that parade as innocent and outside of historical and social struggles. The liminal servant is the ‘tramp of the obvious’ or the ‘tramp of the demystifying conscientization’ (Freire, 1985b: 171). The liminal servant reveals the world ‘not as something that only exists, but as something that is to be’ (ibid.: 169). As a ‘cultural worker’ (Giroux and Trend, 1992; Freire, 1998), the liminal servant ponders questions such as: what is it that this society has made

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of me that I no longer want to be? In working a dialectic between critique and transformation, Basil was wary of moribund intellectualism and leaned towards lived forms of consciousness instead. In this sense, knowledge is not merely handed over but embodied in a practice to develop a collective understanding of struggling to change oppressive realities. From Basil, I learned to be ashamed of being an accomplice of the gross and subtle forms of dehumanisation that prevail under the name of freedom, liberty and enlightenment. It is far too easy to live inside of ‘the illusion of not knowing’ (Levi 1979: 386) and hence not an accomplice. Rather than ‘wanting not to know’ (ibid.: 386), of turning away from the suffering of others, the liminal servant understands that no-one is outside of responsibility for the poverty, the violence and the alienation suffered by others. This insight demands the difficult task of seeing one’s own place in the order of things and continually nurturing a critical sensibility.

TRANSMISSION OF A CRITICAL SENSIBILITY By way of a personal reflection, and returning again to the notion that critical pedagogy is a ‘traveling theory’, what is it that Basil has passed on to me these past few decades? What has ‘traveled’? I could outline in some detail a hermeneutic of suspicion that I have learned, as a critical practice of reading the world and the word. The key issue here of course is what it means to be critical. In other places (Hattam, 2004) I have attempted to explain criticality in terms of a sceptical sensibility towards reading the world and the word. Horkheimer (1972) spoke of this scepticism as a ‘critical attitude’, one that is ‘wholly distrustful of the rules of conduct with which society as presently constituted provides each of its members’ (ibid.: 207). In a similar vein, Hunter (1997) argues that criticality draws ‘on a variety of post-Kantian

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improvisations on the critical thematic’ (ibid.: 27). The Kantian idea of being critical ‘requires a mistrust or suspension of experiential judgements as the means to look for their conditions in us’ (ibid.: 28). This postKantian notion of being critical is a response to our own ‘immaturity’ which in this case refers to ‘a certain state of our will that makes us accept someone else’s authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for’ (Foucault, 1984a: 34). Kant developed this view of the critical as his own diagnosis of his times. Living during the beginning of what we know as modernity, Kant proposed that a new form of consciousness was emerging. And a new form of philosophy was required to make sense of it. The Enlightenment inaugurated a form of reflection or self-awareness (and hence philosophy) of the present, ‘of problematizing its own discursive present-ness’ (Foucault, 1986: 89). The Enlightenment inaugurated modernity’s revolt ‘against the normalizing functions of tradition; modernity lives on the experience of rebelling against all that is normative’ (Habermas, 1988: 5). In this way, Kant becomes the first to develop a philosophical discourse of modernity as a critique of impure reason. Such a critique ponders these questions: What is the reason we use? What are its historical effects? What are its limits and what are its dangers? How can we exist as rational beings, fortunately committed to practicing a rationality that is unfortunately crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers? (Foucault, 1984b: 249)

The Enlightenment does not offer us any doctrine to believe in, but ‘rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude … that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era’ (Foucault, 1984a: 42). Being critical in the post-Kantian sense is often understood in terms of an attitude, an ethos or a sensibility, defined here as: a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a

relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. (Foucault, 1984a: 39)

In contradistinction to traditional theory, which misrepresents its own reasoning as dispassionate, objective, disembodied, valuefree and having little or nothing to do with ethical questions, a critical sensibility demands that we interrogate rationality – our own and others – for knowledge interests and to adjust these interests in favour of emancipatory possibilities. A critical sensibility rejects playing ‘the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere’ (Haraway, 1991: 189). A critical ‘sensibility’ assumes that knowing is always ‘socially situated’ (Harding, 1993: 53) and is always ‘passionate’ (Du Bois, 1993), perspectival, embodied, has a subjective dimension and understands that knowing and reasoning are positively dangerous unless intimately connected with ethics. Because a critical sensibility is motivated by an emancipatory wish, it is not possible just to decide to be critical. Rather, such a sensibility has to be nurtured and developed. In this sense then, being critical requires personal transformation. Such a sensibility is never complete, but constantly in process, and constantly being transformed, involving unlearning/learning a way of being that ‘emerges in the struggle against violence and exploitation where this struggle is waged for essentially new ways and forms of life’ (Marcuse, 1969: 25). Thought about in this way, being critical infers a form of subjectivity, as not only a way of reading the word and the world but also a way of acting on the world: [I]t has to be considered as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and experiment with the possibility of going beyond them. (Foucault, 1984a: 50)

This last quote encapsulates a view of being critical that makes the connection between an ‘analysis of limits’ to the ‘possibility of going beyond them’. Critique in this case is more

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than just a diagnosis of the present as a description and explanation of our alienation or lack. Critique also contains an impulse to go beyond the present, to experiment with the possibility of going beyond, or to at least imagine how things might be different. Being critical in this sense has two interrelated moments of critique and possibility. The moment of critique ‘consists in seeing what kinds of selfevidences, liberties, acquired and non-reflective modes of thought, the practices we accept rest on’ (Foucault, 1982b: 33). Critique stops ‘treating thought lightly’ (ibid.: 33) and opens up our reasoning for interrogation: Criticism consists in driving this thought out of hiding and trying to change it: showing that things are not as obvious as we might believe, doing it in such a way that what we accept as going without saying no longer goes without saying. To criticize is to render the too-easy gestures difficult. (Foucault, 1982b: 34)

Upon the basis of such criticism ‘one begins to be unable, any longer, to think things as one usually thinks them, transformation becomes simultaneously very urgent, very difficult, and altogether possible’ (ibid.: 34). Hence the moment of critique leads to the moment of possibility that involves the practice of hope, of ‘thinking beyond existing configurations of power in order to imagine the unthinkable’ (Giroux, 1996/1997: 79). The practice of hope, born out of a sense of distress, rebels against the domination of the past over the future. Against inevitability, factuality and any faith in the unchangeableness of the social structure, a critical sensibility promotes a consciousness that rejects any adaptation to reality, and hence lives with a certain hostility from those who are convinced of the inevitability of the present. But how can we apply a critical sensibility to imagine how critical pedagogy could be enacted? Given Basil’s biography, it is not surprising that when he took on an academic position in Adelaide he applied his own critical sensibility to contesting racism and out of that project he devised his teaching for resistance approach.

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Firstly, Basil understood racism as a process of racialising social formations, culture and ideology, consciousness and inter-­ personal behaviours ‘in such a way as to impoverish, de-power, disenfranchise, divide, silence and exclude’ (Moore, 1993c: 5). ‘It is primarily about the use of the concept of “race” to organise society in such a way as to structure in the oppression of Black people systematically’ (ibid.: 5).3 His view of racism rejects the prejudice thesis of racism which unfortunately dominates the logic of too many anti-racist interventions, and which promote a values clarification approach to anti-racism. Basically, through clarifying our values we can rid ourselves of racist prejudice and the problem is solved. The prejudice thesis, which is deeply entrenched in popular culture and educational policy asserts that racism is ‘caused by prejudice, which is related to deviant personalities and fed by ignorance and irrational fears and reinforced by negative stereotypes’ (Moore, 1993a: 53). But psychologising racism in this way ‘consigns racism to the aberrant margins of society’ (ibid.: 54) and hence undermines those theories of institutionalised racism outlined in much of Basil’s writing. For Basil, the educational implications of his analysis involved abandoning a prejudice thesis as a theory for educational policy and practice. Secondly, he argued that we need to cease using ‘race’ as an explanatory category and confront ‘vulgar racism’ in schools with a curriculum that provides accounts of the ‘social, political, economic and cultural functioning of racism’ (ibid.: 62). Thirdly, educators need to acknowledge that racism will not be overcome ‘simply by young students making alternative, non-­racist meaning of events in their lives’ (ibid.: 62) but requires schools being much more connected into antiracist movements in the community. And as a corollary to that, finally, anti-racist education needs to focus on learning about anti-racism rather than racist logics. From such a definition, Basil argued for anti-racist pedagogy that rejects a victim approach. By psychologising racism, the

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social processes of racism are elided and hence those most affected are represented as ‘disadvantaged victims’. With no social theory of racism, and with theories that essentially assert the view that ‘society is normal, healthy, rational and informed by human beings that are not racist’, there is a tendency to characterise those disenfranchised as disadvantaged victims who may even be contributing to their own under-achievement. Of course, the politics of victim construction gets played out in disenfranchised communities who can internalise the logic and ‘live out a victim mentality’. Basil also suggests that anti-racist pedagogy needs to confront the processes of racialised identity formation. Drawing on Biko and others, resisting racism involves engaging in identity work that retrieves knowledge of history, culture and traditions of those groups oppressed by raciologies. And most importantly for Basil, anti-racist pedagogy is about learning from resistance to racism. In an attempt to operationalise this set of ideas into a pedagogical sequence that teachers could use, Basil and some colleagues developed what they call an approach to teaching for resistance. Three key processes are involved in this approach which are described as:

Dr Basil Moore, who received an Honorary Doctorate in today’s Graduation ceremony (8 April), also received an apology from the University for refusing him a lecturing post during the apartheid regime.

• consciousness raising – becoming aware of the nature, causes and effects of injustices and of the possibility for socially just alternatives; • establishing contact with actual resistance movements through literature, the media, the arts and organisations working for social and political change; • taking social action to bring about changes, e.g. lending support to social reform groups and acting as an advocate for the oppressed.

At the UCM conference the following year Steven Bantu Biko called for a black caucus, which recommended the establishment of a new student body for black students. In response, Biko and Barney Pityana formed SASO, the South African Student’s Organisation.

AFTERWORD

When Council refused to reveal its reasons for the decision, and refused to let SRC representatives address their meeting, a sit-in in the Council Chambers resulted, leading to the eight-week suspension of thirteen students and the dismissal of temporary politics lecturer, David Tucker. This became known as the ‘Basil Moore affair’.

By way of an ending, I have included the text that was published by Rhodes University on conferral of an honorary doctorate for Basil Moore on 8 April, 2011:4

Dr Moore initially enrolled at Rhodes in the early 1950s, returning later that decade to begin formal training for the ministry. It was then that he became involved in student politics, culminating in his election as President of the Student Representative Council (SRC) and, later, of the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). He took on a role as a part-time lecturer at Rhodes in 1965. In 1966 he and Fr John Davies, Methodist and Anglican chaplains respectively, were approached by Catholic chaplain Fr Colin Collins, who was propounding the idea of a radically ecumenical and non-racial student Christian body. With the parent churches raising no opposition, the United Christian Movement (UCM) came into being. Although committed to non-violence, the UCM was still regarded with suspicion by the Rhodes Council, who feared it would act as a conduit for Black Power movements and lead to student radicalism. The year 1967 saw the banning of black [sic] political parties, and their student wings. In addition, the government tried to discourage black students from further participation in NUSAS, leaving them with no national forum in which to meet and discuss issues except the fledgling UCM.

The year 1968 also saw the seizure of Dr Moore’s passport by the apartheid government; prevented from travelling overseas for research purposes, he applied for a theology lecturing post at Rhodes and was refused by Council not once but twice in 1969, despite gaining approval from Senate.

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After being refused employment by Rhodes, Dr Moore completed the research for his PhD, and spent two years stationed in Carltonville, a strongly nationalist mining town of which he says, wryly, ‘I survived two years there. (It) was not exactly the kind of place for someone with my history and ideas to try to minister.’ Thereafter he became full-time theology director of the UCM, until its closure in 1971. He was appointed Director of the leadership training program of the African Independent Churches Association, but this came to an abrupt halt in December 1971 when he was banned and placed under partial house arrest. In August 1972 he was given permission to leave the country but at the same time declared a ‘prohibited immigrant’, a ruling which took him and his family into exile. His passion for education has not diminished, however, and he is, he writes, ‘deeply and passionately involved in our local Aldinga U3A (University of the Third Age). It keeps me very busy and keeps the aging brain alert’. At this graduation ceremony, Rhodes University honoured not only an alumnus and a former member of staff, but also a man who helped to fight the good fight against a harsh and unjust system; a man who fought for the essential humanity of all to be recognised.

And to close, here is the final paragraph from Basil’s speech at the conferral ceremony: Graduands, I know that you are not theologians and some of you may not be Christians, but in conclusion I would admonish you in similar vein. Our task as intellectuals is still to engage with the victims of injustice, to analyse their plight, to give voice to their distress and their hopes. But it is not to do this standing aloof from their struggle. It needs to be done from the very heart of that struggle. It is to devise and implement strategies that will restore to people their dignity and humanity. Each of you in your own chosen field is being called upon to become liberation activists for social justice. This is a tough commission requiring courage, great skill and determination. I am sure, however, that your experience here at Rhodes has inspired and skilled you for this vocation. This is what makes it a great university.

Notes  1  At the time of publishing the first edition, Sabelo Ntwasa was banned and this forced the group to

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delete his contribution. Sabelo Ntwasa’s chapter was re-inserted in the second edition.  2  See http://psimg.jstor.org/fsi/img/pdf/t0/10.5555/ al.sff.document.min19710327.026.009.929_ final.pdf  3  For Moore (1993a), the use of the term ‘black’ is to invoke a double meaning: first, ‘black’ invokes a political project as in the black consciousness movement and is not a descriptive concept and refers ‘to those who have been oppressed by ­ racism’, thus linking together those whom ­colonisation and apartheid have tried to divide; second, it refers ‘to those in this group who have actively resisted racism’ (1993: 1).  4  https://www.ru.ac.za/latestnews/2011/201104-082004.html

REFERENCES Biko, S. (1971) The Definition of Black Consciousness. http://www.sahistory.org.za/ archive/definition-black-consciousnessbantu-stephen-biko-december-1971-southafrica (Accessed March 2018) Collins, C. (1972) Man Names the World: A Study in Paulo Freire’s Theory of Knowledge and Its Relationship to Adult Literacy. Unpublished monograph loaned to a seminar on Paulo Freire conducted by Dr. John Ohliger at the Ohio State University. Collins, C. (1974) The Ideas of Paulo Freire and an Analysis of Black Consciousness in South Africa. Unpublished thesis, University of Toronto. Cone, J. H. (1970) A Black Theology of Liberation. New York: Orbis Books. Cone, J. H. (1974) Black theology and Black liberation. In B. Moore (Ed.), Black Theology: South African Voice (pp. 97–108). London: C. Hurst & Co. Cone, J. H. (1997) Black Theology and Black Power. New York: Orbis Books. Du Bois, B. (1993) Passionate scholarship: Notes on values, knowing and method in feminist social science. In G. Bowles & R. D. Klein (Eds.), Theories of Women’s Studies (pp. 105–116). Boston: Routledge & Kegan. Education for Social Justice Research Group (1994) Teaching for Resistance: Report of the Education for Social Justice Research Project. Adelaide: Texts in Humanities and the Centre for Studies in Educational Leadership.

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Fanon, F. (1967) The Wretched of the Earth. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Foucault, M. (1980) Power and Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1982a) The subject and power. In H. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow (Eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (pp. 208–226). New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Foucault, M. (1982b) Is it really important to think? An interview translated by Thomas Keenan. Philosophy & Social Criticism 9(1): 30–40. Foucault, M. (1984a) What is Enlightenment? In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought (pp. 32–50). London: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1984b) Space, knowledge, and power. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought (pp. 239–256). London: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1986) Kant on Enlightenment and revolution. Economy and Society 15(1): 88–96. Freire, P. (1972a) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Freire, P. (1972b) Cultural Action for Freedom. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Freire, P. (1974) Education: The Practice of Freedom. London: Readers and Writers Publishing Cooperative. Freire, P. (1985a) Reading the world and the word: An interview with Paulo Freire. Language Arts 62(1): 15–21. Freire, P. (1985b) The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey. Freire, P. (1998) Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare to Teach. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Giroux, H. A. (1996/1997) Radical pedagogy and prophetic thought: Remembering Paulo Freire. Rethinking Marxism 9(4): 76–87. Giroux, H. A. & Trend, D. (1992) Cultural workers, pedagogy, and the politics of difference: Beyond cultural conservatism. Cultural Studies 6(1): 51–72. Goddard, A. J. (2016) Invitations to Prophetic Integrity in the Evangelical Spirituality of the Students’ Christian Association Discipleship Tradition: 1965–1979. PhD Dissertation.

­ niversity of KwaZulu-Natal. https://www.­ U academia.edu/23754431/Invitations _ to_Prophetic_Integrity_in_the_Evangelical_ Spirituality_of_the_Students_Christian_ A s s o c i a t i o n _ D i s c i p l e s h i p _ Tr a d i t i o n _ 1965_-_1979 Gutiérrez, G. (1973) A Theology of Liberation. New York: Orbis Books. Habermas, J. (1988) Modernity – An incomplete project. In H. Foster (Ed.), Postmodern Culture (pp. 3–15). London: Pluto Press. Haraway, D. J. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Harding, S. (1993) Rethinking standpoint epistemology: ‘What is strong objectivity?’. In L. Alcoff, L. & E. Potter (Eds.), Feminist Epistemologies (pp. 49–82). London: Routledge. Hattam, R. (2004) Awakening-Struggle: Towards a Buddhist Critical Social Theory. Flaxton, QLD: PostPressed. Havel, V. (1986) Living in Truth. London: Faber and Faber. Holmes III, U. T. (1978) The Priest in Community: Exploring the Roots of Ministry. New York: Seabury Press. Horkheimer, M. (1972) Critical Theory: Selected Essays. New York: Seabury Press. Houston, W. (1997) A Critical Evaluation of the University Christian Movement as an Ecumenical Mission to Students, 1967–1972. Masters of Theology, University of South Africa. http:// uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/ 16970/dissertation_houston_wj.pdf?­ sequence=1 (Accessed February, 2018) Hunter, I. (1997) The critical disposition: Some historical configurations of the humanities. The UTS Review 3(1): 26–55. Levi, P. (1979) Is This a Man and The Truce. London: Abacus. Magaziner, D. R. (2010) The Law of the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press; Johannesburg: Jacana. Marcus, G. E. (1998) Ethnography Through Thick and Thin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marcuse, H. (1969) An Essay on Liberation. London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press. McLaren, P. (1988) The liminal servant and the ritual roots of critical pedagogy. Language Arts 65(2): 164–179.

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Moore, B. (Ed.) (1973) Black Theology: The South African Voice. London: C. Hurst and Co. Moore, B. (1993a) The prejudice thesis and the de-politicization of racism. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 14(1): 52–64. Moore, B. (1993b) The Politics of Victim Construction in Australian Social Justice Policy. Paper presented at the Australian Curriculum Studies Conference, Belconnen, Australian Capital Territory. Moore, B. (1993c) Anti-racist education: South Australian policy in Black Perspective. Australian Educational Leader 4(1): 1-12. Said E. (1983) Traveling theory. In Edward W. Said (Ed.), The World, the Text, and the Critic (pp. 226–247). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Said, E. (1994) Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. London: Vintage. Santoro, N., Kamler, B. & Reid, J-A. (2001) Teachers talking difference: Teacher education and the poetics of anti-racism. Teaching Education 12(2):191–212.

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Smyth, J., Hattam, R., with Cannon, J., Edwards, J., Wilson, N. & Wurst, S. (2004) ‘Dropping Out’, Drifting Off, Being Excluded: Becoming Somebody Without School. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Smyth, J. & McInerney, P. (2013) Whose side are you on? Advocacy ethnography: Some methodological aspects of narrative portraits of disadvantaged young people, in socially critical research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26(1): 1–20. Starr, K. (1991) Justice for whom? A critique of the social justice strategy of the South Australian Education Department. South Australian Educational Leader 2(5): 1–10. Turner, V. (1974) Liminal to liminoid, in play, flow and ritual: An essay in comparative symbology. Rice University Studies 60(3): 53–93. Van Gennep, A. (1960) The Rites of Passage. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. wa Thiong’o, N. (1986) Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Wren, B. (1977) Education for Justice. London: SCM Press.

34 Coming to Critical Pedagogy in Spain Through Life and Literature: Jurjo Torres Santomé and Ramón Flecha Gresilda Tilley-Lubbs

UNDERSTANDING THE SOCIOPOLITICAL CONTEXT OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN SPAIN For a number of years, I have worked in the Spanish-speaking world with scholars who base their work on principles of critical pedagogy. Since I can communicate fluently in Spanish, I assumed for a long time that we were speaking the same language when we used the vocabulary associated with critical pedagogy. However, conversations with colleagues led me to realize that we use the same terms, albeit in our own languages, but those terms construct different meanings, based on different social and political histories and understandings. I couldn’t articulate the differences or similarities; I intuited them. This eureka moment sent me on a quest to talk to two scholars whom colleagues named as leaders in critical pedagogy in Spain: Jurjo Torres Santomé at the University of A Coruña and Ramón Flecha in

the Community of Research on Excellence for All (CREA) at the University of Barcelona. As we talked, they shared how their political and historical backgrounds have shaped their conceptualizations of critical pedagogy. I spent time with each scholar, engaged in conversations in which they shared their lives and the academic experiences that led them to develop as critical pedagogy scholars. During our time together, the resonance among our stories surfaced, weaving patterns that described life experiences that caused us to seek social justice during the chaotic years of the 1960s and 70s and beyond. We shared experiences that related our personal stories to the world that surrounded us as we came of age, whether in high school or university, in our respective countries. The contrasts in our personal and national histories led to a deeper understanding of the ways critical pedagogy assumes different forms in different locations. Both scholars are consummate storytellers, and they brought to life that time in Spain

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now referred to as the government-enforced ‘years of repression’ as they came of age politically during Franco’s dictatorship. In the United States during the 60s and 70s, we were experiencing political and cultural chaos and change as evidenced events such as the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Lib, demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr in April and Bobby Kennedy in June 1968, among others. During those same years in Spain, a culture of fear and silence prevailed under a dictatorship that restricted individual liberties and promoted conservative values espoused by the Catholic Church, repudiating the freedoms won during the Second Republic that preceded the Spanish Civil War. While students in the United States were participating in protests, in Spain, Jurjo and Ramón were reading and discussing, then hiding, forbidden books, developing radical ideas under clandestine situations. During the mid-to-late 60s, I developed radicality by reading and discussing Spanish literature in my US university classrooms, while outside of class, I participated in protests and felt the freedom to speak out against governmental and societal policies. At the same time, my Spanish colleagues clandestinely studied the same literature, and developed an intentional sense of social justice and a desire to change the political structure of a repressive dictatorship that had been in power since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. I heard and consumed their stories, which filled in many of the gaps of knowledge I had experienced as I learned about Spain during those same years while I was an undergraduate, then a graduate Spanish major. As I sought to understand the years of repression/oppression they described, I was learning about a Spain about whose existence I had been oblivious. Jurjo and Ramón carried me back to those years with the richness of personal narrative that resonated with my own story, while also bringing me to an understanding of the repressive society in which they formed their beliefs about education and its power to

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transform society, and about Spain in the 21st century. I interwove their narratives with my own memories and connections, first mentally and then verbally, provoking one eureka moment after another. Our dialogues became collaborative critical autoethnographies, as we related the personal to the public social and political environment (Bochner and Ellis, 2016). I examined our conversations through the lens of critical autoethnography, which combines critical pedagogy to interrogate systemic violence that results in oppression, with autoethnography, to examine the role of the Self in establishing hierarchy and un/consciously perpetuating oppression when working in vulnerable communities (Tilley-Lubbs, 2017). I realized that they related their experiences as members of an oppressed society, whereas I lived my experiences from the privilege of freedom to protest and read what I chose, not through a dictatorship. Jurjo and Ramón narrated their critical autoethnographies as I listened and engaged in dialogue with them. Their quoted words and stories come from those recorded, transcribed dialogues. In this chapter, I have translated the quotes from Spanish, Catalán, or Galician into English, the languages of the interviews.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND Soon after I began this project to understand the emergence and conceptualization of critical pedagogy in Spain, I realized a need to understand the Spain that existed in 1969, the year of the first translation of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed from Portuguese into Spanish. Examining the sociocultural and sociopolitical climates of Spain and the United States reaffirmed the knowledge that Freire’s seminal work had overturned educational thought in its current state, even though it sprouted and took root in different circumstances in different places around the globe. I questioned how our different histories and political environments caused our beliefs and

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performances of critical pedagogy to take different turns. Considered the foundation for critical pedagogy as it exists today, Freire’s book entered a Spain still recovering from the devastating effects of a Civil War (1936–39) that pitted neighbors against each other as bombs dropped by the two Axis Powers, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, devastated the country. As political alliances formed, constantly morphing and changing, Francisco Franco’s battle to overthrow the Second Spanish Republic raged, until his ultimate conquest in April 1939. The Second Republic, established in 1931, had felled a dictator, Miguel Primo de Rivera, supported by then King Alfonso XIII. The working class regarded the Second Republic, with its democratic ideals regarding education for all people, freedom of speech, women’s right to vote, freedom to divorce, and land reform, as the antithesis of the oppressive dictatorship. Despite these democratic ideals, strict legislation maintained the Catholic Church’s control over property and education, based on traditions that went back to the unification of Spain as a country in the second half of the 15th century, following the marriage of King Fernando and Queen Isabela. The union between Church and state remained firm, despite the self-exile of King Alfonso XIII in 1931. Tensions grew between liberals and conservatives, as the Republic failed to live up to expectations. As a result, Franco assumed complete control of the army following the death of two other generals, from his post in Morocco. Leading his troops north through Spain, he attempted a coup d’état that failed. Despite this failure, his attempt to reinstate the monarchy cemented his position with the right-wing conservatives. This led to the Civil War as the conservative rebels led by Franco joined the centrists who still supported the monarchy to form the Nationalists. They still received support from the Fascists in Italy and the Nazis in Germany. On the other hand, the Republicans formed similar alliances of convenience among

the Anarchists, Communists, Stalinists, Socialists, and other leftist groups, all united by their common desire to defeat the Nationalists. Following Franco’s victory, he established a dictatorship sanctioned by the Catholic Church, due not only to his continuing support of the Church, but also the fact that the opposition had executed many priests, and been accused of executing even more, during the Civil War. This support enabled him to maintain strict control of society against any ideas of atheism, granting him further control of a society living in fear. As dictator, he was known as Generalísimo Francisco Franco por la gracia de Dios [supreme leader by the grace of God], a title that provided evidence of the continuing power of the Catholic Church. This title reinforced the belief that his heritage continued the lineage of the Catholic King and Queen, Ferdinand and Isabela, whose fanatical Catholicism unified the two kingdoms of Castilla and Aragón into a single kingdom, Spain. Franco’s dictatorship, now referred to as the ‘years of repression’, followed the end of the war, creating a culture of fear and silence, causing people to work underground in an attempt to overthrow the government and establish a free society. I had studied the Spanish Civil War as a Spanish major at the University of Illinois (1964–70). I studied at the University of Salamanca in 1969, so I thought I understood Spain, especially since the majority of my professors at Illinois were from Spain. When I looked back at my Spanish history books, I found a paragraph in each book acknowledging there had been a Civil War, and that Generalísimo Francisco Franco emerged as the victor, establishing a government in 1939. I knew his government had lasted until his death in 1975. I didn’t understand that the use of this title, translated as ‘Supreme Commander’ over the armed forces and the country, implied an acceptance of the totalitarian rule he had established. These brief summaries of the Civil War mentioned the various factions

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that fought, but not with sufficient detail for me to untangle the complexities of the alliances, or to understand the implications of Franco’s victory. There was no mention of Franco’s dictatorship. I had studied the theater output of Carlos Muñiz, censored during Franco’s reign, but apart from that, I had no idea of the repressive conditions in place in Spain during those years. Even when I attended the summer session at the University of Salamanca, or when I returned in 1970 to Madrid to work on a dissertation study based on the thematic content of Muñiz’s plays pre- and post-war, I didn’t understand the systemic issues involved in the censorship of his work. A series of circumstances led me to design a research project examining Spain during those years, and as I engaged in conversations with people about life in that time, they all referred to the ‘years of repression’. This project coincided in time with my goal of talking to Jurjo and Ramón, whose stories made connections with the sociocultural and sociopolitical environment in which they came of age as critical pedagogy scholars, the period they also called the ‘years of oppression’. Our conversations were informal, with the result that we also made connections in our own stories and our coming of age through literature and political events. What follows are the stories of two scholars who shaped critical pedagogy in Spain, beginning with their involvement in clandestine anti-Francoist groups during what became a 36-year dictatorship, to the publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1969, to the present day. Situated on the opposite coasts of Spain, Jurjo on the Atlantic coast to the west and Ramón on the Mediterranean coast to the east, the programs that developed through their work share similarities, but they also differ. From their youth, both scholars worked to change the systemic structures of oppression that operated during the years of repression and that have carried into present day Spain, and in so doing, they have become leaders in critical pedagogy in Spain and the rest of the Spanish-speaking world.

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JURJO TORRES SANTOMÉ Jurjo identifies as a political activist who fights for better education. His activism began when he was a young man with convictions that caused him to work against an oppressive government. He was born in 1951, 12 years after the end of the Civil War. He begins, ‘I had read two of Freire’s works, Education as the Practice of Freedom (1967) and Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1969), which had come to us clandestinely because Paulo Freire was forbidden’. Although he found that Freire’s work focused on adults, the theory appealed to him. He was studying psychology, and at that time, cognitive psychology was entering Spain, followed by behaviorism. Jurjo saw education as a ‘political process of political socialization and the construction of a different kind of world’. With that introduction, he began a passionate recounting of the entry of critical pedagogy into a country still recovering from 39 years of a cruel and repressive dictatorship whose strength and effects were still present, albeit occult, in the 1980s world Jurjo entered as an academic. He said that in order to educate people at that time, it was necessary to change their mindsets. He found himself embroiled in certain dilemmas because he belonged to leftist organizations whose priorities believed in the necessity of changing the political structure before other infrastructures, such as the educational system, could be changed. His friends told him not to get involved in politics, but his parents had been Republicans who fought for democracy, so he grew up in a politicized environment. Although his parents were young at the time of the Civil War, they lived the atrocities that befell the Republicans as Franco’s army came to Galicia and created chaos by turning neighbors against each other in fear. He remembers an attempted coup d’état on February 23, 1980, only five years after Franco’s death and the re-establishment of democracy, the same year that he returned to La Coruña from the army. The Fascists had

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made a list of the first persons they planned to eliminate, and when they made the list public, Jurjo’s name appeared. He understood the culture of silence based on the fear still present in those post-Franco years. Since the coup failed, everything turned out well, but he experienced the possibility of death by the Fascists who attempted the coup. Jurjo continued struggling with doubts and contradictions, believing that change could take place in education despite the fact that the economic system didn’t change. He saw that in Spain myriad problems existed about which most people knew nothing. He began working on his doctoral thesis, while at the same time he was working with his wife in early childhood education, politicized like everything else, although it was more social. Jurjo and his wife wanted children to feel like community members as part of their cognitive and affective development. As they worked, he discovered that he and his wife knew nothing. They needed to learn English to be able to understand things. His training had been in French, but by reading English book titles, he realized that educators were doing important work in English. He remembered the first book he read in English, a book by Noam Chomsky, and how much effort it took to read it, due to his weak English. Just as he was developing his work, he received an offer from the University of Salamanca, which is where he says he ‘began to be a professor’. While there, he discovered some books that were more or less interesting in the field of sociology. He also found new colleagues with whom he felt aligned ideologically, such as José Gimeno Sacristán, a scholar in critical curriculum theory. He also discovered Morata, a Spanish press that became fundamental in the critical pedagogical reform that occurred after the end of the dictatorship. Morata had been created during the Second Republic as a Republican press linked with the left in its publications of literature in the social sciences. During the dictatorship, Morata had turned the press over to the ‘Church of Opus Dei’, the most

conservative arm of the Catholic Church, tied to the Falangists, Franco’s followers who were Fascists. Morata changed its emphasis from education to medicine as Franco closed down everything not aligned with his Fascist politics, and with the dictates of Opus Dei. With the arrival of democracy after Franco’s death, another generation of the Morata family took over, and they were more receptive to critical work. During that time, Morata published a book that no other press would touch since the publishing houses were still ‘all Fascists – that’s how society was’. Jurjo continued, ‘You can imagine the literature we were creating – some mind-boggling atrocities. With the little that was being written about education, it was hard to tell if it was metaphysical theology or what’. He began going to London every summer, and at the educational institution he visited, he could ‘devour other kinds of books in an incredible way’. Every summer he took enough books home to Spain to last for the rest of the year. At the same time, Morata wanted to update the classics they had. They noticed that Jurjo was a specialist in matters of early childhood education and of play, the subjects of his first works. They asked him to prepare an appendix of reviewed literature in the field as an updated bibliography. He enjoyed the work, and from there on, he had a good relationship with the publisher. He suggested translations of certain books he had read in English. Jurjo emphasizes the necessity of understanding the role Morata played in bringing critical pedagogy to Spain and Latin America. They are the only firm with which Jurjo has published, beginning with his first book, El Curriculum Oculto [The Hidden Curriculum] (1991), which he said other presses wouldn’t have published due to its radicality. The book sold well, and ever since, he has only published with them, feeling a close relationship to the press that dared take a risk with his radical work. Morata has served as a compatible vehicle for his ideas, aspirations, and political fights in society and in education. In a history of the firm (www.edmorata.es/

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la-editorial/nuestra-historia), Morata mentions the works of José Gimeno Sacristán and Jurjo Torres Santomé as fundamental in shaping Spain’s transition to democracy with texts more in line with the moment. Jurjo reflects on that first book that presented his ideas about the hidden curriculum. He explains that no one intentionally wants to be a bad professor or to teach bad habits and other worse things to children, such as lying, cheating, and so on. These ideas led him to read literature by Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970) about cultural reproduction, and other authors who were part of the ‘Bourdieu School’. Reading Althusser (1976), he explored ‘all that pedagogy’. He wanted to understand the hidden curriculum that underlay negative behaviors in the classroom. He began to construct a theoretical framework that would allow him to envision a more practical and functional way to conduct research. He read Willis (1977), which provided him with ethnographic research methods to understand the world of schooling. He learned how to conduct research to help him understand things, rejecting the positivism that was predominant in Spain. He wanted to research what was happening in the ‘black box’, as he described the classroom. From there he established relationships with people to exchange ideas. He and his colleagues started making their research public so people could see how things were in classrooms. Their discovery of qualitative research created a revolution. Morata began translating qualitative works, but it was difficult to do this kind of work in the ultraconservative ‘official academy’ of Spain. Translated literature was key to helping them enter and understand the world of schooling, which hadn’t been possible when they were buried in social reproduction theories. Jurjo talks about his colleagues in Salamanca, José Gimeno Sacristan and Ángel Pérez Gómez, whose critical work in curriculum added to the revolution in educational research. All three were young, but he was the youngest and most politicized due to all his years in clandestine organizations.

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He was accustomed to having the police seek him out to find out who the participants were in those organizations. He had been threatened by the police during that time, so when things happened to him at the university, it was nothing. He was used to interrogations by the Guardia Civil due to his membership in clandestine organizations and his appearance, with less-than-conservative clothing and a long beard. He was so accustomed to more disturbing and life-threatening wars that he was unaffected by conservative professors who tried to scare him. He reflected that his history saved him from surrendering. He remained a force of resistance. Even when he stood up to the worst of them, they backed down. It was very hard, but that’s how things were during that time. As Morata began translating books, younger people began reading them and saying, ‘We don’t understand this [literature]’. Traditional unintelligible, verbose work was meaningless, but it seemed useful to people. The newer, translated literature showed people ways to go to the classroom to work and to understand what was happening. Things began to change, but traditional groups still existed. While pursuing his doctorate, the time came for Jurjo to do his mandatory military service, but he took advantage of a legal mechanism that allowed him to request a deferral to finish his education. He completed his doctorate quickly, receiving his degree in 1979, only four years after Franco’s death. During that time, Franco’s government still punished people whom they considered political dissidents by sending them to horrible places for military service. They sent Jurjo to Melilla to work toward the decolonization of the Sahara, an assignment he described as ‘one of the most dreadful possible, one saved for politicized people’ like himself. During the last year of writing his doctoral thesis, he and his wife had had a daughter, and after he had served 18 months of military service, the government passed a new law that exempted fathers from military service.

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He had hoped that with the doctoral phase of his life completed, he could leave behind the opposition he had experienced as an academic, but political opposition followed him. When he returned to civilian life, he and his colleagues developed ‘neo-Marxist pedagogy’, which evolved into critical pedagogy. He still questions what the term critical pedagogy means. Does it refer to teacher training? He describes critical pedagogy as one of those terms whose meaning no one knows for sure. People recognize it as an alternative pedagogy that is critical. Initially the term ‘critical pedagogy’ was more powerful because it pushed people to critical education that pushed against the conservative norm. If people talked about neo-Marxism, they were talking about discrimination based on social class, according to what was coming out of the analyses they were conducting. Now he suspects that people use these words to ‘be in style’. Jurjo says, If critical pedagogy becomes stylish, and we say it started in the middle of the 20th century, the right will take the term and rob us of our language. The right will subsume all the powerful words the left used to mobilize people. They will distort and change the meanings and convert them into meaningless phrases. It’s when you dig deeper to carry out and to intervene [in education], that change can occur. With critical pedagogy, and the way it developed here, the right stole these words. That way they could more easily and ethically influence people. Who wasn’t democratic? Even the Nazis said they were democratic! From that point on, we were playing with the term, because when we related to people in critical pedagogy who were critical, we knew who they were. We knew their work, and it didn’t matter if they referred to themselves as critical or not. I would know if they were working with critical pedagogy as their philosophical base, and that’s what interested me. We were writing with critical pedagogy as our base, and we began to use the term. I recognize that the term has become confusing in recent times, since no one is going to claim to not be critical, even the most acritical and passive person. What remains clear is that critical pedagogy is a concept that explains oppression, which lay underneath what was and is going in schools.

He questions the cultural criteria educators are using. He asks, ‘What is being researched and analyzed?’. He credits the right with continuing to create the rules determining curricular content, although its origin is never known with certainty. He says that curriculum was a fundamental key that led him to question the system. He wanted to interrogate how curriculum was revised; he didn’t see how the ‘rule books’ were constructed for curriculum. He believes that is how the right introduced neo-behaviorism into the education system. In the 1980s, educators talked about constructivist or collaborative learning, but, ‘What about the content?’. Jurjo would talk to the kids, and they would say they were bored because they didn’t understand what they were doing. They weren’t interested because they could see no purpose in what they were learning. He says, ‘No one analyzes that dimension of learning’. He argues that the common educational system always has held as fundamental that education must promote learning to live together with certain constructed common sense. Jurjo states that so much rests on how curriculum is determined, on who decides which knowledge has value, based on which cultural work is being used. The educational system has to progress within the construction of knowledge, even putting into place ‘poly ethos’ pedagogy, rather than organized knowledge that ignores the possibility of recognizing the value of other ways of knowing. The educator needs to be an architect who builds foundations that permit students to deepen their knowledge, building it on clearly developed and explained structures. He says that social fights marked him. During the fascist years, the social problems were matters of life and death that helped him to become a person who could see ordinary problems of daily life. He recognized that he wasn’t allowed to understand things, which in turn caused him to develop a greater curiosity. This curiosity has led him to develop a body of work that interrogates

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curriculum within the context of neoliberalism. He travels throughout the world giving lectures on multiculturalism, neoliberalism, neocolonialism, and curriculum (2018, 2008, 1991; Paraskeva and Torres Santomé, 2012), all stemming from his work in those fields, and all presented through the lens of critical pedagogy.

RAMÓN FLECHA Ramón Flecha identifies himself as a ‘precursor’ of the movement to critical pedagogy in Spain. Born in 1952, he establishes the genesis of his trajectory with critical pedagogy in 1969 with the arrival of the translated version of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in Spain. Ramón begins his story by sharing a memory of the first time Paulo Freire set foot in Barcelona. Ten minutes after his arrival in Barcelona, Paulo began questioning Ramón about the treason of Ferrer i Guàrdia, which was what interested him most about Spain. Ramón explained that Ferrer i Guàrdia (1859–1909) was a revolutionary Catalán educator who embodied his work in three important traditions of the 19th and first part of the 20th centuries: anarchy, socialism, and Christianity. His educational ideology developed alongside his anarchism, beginning with his realization that prevailing authoritarian influences promoted principles of injustice and exploitation in education. In 1901, he established the Escuela Moderna [Modern School] (Ferrer i Guàrdia and McCabe, 2014), a school separate from the Church, to teach students to have a radical social conscience during a time of extreme conservatism and Church control of education. This school served as the origin of an international network of 32 schools, some of them in Brazil, which explains Freire’s knowledge of and interest in the work of Ferrer i Guàrdia. He was not opposed to religion; he simply believed that religion shouldn’t be part of schooling. He believed that schools needed

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to focus on scientific discoveries and reasoning, not on the conservative perpetuation of authoritarian control, a philosophy that caused him to clash with the most conservative powers in the Spanish schools. At the beginning of the 20th century, the ruling classes feared any movement that might compromise their established privilege. The school was closed in 1906 when Ferrer i Guàrdia was falsely accused and arrested for presumed involvement with an anarchist librarian at the Modern School who attempted to assassinate the king. The conservatives took advantage of this moment to declare Ferrer i Guàrdia as the leader of the movement, although he was not. He was executed because of his ideas in 1909, during Semana Trágica [Tragic Week], a revolutionary week in Spain, by conservatives who sought to impede his awakening of a ‘free, critical, and rational conscience’ in people, making them aware of the hierarchical privilege that existed in society. Ramón says the group that killed Ferrer i Guàrdia realized their error within six years of the execution. Eventually the Ferrer i Guàrdia Foundation was established, and as evidence of the impact of Ferrer i Guàrdia on critical pedagogy in Spain, Ramón related that for the centennial of the closing of the school, CREA collaborated with the foundation to pay homage to this pedagogue, who, in Ramón’s words, was a ‘great person’. Ramón says that when there are dictatorships, clandestine movements against the dictatorship are inevitable, just as happened with the French Resistance. He became part of such a movement at a cultural level when he was a 14-year-old high school student. This antiFrancoist group mimicked a group headed by Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who had been executed by the Francoists in 1936 at the beginning of the Civil War. García Lorca had been appointed theater director of a student theater group, the Teatro Universitario La Barraca [University Theater The Shack] at the start of the Second Republic in 1931 with the charge of taking

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radical theater to rural areas. Ramón’s group, Misiones Pedagógicas [Pedagogical Missions] took culture and cultural discussions to the most disadvantaged districts of Bilbao, the Basque city that was his hometown. ‘Here I am, a high school student, going to two of the poorest slums in Bilbao’, he says. ‘It was – and is – where I am from’. As they tried to achieve their goal, they saw people who didn’t know how to read or write. Then they identified their unanticipated goal of teaching literacy. They had to search for how to do this, because none of them understood education. They were all high school or university students, but none were majoring in education. Some of their companions were revolutionaries in Latin America who began sending them rudimentary printouts of materials from Paulo Freire that weren’t published in book form. At that time, 1967, there was no book, so they used the stenciled printouts they received. ‘So with that kind of materials, we came to know the work of Paulo Freire, his literacy method’. Using those printouts, they began to teach literacy in the slums of Bilbao. ‘I don’t plan to dedicate myself to teaching, but in fact, I start studying it’, he continues. All of a sudden, at the university, they create a ‘business school’ [here Ramón uses the English term], the first one in Europe, in Bilbao, so he plans to major in economics. He continues with his volunteer work, and he becomes the university delegate and leader of the many anti-Francoist movements, which causes him to become the persecuted victim of reprisals. In his third year at the university, he has to escape from Bilbao, and he goes to Barcelona. At that time, 1972, there was more repression in Bilbao than in Barcelona, where a democratic bourgeois protected the movements to a certain extent. Jesús Gómez, or ‘Pato’, his friend of many years from playing soccer together, went with him, since he was also a victim of the reprisals. Ramón says, ‘We had no intention of studying in the university because we thought the university was bourgeois’. Instead, they

wanted to go to the neighborhoods to start a social movement. They met some girls who ended up introducing them to their uncle who was in the midst of starting an anti-Francoist school for teachers. Marta Mata,1 a leftist pedagogue, would teach classes. The uncle managed to convince them that creating a different kind of education was the way to fight Francoism, so they began studying teacher education in what is now the Escuela de San Cugat in the Department of Education at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. They were the first students. From that time on, they became more and more involved with education, and they thought more about majoring in education as a profession. They began to read everything and discuss all the revolutionary movements in education around the world up to that time. Until then, they only knew about Paulo Freire. They became involved in critical pedagogy movements, still clandestinely, although they had decided to dedicate themselves as professionals to critical pedagogy. That was the first time they understood education as social transformation, as a social movement. Ramón and Pato became leaders of the educational anti-Francoist movement. Ramón became the representative of the most important strike movement in teaching in Spain, in February 1976, one year after Franco’s death. Together he and Pato played a leadership role in transition movements as the dictatorship ended. However, there was a reaction against those movements, with the idea they were political anti-Francoist political movements. He and Pato hoped for an anti-Francoist democracy, but in fact, before his death, Franco had named as king of the democracy Juan Carlos, the grandson of Alfonso XIII, who claimed to be the king in exile when Franco began his uprising. The first president of the democracy, Adolfo Suárez, had been the president of the Francoist Movement. Those who had held positions of power in the Franco dictatorship still held those positions in the democracy. People said they wanted to have a democracy, but without revolutionary movements that

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‘want to go too far’. Between 1975 and 1980, there was a great explosion of movements in the state and in the governments, which the former Franco supporters tried to eliminate. Ramón says the Franco supporters told the movements, ‘It was well and good what you did during the dictatorship when you had to fight, but now there is a democracy, so go home. We don’t need you’. They used that approach to get rid of the movements, which had two fundamental currents in education: the reproductionist model, which says that education can’t transform society because it reproduces inequalities, as in the Althusser Movement; and the Postmodern Movement, which was based on ideas of transformation and a better world. ‘These were old ideas. Now we have to go beyond any narrative of emancipation. Any meta narrative’, Ramón states. In 1991, with colleagues from different disciplines, he founded CREA. He was fundamental to developing the communicative methodology that is the basis of CREA’s public sociology work (https://isapublicsociology.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/martasoler-and-ramon-flecha) based on the theories of Paulo Freire. In the early 1990s, CREA’s detractors attacked them fiercely. They called Paulo Freire antiquated, and said that critical pedagogy was dogmatic and worthless. During the 1980s, scholars abandoned critical pedagogy, and detractors called its few supporters ‘nostalgic’. The greatest insult occurred when the press referred to them as ‘anchored in the past, in May 1968’, referencing the time when French workers and students went on strike, and France seemed to be on the brink of a leftist revolution. They said, ‘Young people don’t like that. You are behind the times. Young people want neon lights. They want discotheques. They don’t want social movements’. All of this was a great defeat for critical pedagogy ‘We tell ourselves we have to break up this situation’, says Ramón. ‘We organized the movement they said was out of style in 1994, which is a key moment in critical pedagogy’. In that year, they organized

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the congress, New Critical Perspectives in Education. Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo attended. When the time came, Henry Giroux couldn’t come, but he sent a presentation. They rented the most important conference center in Barcelona, which held a thousand people. Everyone laughed at them, saying no more than four people would attend. The congress would be in Spanish and English. The book for the conference was also in English with a prologue by Peter McLaren. Ramón marks this as a peak moment in critical pedagogy. A thousand people came, and they filled the conference center. Their detractors had said young people weren’t interested, but a junior researcher from CREA, Marta Soler, who was 23 or 24 at the time, opened the conference by reading Peter McLaren’s prologue. More than half the people attending the congress hadn’t even been born in May 1968. Paulo Freire loved this! He was enthusiastic because they had been told that young people wouldn’t be interested, but they were even more interested than before. That congress broke down the prejudice about critical pedagogy as something that no longer counted, as something from the past. With this congress, people viewed critical pedagogy as belonging to the present. From that moment on, critical pedagogy movements began to resurge in Spain, and they haven’t ceased up to the present time. In 1978, Ramón had founded a learning community for adults called Centro de Verneda, located in a working-class Barcelona neighborhood. Following the congress in 1994, CREA transformed the center so that it was no longer a single school, but rather many schools. Up to that point, Ramón compared Verneda to the Highlander Folk School2 or the Barbiana School3 or Summerhill School,4 but with the congress and the resurgence of critical pedagogy, La Verneda became a movement. From the beginning, CREA had understood they couldn’t create a revolutionary educational movement unless it was better than the schools that had gone before. They wanted to pick up the torch from Ferrer i Guàrdia with

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his ideas about scientific reasoning and anarchism. The Catholic Church still organized and controlled schools in Spain at this time, but Ramón founded a dialogic learning community which would follow a pluralist humanistic tradition rather than having Christianity as its base, Verneda increased the prestige of critical pedagogy in Spain as its greatest characteristic (Flecha, 2000). Ramón has continued his work in critical pedagogy, with his sociological theories on dialogic societies regarded as seminal (Flecha et al., 2001). His work on alternative masculinities and against gender violence has had an impact on Spanish universities, as well as on legislation (Flecha et  al., 2013). He continues to work in marginalized communities. The Roma community recognized him with an honorary doctorate from a Romanian university. In addition, Roma citizens in Catalunya granted him a national award and invited him to be a member of the National Roma Council to advise the government (Flecha, n.d.). He travels throughout the world giving lectures based on his extensive work.

education, and they still fight the government and Church control of education as they seek ways to create social justice in society. As I talked to Jurjo and Ramón, I realized that my studies as a Spanish literature major many years ago had set me on a path that would lead to my current journey to develop my understanding of critical pedagogy. As both Jurjo and Ramón talked about their early involvement in clandestine organizations, they talked about Federico García Lorca, Miguel de Unamuno, and Antonio Machado, to mention a few of the writers who helped to shape the genesis of our paths. We all developed according to the circumstances and situations in which we lived. Although we are all within five or six years of age, we came of age politically and educationally under different political systems and ideologies. Paulo Freire constantly reiterated that he didn’t want his work to become reified and iconized. Rather, he wanted his work to reflect different cultures and societies, which, with these scholars, I suggest happens continuously.

Notes FINAL THOUGHTS Conversations with both men made it apparent that their distinct paths reflected the society in which they came of age, and in which they currently work. The global influences on their development as critical pedagogues also surfaced as they shared their histories, and they now travel to give lectures globally, completing the circle. Ramon’s references to the Highlander Folk School in the United States, the Barbiana School in Italy, and Summerhill School in England, all influenced his work. Jurjo’s summers in England allowed him to read the literature produced outside the repressive society in which he lived and worked. Although they have worked in different ways, both have been spent their lives trying to change the political structure of society through education. For both scholars, critical pedagogy is a lived theory. They seek to improve

1 Marta Mata Garriga (1926–2006) was a socialist Catalán politician and pedagogue whose work helped to re-establish public education, which had been repressed after the overthrow of the Second Republic. In 1965, she worked clandestinely with a team of teachers to regain what had been lost during the Francoist dictatorship. She established la Escuela de Maestros Rosa Sensat [Teachers’ School Rosa Sensat], which focused on public schools based on Catalán language and culture. 2 Myles Horton (1905–1990) established the Highlander Folk School in the US southern state of Tennessee in 1932. As a socialist and activist, he believed that education should encourage free thinking and help people to understand systemic issues that create oppression. He fought tirelessly for integration and labor organizing. The school, situated in the segregated south, became a place where the Civil Rights Movement could be discussed during the turbulent years of the 1950s and 1960s, attracting influential leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt, and so on. He and Paulo Freire held conversations to share their beliefs about societal change (Horton, 1998; Horton and Freire, 1990).

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It would go between the notes about Marta Mata and Lorenzo Milani. 3 Lorenzo Milani (1923–67) directed the School of Barbiana in Tuscany, Italy. He based his work and writings on examining the role of class politics, imperialism, and the culture of militarization in education. He also explored ‘themes of learning and writing, peer tutoring, critical media literacy, and reading history against the grain’, all in the spirit of establishing ‘social justice-oriented critical pedagogy’ (Batini et al., 2014; Borg and Mayo, 2006). 4 A. S. Neill (1883–1973) founded the school that became Summerhill School in 1921 as an independent boarding school in England based on his educational belief that both students and faculty needed to operate by democratic governance (Neill, 1960).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to express my heartfelt thanks to Jameson Jones and Roger Reguant for transcribing the recordings of these conversations; to Dan Lubbs, for his constant technical support and suggestions; and to Shirley Steinberg for naming and guiding my own journey in critical pedagogy. Most of all, I express my deepest appreciation to Jurjo Torres Santomé and Ramón Flecha for giving me their time, their thoughts, and their friendship.

REFERENCES Althusser, L.(Ed.) (1976). Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État. (Notes pour une recherché). In Positions (1964–1975). pp. 67–125. Paris, France: Les Éditions Sociales. Batini, L, Mayo, P., & Surian, A. (2014). Lorenzo Milani, the School of Barbiana, and the struggle for social justice. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Bochner, A. P., & Ellis, C. (2016). Evocative autoethnography: Writing lives and telling stories. New York, NY: Routledge. Borg, C., & Mayo, P. (2006). Critical pedagogy and citizenship: Lorenzo Milani and the School of Barbiana. In C. Borg & P. Mayo (Eds.) ­Learning and social difference: Challenges for public education and critical pedagogy(Chapter 8). Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm.

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Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1970). La reproduction: Éléments pour une théorie du système d’enseignement. Paris, France: Les Éditions de Minuit. Ferrer i Guàrdia, F., & McCabe, J. (translation). (2014). The origin and ideals of the Modern School. [Kindle Christie Books version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com Flecha, R. (n.d.). Curriculum vitae. University of Barcelona, Department of Sociological Theory, Philosophy of Law, and Social Sciences Methodology. Retrieved from www. ub.edu/tsociologica/?page_id=254 Flecha, R. (2000). Sharing words: Theory and practice of dialogic learning. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Flecha, R., Gómez, J., & Puigvert, L. (2001). Contemporary sociological theory. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Flecha, R., Puigvert, L., & Rios, O. (2013). The new alternative masculinities and the overcoming of gender violence. International and Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Sciences, 2(1), 88–113. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.4471/ rimcis.2013.14 Horton, M. (with J. Kohl and H. Kohl) (1998). The long haul: An autobiography. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Horton, M., & Freire, P. (1990). We make the road by walking: Conversations on education and social change. (Eds.) B. Bell, J. Gaventa, & J. Peters. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Neill, A. S. (1960). Summerhill: A radical approach to child rearing. New York, NY: Hart. Paraskeva, J., & Torres Santomé, J. (Eds.). (2012). Globalisms and power: Iberian education and curriculum policies. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Tilley-Lubbs, G. A. (2017). Re-assembly required: Critical autoethnography and spiritual discovery. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Torres Santomé, J. (2018). Políticas educativas y construcción de personalidades neoliberales y neocolonialistas. Madrid, Spain: Ediciones Morata. Torres Santomé, J. (2008). Multiculturalismo anti-racista. Madrid, Spain: Ediciones Morata. Torres Santomé, J. (1991). El currículum oculto. Madrid, Spain: Ediciones Morata. Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labor: How working class kids get working class jobs. New York, NY: Columbia University.

35 Interviews with Marta Soler-Gallart and Teresa Sordé Martí M a r t a S o l e r - G a l l a r t a n d Te r e s a S o r d é M a r t í

This first interview was conducted by Joe Kincheloe while we were working in Barcelona with CREA, the Community of Research on Excellence for All (originally the Center of Research in Theories and Practices to Overcome Inequalities). As mentioned in the previous chapter by Kris Tilley-Lubbs, CREA was founded by Ramón Flecha. Joe interviewed Marta on her work with CREA and the importance of the work of Jesús ‘Pato’ Gómez. The contributions from CREA to not only Spain, but the European Union, Central and South America, Africa … the world, have exemplified critical pedagogy both in stellar, rigorous research and in real-life, on-theground critical work with marginalized peoples. Working with CREA (http://crea.ub.edu/ index/) is to experience humble, selfless commitment (srs, editor’s note).

MARTA SOLER: INTERVIEWED BY JOE L. KINCHELOE, BARCELONA, 2006 JK: Marta, it’s great to see you here. I’m interviewing Marta Soler who is the director of

CREA here in Barcelona at the University of Barcelona. And I’d like just to ask you a few questions and just to let the world know what you’re doing here. First of all, would you just explain to a lot of people who are in North America in particular and around the world, what is CREA and what is it that CREA has been doing in the context especially of critical pedagogy? Marta Soler: CREA is a research center. It’s a center of research in theories and practices that overcome inequalities. So, the main goal of CREA is social transformation. The main goal is to overcome inequalities. And all the research and projects that we are conducting, they are oriented not to study inequalities or the barriers that exclude these populations have, but how to overcome those barriers. So, this is the main goal of CREA and its bigger organization. And between those inequalities, we are working on many different diverse inequalities. For instance, one of the works that we do is on gender inequality, also culture inequality, educational inequality. Let’s say for instance about gender, we have been doing a lot of work on gender. Within CREA there is a group on gender issues. The name of women’s group is SAFO [En., Sappho]. And SAFO is working on overcoming gender inequality in the broad sense. For instance, working with other

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women, women who have been marginalized or at the border like Judith Butler says, at the borders of the society. Also, with gender violence, that’s another issue with which we work, also neo-­ masculinities, Roma women – these are the different topics that SAFO is working on. One of the main topics we’ve been working on is gender violence, including gender violence at the university. It’s one of the latest issues that we have. It has been very contested in our environment in Spain and it has got a lot of consequences. If I can keep going a little bit on that? JK: Yes, please. Marta Soler: For instance, what we’ve been doing on gender violence at the university – well, for us, it is very important as CREA that what we do in our research is coherent. What we do in our research center within CREA in our work, in the university, in our own lives so that there is coherence between what we say and the discourse, the critical discourse that we have and the work that we do, and that is very important, this kind of coherence. And because of this coherence, this sometimes, as many critical scholars had happen the same to them, causes also some people in CREA lots of problems. I’ve been listening to you saying that the critical scholars are often persecuted because they say things and they’re coherent with what they say, in the work that they do. In our case, for instance with the women’s group SAFO, we broke the silence about gender violence at university, in campus. So, that caused a lot of consequences because many people, they didn’t want us to break the silence. And the men who supported us, the women’s group, like for instance, the former director of CREA, Ramón Flecha, and Jesús Gómez, ‘Pato’ – they suffered a lot of persecution because, for instance, Ramón Flecha – with the institutional position being a director of a big research center – supporting that, he got a lot of attacks for that. So, these are the consequences of doing critical research and critical work, critical pedagogy work. But we think it’s worth it because we still have many women that are suffering gender violence, many Roma people who are being excluded in many locations. And we should keep with this coherence working like that. JK: I’m just so impressed with the work of CREA, the work of Ramón Flecha obviously over the years, and your work. You’ve done so many amazing projects over the last decade or so. How did you come to be a scholar of critical pedagogy? How did that happen in your life?

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Marta Soler: I think that’s a nice story. I was a student in the field of education myself at the University of Barcelona. So, I think it was through Paulo Freire. I was in my second year at the university and suddenly I had a professor, Professor Flecha, and he talked about Freire in class. In my second year, I have never heard a word of any of my professors about Paulo Freire. So, we read Freire. We talked about critical work and that’s why I discovered the world of critical pedagogy and transformative education. And, actually, he [Ramón] was the one, because when I studied – this was back in the 80s in Spain but also in Europe – it was a time of the peak wave of postmodernism. Like Freire, he had many followers in Europe and Spain in the 60s and 70s. But in the 80s, with the wave of postmodernism, many people said that we didn’t need the emancipatory discourse. That was not needed for the new society. So, we didn’t have to talk about inequality, we didn’t have to talk about – [we need a] different kind of discourse. And so, in that moment, nobody would talk about Freire at the school of education for instance. So, Ramón, he was keeping Freire alive. In the 80s, he made possible that Paulo Freire was awarded Doctor Honoris Causa at the University of Barcelona. And he’s the only one honoris causa that we have in the University of Barcelona in education and that was very good. And since then because of this hard work of having critical pedagogy alive, it has been developed further. That’s why I came to know that as a student. JK: So, it was in Ramón’s class that you found Paulo, in a sense? Marta Soler: Yes. JK: And then you met him several times when he came here and visited and taught and worked in the following years, right? Marta Soler: Yes, I met Paulo. It was in 1994 that CREA organized an international conference on critical pedagogy. And in this conference, we invited Paulo and also Donaldo Macedo, Paul Willis, different scholars from Europe and from – internationally. So, Paulo was here, and I met him here. A good story about this 1994 conference was that when we opened the conference, we had been talking a lot in CREA on how, in that moment, that there was this postmodern offensive [and] that a critical pedagogy needed to be alive; that people were saying that young people didn’t like this emancipatory discourse or critical pedagogy. That was for old people from the 60s, those of May ‘68.

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Then I was a student and had started in CREA, and Paulo was the one opening the conference. And I said, ‘Well, many people say critical pedagogy is for nostalgics of ‘68. I was not born in ‘68 and I’m here like many young people who was in the audience’. And that was big. I remember that Manuel Castells, the sociologist, he was next to me, and he was like, ‘Oh, that’s good’. And Freire also, he said that he liked that a lot, that youth was with the spirit and the ideas. It’s not a thing about age, it’s a thing about the ideas. Well, Freire used to say that, and Pato (Jesús Gómez), he always says, ‘Freire always says, “our youth, it’s linked to our ideas, not the age”’. JK: That’s beautiful. One of the things that I wanted to talk to everybody here at CREA about is Jesús ‘Pato’ Gómez who meant so much to so many of us and, of course, who died recently. We all are still not over it and we’ll never get over it. What did Pato and his work mean to you? What did you learn the most from Pato’s critical pedagogy? Marta Soler: Well, Pato, he was an initiator of some of the key work that we have been developing in CREA. For instance, the line of research on prevention of gender violence – part of this work is based on the theories of Pato, Radical Love and what he calls a preventive socialization of gender violence, how people are socialized in different ways of attraction. So, his theory of love and his support to the women’s group in the gender violence fight, or struggle I would say, that was very, very important for me and also for the women of CREA and CREA as a group. Another thing that Pato was developing strongly along with other scholars like Ramón and others was the methodology that we used in our research in CREA, which is critical communicative methodology. And most of our research on gender inequality or educational inequality, we used this approach which is putting into dialogue – I’ve listened to you talking about this – the scientific community. What we are doing in academia, combining the knowledge that we already have with the knowledge that is created by grassroots movements and by the disenfranchised, the excluded people that are also creating knowledge. So, putting into dialogue that knowledge; the interpretations that we have in the scientific community with the interpretations of the social actors. He [Pato] was developing this critical communicative methodology.

JK: It’s just amazing to me how brilliant he was in his work on love, his work on the communitive methodology will live on forever. I just want to thank you so much. I hope you know how much I appreciate you and how much I respect you and how glad I am that those of us in the Freire Project in Montreal are going to be working closely with you here at CREA. And I look forward to that so much and we are going to do some good things together. Marta Soler: Thank you. JK: Thank you so much, Marta. Thank you.

TERESA SORDÉ MARTÍ: INTERVIEWED BY FREIREPROJECT.ORG (FP), BAEZA, SPAIN 2009 Teresa attended the first gathering of the International Congress for Critical Pedagogy and Transformative Leadership held in Baeza, Spain, 10 months after the death of Joe Kincheloe. The Congress was created to commemorate the lives of Jesús ‘Pato’ Gómez, Paulo Freire and Joe Kincheloe. The three men were herculean in the world of critical pedagogy, yet, all three remained humble, vital, exuberant and dedicated to radical love, education for all, equity, literacy and life. To know these men was to indeed, love them and to honor them. Teresa’s work in CREA has often focused on the wellbeing and education for Roma peoples in general, and Roma women specifically. Both Marta and Teresa were inspired by their work with CREA and as a community, they have participated in essential legislation and scholarship dealing with ending gender-based violence (SRS, Editors note). Teresa Sordé Martí: My name is Teresa Sordé Martí. I’m from Catalonia. I work at the Autonomous University of Barcelona as a Professor at the Sociology Department. But I also collaborate with CREA for many years. FP: Tell us what CREA is again. Teresa Sordé Martí: CREA is the research center on theories and practices that overcome inequalities. It’s located at the Barcelona Science Park. This is part of the University of Barcelona. And it’s – I would say – the largest

INTERVIEWS WITH MARTA SOLER-GALLART AND TERESA SORDÉ MARTÍ

research center in the Spanish state that looks at how to overcome inequalities in different areas. So, from gender, from the women’s group to migration, migrants to Romani studies and that’s the area where I’ve been more involved. FP: How did CREA start? Teresa Sordé Martí: CREA started – actually, Ramón Flecha found it. And it just started as a reading circle, as a seminar. And we are still doing it. We call it our ‘seminar with the book in our hands’ because we get to read from Freire to Vivar to Adam Smith, Marsh [ph]. Many authors’ classical works that are important in social sciences but from a very interdisciplinary perspective. So, we get together – professors, students, grad, undergrads, everybody, people from the community. So, we all have read that book and we discuss based on the text. So, that’s why we say that we have the book in our hands. FP: So, you’re in Department of Sociology? Teresa Sordé Martí: Yes. FP: And what’s your area of interest? Teresa Sordé Martí: I’ve done a lot of work on Roma and Romani women, like how they organized themselves at the European level and how they are organizing to claim and to transform their community and society. I’ve done also work in education, social movements, social theory. FP: Our North American audiences know nothing about the Roma or some will, some will not. Can you tell us about the Roma? Can you give us – for somebody who doesn’t know anything. Teresa Sordé Martí: The Roma is an ethnic minority that immigrates from the northeast part of India around the centuries – we don’t really know – 9th, 10th, 11th century. And since then they have spread out all around the world. So, at the moment it is estimated that there are 12 million Roma in the world and 10 [million] of them live in Europe. So, that means that the Roma is considered the most important ethnic minority in Europe. FP: And in Spain, are they all across Spain or are they concentrated in places? Teresa Sordé Martí: You’ll find Roma communities all throughout the Spanish state but mostly the part of Spain where there are more Roma is in Andalusia. So, where we are. [AUDIO SKIPS]. And most of them are living – or victim of many discriminations and are located in many marginalized neighborhoods. So, even though they live in Europe, well – being society and very advanced that we

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have a lot of wealth, Roma are still an exception to this. There have been large part of Romani population that have not had access to quality education, to quality social services, to employment, et cetera. FP: The first time you read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, do you remember this? Teresa Sordé Martí: I think that it was in a CREA seminar that we read it. No, I think I first read A La Sombra De Este Arbol and then I read Pedagogy of the Oppressed. But it was at CREA seminar and then I did my PhD at Harvard, so I read it again in English and discussing it in the US context, so that was also interesting. So, I remember these two times discussing and reading it and feeling different. FP: How did you feel different? Teresa Sordé Martí: Well, I think that the discussions are different because of the history and the context and the experiences that people bring in. I remember at CREA, the discussion – in the US and they were very different, I don’t know. In the US there was all this praise [ph], theory behind. And I remember that it was in a critical theory class. It was very diverse environment, so it was different. FP: I’m really interested because this is one of the things which gets talked about is the North American – let’s put a real point on it, I mean, this sort of American – as Joe Kincheloe, our project founder, said, this appropriation of this Brazilian thing. But I wondered, does Spain feel that way about Paulo Freire’s work or have those concerns? Teresa Sordé Martí: That the US has taken… FP: That the US academia has somehow taken the ideas of Paulo Freire and applied it to its situation without maybe – now, maybe the next wave of critical pedagogy is to go back outside of its own borders and listen carefully to Indigenous people from around the world. Teresa Sordé Martí: If this is the case, I think, it’s good. It’s a positive move because I think that Freire sometimes is used as a framework to critique, but Freire does not stop at the critique. He also proposes. So, I like to have both, not only how we can overcome oppression but also how we can construct a better world and another world. So, I always like to keep in mind both the critique but also transformation. So, I feel that sometimes in the US, but also in Europe, the critique is much stronger than the constructive part. And at CREA, I think that we tend to focus on the constructive part, like how to overcome this. So, that would be a difference.

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FP: Tell us a little bit more about CREA and the constructive literacy circles – and you’re saying a book in hand. Teresa Sordé Martí: Well, the focus on overcoming inequalities is because we believe that the reality has already the solution to many of our problems. So, it’s a question of identifying them. For instance, to identify how learning communities are overcoming school failure among Roma students. So, to analyze why they are succeeding and try to extend the strategies that they use in another context, always in dialogue with the actors of that community. Never imposing it or just transposing from one context to the other, but always what has been considered that works and how it can be implemented in another context, but always with dialogue with the Romani families and the people from the community, with these two elements. FP: How big is the Romani community around Barcelona? Teresa Sordé Martí: Around Barcelona? FP: Or is CREA moving around the country? Teresa Sordé Martí: Yes, even Europe. We work with European projects that have focus on Roma. We are also very connected. For instance, at CREA, we are Roman and Romana researchers working on this area. And most of us are very connected to the Roma rights movement. We are advising them, having meetings with them, discussing. So, we are doing a lot of work supporting the movement. This collaboration is from the place where all our research project is tapped because we would never write a proposal, a research proposal, without having discussed the objectives, the work plan and everything with the communities. FP: So, tell us more about your work today. Teresa Sordé Martí: I was presenting today the work that we are doing with Drom Kotar Mestipen. That means, in Romano, Road to Freedom. And this is a Romani association of women. So, that means that it’s composed by non-Roma and Roma women from all ages and from all educational backgrounds. And this association has been founded ten years ago [now over 20 years, ed.]. And since then one of the projects that has been more successful has been the Romani women meetings. The idea of creating these meetings arose from the need to overcome the approaches that were used to overcome Romani absenteeism at the school. The idea is always that we need to convince, and we need to talk to the families to

convince them to bring their kids to school. And sometimes even the governments and the policy makers use force on families, like using legal tools or even through the police to push them to convince [them], because ‘they are the ones who have the problem because they don’t like school’. I mean, that there is no challenging of the school system and why they don’t like it. So, the idea of these meetings was to listen to them, to create a space where Romani women could speak up and could express what changes they think that should be made at the school level for them to be successful at the school. So, the Romani women meetings, we’ve been organizing 15 of them. They are always organized in predominantly Romani neighborhoods and always a local organizing committee is setup. They are the ones deciding everything – from the food, from the agenda of the meeting, from the place, everything is decided by these women. And from these meetings – from these local organizing meetings – many Romani women associations have been created. So, it’s also a way to organize them throughout the territory. And these meetings, it’s Saturday, that Romani women from all ages like grandmothers to children to girls get together and they have a whole day to discuss and to speak. So, that means that only women are invited, and Romani women have preference to speak over non-Roma because we have many spaces to speak about our problems as professionals, and they don’t. So, this space is very protected for them to speak and we listen – the professionals. We listen to their proposals. So, normally, there is a round table of role models like Romani women and Romani girls who have achieved some level of education, someone who has got to the university, who had finished high school, et cetera, and then we split in working groups. And these are the places where Romani women from all ages speak and discuss which changes need to take place at the school for being a different place that really serve their needs and their expectations towards the school. FP: I guess maybe this is a North American question, but is feminism something that you’re introducing to the Romani women or is this something that’s natural, that you’re already – what’s the dialogue on feminism? Teresa Sordé Martí: Well, I don’t think that we introduce it. It’s already there. And that’s what they call Romani feminism. And Romani

INTERVIEWS WITH MARTA SOLER-GALLART AND TERESA SORDÉ MARTÍ

feminism is defined from the Romani culture. And in a sense, they are giving us lessons of how to combine tradition and opportunities and how to [re]concile both their own way. So, you can see Romani grandmothers who are illiterate encouraging the younger ones to go to school and to continue with their personal lives and creating spaces where you can – you then need to choose between one thing or another and both can be possible, like personal and professional. They are already feminists, we are not introducing feminism. They have the Romani feminism at the core of these meetings. FP: And just talking about the work that CREA is doing as well concerning gender violence. And since you’ve been to North America, can you compare some of the gender issues and issues of feminism in Spain and North America? Where is Spain now? Teresa Sordé Martí: Well – you mean the gender violence issue? FP: Well, the gender violence but this must surely be associated with issues of feminism in the academe … Teresa Sordé Martí: Spanish universities are changing a lot. We say that now we are underway, the first revolution. We have finished with the feudal system. And that has been made mostly because of CREA’s women’s group because we were the ones denouncing that gender-based violence was also at the universities. Something that no one would imagine at the university, our ivory tower. These things don’t happen at the university – but they do and we all know. So, the work that we’ve done from this women’s group has made it possible, for instance, to denounce cases of gender violence at the university that we’re hiding that, that we’re silenced by the legal services, the university legal services, from the president of the university. There was complot, like a secret pact of silence that everybody was supposed to just ignore what was happening and just play the game in order for these

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cases that we were denouncing to come up and to go public. So, in a sense, I think that many of the changes that you find at the Spanish universities are due to this kind of work of speaking up and saying what is really happening. FP: So Pato, can you tell me a story or two or how’d you get to know him or… Teresa Sordé Martí: I first met Pato when I was a research assistant at CREA in 1997. And I remember that he came to the office and he was always happy and cheerful and make everybody laugh. So, that’s my memories of the first time I met Pato. But then we shared many things and many experiences that I wouldn’t know how from where to start. Pato is always remembered because he was very funny and because he was very generous. But behind this, there was a really great man who helped so many people throughout his life. He was always thinking how to help people but in a very diverse way like talking about our private life, our professional life, our well-being. He was an amazing person. I’m so glad that we are doing all this work not to forget him because I think it’s worth for the humanity to keep him alive like we do, like the same for Joe and Paulo. FP: What’s the lesson of Pato’s life? Is there a pedagogy of his life? Teresa Sordé Martí: Pedagogy. I think that it’s just that he was always giving everything, but not only taking you out for dinner. When I’m saying giving, it’s giving all his happiness and all his advice, all his knowledge or his experience. He was always sharing with all of us. I remember that he used to say to me that I was very lucky because – and I feel lucky – I got to talk and to discover the radical love very early in my life, not like him that he discovered later but he did. He did discover it, of course, with Lydia. But I remember that he used to say that I was very lucky because I could talk and discover and experience radical love early in my life, so I would say that this could be a good memory.

36 Interview with Henry A. Giroux Graham Jeffery and Diarmuid McAuliffe

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION When Henry Giroux is in dialogue, when he is riffing, he’s at his most powerful. This conversation took place at The University of the West of Scotland after Giroux received an honorary doctorate. As an homage to critical pedagogy it was appropriate that he speak in a dialogic fashion. Henry’s work is always an encounter. And if you haven’t felt like it was an encounter, you haven’t read it well enough. It’s not safe, it’s not simple, it’s not soft and it’s not complacent. When we encounter Henry’s work, it demands that we acknowledge histories, failures of our own education, perhaps our own pedagogies, and certainly we start to understand how power and position work in society. We begin to understand that teaching and pedagogy is an active resistance for teachers and for and with our students. We begin to understand that teaching and pedagogy is theoretical, complicated and intellectual. As an encounter with

Giroux, we find that it reminds us just how important our work is in classrooms, in communities and in our society. We must continually expect to challenge the norm, to stand up for justice and equality and equity and to work in solidarity with those who are also resisting. We must begin to understand what it is we know by knowing what we don’t know, that knowledge is both tentative and fluid, that change is part of pedagogy and that pedagogy above all else is a political act. It has been almost three decades since I met Henry on a cool autumn day at Miami University of Ohio. I realized at that first meeting that Henry embodies his own words and teachings, he is the man we hope he is when we read his work. That first read is a special moment. He’s always provocative, always engaged. He is a public intellect. His work challenges. It disturbs. It incises. It influences. It stimulates. It inspires, and it makes the difference. (SRS, Editors note)

INTERVIEW WITH HENRY A. GIROUX

Diarmuid: Shall we start? Okay. We’re going to go right back to 1983 to your publication. Yes? Theory and Resistance. Henry: That’s okay but it makes me seem very old. Diarmuid: Well our technical team will sort that. You essentially took off where Pedagogy of the Oppressed left off… And we are assuming that Paulo Freire was a mentor to you in your 15-year or so relationship. I want to actually refer to the foreword to Theory and Resistance. And let me just read what Paulo Freire said of your work at the time: ‘The seriousness of the writing, its clarity, its rigor, all had a deep impact upon me’. And this is Freire talking. ‘I read it, reread it with the same seriousness with which it had been written. Afterwards, I wrote to the editor of the journal stating that in my view, this article should have been published day before yesterday’. So the urgency that is in your work, we’ll see here this evening. Pedagogy of Opposition, as Theory and Resistance, was taking off from Pedagogy of the Oppressed as we’ve just said, looking back at this now. Yesterday, you talked about how memory produces hope for the students graduating: powerful. In what way do you see your memory of the early formative work that went on in Theory and Resistance producing any hope for you now? How do you see this work now looking back at it? Henry: First, for me, just to say something to the audience, I just want to thank you all for being here. I know that many of you have traveled enormously long distances. I’m just really humbled and grateful for that. I think that one of the things that you have to understand, at least I tried to understand, was that Theory and Resistance was a reaction to a very specific historical context in which I saw people engaging in a discourse that was opening up in new ways to show how domination works very specifically in schools. They were trying to shatter myths about meritocracy. They were trying to shatter the myths that school somehow was a dream machine in which matters of class and power and inequality were not really operative. And they did that well. There were people like Gintis and Bowles with Schooling in Capitalist America, and a whole range of other people who were writing in a similar vein. But there was something about the language that was mired in the discourse of domination. I wanted to challenge that discourse because it seemed to me that in many

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ways, what it lacked was a realistic assumption that with resistance has to come hope. And schools weren’t simply just boxes of domination. They weren’t just simply prisons. The prevailing discourse seemed to suggest that schools were iron boxes. And I often thought to myself, ‘What do you say to teachers who are working in those schools, right? Are they simply just prison guards?’ There was an enormous underestimation of the way in which people within very specific relations of domination often found spaces to challenge that domination. So I was increasingly concerned with how, within structures of domination there were opportunities to challenge, at the very least, forms of resistance both within those structures and outside of those structures. Now if you fast forward whatever it is, 40 years, I think we find ourselves in actually a more urgent place because it seemed to me in the 1980s… when I wrote Theory and Resistance… I wrote that book by hand, by the way. You know, writing and throwing pages away and trying to reformulate ideas. It wasn’t an era where information so overwhelmed you, that it was by its very nature fractured. There was a space for thoughtfulness. There was a space to sort of comprehend in a more totalizing way how ideas came together. There was a way of relating specifics to a larger sort of issues. And I think today that space is shrunken. And I think it’s much more difficult today to have a more comprehensive view about politics, about the various modes of resistance and how they interrelate, and more importantly how in fact diverse modes of resistance can be mobilized. It seems to me possibilities that are enormously important at this particular time in history are more difficult to imagine. Today we have to contend with the power of powerful dis-­ imagination machines. It is important to remember that C. Wright Mills wrote about cultural apparatuses and how powerful they were, right? He understood that domination never existed without ideological and affective dimensions. It is not just about economic structures, a position that the left it seems to me has reproduced for years and to their great disadvantage. But I think today we have something else going on. And I think today, the question of ideology, the question of emotion, the question of affect, the question of identity, the question of identification, the question of being able to put things together, the question of what it means to somehow move beyond a

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culture of immediacy and a culture of sensationalism offers a far more dangerous and poisonous notion of domination and makes resistance all the more difficult. We see it all over the place. I mean, especially as neoliberalism has exhausted its own ideology, right? Especially as the culture has become so hard, especially as fascism now has come out of the closet and now moves from the fringes of society to the center of society. These ideologies are right in your face. They’re not hiding anymore. But that’s all the more reason to re-theorize not just simply resistance, but I would think to re-theorize the notion of politics itself and what it means. And I don’t think you can do it without the question of memory. I don’t think you can do it without a sense of historical consciousness. I don’t think you can do it… I’ll give you a classic example. There’s this enormous debate going on in the United States. An enormous debate going on whether he’s a neo-fascist or whether Trump is a clown or whether we’re really in a new era of fascism per se. And it seems to me that what that debate misses is that fascism doesn’t stand still. It emerges in different forms. That the elements of totalitarianism as we saw them in the 1920s, the 1930s, are not reproducing themselves in ways that are mimicked exactly, but they are reproducing the principles of the social relations that we often find that add up to what I call new forms of authoritarianism. I think that Theory and Resistance is interesting in the title and also in the implication. And that is… forgive me for this, but we can’t have resistance without theory, I’m sorry. You have to think through in some way what you’re going to borrow from history, what you’re going to learn from history, what is it about history that teaches us something about what it means to be an agent in a new set of social and political contexts so we can act on that knowledge thoughtfully. There is an enormous degree of mystification that takes place politically today which confuses experience with knowledge. Experience has to take a detour through theory. It has to take a critical tour through theory itself. Experience does not speak for itself. And when politics collapses simply into experience, it means the only politics you have is the politics of the personal, and I think we have to be very careful with that, and I think that that title in some way represents a challenge to that position. Graham: You’re running ahead into my second question. You’re way ahead of me, about five miles ahead of me. That’s kind of what I expected.

Graham: That’s alright. One argument about education is that it’s always about the future because it’s about enabling people to face the future. And in your recent work, you present a vision of the future which is frankly pretty dystopian. If things don’t work out well, disposable futures, we see whole populations, young people, the disabled, people of color, poor people written off, just kind of left to fester while minorities get richer, etc. I want to just explore a couple of things. Firstly, what do you think are the consequences of this attitude that regards people as disposable, because obviously that runs counter to all the things any mainstream educator would say. All educators will hold up this idea of equal opportunity, every child born equal, every child born into a state where they might have… We want as educators for people to reach their potential. But we’re facing a society which, if you’re right, is writing off those people almost before they had a chance to even get to one years old. So that thing about the centrality of pedagogy and education to politics. And secondly, there’s this question of the relationship of the past and the present and the future that we have to deal with as educators. We’re kind of always pivoting on that. I mean that’s why I’ve said you’re five miles ahead of me because you’ve kind of explained it already, but you were always pivoting on that question of how do we work with the past and the present, which is all we’ve got, but we then work to try and face the future as educators. So, disposability and the future. Henry: Let me take the first question first. I think that when somebody says to me that your work is enormously dystopian, I think that my first response is that my analysis is of a new dystopia that has an urgency that needs to be addressed in ways that necessitate a sense of hope and possibility. You can’t fight what you don’t see. And it seems to me that you have to recognize the changing historical conditions that are producing new forms of domination in order to address them in ways that would be effective. My argument about a new dystopia or dystopian forces is that they have taken on elements of a notion of domination that are more intense and expansive than anything we’ve seen before. Because when we talk about injustice today, we’re not just talking about the old Marxist line about exploitation, you know that workers are being

INTERVIEW WITH HENRY A. GIROUX

exploited. We’re talking about people being literally excluded, you know literally seen as excess, being seen as disposable. And whether you want to talk about the new technologies, you want to talk about the ruthlessness of financial capital, you to talk about the rise of artificial intelligence and what that portends, you should also talk about the fact that you have 3 people in the United States who control half of all the wealth or you have 8 of the richest people in the world controlling half the world’s wealth and clearly what that represents for power is another question. But I think that unless we confront that notion of dystopia and how it changes, we find ourselves seduced by a logic that drives all forms of what I would call oppression, and that is to make power invisible, if not normalized. And you have to make power visible. You can’t confront it unless you have a sense of what it does. And I think we’re in a new period where it… politically… my argument… and this is not my argument. A lot of people have talked about this, everybody from Bauman to Balibar. But you know, we’re in a period in which because of the rise of the financial sector, power is global and politics is local. I mean these people don’t care about anything regarding the state except the state has now two functions: to manage their financial interests and to punish people who basically don’t agree with their market driven world view. That’s why in the United States for instance, you have the two biggest forces in the United States are the military and prisons. They complement each other. They’re both sides of the death of the social state and the rise basically of the punishing state. And so that notion of dystopia is far from dystopian in the sense that you’re talking about… I think you’re suggesting in terms of how people would read it, it’s really an attempt to in some way come to grips with these new forces that we find ourselves confronting.   The second part of the question, is that one of the things that is new politically in terms of its acceleration and that we see that has much greater valence and intensity is the power of neoliberal ideology and its its ability to depoliticize people. I’ll tell you a two-minute story about something that changed my mind that was very helpful in my understanding what I’m about to tell you. I had operated under the assumption that a lot of young people because of the terrible conditions in

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which they find themselves will automatically be resisting a kind of neoliberal affect that individualizes everything. All problems are reduced to problems of character. You’re homeless because you like to be outdoors. If you’re poor, your poverty is cool. If you’re unemployed, it’s because you don’t have time to fill out an employment application. This is a collapse of the public into the personal. This is a refusal to translate private issues into larger systemic considerations. It forces upon people the horrible, horrible assumption that whatever they have to confront, they have to blame themselves for. They’re responsible for whatever condition they find themselves in. There’s a book called Coming Up Short which is an ethnography that was done of four, five communities in the United States in which the author went in and talked to workingclass kids. I thought these kids, man, they have to be on the cutting edge of politics, right? I made a terrible mistake, and the mistake was that harsh and cruel capitalist relations have a good chance of opening up progressive political insights. And it doesn’t. And I found that out in particular with this book. Every one of those kids blamed themselves. Living in dire conditions, on welfare, they can’t get jobs. All the conditions that trap people into a notion of time in which time is entirely a burden. A burden. One of the great myths of neoliberalism is that choice is like a drug you can take that liberates you. But you cannot talk about choice, if you don’t talk about constraints. If you eliminate the constraints, and choice becomes an abstraction that simply imposes violence on people because it hides the concreteness of the events that bear down on their lives that don’t give them much choices. It seems to me that what struck me reading Coming Up Short that is more urgent and something that I have been writing about for 40 years, is that education is central to politics. If we don’t know how to change consciousness, if we don’t know how to provide a language that’s accessible, if we can’t speak and write and work with people in which they could recognize their problems in the languages that we’re producing, we’re going to lose them and they’re going to find a sense of community and hope somewhere else. And they found it in the Trumps. They find it in a kind of right-wing populism that is saying ‘Hey, look, the financial elite have let you down. Be angry at Blacks’. This is all about the politics of displacement. And it seems to be that this suggests there is something about the notion

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that education that is central to politics that is so radical because it upends a whole range of assumptions that a lot of leftists have in some way believed in for years. And that is that these structures are so oppressive, they often say things like this: they say, ‘Well, let the conditions get so objective and so bad that people will automatically work on the left’. Not only is that position wrong. It’s cruel. I mean, it’s just cruel. The other side of this is that it means in some way you have to move into context in which there are real people. I mean, this is what serious educators do. I mean, you actually talk to people. You understand what the forces are that is shaping their lives so you don’t bring the problem to them. They bring the problem to you so you can both try to theorize this in ways that make sense to their lives. I told you this story last night. If you don’t mind them… I’m sorry. I hope I’m not boring you. But my father… he worked in a factory, right? He made chemicals, a working-class guy. And he came home one day and he said, ‘Henry, these guys from SD something came to the factory’. You know, SDS, right? (Students for a Democratic Society.) But they came to the factory and he said, ‘They’re talking about some guy named Mao Tse Tung. And they’re talking about how he put the alphabet in the back of people who are fleeing in the mountains’. And I tried to explain what this is about. And he asked, ‘Why don’t they talk to me about the fact that the factory’s polluted? Why don’t they talk to me about the fact that we’re underpaid here? Why don’t they talk to me about the fact that we’re being exploited and the union is being destroyed? Why don’t they talk to me about the fact that we have no wages and we’re barely surviving?’. That’s the question, right? I mean, the question is how do you touch people’s lives in a way that doesn’t allow them to believe you simply narrating yourself in a way that mimics one’s own stooge. He’s talking about alternatives and fake news. What happens when the abstract actually evolves into a form of violence? Graham: Well you’re prefiguring the next question. Diarmuid: I think anyone that saw that first slide and you’ll see it again at the end of the session, you will see how you’ve used visuals very effectively to kind of illustrate a point or two in your books. If we just look at this next slide, which is hard or to realize in a way… [indicates towards slide of Grenfell Tower in flames] Diarmuid: I want to take you to this notion of making power visible. You talk about it in

your most recent work. Is this critical pedagogy in action? If you think about what happened in the deep South when the levees broke, they immediately…institutions such as Teachers College in New York embarked upon a curriculum project called Teaching the Levees, and others. I was very impressed with that, I was thinking, really, as teachers, should we be responding in this kind of way? For example, what might teaching Grenfell Tower look like? If we’re really serious about critical pedagogy, what about the application? Henry: I’d be happy to answer that question. What happens when you’re a student in a school and you turn on the media after you leave, and there’s a building burning in your neighborhood and people are jumping out the windows. And you go back to school the next day and there’s a kind of silence about a form of violence that has taken place, in which people literally have been murdered because of the inexcusable irresponsibility on the part of people wedded to a form of neoliberal capitalism that thrives on creating unsafe conditions for people in some of the most extreme examples, that stuff becomes visible. School becomes irrelevant. It becomes dead time. I don’t know what it means to separate pedagogy from questions of economic and social justice while not collapsing them into simply that. And I also don’t know what it means not to be able to teach in a way in which teaching has some relevance to the kind of experiences that kids in some way engage in their every day lives. For instance, the academy it seems to me has become, in the United States and increasingly across Canada, incredibly irrelevant. It’s not just old. It’s just irrelevant. I mean people are writing books for five other people. The language of theory has become the language of a kind of secular religion rooted in narrow orthodoxies that ignore the obligation of educators to write and address social problems that move the public and make clear that education is a public good. We have new forms of theocracy emerging in the disciplines that strike me as both narrow in focus and irrelevant when it comes to addressing the public good. And I think that that question goes to the heart of the most central question of all, and that is what’s the role of education? In this case, institutionalized education. And what’s the role of pedagogy? What does it do that makes a difference? I mean, how do you make something meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative. This is right out of Theory and Resistance. Probably the best sentence in the book for me.

INTERVIEW WITH HENRY A. GIROUX

That is, how do you make something meaningful to make it critical, to make a transformative? How do you do that? What kind of pedagogical challenges does that suggest without reducing it simply to a pedagogical issue? How do you change the structure of the school? How do you fight the forces that are imposing austerity measures on the school? How do you work with other teachers to create an environment in which a formative culture exists that’s vibrant and alive and sparks kids’ imagination? What do you do to in some way teach, to convince young people that they don’t have to be simply consumers, that they can also be socially engaged citizens? Because remember in the end, pedagogy is a fight over modes of agency, not just the future. It’s a fight over how we’re going to define, how relationship to ourselves, others, and the larger world, how people are going to be agents in the world in which they are going to inhabit when they leave that school and what it’s like in that school. I grew up as a working-class kid in a public school. It was called Hope High, ironically. I’ve walked into them and told them to change to Hopeless High. We were enormously tracked. I was in the lowest group. We understood the violence of that school. I mean the only hope I had and the only reason I went to college was because I had a basketball scholarship. But there was a kind of recognition of symbolic and intellectual violence in that school that we understood but we didn’t have the language to articulate. And it seems to me that when you ask that question, and I’m not being… I’m sorry. I’m trying to connect something here. I mean when you ask that question about well, what do we do about this? I mean, I guess there are three issues for me. One, in light of legitimized violence, what role does the school have to address that? Secondly, what role does the school have to inculcate in students the need to struggle over what it means to fight for a democracy that is never given? And thirdly, it seems to me there’s the question of how are we going to educate young people to be able to translate private issues into larger public concerns. And maybe fourthly, how are we going to convince them they can never just do it alone, that this is a collective endeavor. This is about modes of solidarity. Especially as they grow up in a culture which says that the only obligation of citizenship they have is to shop and to use their iPhone, and go online. That’s a real challenge. Graham: I want to take you on actually, because again, you’re anticipating slightly

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where we’re going, which is great. When I read Border Crossings, I’d have to say it completely changed my conception of what being a teacher and educator could be. Henry: You are being too kind. Graham: Seriously, it’s a great book. And we were talking about this last night. It was certainly 15 years ahead of it’s time and it’s still very, very current. And arguably, since 1993, our institutions have become even more porous, even more slippery, and we’ve all, as teachers, educators, activists, social workers, whatever we are, have had to become even more slippery shapeshifters in order to survive as well, because we’re working across even more borders and even more boundaries. There are even more borders constantly having to be crossed partly in order to do this work, because it’s about a connective kind of politics. On the one hand there is enormous potential for new forms of pedagogic partnership, engaged pedagogy out there, getting people out of institutions and into society, those connective pedagogies that you describe in the book. And technology facilitates that through media, internet, etc. Also, we can acknowledge the fact that inclusion in education has brought more people in. The idea is, you know, our universities are more diverse than they were 15, 20 years ago. There are more people going. So, on one hand, that’s really positive. On the other hand, there’s this absolute tightening of focus where any kind of education is regarded as kind of an individual career investment, a privatization of the self and the privatization of education. It’s Freire’s banking model. So we have this kind of tightening of vocational focus. At the same time, there’s an opening up of the possibility of what education could be. So how do you reclaim that idea that of education as a space of possibility for acts of radical imagination, because that’s where you can find that utopian stuff. What kind of border crossers do we need to be now? Henry: I think that’s a question that suggests something about the shifting nature of historical contexts. And I think that in many ways maybe the first response to that would be we no longer should assume that education and schooling are the same thing, that education is now so powerful and so widespread that there’s been a fusion of power, politics, and culture in

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everyday life that now has become truly an apparatus of domination. And yet at the same time, it seems to me that it suggests… we’re not really talking about borders anymore. We’re talking about walls. I think if I were to write that book today, maybe the title would be Crossing the Walls, Demolishing Walls. Whether we’re talking about Israel or we’re talking about the United States, this logic of exclusion and disposability is very clear, whether we’re talking about mass incarceration, or whether we’re talking about the refugee crisis. Clearly, there is an attempt on the part of the punishing state to reinvent a notion of exclusion that becomes normalized while it’s rooted in the most despicable language of hate and bigotry. And I think that’s one side of that dystopian imagination that we have to address. The politics of disposability is more widespread. It’s more open. It’s more visible. It’s more arrogant. And it has no interest in self-reflection or critique. It serves very powerful interest. The other side of this is that the spaces of resistance are actually multiplying in ways that suggest two or three modes of opposition that I’m particularly concerned about. One is, what does it mean not to run away from the structures of domination that already exist and to work within those structures with one foot in and one foot out? To say, ‘Hey, look, we need to keep the resistance alive. This is a long-term goal. This is not about reform. It’s about restructuring. But we need to in some way be able to mobilize people in those structures because the people who are in them, the consequences for them are everyday’. It’s like saying, ‘Well, you really want to support the welfare system when that might support capitalism?’. I don’t want people to starve tomorrow. I’m sorry. I realize it when people are taking more food stamps within a week, you have people who are making the choice between taking their medicine and eating food. So yeah, I am concerned about that in the most immediate sense, but to be concerned about that in the immediate sense is not to say that you give up in the long-term sense about being able to actually restructure the system, fundamentally change the system. So, one foot in and one foot out. The other system is that we need to educate young people. We need to educate people to be cultural producers and not just simply be called critics. And I think we need to do that because the technology that now exists has a possibility for a multi-

plicity of public spheres that basically offer for the first time, opportunities for discourses that were impossible 30 years ago. When I first started teaching and writing, when people like Noam Chomsky, Stanley Aronowitz, Carol Becker, Angela Davis, and others were producing important theoretical work and important forms of criticism that were both comprehensive and accessible. I mean when this was all the start of an important democratic movement in the United States that signified at the very least two things. In the 1960s, there was a democratic revolution across a whole range of institutions, that signaled not only that there were enormous opportunities to mobilize people around questions of resistance, whether you’re talking about civil rights, you’re talking about gender equity, you’re talking about the gay rights movement, but also that you can create your own spaces to do this. You don’t have to work then establish spaces in order to do this. We didn’t have the internet. The media was completely dominated by conservative and corporate interests making it difficult for those of us on the left to get published. I was publishing in journals that had circulations of like ten. I mean nobody read them… It was almost impossible to get our work out. And the liberal journals hated what we did. I mean they wouldn’t publish Chomsky. The Nation, which is really as radical as Ivanka Trump, published one review of my book in 35 years. ‘Common Dreams’, if you plug it in there, put my name, search it. Nothing. Nothing. This is the liberal media now. But you go to Truthout, CounterPunch, Truthdig, Rise up Times, and Alternet. The circulation of my work, and this is as a public issue, not a private issue, if I published my articles today, in the first week, I sometimes get about 5,000 hits. Five thousand. When I was publishing in the 70s and the 80s and up until the early 90s, if 50 people read anything I wrote, I felt good. There is a different kind of space available today. And here’s the third issue. The third issue is that these spaces offer modes of collaboration for people to make different interventions and to produce new forms of cultural pedagogical work that I think are astonishing. I mean, what you showed me last night (work from a graduate student1)…I mean my God, going in with this visual media, taking pictures of slums or so-called ghetto areas and portraying people as only disposable and only victims of no sense of agency, using

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those images tend to talk to people and say, What do you think about this representation? And how can we use this? How does this offer a dialogue? It’s a new world for the possibility to educate people. I’m not pessimistic to be honest with you. I’m not going to underestimate the fact that fascism is emerging in places all over Europe, in the world, but It seems to me at the same time, there are other forces emerging. Politicians such as Bernie Sanders are moving towards socialist issues, which is remarkable for the United States at this time. I think that when you see the emergence of young people who are saying, ‘Why have we been written out of the script of democracy? Why are people telling me that I have to live with my parents for the next twenty years in their basement, maybe playing video games? Why do I have to have a life burdened by loans that will take away any sense of public service forever. Why do I have to find myself living in a world in which the notion of selfinterest is elevated to the only value that matters?’. They were not buying it, you know, and they don’t think in silos. They think collaboratively. They think, they break down the interdisciplinary barriers. The questions that students ask me today are so much more sophisticated than the questions they asked me 30 years ago, because I’ll tell you why. They don’t realize even now how worldly they are. For all the forces of privatization, commodification, and deregulation, these kids are worldly in a cosmopolitan way that needs… how do you say it? A more formative kind of theoretical apparatus to bring that stuff together. Diarmuid: Literacy strategy running in Ayrshire. Diarmuid: Ayrshire, which is just that territory over there where we have a campus, our School of Education is based there. They’ve adopted this notion of making thinking visible. They’ve tried everything in terms of literacy strategies, and they’ve failed. These are really poor neighborhoods we’re talking about. So they’ve looked at the arts to help out and to see if you do make power visible, if you do make thinking visible, what impact can it have on children’s literacy in a sense if that’s not too particular? Henry: You want to ask that question? Diarmuid: I do want to ask. I do. It’s this idea of privileging image over a text we talked about earlier. It might get us somewhere. Henry: Let’s begin with something basic and fundamental regarding a dominant percep-

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tion of literacy and then I want to move to that question specifically. A lot of people think that literacy is about learning skills and simply about learning knowledge. To me, that’s only a precondition for what literacy really means, and I can thank my mentor Paulo Freire for this. What it really means is that you provide the positions in the formative culture; the knowledge and skills and the values for young people to be able to intervene in the world and learn how to govern rather than be governed. That’s a very different notion of literacy. Literacy in this sense always is a political act. It’s a political act which means that one appropriates, learns, and gauges, uses the tools that expands the possibility of both relating to the self, to others, and to the larger world. I think the other side of this, while there are many, many programs that are concerned about literacy, these programs seem to be more concerned about getting people to think critically than to act responsibly. And I think what that means is that they individualize these programs in ways in which they don’t talk about critical consciousness. They talk about critical thinking. They’re still talking about a skill. Deconstruct this, understand that text, how do you read this against that? There’s nothing wrong with that. But it seems to me that for many kids, (a) that stuff is often almost entirely grounded in print culture, a culture that many kids now have some trouble with. And secondly, it’s it doesn’t expand the possibility for moving from what I would call an isolated sense of agency to a more collective sense of agency. One that sees the world not as a recipe of methods that we call literacy instruction, but as a way of reading the world in a complicated way that’s visual, that employs print culture, that somehow uses the tools of technology to somehow relate actually to kids’ lives. But you also have to remember, we are talking about literacy as one fundamental element of what I would call the formative culture that we need to produce, to undo the dis-imagination machine, to liberate the imagination rather than kill it. And I wouldn’t want to suggest that literacy is basically the only tool that does that. I think it’s one tool of many that has to be put in place. You understand what I’m getting at? I think when you focus too heavily on one tool, regardless of how expansively you want to define it, that often can be a recipe for failure, because I’ll give you an example. Teachers find themselves in school saying,

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‘This notion of literacy is fabulous. I’m going to make these interventions in my classroom’. It’s like the vice principal that I used to have, right? This is really revolutionary: I used to put kids in a circle and rent films from the Quakers. And then we’d watch these films and talk about them. He’d come in and pull me out of the class, come to me at the end of class, and he’d say things like, ‘I don’t want kids in a formative circle, they should be sitting in rows’. This kind of neofascist nonsense. Pedagogies of oppression, that’s all they really were. They were disciplining pedagogies. And it was very clear to me that I couldn’t do this alone. That as important as these approaches might be, I had to create in solidarity with other teachers the room to be able to challenge these structures that limited what I did. And when you look at the emergence today in countries all over the world of these audit cultures…the culture of education has now become the culture of business. Makes a very powerful ideology that operates at multiple levels of power and embraces multiple social relationships. I mean, you have to have collective struggles to change those structures to make those interventions more than simply remote…how might we say it? Aestheticized, romanticized pedagogical interventions. Graham: And those are rich pedagogical interventions themselves. We’re living in this utterly saturated kind of media scape, which is very, very bamboozling, even for the best of us trying to figure out how to kind of navigate it. And if you think about media almost in a McLuhan sense of central nervous system, and to me I think is often governed much by emotions, we’ve talked about this a little bit before, the people are tweeting and retweeting and responding incredibly quickly. When we have a politics based on that kind of emotional logic which goes back to, I guess, things like Reagan’s 1984 ad, ‘It’s morning again in America’, which was, on one level, a vacuous kind of portrayal of an imaginary future, and at another a very powerful pull on peoples’ emotional heartstrings, which generates a certain kind of hope, I guess. You’re talking about how we build alternative media, alternative structures. In a sense, we’re battling it out in this spectacular society with these mediascapes and people like him [pointing to image of Fox News presenter Sean Hannity on screen] screaming that we’re all left-wing lunatics for even thinking that we could chal-

lenge it. What do you think? What forms of media can cut through this? Where are the media strategies? And literacy is a strategy. Literacies, archives, memories. There’s a whole set of tactics and strategies that people can use to challenge this hegemonic ideological apparatus that we’re all subject to. Henry: I think we’re in an age when the possibility of being guerilla pedagogues is probably more optimum than it ever has been before. I love the reference to Reagan. He’s just a politician who hates the public, hates notions of solidarity in the interests of the common good, and believed in a view of society that enshrines isolated entrepreneurship. But Reagan was smart. Reagan used the notion of hope in an emotional appeal to basically cover up a very dystopian understanding of the social order. I mean, you know, he hated Blacks, he hated poor people, he hated students. Like that long legacy that’s informed the Democratic and Republican party. This is a party of financial elites–this is the party of Goldman Sachs. I mean, you know, I think we have to go back to something even earlier to understand this. Remember, something happened in the 60s that launched new forms of what I call the counterrevolution. And what happened in the 60s was that all of a sudden, you had an enormous number of groups wanting to democratize the university, wanting to democratize all kinds of public spaces. An enormous philosophy of the cultural revolution, in a way that Mao would never have anticipated—much more democratic, much more intense, much more widespread. And I think that out of that, you have in the 1970s, the emergence of something called the Powell Memorandum. Then you have the Trilateral Commission. The Powell Memo was written by conservatives in the 1970s who were saying things like, ‘There’s been an excess of democracy in the United States. We have to stop this. We have to stop this. And we stop it because we’re going to fight on the battleground of ideas. We’re going to create anti-public intellectuals, we’re going to create all kinds of conservative institutions and foundations, the Olin and Heritage Foundations. These are going to be global, we’re going to take over the media’. And they actually said this. If you go back and read the Powell Memo, it’s all right there. It’s very clear. Only about four or five pages. And then you have the Liberals, the trilateral commission comes along, and says, Wow, we have to stop this because the writers considered any form of

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militant democracy as dangerous. The only relationships that really matter are commercial relationships. And we have to keep Blacks and minorities really out of positions of power. With that said, now the question becomes what kind of magic tricks do you perform in the realm of a battleground of ideas that fed people what Huxley called soma, a drug that made people happy while putting them in a kind of ideological coma. That would actually allow them to believe stuff that is antithetical to any sense of possibility for emancipation or agency, and they did it. They really understood how education works in the worst possible sense. They created the era of dis-imagination machines, machines that basically stripped the imagination of any sense of possibility while at the same time imposing in the name of hope a dystopian logic that was dreadful for everyone—for the planet, for Blacks, for minorities, for working people. But they got it, right. I mean, they understood that with the language of critique, there had to be a language of hope, because they knew that as time went on, there would be a hardening of the culture. And they knew that somehow a language that was emerging that was so cruel, ‘The poor people are stupid. People on welfare are lazy’. They took the question of character, they individualized the social, and they created an ecology of oppression around a wide ideological spectrum that actually worked. It seems to me now in reference the way you go with that is that not only does that language have to be challenged. Think about what they did with the language with the left. They took questions like freedom and reduced it to the freedom to consume. The freedom not to be involved with government except when it serves elite financial interests. They took the language and they repositioned it to serve their own interests. What happens at a time in history when one of the great challenges that we face is putting substance back into language? What does it mean when language has been so emptied out, that it becomes either meaningless or misrepresents the truth? Does that mean that we need a resurgence of a kind of ideological struggle that in some way can be both critical and hopeful rather than doctrinaire? Does it mean that we have to create social relationships that in some fundamental way represent the concrete alternative invisibility of what that hope looks like? Does it mean that in some way we need to reinvent new motions

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of solidarity? And does it mean that we need to invent the politics that’s not just simply local but also global? I think so. Diarmuid: This following quote, Henry, really does resonate with me. And I’ve used it in a recent piece of writing I’ve been doing for Scottish teachers. And I quote, it’s from Border Crossings, 2005. ‘No tradition should ever be seen as received because when it is received, it becomes sacred. Its term suggests reverence, silence, and passivity. Democratic societies are noisy. They’re about traditions that need to be critically re-evaluated by each tradition, each generation even’. For the next generation of educators, how do we make it troublesome, noisy, and difficult? Because in fact, that’s a question that we really struggle with here in Scotland. Graham: We’ve got a lot of very fearful people, and I think people working…young people starting out in these slippery difficult institutions with all these neoliberal regimes they’ve got to navigate, with one foot in, one foot out. We’re all aware of the politics. We know what it takes to kind of survive in these institutions. So, where does the courage come from? Henry: I’ll tell you I’m going to be giving a story to answer that, and the overall category I’m going to use is called flipping the script. I think when you grow up in a society where people define you entirely by your deficits, the language of hope rings hollow. And I think that in many cases, and I’ll give an example of how that worked for me. I was a working-class kid who just didn’t have the language. I just, largely and really believed what they said about me, that I was dumb, I was stupid, too emotional, angry, all the kinds of things that they say about working-class kids male and female, that really is not only an attack on identity but really an attack on a very powerful sense of self-esteem, and a very powerful sense of what it might mean to be able to use what is considered a deficit, as an asset. Something happened in my life in which… and I’m not going to go to the particulars, but at some point, what became clear to me is that what they defined as worst parts of me were the best parts. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, we had a sense of solidarity, we looked out for each other. When people got sick, families came together and they fed them. We never acted as if we were alone. We were part of a larger community. We were always humble. We realized that people intervened in different ways with

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different narratives. And we understood that…but at the same time, we didn’t romanticize, we knew there was violence, there was racism, there was sexism. But as I increasingly moved away from that and flipped the script, I became more self-critical about my own past and the complicated nature of that past, but the best sides of that were redeemed. And that’s a great challenge for educators. The challenge is to create the formative culture in which you can basically flip that script for kids and say, ‘Cut the crap. You don’t want to believe this stuff. You’ve got an enormous sense of possibility and agency and a… great capacity for creativity. You can do this. You will do it with other people’. We have to work hard. We have to focus. We have to learn skills. And we’ll do it, because if we don’t do it, we’re going to be implicated in systems of domination that’s going to not just ruin our lives, they’re going to ruin our kids’ lives. They’re going to ruin future generation’s lives. And it seems to me that if I been impressed by anything in the last 40 years, I’ve always been impressed by the way in which working-class people respond with passion and a sense of struggle to the problems they face as opposed to people who basically go home at night, there’s a coffin open, they put a cigarette in their mouth, they close the door, they come out in the morning, and then they manage a university.

AUDIENCE QUESTIONS Speaker 1: I want to ask how we reimagine the curriculum we actually have, not the curriculum…the utopian curriculum we dream of. In the example of Grenfell, I suggested a couple of weeks ago at the European Curriculum Studies Conference that what the children of Kensington and Chelsea should do is not boycott schools the way the Sandy Hook kids did in New York. They should go back and study King Lear, text for A level English, because King Lear is a play about homelessness, of an unaccommodated man written after the passage of the first vacancy acts in England. How do we carry on that kind of meaningful tasks that teachers and learners can perform every day in our schools? Henry: I think the first thing we have to fight for is to recognize that there is a curriculum in

place as you would say, already, that really is part of what I would call the horror of a pedagogy of disciplinary oppression, that it doesn’t liberate the imagination. It doesn’t allow teachers to have the autonomy to be able to work with Shakespeare or any other text in which they can make that come alive for kids in a way that relates to their lives. And I think to the degree that those structures bear down and what we do as teachers and prevent us from doing that, there’s not only a great injustice being committed against both the autonomy of teachers, the notion of a democratic school, and the possibility of what kids could learn, but there’s also a refusal to take traditional forms of knowledge in the past and reinvent them. I’m not somebody who believes that the only thing you can begin with is experience and talk about that. Experience has to be informed. It has to be rooted in other traditions. It has to wrangle with those traditions. Nothing can be sacred. And I don’t mean that we don’t have reverence, right? I mean the highest form of legitimacy, the highest form of what I would I would call respect, is the ability to ask questions, is the ability to work in a culture of questioning in which we’re allowed to take the practice of freedom seriously. Remember, pedagogy under Paulo Frere was not simply about critical consciousness. It was about the practice of freedom. That’s different. That’s a different concept. That’s about creating a whole range of conditions in which people can learn from each other, people can ask particular kinds of questions, people can experiment with text. It also means that we break down the borders and the barriers that say that, ‘Well, that text belongs in so-and-so. That text is for English teachers, that’s not for me’. I don’t understand what it means not to mind the past to the best that we can and use it in the best possible way. I want kids who are historically informed. I want to see kids who are literate in the broadest possible way. I want to see kids who have an understanding of the world in which when they talk about technology, they can place it within a context that’s informed for them so that they cannot just talk about it in instrumental rational terms, they can also talk about it in ethical and political terms. And I think that that’s what that kind of pedagogy does. Speaker 2: I teach journalism. I’m really interested in discussions around the spaces which you talked about that technology is enabling

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us as a society to create, to extend discourses. Because what I sometimes find quite troubling is that any spaces that we have created, that now exist for us, where freedom of expression is a fantastic thing, but it can also give rise to alarming expansions of bias, bigotry, and racism. It strikes me that the media landscape at the moment, the news media landscape has become enormously selfregarding, and that does not necessarily always serve with practices of democracy well. What we need is a journalism that remains itself in society. That has to be ‘other-regarding’. It has a public sense of duty in some respects. And this question is more about how we keep on teaching, because I’m teaching students to be journalists with responsibility. So where do you think we sit in terms of enabling these young people to understand this? Henry: I don’t think that when we’re talking about democratic spaces, we’re talking about balance. We’re talking about commitment and truth. I think that’s different, right? With a small t. And I think that when you talk to young people and you say, ‘Look, how do you want to use your resources? What does it mean to use your resources in a way that extends and deepens the possibility of democracy?’. That’s a lot more than simply saying that we have to tolerate all modes of expression. That’s not to say that we have to shut them down, but I think it means that we have to move away from a politics of shaming to pedagogical interventions in which they could be challenged. I’m against the politics of shaming. I’m against saying that people are stupid and we shouldn’t allow them in a room. I think that young people learn by interrogating. I want to hold people accountable for what they say. And I think that journalism at its best does. It both holds people accountable and it imagines a future in which those modes of accountability deepen and extend the possibility of democracy in the very notion of justice and agency itself. I don’t want to say that’s a biased mode of journalism. I want to say that’s a journalism that matters. I’m against journalism that doesn’t matter, and I’m against journalism that in some way distorts the truth. I’m against journalism that believes in false equivalences. I’m against a journalism that so isolates issues, that when they talk about schools that are run-down and poor and not talk about the way in which the state defunds public goods that they commit an active injustice. I want to

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broaden the notion of justice around journalism, and I want to broaden it in a way in which journalists can take chances and not be punished for that. That to me is an active civic courage. And I think it’s such a great question, thank you. I think it’s so important because we take risks. We can’t believe in a sense of commitment and not take risk. We have to teach students how to take a risk. Two short stories if I may, forgive me. I was fired in 1981. I was at Boston University and I had gone through the tenure process unanimously. And the president intervened, and he denied me tenure. Then he called me to his office. He wanted to talk to me. He was a right-wing goon. I don’t mean to be too hyperbolic. And we sat down, and the first thing he said to me was, ‘I hear you’re such a great teacher. Why do you write s***?’. That was an inviting question, and of course that ended the conversation in many ways. But since then people have often asked me, ‘Well, if you knew that what you were writing was going to get you in trouble…’. Howard Zinn was my mentor and friend. You know who he is? The late historian Howard Zinn. I had cited Zinn a lot in my work. And people have often said, ‘Well if you didn’t do that, you would have gotten tenure’, because he actually took the conversation further which I haven’t told you. He said to me, ‘I’ll make a deal with you’. This is written up if you don’t believe me. He said, ‘If I can become your private tutor for two years in philosophy, education, and science’, he said, ‘I will increase your salary for two years, but at the end of two years, we’ll reconsider you of tenure’. And I looked at him and I said… you won’t know the reference but I’ll explain, ‘What to do you want to do, turn me into George Will?’. George Will was a very conservative commentator in the United States. He then turned, he faced the wall, and I left. I went back to the school. They’re all the janitors were there that I had been working with, and we have a party. I get terribly drunk and then went home the next day and realized what had happened. But in the midst of all of that, if they ask me, ‘Would you do it again?’, I give them a very simplistic answer. Would you rather live on your knees or live standing up? I want to live standing up. I want to take risks. I’m going to challenge those… I hate to see people suffering. I think that when I see this unnecessary suffering in the world and this enormous power—hard, cold, cruel, lack of compassion, the inability to exercise any kind of empathy—that’s a

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psychopathic mind set. I mean this has to be challenged. I mean, there’s no choice. Silence is complicity. And I think that when you come across teachers like yourself who just emanate, you know, this wonderful sense of, ‘Wow. How do we do this? How do we challenge this?’. The thing that we can’t fall back into is the call to be on our knees, and then figure that out. And then good for you. Speaker 3: I’m currently writing a chapter called ‘The University as a Form of Border Control’. And what the chapter is about is a history of the collaboration of the university with the police and the Home Office. And the way that manifests itself just now in our university is through the T4 Visa regime which requires us as tutors and academics to monitor our international students and report that information back to our home office, and via PREVENT legislation, which obviously is about reporting our students’ beliefs and behaviors to the police and to the Home Office. My question is about the encroachment of border practices in our universities, is it unprecedented in the history of our educational institutions? So that’s the first question, and the second question is have you come across any productive resistance to this kind of border practices in your experience? Henry: That’s a fabulous question. It’s a fabulous question that has a universal kind of content to it, because I think all across Europe and across the United States and particularly in the United States, we’re seeing something very different. And what we’re seeing is the emergence of something called punishment creep. And what that means is that the model of the prison now becomes the model of social services. The model of the prison now becomes the model of schooling. All of a sudden, instead of teachers dealing with students who violate a dress code, we bring in the police, they get arrested, and they’re all of a sudden processed through the criminal justice system. I think the real here in light of that specific example is how do we theorize that in ways that allow us to understand its connection particularly to modes of neoliberalism, that while they attack the social state are increasing the reach of the punishing state. We have to see that in a larger totality in order to really understand what it does and why it’s happening. Secondly, it seems to me that the first response to that often is that we have to somehow attack police violence. It’s a form of police violence, it’s a terrible

thing. And of course we do, but I think that what we really need to do is to understand something about the defense of schooling as a public good, and what it might mean to have a theoretical argument so that we can make very clear that that’s antithetical to any notion of democracy itself. And that the presence of the police in school undermines the school as a public good that it really has to be fought at every level—local, state, and national. We have to talk about that in terms that are destroying the very formative cultures in some of the most important civic educations in any society, on the basis of a mode of punishing that is transforming that society as a whole and not just punishing teachers and students into something. I don’t need totalitarian. I mean, we know what totalitarian societies do. They go after intellectuals first. They go after ideas. They burn books. They shut down the possibilities for intellectual ideas to spread. And then what happens secondly is all those intellectuals who had been irrelevant in the first place now become neo-Nazis and become part of the stuff. And I think that if we can’t defend the institution, public higher education as a civic good, we have no starting point except for moral outrage. Moral outrage is not enough. You have to politically be able to understand these forces in order to attack them within a broader system of assault. That makes sense? Speaker 4: Wonderful evening. Like you, I spent quite a long time teaching in high school before I came into the university. Henry: Before you got demoted? Speaker 4: I know; and it seems to me there has been a long war between those who see universities as a public good, something that should be involved with our communities, something where there should be the free reign of ideas, somewhere the student should be challenged and developed, and of course neoliberalism. And neoliberalism has seen the student as a consumer, the student as somebody who buys our services, who doesn’t care what he or she gets as long as he or she gets a good degree. For those of us who have tried to argue the public good case. Up until recently, I think it’s been very, very difficult because we have ourselves embroiled in a system where analytics and measuring and performativity are the key things that we’re all involved in, much as we don’t think it really develops the idea of the university as a public good. And I think that

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is problematic for us, this is why I liked your idea of the one leg in, one leg out, or we have our heads in the clouds. We want to imagine and develop a better future, or we have to somehow try and struggle in the here and now against it. Henry: Terrific question. It really resonates with me. People often tell me that I write about neoliberalism too much, but actually I don’t think I write enough about it, because I think it’s so widespread. It reaches into every aspect of our lives. And it’s not to say that it’s the only form of domination and I don’t believe that. And I understand that it comes in very different forms. But I think around the university, something very specific has happened that’s both structural and ideological. And I think that when we talk about the takeover of the university, we’re not only talking about the eradication of teachers as agents that in some way have some power over the institution itself. In the United States, 70% of all faculty now are on non-tenure tracks. They live in constant fear. They have no security in many ways. And this is spreading all over the place. There’s an attempt in some way to capitalize on their labor while at the same time making them expendable. Secondly, it seems to me as you well know, this audit culture that has come in, that commercializes every relationship suggests something about the rise of the managerial relationship and its complicity with neoliberalism that has effectively in many ways so undermine the mission of the university as a public good, that we now are on the verge of losing higher education as a civic institution. We really are on the very verge of losing it. I think that that suggests a number of things. The first things it suggests to me is we have to learn from young people about how they’re struggling against the university that in many ways produces an enormous amount of violence on them. We have to listen to young people. They’re struggling. They hate the loan situation. They hate the fact that the education that they’re getting has very little to do with what it means to be in the world in a way that matters. They hate the fact that they’re being isolated. And at the same time, we have to deal with faculty who for some reason have been so isolated for so long, so removed from public life that they really don’t know how to reach out and be able to mobilize communities who basically can work with them because they can make the

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argument that university is such an important public good, you eliminate it, you may not have a democracy. There aren’t a lot of places that have the power to create the formative cultures that inspire and energize people to be critical and democratic agents, right? We haven’t done our job in convincing people how important we are to democracy itself and that’s a great loss and that has to change. Thirdly. It seems to me that in the age of social movements, in the age of an intensification of labor movements, a rethinking of what labor can do, we have to make education central to politics. We have to do that. And we have to do it by both talking about how we can restructure in a democratic fashion an institution that already exists and how outside of those institutions we can work to build alternative institutions that become models for those institutions. Speaker 5: Thank you so much for a stimulating and perplexing evening. I was a primary school teacher for many years, I’ve worked in communities and the inner city in Dublin, and I’ve been working in the university system now for 15 years. And what really concerns me now having worked at different levels of different spaces in education is how higher education itself has been incorporated, but in the pedagogies that we try to experiment with, with our students, and how we try to listen to them, that somehow the scientification of education, and the commodification through technology has become very hard to resist. I’d say at primary and secondary level and a third level as well, the big companies are offering and sponsoring education to the extent that in fact we see these institutions can no longer exist without that kind of private sponsorship. And it’s really hard then, for the individualized intellectual or teachers to resist that because they’re trying to survive with, as an earlier person said, we’re in a curriculum that we have already. We’re also in institutions that as the previous speaker said, we owe them some allegiance in terms of what we understand as the public good. But at the same time they may not be in fact for the public good. I suppose that’s what I wanted to address. Are these institutions really for the public good or are they incorporated? Henry: Again, a wonderful question. I don’t know if you read The New York Times recently where Google, Facebook—all

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these major media corporations are now going to the schools. And what they’re doing is offering free technology, but not… they’re actually sending personnel in to be able to shape the curriculum in a way that in some way of course means that they’ll be training students to work at Microsoft or Google or Facebook. This is an assault unlike anything we’ve ever seen before but it’s an assault that has to be understood within what has happened to education and its relationship to the state under neoliberalism. As schools are defunded, as they lose money, as they can’t support themselves, they become more vulnerable to these kinds of pressures in which all of a sudden, you know corporations are coming in. You know this. You know, we say, ‘Can we put our name on the gym? How about the Microsoft gym? We’ll give you $50,000 to put our name up there’. And people are buying this because they’re desperate. The real issue is not simply that schools are being instrumentalized. The real issue is that they have no way to protect themselves because they don’t have the resources any longer to do it. Sure we can mobilize in the meantime, we can have social movements involved, we can work with local communities and get parents and young people to challenge it. And they have challenged it. In Florida, there was a prison group, private prison complex—can you imagine?—wanted to give us— University of South Florida I believe, $60,000 to put their name on the football field billboard. And they fought it and they won. And that’s okay. It proves that resistance can happen. But this stuff is symptomatic of much larger issues, the utter defunding of the public good, the utter destruction of the welfare state, the utter attack on those spaces where the very vestige of critical thought can germinate and grow and the conditions that provide it. And that’s the kind of connection we have to make because it’s going to be very difficult to fight these organizations. They are not simply about technology. These are ideological political organizations that have a view of the world that views the question of social responsibility and critical thought as being very dangerous because we would then be able to hold them accountable. I mean when I turn on Facebook, do I really have to see a page that says, ‘Here are your memories for the

last 10 years’. You’ve gotta to be kidding me. I mean all of a sudden, the surveillance state is dressed up as entertainment. We’re doing you a favor. We’re making sure we could let you know that we’re monitoring all your memories so that when we talk to you about Big Brother, you think it’s only a reality TV show. When I say we have talked about new forms, how we have to reinvent the political. I mean think about the emergence of the surveillance state. I mean, think about East Germans that they’ve talked to recently who said, ‘We dreamed about what you’re doing now. We dreamed about this technology and the way it’s being used’. And what I see is that the ideology of privatization and the individualization of the social has become so powerful that I have students to whom privacy is a burden. They can’t hit the exit fast enough to put everything they have on Facebook. When I hear about young women, you know, basically doing cosmetic surgery because they want to improve the 200 selfies that they’re taking every day, something is terribly wrong. That there is an ideology at work here that is so dangerous and so disconnected from public life, that we can no longer recognize the visible signs of oppression because they are far more sophisticated given the technology and given the sales pitch. This is for you. This is free. This is where the question of freedom becomes an abomination because it’s not about freedom, it’s about slavery, and it works in such a way as to be far more complicated than the kind of visible stuff that we saw 30, 40 years ago. It’s an important question and it suggests an important way to re-theorize the notion of the political self. Henry: Just one last thing I want to say. I know that these are very difficult times and I know how hard it is for all of us because the forces that separate us are more powerful than the forces that bring us together. And it seems to me that we have to find new ways to create modes of solidarity in which the most vulnerable become our neighbors, become our friends, in which we can realize that their plight is our plight. And this fight has to continue. It just has to continue. We cannot give up on this. We’re all involved. And I would certainly believe that the people here in the forefront of those kinds of… so just be brave. Be courageous. And don’t believe it’s going to happen tomorrow. Thank you.

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Note  1  This refers to work contained in Dr Ben Parry’s PhD: Cultural Hijack: critical perspectives on urban art intervention (University of the West of Scotland, 2014).

REFERENCES Balibar, E. (2016) Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology, translated by Steven Miller, New York: Fordham University Press Bauman, Z. (2011) Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age, Cambridge: Polity Books Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. (1976) Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Crocco, M. (2008) Teaching the Levees: A Curriculum for Democratic Dialogue and Civic Engagement to Accompany Documentary Film Event, Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, New York: Teachers College Press Freire, P. (2018): Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 50th anniversary edition, New York: Bloomsbury Academic

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Giroux, H.A. (2001, revised and expanded ed.) Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition, London: Bergin & Garvey Giroux, H.A. (2005, 2nd ed.) Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education, Abington: Routledge Goldwin, R. (ed). (1971) How Democratic Is America? Responses to the New Left Challenge. An Official Statement of Students for a Democratic Society, and Essays by Water Berns [and Others], Students for a Democratic Society, Chicago, Rand McNally McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Parry, B. (2014) Cultural Hijack: Critical Perspectives on Urban Art Intervention, available at www.academia.edu/18707853/Cultural_Hijack_Critical_Perspectives_on_ urban_art_intervention (accessed 18.10.19) Silva, J.M. (2015) Coming Up Short: Working Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty, Oxford: Oxford University Press Zinn, H. (1990) Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology, New York: Harper Collins

37 Interviews with Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter McLaren Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter McLaren

These interviews both took place in Montreal, about a year after Kincheloe became the Canada Research Chair in critical pedagogy. One of the mandates of the center founded for his chair was to archive the voices and works of those who discovered and nurtured critical pedagogy. McLaren, then Kincheloe were engaged in critical work in the 1980s stimulated by Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux. The first interview contextualizes Joe Kincheloe and his determination to create a global and virtual center in which critical pedagogy would thrive, change and grow. The second interview is a perfect example of the two brothers in theory and humor. It reminds us that while critical pedagogy takes education, criticality and social justice seriously, that there is always time for levity and humor. Much like their mentor, Freire, and followed by Giroux, Joe and Peter understand the essential nature of laughter as they transverse the political. Their consistent homage to rock and blues also reminds us that personal passion, artistic passion,

ideological passion, merge in the attempts to create wholeness within the tentative (srs, editor’s note).

JOE L. KINCHELOE: INTERVIEWED BY THE FREIRE PROJECT, MONTREAL, 2008 Joe Kincheloe: I’m Joe Kincheloe. I’m the Canada Research Chair at McGill University in the Department of Integrated Studies and Education and the founder of The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for the study of Critical Pedagogy. FP: What brought you to Canada? JLK: Well, I was at the City University of New York in the PhD Program at the Graduate Center and had a wonderful job. I’d been able to help put together a doctoral program and create the framework, its purpose and curriculum, I had a wonderful situation. I wasn’t looking to leave that but when a Canada Research Chair came open, there was a possibility of applying for that, that really

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changed my mind. I interviewed for the job and it was just obviously a wonderful fit. There was a great group of people to work with, an amazing group of students and the possibility of forming a critical pedagogy center, The Paulo and Nita Freire International Center for the Study for Critical Pedagogy, so I took the opportunity. I’m the Canada Research Chair for critical pedagogy. And so, critical pedagogy is basically – in the most simple, quick sense – the study of oppression in education, the study of how issues of race class, gender, sexuality, colonialism will shape the nature of what goes on in education, shape the purpose of education. In this context, what I’m doing is putting together an international center, an international project where we can bring people from around the world. We can create an open access internet space where we have people contributing to the critical pedagogical conversation. I oftentimes am really worried by the fact that critical pedagogy is a North American white boy appropriation of a South American thing. And so, the purpose of the center is to make sure that it’s a worldwide thing that people from North America listen carefully to what people from Asia, from Africa, from South America – obviously – and from Indigenous peoples all around the world have to say about the notion of oppression and how to fight it. The center really is – as much as anything – a manifestation of my respect for Paulo Freire and his wife – his widow now, unfortunately, Nita Freire. And in my life, just thinking about my intellectual influences, Freire was just such an important figure. In 1970 he had a book come out in English. It’d been written in Portuguese originally 1967. The book was called The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I read it in 1970 and have been reading and working on Paulo’s work ever since that time. And I think that Paulo certainly will be remembered. I want to help him in making that happen as the greatest educator of the 20th century – almost a saintly man in many ways. He was a wonderful scholar, completely dedicated to the eradication of human suffering and just very, very human and funny and wonderful. It was a wonderful combination for a human being to possess. I want to do everything I can to honor his memory. As I said, I studied Freire for years and years, put together a study group for studying the

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work of Paulo in 1975, 1976, never thinking I’d have a chance to meeting him. Just through the luck of being involved in the field and getting to know people – it’s all about always who you know – but getting to know people, I was linked to him. And my good friend, Donaldo Macedo invited Shirley [Steinberg] and myself to come to Boston while Paulo was there. And Shirley and I, and Donaldo and another friend of ours, went out to Paulo’s favorite Portuguese restaurant in Boston and sat for four hours and he talked about radical love and critical pedagogy. And it was just one of the most fascinating four hours. We bonded immediately because he was from the poorest area of Brazil and I was from the poorest area of the US. And we just had such similar resonating stories about our childhood and about how we came to our ideological and pedagogical positions. And so, from that moment on, it seemed foreordained that we would work together with Paulo. We met his wife and we just loved her dearly. And Shirley and I were seeing him as much as possible, seeing Nita as much as possible, went and visited them in Brazil, had a wonderful time there. There’s so many stories I can tell about this but just to be with Paulo, and coming from where I had come from in a very poor area of the country and not thinking that I would ever have a chance to be around somebody like Paulo Freire, his friendship and his mentorship and his genius changed my life in so many ways. And wow, how many people have an opportunity to build a kind of enduring shrine? Although, Paulo would hate that term because he always hated the cult of celebrity and very much was an ideal that I hold dear of a humble, humble intellectual scholar. Paulo would say, ‘You can build the project around me but you must critique my work and take it to the next level. Do not make me some type of icon’. And so, as much as I try, I will not make him an icon – though I love him and respect him dearly – I know that he would not want that. And so, the Freire Center is to study Paulo’s work, study critical pedagogy, have an evolving critical pedagogy that encounters new discourses, new peoples with new ideas, and continues to move forward in the 21st century. What’s going on in education around the world is part of what I oftentimes called a recovery movement – a recovery of dominant

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power – whether it be colonial power with new forms of colonialism, whether it be gendered power with the recovery of new forms of patriarchy, whether it be racial power with new forms of the recovery of white supremacy, whether it be class power with the recovery of new forms of class elitism and a globalized empire that exists. And unfortunately, I think the evidence is pretty clear that no matter where we go around the world now, education plays the role of helping support that imperial behemoth and all of these recovery movements that are embedded within it. And as I go to schools – whether they be in Johnson City, Tennessee or Baton Rouge, Louisiana or Edmonton, Alberta or NDG in Montreal – I see schools that many times unconsciously are arranged and developed in a way that simply perpetuates this behemoth, that punishes questions about subjects that I’m talking about here that would raise the issue of what’s the purpose of schools, what type of people are we turning out, how do they fit with these power relationships, are they better equipped to address and help end human suffering than if they hadn’t gone to school. Those are not questions that are typically talked about or asked in contemporary conversations about education. We’re talking about raising test scores. And the raising test scores is in the sense of a smoke screen in a way, I think. It diverts our attention from these questions about what is the role of education in a democratic society, what kind of people do we turn out and how do they relate to this power behemoth that I’m talking about. If we concentrate only on memorizing fragmented pieces of often untrue data and regurgitating them on a test score, we certainly are not talking about the very heart and soul, the 800-pound gorilla with bad breath that’s sitting in the room with us. Wow, education has got to come to grips with the fact it’s being employed to serve the purposes of something that is not good in the world. There’ve been a number of books and lots of articles written on the theme of the continuity of education despite changing technologies and changing zeitgeist and changing this or changing that. I mean, the world has changed dramatically in the last 150 years, yet when we go into the schools, we see – there’s obviously differences, but generally speaking – the same types of education occurring in 2007 that we did 150 years ago.

And most importantly in that lack of change, that continuity, is that we still don’t ask questions. We don’t challenge students to ask questions about the types of powerrelated issues, about the purposes of schooling, about questions concerning what does it mean to be an educated person, what’s the purpose of doing this. We just simply mindlessly go in, recapitulate the status quo, teach the same data without questioning where it came from, that we’ve taught, that we’ve dealt with, for the last 150 years. And so, in that way, education has remarkably stayed the same. And so, I’m really excited – even though I’m depressed at the same time – I’m really excited about new questions that we can bring up in education, that we can bring new disciplinary perspectives, new ways of thinking about how we go about educating teachers to induce schools and students to think about these things, to induce teachers themselves to think about these things. I think teaching is one of the hardest, hardest, hardest jobs in the world – no doubt about that. It’s hard. Yet, at the same time, we do our teachers a tremendous disservice when we don’t integrate them into the questions that drive the very nature of life at this time in human history. Those are almost separated from the process of educating teachers. And so, what a critical pedagogy that I imagine does is engages teachers, school districts, parents, politicians in really rethinking the nature of the very questions we ask about schooling, about the nature of mind, about the possibilities that human beings can aspire to, about human potential itself, the idea of the mind and its possibilities and the cognitive abilities that we can develop. God, that excites me. I am so excited about that, yet you never hear that talked about in a public conversation on education. What’s going on there that would have that kind of chasm between those thoughts? They should be directly related to each other and yet we’re not even talking about them. My god, that’s the amazing thought. There’s a lot of things that we can do if we just use educational and social imagination. FP: So, with all that in mind, what is normal? JLK: What is normal is just absolutely a social construction. It’s constructed in a variety of linguistic, social, cultural, political linguistic types of ways. And I believe that it’s nothing more than that, and it’s nothing less than that. Now, at the same time I say that, we need to understand what that is and what it

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means for us in our present lives and the lives of other people. How does it contribute to human suffering? How does normal contribute to the quality of our lives? And then if we know that normal is simply a social construction, then that gives me tremendous hope. It gives me hope in the sense that, ‘Hey, we can remake it’. The Matrix can be reloaded. We can begin to make something that was unimaginable in this notion of normality in the coming years around issues of sex, race, class, gender; rethinking the nature of colonialism and undermining it, getting rid of it, looking at how people are suffering around the world and alleviating that suffering. I think the last thing on earth I’d want to be is normal. I like to be around people that are – in a sense – transcendent of normal; that notion of conforming people which pedagogy often does into a certain form of normality. And I’m not talking about just in elementary school or in high school, I’m talking about bringing them into the normality of being a scholar or being an intellectual, [or] being a public knowledge producer is such an unsavory process for me, where certain types of behaviors and certain types of thinking are allowed within that kind of construction of being a normal professor that you have to express yourself in a certain way that writing, you have to write with a certain voice, ad infinitum. We could go on and on with that. But the idea of being even normal on the level of what it is that we’re supposed to be as public intellectual professors to me is repugnant. And I work really hard to try not in a trite way – and I certainly don’t always succeed with this as you well know – but I try very hard to try to construct different notions of what it means to be an intellectual that again is always transforming and always evolving as the world evolves itself. And so, in that context, the notion of what a scholar might be is so far from anything that has traditionally been thought of as normal within hyper reality, within this particular zeitgeist that normal professors are dinosaurs. They’re just dinosaurs, they’re antiques. I think I had always wanted to teach as long as I could remember but I quickly grew disillusioned with becoming a teacher once I found out what school was. I certainly didn’t want to be a teacher in a school. And the situation the moment that I realized that I did want to do it, I was thinking about doing a lot of other things. But the moment that I realized I can do this, I will do it, is when I

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read Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo, that I said there’s someone else in the world that actually thinks about school and thinks about the possibilities of school and being an educated person in the same way that I do. That just was such a reassuring moment. It was not just an intellectually stimulating but it was just a psychologically reassuring moment that, ‘Yeah, I could go and be who I wanted to be and do the types of things that I wanted to do and to develop the pedagogical imagination that I wanted to develop and actually go to an institution called a school and do that’. That was quite a remarkable moment for me because I didn’t think that that could happen. Of course, once I did it, I realized that the education imagination that I had was always somewhat of an impediment in me trying to become a teacher. Time will pass without me even realizing that I could talk to a student for an hour and it feels like ten seconds. I love teaching classes. I don’t think of it as work. Shirley will say, ‘Did you get any work done today?’, and I will have taught class and had six hours of meetings with students, and I’ll go, ‘No, I didn’t do any work today’. And I realize, ‘Well, that’s what my job is’, but I don’t think of that as work. I think of my writing as work, and my research. And even though I say it’s work, I find as I use that term because it is such a demanding and all-encompassing process and I’m exhausted when I get through, but as far as my love of it, I love it just as much as I love the other dimension. So, the idea of being a researcher-writer, getting a chance to talk to students, teaching classes – they’ll have to carry me out. I’ll never retire, I’ll never retire.

PETER MCLAREN: INTERVIEWED BY JOE L. KINCHELOE, MCGILL UNIVERSITY, MONTREAL, 2007 Joe Kincheloe: Peter, just one of the things that I’d like to talk to you about is the nature of critical pedagogy. And so often, we know that there’s – as you’ve said many times – critical pedagogies and not just a critical pedagogy. Peter McLaren: That’s right. JLK: In your opinion, when we talk about critical pedagogies, what are we talking about? If you were talking to a group of people who

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had never encountered this animal, what is it that you’d say to them? PM: That’s a great question. I’d start talking about critical pedagogy, then I would move into a discussion of some of the distinctions among the various critical pedagogies that are being developed across North America. But I would begin my answer with an ethical imperative of trying to live one’s politics, trying to develop a coherency between the ethics that you profess, the theories that help to guide you in your life in thinking about your experiences and how you actually are living – are being and becoming – in the world, your being in the world. Now I’ll be the first to admit that I have been at various times in my life an utter failure in living the way I believe that I should, but it’s important to pick yourself up and to keep trying, with no guarantee that you will succeed. So, in a sense, critical pedagogy is a way of learning to be self-reflexive about what you do, learning to be critically self-reflexive about how you behave, with yourself, with others and in relation to the larger social relations that constitute the milieu or the social context in which you are living your politics – and that of course makes demands on you, and oftentimes the weight of those demands taxes you beyond what you feel you care bear. And those demands have to do with becoming familiar with various languages, discourse, histories of political struggles and theories – social theories, cultural theories, economic theories – so that you can make sense of your life by discovering how your life is mediated by all these languages, these political and economic formations, social relations, institutions and, of course, the environment. I call these structures of mediation, with the environment constraining the social forces and social relations of production, with these constraining our political formations, and with these constraining – pulling and pushing against – our human nature. These structures or relations of mediation create us as we reproduce them. But we don’t simply reproduce them, we can modify and transform them because we have the ability to discern which actions we can take to help build more democratic social relations and institutions. And if you read only the bourgeois social theorists and philosophers you will likely develop a certain kind of social and political agency, and we could call this progressive. If you read the revolutionary literature on politics and economics

you will have a chance to engage in a more focused attempt on challenging capitalism at its roots as many socialists have been doing for centuries. And so, in fact, you become able to answer the question. How have I come to be? Who am I? How have I been produced historically, culturally, sociologically, ethically? How have I been produced? And that means how have you become knowingly and unknowingly complicit in reproducing those historical social relations that constrain rather than enable democracy and emancipation from oppression. Here I am not restricting myself to liberal or representative democracy, but I mean participatory democracy, direct democracy, creating democracy from below. So, you have to understand that process. And when you’re able to do that, then you can make more critical choices how you live, and you can make better decisions and you can be more authentic and more consistent. JLK: I think that oftentimes people really miss the point that there is this ‘way of being in the world’ aspect of critical pedagogy and think of it undoubtedly within methodological terms within educational policy terms. Not that those points are unimportant – obviously, they’re very important – but it seems to me – and I agree with you completely – that fundamentally, it really is about being in the world. With that in mind, how has it changed your being in the world to be a critical pedagogue? PM: Well, for one thing, it’s made me more aware of the contradictions that plague my life as a citizen living inside a capitalist behemoth and it’s made me, I think, a little bit harder on myself. I’m always ferreting out and trying to overcome the contradictions that render me much more ineffective than I would like to be when dealing with institutions, when dealing with groups, other people and policies, practices – both pedagogical and political. So, it’s made me a critic of myself that’s both good and bad. It can be debilitating, it can be paralyzing sometimes because I tend to be hard on myself but I think it’s also important to accept the fact that you’re going to learn constantly throughout your life, that we are all unfinished human beings, that we are in the liminal state of becoming, and hopefully we can pick up the pieces of a life shattered by capitalism and learn to make better choices and to be more effective as an agent for social change and social justice.

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So, I think that it’s made me a lot lonelier because I’m brought together with like-minded people who also feel the sense of anomie and alienation, and at times a heightened, pulsating desperation, who feel that they’re anguishing about the world while other people are simply in the world to enjoy it and to take advantage of whatever situation they can in order to further their own interests. Sometimes it’s almost incapacitating because you’re so aware of structures of oppression and mediation. Every time you pick up a newspaper, you can just see the propaganda. Every time you have a discussion with someone in the coffee shop, you get a sense of how they’ve been positioned to answer questions or to think about things in certain ways. You being to see manifestations of the structural unconscious of society – what we could call the macrostructural unconscious. The structural unconscious is a sepulcher of repressed memories whose function is to protect the oppressed from the trauma of their struggle against capitalism. We are living the horror of history’s barbarism towards the working-class. And we would do well to uncover the sites where these repressed memories lay buried and expose them to critical scrutiny, and pay homage to the victims of our aggression. We need to understand the roles that capital/ labor relationships play in our society. Every high school and university class should have a required course on the history of capitalism, and certainly material written from the victims of capitalism, not the victors, because we are in a war, a class war, and we’ve been in this war since we left feudalism behind. Some might even call today’s transnational capitalism a form of neo-feudalism, and they wouldn’t be wrong in doing so. As an ethnographer, you can engage in all kinds of lengthy discussions with people and get a sense of why they might be thinking the way they are. And it can make you angry at times because you want to create a situation where people have an opportunity to be self-reflexive since our society, very often, doesn’t provide those opportunities systematically, even in universities, certainly, in public schools. So, that’s where my struggle is. I guess I’m lucky because I do have an opportunity to spend time with grad students as well as with activists that I meet in my travels, in my journey. So, I think I’m luckier than some in that respect. Because, Joe, we do all share a common commitment

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to social justice, but day-to-day life can be overwhelming as I’m sure you know. JLK: That’s beautifully put. One of the things that just comes to mind when you say that is the notion that’s really informed me as I think about that in my own life is the blues aesthetic, right? PM: Right. JLK: And think about it just for a second that one of the things that the blues has traditionally done in African-American music is saying like, ‘There is horrible stuff going on in the world yet at the same time we’re going to talk about it’ like Helen Wolfe talking about, ‘I’m here on death row getting ready to be killed, yet at the same time I’m singing about it’. And so, we’re talking about the horror of the world – the horror in the world – and then concurrently, celebrating the fact that we’re alive and that there’s possibility in being alive. And to me, that’s so inspirational. PM: Within every structure and practice of oppression, there is a moment where we can seize and try to create something good out of that moment. There is always a leak in the fabric of hegemony, there is always a sliver of light in the darkest gloom. Roots shoot out from cracks in the sidewalk. But the blues of course has been something that has been so important to me as I know it has to you, Joe. JLK: That’s right. PM: I grew up listening to the blues as a young man. I took guitar lessons from a Toronto guitar player named David Wilcox and learned to do some Robert Johnson licks. And I was never very talented, but it was very cathartic for me. Even today, I will put on an album, whether it’s Muddy or Howlin’ Wolf even Paul Butterfield Blues Band – East–West – and listen to Mike Bloomfield, Elmore James, John Hammond Jr., Billie Holliday, Etta James and Buddy Guy… JLK: Buddy Guy! [laughs in agreement] PM: … just to get back in touch with that sense that life is a horror, but within that horror, we can find spaces to celebrate and to affirm our humanity and it’s that kind of dialectic support. Yesterday is a memory; tomorrow is a vision – but today is one hell of a pain in the ass. JLK: And one of the things that – I’ll run into people who know you from your speeches or know you from your books. And one of the things that always surprises me – because I know you so well – is that I don’t think that they see in just the public persona that you

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have some time, that dialectic – that blues dialectic – because honestly, I find you not only one of the most brilliant people that I’ve ever known, but you’re honestly one of the funniest people I’ve ever known. And I’ll say that to people and they’ll go, ‘I didn’t know that about Peter’. PM: He’s a Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. JLK: That’s right. ‘I Put a Spell on You’. PM: Well, that’s interesting because there are people who have said to me after getting to know me for a while, ‘You’re a pretty funny guy’. It’s interesting because in my writings I seem to terrify people and it’s a real in your face song. It’s all out and I don’t really hold back. Sometimes I try to be a little bit more gentile, but my words come across as sandpaper covered with a fine velvet. The velvet being the academic language that takes the edge off the sandpaper. But the sandpaper is very coarse and even though I’m covering it with a velvet glove, you can feel the sandpaper underneath and sometimes it scratches right through the velvet. It’s mean not to leave an abrasion on your civilized sensibilities but to literally rub you the wrong way. My words are meant to be uncomfortable, even if, as some say, they sound as if they’ve been dipped in a fine, vintage whiskey. So, I tried to do that, I put that veneer on my work but it’s very, very raw and I find the academic discourse softens that rawness a little bit. But humor is really important. I do sometimes feel I’m just – every day is a battle for your sanity and every day is a battle to make sense of the world and to keep yourself together, and humor certainly does help. I have a kind of absurdist view of the world, I think. JLK: Critical data is an… PM: I’m very much a surrealist at heart. I mean, at academic wine and cheese parties or at official gatherings I feel I am the Duchamp urinal in the museum. JLK: [laughs] I’ve always thought of you that way, right? PM: Right. And it’s really me in a urinal costume. But no, I think that I’ve always been drawn to the surreal, and often the absurd aspects of life, I’m the Dada piece in a hall full of Renaissance paintings. I’ve always enjoyed that and I love the sense of performance. The very serious Marxists who will monitor my work are little concerned about me at times. But at the same time, I take Marx very seriously. They think that the performance aspect of me detracts from the theoretical pristineness

that they’d like me to display and that they feel I do display at times. But that’s very much me. I really like to get my whole body involved and it’s very much like spoken word now. And I think the reason I’m connecting with young people in my work quite a bit these days is because they appreciate that performative side of me – the tattooed, crazy, older guy who’s just refusing to grow up in certain ways. I suspect that I will have regrets as I get older and I am better prepared to attempt to interrogate life under capitalism. JLK: And redefining what it means to age. PM: Redefining, I think, what it means to age. And the possibilities that we can have. There’s always a danger of becoming the old fool. It’s the question of how you can get your message out and who will likely listen. I think the message of Paulo Freire, and Marx, and bell hooks, Henry Giroux, and Maxine Greene, are of great importance, and I try to connect their work with different audiences. Which is not to say I don’t respect established venues and the formal academic talk, since I’ve learned much from visiting speakers, nationally and internationally. And I was a Junior Fellow at Massey College where we were required to wear gowns and sit at high table dinners. Now that’s a performance! But one that keeps the status boundaries neatly in place. JLK: Of course. PM: And I’m sure I have stepped into the performative arena far too many times – after reading Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, you know what I mean by that. And let’s not forget Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, or Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect. And I did play one act as Hamlet in college, and not very well. But it’s just that you push on, you speak up, you try not only to speak truth to power but to find ways to reshape power relations, such as transforming relations of patriarchy, homophobia, heteronormativity, white supremacy. It’s not enough to speak truth to power – you need to transform relations of oppression to relations of mobilization for social justice. At the same time, you try not to be immobilized by the embarrassment you may have caused yourself and others or the pain sometimes. You learn from your mistakes. And Myles Horton has said that you only learn from the experiences that you learn from. Sounds a little strange but there’s a lot more packed into that idea than at first blush. And you just try to keep on moving ahead, learning as you go.

INTERVIEWS WITH JOE L. KINCHELOE AND PETER MCLAREN

You make the road by walking, as Antonio Machado would put it – Caminante no hay camino se hace camino el andar. JLK: Keep on keeping on. PM: Keep on keeping on. JLK: I think Mr. Zimmerman might have used that phrase. PM: Ah, yes, Bob Dylan. Well, he might have. I was reading about his performance with Pope John Paul II and how the current Pope just did a book about his predecessor, and he cited in his book that he disapproved of John Paul inviting Bob Dylan to a major sort of concert. And he’s gotten rid now of the Vatican ‘pop event’ because he’s much too involved in classical piano concertos. JLK: [laughs] That’s funny. I saw that too. He just… PM: I just think of him as a Peanuts character – the new Pope – like … [mimes striking a piano keyboard] JLK: Schroeder. PM: Schroeder. JLK: Pope Schroeder. PM: Well, we should rename him Pope Schroeder. JLK: That’s funny. Let’s start a movement for that. PM: We’re on record here, Pope Benedict, but you should rename yourself – reanoint yourself – as Pope Schroeder. And I say that as a practicing Catholic, but one who supports liberation theology, which Benedict helped to destroy with the help of Ronald Reagan and the US military. JLK: The XVI. PM: The XVI. JLK: That’s right. And that’s the side of you that people, I think, I don’t see a lot of times. It just… PM: Well, no… JLK: Please… PM: …no, I was just saying that I can remember one story about how that occurred to me in Mexico. There was a dean of a school of education at a university – a pedagogical university. I can’t remember what city in Mexico because I’m there frequently and visit in order to make political alliances in many different places. But she was so nervous about meeting me that she threw out her back and it was because of the strident militancy of some of my writings. They know you because people read your books and they haven’t met you and they think you might just be an angry old gnat – it’s amazing the amount of people that meet me who express how surprised they are that

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I am friendly or they’re surprised that I even just will chat for, like, 15 seconds while I’m going to get my coffee. And this Rector of the university was really upset, so I said to some of the doctoral students, ‘Let’s go visit her. Let’s go to her house’. And so, we went upstairs and I jumped on top of the bed along with a half dozen students and faculty. And we’re sitting there just talking on the bed and they were taking photographs. And she was saying, ‘God, if I’d known you were this nice, I never would have thrown my back out in the first place’. Some think my persona does not fit the seriousness of my message. But that’s something that they need to deal with, not me. If I were as angry in person all the time as I am in the pages of my books, I wouldn’t want to spend much time with me, either. So I try not to preach, but to dialogue. I start with a conversation with the hope that it turns into a dialogue. JLK: That’s fantastic. On this personal part, which I really wanted to capture with this – not that we want to ignore the gravitas of your work, as you think of yourself now – we’re doing this in March of 2007 – by March of 2012, what will you have wanted to accomplish in the next five years? What is it that you – if we were to come back to McGill University and we were to have the same interview and we were to review the last five years, what would you want to tell me? PM: Well, that’s a great question. Well, I would like to say that I’m still in Venezuela in support of the Bolivarian Revolution and that great gains had been made. And that we have successfully repelled US imperialism and gotten the US to withdraw 700 plus bases from around the world and… JLK: Amen. PM: … got the US to dismantle its nuclear program and its program to build ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as well as ‘weapons of mass distraction’ that we confront every time we turn on the television or visit social media. That would be something. But that’s, of course, just a pipe dream but the latter part of that with the US administration. But I’d like to start an institute in Latin America. I was hoping to start it in Ensenada near the border – near La Linea, near La Frontera – between the United States and Mexico. I’d like to start an institute so the people from Latin America and North America could meet just across the border in Mexico and we could have an institute of world peace. And that’s something I’ve been thinking a lot

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about is how to go about creating that kind of institute. It would be very different from what the La Fundacion McLaren that exists in Tijuana. It could be affiliated with that organization, possibly. Athough that Institute is doing some amazing work, under the leadership of Sergio Quiroz Miranda. It’s interesting because my big weakness is knowing how to get funding. One weakness I have as a professor, and I have many I am sure, is in bringing sizeable grants to benefit my graduate students. And so, I often think if I just knew how to approach people to create things like an institute for global peace, I could probably do it, if I just knew how to do it. And my biggest regret is that I just haven’t, as yet, tried to get this off the ground. However, Instituto McLaren has been established, but the credit for that goes to the professor and students in Mexico who always continue to garner my appreciation and respect for their hard work and their incisive understanding of how capitalism works. JLK: Well, I think of all the major figures in critical pedagogy in the US in particular and think about the fact that how little any of us that have worked in the US in critical pedagogy have been funded for the type of work that we’ve done. That’s just not you, we could go through a whole range of people and the fact that I had to come to Canada in order to get funded for critical pedagogy, is – I think – very indicative of the situation we find ourselves in. So, I don’t think that’s unusual at all. I think that you can be excused for that failure because we all have failed in that type of place. PM: I just haven’t tried, that’s my point. You’re right, I think you’re probably right. I wouldn’t be very successful at this venture but I’m thinking of a global institution and a global institute that could have some impact and bring the best folks in that could try to analyze what’s happening in neo-liberal capitalism, finance capitalism, and things we’re going to need to do. There are similar institutes but this one would be directed at teachers and educators and hopefully it could affect curriculum. I was invited recently to join a project – that might interest you – that involves developing a global curriculum for social change and I think that’s really important. JLK: That’s so interesting. PM: Critical pedagogy for a global future. I hope there is a future for the world, given the environmental peril we are in, and given the world

historical challenges facing the survival of democracy. JLK: Actually, I was just thinking about funding in the US for critical pedagogical work. We can certainly have ‘the Dick Cheney Center for Critical Pedagogy’. That would work very well in these political times. PM: Well, the states now – with what happened to me and UCLA and things are still crazy there with the junkyard dogs of our political system. JLK: You are the poet laureate of the educational left. PM: Thanks, Joe. I live in Hollywood, people have nicknamed me the Hollywood Marxist. But it’s interesting how many political activists you do run into in places like Hollywood. They are not out for the glory, they are in it to help people who have been victimized by the political system, the state, and the social relations of production that oil the gears of state enterprises. And it’s a really surreal place, so it really helps with that surreal side of me. But there’s a lot going on politically, too, and a lot of social movements, a lot of political activism takes place in California. I’m currently a member of the Industrial Workers of the World [Wobblies], but unfortunately I haven’t been very involved in the union given the crazy schedule I live with. I hope to change that. That’s another thing I’d like to do. I’d like to come back and say I’ve been able to do more work on the ground with the Wobblies or other organizations. But just fighting this Bush administration right now is so taxing of my energies; here we are in 2007, I’d be curious as to what the state of the world will be like when you invite me up to the Great White North for another conversation (I miss Canada, as you know, I was born and grew up in Toronto and lived in Winnipeg as a youth). But I must say that UCLA – at least up to this point – has been relatively supportive with respect to the attacks on me – well, at least they haven’t yet used the attacks against me. JLK: And I wanted to ask you about the ‘Dirty 30’ in that context. PM: The Dirty 30 was a list of professors that was created by a small right-wing group known as the Bruin Alumni Association, an organization not officially part of UCLA but they used the word ‘Bruin’ so that they would sound more official. This group egregiously offered $100 to students to secretly audio-tape me or other radical professors, and $50 to provide

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notes they took in our classrooms. And that made the worldwide press because of the money transaction, I think, and the resemblance to the McCarthy Era in US history. The head of the Bruin Alumni Association had a bake sale called the ‘Affirmative Action Bake Sale’ where baked goods were sold to minority students at cheaper prices. JLK: Yes. PM: The founder of the organization was racializing the bake sale, mirroring affirmative action as he saw it; it was a political stunt that was meant to be attention-grabbing but was ultimately repugnant. JLK: They did it all over the country. PM: The head of the Bruin Alumni Association got some press for that, so then he thought that he may be have a chance of becoming Karl Rove number two when he gets a little older – he’s in his early 20s – he cooked up an organization of bullies that schemed to find dirt on leftist professors, and offered to pay students money to spy on radical professors. And so, the stories came out. I started getting attachments in my email, newspaper attachments from Italy, Japan, Greece, Canada. So, it was a story that was picked up by numerous news outlets – and I should point out that the Bruin Alumni Association put me on top of the list as UCLA’s most dangerous professor – and it was rather disconcerting when I found out it was a serious organization with Republican money backing it up. I’d heard about this group and I’d heard about this list and initially I thought it was a joke. I mean, there was a sad humor to this whole stars and stripes spectacle. I was ready to give some talks at the World Social Forum in Venezuela. And this was, I think, the day before I was to leave for Caracas and I was doing some last-minute preparation in my office. Suddenly, outside my office door, the mass media had assembled. I gagged, left abruptly, and before I knew it they were chasing me across campus. I’m used to appearing on academic hit lists, but this organization was just plain nasty, and the ideas they represented were flatlined from the outset. Apparently, if you use critical pedagogy in your classes – especially the variant I developed that was punctuated by the work of Paulo Freire, Marx, Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School, as well as philosophers from Latin America such as Enrique Dussel – then you are un-American. Can you even imagine that term, ‘un-American’? I can’t imagine Canadians calling someone un-

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Canadian. Can you? You have the tall poppy syndrome here – but I don’t hear criticism that professors are un-Canadian. Critical pedagogy in the classroom is what I called enacting critical patriotism, not the knee-jerk patriotism of standing for allegiance before school starts, or before, say, a football game. And this is a time that the country – the United States – is so polarized, it’s quite frightening. And the frenzy with which the fanaticism which the right attacks you now means, ‘No holds barred. You are Satan. You are destroying the country. You must be purged from the system’. It’s so virulent. It’s like the country is fighting the Civil War all over again. I remember Christmas Day getting up and the first thing I read was an email sent to me with the names of all of those that were executed in Cuba by a firing squad led by Che Guevara in La Cabaña right after the revolution. It didn’t mention that those executed were, many of them, rapists and murderers. It was done deliberately to attack my association with the life and teachings of Che Guevara. I did a book which I thought gave Che considerable praise as an educator, leader, philosopher and thinker. And you can’t do that in the US without getting some pretty serious backlash going. Now to clarify, I am personally against the death penalty; I never celebrated or condoned executions in which revolutionaries such as Che may or may not have participated. But at the same time Che was a heroic guerilla fighter whom, in my opinion, deserves respect. I do not believe the ‘foco’ – or small group of armed guerillas – would be a feasible means today to begin a revolution. But I remain a supporter of the Cuban revolution and of Che’s participation. I would only participate in violent activities if my family or my comrades were under direct threat, and I would like to think I would have the courage to defend vulnerable groups against fascist regimes who were engaged in murderous repression of the popular majorities. One of my heroes is Archbishop Romero of El Salvador who was gunned down in 1980 as he was participating in a celebration of the mass. Today, I still mourn the Jesuits, their housekeeper, and the housekeeper’s daughter who were slain in 1989 in the Central American University in El Salvador by a Salvadorean death squad – the Atlacatl Batallion – trained in the United States. Lieutenant Guerra gave the order to kill the priests, Ellacuría, MartínBaró, Montes, López, Lopez y Lopez, and Moreno. The housekeeper, Julia Elba Ramos

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and her 16-year-old daughter, Celina Mariceth Ramos were also killed. JLK: That’s right. What’s the best book you’ve ever written? PM: The best book I’ve ever written, that’s interesting. I think, probably, there are two books that stand out. The book that everyone seems to know is Life in Schools … JLK: That’s right. PM: … and I wrote that book as a corrective to a diary I published in Canada in 1980 called Cries from the Corridor. I hate that book and I wrote that book as a corrective to that book; includes that book but criticizes that book. So, that’s, I think, my favorite book in the sense that it’s constructed as – it’s a pedagogical book. It’s meant to bring you into the conversation and then jar you out of the conversation then bring you back in again. So, I like the way it’s structured – I love the structure of that. JLK: I do too. PM: You’ve done the intro to the most recent version, which I think is the best version of that book to date. Hopefully there will be more versions. But I like Che Guevera, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution. I think that’s a good book. Che’s daughter told me there’s a few biographical errors and she told me that just about three weeks ago in Havana. So, I hope she will send me those corrections. But I’ve been asked to do another volume of that and expand it. And I’m thinking of addressing some questions which I didn’t do sufficiently in the first, like the whole question of violence. And how do we begin to think about that as critical educators? There are all kinds of things we don’t talk about, it seems, in our work because they’re controversial topics. But that’s precisely why we need to engage those issues because as professors we are public intellectuals are we not? And I think some of us are a little nervous to pursue those questions, just sometimes, for fear of what we might arrive at. Certain things that we don’t explore as much as we should. And I think I’m going to look at the whole question of violence. JLK: I think that’s fair. What is the – gee, I forgot the question I was going to ask. There was some good question to add around that. And a lot of things that I’m asking you about now are things that you didn’t talk about the other day. And so, that’s where I’m going in a lot of this, but – oh, I know, just as I look over and

see the picture of myself and Paulo Freire – Peter, I [remember] I was going to ask you, what is the impact of Paulo Freire in your life? PM: It’s been a profound impact – absolutely profound impact. I was in Toronto doing my PhD work and I missed a visit from Paulo Freire and I regret that, but I managed to get the tape that they made. And I think it was around in the early 80s, let’s put it that way. I still have it – it’s an old three-quarter-inch tape. I audited a class with Michel Foucault and should have recorded the classes – there must be recordings somewhere. You couldn’t make out really what Paulo was saying in that tape as he was developing his English. But I had an opportunity to meet him for the first time when I went to the US in 1985. My contract was not renewed at Brock University, where I had a one-year appointment, I could not find a job in Canada anywhere. So, I received a wonderful opportunity to work with Henry Giroux when he was teaching at Miami University of Ohio and he introduced me to Donaldo Macedo, and both of them introduced me to Paulo Freire and that was quite a remarkable event, I remember. And Paulo was aware of some of my work and that shocked me because I had no idea that Paulo knew my work at all. One thing made a powerful impact on me, is when Paulo’s wife, first wife Elza died. I’ve got a letter from Paulo and it said that the first reading he’s been able to do since she died was some passages from one of my books. JLK: Amazing. PM: Well, I was surprised that Paulo felt moved to write me especially during this time in his life. I was delighted to know that Paulo had this organic connection to some of my work and I was a little nervous about that letter. Now, this is an interesting story, I remember I was sitting in my office at UCLA and I came across the letter which I put it in one of those plastic file folders, and the letter was secured in that folder. And I said, ‘I hope that I’ll lose this because I’d hate to ever be tempted to publish this because it would seem a little self-serving if I did’. And so, I was always worried about it – what might happen to that letter. And by midnight that night, I’d lost it, permanently. I’d taken it and I was going to Xerox it. And I thought, ‘Well, I hope I’ll lose it, but I still want to Xerox it’. It was kind of a contradiction, but I remember by that evening, I had actually lost it and I’ve never been able to find it. And I think it might’ve been thrown out in

INTERVIEWS WITH JOE L. KINCHELOE AND PETER MCLAREN

the trash. And I can’t find the copy, either. I’m glad because the temptation to publish such an intimate letter is no longer there. JLK: Incredible. PM: And I did look really hard for it, for months after that very evening, I decided that it’s probably a very good thing to have lost it. JLK: You’ve traveled all around the world, and you’ve travelled certainly all around Latin America and then from Finland to Ramallah to wherever it might be. What is the most profound experience that you’ve ever had in your travels? PM: My goodness, that’s an amazing question. I think that, searching my memory there’s a number of things. I think traveling to Venezuela, to Caracas a few years back, meeting Hugo Chavez at Miraflores Palace because we were in an office adjacent to Chavez’s office, and I had recognized the scenery from watching the movie, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, which showed the inside of Miraflores Palace, and we were in an office adjacent talking to Luis Bonilla and Marta Harnecker who were working for Chavez at that time. And when Chavez moves around the palace, there’s kind of a lock down until he gets into his office. Agents come out, ‘Chavez is coming’. But you’re not – it really locked you down but you’re not supposed to leave the office because everyone would go out just to be able to get near him. And so, we were watching from the window in the office just to catch a glimpse and suddenly he started walking towards our office, opened the door, came in and he started talking to the secretary who is about 18. And in that conversation with the secretary he had asked her, ‘Why are you here working? You should be in a university’. He started wanting to know why she was here and why she didn’t go on the university and he was emphatic that she should be in school. It was quite amazing.

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I was taken by Chavez’s charisma as well as his courage. So, that was a powerful moment because I didn’t expect it to happen. And that was quite a precipitous time to meet someone who’s creating such an impact around the world. He thanked us for pedagogical work we’ve been doing – so he knew that – and he remarked that a monster was living in the White House. He was referring to Bush. He was correct in his assessment. JLK: El Diablo. PM: We will have to defeat that monster. And he said that… JLK: I can smell the sulfur, just … PLK: I can smell the sulfur. JLK: …you’re bringing it up. PM: We should work harder as a result of being inspired by the Bolivarian Revolution. So, it was just quite a wonderful time. But there’s been so many experiences. There has been new people I’ve met that shared very moving moments of their lives with me – I remember I was in Pakistan and someone told me there a story about meeting Che just before he went to Bolivia. It was very touching to meet people whose lives have intersected with these great historical figures and they’ll trust you enough to bring you in and share those stories with you. Those are always very wonderful moments. Meeting the shack dwellers and the shackdwellers’ movement in Durban, South Africa was a powerful moment for me, as was spending time with the Indigenous movement in Mexico. Having the opportunity to watch them practice their activism was an inspiration. They’ve all been incredible experiences and they continue. JM: Peter, thank you so much. Obviously, you are my brother and I appreciate all of the things that you’ve shared with us. And one of the things that I look forward to is you working closely with the Freire Institute here at McGill.

38 Influenced by Critical Pedagogy: Interviews with Critical Friends Shirley R. Steinberg

In the dialogic fashion of Paulo Freire, our work in the freireproject.org has centered on collecting the words, writings, voices and knowledges from those who have influenced the field of critical pedagogy. To this end, it was important for our work to casually interview a range of critical scholars in order for different communities to have access to not only the scholarship, but the personal words of those who have made a difference … influenced the field. These change-makers, Earth-shakers, these beloved people are critical friends. Understanding context and positionality, the four people interviewed come together bound by their commitment to a socially just pedagogy which names, recognizes and identifies power. They are teachers and community members who respect history, narrative and continue to ‘make the road by walking’. These short interviews were done by our project in our attempt to bring together both the personal and the political for a larger audience. It is my privilege and honor to know and love each of the interviewees; each one of them is not only a mentor to me but has

been a close friend for at least two decades. An essential benefit to working in critical pedagogy has been an unexpected one – yet, possibly the most cherished – the friendship and solidarity one finds with other teachers and community workers who attempt to work together to create a global (yet tentative) pedagogical way of knowing. Prefacing each interview, I have written a short piece (italicized) to contextualize the interview and my personal reflections on each beloved person. My prefaces are personal, reminding me as I wrote them, that in critical pedagogy, the personal and the professional are interchangeable. I’ve edited and organized each of the interviews, sometimes adding an italicized editorial comment or an update with the permission of the interviewee. Our deepest appreciation goes to the members of freireproject.org who conducted the interviews, and to Deborah Britzman, Rochelle Brock, Ivor Goodson and Handel Wright for their permission to use the text of the interviews. Note: interviews follow alphabetically.

INFLUENCED BY CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: INTERVIEWS WITH CRITICAL FRIENDS

INTERVIEW WITH DEBORAH BRITZMAN, UNIVERSITY OF COLUMBIA, VANCOUVER, JULY 2009 Dayton, Ohio, sometime in the early 90s, I spied Deborah Britzman talking casually to a group of friends. Having just purchased her book, Practice Makes Practice, I was verklempt. I remember being somewhat speechless when she was introduced to me, I’d hoped to make a brilliant remark about her book, instead I shook her hand and stared; my star-struck silliness was rooted in the fact that Deborah was the first Jewish critical pedagogy-type person I’d met – that seemed important to me. We became acquaintances, conference friends, doing the occasional writing project together – but it was a decade later, after Kincheloe had died, when Deborah and I were both teaching at the University of British Columbia for the summer, when I realized the personal treasure of being Britzman’s friend. A day with Deborah Britzman is predictably unpredictable – she is dry and observant, funny, with gourmet food and wine opinions and is a cerebral shopper. Deborah’s humor is dead-on; her Freudianinformed read on anything grabs hold and becomes one of those re-visited remarks. Deborah doesn’t force advice or pedagogy upon a listener; it infuses within her ways of being, makes one walk away with knowing she is a presence without being one. Never sentimental, she is honest with sentiment, in short – a fabulous human being, the ultimate mensch (srs, editor’s note). Deborah Britzman: I did my graduate work at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst – both the master’s and the doctoral work. I was a high school teacher before that. And before that, I did my undergraduate work at the University of Massachusetts. I finished my doctoral studies in 1985 and then I went to the State University of New York at Binghamton. I was there for seven years. Then I went to York University and I’ve been at York University now for 17 [now over 25 years, ed.]

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FP: Why did you return to academia after being a high school teacher? Deborah Britzman: It was quite accidental, really. After teaching in high school for seven years, I began to understand all that I didn’t know. I’d had nightmares, actually, about teaching and felt that there was something that I had to think about differently outside of the school. So, I took a year off and just read, and then went to graduate school, originally, to do a master’s degree in reading because my area was English. I was an English teacher and one of the things that shocked me – I don’t know why that was the case, but I was quite shocked that a great many of my students couldn’t read. And I was also more shocked that I didn’t know how to help them. So, originally, I went to do a master’s degree in reading and anthropology and I thought after that I would go back to the school and at that point, I thought maybe in administration. I found that schools are closed shops. It’s very, very hard for an outsider that doesn’t live in the neighborhood, that doesn’t come from anywhere to just suddenly go somewhere, to work at the school. I decided that I might as well stay at the university, and for the doctoral work, and studied ethnographic research and continued in looking at reading and literacy. And when I finished the doctorate, I applied to higher education and received my first job at the State University of New York at Binghamton as an Assistant Professor. That was in 1985. FP: And when did you start to first get interested in psychoanalysis? Deborah Britzman: I began to think about psychoanalysis differently probably in my fourth or fifth year teaching at the university at SUNY Binghamton; began to read Freud. And then when I moved to Canada, I realized that all of my ‘areas of expertise’ were irrelevant because they were so grounded in the US context. And so, I needed to create a new area of study that wasn’t dependent upon nation and then I became more and more interested in psychoanalysis. I started reading psychoanalysis, I went into my own analysis and then decided during my analysis that I would like to know more about the clinical side. I was very interested in the theoretical side of psychoanalysis, but I was also very, very interested in the clinical side. So, I decided to train as an analyst. I began to train as a psychoanalyst, which first involved doing work in a clinic. I started

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working with a team in a clinic that serves parents and kids. And I worked with a team of people – psychiatric students, social workers, people interested in learning more about the clinical practice, psychologists, psychoanalysts. And we were involved in assessing kids, which was a very long and drawn out process. But of course, when you’re working with kids, you’re also working with their families. I began to learn how to listen psychologically to people’s experiences in their lives and how they make sense of it. I entered a psychoanalytic institute and began training in earnest and started a small private practice, finished the program in 2009, and now have the designation psychoanalyst as well as the Distinguished Research Professor which is my title at York University. I carry a very small private practice and I also teach at the university and I do quite a bit of writing. I’ve written a number of books on the topic of psychoanalysis with education. Two of those books have had as their focus Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein. Both are about what has happened to the concept of education in psychoanalysis. My current project is a book-length study called, When History Returns: Thoughts on the Making of Psychoanalysis. FP: When did you first encounter Paulo Freire? And tell us your experiences in the early days of Critical Pedagogy. Deborah Britzman: In 1972, I went to the University of Massachusetts as an undergraduate. I had spent two years at the University of Cincinnati and when I went to the University of Massachusetts, I met someone – a friend of mine who is still an old friend of mine – who introduced me to two ideas: anarchism and Paulo Freire. And she gave me a present right after we met, a little book called Pedagogy of the Oppressed. That was a book that was so surprising because so much of education was oriented towards, I would say, a technocratic understanding and the compliance to the mechanisms of school life. No one really had talked about the idea that education oppresses. We felt that way, but the idea that there was an existential dilemma to the problem of education and to the problem of literacy and to the problem of being able to tell your own story in very general terms – it wasn’t an idea that I had thought about before. Pedagogy of the Oppressed came out in 1970 in English from the Portuguese and I

don’t know how to say it, but it was a book that made a terrific difference in the way in which I started to think. And, it was a very hard book, not because the sentences were long and complicated but because of what Freire was trying to talk about. And that was the idea of a prison house that was created socially, that was internalized. In this sense, it’s a very psychological study of what it means to not be able to read. And the reading wasn’t a reading that was physical reading, because we could read the words, but the actual problem was meaning in education. The paradox of education is that you can spend years and years there and come out thinking you’re stupid, or you can spend years and years there and feel nothing means anything, or you can spend years and years there and hate reading. You can spend years and years there and feel that you don’t belong. With Pedagogy of the Oppressed, suddenly, what enters into education is language, the problem of language, the problem of speech, which wasn’t ever spoken about in that particular way because reading was seen – normally speaking – as a technical endeavor. And Freire offers the idea that there’s an existential, libidinal relation to the ways in which we take in meaning. And it matters to not only how we live our lives but in how we can see the world. And so, he’d liberated reading from print and put it into the problem of interpretation and therefore made literacy an interpretive art, which is very close to what Freud did with language as well. I think about that now. I don’t see those two views as at odds with one another. Freire, I think, was very interested in the psychological world of the subject and the ways in which that world is made small and thoughtless by social processes and censorship, and reason, I suppose. So, the book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, was really a very central text for my own thinking. It led to Marcuse, it led to Erich Fromm, it led to Hannah Arendt, it led to Herman Melville, it led to a world of literature and a deep abiding interest for the status of the conflict in education. I finished my undergraduate work and it was a very radical education that I had at the University of Massachusetts. There were no grades. It was a time of experimentation; the school was desegregated. It was run by a dean by the name of Dwight Allen and Dwight Allen was of the Bahá’í Faith, and the Bahá’ís are quite interested in integration.

INFLUENCED BY CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: INTERVIEWS WITH CRITICAL FRIENDS

And so, when Dwight Allen got there at the University of Massachusetts – it was a very conservative education faculty before Dwight Allen – there was a rule that the dean could not inaugurate new courses. The only power that the dean had was that he could cancel courses. So, when Dwight Allen got there, he cancelled every single course in the faculty of education except one, independent study. He then invited all of the faculty that he wanted to keep on a trip to talk about the reinvention of education. The ones he didn’t want, he didn’t invite, and eventually, they became isolated and left. He brought in people from New York – people from the New York school system, people who were very key in desegregation – Roberta Flack went there – people that were thinkers, artists, people out of prison. It was a very lively and interesting and radical place. We had courses like, ‘Education is love’, ‘Sexism, racism and education’. This was in the 70s. And feminism was alive and well, Black liberation. The problem of the politics of education was a very key idea. FP: Did Paulo ever come and visit you? Deborah Britzman: Well, Freire was a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts and so was Ralph Tyler. So, we had the right and the left visiting. When I returned for graduate school – and that was in 1983 – Paulo had a yearly seminar which I began to attend. And so, I went to his seminars. Whenever he was there, I went to his seminars and got to know him very well. He was very friendly, very open. I remember the first class I went to, everybody was afraid. He walked into the first class and he sat down, and he spent a long time telling us how important it was to take notes. He described his procedure of taking notes and the little notebooks that he carried with him and that he would have an idea and he would write it down and then he would play with the idea and he would take some more notes and he would listen to people’s conversations and he would take snatches of notes. And from these notes, he began to write. And so, there were no assignments in the seminar, there were no grades, and no requirements and no attendance, and one just came. The people in the seminar was interesting. There were people in teacher education. They were mainly people in adult education, people in development, people

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working in Latin America, in Africa, in Europe and we all came from very different vantages. There were many languages spoken in the seminar. He worked in Spanish and English and French and we were just talking. The entire seminar was just … whatever was on our minds is what we talked about and tried to make some sense of. One of the things I remember about Paulo is sometimes he talked about his depression and what he did when he was depressed. And it’s probably what we all do: if we’re lucky, when we’re depressed, we go shopping. So, he was very dapper, he was very handsome, he cared about his dress. He was very, very interested, he was very, very funny, he was very, very serious. He had a long beard. He was just a very approachable, interesting … ‘My friend, my friend’, he would say hugging people and so on and made us all very comfortable until finally, we could have meaningful discussions with him. In 1986, I worked with a couple of my friends, Catherine Walsh and Juan Aulestia, who … we were in graduate school together and had all finished around the same time. They’re now living in Ecuador, they’ve been there for probably about 20 years [now 35 years, ed.] – Catherine Walsh today known for her scholarship in postcoloniality and decolonizing education and Juan known for his work in Indigenous education. But we decided – in 1985 – to make a working conference and we called it The First Working Conference on Critical Pedagogy and we held it at the University of Massachusetts. It had three strands. And we brought together areas that were seen as quite separate in education. Adult education, which – primarily, the people in adult education and literacy education were very keen on community education and were very keen on Paulo Freire. Teacher education which didn’t really do much with Freire unless there were people that were very interested in Freire. The third strand was feminism and AfricanAmerican studies. We brought all of this group together. So, we decided to invite people that were very known in the area. In Canada, it was Roger Simon who was invited; and Maxine Greene, Paulo Freire, Madeleine Grumet, Elizabeth Spelman, John Bracey, Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren – I don’t think I’m forgetting anybody. But what was interesting was that this group of people rarely were in the same room together. And those folks did keynotes

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and then in addition, we had panels and Paulo Freire. And the keynotes, of course, also came to the panels and moderated the panels and so on. So, I handled the strand in teacher education. It was there that I gave a paper that ended up being a very popular article published in the Harvard Ed. Review called ‘Cultural Myths in the Making of a Teacher: Reality and Social Structure in Teacher Education’ (1986) and some really interesting work came out of that. Harvard had actually published a special issue about the conference. Maxine Greene had a paper called ‘In Search of a Critical Pedagogy’, which is a sort of opening moment of thinking about critical pedagogy as a project as opposed to a thing you did; critical pedagogy as something to search for, something that you could find in the national literature, that you could find in art, that you could find in people’s conversations. It wasn’t something that was brought to someone, but it was something that was made and discussed and pondered over and thought about. It was my pleasure to introduce Maxine to Paulo, and it’s something Maxine often talked about. Those years were really a time when critical pedagogy was in the process of becoming defined. It was a term that was shocking. It was as shocking to us as Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It’s hard to believe because now critical pedagogy may be so normalized, where people speak about it all the time. Although, even today, people think about pedagogy and they say, ‘Well, what’s that? Why don’t you just say teaching, or, why do you say pedagogy? What is pedagogy?. So, it’s a word that decenters us that we don’t know what that word means. And that sometimes we associate it with children, but mainly we associate it with our own education, with our own capacity to learn as the basis of how it is that we teach, that is, that we teach our style of learning. I learned that from Paulo. He didn’t teach us content, he presented us with a style, similar I would say to how Lacan teaches – Lacan’s work is all oral. And his seminars are great – Lacan seminars. His 25 seminars that he held from, I would say, 1953 to around 1980, he would come in and say, ‘Well, this year, the topic is, say, ethics and psychoanalysis’, and he would spend the year talking about one thing. It would be transcribed, and it would be handed out, and there’ll be pirate copies,

and it would be translated. Our seminars from Lacan are his oral teaching. And I would say that Paulo as well – we could say – based his work on his oral teaching. He talked about his work in the favelas and he talked about how people approached the word, similar to the signifier in Lacanian psychoanalysis. So, our words and things, as Freud would talk about. Words and things bother people. FP: What common ground do Freire and Freud share? Deborah Britzman: I guess I make a leap. Freire of course talked about consciousness and Freud, of course, talked about the unconscious. But what brings them both together is their understanding of the status of meaning in human life, in the emotional world. Freire always admitted that education is an emotional situation. And this question of the emotional situation of the human. The human condition is an emotional situation. The human having desire. All of those are quite psychoanalytic questions. I think Freire was deeply impressed by Frantz Fanon, who was a psychiatrist and both a deep admirer of Freudian thought and a deep critic of Freudian thought. And I don’t think the contradiction of being both a critic and an admirer is a problem: we have to say yes and no to our knowledge, mainly. I think that what Freud was interested in, isn’t what the state kept from you but what you, yourself, don’t know. The subject is unconscious in the Freudian approach, but the subject suffers. And that question of suffering is very key in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. And what eases the suffering – if I understand Freire and if I understand Freud – is our capacity to think, because thinking is an experimental form of action. Thinking is the way in which we imagine what isn’t here, and that question of the imagination is really the grounds of our capacity to read, to project, to take in the world, to construct something that has never existed before in the mind, to want, to desire. And this question of desire, I think, is very key in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Now, Freire was most interested in the existential problem of how to live, how to choose freedom, how to let go of constraints, how to risk love, how to work. Those are the key problems that education inherits, and whether or not there can be a way for education to allow for those kinds of existential explorations is one thing.

INFLUENCED BY CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: INTERVIEWS WITH CRITICAL FRIENDS

Freire felt that reading was allowing that procedure whether there were institutional supports or not; that reading was the thing that freed the psyche or allowed the ego its grace and its flexibility and its imagination. So, the status of ideas you could see across all of these great thinkers, that thinking mattered, as Foucault asked in that great question, ‘Is it really important to think?’. And without thinking, without the capacity to bring things together, to see relationships, to put oneself in another’s place, to imagine our own feelings, to represent, to put things into words … all of those procedures feed love. And I think that Freire was quite interested in questions of education and love. He was quite interested in the cure of reading; reading as a way of reading the world, of moving into the latency of meaning – which brings us back to Freud. And in a way, one could say – if you know a lot about Freud – that Freud’s work of interpretation of dreams is another way of talking about how to read. And so, this question of reading at the 20th century, this question of literacy, this question of literature, this question of the poetics of thought, would link all of these thinkers together although we could say that they have such great differences between them. But the capacity to see, to bring into relief, I guess, what is latent in their work and to create some new ways of relating to these folks is something I’m quite interested in thinking about. FP: Describe your experience of knowing Freire Project founder, Joe Kincheloe. Deborah Britzman: Well, I’ve known Joe for a very, very long time and very, very sad – his sudden death. I met Joe in 1987 in front of an elevator at an educational conference. At the time, he was quite skinny and he had blond hair, and I didn’t know him. So, I was standing by the elevator – this was an American Educational Studies Association conference – and he comes up to me and he says, ‘I’m making a little book and I want you to write a chapter for me and the topic will be, “Are teachers as good as they used to be?”’, and I thought, ‘Well, this is quite interesting’. He was happy, he was laughing, it was a funny question. He says, ‘Just a few pages is all I want. There are ten questions that are always asked about education. I think this is going to be a really good book’.

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I was with Magda Lewis at the time. We were standing there together and we both smiled and we both said yes but we thought he was kidding. And then I get a letter from him and he says, ‘No. This is when we want it’. And that started my relationship with Joe. And I’ve contributed to many of his collections of his books and he’s been always just really sweet and generous and generative. He published in his series – I think I was number 300, my book, Novel Education that came out in 2006 with Peter Lang Publishing. And he published a piece in the old Taboo (Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education), Joe and Shirley Steinberg were editing. Of course, I met Joe and Shirley at Bergamo, AERA [American Education Research Association conference], and I went to his music. Joe opened the field of education in a way that allowed people their idiom. And he published both new scholars and older scholars and in that sense gave legitimacy to the newer people coming up by making sure that there were established names in his many series. The Education Researcher journal had a discussion of Joe because Joe was such a writer. I mean, the guy was always working, he was always writing. He had a talent of taking small objects like the hamburger and creating a story of education. He had a great educational imagination, and generous and funny and loved life, and that was evident in everything that he did. He built something but didn’t infuse it with a rigid ego, if I could put it that way. He was very, very interested in other people’s ideas and took a great deal of pleasure in the world of ideas. And you can’t ask for anything better than that in education. If we don’t love ideas, if we don’t love freedom, if we don’t love struggle, if we don’t love each other, it’s as if we’ve never been here before. And I think that Joe made a great work of art in his life and his publications. The people that are after Joe, the people that know Joe will always miss him. We’ll always remember Joe as one of the fine, fine thinkers in our field, and an innovator in education. FP: How would you like to see the future of critical thinking in education evolve? Deborah Britzman: What I hope is next – maybe for me. I don’t know what’s going to be next for other people. But one of the preoccupations that may be gaining some renewed

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interest is the status of emotional life in learning and in ethics. I would hope that psychoanalysis would become a very interesting preoccupation for education to begin to notice the emotional world of the student as the basis for their understanding of themselves and others. And I would imagine that for teachers in particular, understanding a very specific dilemma in the profession of education – and this is the case for the university as well – and that is, because we were once children who grew up in education and return to this field as adults, we bring to this field our childhood of education and our infantile theories of learning. These infantile theories of learning are often attacks on the capacity to think. So, I would hope that one would think about the emotional situation of critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy not only as a set of ideas about critiquing the world and an understanding of how ideology works and understanding of problems of inequality, but also an understanding of fantasy and sexuality and desire as also significant to the capacity to think. And not just about thinking about ideas, but being able to tolerate the frustration of being with others, to tolerate conflict in education as a constitutive feature of education as our split subject and so to begin to think about critical pedagogy not as a set of things to carry out but as an emotional situation that people must work through. That would allow us to begin to tolerate all of our differences and see what’s important and what’s unimportant. I think we’re still at that place where we’re not quite sure what’s important and what’s unimportant so we’re still, sort of, we could say, in the Hamlet complex, ‘To be or not to be’, or we want to begin to think about what the unconscious means in critical pedagogy as well as in life. So, I would say that critical pedagogy is now ready to begin to think about itself as an emotional situation, as much as an intellectual project, as much as a political project and begin to whittle away binaries of either its emotional or its intellectual blah-blahblah and to begin to see that these processes as needed and necessary for each of the other’s intelligibility. FP: Any additional thoughts? Deborah Britzman: So much has changed since I began as a student, as a teacher, as a professor. One of the big ones, of course, is the

Internet and the accessibility that people now have to ideas. One of the more difficult dilemmas that education will now inherit will be how to think through the thicket of information and superstition that are associated with these technological innovations and the immediacy of knowledge. I often wonder what the high-speed mentality does to our capacity for patience and for tolerating not knowing, for being suspicious of knowledge in new kinds of ways and to question the entertainment features of our pedagogical situation. And so, these are things that I very much wonder about – how that will affect our capacity to think and to deal with absence when things are so present. This is really one of the big questions I have about the condition of mental and emotional life right now.

INTERVIEW WITH ROCHELLE BROCK, MCGILL UNIVERSITY, MONTREAL, 2009 State College, Philadelphia, probably 1995. After a phone call from a former colleague in Miami, we offer to host her friend, Rochelle, in our home, as she investigated the Penn State doctoral program in curriculum. Originally from Akron, Ohio, Rochelle had graduated from UC Berkeley and was teaching in the South Florida area. Not sure what we both thought of one another – Kincheloe was a glue in our relationship – he worked with her to find a place at PSU and became her supervisor. I was struck by Rochelle’s direct delivery and her rye observations about our ‘White People House’, overrun by multiple big dogs – making the point, she went on to tell us escaped slaves were often chased and retrieved by dogs, and about her belief that many African Americans had an intuitive fear of dogs. Rochelle’s knowledge of Black History and the essential nature of narrative in educating for equity and critical pedagogy is instinctive to her. She creates artful illustrations as she breathes and as she teaches, she is the ultimate contextualizer. When she started teaching undergraduate classes at

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Penn State, our daughter, Meghann, was in her class. Meghann had been raised in a cloistered Southern Alberta town of 1,500 people and endeavored to become more world-aware. Rochelle as teacher, as mentor, as advisor, as artist, as resource, facilitated an awakening for Meghann, and years later, Meg still regards Rochelle as an Elder, a keeper of knowledge, and attributes her own sociological, political evolution to her class (srs, editor’s note). FP: Can you talk about being a Black woman graduate student and your history in the academic setting? Rochelle Brock: Being a Black female graduate student … was interesting. There were some really hard times where I felt invisible and I felt that in various classes that professors weren’t hearing me, or if they heard me, it didn’t make a damn bit of difference what I said. I think one of the really great things about being a Black or being a graduate student was that there was a cohort of Black, Brown, gay, critical students and that we all hung out together; we became each other’s support because all of us ran the problem of not being heard in class or not being seen in class or just feeling very alienated in the whole academic setting. So, we were able to talk to each other and depend on each other and lean on each other. When I was writing my dissertation, there were two other Black females writing theirs at the same time and we actually had a little study group. We called ourselves ‘The Colored Women’s Dissertation Writing Group’. When we met, we didn’t do anything with our dissertations, but it was about talking, food and fellowship. But that’s what you need. That’s what we found that we all needed just to survive being a graduate student in the environment where we were. FP: And just in general about being a Black female professor, how do students react to it? How do faculty react to it? Rochelle Brock: Interesting question. Reminds me of something. I was at a conference some years back and one of the professors, a Black female professor, I believe she was at LSU [Louisiana State University] at the time, made the statement that she felt like the ‘tit’, students would come to her office to talk about personal issues, or they would come to her office to get that mothering that she was

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very good at. But they wouldn’t come to her office to ask academic questions, or questions about scholars or theory or whatever. That as a Black female, she was looked at as the suckling tit, and she said she was so tired of that. And I think that that is something that a lot of Black professors run into – I know, I run into it constantly and more so at my previous university where I was the professor that students could come to and talk about fashion. Of course, I consider myself a very fashionable person… So, they could come and talk about fashion or they could come and talk about whatever, but they would not ask me a question about Freire, or they would not ask me a question about critical pedagogy, or ‘What do you think about this?’, or questions that were really framed by what they did and what they were trying to study. Sometimes it would upset me, sometimes I would just laugh it off. One of the other problems in being – challenges, I won’t say problems. One of the other challenges in being a Black professor, I can remember sitting in meetings with my colleagues, and my colleagues talking to each other and just ignoring me even though the meeting was about my program or our program together. Again, I guess going back to graduate school, just that sense of invisibility and alienation – it’s hard, it’s trying, it personifies being the other and people just don’t get it. One of the things that I found being a Black professor, really creating a community mostly with my graduate students, I think some of my best friends to this date really are those individuals that were my graduate students. The collegial relationship was problematic in many ways because of the things that I just discussed. It was the graduate students that I really found that sense of home with. Being a Black professor is – it just is. It’s what I am. So, I find ways to work with it. I find ways to work through it. Sometimes it’s just leaving campus and batting your head up against the wall, and it’s like, ‘Why the hell am I doing this?’. I think it’s tiring. I’ve talked to other African Americans who are in the academy and one of the things that we constantly talk about is sometimes we’re just damn tired. It’s a struggle to be heard. It’s a struggle to be seen in faculty meetings. It’s a struggle to have your research understood. And not so much understood as respected. It’s just a

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c­ onstant struggle. So you really have to have an armor to defend yourself against the crap that you constantly have coming at you. FP: I know a lot of students that I deal with, a lot of colleagues, are like, ‘Well, it’s all about diversity and things are better now’. Do you feel things are better? Have you seen a change within the past ten years in terms of how students react to you? Rochelle Brock: I’ve seen a change only because of where I’ve been. I’ve seen a slight change. I directed an Urban Teacher Education Program. And the majority of my students were in my program because they wanted to teach urban education. So, that’s one battle I didn’t have to get over, I didn’t have to get past. So, at least when they came into the program, they knew what we’d be talking about, what we’d be dealing with, and it was what they wanted to learn. At the same time, I still have some students, and specifically some White students, that I still get that battle. ‘You’re Rochelle. You’re not Dr. Brock. You’re Rochelle. And you really can’t tell me anything because you’re a Black female in front of the class’. So, they still look at me through that stereotype that they’ve always had about who a Black female is and who really should be in front of the class giving them the great bits of wisdom. So, no, it’s hard to say that things have really changed. Stereotypes still exist. Feelings of the other still exist. Prejudice – everything is still there. I think there are a couple of differences – in some ways, what’s out there is more covert than it has been in the past. And then maybe one of the other things that has changed – I just know how to deal with it. I had a student giving me crap in class a couple of weeks ago about – just everything. And, as much as I want to just reach out and scream, I dealt with it, I shut them down where they needed to be shut down. And then I went home and I called a friend and for an hour, we talked and laughed on the phone about what happened. And we also theorized what happened and why. So, now, I think I have more coping mechanisms. It’s not that they’ve changed or anything has changed in society. I’ve changed and know how to deal with it. FP: So, in terms of critical pedagogies – obviously, you are a critical pedagogue – how do you see critical urban education?

Rochelle Brock: Critical urban education – what I try to do in my program – is about making sure that those future teachers that are going out there into urban schools have the tools that they need in order to truly understand that child in the urban classroom, both from a – I guess – philosophical as well as a socioeconomic standpoint. And importantly, they know how to give those tools to the students that they’re teaching. I think an important part of critical urban education really is giving our kids the tools to change their environment in order to have that agency that they are the masters of their destiny, even taking into account those obstacles that are in front of them. Those obstacles of race, those obstacles of economics, just the daily shit that you have to deal with – but you have the tools, first of all, to understand where it comes from and to understand that it’s not you. It’s out there. But not making it internal like, ‘This is happening to me because I am bad, because I am nothing, because I deserve it’. So, they know the reality of the situation. And importantly, they know what they need to do in order to change the situation. I think that one of the things that I really try to do with my students, that piece of critical pedagogy that talks about radical love, I think that is so important working with urban education, working with urban students, the love and the passion that has to be part of education and has to be part of what you do in front of the classroom. Urban students especially – remember, those are the students that I’m concerned with – need to feel that connection. It’s a lot about relationships and it’s a lot about respect. And I think when a teacher goes in and they understand that and they can begin to develop that relationship with their students – they have that going for them, then the pedagogy follows. Part of the obstacles that urban students are dealing with, some things as simple as just not having a good breakfast in the morning, some things like having a full night’s sleep, having text in the household to read. Just so many different things that some are in their control and some are out of their control. But again, making that teacher – that pre-service teacher, that in-service teacher – aware of what those issues are, aware of what those obstacles are, and then how they can get past them, overcome them,

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knock them – knock the obstacles out of the way. FP: So, in terms of Rochelle, who’s influenced you in terms of scholars or academics in general. Are there any people that you really respect and admire for their work and if they’ve influenced you in any way? Rochelle Brock: Yes. I used to call her my ‘warrior goddess’. When I was writing my dissertation, I grounded my dissertation – now, I ground a lot of, I think, just my total existence on Patricia Hill Collins. And the reason that I called her my ‘warrior goddess’, is when I was at Penn State where I did my graduate work, I taught a class called the ‘African American Woman’ and Black Feminist Thought was a book that was used in the class the semester prior to my teaching it. And I picked up the book and I read it and it was like there was someone out there who put voice to what I had been thinking, someone who articulated a lot of my feelings and angst and my questions. And so, I try to read as much of her as I possibly can. I love the writings of Patricia Hill Collins. She’s definitely one of the scholars that I read and I listen to. A lot of scholars dealing with Black feminist theory from Collins to Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Of course, Joe Kincheloe being my advisor and my great friend, I read a lot of Joe and listen to mini-Joe stories and learn so much from the Joe stories. And then Shirley Steinberg with immediate theory, popular culture. Pedro Noguera, who was at the urban program at NYU. I like Pedro’s writings and I use a lot of his writings in my class because it’s the nuts and bolts of urban education and the nuts and bolts of funding – the inequities in funding – and school systems. I like what he has to say and I think the students really appreciate it because, again, it’s ‘this happen and then this happen and then this. And this is why these things took place’. Of course, there’s Freire. I’d say most of the critical pedagogues in critical theory I read, but I always bring in the African American perspective, and I think that it has gotten better. At one point, I really felt it missing from critical theory. I see more of it, much more of it now, but I bring in a lot of African Americans scholars that probably would not call themselves critical pedagogues even though that’s what they do and that’s what they’ve always done. They have another name for it – could just be

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natural, could be critical race theory. I mean, there are a lot of different names out there for what we do. FP: So, in terms of you as a teacher, what are your goals? What do you hope that your students, when they leave your class, leave with? Like what? Rochelle Brock: I hope they leave with saying, ‘Rochelle was the best damn professor I ever had’. FP: I’m sure they do. Rochelle Brock: Besides that, I hope they leave my class with a sense of purpose. I hope I instill in them that passion. And I know I drive them crazy throughout the classes with, ‘You got to be passionate about education and you have to passionate about learning. And you have to figure out ways to infuse that passion in your teaching and make sure that your students feel it and become it’. So, I hope they leave my class, I hope they leave my program, with that sense of passion. I hope they leave my teaching with a commitment to social justice as an extremely important part of urban education in what we do. I hope they leave my class knowing that what happens in the classroom from 7:00 to 2:30 or whatever the school day is, that pedagogy’s beyond those seven hours, that learning takes place all around. So, I want them to leave class with that. As a teacher, I guess my main goal is to be the type of teacher that I want my students to become. I want them to be passionate as I’ve said countless times, I want them to be caring, I want them to understand the sense of social justice, I want them to put 150% in daily to their teaching, I want them to be researchers, I want them to constantly work on making themselves better and work on developing more knowledge about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it and how to do it better. So, again I just try to be who I want them to be. FP: Are there any other comments or anything else you’d want to add that we haven’t asked you? Rochelle Brock: Education should be messy when we’re talking about the types of subjects that we’re talking about. It needs to be messy and it needs to be uncomfortable when you need to figure out ways to work through it. I think that’s an important part of all of the questions that you’ve asked because there are no easy answers. There’s not an easy answer to what it’s like to be a Black professor, there’s not an easy answer to what it was like to be a

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Black graduate student, or to critical urban education, or any of those things. But understanding that the messiness in education is also the joy in education and then in teaching. And there are fields that I could be in that I would make more money – probably a lot more money. But the feeling that you get from getting through to that pre-service teacher, and you know that they’re going to go out there and do what they need to do in the classroom – it’s just such a wonderful feeling. The feeling that you get from going out and working with students, and you get through to them and you know you’re making a difference. That’s a great feeling that money really can’t buy. I know that sounds damn corny but it’s true.

INTERVIEW WITH IVOR GOODSON, AERA CONGRESS, BAEZA, SPAIN, 2008 Somewhere in the United States at an academic conference – I can’t recall how I first met Ivor. Was it the year he pushed Falmer Press to pay for our flights to AERA to celebrate Kincheloe’s new book? Was it the year I asked him to be on a panel with us on literacy and narrative? What I do know, is that Goodson will know the day and year we met. He is a keeper of facts, he is a networker, he is a narrator, he is a consummate teacher and colleague. I can say without exaggeration, that most of how I have conducted my professional life, my publications and particularly, my speeches and workshops, has been informed and guided by whom I quietly call Uncle Ivor. Along with knowing more about rock ‘n’ roll than most anyone, he has a plethora of facts and linkages. If Ivor doesn’t know, he knows someone who does. His enthusiasm for life, learning, knowing and sharing has informed my everyday scholarship, my pedagogy and my own narrative. Without ego, he is confident without patriarchy, he parents without fear, he is honest. When Joe died, we celebrated his life at the first Congress of Critical Pedagogy

and Transformative Leadership in Baeza, Spain. Inviting about 100 people, we weren’t sure who would actually show up to this tiny town in the middle of sweltering Andalusia. The Congress had begun, and the first day was finishing up, and I was called to come to the lobby. I spotted a hot and red-faced Ivor sitting on a stool, smiling. We had no idea he was coming. Indeed, his decision to come was kept secret, and instead of contacting my office to get assistance, he took a boat across from the UK and grabbed a taxi to the Congress. Over 400–500 Euros lighter, Ivor charmed all. I asked what had possessed him to come so far and he replied that he had to see me in person to let me know how much Joe meant to him. Two days later he was gone, I still don’t know how he got home (srs, editor’s note). Ivor Goodson: I’m Ivor Goodson and I’ve spent the last 36 years [now 45 years, ed.] in what is called the academy, and spent the first ten years at the University of Sussex running a thing called the European Schools Unit which was trying to develop policy for the European Commission because England joined in 1976 and I was involved a lot in Brussels in developing egalitarian policies for the EU. And then in 1979, Margaret Thatcher was appointed [UK prime minister] and in 1985, there was a thing called the miners’ strike in England and I vowed if the miners were defeated, I would leave England. So, they were defeated, and I was offered a chair at the University of Western Ontario which is just south of Toronto. And I went there and set up a research unit there called RUCCUS – Research Unit on [Classroom Learning and] Computer Use in School, actually – got shedloads of money for the next ten years and did a lot of work and created a lot of projects and built up a decent research program which subsequently became a PhD program – they didn’t have one before. In 1996, I was offered an endowed chair at the University of Rochester and moved – well, it’s a complicated story, but my wife and son did not want to go and work in America. They have always had a thing about America. They refused to leave Ontario which seemed fair, because they’d been dragged all the way, they didn’t want to make another move.

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I actually did a halftime deal where I did halftime at Rochester, halftime still in Ontario. Then I had a sabbatical, and it was 1996, and I suddenly got the drift that the [UK] Labour Party was going to get into power. During the sabbatical, I was offered a chair at the University of East Anglia which is a center for applied research where action research started, and the teachers’ researcher movement started. It was a great, great place. And my mentor Lawrence Stenhouse was there and I was subsequently offered the kind of chair that was the same chair he had had. I went back halftime to East Anglia, halftime to Rochester, which I did for seven years, pretty exhausting actually and difficult because I had an apartment in Rochester, a house in England – two tax systems, all the rest. And then in end, in 2002, I resigned the Rochester post and was offered a Research Associate’s post at Cambridge and continued at East Anglia, and then was offered – this is a long story but whilst I was in the pub back in Brighton during my sabbatical, I was offered a chair at Brighton. And so, I’m now Brighton–Cambridge and probably settled for good now in Brighton, and we have a little place out in the country and we all like it. That’s probably it. Again, a little bit more history going back before when I was at Sussex. I was a history lecturer at the University of London. So, I was in the academy from 1967 onwards. And in 1968, read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, read a lot of Basil Bernstein and decided to resign from university life and become a school teacher; interesting thing to do, not many people do that now, but it was 1968. A year went on and so I went to work in a very radical school where Freire was very much part of the ethos. And the English equivalent of Freire in a way was this man I just mentioned earlier, Lawrence Stenhouse, who ran a thing called the Humanities Curriculum Project, which is about developing a pedagogy for the oppressed, basically. I worked at that school for four years and then moved to another, and set up a Humanities Department there, and then moved to Sussex. I spent six years in English comprehensive schools at the time when they were being started. That was a very interesting time to work through inclusive pedagogies, which has always been my interest. Going back even further, my parents were manual workers, so I’ve always been committed to a sense of how one develops an

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­ ducation for that particular oppressed group. e I have a very specific interest – which has remained with me right throughout my life – which is how we help people from the English working class and English underclass to get a curricular understanding of the world. So, pretty Freirean, early on. FP: When did you read The Pedagogy of the Oppressed? Ivor Goodson: Penguin – probably late 60s, I think. FP: Was it somebody who gave it to you? Do you remember? Ivor Goodson: Interesting question. No, I bought it. I bought a range of stuff around ‘68 on pedagogy and became convinced that’s what I should do. It all started in 1970 and we certainly ran into Freire then, so maybe early on. It was a red Penguin book, I’ve still got it. FP: Maybe this was in the United States too when it came out. So, did you ever meet Paulo? Ivor Goodson: No, never. No. Of course, I mean, all the guys I respected – I mean, Joe [Kincheloe], I’ve known a long time now and Shirley [Steinberg]. So, they would talk a lot about him; Peter McLaren talks a lot about him, of course. And so, a lot of people I was meeting at AERA from the 80s onwards were Freirians, but that’s a little later. I mean, in my own pedagogic practice as a teacher, critical pedagogy was important, before I’ve met any American Freirians. FP: So, take us back to your original work and tell us a couple more stories of this sort of opposition you’re dealing with in England at that time. Ivor Goodson: It’s interesting because again, historically, you’re going into a period where there’s a huge struggle in England in 1970s – you’ve still got Labour Government, you see, which is – 1965, it gets rid of all the privileged grammar schools and creates comprehensive schools. You have a government diktat which says all schools should become common schools where everybody is mixed together – a fascinating experiment, just up my street. I wanted to be in one of those schools. And the most radical school in England of all those common schools was where I taught, in the Midlands. That’s where I shipped off to when I left the university – straight up to the Midlands to this school which opened in 1970. Essentially, my interest was in developing a

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pedagogy of the oppressed. I got particularly interested in the nature of the curriculum and how there was a deliberately constructed curriculum which delivered what I called structured inequality – you could call it oppression – which delivered oppression unproblematically and normatively. It was the kind of curriculum I had had in school which I hated, which was completely alienated from the world I’d grown up in. I grew up in a working-class area. The kind of curriculum I had to do was Latin, ancient history, which was just of no interest whatsoever to me. It was guaranteed – in other words – to oppress me, fail me. It was delivering structured inequality. When we got the common school system, a group of us set about creating a new curriculum to develop, in a sense, a pedagogy of inclusion. We developed new subjects. I developed urban studies, environmental studies, community studies. And these new subjects began to change who succeeded and who failed in the school. Actually, the oppressed began to succeed, so much so that in 1972, the then education secretary, who was called Margaret Thatcher, ordered a special inspection of the school. Not because we were failing but because we were succeeding so dramatically – and in their [Conservative government] sense disastrously – with working-class children. We were getting large numbers of people through O-level. When only 20% should’ve passed, we were getting much larger numbers through. So, it was a fascinating time. And then what I began to see was that actually if you challenge the subject hegemony, that was the place at that time to challenge oppression, so you had to develop another curriculum. Shirley wanted me to talk a bit about this and I will. I got very interested in what I called Curriculum History, which is why are school subjects as they are, and, when you create new ones which bring in inclusion, why are those subjects not deemed to be proper subjects, was the question. I went back to Sussex in 1975 to do a PhD, which became the book School Subjects and Curriculum Change, which is still in print – it’s in its 5th edition – and it’s about an attempt to introduce environmental studies and how the conventional subjects fight against it and how that actually means oppression is delivered in different ways. I did that PhD and then I started to run this unit I talked about, the European Unit.

But at the same time, again, the theme running through this is most of my key networking, most of the key meetings, appeared to be in pubs. So, I’m in a pub one night – The Swan in Falmer – and I meet this guy and we have a few beers, and we talk and we like each other. And at the end of the evening, he says, ‘I really enjoyed this evening. I run a publishing company, do you fancy working for me?’, and I said, ‘Yes, sure, it will be nice’. Well, it turns out – this is 1979, I think – this is the seeds of what became Falmer Press. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but it was a reasonable deal for a while. Sir Malcolm [Clarkson] and I started to talk, and in 1982 I became executive director, he was managing director. And in 1983, we were taken over by Taylor and Francis and they pumped shedloads of money in and said, ‘Go out and conquer America’, was what Malcolm said. So, there’s these two guys sitting in a pub in England. Falmer, if you’ve ever looked at the books, they have two swans on, that’s the pub – The Swan. Now you know why there are two swans on the book. We’re sitting in a pub and he’s saying to me, ‘Actually, I think what we should do now is just conquer America’. I said, ‘Fine, let’s do that. That’d be great, do you want another pint?’, and that was it. So off we go, 1984, our first year at AERA. We arrived with five books on the table, but we have one of those booths, so we’ve created all sorts of mock ups of potential books but we’ve actually only got five books in. And I remember, I said, ‘We should have a party’. So, we got some really big names. I remember I shuffled around and I talked to a few people and said, ‘Who should I invite?’. And they said, ‘You should invite Tom Popkewitz’. And these people turned up to this party. And because it was an English party, it was a great party. There was booze everywhere and Malcolm gave a speech and this was a start. I mean, what we set about doing actually – playing an Anglophile card, really – was to create desire of a particular kind. But it was going to be an elite Anglophile club where you came, you had lots of booze and food and you joined the club and you wrote a book. I did that rather consciously. I remember saying to him, ‘We need to create a kind of desire here. This is not a conventional project. We want to create a radical press here, but we’ve got to get the key players in America involved. We can’t do that with

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money, we got to do that with Anglophile desire that they’ll want to be part of this club where we have great speeches and great food and great booze. And that’s how we’ll deliver it’. It became a fairly big deal. In the end, we went from producing five books a year to 100 books a year, and then it became one of the biggest publishers of critical pedagogy in education in America, right through until, I guess, 2000. I just had to give the funeral oration at Malcom’s funeral. He died of Parkinson’s a few years ago. That was part of the kind of public intellectual work I spun off from my own pedagogical interest. So, the whole idea of Falmer for me was to create a press which would carry these messages. It was a real chance to be, in my terms. a kind of global organic intellectual and do something quite good in terms of the means of production. Actually, we stole the means of production and produced a press which I think still is an enormous repository of interesting work. FP: Ivor, can you tell us some of the most influential books that came out of Falmer? Ivor Goodson: I think for a start, there was a huge series on Curriculum History, my thing. So, I actually in a sense mobilized my own work to get. So, we had Barry Franklin’s book on Building the American Community, Tom Popkewitz’s book on School Subjects, we produced a lot of Michael Apple’s work, Giroux’s work, Kincheloe’s work, Steinberg’s work, we did most of Eisner’s work. And all of this work, we basically mobilized. We had a series on Curriculum History, we had a thing called the Falmer Teacher’s Library which teaches qualitative research. Virtually, all the big names that you can think of, we did the most of work, we had other series. FP: Did you do the Paulo and… Ivor Goodson: Yes, of course. Yes, yes, yes. Yes, I mean, you can see how in a way we were holding the line for a whole raft of fascinating work. And at the time, there weren’t many other publishers you could go to. FP: We actually have Henry Giroux on tape talking about the lockdown. Ivor Goodson: Do you? FP: Yes. So, this is a nice time … Ivor Goodson: We did Henry’s first book, you see. Back in ‘78, something like that, we did Henry’s book in England when he was unknown in England at the time and we just took a punt on him. And McLaren was

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another one that we took early. So, I was, in a sense, going around the world. Another example was, I fetched up in Auckland – I was traveling the world all the time at this time, lecturing but also working for Falmer, in a way. And I was a Visiting Professor at Auckland, I remember, and I walked into Auckland that night and went into a pub again and got talking to a guy and I said, ‘What do you do?. He said, ‘Well, actually, I’m a literacy scholar’. We had few more beers, we had too many beers. And I said, ‘Why don’t you write a book called Literacy, Schooling, and Revolution?’. He said, ‘I’ll do it.’ And it was Colin Lankshear, and he delivered the book six weeks later. I mean, he was just an obsessive, wonderful guy. And he won prizes. And that literally came out of the kind of conversations that you have in pubs where you’re talking in an engaged way. It was a really good example of what I tended to try and do as I went around the world, so a lot of Australians I’d picked up, we did all the critical scholars from Australia. Basically, all of the people who are interested in pedagogies and inclusion and oppression, I think began to come to Falmer. So, that was our kind of niche, if you want to put it in those crass marketing terms. If you think about it as a formulation of the role that I was playing, I think it’s the only time I can think of – although I’m being immodest here – where an academic who is himself working as a professor and doing all that stuff is, in a sense, ‘insider trading’ inside. Because the great advantage I had was that I knew the view of all those inside the academy because I was inside the academy, whereas, normally, publishers come and they’re trying to find that out – I kinda knew it. I knew the lifestyle. I knew Joe Kincheloe, I knew he would deliver, I knew everything about him. I didn’t need to take him out to lunch and wine and dine him to say, ‘Joe, what would you like to do a book on?’. I mean, we just had the intellectual conversation at that level and we just piloted it into books. It’s normally publishers come to you and try to understand the academic world and take you out and talk about it. Whereas here, it was just what we did. I remember Shirley [Steinberg] dedicated a book to me, she said, ‘To Ivor Goodson, for whom this is just rock and roll’. What she meant by that I think was it was just what she

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did. You didn’t have to set yourself up as a publisher, you had all those roles integrated. In a classic, what I think would still be the right public intellectual way to go, if you wanted to be a public intellectual. You integrate all of your roles and you seize the means of production in terms of publishing and of you go. That was great, interesting time – fascinating 25 years. And at the same time, I was ­founding journals as well because we ran journals and founded the Journal of Education Policy which is well past 30 years, and has more impact on citations then the Harvard Ed. Review. So, it’s a leading European journal – and loads of other journals. I was involved in founding Qualitative Studies in Education, Critical Studies – all of them. All of these I would say I got to do from the inside – help from the inside. Social Epistemology was another journal I was involved in. So, I was in a very, very intriguing position within a publishing company which allowed me to push my intellectual agenda, which, as we’ve said, is inclusive and concerned with issues of social justice. So, in a sense, it’s doing what one always does. It’s traveling around having conversations about these issues. But it’s a difficult time I think to be a progressive intellectual. I think you can see the dilemmas of an Obama. Audacious hope is hard to deal with in the current political situation. And I have to stop myself being pessimistic because partly I feel pessimistic, but it’s important to have audacious hope still and to have Utopian dreams and to take those right through your life. But as you get older, it does get harder. My own political position is probably to the left of what it was when I was 20. So, I’ve gone the opposite direction to most people. I do not age and go to the right; I age and go to the left. FP: My dad’s line always was, ‘If you’re not a socialist before you’re 30, you haven’t lived. If you’re a socialist after you’re 30, you have learned’. Ivor Goodson: Yes, I know. Well, I haven’t learned, then. But I think, actually, I’ve learned a hell of a lot. And I think the ones who haven’t learned are the ones who go the other way. I don’t think you could really seriously point to right-wing Republicans and say, ‘This is a group of learned’. I think this is a group who will poison the planet in their absence of learning. So, if you want a clear line on who’s learning and who isn’t, that

bunch aren’t learning, they’re not going to learn. FP: What do you have coming up? Ivor Goodson: Well, I’ve just finished writing. I’ve finished a book on narrative learning. What I’m writing about is life politics, how we make moral decisions within our own life program. And created a lot of work on lifelong learning in England, a project called Learning Lives – a five-year project funded by the Labour Government. And I’ve done an EU project on professional knowledge – fouryear project funded by EU. And both of those are leading onto other books. I’ve written on narrative pedagogy. I’m increasingly spending my time writing rather than keynoting and floating around the world. So, it’s the first time in my life – my wife tells me – I’ve stopped traveling obsessively. We’ve got a place in Sussex that we both like. And so, I write most days in the study. It’s a study where Greenpeace was founded, actually. And I was sitting last night, thinking that the Rainbow Warrior Campaign was organized in my study. So, it’s a nice place to sit, with its own legacy. And so, a little more at peace with the world, writing more – haven’t changed my mind at all. I’m still in exactly the same place, arguing for exactly the same thing that I’ve believed for 50 years – an unchanging non-learner.

INTERVIEW WITH HANDEL KASHOPE WRIGHT, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, JUNE 2009 The first time I heard the name, Handel Wright, was when Kincheloe noted to me that his alma mater, The University of Tennessee, had hired an African assistant professor in cultural studies. A double significance in the 1990s: first, that an African professor would be hired in Vols Country, Knoxville, Tennessee, and second, that there was a cultural studies program. In those days, cultural studies was a unicorn, known to we critical theorists and random English programs, but certainly not a staple to a faculty of education. Clearly, this Dr. Wright was going to be impressive.

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And, he was … he is tall and engaging, Handel is the epitome of warmth, laughter, seriousness and knowledge. He has been instrumental in literally and figuratively changing the face of education in an important Southern university, and has gone on to create essential spaces for diversity, multiculturalism, youth studies and curriculum in both the United States and Canada. Generous in time, scholarship, listening and teaching, Handel is respected and known for his contributions to his students and colleagues. I often meet a student who has worked with Dr. Wright and gone on to become a successful scholar/ teacher, always noting the importance of his tireless contributions and advice to their own lives. As a friend he is tireless, one who knows what to say, how to be. When Joe died, I was in a mist – in Montreal, clearly not coherent. My family was staying with me at a hotel, and I walked into a common room on the 2nd-floor mezzanine, Handel was standing there … to be there … to be a friend (srs, editor’s note). Handel Wright: My name is Handel Kashope Wright. I’m Sierra Leonean. I was born in Sierra Leone, which is – I have to explain to some people – a small country in West Africa. I did my undergrad studies in Sierra Leone. I did an honors degree in English and I was a high school teacher for two years. I taught A-level literature and came to Canada for graduate studies. I did a master’s at the University of Windsor and then went back home, and worked with a teacher education program for a year doing some editing stuff for their publications. And then came back to Canada and did a second master’s degree, this time in education and stayed on and did a PhD. When I finished my PhD, I taught in the States at the University of Tennessee for ten years and was attracted back to Canada with the Canada Research Chair offer. So, I’m here at the University of British Columbia. I’ve held several different positions. I was Canada Research Chair for cultural studies, the David Lamb Chair for multicultural education, and am presently director for the Center for Culture, Identity and Education. And my area, one of my biggest areas of interest, is in the field of cultural studies. And

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I’m fascinated by the intersection of cultural studies and the field of education – what some people are now calling cultural studies of education or cultural studies in education. I look at this as an opportunity to do work in cultural studies in education. But most specifically the project that I developed to do as Canada Research Chair involved a comparative multiculturalism because I had been in Canada for about a decade and spent about another decade in the US. So, I’m fascinated by the similarities and differences between Canadian and American forms of multiculturalism. And I’m interested in education of course, and in youth. I also look at how youth think of themselves and how they fit into multiculturalism. But I didn’t want to look at just all youth. I’m looking at a comprehensive category that I’m calling ‘new youth’. And the category that I’m calling new youth involves basically three types of youth and relatively new categories. One is recent immigrants or refugees. So, ‘new’ in the sense of being literally new to the country, and how they feel that they fit or don’t fit into Canadian multiculturalism whether there’s a sense of belonging there or not belonging. I’m also looking at another category, say queer youth. By that I don’t just mean gay and lesbian youth, but gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, youth that feel ambivalent maybe even about sexuality. And what that says about their identity and how they feel that they fit in or don’t fit into Canadian and American forms of multiculturalism. And the third category is multiracial youth. And these are not necessarily new in the sense of, well, there’s a new set of people who are multiracial. They’ve never been multiracial people. They’ve always been multiracial people, but it’s used to be the case that people had to be pigeonholed into one or another identify. So, in the United States for example, the one drop of blood rule meant that it didn’t matter how light skinned you were, just having any amount of Black blood in you made you a Black person. Whereas now, there are people who are coming to the fore and taking up multiraciality and multiethnicity as a new kind of category of identity in and of itself. So, I’m fascinated by that as well. So, those three different kinds of categories of people are what I’m calling new youth

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and part of my research is to look at how new youth fit into community. And community could be anything from the nation – the nation of the US and Canada – to cyber communities, to raves, more social youth kind of organized spaces – what some people are calling youthscapes. FP: Having spent time in both the United States and Canada, can you compare the two, specifically from urban education and youth culture perspectives? Handel Wright: Part of what’s happening with this project is I’m already shifting and thinking of this much more internationally than a comparison between Canada and the States. Because when it comes to a comparison between Canada and the States, I think Canadians are very big on that comparison. Whilst the States – the States almost thinks of Canada as a vague continuation of the US. It’s another vague state somewhere up north that they don’t quite know enough about. And that’s a reductionist statement, but for some Americans there is that idea of Canada as not being necessarily a very separate country or if it is a separate country, then it’s just a vague country to the north. Whilst Canadians on the other hand are very aware of America. So, they have these images of being in bed with the elephant and all of that sort of thing, and the proximity of this very large influential country. Canada is large in terms of space but not in terms of population. So, you find that the culture is in some way very similar, but Canadians would like to really emphasize the differences. But I am not sure that I’m finding a lot of very, very stark differences between Canadian and American youth. I find that it’s a continuum and there’s more to be found around regional differences. So, there’s a more distinct kind of West Coast feel to youth culture that might stretch all the way from Vancouver down to San Diego, for example that might be different from a kind of Toronto or New York continuum. And so, there are little bits of difference but they are not as significant as one would want to think. And I think that the spaces of unity, for example, in cyberspace, in social networking, in groups like Facebook and et cetera, et cetera, and what people upload onto YouTube, et cetera, et cetera, there’s very much a continuum. So, sometimes people stress the differences but I find a lot of similarities as well.

For me now, part of this is shifting into, well, what other discourses are coming to the fore as alternatives to multiculturalism. In Europe, for example, there’s a big turn towards interculturalism as a new discourse for dealing with difference and diversity. And in Canada we actually do have interculturalism. So, one of the differences might be, for example, if you want to talk to kids in Quebec, you want to know about how they feel about interculturalism as opposed to multiculturalism because Quebec has official interculturalism as policy. I’m finding that there are little bits of differences but what might be more interesting is how do North American kids think about themselves or youth in general compared to, say, British youth or Australian youth or youth in other parts of the world. But for now, I’m opening up the project to look at other ‘Western’ countries. Australia is a dubious one because Australia is now positioning itself more and more, beginning to realize it’s more and more related, has more proximity with Asia. So, Australia is an interesting example of a kind of country in transition between thinking of itself as ‘Western’ with strong ties to England and to Britain in general, and Australia as part of Asia. But I’m also interested in the comparison between that and, say, how British youth not only in England but also how, for example, youth in Ireland – and this is not Northern Ireland but the Republic of Ireland – because they have official interculturalism as opposed to the British who don’t yet have official interculturalism. So, what’s going on there in terms of policy, what does interculturalism mean for shifts in thinking about and dealing with diversity and society, and how different is it from multiculturalism? So, one of the new sorts of questions that I’m moving some of my research towards. FP: What is interculturalism? Handel Wright: Interculturalism is a relatively new discourse which is strongly about dialogue. So, the premise of interculturalism – and it depends on which version of interculturalism one is speaking about. So, it is about the relationship. It’s about getting different groups in society to come into dialogue with one another in order to create a more harmonious society. That’s basically what it’s about. But it takes on different forms in different contexts.

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So, for example in Latin America, in Mexico for example, there is a form of interculturalism that is very distinctly about Latinos and their relationship with Indigenous people. So, that form of interculturalism is about the empowerment of Indigenous people for them to have agency, for them to have a voice, for them to ‘come to voice’ as bell hooks would put, it in their own affairs and in having a greater voice in society. So, that could be one form of interculturalism. And a very different form of interculturalism exists, for example, in Quebec, which is a kind of interculturalism that is almost in some ways a reaction to Canadian multiculturalism. And that form of interculturalism is one that says there is a Quebecois culture and society and French as the language of Quebec. And these are given – they’re not really up for negotiation. And the idea is that people who come to Quebec would be, in a way, integrated into society. And those people would bring something to Quebec and Quebec will make reasonable accommodation – which is this term that’s really been used and tossed around quite a bit – reasonable accommodation of the differences that people bring. So, that’s different from multiculturalism which says there’s no real such thing as Canadian culture and society, but it’s what people bring and we put all together that creates this mosaic of Canadian culture. Now, whether that actually works in fact or not is a whole different thing. Some people might think that there’s a bit less flexibility in Quebecois interculturalism than there is in Canadian multiculturalism, but I would argue that Canadian multiculturalism in fact, a lot of a time, operates as a version of Quebecois interculturalism but just does not admit that to itself. So, that’s another kind of interculturalism altogether. And I think that in Europe there’s been a reaction to multiculturalism especially after bombings, terrorism, et cetera, et cetera. There’s been this shift to say that multiculturalism hasn’t worked, so we need another kind of discourse. And so I see more of a rigidity to European – what is emerging as European – interculturalism? A lot of it is about dialogue, but what is not being asked is a basic critical pedagogic question which is, dialogue amongst whom and what power differential exists between those groups? I don’t feel that those questions had been

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asked strongly enough in what is emerging as European interculturalism. And if people had a background in critical pedagogy, they would know this is one of the first questions to ask – who has power here? I mean, on what basis do people come into dialogue? So, there are different ways of thinking about dialogue, and interculturalism is very big on dialogue. But I would say that there are things to be critiqued about this new model of interculturalism because I think some of it is starting from a place where in fact multiculturalism has been – in Canada, for example. And multiculturalism has overcome some of the issues that are now being confronted by interculturalism. So in some ways, in my mind, interculturalism is a kind of reinvention of the wheel. And as people begin to ask more critical questions, then people are going to shift into a version of interculturalism that begins to look like versions of multiculturalism that Canada and other countries have already moved through. And that’s just my take on some of this. But again, I see the way that I answer that, part of what I had to draw on was what I call basic critical pedagogy. And the kind of premises that critical pedagogy comes from, which underlies a lot of the work that I do, a kind of neo-Marxist take that society is not fine the way that is. There is discrimination, exploitation and these things need to be addressed, not only through education but in education as well. And that has not left me as the foundation of any kind of work that I do. I think a lot of what I do is still very, very much grounded on the premises, very basic premises and tenets of critical pedagogy. FP: How do interculturalism and critical pedagogy relate to one another? Handel Wright: Interculturalism is something different again from critical pedagogy. One of the fascinating things, I think, is the different discourses that are all aimed at getting at a more just and equitable society and world. And for me, I’m fascinated by the connections and the delineations we might make between them. So, I would think of critical pedagogy as one kind of discourse; I would think of multiculturalism as another kind of discourse, and I would think of interculturalism as a kind of discourse that’s related to multiculturalism but not so much to critical pedagogy. The interesting thing would be to look at how something as distinctive as critical pedagogy doesn’t have very, very neat edges

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anymore. It was very distinctive as Freirean pedagogy. Or people talk then about a move towards from Freire to a critical pedagogy, which is kind of movement that Freire himself was part of, the evolution from a strictly Freirean set of thinking. So, how that’s linked, for example, with Theatre of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal and that sort of thing. So, there’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, there’s Theatre of the Oppressed. And how those things might be linked to other discourses. So in the 90s for example, at OISE, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education when I was a student there, there were points of intersection but also points of tension between critical pedagogy, feminist theory and research and practice and activism, antiracism and antiracist theory, et cetera, et cetera. Part of how I got my head around some of this is that with some of the feminist work, some of it opened up beyond strictly looking at gender in a homogenized way, and that led a bit closer to critical pedagogy. In the same way that antiracism was critiqued when multiculturalists and others – there was a backlash against antiracism in the same way that antiracism is a result of a backlash against multiculturalism. So, that people then said not everything is about racism. There was the development of a more integrative antiracism. So, an integrative antiracism that takes into account gender, sexuality and social class begins to look very much like a critical pedagogy, just what critical pedagogy was saying from – not necessarily from the very beginning, from the very beginning it was about social class. Then, so I’m really interested in forms of social difference. So, how issues of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and age overlap and intersect. And critical pedagogy was very strong in at least bringing three of those to the fore in early crit ped work, and that I thought was its advantage. Critical pedagogy did talk about race, gender and class in a way that early antiracism work did not, in a way that second wave feminist work, for example, did not. And so, the fact that these other discourses are now being more integrative and now dealing with other forms of different than the one that is supposedly primary, means that they’ve moved towards where critical pedagogy already was. And then it then becomes, ‘Well how much has critical pedagogy moved itself?’,

because some other discourses have come to the fore that you could say could be used to critique even integrative antiracism, or whatever, and feminism work, et cetera, et cetera, including cultural studies which is another overlay. So, for me, it’s very interesting to get people to think of these different discourses, firstly as being individual discourses, but to think of what Henry Giroux would have called in the 90s, the ‘larger project’. What is the larger project? Are we married to these very specific discourses or are we really interested in getting at a more equitable, just and representative society, community, locally in schools, internationally, and so forth. And for me, I’m thinking that maybe it’s the borrowings between these, the creation of almost new hybrid discourses that don’t rely just on the outlines and the boundaries – the policed boundaries – of each of these individual discourses that might be sort of the way of the future. FP: Was critical pedagogy born out of a postcolonial moment/movement or was it a North American academic invention? Handel Wright: That’s really interesting to talk about. I don’t think it’s one or the other because, I mean, to introduce a little bit of post-modernist take on things, there usually aren’t definitive individual histories of discourse, but rather things been taking up in different places at different times. So, I think there is very much a post-colonial streak to critical pedagogy and that’s almost like one of the trajectories of crit ped – all of this coming out of Freire, of course. And even that is debatable, so by the time we begin to call what we’re calling critical pedagogy, one way of looking at the history of that – the origin of that – is directly from the work of Freire. Another way of thinking about it is through the Frankfurt School and the kind of work that came out of there. And so, there is a kind of Latin American post-colonial version of critical pedagogy. And that’s true, and maybe other people can give a better, a more accurate account of that history. But that history is very much there. And even that has gone interestingly back to the colonizer because when I went to Portugal, for example, people wanted to interview me about critical pedagogy. So, this is the language of the colonized now being taken up by the colonizer in order to do critical work within the center rather than just in the periphery, which I think is really

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fascinating. And that’s one way of historicizing critical pedagogy. Another way of historicizing critical pedagogy is to look at when critical pedagogy was taken up in North America. And a lot of people think that you can go back directly to Henry Giroux – like there was a handover from Freire to Giroux, to McLaren and Kincheloe and Steinberg or something of that sort. And that’s an awkward way to think about histories but these are the kind of easy ways that we want to historicize things to central figures and to central discourses. Another way to think about this, and a kind of history of critical pedagogy which is not well enough known, is the fact that Freire’s work was taken up by people like Edmund O’Sullivan and Roger Simon at OISE. There’s another kind of direct Canadian way of historicizing critical pedagogy which is not often spoken about when people historicize, partly because America is so dominant in terms of the discourses study. People think of North American critical pedagogy as, kind of, having originated in the States when in fact we could make another kind of argument for a distinctly Canadian origin of critical pedagogy being taken up in the 80s and early 90s, by O’Sullivan, by Roger Simon – very strongly by Roger Simon. I was one of Roger’s students, and for a time there, he was all about critical pedagogy until he began to do his own critiques of critical pedagogy and moved on to what he called a ‘pedagogy of possibility’, which was somewhat distinct from critical pedagogy. And so, critical pedagogy has evolved and part of what we now have through AERA and other venues is the meeting of, one, that kind of post-colonial version of critical pedagogy which is heavily Latin American and, [two], a kind of more North American version of critical pedagogy which is, as I said, not acknowledged enough as being Canadian but is supposedly heavily American and with a scattering from elsewhere in the world as well. Places that Freire’s work had touched, from Guinea-Bissau – you know his letters to people in Guinea-Bissau – to people in Europe, people in England, who were attempting to do critical work. So, rather than saying there is an origin of critical pedagogy, I would say, more interestingly, the several different histories of critical pedagogy and the discourses have come together

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in a way to formulate where we are with critical pedagogy. And I think people can learn a lot from one another. I mean, there are people who adhere still to a very, almost narrow Freirean notion of critical pedagogy who are sort of purists, in a way. And there are others who are doing intersections of critical pedagogy with post-modernism, with post-colonialism, with other ways of theorizing; asking questions that are coming out of either postmodernism, post-structuralism, strongly out of feminism, how does cultural studies intersect with some of this? So, that’s what I mean by the porousness of these discourses. We can talk about a history of critical pedagogy but it’s hard to speak about one definitive history. I think, to my mind, that does a disservice to what critical pedagogy actually is in its multiplicity and richness. FP: Can you tell us something about your work as it pertains to Africa? Handel Wright: Sure, I can take you to Africa. I’m African myself, so part of what I’ve done here and part of what I haven’t lost sight of is the African continent. So, for me, part of the academic activism that I did as soon as I came to UBC [University of British Columbia], one of the first things I was very shocked to discover was that there wasn’t African studies at UBC. So, one of the first things I got involved with at UBC was a movement of faculty, but especially students, who were advocating for setting up African studies at UBC. There’s a group called Africa Awareness that has been at the forefront of this work, together with a smattering of faculty, Margery Fee and the English department and some others. And I immediately gravitated towards that work. So, we’ve really pressured the university to the point now where there has been established an undergraduate minor in Africa studies at UBC. I think it’s shaky, I think it could be a lot stronger, I think it could be better, but at least, it’s there. And within the Faculty of Education, I have for example done, through my Center, a symposium on African education. We had Ali Abdi come in and give a keynote address for that symposium and we’ve published two journal issues out of that. So, there’s work through the center that has helped to bring Africa and ‘Africanness’ to the center of some of the work that’s being done in the Faculty of Education.

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One of the things I will say about BC is that it’s a pretty tough place in which to do Black studies in general, let alone continental African studies. And in my own work, part of what I do, apart from cultural studies of education, is African cultural studies. So, I’ve been involved in trying to develop what we might want to call ‘African cultural studies’. I mean, I’ve written one book about it, I collaborate quite a bit with Keyan Tomaseli, who’s in South Africa at the University of Natal – KwaZulu-Natal now – and he and I have been sort of, I don’t want to say at the forefront, but have done a lot of work to represent Africa within the field of cultural studies. I was on the international board for the Association for Cultural Studies, one of the representatives of Africa. Keyan has moved on, I’ve still continued that work and I’ve brought in somebody like Boulou de B’béri to also be on that. And that’s the international board that is representing all of cultural studies. So, in the field of cultural studies, I’m doing quite a bit of work on Africa and its diaspora in terms of creating the kind of cultural studies work. And even in the work around multiculturalism, part of what I want to shift some of that work into – because I’m starting first with the country that could have that official multiculturalism or have a strong history of dealing with multiculturalism as a discourse, that’s why I’m dealing with the US and Australia and England, et cetera, et cetera and Canada. But part of my intention is to look at, further down the road, what forms of ways of addressing diversity are countries like South Africa using

and other countries in Africa as well, and other third-world spaces. So, I am really interested in Africa but I don’t focus solely on Africa, but at the same time it never falls out of the range of things that I do and work on. So, there’s a lot of work to be done. And even Freire, because we tend to forget that there is an African connection to Mozambique, to Angola, to Guinea-Bissau, between Freire’s work and what we now call critical pedagogy. And those of us who do critical pedagogy work, I don’t think have done enough to connect with the African continent and with the kind of projects that are taking place. I think popular theater, theater for the oppressed, has more of a presence than the discourse of critical pedagogy does. And I think some of that is a pity. So, part of the work might include bringing in some of those voices, bringing in some of those kinds of ways of thinking and how that might look different from a kind of postcolonial Latin American version of critical pedagogy. It might be very exciting to think about what a kind of post-colonial African version of critical pedagogy might be. But again, the focus is always on what kind of society do we live in, what kind of community do we live in, whether it’s the local community, whether it’s the school, whether it’s our institution, and always fighting for that to be better. Better in terms of representation of different groups, better in terms of being more just, better in terms of addressing forms of discrimination, better in terms of creating more harmony between people because of difference, because we have a rich diversity of people.

SECTION IV

Global Perspectives Cathryn Teasley

As this Handbook unfolds, a transnational trend is leaving its characteristic mark of discrimination, inequity and exclusion on education systems throughout the world: far-right forces are on the rise in both the global North and South,1 and are impacting curricular contents – or what and how children learn – through the power/knowledge dynamics present in all learning environments (Agnello and Reynolds, 2016; Apple et al., 2009; Darder et al., 2015; Kincheloe et al., 2017). Riding the tide of a worldwide political economy whose roots date back more than four decades, recent ultra-conservative and neo-fascist forces have been propelled and emboldened by a neoliberal political/economic undercurrent (Brown, 2017; Giroux, 2018; Harvey, 2005; Roy, 2014) that minimises state controls on individual choice, capital accumulation and competition in order to advance the global ‘free market’ as an allegedly ideal social organising principal and policy.

This agenda began to take root in highly industrialised petroleum-dependent countries shortly after the United Nations had condemned colonial rule in 1960, and after several Southern and Eastern oil-producing countries – which had long been occupied and impoverished by European imperial and colonial forces – formed the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) that same year.2 In that postcolonial scenario, OPEC made a strategic move to help its member states regain sovereignty over their natural resources, internal development and wealth, given the fact that the rich countries of the global North had never ceased to extract their oil (through various multinational corporations), despite having officially terminated colonial rule. The prosperity enjoyed by such wealthy countries was then, and still is, largely the product of a combination of historical slavery and the ongoing economic exploitation – or neocolonisation – of former colonial occupation around the world. But in

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the early 1970s, OPEC managed to bring the imperial North to its knees through two key moves: limiting production in order to raise the price of crude oil, and imposing an oil embargo against the United States from 1973 to 1974 as a means of censuring US support of the Israeli government’s intentions and actions in the Middle East at the time. As a result, an existential panic of sorts broke out in Western countries, but especially in the United States, with its particularly acute dependency on petroleum. In reaction to the ensuing ‘oil crisis’ of the mid 1970s, neoliberal ideology quickly gained legitimacy among US and European politicians (Harvey, 2005). The neoliberal turn in capitalist democracies has since become a lasting reality, one which relentlessly diminishes political commitment to the Welfare State, that is, to solid public investment in social security, including education, healthcare, pensions, unemployment, civil protection and many other public services that guarantee that all people’s most basic human rights and needs are covered, collectively. Instead, ever greater wealth is flowing into fewer and fewer hands at the expense of the immense majority of inhabitants of the world, especially in the South, and freedom of movement is now more applicable to capital than to people.3 Neoliberalism is thus propagating inequality and, in turn, xenophobia, White supremacism and hate in weakened democracies of the North where growing sectors of the White working - and middle classes see their relatively more privileged quality of life dwindling. In the meantime, Black, Brown and non-Christian peoples of the North and South are increasingly blamed for the former’s woes, despite the fact that the majority of people of nonEuropean descent have family members (if not they themselves) who have been displaced or have chosen to migrate as a result not only of the poverty left behind by the colonial plundering and occupation of their historical lands, but also because of the current neocolonial mechanisms of unbridled,

transnational, capitalist warring, exploitation and supplanting of traditionally sustainable local markets. We educators work today within this particularly predatory world-system (Wallerstein, 2004), one steeped in epistemological, socio-cultural and economic expressions of violence: supremacism, subordination, marginalisation, bias and negation. Under such conditions, people are measured and judged according to some arbitrarily established standards of individual merit, this despite world-system dynamics that condition people’s orientations and abilities in very inequitable ways. Meritocracy thus encroaches on democracy, paving the way for authoritarian controls over the social ‘order’ (as opposed to social organisation). The growing influence on education from non-democratically established global institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the Organisation for Economic Co-operation Development (OECD), including its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), testify to this turn. A patent example can be found in the ‘solutions’ former IMF economists came up with in 2015 for Puerto Rico to pay back the billions it still owes hedge fund billionaires: lay off teachers and close public schools (Neate, 2015). As Naomi Klein (2018) asserts, between 2010 and 2017, approximately 340 public schools were shut down in Puerto Rico, its educational system downsized and private and charter schools opened as a neoliberal means of paying off foreign debt owed to lenders based mainly in the neocolonial ‘parent’ country (the United States). Thanks, however, to the undaunted efforts of mobilisers such as teacher unionist Mercedes Martínez, many Puerto Rican educators and families have become critically aware and are pushing back against the workings of such ‘disaster capitalism’ (Klein, 2018), which preys on catastrophes such as Hurricane María’s razing of Puerto Rico in 2017. A staunch promoter of neoliberalism,

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Milton Friedman, shortly before he died, unleashed one of the first such projects of systemic educational privatisation in the United States, in the poor Black and Brown communities of New Orleans following the mass destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (Klein, 2018). Nonetheless, these cases represent just one of the structural dimensions of the worldsystem’s effects on education; on the cultural front, ideological struggles are growing throughout the world. In Spain, for instance, the subject of Citizenship Education, following its implementation in 2006, came under constant attack from right-wing ideologues and politicians who censured the emancipatory ways critical teachers addressed (through that subject) nationhood vs. statehood, religion, immigrant rights, sexuality, abortion, gender diversity and types of families, among various other issues. That battle, however, is not yet over. The international contributors to this section of the Handbook address similar ­operations and effects of this transnational ‘order of things’ in education, and what we critical educators can do about it. In keeping with Freire’s notion of conscientização (1970), the authors employ critical pedagogies to resist what Joe Kincheloe (2008) called the FIDUROD: Formal, Intractable, Decontextualized, Universalistic, Reductionistic and One-Dimensional modes of knowledge production and dissemination. By questioning authority and putting into practice various (including decolonial) forms of ‘critical hermeneutics’, ‘literacies of power’ (Kincheloe and Steinberg, 2010) and community projects, we enable students to expose the relation between power and knowledge and confront the underlying violence of the world-system.

Notes  1  For instance: Bolsonaro in Brazil, Macri in Argentina, Trump in the United States, Orbán in Hungary, Vox in Spain, the Northern League in

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Italy, the UK Independence Party, Golden Dawn in Greece, the Sweden Democrats, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, among many others across the globe.  2  The founding member states included Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Today, the OPEC also includes: Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Libya, Nigeria, the Republic of the Congo and the United Arab Emirates (Qatar and Indonesia having recently left the organisation; see the OPEC webpage at: www.opec.org [Accessed 27/04/2019]).  3  According to the on-line report ‘Global Inequality’ by Inequality.org: ‘Inequality has been on the rise across the globe for several decades. Some countries have reduced the numbers of people living in extreme poverty. But economic gaps have continued to grow as the very richest amass unprecedented levels of wealth’. Furthermore, ‘[t]he world’s richest 1 percent, those with more than $1 million, own 45 percent of the world’s wealth. Adults with less than $10,000 in wealth make up 64 percent of the world’s population but hold less than 2 percent of global wealth’ (see https://inequality.org/ facts/global-inequality/ [Accessed 16/10/2019]).

REFERENCES Agnello, Mary Frances & Reynolds, William M. (Eds.) (2016). Practicing Critical Pedagogy: The Influences of Joe L. Kincheloe. London: Springer. Apple, Michael W.; Au, Wayne & Gandin, Luis Armando (Eds.) (2009). The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education. New York: Routledge. Brown, Wendy (2017). The Big Picture: Defending Society. Public Books, 10 October. Accessed 28/04/2019 from: www. publicbooks.org/the-big-picture-defendingsociety/ Darder, Antonia; Mayo, Peter & Paraskeva, João (Eds.) (2015). International Critical Pedagogy Reader. London: Routledge. Freire, Paulo (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: The Seabury Press. Giroux, Henry (2018). Neoliberal Fascism and the Echoes of History. TruthOut, 8 August. Accessed 28/04/2019 from: https://truthout. org/articles/neoliberal-fascism-and-the-echoesof-history/

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Harvey, David (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Kincheloe, Joe L.; McLaren, Peter; Steinberg, Shirley R. & Monzó, Lilia D. (2017). Critical Pedagogy and Qualitative Research: Advancing the Bricolage. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, 5th edition (pp. 235–260). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kincheloe, Joe L. & Steinberg, Shirley R. (2010). Why Teach against Islamophobia?: Striking the Empire Back. In J. L. Kincheloe, S. R. Steinberg & C. D. Stonebanks (Eds.), Teaching against Islamophobia (pp. 3–27). New York: Peter Lang. Kincheloe, Joe L. (2008). Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction. London: Springer.

Klein, Naomi (2018). The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Neate, Rupert (2015, 28 July). Hedge funds tell Puerto Rico: Lay off teachers and close schools to pay us back. The Guardian. Accessed 30/04/2019 from: www.theguardian.com/ world/2015/jul/28/hedge-funds-puertorico-close-schools-fire-teachers-pay-usback Roy, Arundhati (2014). Capitalism: A Ghost Story. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Wallerstein, Immanuel (2004). Wallerstein, I. (2004). World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham (NC): Duke University Press.

39 From Theory to Practice: The Identikit and Purpose of Critical Pedagogy Domenica Maviglia

INTRODUCTION This chapter is based on my research and teaching in southern Italy; my intention is to describe the meaning, purpose, value, and importance of critical pedagogy, to locate this within my current practice, and to illustrate how the theoretical apparatus of this paradigm promoted educational interaction in this setting. To begin, I will examine some long-­ standing but still topical questions concerning pedagogy, such as what the relations between pedagogy, education, and training are. In the second section, I will introduce the pedagogical ideas of Joe L. Kincheloe as well as my personal attempt to implement his concepts and approach in my work as a teacher in higher education. My reading of Kincheloe allowed me to ‘critically’ question the different forms of teaching and learning used by myself and others, and to ponder the role of education as a personal and interpersonal event. It compelled me to question myself about who the subject is

when placed under the tutelage of educators, including the complex and recurrent question concerning the best way to help individuals discover themselves as human beings. It allowed me to consider what kinds of practical interventions, modalities, times, and places (all of which are elements affected by historical transitions in mentality, habits and, customs) could be exploited to carry out educational actions, and to think about what kind of skills educators must have and use in order to help students become ‘fully grown individuals’ in the light of a democratic, fair, responsible, and empowering telos (Cambi, 2006).

PEDAGOGY, EDUCATION, AND TRAINING: IDENTITY, STRUCTURE, AND FUNCTION In order to grasp the potential of critical pedagogy it is crucial to trace its etymological origins. This evaluation will provide a

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particular picture of modern education, which, as is generally acknowledged, faces a more and more fragmented and multiform reality. Contemporary education is held accountable for the provision of the vital life skills needed in today’s world: the ability to live in situations characterized by precariousness, diversity, and a multiplicity of experiences and knowledge, as well as the ability to organize knowledge, move in reticular contexts, and tear down the obstacles that exist between disciplines, with the aim of finding the ‘part-to-whole’ relations and the feedback loop between every phenomenon and its context (Chiosso, 2002: 12). The word ‘pedagogy’ appeared in ancient Greece and Rome and pedagogy is recognized as the most ancient form of knowledge. It was developed as a tool to analyze, reflect, propose, and act in order to establish educational and formative processes. One of the first examples of its use can be found in a tragedy written by Euripides and already in Homeric poems there is a reference to ‘Phoenix, Achilles’ pedagogue’. The ‘pedagogue’ was an educated slave or freed man who had the duty of tutoring the child (παις) outside the school and the gymnasium by teaching, counselling, and mentoring (ago) him. From the beginning, pedagogy was configured as a theoretical–practical discipline that anchored its discourse on the educability of women and men. In the realm of the human sciences, pedagogy might be understood as the science of education; the only discipline that focuses entirely on the education of the subject. It encompasses the scope, content, means, and methods that support subjects in the extremely difficult task of building a sound ‘existential project’ (Portera, 2006). Portera (2013) defines pedagogical discourse according to its three features: pedagogical anthropology, which includes all disciplines devoted to the study of human beings; pedagogical teleology (object), which encompasses all the reflections concerning who a human being should be according to the purposes of education (as a set of

shared ideals and values); and pedagogical methodology (method), which encompasses the studies of the pathways that should be ­followed and the tools that should be used in order to support the promotion of the person. Pedagogy is thus a paradigm focused on the pondering over the educational act; in other words it is the synthesis of theory (reflection on education) and practice (education) (Mariani, 2006). Accordingly, the term pedagogy refers to the knowledge concerning education (all theories developed in the field of education, its ‘theoretical apparatus’) and the management of the educational action (organization of the actions through which the educational process takes place, its ‘practice’) (Nosari, 2013). Within the core of the definition of the term, it is clear that pedagogy may be configured as a practical knowledge through which the ‘shaping process’ of education may be both analyzed and designed; it is a form of knowledge that addresses the double need raised by a new generation’s right to education and the duty of educational care resting on the older generation, while at the same time it recognizes the shared value represented by the uniqueness of each human being. According to Flores d’Arcais, this uniqueness is emphasized by the fact that ‘subjects involved in educational processes are always an exception and cannot provide guidelines for others, because they are unique, individual’ (1982: 909). Having examined the structure and meaning of pedagogical science we can begin to think about the dialectic of education and training. From an etymological point of view, the term education stems from the Latin word exducere, which literally means to take (ducere) out (ex). Education is a general formative process that involves subjects for their entire lives, from the moment of their conception to their deaths, for the simple reason that learning never stops. According to Mariani (2006: 76), ‘the term education refers to all actions (individual and social) that promote the physical, intellectual, and

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ethical development of human beings, leading to self-awareness, the full control of one’s own actions, and the ability to mutually answer the needs of communication and social cooperation by committing to the same values’. Therefore, education is a process that produces changes in human beings as such. Because of the ‘educability’ of human beings, ‘life is seen as a space of change and transformation’ (Nanni, 1995: 57), ‘a space where human beings not only survive or exist in a pre-established condition, but rather, where they have the possibility of testing themselves’ (Nosari, 2013: 25). There are different scenarios that can spur change. Human beings can change in order to adapt to the stimuli of the environment surrounding them (Skinner, 1948: 253) or respond to significant emotional events by changing their behavior (Rogers, 1969: 128). They can change in the context of an interpersonal relationship guided and regulated by the principles of reciprocity existing in communication (Postic, 1979), or they can change because of their c­ o-­existence in a social context that forces them to choose between conscious and unconscious changes (Mead, 1934). ‘The transformation of human beings might hence take place as a progressive process of construction, in which everyone commits to a series of adaptations and compensations, showing all its potential richness’ (Nosari, 2002a: 45). Considering all this, human beings should be educated so that change could become a genuine self-building process through the ‘creation of a sense that projects them in the future’ (Stein, 1990: 41). For these reasons, the scope of education should be considered, analyzed, and measured in terms of evolution, development, growth, training, customization, and socialization; an evolution seen as a dispersion and integration mechanism or a spontaneous and always innovative action that continuously creates and enriches itself (Bergson, 1907). Educability is seen therefore as a change that, on the one hand, manifests itself in forms of growth and development, and on the other hand represents a form of personal and

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creative expression that marks the spontaneity, originality, and uniqueness of the subject in defining his/her self-realization (Nosari, 2002a: 47). In this reflection on human educability, teacher practitioners should recognize that their specific task is to enquire into the ‘transformation process of the subject’ by focusing not only on the contents of educability, but also on its ‘form’, the journey on which subjects embark in order to ‘take shape’ as human beings, which is represented by training. The concept of training therefore intertwines and overlaps with the concept of education. It represents the complete maturation of human beings; an open, dynamic process, always in fieri that aims at different goals, in order to restore the specificity, unity, and uniqueness of every subject. In Italian, the concept of training is expressed with the word formazione, a word composed by two Latin words: forma (beauty) and agere (action). To understand the value of this term and the process at the basis of every formative action in the framework of a training process, it is worth mentioning the answer provided by Michelangelo to one of his pupils when the master was asked how he was able to provide such a beautiful ‘shape’ to one of his masterpieces, the Pietà. The answer of the sculptor was quite simple: to create the statue, he just had to take away everything that was super­fluous in the marble slab, because the ‘shape’ of the statue already existed in the marble, it was embedded in it. In the ‘shaping’ process defined by the limits of the educative project, subjects move coherently to be-towards the definition and the development of their personal identities and projects, which must be seen as possibilities and therefore forms of internships to openness, dynamism, adventure, and plurality (Rossi, 1994: 21). From this point of view, training does not represent an ‘external mechanism’ for the subjects involved; it is not a compulsory, functional transition that turns incomplete, shapeless,

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and incoherent human beings into complete, educated, and perfect subjects. It rather represents the most profound essence of human beings, their ‘innermost and most fundamental’ part (Nosari, 2002a: 50). In this ‘shaping’ process, human beings are considered subjects who educate and train themselves; subjects whose becoming (shaping and therefore training) takes place in order to build their own identity, suggesting the existence of a pedagogical shape embedded in the essence of every individual (Guardini, 1955: 27), their ontological dimension as human beings. As Nosari argues, human beings represent ‘subjects in becoming’ (time perspective) and ‘subjects in relation’ (encounter perspective) (2002a: 4–55). Time and encounter are the two main features of educability – its main t­ riggers – and they must be sought in the daily lives of human beings. Time (past, present, and future) ­represents the place where human beings evolve and transform themselves, aiming only at one goal: self-shaping. With time, every human being becomes what he/she is by devising his/her own project and taking his/her (individual) shape, without applying pre-established or pre-determined identities. In fact, this shaping process does not represent the execution of a more or less complicated sequential plan in which education and training become a strategy of control and assistance. It is rather an original and fundamental journey that does not limit the identity of the subject involved to one definition, as if it were the result of the sum of the personality traits of the individual. On the contrary, it opens up the identity of every individual to every moment that could lead to full self-expression, which causes self-discovery and self-realization. In these terms, education becomes a project, an operative modality of the ‘beingtowards’ of every human being. As such, the educative journey is an activity that defines the self-realization and self-becoming of subjects in the future. In this ‘to be in-becoming’ experienced by human beings, in addition to time there is also the principle of encounter,

which breathes life into the time principle of educability by adding to it the relational dimension. On their formative journey, human beings continuously configure ­themselves in relation with themselves and o­ thers, looking for possibilities to stand out, express themselves, measure themselves, and evaluate the people surrounding them. Human beings become masters and witnesses of reflection to promote the creation of an identity in-becoming. The need of being includes a dimension that places human beings in front of a must be that concretely requires them to respect their genuine identity as human beings. From this perspective, Rousseau’s paradigm suggests that the true value of human education is provided by its originality, seen as the spontaneity to live naturally the basic human condition. For example, individuals should be educated following the path dictated by their own individuality, by ‘seeing with their own eyes and following their own hearts’, giving them the opportunity to freely and fully show and express their character without being affected by educators (Rousseau, 1762: 82–4). Education means paying attention to the particular journey on which there is always the possibility to look for or to test something new, provided that it can enhance the process of shaping a genuine subject. The idea of educability therefore outlines a form of being that represents a must be and manifests itself as a might be. This means that education becomes reality only if implemented as a unified expression of the relationship between the subject in education and the educator, considering also their situation and context. The unity and harmony of these elements build the reality, sense, and concrete values of the educational journey. Change in human beings is always accompanied by a reflection that inevitably focuses on a series of sensible questions; ‘being able to think and act in the framework of what is “sensible” means being able to acquire a richer and more nuanced level of human awareness, and the deeper this sense is, the more significant the human experience will be’ (Nosari, 2002b: 84).

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GLOBALIZATION, MULTICULTURALISM, AND CONTEMPORARY EDUCATION IN POSTMODERNITY: TOWARDS A WORKING MODEL OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY From the outset of the new millennium, a number of profound crises and radical changes have affected our society, influencing it from an economic, financial, political, cultural, and – more importantly – educational point of view. Combined with an increase of the intensity of migration flows, the phenomenon of globalization (i.e. freemarket values and practices) has led to the creation of complex, multicultural societies, also characterized by distinctly postmodern features. These features of postmodernity incorporate, for example, my themes of time and encounter outlined above. For example, Bertman (1998) coined the terms ‘hurried culture’ and ‘nowist culture’ to describe how life in Western societies is affected by haste, absence of time, and unilateral glorification of the present. At the same time, Bauman (1998) highlighted the emergence of a postgeographic world characterized by a growing deterritorialization of practices – not only of economic and social nature, but also cultural ones – that are now completely independent of national borders. In the postmodern age, such changes have effected a severe crisis regarding one of the most fundamental elements of the educational process: its final purposes (Portera, 2013: 9–11). It would be possible to identify educational purposes by defining a model to which education should aim in order to ‘measure’ itself. What kind of indications could be given to allow the formative process to take place, in order to promote a journey of sense and, more importantly, value? Which image of human being should education take into account in order to guide individuals, without cancelling the originality of their personal journey? Having unraveled a wide range of ideas that describe the meaning and sense of

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pedagogy from the past to the present, I will now turn my attention to the specific pedagogical paradigm that combines theoretical and practical aspects of contemporary pedagogical thought and educational practice: Joe Lyons Kincheloe’s critical pedagogy. This paradigm stands out as a viable scholarly tool for engaging a variety of issues in education that represent a personal and community challenge, particularly for those who see education as a fundamental process of human life, and hold it close to their hearts. In my opinion, Kincheloe’s critical pedagogy provides both a framework and methodology with which to assess and address these issues, since it represents a theoretical practice that simultaneously plays a theoretical function (analysis, synthesis, etc.) and an ethical function (empowerment, demo­ cratization, etc.) in the educational process. Critical pedagogy enables its practitioners to investigate how theory affects practice, and vice versa, through a critical analysis of the different facets of education as a phenomenon. Furthermore, this paradigm allows us to turn the ‘contemplation’ of an action into a genuine action that continuously triggers reflection, hence creating a ‘virtuous cycle’ (Mariani, 2006: 49). In other words, we face a ‘theoretical practice’ that refers to a d­ ouble and symmetrical level: active, intentional, contextualized, self-reflective, reflective, and meta-reflective. One needs the other, because educational issues must be tackled in practice without forgetting about theory (Mariani, 2006: 49). Kincheloe (1950–2008) was an American pedagogue committed to the defense and dissemination of the ideas of equality and social justice in the field of pedagogy. He was an interpreter of the Western intellectual world who explicitly supported efforts to promote decolonization at every level. His pedagogical proposal was based on the study of oppression in education, focusing in particular on issues of race, class, gender, sexual preference, colonialism, and religious belief; highlighting how these aspects and

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other social–political–cultural ­ interrelations shape the nature and purpose of education (Kincheloe, 2008). Kincheloe’s critical pedagogy might be defined as an approach that aims at developing a democratic critical consciousness with which to identify and understand the impact, correlations, and subtle influences that multiple and shifting dynamics of orders and processes of domination have on the theory and practice of education. It begins with the premise that the purpose of education is to face and transform the social and oppressive conditions of those who accept them with excessive passivity and fatalism, with the purpose of promoting social justice and empowerment among marginalized peoples. To be more specific, this approach pays particular attention to the systematic modus operandi of the numerous and multiple disguises of domination and power that construct oppressed human identities and groups, generated and structured via complex processes of racism, religious intolerance, or hateful labels of sexual orientation, gender, and social status (Kincheloe, 2008). Hence, the empowerment of the human subject is presented by Kincheloe as the key element of every pedagogical project. His concept of critical pedagogy emphasizes the role played by the transformation of spaces – particularly the educational space – where it is possible to find experiences of human oppression, with the aim of promoting change in terms of social justice, minority rights, and the importance given to topics such as difference or marginalization. Following the work of Kincheloe and his contemporaries (Kincheloe, 2008; McLaren and Kincheloe, 2007), critical pedagogy has become an acknowledged theoretical field of study where pedagogy is the core and engine of a transformational project to ‘democratize culture’ and to develop a progressive, creative, and democratic society by following a principle of active and pluralist citizenship. In other words, the project proposed by Kincheloe is a form of intercultural education that promotes the authenticity of human beings, the

originality of the person and the diversity of humankind. It is an education that questions, raises awareness, and aims at breaking the shackles of fatalism in order to enable individuals to understand that their existence and self-realization cannot be pre-established by others, because all human beings are architects of their own destiny, without considering their geographical, cultural, and religious origins (Kincheloe, 2008). Critical pedagogues therefore investigate the complexity of the educational phenomenon, not through universal explanations of different pedagogical elements, but by providing a series of rigorous tools for investigating the multiple manifestations of education in different places and among different peoples. In this way, that is, through intercultural and interdisciplinary exchange, critical pedagogues aim to develop a new roadmap for educational practice that takes us to a different place in our theoretical and pedagogical analyses. At the same time, critical pedagogues emphasize the complexity of multiple forms of knowledge, the variety of research methodologies, the goals of existing educational practices, and the nature of their results. Specifically, the critical pedagogic approach invites us to stop and reflect on what Kincheloe refers to as the ‘fake democratic nature’ of educational practices that falsely present themselves as processes oriented towards the respect for the value of democracy and justice, but which actually form part of numerous subtle and ambiguous cultural practices that silently support, through their systematic exploitation of prevailing dominant structures, the survival of totalitarian and oppressive educational regimes (2008: 1–43). In fact, too often when examining curriculum development and school operation, critical teachers observe modes of knowledge distributed to teachers and students that feign neutrality but covertly support particular political interests. Students are not encouraged to study multiple points of view or learn that both within US society and around the planet there are profoundly different i­ nterpretations

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of historical, scientific, literacy, political, social, and economic issues than the ones offered in their textbooks, content standards, and curriculum guides. Students are typically not taught about the complex nature of interpretation and the assumptions embedded in and power imprinted on all knowledge. (Kincheloe, 2008: 108)

Critical pedagogues are thus concerned with the goal of unmasking forms of domination and oppression by making them understandable, that is, by exposing them through a series of processes and tools of deconstruction that identify and name their parts (colonization, ethnocentrism, ideology, and so forth), as they affect contemporary thought and practices of education. Critical pedagogy therefore represents an interdisciplinary pedagogical approach that deals with fundamental issues of human rights such as democracy, oppression, social justice, global economy, poverty, migration, multiculture, interculture, the destruction of the environment, fair and just development, and peace. In simple terms, this calls for an education for the future, encouraging individuals to responsibly commit themselves to the creation of a global society by providing them with the necessary tools to lay the foundations of a thought and an action that could be both fair and global. Critical pedagogy is based on values and processes that respect human dignity and that consider social justice a condition of human survival, highlighting in this way the importance of the role played by altruism in safeguarding human dignity itself (Cambi, 2006). From this point of view, critical pedagogy adopts a guiding role, revealing its significance as a fundamental discipline that can challenge and change teachers’ values and practices. This implies an activity aimed at ‘cultivating humanity’ (Nussbaum, 1999); it requires human beings to avoid the temptation of ruling the Earth, asking us instead to become the main custodians of its resources, beauties, and different forms of life. In our educational actions, it is possible to find the basic concepts of care for the existence and

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acceptance of others, and care for the present in order to preserve the future. According to Mariani (2006: 34), we are approaching new front lines of global co-existence that must be established, ­interiorized, spread, and shared as common front lines.

PONDERING OVER THE REFLECTIVE STATUS OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: A SEMINAR EXPERIENCE Given that critical pedagogy interacts with education and training in a dynamic, open, and critical way, it is particularly suited to detecting the critical–regulative perspective that concerns the complexity of implementing an active education from a democratic and collective point of view. Considering the ‘purposes-­responsibilities’ of the critical pedagogy approach, I decided to introduce my students at Messina to the critical pedagogy paradigm as understood from my readings of Kincheloe. During the second semester of 2012, I was invited to organize a 12-hour seminar for a group of 20 students of a degree course in education and training studies, within the framework of a 30-hour module on comparative education. The professor in charge of the teaching module had developed a curriculum based on three books; one of them was Educate to critical thinking: History and development of Joe Lyons Kincheloe’s Critical Pedagogy, a monograph that I published in 2011 (Maviglia, 2011). My passion, interest, and belief in this pedagogical current of thought, as much as the love for my students and for the art of teaching, pushed me to accept the offer and I decided immediately that the main topic of my seminar would be critical pedagogy. This decision was based mainly on three reasons. First, the professor had decided to have my book in the curriculum of the course; second, the fact that I had written my PhD thesis on critical pedagogy, a subject that is still at

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the center of my research activity; and third, because as member of the examining panels in the disciplines of general pedagogy, intercultural pedagogy, the history of pedagogy, and comparative education in Messina, I had frequently noticed how unable (or perhaps unwilling) students seemed to be in the use of their critical sensibilities and how much they seemed uninterested in knowing or pondering over the many social issues that characterize our social context. I often wondered why this was the case and, after due consideration, I came to the conclusion that we – as ­teachers – are the ones mainly responsible for this situation. The reader might think that my standpoint is too simplistic and hefty, but it is informed by my personal experience as a student for 20 years, and as a teacher and tutor during my PhD and unpaid postdoctoral studies for a further 7 years. During this period, I have often asked myself: who is principally responsible in southern Italy’s schools and universities for the quality of teaching or the skills, knowledge, and other competences that should be taught critically to young people in different educational institutions? Who might be considered responsible for the bad academic performance or the high dropout rates, when classes are structured according to the social status of students and teachers publicly accept and perpetrate discriminatory and dismissing attitudes that jeopardize the personal sensibilities and civic morals of students? Or when there are teachers who publicly call them ‘animals’, ‘geese’, or ‘chickens in a roost’ and blame their failures at school on their colleagues in other educational ­institutions in order to avoid at any price, the possibility of questioning their role and ­figure as teachers? For me such questions served to highlight the crucial role played by teachers and the fundamental responsibility we hold to promote the moral, civic, and human growth of current and future generations. For this reason, I decided to invite my students to ask themselves the same questions and ponder over their answers, because in a near

future, those among them who will decide to become teachers will have to shoulder the same responsibility. I decided to introduce critical pedagogy to the students placed under my tuition. The experience proved interesting and constructive for them and for me, which also eventually provided me with a great sense of satisfaction. The class was composed of 20 students aged between 22 and 28, of whom 18 were female and 2 male. One of the students was originally from the island of Salina, 4 among them were from the region of Calabria, while the remaining 15 came from the city of Messina and its province. To begin with, I devoted four hours to a general introduction on the epistemological status of pedagogical science. By making full use of a hermeneutic, argumentative, and critical methodology, the class engaged in a dialogue about the concepts of pedagogy, education, and training, using passages taken from the books of Chiosso (2002) and Mariani (2006). Then, I decided to involve the students in reading and analyzing some passages (which I translated) taken from Critical Pedagogy Primer (Kincheloe, 2008). In order to do so, I divided the class into four working groups and asked them to analyze different parts of the book. During a lesson of one hour and a half, each and every member of a group had to identify and explain critically to the other members of his/her group the main themes and keywords encountered. Then, by standing in front of the entire class and through a dialogical interaction, each group would present to the others what they had discovered and what they thought about the concepts encountered. The attitude of the students surprised me, because after overcoming a layer of prejudice towards the topics and issues ­analyzed – such as oppression, neocolonialism, the relationship between political power and education, and the discrimination based on culture, religion, gender, or social class – and in some cases what seemed a sense of shame and almost fear of speaking, expressing their opinion, or even being judged

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for it – often, when students had to introduce their ideas, they would start by saying ‘I’m not sure, maybe I’m saying something silly’; ‘maybe you will think that I’m too harsh’; ‘maybe what I’m about to say doesn’t have any sense’; ‘I could be wrong but I believe that’ – the students became eventually more actively involved and ‘critical’ about the topics addressed. For example, some of them were able to overcome the shame they felt and share the first-hand experiences they had in relation to the topics addressed. A student told the class about his experience of discrimination and marginalization at the university because of his sexual orientation, an experience that fueled in him a strong sense of discomfort, rage, and fear during his studies. Another student, this time female, told about her experience in a nursery classroom where she was working as an intern and where she witnessed a situation in which a teacher verbally attacked and discriminated against some children originally born in Indonesia. Another female student told the classroom that, while attending high school, she was a victim of the discrimination perpetrated by her philosophy teacher, who said that she had a very low IQ because of her social class and family origins. According to her, the words of her teacher strongly lowered her self-esteem, causing her to constantly think about the ­possibility of dropping her studies and take on whatever job she could find. Within this methodological framework I had two different tasks: that of a critical researcher (Kincheloe, 2008), and one of an intellectual who does not play the simple role of a transmitter of information, but who endorses a critical teaching method and develops a democratic critical consciousness among his/her students (Kincheloe, 2008:  125). Following this approach, I succeeded in endorsing an educational maieutic practice, allowing also the class to gain a general critical vision of the political–social and educational–cultural reality that characterized life in 2012, after almost 20 years of Berlusconi’s government. As a matter of

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fact, by analyzing the topics identified by the students in the texts I had provided them, we were immediately reminded of the situation in Italy. We started therefore a dialogue about the lowering quality of public education during Berlusconi’s government, which followed a policy based on a logic of ‘reduction’ (fewer rights, fewer resources, less education for all) that favored the few against the many, widening the gap among social classes and regions, attacking the rights of students, and reducing the possibilities of active citizenship. After reading and discussing the content of article 64 of Law no. 133 approved on August 6, 2008, which introduced the possibility of finishing compulsory school also through vocational training, and the main concepts of the Gelmini reform (Law no. 169 of October 30, 2008), which aimed at reforming the whole Italian school system, we came to the conclusion that the education policy brought forward by Berlusconi was based on an education and training model that was deeply classist and elitist. As Fiora Luzzato highlighted (2013), at first glance Law no. 133 could have looked like a good way to support teenagers who did not wish to attend school, but ultimately it put an end to equal opportunities because it embodied the idea that public Italian schools wanted to give up on the students who experienced difficulties at school. At the same time, the Gelmini reform was heavily criticized for keeping the same level of public aid for private schools while reducing year after year the support given to public schools, cutting also the total number of teaching hours, investment in facilities and infrastructure, and even the support provided to disabled people. These measures led to the situation that ISTAT (Italian National Institute for Statistics) recorded in 2012, with two million people aged between 15 and 29  years who were classified as NEETs (Not in Education, Employment, or Training). At the same time, data provided by the Ministry of Education on February 17, 2012, clearly showed that 22% of young boys dropped school before obtaining a qualification. Finally, already in

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2012, the OECD ranked Italy at the secondlast place for its level of education in a group composed of 30 developed countries and third-last place for its level of investment in education, with a rate of young unemployment of 35% compared to a European average of 22%. The dialogue about the political and cultural situation left by the Berlusconi government and its effects on education allowed my students to rediscover the value of criticism, seen as the ability to reflect, analyze, interpret, compare, and reinterpret our local context. This is why I firmly believe that we – as parents, teachers, educators, and pedagogues – should do everything in our power to promote the development of this fundamental skill in young people, hence taking care not only of the well-being of the subject, but also of the general and collective well-being, since human beings can achieve their full development only when they decide to take charge of their responsibilities both for the common good and their own personal wealth. Obviously, all this implies a double commitment. On the one side, the commitment of politicians to avoid decisions that could turn schools, universities, and research institutions into assets in the hands of private investors or subject to market mechanisms. On the other side, the commitment of professionals to the practice of a truly critical and reflective pedagogy that requires long periods of dialogue with students and a higher level of awareness by pedagogical professionals, who should be responsibly active for the good of future generations. Schools, universities, and research institutions are a common good; they belong to all citizens and exist for all citizens. They influence the life project of every individual and the democratic future of the whole country. Schools and universities are a place where individuals are trained and common know­ ledge is nurtured; where the skills related to criticism are developed, and where people are educated to a democratic comparison of  ­differences. They represent, therefore, an

anchor of peace and of the idea of a country strongly committed to solidarity – the value of culture and knowledge as common asset.

CONCLUSION The pedagogical paradigm of critical pedagogy – by orienting its educational ­ action towards the empowerment of the ­subject – allows us to experience ‘in real time’ the anthropological–cultural challenges of our age. It is a form of pedagogy that analyses the educational relationship, the role of teachers, the role of culture in education, the educational institutions, the expropriations created by politics, the interiorized anthropological structures, the indoctrination as a degenerated form of teaching, with the aim of defining a dialectic concept of human education (Mariani, 2006: 98). Following this line of thought, it is clear that it is the teaching that professional teachers, professors, educators, and pedagogues carry out that leads to the form of education and training described in the previous paragraphs. In addition to all these aspects, there are other issues that these professionals often need to face in their daily activities: the care for the person placed under their tuition, the assistance relationship, the educational relationship, the interpersonal communication process, the need to listen and respect the feelings of students, common good, the sense of life, the values and moral choices, culture, freedom, empowerment and ­authoritarianism, authenticity, and interculture. Therefore, the ability of understanding the moral and deontological importance and cultural, social, and political meaning of all these aspects, and the one that allows us to connect these elements to other fields of knowledge by following interdisciplinary approaches, highlight the identity and purpose of critical pedagogy as fundamental knowledge to educate and train students as well as teachers (Mariani 2006: 84).

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REFERENCES Bauman, Z. (1998). Globalization, The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University Press. Bergson, H. (1907). L’évolution créatrice. Italian translation by Penati, G. (1979). L’evoluzione creatrice. Brescia: La Scuola. Bertman, S. (1998). Hyperculture, The Human Cost of Speed. Westport, CT: Praeger Trade. Cambi, F. (2006). Incontro e dialogo. Prospettive della pedagogia interculturale. Rome: Carocci. Chiosso, G. (Ed.) (2002). Elementi di pedagogia. Brescia: La Scuola. Flores d’Arcais, G. (Ed.) (1982). Nuovo dizionario di pedagogia. Rome: Edizioni Paoline. Guardini, R. (1955). Die Begegnung. Ein ­Beitrag zur Struktur des Daseins. Italian translation by Fedeli, C. (1987). L’incontro. Saggio di analisi della struttura dell’esistenza umana. In Guardini, R. (1987). Persona e libertà. Saggi di fondazione della teoria pedagogica (pp. 27–47). Brescia: La Scuola, Kincheloe, J. L. (2008). Critical pedagogy primer (2nd ed.). New York: Peter Lang. Luzzatto, F. (2013). Esiste ancora lo stato sociale? Passato, presente e futuro del sistema italiano e di welfare. Milan: Franco Angeli. Mariani, A. (2006). Elementi di filosofia dell’educazione. Rome: Carocci. Maviglia, D. (2011). Educare alla criticità. ­Fondamenti storici e linee di sviluppo della Critical Pedagogy di Joe Lyons Kincheloe. Messina: Bertone Editore. McLaren, P., Kincheloe, J. L. (Eds) (2007). ­Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? New York: Peter Lang. Mead, H. (1934). Mind, self & society from the stand-point of a social behaviorist. Italian translation by Tettucci, R. (1996). Mente, sé e società. Florence: Giunti-Barbera.

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Nanni, C. (1995). L’educazione tra crisi e ricerca di senso. Rome: LAS. Nosari, S. (2002a). Spazi e margini dell’educazione. La questione dell’educabilità. In Chiosso, G. (2002) (Ed.). Elementi di ­pedagogia. Brescia: La Scuola, pp. 43–82. Nosari, S. (2002b). Direzione e senso dell’educazione. La questione dell’educativo. In Chiosso, G. (2002) (Ed.). Elementi di pedagogia. Brescia: La Scuola, pp. 83–120. Nosari, S. (2013). Capire l’educazione. Lessico, contesti, scenari. Milan: Mondadori. Nussbaum, M. C. (1999). Coltivare l’umanità. Rome: Carocci. Portera, A. (2006). Globalizzazione e pedagogia interculturale. Interventi nella scuola. Trento: Erickson. Portera, A. (2013). Manuale di pedagogia interculturale. Rome/Bari: Laterza. Postic, M. (1979). La relation éducative. Italian translation by Sassone, A. (1983). La relazione educativa. Oltre il rapporto maestroscolaro. Rome: Armando. Rogers, C. (1969). Freedom to learn. Italian translation by Tettucci, R. (1981). Libertà nell’apprendimento. Florence: Giunti-Barbera. Rossi, B. (1994). Identità e differenza. I compiti dell’educazione. Brescia: La Scuola. Rousseau, J. J. (1762). Émile ou de l’éducation. Italian translation by Nardi, E. (1995). Emilio o dell’educazione. Firenze: La Nuova Italia. Skinner, B. F. (1948). Walden Two. Italian translation by Mainardi Peron, E. (1995). Walden Due. Utopia per una nuova società. Florence: La Nuova Italia. Stein, E. (1990). Ganzheitliches Leben. ­Schriften zur religiösen Bildung. Italian translation by Franzosi, T. (1999). La vita come totalità. Scritti sull’educazione religiosa. Rome: Città Nuova.

40 Reimagining the University as a Transit Place and Space: A Contribution to the Decolonisation Debate Colin Chasi and Ylva Rodny-Gumede

INTRODUCTION In South Africa, following the #RhodesMustFall and subsequent #FeesMustFall campaigns, facilitation of access, promotion and recognition of diversity of cultures and languages, and transformation of curricula have been put on priority agendas, under the allembracing heading of ‘decolonisation of the university’. Little emphasis, however, has been put on the transformation of university campuses themselves as an embodiment of colonialism and the exclusionary politics thereof. In fact, we propose that the university campus can be used as an analogy for the role that higher education can play in facilitating decolonisation and the kinds of social transformation that is envisioned through such projects. In this sense the university campus can constitute a critical pedagogy in and of itself. We argue that discussions on the decolonisation of the university are incomplete until they also encompass critical and creative thinking about the places and spaces

in which university work, practices and lives happen and are fulfilled. We propose doing this through reimagining the campus as a ‘transit space’. We know that education is mediated and/or framed by the spaces in which it takes place, and spaces are in turn influenced by cultural, political and social concerns about teaching, learning and the students (cf. Darian-Smith and Willis, 2016). From within sites which also function as guides and landmarks of colonial, apartheid, anticolonial and antiapartheid historical arrangements, facts and processes, it is opportune to ask what role the place and space of the university campus itself plays and can play in a broader transformation process, and in enabling knowledge acquisition, agential development and empowerment? We know that architecture and buildings have an impact on the learning experiences of students, and that school buildings provide the literal structure that enables a conducive learning environment (McLeod et  al., 2016; Mayer, 2010; Burke and Grosvenor, 2008).

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Building on this we argue that, universities are known as places that produce, assess, distribute and legitimate knowledges for uses associated with how ‘educated people belong’ and are identified through cultures and processes with implications for gains that may be claimed and denied in job markets and in other spheres of cultural expressions and work. Inter alia, it has become normative to argue that universities should (1) produce innovations that enable societies to overcome the most challenging social, economic and technological challenges facing societies, (2) teach students to think, work or operate in ways that address the challenges of their epochs and (3) certify the rank and worth of knowledges and of those who lay claim to it; equally, it can be argued that university campuses and the buildings they house, as extensions and essential parts of the university itself, should provide a literal structure that enables a conducive learning process aligned with all of the above (cf. Tanner, 2000). At the very least, as Xing et  al. say, ‘As more universities embrace strategic plans that assimilate digital technology and introduce more active learning in traditional lecture halls, they have also reconfigured their physical surroundings to spur these teaching and learning shifts’ (2018: 180). In one instance, [t]o meet this requirement, UJ [University of Johannesburg] has built a mock mine environment at its Doornfontein Campus, which includes a 180meter-long haulage connected with a 32-meter-high elevator shaft and a workshop complex. Such emulated facility can simulate real mining conditions that offer students an authentic mining learning experience through practical engineering, construction, and observation methodology during laboratory and tutorial sessions. (Xing et al., 2018: 195)

To this end, it is necessary that university spaces and places are changed so that the legacies of colonialism and apartheid are overcome in ways that enable people to exit zones and traps of colonialism to instead enter zones of freedom and liberation. It is in this sense we argue that universities must become transit spaces. The discussion that follows

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will tap into some of the debates around what is known about the significance of place and space and their relation to the roles and functions of higher education.

THINKING ABOUT THE PLACE OF THE UNIVERSITY In a classic book on leadership, Carlyle (1908) presents education as a heroic practice by which researchers and teachers transform the worlds in which they find themselves. Elsewhere, Ortega y Gasset (1944) has presented the role of the university as one of shepherding societies through the travails of their times by discovering and teaching the most advanced answers, questions and systems of problem solving that their human cultures have developed. In short, there is much that has been written to suggest, as Tomasello (2009) can be read to say, that education, and with it universities, is a key aspect of the human ‘cultural ratchet’ and the ability of human beings to cooperatively learn, teach and progressively innovate in order to overcome problems of living in the world with increasing sophistication. Taking this thinking into account, we hold that discussion of the place of universities in this postcolonial and post-apartheid era must situate the university in relation to the problems of our world. In this regard, there are many that argue that there is a crisis in higher education that is being occasioned by a poor fit between what universities stand for and how they are configured vis-à-vis societal needs (Kromydas, 2017; Cloete and Maassen, 2015; Burke, 2012). Without doubt, higher education finds itself in severe crisis. Under the sway of a global economy in steady decline, with blueand white-collar labour markets being disrupted by technological advancements and by global political insecurities, higher education, once the privilege of a few and later the beacon and foremost tool of economic

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growth in both capitalists and welfare states around the world, finds itself at multiple cross roads. With rising unemployment among graduates, questions can be asked as to whether a higher degree is necessarily an assurance of job security, let alone a job, and whether it still serves as a ticket of entry to a society that places trust, value and credence in the academy. Equally questions are raised as to whether the academy can claim it holds the key to a higher order knowledge and a truth believed to have structured and informed the order of the pre-globalisation, pre-internet era. And, with the cost of university access rising and university bureaucracy and administrative imperatives emphasised at the behest of knowledge production and teaching and learning, traditional residential universities find themselves increasingly having to compete with ‘new’ offline and online degree offers. While these factors might be triggers for a global debate about the role of the academy, the crisis of higher education in South Africa is even more complicated and acute. A decade and a half into the new democracy, much remains to be done to overcome the inherited and continuous legacies of colonialism and apartheid. And while much debate in the global North has focused on the advent of new technology and the opportunities that new technology has created for 21st-century learning models, debates in the global South, and postcolonial societies in particular, have focused on rectifying the injustices and imbalances of the past; this with ‘diversity’ and ‘diversification’ as the main policy concern (cf. Cross, 2004). The legacies of colonialism and the continuous inequities it has created has made sure that state formation, politics and socio-economic development in the postcolony has remained premised on divisions of race. In essence ‘race continues to be a marker of social difference, hierarchy and pain’ (Frassinelli, 2018: 4), and the formal end of colonialism or apartheid did not bring an end to the socio-economic injustices, power hierarchies and suppression of

Indigenous and local knowledges that these systems created (ibid.). South Africa sadly stands as a stark example of this as one of the most unequal countries in the word, with income gaps between rich and poor steadily increasing (Sulla and Zikhali, 2018). We cannot detail how power, knowledge and being is historically and currently constituted in and through higher education and the ways in which higher education, universities and campuses themselves are embedded in the colonial project. This said, we know that higher education still provides limited access to students from working-class, and rural poor social origins, with the social composition of academic staff remaining largely White and institutional cultures dominated by historical traditions that limit decolonisation, de-racialisation and de-gendering of knowledge production. This with the result of denying Black students’ identities, histories and cultures (Badat, 2009: 455; Luckett, 2016: 417). All highlighted by recent calls for the decolonisation of higher education (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013). The tragedy is that, in the context of postcolonial South Africa, as throughout the postcolonial world, higher education and a university degree constitute an entry ticket to social uplift and a chance to transform and turn the clock back on centuries of disadvantage. Overall, higher education serves multiple purposes and needs to be developed and conducted recognising a multitude of overlapping imperatives. Technological, social, political and other changes indicate that a 21st-century ideal is for people to be freed and capacitated to live experiential lifestyles in which they can creatively learn and produce, study and work on lifestyles and cultures to yield multidimensional individualities and multifaceted communities. What is apparent is that for those thinking about the university in this fast evolving social and technologically disrupted time, the question of the place as well as space of the university is of strategic importance. How the physical space of universities is designed

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should be carefully thought of in order to enhance the educational experience of students (Coulson et  al., 2015: 117). Not only do university places and spaces form ‘the ideological terrain on which competing ideas are played out and educational purpose made manifest’ (Locke, 2015: 596–7), solidified and materialised through physical walls and demarcated spaces, they are also ‘active constituents of social relations that intersect in dynamic and fluid ways’ (ibid.). The physical space and place of a university creates the borders from within which teaching and learning are defined and a stage for the shaping and reification of knowledge, ideas and identities takes shape. Equally, it provides a framework for a re-shaping and reimagining of the same. The places and spaces that make up the university campus provide the physical arena in which learning and research activities take place. From a psychological perspective, they create the backdrop for the social interaction and collective and individual memories that are fundamental to the university experience (Coulson et  al., 2015: 121). Overall, a university campus needs spaces designed to generate interaction, collaboration, physical movement and social engagement as primary elements of the student learning experience (Jamieson, 2003: 121).

UNIVERSITIES, PEOPLE, PLACE AND SPACE The human cultures that connect objects, people and practices are what concern us when we try to understand what places and spaces have to do with higher education. This is for at least two reasons. First, cultures produce the patterns of significance within which objects and practices are ruled to have different and qualified meanings. Second, higher education is fundamentally tied to expressing, enhancing and sharing culturally defined notions of excellence and by extension,

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notions of belonging as well as exclusion. This in some respects explains why the #RhodesMustFall movement was galvanised around the statue of Cecil John Rhodes, a key founder of colonial rule in South Africa. The statue signposted the cornerstone role of colonial thought and resources arrangements in the ongoing architecture of dominance and oppression that guides South Africa today. Thus, for example, what was the Rand Afrikaans University’s (RAU) campus in Auckland Park, now University of Johannesburg (UJ), was in its design an ode to the apartheid regime’s own exclusionist interpretation of modernism. At this university and elsewhere in the apartheid state, ‘modern architecture became the style and visual language’ of apartheid (Murray, 2007: 51), making heavily cemented political statements about Afrikaner belonging to Western culture, and equally about who to exclude1. More often than not, and with the ‘aesthetics, styles, and organization of space, campus architecture has been complicit in reproducing dominant ideologies and social relations of society, undermining diversity and its possibilities’ (Dutton and Grant, 1991: 40). Amid the calls for a decolonisation of higher education, examination and rethinking of this aspect seems to have been somewhat ignored and underrated despite protests against, as well as the literal removal and defacing of artefacts and physical places connected to the university and a colonial heritage. Given the above, it is legitimate to ask how campuses can embrace and facilitate access, and conducive learning environments, for students from all socio-economic, cultural and language groups. More precisely, it is worth asking about the range and form of transformative change that campuses must undergo to become places and spaces for university practices that are decolonised. Architecture itself does not determine the possibilities for belonging and ownership of places. Instead, what will reform the postcolonial and post-apartheid campus is neither a demolition nor rebuilding, of whatever scale.

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More significant, will be the claim-making, appropriation and direction-giving acts which make the university a transit point towards decolonisation and goals that African peoples recognise and value, and that have a bearing on the societies they inhabit. As Matshikiza (2007: 284) noticed, an ironic lesson from the South African experience, is that many parts of ‘White’ colonial and apartheid architecture have now been taken over by a wide span of Africans whose practices and actual belonging have Africanised areas while postapartheid developments, irrespective of the architects and occupants, have often been a pale mimicry of Western (Tuscan and other) ideals. What we point to is that the political vision of the African university of the future should, as Matshikiza (2007: 285) can be read to suggest, become a transit place in which the multitudes of people who are associated with it (the African university) are recognised and dignified. As South Africa struggles, negotiates and transitions from the inequity and injustice of its colonial and apartheid histories, it is also engaged in a process that mitigates against the estrangement of the past. Remember that to colonise involves setting people apart in order to then dominate them, and that apartheid entails the production and reproduction of patterns of alienation. South African history shows just how cutting apart and separating people so that they occupy different places has been put at the very heart of political policies of the race-based social engineering. Separate locations for different people were followed by differentiated services delivery and universities, and higher education institutions were no different in this regard. Tiers of university education were created based on language and race. Such divisions still inform the educational landscape in South Africa dating back to the 1959 Extension of University Education Act, which outlined a master plan for higher education in South Africa based on the apartheid ideology of ‘separate but equal development’. Far from equal though, the Act provided access to highly unequal

education based on race and ethnicity, ensuring that historically White institutions served the educational, ideological, political, cultural, social and economic needs of White South Africans, while establishing secondclass higher education institutions geared at feeding the economy of the Bantustan or Black homelands with a semi-educated Black middle class. These divisions still plague the South African higher education landscape despite a major higher education reform in 1996 to address inequities by merging former designated ‘Black’ higher education institutions with designated ‘White’, English and Afrikaans language instruction institutions. While some formerly designated White English speaking universities resisted these perceived enforced mergers, often marked by huge distrust and power inequities between academic staff members (cf. Makgoba and Seepe, 2004), other formerly White English and Afrikaans speaking universities and designated Black universities and/or technikons have undergone major transformations through the merger reform. This is evidenced through massive increases in student numbers, substantial growth in students from previously disadvantaged backgrounds and in particular first generation university students2, a diversification of languages spoken, and increased needs for expanding teaching venues and student services such as accommodation, sports and leisure facilities. And as in many other countries around the world, the increase in student numbers have forced university management and planners to adopt space planning models and techniques focused around calculations of student intakes and the maximising of space to accommodate rising student numbers (Temple, 2008: 229–30). However, little do these calculations factor in other institutional objectives of research, teaching and learning practices and provisions for both internal and external services to students and staff (ibid.: 230). In South Africa, all of these planning needs come with the additional need for addressing equity, institutional cultures and the

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reimagining of place and space to make the university accommodating to students from diverse cultural backgrounds and with differing needs in terms of services, often based in huge socio-economic disparities among the student population. The ‘new’ institutions created by the university mergers are interesting examples of continuing legacies, this as former ‘White’ institutions took on the role of ‘benevolent hosts’ of the historically underprivileged ‘Black’ universities and technicians, creating big brother scenarios in which the ‘host’s’ institutional culture, language of instruction and most importantly location, often urban, has set the frame from which education is conducted. Jansen (2016) articulates the implications and significance of place when he addresses the psychological and spiritual obstacles to change faced by the university from within the context of its history and location. Amid several horrific racially motivated crimes at the University, Jansen (2016) conducts an analysis of letters to the editor published in the local paper the Volksblad in response to these crimes and shows how the surrounding community influences, preserves and legitimates the continuation of separatist politics and ideologies of racism, all with varying degrees of resonance at university campuses in South Africa. All in all, university campuses reify ideas around education, youth, gender, class and race (Yanni, 2012: 348). Thus, there is need to state the urgency of how the place, i.e. the geographical location of the university and its relationship to surrounding communities, and the space, i.e. architecture and grounds of university campuses, can be reimagined and reconfigured in ways that mitigate such reifications and instead form places and spaces in which transformation is exercised and education mediated in ways that enable knowledge acquisition, empowerment and agential development. We argue that universities must be recognised as, and become, what we will term quintessential ‘transit places’, i.e. places in which people can pass or conveyance over,

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or beyond, or across, or from, or through what previously existed, to some other state. The process of decolonisation is of course in itself a process of transitioning from one state to another.

THE UNIVERSITY CAMPUS AS A TRANSIT SPACE The view of the university as a transit place is consistent with how education is itself primarily linked to the metaphor of change; that it is, for example, associated with the transference or communication of information from one to another in ways that create a desired change in another (cf. Low, 2008). As transit places universities function as nodes in which people are, and even society itself is, transformed. In a sense, universities arise here as places and analogies of spaces in which rhizomic network possibilities are produced through educational processes (including those to do with research and community engagement) that enable societies to develop requisite varieties of innovations and capabilities with which to cope with fast changes in the world. These changes are widely associated with new communication technologies that disrupt old ways of living with the consequence that, in what Giddens (2000) famously called a ‘runaway world’, it becomes increasingly difficult for people and their cultures (material and otherwise) to achieve belonging. This is made ever more pertinent in postcolonial and post-apartheid spaces, where people have not been allowed to find ways to ‘feel at home’, and as such the consequences of these disruptions are likely to be more intense. Remember that oppressed peoples, in colonial and apartheid arrangements, are ‘bound to the power structure like a slave to a master’ (Mbembe, 2001: 31) in a ‘civilizational’ logic that regards the reclaiming or regaining of human dignity and recognition by the oppressed as disruptive (Gordon, 2000: 51).

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The reverberations of technological disruptions are therefore more fearsome in the present. However, new technologies are also tied with the prospect of ‘technological leaps’ by which societies may disrupt the flows of resources and opportunities in ways that restructure the world, hopefully rendering the distribution of global and national wealth fundamentally less characterised by inequity and injustice. What technologies disruptively do to make and unmake the university as a transit place is worth serious investigation. Pertinently, traditional forms of teaching and learning are being outpaced by the velocity, i.e. by the speed and the direction, of the 21st-century digital revolution (Coulson et al., 2015: 116). As online education as well as other forms of off-site education becomes more accessible, higher education institutions will struggle to attract students to more costly residential options for obtaining a degree. Within this climate, the campus environment will gain strategic importance through whatever additional services and facilities they offer that will serve as their competitive edge in attracting and retaining the best students and staff (ibid.: 117–21). The latter becomes ever more important in the postcolonial context of South African universities, whereas, as previously set out, the place and space of the university campus have made statements of belonging and exclusion in equal measures. Instead, the strategic direction of South African university campuses must be to make statements about a new set of ideologies and values and serve as a transit space for the re-appropriation of cultural production and reproduction. Thus, what makes universities transit spaces is that the coincidence or meetings that they occasion frame cultural trajectories by shaping opportunities for learning. The university serves as a place where people of different generations and genealogies meet. Through the meeting of people, the university is also placed to connect multiple epistemic schema, disciplines, knowledges, ideas and systems of thought.

The university is a nexus structure whose sustainability is predicated on how it enables requisite varieties of relational configurations to emerge with speed and minimal difficulties. The configuration of places is both materially and socially determined, so the varieties of uses and adaptations are informed by material and social interplays. University places can be adapted to reflect changing relational patterns between learners, teachers, communities, markets, internal environments, external environments, etc. As the world changes rapidly and greatly due to economic, technological and cultural factors, sustainable universities should have a wide variety of multi-purpose spaces that are open to various lifestyles, work, learning, teaching and other uses. Universities that are able to offer diverse sections of places that requisitely address contingent needs are likely to be more capable of satisfying this complex and contending variety of needs. The key point here is that the ‘transit’ metaphor captures the transformation ideal of a university that changes society through its educational, research and other endeavours. It coheres with the idea of a university that breaks the yoke of colonialism and moves to replace colonial norms and forms with orders that are relevant to the needs of the communities in which it is founded. The transit metaphor suggests that the ideal of the university, as a place of advancement through teaching and research, is best met when the university itself is informed by the environments on which it is based. South African university campuses, like their counterparts around the world, are all products and embodiments of the political and social agendas of their time. Around the world, the post-war era brought the construction of large numbers of universities characterised by bold modernist architecture and rigid layouts planned to host much smaller student populations which are ill-suited for today’s large surge in student numbers and the changing demands of 21st-century education, ideally characterised by the flexibility of evolving technological

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developments, changing teaching methods and a greater need for interactions between students and staff and the surrounding communities (Coulson et al., 2015: 117–20). Thus, there is an imperative to reimagine and reconfigure the physical campus space in order to not only accommodate larger student numbers, but to create a campus that is centred around a holistic and equal learning experience that provides for both formal and alternative teaching and learning modalities, and also creates a sense of socio-cultural belonging for all students, most importantly a diverse student body. Our argument is that in order to create a learning environment that is conducive to a ‘future-fit’ university, and to create a learning space that talks to and considers a South African/African cultural as well as a socio-economic context, it is important to rethink, reconstruct and re-practice campuses in ways that mediate transformation. Imagining campuses as transit points allows us to think about how spaces can be reconfigured to become virtual as well as literal transit-hall channels in which social transformation is enabled. Thus, campuses as transit points can open up to processes that are conducive to individuals, societies, nations and the world itself being reimagined, reconfigured, transformed and hence, decolonised. Taking all of this into account, we argue that there are three main areas in which campuses can be reconfigured as transit spaces. First, campuses can work as transit points that link people to multiple and varied possibilities for socio-cultural belonging. It is interesting to note that in South African universities that have undergone mergers, academic staff have perceivably undergone a shift from apartheid constructed ideas of a professional identity lodged within and shaped by allegiances to institutions based on racial and/or language identification, to a professional identity much more linked to disciplines and professional fields (Beelen, 2007). Organisational identification (OI) refers to individuals perceiving that they

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belong to and are one with their organisation (Breytenbach et  al., 2013). Beelen (2007) shows that what the university mergers have successfully managed to deconstruct as well as construct is a professional academic identity that is moving away from a former apartheid higher education system in which academic identities were formed by an allegiance to an institution shaped by and premised on the apartheid ideology of belonging and exclusion. And while academic staff initially identified with their former institutions classified as either White English/Afrikaans speaking universities or their former Black universities, as per apartheid classifications of higher education institutions, their focus of identification has shifted towards their profession. In other words, their professional identification is enhanced as a result of a decrease in OI. Equally, a study by Breytenbach et  al. (2013) of OI among students at a postmerger university in the Eastern Cape shows that students’ race, campus, university tenure and residence have a significant influence on students’ levels of OI. Overall, the OI with the new post-merger university was high, in reference to the findings of Beelen’s (2007) study of academic staff having undergone a re-orientation of their professional identities due to conscious efforts to change the overall identity of the university after the merger. However, the study by Breytenbach et  al. (2013) also found that new students, mainly from the formerly Black institutions, having been incorporated in to the formerly White university, generally had higher levels of OI than students of other races and students who studied longer at the university. Furthermore, resident students had a greater level of OI than those who stayed off-campus (ibid.). What the study shows is that students should be encouraged to adopt the core values of the post-merger university to ensure that OI levels increase. Importantly, the study also shows that university management should implement action plans for those student segments that exhibited low levels of OI (ibid.).

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This shows us that a conscious restructuring and reimagining of the place of the university and those who inhibit it can create new ways for people to reimagine their identities. Second, universities can decolonise by enabling and providing extended educational, professional and social services. For South African universities, the extended student base (Hornsby and Osman, 2014) has increased the needs for extended educational, professional and social services including recreational facilities. And with campuses essentially built to host much smaller student numbers, many institutions are hard-pressed to reconfigure, rebuild and construct new lecture venues, student accommodations, and recreational spaces. The University of Johannesburg here provides an example as a university built to host approximately 10,000 students but, as of 2019, has a student population of approximately 55,000 students. With dwindling funding, new and innovative solutions to space constraints are much needed. In this context it is important to consider what the residential university can offer by way of facilities, services and learning experiences that online/off-campus alternatives cannot. And most importantly, could the residential campus be reimagined in ways that cater for all three tiers of students, as set out above? Could the residential university campus be actuated in ways that contribute to an educational experience that goes beyond the sheer transfer of knowledge? Could university campuses contribute holistically to the teaching and learning experience in ways that are aligned to a broader societal transformation project? Can we think of how the spaces and places of the campus can be enabled to make vital contributions to the ways in which social interactions are carried out in the service of decolonisation and transformation of the university and of societies at large? We propose that university spaces should embody requisite varieties of access and exit points if they are to sustainably and attractively negotiate social, economic

and technological adaptations. We think this is paramount, remembering that people are powerful agents who participate in how mediascapes and landscapes intermesh in the cultural construction of just and unjust arrangements by which it is determined who gets what, from whom, when and how. The emergence of new media technologies, however, presents new options for how people may act, changing the horizons of significance within which information, knowledge, wisdom, legitimacy, meaning, etc. are situationally engaged with practices that variously evidence both freedom and subjugation. Third, campuses can decolonise by recreating and facilitating decolonised relationships between the university, the city/ surrounding community and broader socioeconomic policies and imperatives nationally, regionally and globally. It is argued that to be useful to Africa and the world, African universities have to be grounded in African communities and cultures (cf. Makgoba and Seepe, 2004: 19), and that as Kwame Nkrumah put it already in 1956, ‘The African university draws its inspiration from its environment, as an Indigenous tree growing from a seed that is planted and nurtured in African soil’, and with a ‘consciousness of an African identity from which it derives and celebrates its strengths and assesses those strengths to its own comparative and competitive advantage on the international stage’ (Nkrumah, 1956). Further, transformation and decolonisation projects will have to take seriously their broader stakeholder relationships and make stakeholders key to the transformation agenda of the university and give them real and tangible stakes in the facilities and services of the campus. Thus, university campuses must be configured in such a way that, unlike, for example, US university campuses, that have been structured as a ‘place apart’ (cf. Haar, 2011) and built as microcosms of cities (Yanni, 2012: 348), they instead become a place that is part of the surrounding community, rather than ‘apart’ from it3.

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CONCLUSION Universities mediate and connect people in innumerable ways that constitute opportunities for university managements and for constituent members to rethink and remake education. We have contended that university places and spaces can and should be configured to enable people to have requisite varieties of options for entry, exit and progress in ways that both recognise the best of extant cultures and exceed them. For this we have used the transit metaphor. As transit places and spaces, universities can act as vital nodes for the transitions South Africa envisions in order to advance decolonisation. To do so, it is necessary for those who think and act for the decolonisation of the university to remove structural, material and other barriers that would limit the extent to which the university functions optimally as a transit place and space. This rethinking will surely challenge architects, planners, university leadership, academics and students, as well as other stakeholders of the university to fundamentally rethink the campus and the roles it should fulfil. Ultimately, how universities are constituted as places that are entered and exited has something to say for how people live, teach, learn and research, with consequences for the relationship of the university to societies and their historically formed material and other needs. Thus, how places are constituted and socially given meaning say a great deal about how decolonisation of the university will transpire.

Notes  1  The main building of RAU, with its horseshoe formation, harks strongly to the tradition of Afrikaner settlers forming a ‘laager’, i.e. positioning their wagons into a protective formation to barricade themselves from feared threats posed by the ‘natives’ on whose land they took occupation. Like much architecture of its time, what is now UJ provides an example not only of the apartheid state’s misguided and racially

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exclusive ideological flirtations with modernism, but also its commitment to grow the economy, at the benefits of whites only, through the use of cheap and readily available cement. And of course, most concretely, no pun intended, the University was built to accommodate a much smaller, and at the time, exclusively white student fraternity. While South Africa is not alone in having seen epochs of architectural manifestations of political ideologies in the fascist or brutalist tradition so enamoured with concrete, it created its own form of architecture best described as a ‘neo-fascist concrete brutalism’ enmeshed in, and informed by, the apartheid regime’s obsession with defence against the ‘total onslaught’. This is made most visible in the architectural design of the University of South Africa (UNISA) in the South African capital Pretoria, built not only as a university but also as a fortress and defence against an attack on the city.  2  Students from families where no one holds a tertiary degree.  3  The ideals and vision set out in many mission statements of South African universities, as exemplified through the vision and mission statements of several South African universities’ talk of recognising South Africa as an African country located and oriented towards the African continent, must be made to form strategies of action, in that, ‘An international University of choice, anchored in Africa, dynamically shaping the future’ (University of Johannesburg), ‘towards the African University shaping futures in the service of humanity’ (University of South Africa, emphasis in university statement), ‘UCT aspires to become a premier academic meeting point between South Africa, the rest of Africa and the world’ (University of Cape Town), ‘Building lives, transforming a nation, advancing a continent’ (University of the Witwatersrand). Most importantly, these vision and mission statements must be given ‘concrete’ meaning through the way in which the place and space of campus is configured.

REFERENCES Badat, S. 2009. Theorising institutional change: Post-1994 South African higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 34(4): 455–467. Beelen, P. 2007. Organisational and professional identification: A social identity study of a post merger South African university. Available from: http://essay.utwente.nl/489/1/scriptie_ Beelen.pdf (Accessed 20 August 2018).

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Breytenbach, N., Renard, M., Snelgar, R. 2013. The level of organisational identification amongst students at a post-merged South African university. SA Journal of Human Resource Management, 11(1): 1–14. Burke, C. & Grosvenor, I. 2008. School. London: Reaktion Books. Burke, P. J. 2012. The right to higher education: Beyond widening participation. Oxford: Routledge. Carlyle, T. 1908. On heroes, hero-worship and the heroic in history. London: J. M. Dent & Sons. Cloete, N. & Maassen, P. 2015. Roles of universities and the African context. In Cloete, N., Maassen P., Bailey, T. (Eds.) African minds higher education dynamics series Vol. 1: Knowledge production and contradictory functions in African higher education. Somerset West, SA: African Minds. pp. 1–17. Coulson, J., Roberts, P., Taylor, I. 2015. The future of the campus: Architecture and master planning trends. Perspectives: Policy and practice in higher education, 19(4): 116–121. Cross, M. 2004. Institutionalising campus diversity in South African higher education: Review of diversity scholarship and diversity education. Higher Education, 47(4): 387–410. Darian-Smith, K. & Willis, J. (Eds). 2016. Designing schools: Space, place and pedagogy. London: Routledge. Dutton, T. A. & Grant, B. C. 1991. Campus design and critical pedagogy. Academe, 77(4): 37–43. Frassinelli, P. P. 2018. Decolonisation: What it is and what research has to do with it. In Tomaselli, K. G. (Ed.) Making sense of research. Pretoria: Van Schaik Publishers. pp. 3–9. Giddens, A. 2000. Runaway world: How globalisation is reshaping our lives. London: Profile Books. Gordon, L. R. 2000. Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana existential thought. London and New York: Routledge. Haar, S. 2011. The city as campus: Urbanism and higher education in Chicago. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hornsby, D. J. & Osman, R. 2014. Massification in higher education: Large classes and student learning. Higher Education, 67(6): 711–719.

Jamieson, P. 2003. Designing more effective on-campus teaching and learning spaces: A role for academic developers. International Journal for Academic Development, 8(1/2): 119–133. Jansen, J. 2016. Leading for change: Race, intimacy and leadership on divided university campuses. London: Routledge. Kromydas, T. 2017. Rethinking higher education and its relationship with social inequalities: Past knowledge, present state and future potential. Palgrave Communications, 3(1). doi: 10.1057/s41599-017-0001-8. Locke, K. 2015. Activating built pedagogy: A genealogical exploration of educational space at the University of Auckland Epsom Campus and Business School. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 47(6): 596–607. Low, G. 2008. Metaphor and education. In Gibbs, R. W. (Ed.) The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought. Cambridge University Press. pp. 212–231. Luckett, K. 2016. Curriculum contestation in a post-colonial context: A view from the South. Teaching in Higher Education, 21(4): 415–428. Makgoba, M. & Seepe, S. 2004. Knowledge and identity: An African vision of higher education transformation. In S. Seepe (Ed.) Towards an African identity of higher education. Pretoria: Vista University. pp.1–44. Matshikiza, J. 2007. A renaissance on our doorsteps. In Murray, N., Shepherd, N., Hall, M. (Eds.) Desire lines: Space, memory and identity in the post-apartheid city. London: Routledge. pp. 283–286. Mayer, C. 2010. The school building as a pedagogical space. European Educational Research Journal, 9(1): 116–123. Mbembe, A. 2001. On the postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. McLeod, J., Goad, P., Willis, J., Darian-Smith, K. 2016. Reading images of school buildings and spaces: An interdisciplinary dialogue on visual research in histories of progressive education. In Moss J., Pini, B. (Eds.) Visual research methods in educational research. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 15–35. Murray, N. 2007. Remaking modernism: South African architecture in and out of time. In Murray, N., Shepherd, N., Hall, M. (Eds.) Desire lines: Space, memory and identity in the postapartheid city. London: Routledge. pp. 43–66.

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Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. 2013. Why decoloniality in the 21st century? The Thinker, 48: 10–15. Nkrumah, K. 1956. Opening Address, University College, Accra, Ghana. Ortega y Gasset, J. 1944. Mission of the university. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sulla, V. & Zikhali, P. 2018. Overcoming poverty and inequality in South Africa: An assessment of drivers, constraints and opportunities (English). Washington, DC: World Bank Group. Available from: http://documents.worldbank. org/curated/en/530481521735906534/ Overcoming-Poverty-and-Inequality-in-SouthAfrica-An-Assessment-of-Drivers-Constraintsand-Opportunities (Accessed 21 July 2019). Tanner, C. K. 2000. The influence of school architecture on academic achievement.

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Journal of Educational Administration, 38(4): 309–330. Temple, P. 2008. Learning spaces in higher education: An under-researched topic. London Review of Education, 6(3): 229–241. Tomasello, M. 2009. Why we cooperate. Cambridge and London: MIT Press. Xing, B., Marwala, L., Marwala, T. 2018. Higher education in the era of the fourth industrial revolution. In Gleason, N.W. (Ed.) Adopt fast, adapt quick: Adaptive approaches in the South African context. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 171–206. Yanni, C. 2012. Campus history at the crossroads: Three divergent methods. Journal of Planning History, 11(4): 348–351.

41 When I Open My Alas: Developing a Transnational Mariposa Consciousness J u a n R í o s Ve g a

INTRODUCTION During one of my many trips to my homeland, I decided to search for books on gender studies and masculinities in Panama. After visiting several bookstores, I realized these places lacked information about masculinities. When I asked one of the associates at El Machetazo about books on masculinities, the woman looked at me as if I were an extraterrestrial. Still interested about the topic, the next day I decided to visit another bookstore. This time I walked to Vía Argentina until I found Portobelo Bookstore. When I entered the bookstore, there were two middle-aged men chatting about things they could do to bring more clients to the bookstore. Seizing on the opportunity, I decided to approach them and share my quest for books on gender studies and masculinities in Panama. However, the most interesting thing about my visit was how these two gentlemen understood gender sexual orientation in Panama, although I tried to explain to them that masculinity was not a

single and homogeneous word and that some heterosexual men happen to have sex with other men and still claim to be straight men. Instead, society understands ‘being gay’ as a term for men who look and act very effeminate, like to be penetrated, and feel and dress like women. As expected, these two gentlemen mentioned some examples of being gay in Panama, perpetuating the idea that gays are usually labeled as hair stylists, dressmakers for carnival and beauty pageants, or those who dance ballet. Later, I shared with them that in Panama there is a double standard when people refer to sexual orientation – they usually associate it with HIV and AIDS; however, on the other side, when gays are openly out, corporations and local channels use them as commodifiers to make fun of them and/or to increase their ratings. It was that overwhelming trip and my constant struggles with my queer of color and gay identities that prompted me to write my testimonios about being gay in my homeland. It is through my writing that I made my

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personal experiences political by meeting other queers of color and jot@s (term used in Mexico to refer to the LGBTIQ community) in the United States, and some other gay Panamanian writers and activists.

LITERATURE REVIEW As a scholar, I have experienced some frustration with not finding a voice within queer studies, a voice that could speak about the gay experience of Latino males, especially in Panama. Reading HamesGarcía’s (2011) article titled ‘Queer Theory Revisited’ allowed me to find a niche in traditional queer studies. I learned that I was not alone on my quest to address Latino/a queerness from a non-traditional ontology. For example, Hames-García posits that even though White queers have been using ‘theories of color’ (2011: 26), they have only been used as part of their footnotes to support their claims. He argues that queer theory and lesbian and gay studies have not been able to address ‘theories of color’ correctly; they have only become part of queer genealogies for strategic purposes. Hames-García argues that race, gender, sexuality, and class are constantly interrelated and not occasionally intersected like other scholars have theorized. He claims that queer theory lacks an analysis of race and its interrelations with other identities (2011: 29). Kumashiro agrees, stating that an identity only has meaning when it is related to other identities; there can never be an identity that is all-inclusive (2001: 6). Hames-García claims that even though most of the canonical works of queer theory portray people of color as ‘colorful’, without ever completely integrating an analysis of race into the primary frameworks, the contributions of people of color are necessary since they can provide a look into how their topics relate to race and how race is interrelated to other identities (2011: 29).

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The lack of relevant analysis on queers of color and in-depth discussions of race, gender, and sexuality led to a new split within queer studies called ‘queer of color critique’ (Ferguson, Aberrations, cited in HamesGarcia, 2011: 37). Drawing from women of color feminism, lesbian feminism, transformational feminisms, radical philosophies, US Third World feminism, and anticolonial theorists, queer of color critique develops a better understanding of how race, sexuality, gender, and other forms of oppression are interrelated. Queer and non-queer scholars challenge dominant (White) epistemologies in order to analyze oppression and the marginalization of people of color, especially queers of color, by sharing their own histories, counter-narratives, and testimonios while giving birth to new epistemologies. Some scholars of color have decided to expand on gay, lesbian, and queer studies in order to raise their voice in academia while others have decided to move away from a queer identity. A queer of color critique has dismantled and keeps dismantling how queer sexualities were normalized in places like Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, and also how ‘queer sexualities [have] persisted despite US colonialist practices’ (Kumashiro, 2001: 7). In order to analyze how those queer sexualities were normalized as a result of colonialism, queer scholars have drawn a line and call it ‘colonial difference’ and ‘modern sexuality’ (Hames-García, 2011: 40). Within that ‘colonial difference’ approach, scholars have unveiled how some ‘“native” cultures traditionally viewed gender and sexuality in very different ways than the binary system that predominates Euro-American thought: a system that stipulates that we are male or female, masculine or feminine, straight or gay’ (Kumashiro, 2001: 7). As a result, queers of color scholars have invested their time to understand how queers of color have resisted oppression and marginalization as part of the colonization, immigration, slavery, capitalism, and post-colonialism.

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A Transnational Mariposa Consciousness Like the story of the Ugly Duckling, it was not until I attended and presented the genesis of this paper at the Association for Jotería Arts, Activism, and Scholarship (AJAAS) conference in Phoenix, Arizona in 2015 that I discovered a safe space where queer scholars and community activists voiced their personal and communal stories using a jotería epistemology. Hames-García claims, ‘As jotería, our bodies and our selves are lived legacies of colonialism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, and heterosexism’ (2014: 136). Within jotería studies the political becomes personal, meaning we cannot ignore our personal experiences while decolonizing traditional epistemologies and advocating for social justice. Drawing from queers of color epistemologies, jotería studies, and Daniel Enriquez Pérez’s (2014) ‘mariposa consciousness’, I analyze a transnational mariposa consciousness as a Latin American man who self-­identifies as a queer of color in the United States, but through constant trips to my homeland of Panama, my identity shift pushes me to adopt a homosexual identity. It is based on these geographical borders as a transnational that I share my personal experiences as an immigrant/Latino man of color that make the political (gay) something personal (maricón, cueco, loca, pato) (derogative terms to refer to homosexuals in Panama). It is important to understand that in order to develop my own transnational mariposa consciousness I need to know my own history and embrace all elements of my shifting identities. I understand that I cannot feel ashamed of who I am or of what I do naturally. I use mariposa as a symbol of traveling, border-crossing, critical-lens resiliency, and advocacy. Pérez claims that many Chicano/a and Latino/a artists and writers have used butterfly imagery to develop a mariposa consciousness as a decolonizing theory and as ‘a symbol of transformation, life, death,

resiliency, migration, and the soul’ (2014: 99). As a transnational mariposa, I keep crossing territorial and social borders that sometimes leave me tired and hopeless; this border-crossing that makes me wonder about my own self as someone who can claim to be a queer of color in one space and homosexual in a different space. It is this transnational identity shifting that always reminds me that I live in what Anzaldúa referred to as ‘borderlands, a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary’ (2007: 25), making me realize that I belong to ‘los atravesados’ (the stubborns). It is this transnational consciousness that allows me to develop my own mariposa consciousness. I learn to be a queer of color in the United States, but also become consciously aware of my flesh and soul as gay in Panama. As a transnational mariposa, I experience oppression and discrimination for being an immigrant of color in the United States, and in Panama, I struggle in witnessing how homophobia, sexism, racism, classism, and other layers of discrimination are understood by my own people as normal. I understand that I have to face homophobia and a double standard society in Panama and a racist and xenophobic space in the United States. Like Anzaldúa’s mestiza, I have a ‘struggle of borders, an inner war’ (2007: 25). While living in two different cultures and countries, I get different messages from people: in the United States, I can be oppressed for having a brown body and an accented English, whereas in Panama, I experience oppression because of my mannerisms or for being labeled maricón o cueco and/or for never being married at my age. It is that constant reminder about my incompleteness as a man. Hearing my loved ones ask, ‘Are you still single?’, ‘When are you going to get married?’, or using homophobic slurs against others. As Anzaldúa’s (2007) mestiza, my transnational mariposa consciousness makes me more reflective about my self and my identity shifting. I take this identify shifting as my constant transformation of a mariposa consciousness. It is during this transformation

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that I open my alas (wings) and find liberation; it is my writings, my testimonials, that allow me to experience resiliency. For Pérez, Having a mariposa consciousness is to recognize ‘our inner and outer beauty and strength; it is about being yourself in your true nature, in your own words, in all your mariposada – the full splendor of your beauty, strength, gender expression, and sexuality. It is about knowing your history and yourself fully, and embracing all aspects of your identity. It is about maintaining a physical and mental equilibrium so that you can soar in all your glory. (Pérez, 2014: 102)

21ST-CENTURY HOMOSEXUALITY IN PANAMA Even though conversations about sexual orientation and same-sex relationships have always been a taboo topic in society, it has pushed the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (GLBTI) group to develop its own subculture. Being openly gay and lesbian is still punishable and seen as an immoral act in society. For example, gays and lesbians are not allowed to have access to certain human rights, cannot find decent jobs, and are sometimes marginalized by families and society at large. In the case of the National Police Department, gays and lesbians are not allowed. Instead, they are considered dangerous toward others, aggressive, unintelligent, alcohol addicts, and/or physical abusers. On the other side, there have been some reports of police officers becoming verbally and physically abusive toward transsexuals and transgender. Gays are victims of sexual assaults, violent and aggressive treatment, and some have been asked to pay illegal fees to police officers (R. Beteta Bond, personal communication, July 2, 2016). The local media also discriminates against gays and lesbians with derogatory and discriminatory arguments, perpetuating a double standard society. For example, a gay guy might be rejected by society and religion for

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being openly gay. At the same time, the same individual might be accepted as long as he defines what the majority interprets as being gay or lesbian: a man who is effeminate, a hair stylist, fashion designer, or somebody who loves beauty pageants and carnival queens. This double standard society pushes many self-identified gays and lesbians to keep their sexual orientation as something private. Unfortunately, this type of oppression toward the GLBTI group and an internalized homophobia by most closeted gays and lesbians are usually interpreted as normal. In a recent study, Castillero (2012) found that in Panama, the GLBTI group still experiences positive and negative issues. For instance, on the negative side, self-identified GLBTI individuals find a lack of representation and equality in professions such as police officers, engineers, and architects. Self-identified GLBTIs, in this case, men who happen to have sex with other men, are not allowed to be blood donors. In addition, the word ‘gay’ cannot be used to advertise or to market businesses in Panama since it contradicts Panamanians’ moral values. On the positive side, since April 2002, by law the Republic of Panama grants protection to individuals who have been discriminated against due to their sexual orientation. In addition, since 2006, the Dirección General de Cedulación del Tribunal Electoral (Vital Records Office) allows a legal attorney to help an individual’s claim to change his/her sex on his/her birth certificate based on the individual’s gender self-identification. Finally, Executive Law #332 of July 29, 2008 eliminated Article 12 of Law 149 of May 20, 1949 that penalized sodomy (word used to name homosexuality before 1973) (translated). Although things seem to change for the better in Panamanian society toward a more inclusive GLBTI group, there are still some institutionalized norms and regulations based on religious beliefs, a double standard society, and political agendas that hinder the creation of a State law that protects and grants legal rights to the GLBTI group.

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TESTIMONIO Beverley argues, ‘testimonio represents an affirmation of the individual subject, even of individual growth and transformation, but in connection with a group or class situation marked by marginalization, oppression, and struggle’ (2004: 41, emphasis added). It is the narrator who speaks for or in the name of his community or group. Testimonio also calls for self-reflection, social justice, and action. It includes political, social, historical, and cultural histories based on one’s life experiences by bringing change through critical thoughts, ‘bridging individuals with collective histories of oppression, a story of marginalization is re-centered to elicit social change’ (Delgado Bernal et  al., 2012: 364). For Tuhiwai Smith Indigenous testimonies talk about ‘extremely painful events’ (2002: 144). In my testimonio, I am the testimoniante (Latina Feminist Group, 2001: 13), where I am both the researcher and subject. My testimonio is communal because it is a contribution to the collective of the experiences of other gays in Panama, their identity conflicts, heteronormativity, family rejection, and a homophobic society. As a Latin American immigrant to this country, my testimonio challenges the idea of a homogeneous and static Latino culture in the United States. Instead, my testimonio is placed within a queer Latinidad. Rodríguez defines queer Latinidad as ‘a particular geopolitical experience but also contains within it the complexities and contradictions of immigration, (post)(neo)colonialism, race, color, legal, status, nation, language, and the politics of location’ (2003: 9–10). It is my position as a homosexual Latin American immigrant to the United States, who happens to be a scholar making use of his queer Latinidad, sharing my testimonio on my last trip to my homeland. It was a very emotional and painful trip. Emotional because it is always good to reconnect with family and friends, but painful when I spent some time witnessing how my homosexual comrades

are still marginalized and silenced by a society that prefers to ignore how issues of racism, classism, sexuality, and gender shape people’s lives. Today, as a Latin American queer of color living in this country, I feel the courage to voice this experience as testimonio that ‘travels’, looking for a larger audience that can observe, witness, and feel solidarity for my community (Cruz, 2012). Like other queer scholars of color, I truly believe that the future of theories of queers of color will depend on moving away from a White gay male ontology. The history of queer theory, under the umbrella of feminist studies, allowed me to place queer theory in time. It helped me to better understand how it started, its founders, and their claims; however, my encounter with a queer of color critique and jotería studies led me to find a new scholarship where I can raise my own voice as a queer scholar of color. It is through the use and interpretation of ‘a queer of color critique’ where I can analyze race and sexuality alongside the violence of European colonialism and Indigenous resistance, slavery, imperialism, and post-colonialism (HamesGarcía, 2011). It is through a queer of color critique that I can claim that my ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other forms of oppression are interrelated and not interconnected as many other scholars have claimed. Ocampo (2012) argues that different factors shape the lives of Latino gay men (nationality, generational status, class, race/ethnicity, and location) that allow gay Latino men to perform different masculinities. It is through the exploration of those factors where I can challenge dominant binaries of male/female, man/woman, top/bottom, pasivo/activo, macho/loca within the pan-ethnic Latin Americans (Mexicans, Salvadorans, Argentinians, Panamanians) who also self-identify as queers, gays, bisexuals, transgender, lesbians, or straights. It is through a queer of color critique and a queer Latinidad that I claim identities are neither static nor homogeneous. Instead, identities keep changing, adapting, and resisting whenever they are in contact with other identities as they relate to context and space.

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VISITING PANAMA La Discoteca Gay I think the day after I arrived, I reunited with my friend Eduardo (pseudonym). I don’t remember the last time I saw him, but thanks to social media we saw each other one more time. It was ten at night when I took a cab that took me to the place where Eduardo was supposed to pick me up. I was there; the place was dark and looked dangerous. It was a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Panama City. Finally, my friend showed up and I got in his car. We talked and laughed, making memories of our stories when we used to work as English teachers in the same school. On our way to a gay bar, Eduardo shared with me that he was still living with the same man for over 20 years, ‘mi chombo’ (depending on context it could be a derogatory or affectionate word to refer to Afro-Panamanians), but that he always had adventures with other men besides his long-term relationship. He told me that his new boyfriend was waiting for us at the gay bar. He also told me his boyfriend was the computer teacher at his school. The place was not that nice, its smell was pretty bad, and it was humid and dark. However, I felt like a boy in a candy store. I was there surrounded by locas, maricas, pajaros, viraos, cuecos, los del otro lado, los que se les moja la canoa, los delicados, las bellas, las divas, and also los manachos, las tortilleras, and las lesbianas. I, la loca (gay man), was visiting my country and was so excited for being in a space where everybody in a certain way or another was sharing their togetherness, their homosexuality. After some drinks of rum and coke, I decided to talk to a young guy who kept looking at me constantly, like trying to tell me something. I guess alcohol allowed me to take the first step. We talked and danced many times. Then he asked me to buy him a drink, a beer. I immediately realized this young guy was a gold-digger. Later I realized that this person lived in one of the most marginalized and seedy areas in the city. The funny story is that

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he kept asking me over and over where I was from since my accent in Spanish has changed due to the influence of the English language in the States. Later on, he introduced me to his friends, and one of them told me his friend’s real name and where he lived. Honestly, I wasn’t really surprised that the young guy had given me a fake name and address. It is very common in those places where poor and young gays or straight people go to hook up with somebody for free drinks or sex. After that incident, I went back to where my friend and his boyfriend were hanging out. My friend told me that he was waiting for el show de la Ñata, a famous Afro-Panamanian gay man who dresses and performs as a woman. She is a gay icon in Panama. Before the show started, I approached La Ñata (it is a colloquial word used to refer to the nose; however, in this case it has been used to name a drag performer) and talked to her about my research on issues of homosexuality in Panama. I asked her for her e-mail address so I could contact her later. She kindly shared it with me. At the end of her performances, La Ñata thanked the audience, especially me. She said, ‘I want to thank a Panamanian who is here visiting our country now’. I felt so special for it that I ended up joining her on stage and gave her a tip for her excellent job. After the show, my friend asked one of his friends at the bar to take me back to my relatives’ house.

El Bar en San Miguelito Months before visiting Panama I got in touch with my friend Carlos (pseudonym). We both studied together but I was a year ahead of him. I always felt a platonic love for Carlos but never told him. He used to be very slender, almost six feet tall, with hazel eyes, so for me it was like reaching a star with my eyes. I always thought I was not good-looking enough for him. Carlos and I decided to meet at a local mall in the city. After searching for him for almost an hour, I finally found him. There he was seated at a table waiting for me

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to arrive and worried because his cell phone had run out of battery. Carlos did not look that handsome to me anymore, as he had done 20 years ago, but his hazel eyes still enchanted me like something magical. I don’t know why but Carlos decided to carry on our conversation in English. I followed his game and thought he probably wanted to test my English or maybe he just wanted to practice his English. Carlos and I talked about everything. He talked to me about his affair with a foreign male public figure who was also a writer and married with children, but because of a financial problem, he was in jail back in his country. Carlos also talked to me about his first sexual intercourse with an Indigenous man from the Embera tribe in Darien. I shared with him about my 11-year relationship with Jesse (pseudonym). After two hours of chatting, Carlos suggested we have some cervezas (beers). He shared with me that he didn’t like to go to the gay bars any more. So we ended up in a straight bar in San Miguelito, a popular and dangerous area filled with prostitutes, drug dealers, beggars, and even thieves. But anyway, it was just part of my adventure of being on my tierra y recordar los viejos tiempos (in my old haunts). The bar was almost empty and dark. There were a few men at some tables. It looked like the working- or lowermiddle class stopped by that bar on their way home after working all day long. There were a few senior and middle-aged men like me, or maybe younger, at the counter. Something interesting happened when I was talking to Carlos about my favorite books. I felt a man was staring at me; however, I tried to ignore him. Then Carlos said to me, ‘I think somebody is interested in you’. I faked that I didn’t know what was going on. Then Carlos let me know that the man was trying to tell me something, but I did not show any interest this time. After a while, Carlos told me he had to get up early to take some of his college students to donate some Christmas presents but encouraged me to stay in the bar, especially since that man was interested in me.

Honestly, I felt so scared, being in that place by myself and knowing that something bad could happen to me if I decided to spend the night with that stranger. I didn’t know if he could have killed me or maybe it would be hard for me to find a way to get back to my relatives’ house. So I asked Carlos to drop me off where we had met earlier so I could drive the car I had rented. If this experience had happened to me 10 or 15 years ago, for sure I would have spent the night with that man, risking my life for a moment of sex, but this time I decided that going home was a better choice. It is probably because I am more mature now or maybe because I am more consciously aware of my country’s lack of laws that protect homosexuals. Also, I have known of former professors and friends who have been killed by other men and the authorities have done nothing about it. Even though the whole country talks about it behind curtains, nobody does anything to fix it. So I try not to risk my life that much whenever I go back home. Once I came back to North Carolina, I continued my search to find Panamanian writers who discuss sexual orientation issues in Panama. To my surprise, I found Javier Stanziola, a well-known writer, and Pablo Ernesto Salas Fonseca, a playwright and director, one then living in England and the other in Panama, who gave me excellent inputs about this topic. Both writers have won awards for writings that address issues of sexual orientation and homophobia in Panama. Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, authors and other professionals like Stanziola have no choice but to immigrate to other spaces where our sexual identities are not criticized and/or marginalized. Stanziola states, ‘I decided not to come back to live in Panama after university so I could liberate myself from insile, caused in part by local homophobia. I decided that amongst all the things that I am, my sexual identity was non-negotiable’ (2013: 868). By the time I finished writing this essay, Stanziola and his husband returned to Panama to raise

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their son and to advocate for the GLBTI community. Since then Stanziola has been invited to multiple talk shows and radio stations to talk about his writings on sexual orientation and homophobia in Panama.

DISCUSSION Gay spaces (borders) have always become like neutral places for gays and lesbians where issues of classism are more evident than racism since it is more institutionalized. A good example happened when my friend Eduardo referred to his partner as ‘Mi chombo’, which was considered a very derogatory way to refer to Black Panamanians. Nowadays, most people still use the word ‘chombo’, claiming it is not racist; however, its racist and historical meanings have been internalized by the majority of Black Panamanians as normal. Gay places in Panama (not that many) attract all kinds of people, sometimes nongays and lesbians. In the case of straight men who like to have sex with other men, gay bars are excellent places for them to get easy money, sex, and sometimes drugs. It is very common to see low-income straight men visiting seedy places like this particular bar, befriending gay men and then asking for free drinks, sex, and money. In other situations, you can also witness young gay men looking for older men with a higher income and financial status. When they are individuals with a foreign accent then things can turn into a fetish. Cantú (2009) claimed that when sexuality, as a dimension of power, intersects issues of race, gender, and class, privileging some groups more than others, the privileged group becomes more visible. Unfortunately, most Panamanians have the tendency to value newcomers more than their own kind as outcomes due to colonization and American imperialism in the isthmus during colonization and US expansionism. Panama, like most double standard societies, have learned to accept some openly

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gay men as long as they follow the maricón stereotype, that is, an effeminate man who is very passionate about carnival queens, beauty pageants, or who is a hair stylist; dresses as a woman; or is willing to have sex with any straight man. La Ñata has become an icon in a small town in Panama called Las Tablas, famous for its carnival and infamous for its large number of gay men. Like any other carnival in the world, Las Tablas attracts gay men from all over Panama and sometimes overseas. Even though La Ñata is not known as an advocate for gays and lesbians in Panama, his characterization on stage at gay bars and his active participation during the carnival has made him one of the most outstanding gay men in the country. Although La Ñata has become an openly gay man and a role model to many other gay men in Panama, due to local reality shows, his character has been used to perpetuate the stereotypical image of gay men. Men having sexual encounters with other men does not only take place in gay bars but also public spaces like cantinas. I still recall one of my best gay friends telling me how much he enjoyed going to cantinas to meet straight men for sex. San Miguelito district is a popular district within Panama city created by families who moved from the countryside looking for a better future and opportunities, but, as mentioned earlier, the area has become very dangerous and unsafe. However, as a transnational Panamanian, it is always interesting to see how people interact and survive in a country that is led by corrupt politicians and religious beliefs. Like many cantinas in San Miguelito, it is normal to see a lot of prostitution, drugs, and men having sex with other men. It seemed to me that it was not the first time my friend Carlos was in that place. He already knew its culture and how to read straight men’s body language who wanted to have sex with other men. Most of those straight men are married and have children. Most of them are living a double standard life in order to fulfill a man and woman binary roles. These men can pass as straight to their

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families and friends, but once they have visited neutral places like gay bars or cantinas they realize that their manhood has not been tested, and they externalize their inner and repressed feelings of having sex with another man. As Cantú argued, ‘the norms, reproduced in daily activities, since childhood, marginalize not only men with “feminine” characteristics but also those able to pass, who were instilled with a fear of discovery’ (2009: 140). When I was growing up, it was common to see how gay men had to leave their parents’ houses to avoid society’s comments about someone’s son being gay or lesbian. Due to a religious and double standard society, this was considered normal. In my case, I left my mother’s house to pursue higher education, but also to find a place where I could fit in. I always knew I was different, or people around me reminded me that I was different. Being raised in a Catholic house was not an easy task, since our lives are so tied to being a sinner who will go to hell for being gay. However, many gay Panamanians decide to stay close to their parents and to battle family and society. Although most gays and lesbians never address their sexual orientation to their parents out of respect or in case of causing them any health problems, most of them decide to continue this double standard attitude of calling their partners ‘my friend’, even when everyone in the family and friends know they are a couple. Cantú (2009) claimed that it is in the family and the home where gender rules and sexual conduct and performance are learned on a daily basis. Unfortunately, due to homophobic ideas, most people and society in general usually think about the sexual act when they think about same-sex couples or who plays which role when having sex, limiting a same-sex relationship to sex. Class status makes also a remarkable difference, especially when you are gay in Panama. Your social status and higher education can allow you to gain more acceptance in Panama’s society. However, if you are openly gay (effeminate), poor, Indigenous, and/ or Black, your chances to experience triple

discrimination becomes the norm. Cantú posited, ‘Groups that are marginalized as sexual minorities are constrained by discrimination and prejudice that may limit their socioeconomic opportunities’ (2009: 132). It is common to hear gays and lesbians saying things like, ‘my parents know I am gay or lesbian but they never say anything to me about it’. It seems to me that some parents believe that being gay or lesbian is a momentary phase and that once you get older you will stop being that way. It could be the mutual feeling of talking about something that could end up separating families. It is part of this double standard engraved in Panama’s culture to understand sexual orientation in Panama as a sexual preference (something someone chooses or adopts momentarily) or a life exploratory phase. As a result, some parents start taking their children to psychologists or to church so they can be cured or saved.

CONCLUSION Over the past 18 years since I came to live in the United States, Panama’s economy has grown more than any other country in the region, having a large influx of immigrants, especially from Central and South America and other parts of the world, due to the construction of new locks in the Panama Canal and its growing economy. These changes have also brought the creation of grassroots organizations (with the support of international organizations) that advocate for historically oppressed groups. Over 20 years ago, a group of concerned Panamanians, led by Ricardo Beteta Bond, founded Asociación de Hombres y Mujeres Nuevos de Panamá (AHMNP; Association of New Men and Women of Panama). AHMNP’s mission is to better the quality of life of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender and intersexuals (gays, lesbianas, bisexsuales, transgeneros e intersexuales – GLBTI), men who have sex with men (hombres que tienen sexo con hombres – HSH), and

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women who have sex with women (mujeres que tienen sexo con mujeres – MSM). This grassroots organization offers training on health issues, counseling, and education focused on advocacy and respect of individuals’ human rights and Panama’s diverse population. Throughout the years, AHMNP and Ricardo Beteta Bond have become the face of the GLBTI group in Panama. Unfortunately, because of homophobia, ignorance, a double standard society, and a lack of government support for this marginalized community, GLBTI is still fighting for better treatment of the GLBTI group and the creation of a State law against discrimination in Panama. Ricardo says, Although many people say that discrimination does not exist toward GLBTI people and that Panama has a lot of tolerance in this respect, the truth is that discrimination and homophobia are still present in our daily lives; they are both ingrained and accepted. As a result, some people do not even realize they have experienced discrimination and homophobia. Discrimination and homophobia occur even in government establishments (translated). (R. Beteta Bond, personal communication, July 2, 2016)

Throughout the years, AHMNP has learned to overcome multiple social and government hurdles; it has developed international exposure, which is one of the reasons why I decided to include them in my essay. Some of the most relevant AHMNP accomplishments and events include the elimination of the law that penalized homosexuality in 2008, the Gay/Lesbian Film Festival in July, the International Day against Homophobia in May, El Gran Huevo Rosa (The Big Pink Egg) – an annual award given to a local individual who has used his/ her position to vocalize homophobic beliefs – the gay pride parade which has taken place for over 12 years, two diagnostic studies on HIV in gay men and HSH, and an annual award to companies that support the organization. AHMNP has also become the springboard to support the creation of other grassroots groups that provide health services and counseling to the GLBT group. Some of those grassroots support groups

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include Nuevos Horizontes (New Horizons), Asociación Panameña de Personas (Trans Panamanian Association of Trans People), and Mujeres con Dignidad y Derecho de Panama (Women with Dignity and Right of Panama; R. Beteta, personal communication, May 27, 2016). Even though there have been significant changes that involve advocacy for the GLBTI community in Panama, there is still a lot to be done. For instance, there is not a State law that protects GLBTI individuals against homophobic practices by the police, and in hospitals, jobs, and other government institutions. It is important to highlight that even when Panama officials attend and sign international compromises to protect individuals against any type of discrimination, including sexual orientation, in practice, those rights are not put into place. Panama, like most Latin American countries, shapes people’s lives through double standards – open sexual orientation is not socially accepted, unless you have a good last name and/or possess a good financial status. However, the poor, Indigenous, and/or Black gays who are open about their sexual orientation are commonly used by the media as commodifiers to increase their profits during the carnival and beauty pageants, perpetuating the idea of the gay as a man who acts and/or wants to feel like a woman. Local media usually increases its rating by bullying and/or stereotyping gay Panamanians. Panamanian authors like Beleño (1991), Britton (1999, 2002), and Pulido Ritter (2005) have addressed homosexuality, however, their interpretations of sexual orientation perpetuate the traditional assumption of an effeminate man or a man-like woman. It is saddening to witness how gays buy into this idea of getting what I call ‘spatial’ acceptance, making people laugh about them while using their bodies (mannerism) and language to show off their gayness. It is also common to hear locals warning single men who visit Las Tablas during carnival not to get drunk for they will end up in bed with another man.

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Panama and its citizens at large, especially those in the media and leading positions, need to educate themselves about the GLBTI population. Government officials should advocate and pass a State law against any act of discrimination against this vulnerable group. Instead, they should advocate for a law that protects and accepts individuals who do not conform to heteronormative definitions and the elimination of homophobic practices taken as normal by the society at large. It is my goal that my essay will join Stanziola, Beteta, and many other new Panamanian literature and advocacy groups to claim for social justice and respect toward the GLBTI group.

REFERENCES Anzaldúa, G. (2007). Borderlands/La Frontera: The new mestiza (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Beleño C., J. (1991). Gamboa road gang: Los forzados de Gamboa. Panama, Panama: Manfer, S.A. Beverley, J. (2004). Testimonio: On the politics of truth. Minneapolis, MN: Regents of Minnesota. Britton, R. M. (1999). Teatro. Panama, Panama: Litho Editorial. Britton, R. M. (2002). Laberintos de orgullo. Panama, Panama: Alfaguara. Cantú, Jr., L. (2009). The sexuality of migration: Border crossings and Mexican migrant men. New York: New York University Press. Castillero, C. J. (2012). Informe nacional sobre la situación de los derechos humanos de la población gay, lesbiana, bisexual, y transexual (GLBT) de la Republica de Panama (Junio 2011–Junio 2012). Cruz, C. (2012). Making curriculum from scratch: Testimonio in an urban classroom.

Equity and Excellence in Education, 45(3), 460–471. Delgado Bernal, D., Burciaga, R., & Flores Carmona, J. (2012). Chicana/Latina testimonios: Mapping the methodological, pedagogical, and political. Equity and Excellence in Education, 45(3), 363–372. Hames-García, M. R. (2011). Queer theory revisited. In M. R. Hames-García & E. J. Maritínez (Eds.), Gay Latino studies: A critical reader (pp. 19–45). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hames-García, M. R. (2014). Jotería studies, or the political is personal. Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 39(1), 135–142. Hames-García, M. R. & Martínez, E. J. (Eds.) (2011). Gay Latino studies: A critical reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kumashiro, K. K. (2001). Troubling intersections of race and sexuality: Queer students of color and anti-oppressive education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Latina Feminist Group. (2001). Telling to live: Latina feminist testimonios. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ocampo, A. C. (2012). Making masculinity: Negotiations of gender presentation among Latino gay men. Latino Studies, 10(4), 448–472. Pérez, D. E. (2014). Toward a mariposa consciousness: Reimagining queer Chicano and Latino identities. Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 39(2), 95–127. Pulido Ritter, L. (2005). Recuerdo Panamá. Panama, Panama: Articsa. Rodríguez, J. M. (2003). Queer Latinidad: Identity practices, discursive spaces. New York, NY: New York University Press. Stanziola, J. (2013). Casco Viejo walks: Performing Panama’s ‘other’ sexual space(s). Interventions: International Journal of PostColonial Studies, 17(6), 866–878. doi:10.1080/ 1369801X.2014.998261 Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2002). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. New York, NY: Palgrave.

42 Critical Pedagogy and the Acceptance of Refugees in Greece Aristotelis Gkiolmas, Constantina Stefanidou and Constantine Skordoulis

INTRODUCTION This chapter is simultaneously a review and a case study of how Greece, a country hit in recent years by the austerity measures of neoliberal capitalism, has accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees. The educational policies that followed, as well as the ways radical educators, inspired by critical pedagogy, resisted government policy, both on the institutional level and through teaching practice, serve to exemplify the power of critical pedagogy. The chapter is structured as follows: in the first section, an account of the major international policy issues is given. These include: (i) international conflicts and wars responsible for the continuous influx of refugees to the south-eastern part of Europe; (ii) the policies of the European political institutions which determine quotas for the number of refugees accepted in each country; and (iii) the attitudes of European governments and their actions in preventing refugees from crossing into their territory, thus creating the so-called ‘Fortress

Europe’, which resulted in around half a million immigrants and refugees becoming trapped in Greece. In this first section, the important role that critical pedagogy can play in educating young students (both refugees and local residents) about anti-racism, inclusion and global social justice is also highlighted. In the second section, we present: (i) the policies of the Greek government; (ii) the attitudes of local populations in villages and cities neighbouring the immigrants’ camps, hot spots or detention centres, thus shedding light on the widespread feeling of Islamophobia fuelled mainly by the actions of neo-Nazi groups that are flourishing due to economic austerity and social corruption; and (iii) the structure and function of the refugee camps, as well as internal tensions in the camps, cases of rebellions/insurgences among refugees and the role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in this scenario. In this second section, actions of solidarity with the refugees – initiated mainly by radical left-wing groups on behalf of local Greek people – are discussed.

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In the third section, the focus is on the official policies developed by the Greek Ministry of Education, which are interpreted here as segregationist in that they aim to isolate refugee children in afternoon classes, separating them from the Greek student population. The critical pedagogy perspective and corresponding solidarity initiatives are analysed, along with how they compare to NGO programmes. Finally, the fourth section is dedicated to praxis – and particularly to the resistance practised by critical educators who, despite government policy, support multicultural and democratic education as well as education for social justice. Within this context, a case is studied: that of the cooperation between refugee students from the Elaionas refugee camp and the students attending a secondary school located in the centre of Athens. This section will also discuss the relevance of the creation and implementation of a teaching intervention consisting of activities related to science and technology developments which functioned as meeting points between different civilisations throughout human history. The overall aim of this chapter is to trigger interest in the educational needs of refugee children, as well as thoughts and perspectives concerning anti-racist education in general. It is also the authors’ intention to highlight teachers’ contributions as decisive agents in shifting the attitude of the wider educational community by addressing in particular the catalytic role that critical educators can play in that shift. Once more, the terms ‘agency’ and ‘teacher empowerment’, as key elements of the foundations of critical pedagogy, are suggested and discussed as key alternatives.

GEOPOLITICAL CONFLICTS AND CRITICAL PEDAGOGY The continuous and immense inflow of refugees towards Europe and especially towards its south-eastern regions is one of the major historical and social issues of the first and

second decades of this century (Reich, 2010). Thousands of people, coming mainly from the Middle East and specifically from Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, arrive at the European borders each month, and many more never make it, losing their lives enroute (Zimmerman et al., 2011). It is a phenomenon that has definitively altered the anthropogeography of today’s societies (Holmes and Castañeda, 2016) – as well as the economies of most European countries – while, at the same time, not leaving the North American and Oceanian countries unaffected. Thus, the so-called ‘21st-century refugee problem’ possesses some specific characteristics (Guild, 2009). A central issue is that the aforementioned people are not leaving their native lands in order to search for better jobs or due to financial problems, so they do not belong to the much older migration phenomenon. Nor are they environmental refugees, which is another broad category. The vast majority of the refugees arriving in Europe, North America or Australia in our era are refugees forced to leave because of wars, internal conflicts or political persecution and violence; the term ‘war-refugees’ is often used in a broadened sense to describe this category of immigrants. A second differentiating characteristic is that this is the first time in centuries that refugees have come to Europe from other continents and not from Europe itself (Kosovo being the only exception). Three major reasons are identified here for the consolidation and growth of the refugee problem. First among these reasons are wars, internal conflicts and dictatorships; a varied category of political riots that cause people to forcibly leave their countries. The protagonists of these situations are usually either the installed regimes in each country or specific persons or groups of persons – though the remaining international community (other countries) also plays an important role by allowing said situations to continue without intervention. The international community – and, in particular, the ‘Superpowers’ – selectively terminate some

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wars and regimes while allowing others to continue to flourish, either from a wish to control or financially exploit. Such situations lead, obviously, to extremely large waves of refugees. Needless to say, the international organisations responsible for, among other things, the restoration and preservation of peace and democracy – such as the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU), to name but two – have turned into mere figureheads. The various policies of the international institutions concerning the reception and treatment of refugees in Europe is a further factor that affects the problem in question. Although theoretically and abstractly in favour of accepting refugees, institutions such as the EU, the European Parliament (EP), the European Central Bank (ECB) and others have, in practice, actually been against their reception. These organisations have set quotas on the number of refugees accepted by each country, and have done little to support economically weak countries take on the burden of hosting new arrivals. Additionally, European and other international institutions provide selective financial support to some NGOs while not to others, significantly hampering the effectiveness of those overlooked. The third component of the European refugee problem concerns the governments and the politics of the European countries involved. Those countries raise barriers – both legislative and physical – to the inflow of refugees and impose limits on the time they are allowed to stay in their territories. Despite the Dublin III Regulation (Brekke and Brochmann, 2015), many countries do not accept or accept very limited numbers of refugees. This has created the so-called ‘Fortress Europe’, and has tacitly encouraged attacks on refugees by ultra-right or neo-Nazi political groups. In addition, many European countries have exacerbated the situation by allocating very limited welfare benefits and resources to the refugees finally accepted in their territories. It can be argued that the current climate goes against civilised values and is a disgrace to Western societies.

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Critical pedagogy can play an important role in the treatment of the refugee problem and its three major aspects. To begin with, critical pedagogy is committed to analysing the relations of power and control that exist between people and societies (Kincheloe, 2005, 2008; Macedo, 2018; Shor, 1996). Refugee students educated in a critical pedagogy context will, thus, be well informed of the reasons behind the situations that they have experienced. Wars, civil conflicts and dictatorships are the results of the actions and choices of people and groups of people (in particularly social classes); they stem from and create power relationships and, in almost every case, reasons of social and financial inequality are in the substratum. Thus, refugee students can come to critically understand how they became refugees, and what should be done in the future to prevent others from suffering the same fate. Critical pedagogy is a key framework for analysing the oppressive behaviour of classes and social groups over others (McLaren, 2018) – something which, in turn, is central to the explication of the refugee problem in Europe. Furthermore, critical pedagogy is governed by an internationalist, against-borders spirit (Giroux and McLaren, 2014), which would make clear both to the refugee students and to students in the receiving countries that the ‘foreigners’ (the ‘others’) should be accepted without restraints. As many critical pedagogy educators and theorists have often stated (Giroux, 1988; McLaren, 2016), critical pedagogy is dialectic by nature, since it blunts the differences between national traditions, cultures and worldviews, while at the same time valuing them. Within the educational context of critical pedagogy, there is an inherent rhetoric in favour of peace and against war (Bajaj, 2015; Giroux, 1997), and students are taught that conflicts and dictatorships can and should be stopped by movements of the people. A subtle, final but still basic capability of critical pedagogy as a theoretical framework is that it possesses means of explaining and

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illuminating: (i) state policy (‘governmental philanthropy’); or (ii) the dubious role of many NGOs, in terms of post-colonial practices or in light of the great economic interests behind both (Au and Ferrare, 2015; Hoff and Hickling-Hudson, 2011).

THE POLICY OF THE GREEK GOVERNMENT TOWARDS REFUGEES The policy of the Greek government towards refugees/victims of war is determined by three major factors: (i) the geopolitical balance of forces in the region and on the international scene; (ii) the political balance of forces in the interior of the country; and (iii) the effects of the economic crisis and the financial relations established between Greece and the other EU countries, with the memoranda being a key aspect of these. Faced with the largest movement of populations towards Europe since the end of World War II (Louis, 2016), the Greek government first had to find ways to cover their basic needs (safety, warmth, food, etc.), and then to place them within the framework of the educational system. The influx of refugees was determined by specific international conditions. Some of these include: the fact that the Turkish government, which has millions of refugees detained in its territory, threatened to allow them to cross the Aegean Sea towards Greece; the fact that, for most refugees, Greece was only an intermediate station on a journey towards Western (or Eastern) Europe and only a tiny minority wished to settle down there; and the fact that many European nations – some of them very close to Greece – were either tremendously hostile towards the installation of refugees or extremely unsafe for them. In accordance with general humanitarian guidelines and ethics regarding the acceptance of refugees (Singer and Singer, 2010; Ypi, 2010), the Greek government accepted all arrivals. However, it made no serious effort – initially – either to record their numbers, or to

distinguish between those who sought permanent settlement in Greece and those who used it as a transit point to other countries within the EU (Rozakou, 2012). As a result, thousands of refugees were gathered in the detention areas or camps (mainly on the Aegean islands and in areas in northern continental Greece) with no clear intention or policy as to what was to be done with them, not least what should be done about the education of their children. As other European countries gradually started to harden their stance towards the incoming waves of refugees, direct passages from Africa, Asia and Asia Minor to other countries in Europe, as well as routes and passages through Greece, gradually started to close. This created an ‘iron curtain’ to the north and to the west of Greece, which took the Greek authorities by surprise. As a result, the numbers of refugees accumulating Greece for indefinite time intervals skyrocketed. No clear plan existed, and this led to explosive situations both on the Greek and the international political scene. Due to the ensuing overcrowding and uncertainty, the living conditions in both the detention areas and the camps began to deteriorate (Cheliotis, 2013; Triandafyllidou and Ambrosini, 2011). The attitudes of local populations, both in the cities and villages adjacent to the refugee camps and in the rest of Greece, also began to change. On one hand, there were strong movements of support for the acceptance of refugees in Greek territories. On the other hand, there was an increase in intense activities and even terrorist actions against not only refugees but also those who supported them, initiated by a growing far-right and neo-Nazi political wave, which clearly related the inflow of refugees to the country’s increasing levels of unemployment, to the degradation of the public health service and to breakouts of violence or criminality in the involved territories. Islamophobia became a major – sometimes prevailing – characteristic of the racist argument. The third aspect of the refugee problem in Greece is the conditions of detention and living.

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There are different kinds of refugee camps: the ‘detention centres’, which refugees are not allowed to exit; ‘hot spots’, which are identification centres for refugees who are awaiting relocation; and the ‘Refugee Accommodation Centres’ (RACs), which allow refugees to exit the camp. Some refugees live in solidarity structures (‘City Plaza’ is the most prominent among them) and a very few of them live in apartments managed by the municipal authorities. The health conditions were and still are horrific in the camps, since they contain a vast number of people and healthcare provision is poor. Outbreaks of disease were not uncommon, and refugees could not – and, very often, still cannot – satisfy even their basic needs as there was (there is) a severe shortage of necessary goods and comforts. All these issues resulted in riots and even insurgences among the refugees. Within the camps, volunteers and NGOs tried to help, but their roles have been in many cases ambiguous, both for involuntary but also for intentional reasons. Many volunteers were young people, not trained for such situations, who had never faced similar circumstances before. The NGOs, on the other hand, although under a remit to help, on many occasions intervened just to receive money and funding from the European and international institutions and authorities. One positive element, however, was the response of Greek citizens and educators, coming mainly from the political left, who constantly supported the refugees, worked intensively to shift the attitude of the local communities towards supporting them and even intervened in the camps, in any way that they could, in order to better the living conditions and improve the relations between the people there.

EDUCATING REFUGEE CHILDREN IN GREECE Since the school year of 2016–17, the Greek Ministry of Education has taken several initiatives and implemented a programme for the

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education of refugee children. This programme concerned the education of children living in Refugee Accommodation Centres (RACs) and those living in other structures in urban regions. Although a law was passed, guaranteeing the education of all refugee children, regardless of their type of residence, the programme in question was focused almost exclusively on refugees living in RACs, namely Reception Facilities for Refugee Education (RFREs). For the implementation of the programme, 62 Refugee Education Coordinators (RECs) were appointed at 50 RACs. Under this programme, student refugees are provided with special afternoon reception classes that are usually close to RACs. This special kind of primary and secondary school runs from 14.00 to 18.00 – immediately after the normal school-day has come to an end. From October 2016 to March 2017, 107 RFREs were founded, in 7 of the 13 educational regions of Greece, and 2,643 school children attended classes. Overall, as of April 2017, 111 RFREs, with 145 classes, were in action. These covered 37 RACs in all regions of the country except for the islands. According to the report ‘Refugee Education Project – Scientific Committee in Support of Refugee Children – April 2017’ (Refugee Education Project, 2017), a lot of problems have arisen in the RFREs. To begin with, the teachers assigned to the RFREs work with flexible working relationships, meaning they are not permanent employees. Because of the uncertain nature of this position, there is a high turnover, and this creates a discontinuity in the already difficult educational process and in students’ everyday lives. In addition, the teachers assigned do not have the necessary training to cope with the particular difficulties of the situation: students that have been out of school for many years, students with traumatic experiences of wars and separations, students who speak little or no Greek and students from different countries and cultures. To make the situation even worse, classes are overcrowded (more than 20 students), and many students are registered in classes that are inappropriate for

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their age (due to false statements from their parents). Such a demanding environment requires educators experienced in multicultural and socially vulnerable classes. In addition, there is no framework for cooperation between RFREs and the corresponding morning schools, which has made the existing dividing lines between the two even more rigid. The problematic nature of the RFREs can be seen in particular from the high school dropout rates for refugees. Here, of course, we must acknowledge that the student population of the RACs is constantly changing; by the time some students are enrolled in RFREs, other students have been deleted due to relocation or change of residence (e.g. outside of the RAC). Moreover, a large percentage of refugees, for economic and social reasons, have been out of school for several years before coming to Greece. RECs group the factors that affect school dropout into those related to the refugees’ attitudes towards and expectations of education, and those concerning the organisation of RFREs. It becomes clear that the most important factor determining dropout or attendance is the prospect of leaving or staying in Greece. The greatest school dropout rates and discontinuity of attendance is observed in Arab-speaking students, particularly Syrians, who are looking to relocate and hope that they will manage to do so. On the other hand, groups that do not have this outlook, such as Afghans, have a more stable attendance at RFREs. Another reason suggested for non-systematic attendance is concerns about the quality and effectiveness of the education provided: ‘They do not consider it a regular school, they think it is a school for refugees’; ‘They do not think their children are learning. Maybe it has to do with the fact that some of them come from much more traditional and authoritarian pedagogical systems. As a result, they do not recognise the more democratic pedagogical methods of the Greek school as effective and reliable’ (Refugee Education Project, 2017: 58). Furthermore, the special condition stipulated by the programme of cohabitation both in the RAC and in the school (RFRE)

contributes to the problem, because students have no ‘place’ to go to escape the tension of school life: ‘At school, children mock and tease each other, as is always the case. But here they return to the RACs where the fights and the mockery continue, because they live together. If they lived in their own homes and enjoyed their privacy, this would not happen’ (Refugee Education Project, 2017: 59). In many cases, it is reported that children bring the tensions and conflicts that occur between the different groups in the RACs into the classroom with them. Another factor that, to some extent, negatively affects attendance at school is the educational activities organised by NGOs in the RACs. Such activities often coincide with the RFRE programme (although there are explicit restrictions against this), which means that they are in direct competition. From this, it is clear that RFREs and NGOs do not cooperate effectively. While the latter ask for a lot of information and assistance from the RECs, they are not willing to provide them with the necessary information for their work. Finally, there is no educational framework for children over 15 years of age, i.e. children who do not belong in compulsory education. These are children still of a sensitive age, who have often been out of school for many years in their home countries. This oversight, combined with the poor living conditions in RACs, means that, for such children, social integration is made much more difficult. The Ministry of Education’s refugee education programme has left many gaps in both quantitative and qualitative terms. The main problem has been that refugee students who do not live in RACs do not, in practice, have access to education. Despite the law entitling all refugee children to attend morning school reception classes (Law 4251/2014), the Ministry explicitly states in relevant documents that, in order for a refugee student to go to morning school, he or she should already have certain Greek-language skills. Failure to meet the required level will mean that he or she must continue to attend classes at the RFRE. A decision to extend the

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RFREs’ functioning after the school year of 2016–17 further implies that the future inclusion of student refugees in the regular morning schools is not guaranteed. It seems to be a clear political choice to keep the RACs away from urban areas, and then to ensure that the refugees and their children remain isolated from the local population. At a board meeting of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Teaching Federation in Greece on 17 February 2017, it was officially calculated by a UNHCR representative that ‘the number of children currently enrolled both in RFRE and morning reception classes is extremely limited (just 7% of refugees in RFRE and around 3% in morning reception)’. Student refugees who live in certain structures (other than RACs) on the islands have been excluded from school entirely. Specifically, out of a total of about 20,000 children in Greece, only approximately 1,500 have access to the educational programme (RFRE) (UNHCR (B)).

The Critical Pedagogy Perspective It is evident that critical pedagogy can play a prominent role here, since a totally new – not pre-existing – curriculum based on critical pedagogy principles (Bajaj and Bartlett, 2017; Darder et al., 2003; Giroux, 1988) could be designed for children hurt by war. This curriculum would respect the linguistic, cultural and way-of-life particularities of these children and not try to integrate or assimilate them abruptly into the Greek educational system. As an intercultural, contextualised form of education, critical pedagogy would at first address the notion of ‘trauma’ for these children, in an attempt to respect and resolve the psychological and health issues created by the terrible situations they endured. This relies, according to Zembylas (2012), on a pedagogical approach that draws on Jansen’s (2009) concept of ‘troubled knowledge’, i.e. knowledge coming from the ‘profound feeling of loss, shame, resentment, or defeat that one carries from his or her participation in a

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traumatized society’ (Manca et  al., 2017: 112). Trauma (e.g. post-war trauma or political prosecution-generated trauma) is addressed in various frameworks within critical pedagogy curricula and contexts. This treatment could be achieved with the help of experts. Once this traumatic stage has been left behind, these children should not have prolonged ‘treatment’ as a ‘vulnerable’ group but should be treated as equal to native children. Thus, a curriculum should be designed, overriding the drawbacks of any ‘hidden curriculum’ (Giroux and Penna, 1983; Talbot, 2013). This curriculum would have as traits: the elimination of all distinctions and relations of power and subordination in the classroom between the ‘old ones’ (native students) and the ‘newcomers’ (refugees), a respect for cultural differences, fair and equal treatment from the educator, the recognition of the achievements of their nation (Arabic mathematics and Islamic science are typical examples) and intensive efforts to overcome linguistic barriers. As Joe Kincheloe writes: ‘In a racial context, oftentimes the notion of saving students involves a paternalistic effort to help them become more white’ (2005: 25); this is something that critical educators should always take into consideration. At the second stage comes the action of ‘empowered’ educators, who carry out ‘agency’ and fight against racism, Islamophobia and notions of White supremacy, both among students (within the classroom) but also in the local community. It is the duty of critical pedagogy-informed educators and teacher ­ unions to fight against fascist or neo-Nazi groups in adult societies, explaining the role of refugees and standing by them – and, having studied critical pedagogy, they possess the tools to perform these acts. It lies in the foundations of critical pedagogy that a teacher can help to politically reshape local society (or the wider society). The third stage is also prescribed in critical pedagogy. Teachers – or teacher collectives – are supposed to enter the ‘hot spots’. They would perform agency, first of all by diffusing

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the possibility of education in these places. Let us remember the Freirean first Brazilian communities, in the villages, where the adults created groups and the literate ones educated the rest of the group. Greek teachers could also help by improving the health conditions in the camps, by contributing materials or calling – and cooperating with – doctors. They could also raise money or goods to cover all the basic needs of the refugees. This would create – among other things – a much calmer situation in these areas.

Solidarity Initiatives and the NGOs Solidarity organisations, coming from the broader left, have been active in favour of refugee education ever since the first few months. Their concept of education was, however, very different from that of the Greek government, as they supported the early inclusion of student refugees in the morning schools. Refugee and Migration Coordination, one of the most active collectivities, along with many other unions, is actively involved in the integration of refugees into the morning school programmes, and one of its actions has been the publication of a special electronic edition informing parents and citizens about refugee rights and giving direct answers to many questions and concerns that have arisen. Claiming refugees’ right to education is to claim the right to education of every weak, oppressed and poor man. School is a key player in socialisation, in the development of various important skills and is an essential part of the multifaceted and smooth development of children. Particularly for socially vulnerable groups such as refugees, public school is a source of regularity in a childhood that is otherwise spent in camps and other structures and has already endured war, foreign lands and a dangerous journey across the Aegean Sea. A harmonious coexistence with schoolmates is particularly important for refugee children, not only for their own

development, but also for the creation of the society in which we want to live: a society of solidarity, humanity and multiculturalism, not a xenophobic and racist society. The problem is that, of the approximately 60,000 refugees currently living in Greece, only 17,000 will be able to leave Greece (at least, legally); the rest are forced to stay here. For every child, regardless of his/her residence period and the legal framework determining this stay, the state should ensure participation in a Greek public school. Refugees could easily and quickly join the school environment if supporting structures (reception classes, integration departments and, in particular, teaching reinforcements) were to be set up. The authors’ experiences inside schools have shown that, in such cases, not only is the educational process not negatively affected, but the integration of these children works positively because their peers support and reward them. Schoolmates ‘unconsciously’ choose the path of solidarity and coexistence, in sound contradiction to those who maliciously and xenophobically argue the opposite. As far as language learning is concerned, refugee pupils develop language skills faster and better through constant and daily communication with their classmates than in segregating environments such as those found in RFREs. In addition, our goal must be for refugee students to integrate, and this can only be achieved by letting students (refugees, migrants and natives) interact freely in order to establish relationships of mutual respect and mutual support. Therefore, teaching and learning in the segregated afternoon schools (RFREs), separated from the social context, can only lead to both the cognitive and the psychological deterioration of refugee pupils, and leave them feeling isolated, restricted and undesirable, while encouraging natives to view them as strangers and ‘different’. As our experience has shown so far, the particular needs of refugee pupils, like those of every child, can and should be covered in the morning school. Greek schools have

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a long tradition of managing multicultural classes; from Crete to Thrace, thousands of foreigners and migrants have attended Greek schools harmoniously, while some of them have continued their studies in Greek universities or technological institutions. In order to integrate as many refugees as possible into the morning schools, teachers’ unions and other collectivities of the broader left have attempted to help refugee parents to complete the necessary supporting documents for their children’s enrolment. Refugees have also been given information translated into their own language about the benefits of enrolment. The overwhelming majority of refugees, although locked up in the RACs, displayed a sense of hope and possessed a willingness to do their best for their children. Supported by the educational associations and especially by the Refugee and Migration Coordination, many refugee parents approached morning schools and education offices in order to fight for their children’s right to education and, thanks to their insistence and the solidarity they received from the local community, hundreds of children who would otherwise have been overlooked have since registered for and attended morning school. However, there is much more to be done; most refugee children in the country are still deliberately excluded from school or only attend RFREs within camps during the afternoons. There has seemingly been a coordinated effort by the Greek state to keep refugee students out of education, and to prevent teachers’ associations from acts of solidarity and from informing refugees about their right to education. At this point, it is necessary to emphasise the role of NGOs. Their presence is indicative of the Greek state’s perspective on refugee management, as well as that of the EU. Neo-liberal politics releases the state from its obligations to citizens, instead assigning them to NGOs as contractors. An NGO is a form of speculation, a form of private enterprise that exploits the social good and maximises its profits through the unpaid work of its volunteer members, tax breaks and reductions in

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the cost of social care – leading ultimately to its deterioration. It goes without saying that any NGO financed by the EU or by banks is particularly dubious and unreliable, as the state has no control over the funds available to meet social needs. Furthermore, there are often interrelated interests between the banking system, the state apparatus and NGO executives, as the latter often hold important and parallel positions on the former. As Cho (2013) states, using Wallerstein (2004) as a resource and engaging the lens of critical pedagogy: NGOs, while they started as broad social movements opposing the practices of the state, have, in many cases, gradually turned into globalised organisations, practically converging with the aims and the objectives of those groups with large financial interests worldwide. In Greece, NGOs are currently particularly involved in the refugee issue, in which they act in lieu of the state, and multinational-type NGOs that act as umbrellas for smaller NGOs have already been set up. It is ironic that the sustainability of these businesses is directly dependent on the maintenance of the problems and crises they come to cover; to put it simply, they are immoral organisations that speculate on people’s pain. NGOs have spread and become active in many social spheres aside from the refugee issue, and are now involved in, for example, schools, where they increasingly implement training programmes and educational initiatives. Their expansion into these areas can be viewed as a step towards the dissolution of the state, and their activities consume money that would be better and more valuably distributed as part of the state budget.

A SCIENCE TEACHING PROGRAMME: RESEARCH DESIGN AND PROCEDURE In this section, we will consider a study designed and carried out by one of the authors, Constantina Stefanidou, in a state secondary school in Athens. This study

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aimed to investigate the possibility of a cooperation between two student groups (15 students from the school and 15 from the nearby Elaionas Refugee Camp) and encouraged students from the school to consider the plight of refugees, and, in particular, their education. It was a case study, forming an educational proposal for strengthening antiracist education (rather than a research project, the results of which could be generalised), and it followed on from a four-year campaign for anti-racist education and education on human rights – specifically a series of theatrical plays related to human rights and politics, such as Biological Immigrant by Arkas (school years 2013–14 and 2016–17), The Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht (school year 2014–15) and Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (school year 2015–16) – and a drive to increase awareness of celebrations such as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the International Day Against Racism and Fascism, International Women’s Day, etc. The specific research questions raised in the study were: (i) are students from a state secondary school able to coexist creatively and collaborate with peer students from a refugee camp – namely, the Elaionas camp – within the regular school programme?; and (ii) can history and philosophy of science be an appropriate framework for achieving communication? The school chosen for the study was located in the centre of Athens, in an urban environment, very close to an industrial zone. It had a high percentage of students from vulnerable social groups, and the overall educational outcomes of the school reflected this. Due to high levels of poverty and unemployment in the area, a considerable number of students and parents took a conservative stand towards refugees and their difficulties, meaning that anti-racist action and awareness was particularly pertinent and necessary to prevent students from adopting extreme attitudes or behaviours. Over the four years prior to the study in question, anti-racist education had included the aforementioned

theatrical performances, educational visits by Amnesty International, events dedicated to the International Day Against Fascism and Racism and other activities designed to promote solidarity. With moderate optimism, it can be said that this particular school had, despite the difficulties, built what could be called a culture of anti-racism. The study carried out by Stefanidou lasted for a whole school year (2016–17). It was conducted as part of the curriculum, under a subject called ‘Project’, and formed one twohour lesson per week. Needless to say, given the established school atmosphere of antiracism, the programme received great support. Overall, 30 students, males and females, actively participated in the project. Half of these were students randomly selected from the secondary school, aged around 16 years old. Many of these students were second generation immigrants themselves, from families coming mostly from the Balkans. The other half of the students who took part in the project were refugee students who were staying at the RAC located in Elaionas, just a kilometre away from the school. They included boys and girls between the ages of 13 and 16, and came from many different countries of origin, including Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. Many of these students had abandoned school due to conflicts, wars and the constant movement of their families, and had been deprived of education for a long time. At the time of the study, all members of the Elaionas group were attending classes at the refugee evening school (RFRE). The project covered three phases. During the first phase, students learnt about refugees and their rights, and studied the situation in Greece (UNHCR (A)). This raised many issues regarding the mechanisms that generate refugees and the role of Europe in dealing with the situation. Students’ research then focused on the type of education provided to refugees in Greece. They studied the RFRE, and realised that refugees only had access to education under certain conditions and special circumstances. This finding was the

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starting point for the third part of the project, which will be analysed later. During the second phase of the project, anti-racist activities were organised, in which students from all over the school participated. The activities aimed at raising awareness among students and actively engaging them with solidarity issues. One such activity involved making calendars for the New Year, which were given to anyone who donated clothing to the refugees of the Samos Camp. This activity proved to be very successful; most students actively participated, not only by bringing clothing for the refugees in need, but also by engaging with the issue and expressing an interest in becoming informed about the living conditions, the ages of people in the camp, the prospects for improving their situation and, in particular, expediting asylum legislation. Students also organised a threehour school activity for the International Day Against Racism and Fascism on 21 March. The activity was called ‘We are all refugees’, and it aimed at highlighting the difficulties refugees have to face. The third phase of the project concerned the cooperation between the refugee students from the Elaionas camp and the students from the school. When the secondary school students were informed about the refugees’ ‘special’ school, they expressed their dissatisfaction. They believed it was unfair for refugees to be isolated from the local population and attend a separate school outside of normal school hours. They called for a meeting with a group of students from Elaionas and, after a strenuous effort focused mainly on tackling bureaucracy, this was achieved. The cooperation of the two student groups was aimed at the acquaintance of the students and the acquisition of common experience. A six-hour educational programme was designed and conducted, consisting of activities related to Arabic science and technology which functioned as meeting points between different civilisations throughout human history. The refugee students visited the secondary school during morning hours on three

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separate occasions to take part in this programme. This gave them the opportunity to attend a ‘regular’ school, interact with their peers, and to participate in and carry out simple experiments and educational activities. Moreover, the secondary school students had the opportunity to become acquainted with and converse with refugee students of their own age, and to work together on a series of educational activities such as: (i) Match the numbers (Arabic and English ones); (ii) What is science? Ask questions and suggest experiments that facilitate the answers; (iii) Camera obscura: study and then construct one; and (iv) Newton’s colour disc and rainbow. During the first phase of the project, students studied the 1951 Refugee Convention (UNHCR (A)) about refugees’ rights. They also studied and discussed the situation in Greece, using as a reference the site of the Refugee and Migration Coordination (n.d.). Students were informed about the real conditions under which refugees live and their problems with seeking asylum, while also receiving daily feedback about the conditions in the camps. During the second phase of the project, in order to make the calendars, students drew on issues from ‘Monologues across the Aegean Sea’. This is a collection of testimonies from unaccompanied refugee children from Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Morocco and Egypt, who were forced to leave their homelands and travel alone to Greece, across the Aegean Sea. Their stories were recorded in the book Monologues across the Aegean Sea: The journey and dreams of unaccompanied refugee children, which was published in Greek and English by the Hellenic Theatre/ Drama & Education Network and the UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency (Hellenic Theatre/UNHCR, 2016). During the third phase, students studied the context in which Arabic science and technology developed, using the book entitled History of Science and Technology (Arabatzis et al.), which is targeted at secondary school students and was published by the Greek

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Ministry of Education. They also studied the educational material of ‘1001 Inventions’, an award-winning international science and cultural heritage organisation with particular relevance – in 2010, the London Science Museum hosted an exhibition entitled ‘1001 Inventions: Discover the Muslim Heritage in Our World’. Students studied and drew ideas and activities from the corresponding teacher’s guide (1001 Inventions, 2017), which they then implemented with the refugee group. The results of this empirical study are reflected on at least three interrelated levels. The first is the students of the secondary school who were involved in organising the project. The second is the school unit and the local community, and the third level concerns the refugee students. The school and the local community realised that the refugees of Elaionas were like their ‘own’ students, had the same needs and expectations and that the two groups were able to coexist in the same school. Through the sustained solidarity actions that resulted in the refugees visiting the school, the majority of students and teachers, as well as the local community, moved from theory to action. This was an unprecedented experience for all those who were involved either directly or indirectly in the project, and it stimulated the anti-racist spirit of both the school and the neighbourhood. As far as the students are concerned, both groups – that from the secondary school and from the Elaionas camp – gained a unique experience of coexistence and cooperation. Despite the difficulties that both groups faced – in particular, linguistic and cultural differences – their willingness to help their peers and gain ‘normal’ life experiences made them work together harmoniously. Both groups of students expressed an interest in further cooperation. This study brought to light what was earlier referred to as ‘significant cross-cultural differences in the way people conceptualise and interact with the natural world’ (Hodson, 1999: 780). However, while there is a profound incompatibility between the

worldview of Western science and that of the Asian refugees, there is evidence, from this project, that history and philosophy of science can provide students from different cultures an effective springboard and necessary framework for communication.

EPILOGUE The thrust of our argument is that, in light of the formidable social injustices faced by child refugees of war in Greece, critical pedagogy can provide the most effective and relevant framework for their education. What is more, critical pedagogical perspectives could serve educators seeking to promote more equitable, humane and just living conditions and outlooks concerning refugees in other European countries as well. Critical pedagogy plays a manifold role in that its epistemological basis helps educators shed light on the political and economic rivalry responsible for creating refugees in the first place. It serves as a frame that encourages educators to explain the ideological tenets upon which certain political actions are taken, such as those pursued by European governments and institutions. Furthermore, its promoters welcome all ‘different’ and ‘post-traumatic’ human beings into all educational settings. Apart from its analytical and explanatory role, critical pedagogy could provide agency and solutions for the aforementioned children through the development of a more suitable curriculum, and by seeking to improve their daily lives, to resolve their severe survival issues, and to restrict Nazi and fascist reactions towards them. In the activities outlined in this chapter, the role of the teacher as a unit, or teachers’ collective actions, become extremely important, thus validating the identity of ‘transformative intellectuals’ that critical pedagogy attributes to them. To avoid mere theoretical negotiation, this chapter has also offered a concrete example of educational praxis, where critical pedagogy

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was applied in a Greek secondary school in Elaionas as the basis for the education of a group of refugees. The results of this attempt and the difficulties faced have also been discussed in order to explore new horizons for future applications.

REFERENCES 1001 Inventions. (2017). 1001 Inventions Education Pack: Untold Stories from a Golden Age of Innovation (Science activities for 11–16 year olds). ‘1001 Inventions: Discover the Muslim Heritage to Our World’ exhibition www.1001inventions.com/files/1001 iTeachersPacksHiRes.pdf Arabatzis, Th., Gavroglou, K., Dialetis, D., Christianidis, I., Kanderakis, N., & Vernikos, St. (1999). History of Science and Tech­ nology (In Greek). School Book Publishing Organization (OEDB). Au, W., & Ferrare, J. J. (Eds.). (2015). Mapping Corporate Education Reform: Power and Policy Networks in the Neoliberal State. New York: Routledge. Bajaj, M. (2015). ‘Pedagogies of resistance’ and critical peace education praxis. Journal of Peace Education, 12(2), 154–166. Bajaj, M., & Bartlett, L. (2017). Critical transnational curriculum for immigrant and refugee students. Curriculum Inquiry, 47(1), 25–35. Brekke, J-P., & Brochmann, G. (2015). Stuck in transit: Secondary migration of asylum seekers in Europe, national differences, and the Dublin Regulation. Journal of Refugee Studies, 28(2), 145–162. Cheliotis, L. K. (2013). Behind the veil of philoxenia: The politics of immigration detention in Greece. European Journal of Criminology, 10(6), 725–745. Cho, S. (2013). Critical Pedagogy and Social Change: Critical Analysis on the Language of Possibility. New York and London: Routledge. Darder, A., Baltodano, M., & Torres. R. D. (Eds.). (2003). The Critical Pedagogy Reader. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Giroux, H. A. (1988). Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning. Westport, Connecticut: Bergin & Garvey.

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Giroux, H. A. (1997). Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope: Theory, Culture and Schooling: A Critical Reader. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. Giroux, H. A., & Penna, A. N. (1983). Social Education in the Classroom: The Dynamics of the Hidden Curriculum. In: Henry Giroux & David Purpel (Eds.), The Hidden Curriculum and Moral Education: Deception of Discovery (pp. 100–121). Berkeley, California: McCutchan Publishing Corporation. Giroux, H. A., & McLaren, P. (2014). Between Borders: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge. Guild, E. (2009). Security and Migration in the 21st Century. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hellenic Theatre/Drama & Education Network/ UNHCR (2016). Monologues across the Aegean Sea: The journey and dreams of unaccompanied refugee children. Athens: Hellenic Theatre/Drama & Education Network & UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. http:// aegean-monologues.theatroedu.gr/?lang=en Hodson, D. (1999). Going beyond cultural pluralism: Science education for sociopolitical action. Science Education, 83(6), 775–796. Hoff, L., & Hickling-Hudson, A. (2011). The role of international non-governmental organisations in promoting adult education for social change: A research agenda. International Journal of Educational Development, 31(2), 187–195. Holmes, S. M., & Castañeda, H. (2016). Representing the ‘European refugee crisis’ in Germany and beyond: Deservingness and difference, life and death. American Ethnologist, 43(1), 12–24. Jansen, J. D. (2009). Knowledge in the Blood: Confronting Race and the Apartheid Past. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kincheloe, J. L. (2005). Critical Pedagogy Primer. New York: Peter Lang. Kincheloe, J. L. (2008). Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction. Dordrecht: Springer. Louis, C. (2016). Médecins Sans Frontières and the refugee crisis in Greece: An interview with Dr. Apostolos Veizis. Pathogens and Global Health, 110(6), 219–222. Macedo, D. (2018). Literacies of Power: What Americans Are Not Allowed to Know. [New edition, with new commentary by Shirley R.

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Steinberg, Joe L. Kincheloe, and Peter McLaren]. New York: Routledge. Manca, A., Atenas, J., Ciociola, C., & Nascimbeni, F. (2017). Critical pedagogy and open data for educating towards social cohesion. Italian Journal of Educational Technology, 25(1), 111–115. McLaren, P. (2016). Critical Pedagogy and PostModernity: A Look at the Major Concepts. In: Marc Pruyn & Luis Huerta-Charles (Eds.), This Fist Called My Heart: The Peter McLaren Reader, Volume 1. Charlotte: Information Age Publishing Inc. McLaren, P. (2018). Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the New Millennium. New York: Routledge. Refugee and Migration Coordination. (n.d.). http:// syprome.blogspot.gr/, accessed 6/10/2017. Refugee Education Project – Scientific Committee of the Ministry of Education Research and Religious Affairs in Support of Refugee Children – April 2017, www.minedu.gov.gr/ publications/docs2017/CENG_Epistimoniki_ Epitropi_Prosfygon_YPPETH_Apotimisi_Protaseis_2016_2017_070__.pdf, accessed 6/10/2017. Reich, R. B. (2010). The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st-Century Capitalism. New York: Vintage Books. Rozakou, K. (2012). The biopolitics of hospitality in Greece: Humanitarianism and the management of refugees. American Ethnologist, 39(3), 563–577. Shor, I. (1996). When students have power: Negotiating authority in a Critical Pedagogy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Singer, P., & Singer R. (2010). The Ethics of Refugee Policy. In: James S. Fishkin & Robert E. Goodwin (Eds.), Population and Political Theory: Philosophy, Politics and Society 8. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Talbot, C. (2013). Education in conflict emergencies in light of the post-2015 MDGs and EFA Agendas. Switzerland: NORRAG. Triandafyllidou, A., & Ambrosini, M. (2011). Irregular Immigration Control in Italy and Greece: Strong Fencing and Weak Gate-keeping Serving the Labour Market. European Journal of Migration and Law, 13(3), 251–273. UNHCR (A) http://www.unhcr.org/1951refugee-convention.html UNHCR (B) https://www.unhcr.org/gr/11343imerida_ypourgeiou_paideias_ya.html Wallerstein, I. (2004). World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke Universtity Press, UK. Ypi, L. (2010). Justice in Migration. A Closed Borders Utopia? In: James S. Fishkin & Robert E. Goodwin (Eds.), Population and Political Theory: Philosophy, Politics and Society 8. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Zembylas, M. (2012). Critical Pedagogy and Emotion: Working through ‘troubled knowledge’ in post-traumatic contexts. Critical Studies in Education, 54(2), 176–189. Zimmerman, C., Kiss, L., & Hossain, M. (2011). Migration and Health: A Framework for 21st Century policy-making. PLoS Medicine, 8(5): e1001034. Retrieved on 10/10/2017 from: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed. 1001034

43 Indigenous Critical Pedagogy in Underserved Environments in India Madhulika Sagaram

INTRODUCTION Children in underserved environments are susceptible to malnutrition and lack of opportunities for education, the very reasons that keep them chained in cycles of poverty. Poverty is not just an economic reality, it is also a social, cultural, emotional and psychological construct often resulting from rampant exploitation of people and resources. Millions of Indian children’s necessities concerning food, clothing and shelter, apart from education and development opportunities, are simply not met. This number corresponds to an astounding 31% of the world’s children (The Hindu, 2017). While there has been progress in bridging gaps in access to food, clothing and shelter, education and health have remained grossly neglected aspects. India spends only about 3.71% of its GDP on education as compared to approximately 6% by Brazil and South Africa, its peer countries (Shukla, 2017). The burden that the word ‘underserved’ carries along with its own connotation deprives millions of

children access to quality education and educational opportunities. Since only the underserved send their children either to the free schools run by the government or to low-income private schools, parents as well as children are shortchanged in receiving quality education due to a lack of awareness and illiteracy. The government-run schools and the private underserved schools function with a hierarchical outdated system wherein the subjects and material taught were relevant long ago, but now are limited to the compiled textbook culture. The methods and approaches to teaching and learning are antiquated with very little interaction between the teacher and student (Bagla, 2008). Rote learning or ‘parrot training’ is the predominant form of teaching and learning (Mayer, 2002). Many Western researchers have attributed rote memorization as an age-old problem in the Indian education system; they suggest that probably the roots of the system are in the ancient Brahmanical system of learning (Scharfe, 2002). Students are continuously

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provided with facts that must be memorized and regurgitated. Such an environment neither fosters critical thinking nor encourages creativity. However, it is important to note that India had its own pedagogy aligned with its way of life which was destroyed due to colonization over a period of 200 years. The reasons that can be attributed to the abysmal decline in the quality of education in India in contemporary times are discussed in the next section. The purpose of the chapter is to elucidate the compelling reasons behind the use of accelerating learning at an extremely rapid pace. The narrative also enquires into the relationship of emotional development with learning and cultural contexts. Learning in any culture should be based on relevant contexts, otherwise the content being provided does not aid in the development of an appropriate form of knowledge construction. The external conditions around children, communities and schools determine the types of lived experiences that form their perceptions and conditioning. Central to this chapter is the study of an accelerated learning program undertaken in Hyderabad. In the study, the children created educational opportunities for themselves by using resources at their disposal, which resulted in a service-learning project that benefitted several causes as well as a public pedagogy installation at the intersection of mathematics, art, design, anthropology, science and history. The shift in power structures between teacher and learner formed the building block of the program followed by a shift in power between and among the children. When this dual shift was superimposed with learning rooted in local culture, art and craft, unbelievable shifts occurred in the emotional development of children. These shifts in power that resulted from the cultural reconstruction of lived experiences dissolved a good part of the burden of economic, social and psychological poverty. While the physical reality remained the same, and the financial poverty is systemically generated and imposes itself on the children’s immediate environment, emotional

and mental constructs of poverty were nonetheless shattered. Children were facilitated to constantly reframe their stories and narratives from a lack of opportunity and resources towards the potential and possibilities that can be created from what was available. The pedagogy that resulted out of the accelerated learning program was a melting pot of several constructivist approaches, such as arts-based learning, place based learning, social constructivist approaches and varied Indigenous approaches in India. Implementing the pedagogy in critical ways required very few external resources; most of the resources were inherent talent, cultural perspectives, freedom of expression and sharing of power. As soon as the pyramid of power was reversed, social agency and a change in perspective emerged out of the shift. Helpless acceptance of circumstances transformed into empowered zeal to reach one’s own potential.

EROSION OF INDIGENOUS PEDAGOGY OF INDIA Indigenous Indian pedagogy was rooted in the association of ideas and continuity of experience (Singanapalli, 2017). While the method of transfer of knowledge through oral history had been predominantly in use in India since ancient times, it was not to promote rote learning. Students memorized verses, but the meaning of the verse was never taught to them in keeping with the two approaches of association of ideas and continuity of experience. The meaning of the verse occurs in a flash to the learner through lived experiences at different points in time, i.e. across space and time, often guiding the learner and reminding the individual of their life and connection to learning. A parallel to such pedagogy could be drawn with Currere, which, as described by Pinar (2004), is a verb denoting ‘lived experience’, an autobiographical method of thinking and being. It is the process of the reconstruction of educational

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Figure 43.1  The progression of association of ideas and continuity of experience in Indigenous pedagogy across India

experiences based on remembering the past (regressive), imagining the future (progressive) and living simultaneously in the past, present and the future (Pinar, 2004). A pedagogy that was deep rooted for many millennia has been reduced to the memorization of a bunch of facts without any focus or relevance to life and lived experience. Indian education now requires that students are continuously provided facts in compiled textbooks that must be memorized and regurgitated as expressed therein. Such an environment neither fosters engagement with life nor leads to the growth and development of the individual. This approach also leads to homogenization of learning and lived experience; the homogenization of learning systems developed over ages by a highly heterogeneous population of more than a billion, who are rooted in a complex social structure and vary in culture and religion (Rao, 2004), has created both inequity and a lacuna in Indian education. Learning has always been a social process in India, which is quite visible through its fairs, festivals, celebrations, art and craft forms and cultural rituals, and this form of learning was placed in a certain

cultural context or a social process embedded in lived experiences. Several progressive philosophers and researchers in the West have focused on the social process of learning in their own social and cultural contexts. The social constructivist approach to learning, situated in experiential learning, has been a pedagogy that seems very relevant to Indian learning environments and cultural requirements. The pedagogy used in the study described in the chapter approaches learning as a social process involving engagement with the environment as described by John Dewey and later expounded by Vygotsky. Several aspects of the later manifestations of social constructivism, such as David Sobel’s ‘place based education’, can also be glimpsed throughout the work. The separation of nature, life and lived experience in education has been critically acknowledged in the West by researchers like Sobel. Place based education is the process of creating a safe environment in the community that is conducive to learning. The pedagogy creates learning environments by connecting people to nature and culture and building interrelationships between and among them

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(Sobel, 2005). It is interesting to note that Sobel (2005) describes place based education as using the local community and environment as a starting point to teach, engage and learn, through all disciplines, various concepts that are entwined in themes across the curriculum. This paradigm of learning is quite like the Indian systems of learning that have been discarded in favor of a homogenized education system. Uprooting from cultural context is one of the major outcomes of the kind of cultural hegemony now rampant across all learning settings in India. A fine example of cultural context to learning is elucidated below: During the formative years of the National Institute of Design in the sixties in India, Professor Hancock, a British expert, was a consultant to setting up an ultra-modern design workshop. He took on the task himself of teaching scientific methods for using tools to artisans. He saw that they were used to sitting on the floor and holding the wooden tools with their legs while sawing or chiseling. Therefore, he instructed them sternly to use the work benches starting the next day, and failing to do so would mean being sacked. The next day, he was surprised to see all the artisans obediently using the work benches but not standing or sitting in front of them but sitting on top of them as they sat on the floor with their tools handled by their feet. (Singanapalli, 2017: 334)

This example explains the importance of cultural context over homogenization, which has been an inevitable outcome of modern industrialization and mass production. When children are exposed to a homogenous education that does not acknowledge their cultural identity, their way of life, it results in a void of learning opportunities. A gap arises between their way of life and what happens at school. The child, parent and teacher, then, are all forced to accept homogeneity without understanding the core of disciplines and how they are interconnected. Memorization has become the norm as it provides an easy passage to homogeneity and even accommodates it. Lack of heterogenous insights have eliminated multiple perspectives; basing learning on the memorization of the word in compiled textbooks, along with cutting out

lived experiences with a sole focus on education for a job, has led to a destruction of the various value based Indigenous learning systems across India.

POWER DYNAMICS DUE TO SOCIO-CULTURAL HEGEMONY The shared assumptions, values and beliefs of a group of people which result in characteristic behaviors/habits form the development of culture. Uprooting from these shared values, assumptions and beliefs has many implications for life as such and education at large. Cultural uprooting has also decontextualized social structures and learning in India. Socially, India is a hierarchical society with complex class and caste structures, meaning there is significant power distance between people based on class, caste, age and profession. Hence, there is bound to be an impact on the teacher-student relationship. Learners and teachers are expected to assign status based on age, class, gender, education, etc. As a result, students are expected to engage in one-way interactions with teachers due to the hierarchy involved. Students cannot question teachers in many situations, as questioning a superior is considered disrespectful. Based on seniority and superiority, the learner almost never has a final say or a voice in the learning process. The hegemony in Indian learning environments includes a socio-cultural hierarchy on the one hand and an imposed Eurocentric content on the other. While socio-cultural hierarchy based on superiority due to age, caste and creed robs children of equal opportunity in education; Eurocentric content and approaches to learning do not anchor their learning in their own cultural context. Since the Eurocentric content is not relevant to lived experience, disengagement with learning occurs. Children are forced to memorize content instead of developing an understanding as it is not relevant to their culture or way of life.

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Contemporary India, with its movement towards English as the medium of instruction, is preparing its youth for a global market without pondering over a small nuance: education is not just about finding a job; it is about life. As a result, mass populations of people across the country are being forced to learn all disciplines in a language they do not think, feel or express emotion in. Whether it is the Indian learning systems rooted in lived experience or the progressive approaches such as constructivist pedagogy from the West, the common thread has been the same: understanding learning as a social process. Learning is a social process rooted in local culture rather than a mass production mechanism with the objective of procuring a job. It is important to highlight that the purpose of education is towards a fulfilled and meaningful life no matter which cultural and social construct we place ourselves throughout the wide world.

LACK OF TEACHER DEVELOPMENT AND RELATED ISSUES The most limiting factor in the power dynamics in learning environments in India is possibly ill-prepared and underprepared teachers and teacher leaders. The teachers are left to fend for themselves without any source for training or empowerment or a proper direction (Bagla, 2008). Most teachers lack passion and involvement in their profession because they lack any input or contribution in devising the content or the syllabus for the classes they teach. The syllabus is provided by government education boards in the form of compiled textbooks, and the teachers impart the content as-is from the textbooks. Teachers are not adequately trained to disseminate information or facilitate learning in the classroom. There are a few poor-quality development opportunities available for teachers for their professional and personal development, offered mostly during summer months (Chitnis, 1993).

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While governments are focused on improving the quality of the infrastructure and regulations, there is a huge lacuna in the qualitative areas of development of pedagogy and instructional approaches relevant to local communities. It is the need of the hour to engage with pedagogy suitable to local culture, teacher and student development, and to focus on community engagement with schools and learning centers. Only when education becomes relevant to the way of life in the local, social, cultural contexts, and only when it connects to the larger global perspective, will it become acceptable in marginalized communities. The study described in the following section is one such journey into the issues such as described above.

STUDY BY ADHYA EDUCATIONAL SOCIETY, HYDERABAD, 2012–15 The work that the study engaged with can be co-constructed in communities in India, as it helps children and parents in underserved and marginalized communities reverse power structures and create a dynamic that gives rise to solutions and issues surrounding their lives. When education becomes a lived experience, parents become convinced about sending their children to schools, teachers are motivated to facilitate the appropriate learning environments, and children perceive education as a means of overcoming and shattering their drudgery. Through this study, we chose improvement in the quality of education as the means and the mode to address the breakdown of hegemony and hierarchical power structures in the society, thereby enabling underserved communities to take charge of the various possibilities open to them and understand their own potential. In the study, 120 children at an underserved government school in Hyderabad, India, were engaged in a study over a period of three years by a nonprofit organization, Adhya Educational Society, from 2012 to

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2015. In June 2012, it was found that 80% of 7th grade children were at grade 1 level or below and 20% of children were at grade 2 level. This is a trend that one notices across India in underserved schools and communities. It is a grave situation, as there is no possibility of wasting several years again to bridge children to the required proficiency levels. The study doubled as an after-school program for the children for two hours every day. An approach to learning and pedagogy was constructed based on local culture and the acceleration of emotional development. Because of the shift in learning environment and engagement, children were bridged to 7th grade English proficiency by the end of grade 7. Likewise, the following year, they were bridged to 8th grade mathematics proficiency and the final year of acceleration saw them being bridged to 9th grade proficiency in science. Accelerated learning programs (ALPs) are age appropriate, flexible programs complementing or supplementing schooling

opportunities. ALPs are programs that promote access to learning and quality education in an accelerated time frame for children in disadvantaged situations and underserved environments. They are most suitable for youth that are out of school, over-age children and those that do not have access to resources and quality learning opportunities. Sometimes, ALPs are implemented to fill a crucial and critical gap in essential educational services in crisis situations or underserved conditions (Menendez et al., 2016). The factors that went into such rapid acceleration (Figure 43.2) have been discussed below as physical aspects in the form of proprioception and kinesthetics; emotional experiences through art, culture and heritage; emotional development through complicated conversations, perceptions and sublime environments; and the integration of body, mind, emotion and energy facilitated through the pedagogy grounded and rooted in ancient Indian Indigenous ways of life and lived experiences.

Figure 43.2  The approach used to accelerate children at a rapid pace in Hyderabad, India

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PROPRIOCEPTION AND KINESTHETICS Our senses and outward sensory perceptions can be used to enhance our engagement with learning environments. All our experiences emanate from within us and our body and our limited understanding of sensory perceptions emanating from the body can become barriers that can confuse ‘clarity, originality and authenticity’ (Sagaram, 2017: 217). It is thus imperative that our senses and their perceptions are clearly understood so sensory engagement is involved appropriately in learning environments. One such powerful aspect of sensing is proprioception, the perception that provides us with an understanding of relative positioning and movement of the body. Proprioception has been defined as the sensing that happens in relation to stimuli that are produced and perceived within an organism, especially in connection with the position and movement of the body (Jha et al., 2017). Sensory receptors, found mainly in muscles, tendons, joints and the inner ear, detect the motion or position of the body or the limbs by responding to stimuli arising within the organism (Jha et al., 2017). Hence, proprioception is also about balance and equilibrium in a child’s growth and developmental process. Charles Sherrington used the term proprioception in 1906, to describe the relative movement of the body and body sections in space (Sherrington, 1910). Henry Bastian refers to ‘the body of sensation which results from or is directly occasioned by movements’ as kinesthesis (Jha et  al., 2017). It is now commonly agreed upon that by means of this complex of sensory impressions we become acquainted with the position of our limbs and their relative motion in space around us. Some researchers define proprioception as the sensing of joint position only and kinesthesia as conscious awareness of such movement (Jha et al., 2017). Indigenous learning systems in India have always allowed for proprioceptive sensing to be an active part of learning. For example,

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yoga is a fantastic way of understanding the positioning of the body and so are many of our classical art forms. The use of mudras (hand gestures based on yoga) in Indian classical dance forms is a great way to understand the proprioceptive sense of various body parts. Indian percussion instruments like the tabla, dhol, dapli, etc. are based on understanding one’s own proprioceptive sense. Traditional games that involved climbing, jumping, sliding, etc., allowed for a proprioceptive sense to develop, as did activities like weaving, knitting, sewing, etc. Understanding the relative positioning of the body allows for balance between mind and body to set in, and the development of the ability to handle emotions as the child grows up. Children create knowledge through the alignment of body, mind, emotion and energy in a natural and tacit manner. However, the modern education system does not allow children to engage with their proprioception and instead makes them passive consumers of content.

ART, CULTURE, HERITAGE AND EXPERIENCES The approach followed in the three-year study used arts-based learning to facilitate interconnections between mind, body, senses, consciousness and kinesthetic learning. Arts release creativity, imagination and a passion for education, which serves as the doorway for citizenship, common good and as the platform for educational reconstruction and reform (Greene, 2000). Arts-based education was used as a tool during the three-year study to recontextualize learning environments using elements of visual theory. We take our senses for granted and our perceptions to be true all the time. Our senses and outward sensory perceptions can be used to enhance our engagement with our environments. All our experiences emanate from our internal environment because ‘experiences’, as such, are actually our perceptions of the

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developments or situations occurring around us or affecting us, but not the developments themselves. For when we see something, the image is inside our eye; what we hear as sound is a vibration inside our ear. All that we see, hear, smell, touch and taste is a perception that is internal to our body, and our limited sensory perceptions can become barriers that cloud clarity, originality and authenticity. It is very important that our senses and their perceptions must be clearly understood to engage them appropriately in living and learning environments (Sagaram, 2017). Everything we feel, think, perceive, remember – all our lived experiences – is always vying for our attention. Any experience that is generated by the senses in terms of emotion, thought, memories is internal and in relation to an external stimulus. What we pay attention to will grow and manifest into perception and conditioning; what we withdraw our attention from will wane and disappear (Sagaram, 2017). It is essential that children understand their own emotions and interpret them. This enables them to learn to focus on emotions such as compassion, love, kindness, interconnectivity in the world and a sense of purpose. In our study, engagement with the senses and perception was facilitated through arts-based learning and place based learning as the pedagogy, with a focus on the process of the art form rather than the physical manifestation of it. Since the understanding of energy is rooted in art, culture and heritage, the approach can be contextualized to any place and its people in the world.

PERCEPTIONS AND SUBLIME ENVIRONMENTS The following three aspects, namely, content, form and context, are filters for the heightened perceptions and awareness occurring in the learning environment because of the association of ideas and continuity of experience. Content (vishay or vishayam in Sanskrit) refers to the meaning making process. In the

case of a learning environment, it refers to the association of emotional or intellectual messages. Content also refers to the sensory, subjective, psychological or emotional properties we experience in the learning environment. Content in this scenario is not just a description of the subject matter (Stinson et  al., 1994); content also encompasses all the emotional and sensory triggers that lead to a pattern of perceptions manifesting themselves as experiences, initially, then transforming into continuity of experience. Context (sandharbh or sandharbham in Sanskrit) refers to How does the meaning mean what it means? The set of circumstances or facts that surround the learning environment could include ‘when, where, how and for what purpose’ questions (Stinson et al., 1994). Form (aakar or aakaram in Sanskrit) refers to What do I see or hear or smell or taste and touch? Essentially, it is the arrangement of all the visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile elements. The form determines the composition of the experience and the learning environment. Of all the factors being discussed above and focused on, emotional development was of paramount importance. On a broad scale, children were disconnected with their emotions, which manifested in the form of lack of expression and low proficiency levels of learning. Lack of space for learning was a factor that weighed in figuratively as well as literally. There were four aspects that were used pedagogically to accelerate learning: the emotional development of children was addressed through complicated conversations to help them dissolve their barriers; the children were empowered to enhance their perceptions through the connection of senses, emotions and kinesthetic activity; learning environments were reconceptualized using visual theory; and hegemony in the classroom was addressed in several ways to make it a conducive social environment. All of the above aspects are described in detail below.

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ENHANCING EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND ACCELERATING LEARNING Using the study described in this chapter, it was possible to facilitate proficiency development in English in a very short period using local cultural contexts. Phonics were situated in Indian languages and sounds. The English curriculum is based on enhancing emotional development rather than a sole focus on content. Children learn English in the most natural and intuitive manner without a feeling of stress or dislike. This is made possible by linking the known to the unknown and embedding learning in local culture and language. Apart from a lack of English proficiency, it was identified that learning mathematics was a hindrance because of a poor understanding of English as the medium of instruction as well as a mismatch of learning approaches. The majority of children learn through touching, feeling and experimenting with materials. However, the predominant form of facilitation of mathematics in India has come to be the logical problem-solving approach using formulae, without any focus on understanding of concept. Children are expected to memorize formulae without knowing or understanding the basis of the formula or its application. This study has attempted to change this approach to learning mathematics, and has been quite successful. Origami, paper-bead making, painting and tribal art were used to connect mind, body, heart and senses together to help children internalize the process of learning. The whole body engages in learning and, during the study, several approaches were developed that engaged the children. Several fine motor skills development activities were linked to the development of mathematics proficiency. The development of science education is in the nascent stages in India. For a long time, science has been facilitated as fancy English involving science terminology. Neither the method of science nor the scientific temperament is a part of the learning of science in

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India. Critical thinking, analysis and inferencing are not components of the learning of science yet. Hands-on learning involving everyday materials and life around us is key to being involved with science and its learning. This study has made learning science possible through approaches based on observation, reflection, critical thinking and interconnections.

EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT THROUGH COMPLICATED CONVERSATIONS Because of the approaches used in the study, children can make connections between processes, procedures, concepts and disciplines. Freedom of thought, speech and creation of a safe space to discuss and converse about complicated issues and make suitable inferences has been central to the approach. The study provided a means to empowering children and teachers to take ownership of their own learning in ways and means relevant to their life. Language is central to understanding and processing information. When children are unable to express themselves, their learning is limited and hampered due to faulty constructs. Emotional development and language proficiency are clearly related. When an individual is stunted emotionally, they are unable to develop higher-order proficiency in a language. It was observed very early on that children are not able to express themselves in their native languages either. So, the focus was on improving their emotional development ahead of addressing the issues of learning native languages. The study employed the cultural contexts from the children’s lives: celebrations, festivals, ways of life and family histories to bridge proficiency development in native languages. When children learn in their own cultural contexts, they can make connections with life around them. They are not stressed or out of place or left out of the process of learning.

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The pedagogy in the study engages children with local art and craft and anchors their life, education and learning in one triad. Children in underserved schools are deprived of quality learning experiences as well as educational materials. With the focus on English-medium schools, now parents are particular about proficiency in English: neither the teachers nor the parents themselves can express themselves in English. As a result, children are forced to memorize all the content without any engagement with it. The study made a concentrated effort to replace learning that has become synonymous with memorization and regurgitation of facts in complied textbooks with lived experience. The pedagogy implemented in the study was used to link learning to life and restructure the school. Children are encouraged to express emotion in English through various engagements and interactions. A negotiation process establishes the exchange of expression between and among children. Language development that happens in this manner is very much like the process of learning their native language and enables them to develop the confidence to use it. When children learn in a tactile manner, they continuously associate their learning with lived experience. This premise was central to the pedagogy developed during the study.

INTERCONNECTING EMOTIONS, THOUGHT, SENSES AND KINESTHETIC LEARNING: MINIMIZING BAGGAGE Association of ideas is considered important in Indigenous Indian pedagogy: firstly, because perception takes place in relation to the senses distributed across the body, experiences and messages received from all sensory perceptions are stored across the body; and secondly, perception leads to the recognition of an object or experience through a cumulative series of interactions or continuity of experience. This approach to learning or pedagogy is based on allied complementation with

incrementing meaning and value through continuous learning throughout life. If the association of ideas and continuity of experience are to be designed and facilitated as education, then the learning system must be flexible across thematic and interconnected lived experiences (Singanapalli, 2017). The learning environment in our three-year study at Adhya Educational Society facilitated the association of ideas as well as continuity of experience (see Figure 43.1). Another parallel to Indian Indigenous pedagogy based on the association of ideas and continuity of experience has been that of transformative or transformational learning. According to Merriam et  al. (2007), transformative learning is characterized by dramatic, fundamental changes in the way we see ourselves and the world we live in. Of the many aspects of transformational or transformative learning that Mezirow talks about, predominant is ‘frame of reference’. Frame of reference is the meaning perspective with two dimensions to it: a habit of mind and a point of view (Mezirow, 1992, 2000). The ‘habit of mind’ is described as the set of preoriented dispositions or conditioning that act as a filter for interpreting the meaning of experiences (Mezirow, 2000). ‘Point of view’ is described as consisting of meaning schemes which in turn can be described as sets of beliefs, feelings, attitudes, and value judgments that can be changed easily in comparison to the habits of the mind (Mezirow, 2000). Greater awareness has been associated and attributed to ‘points of view’ than ‘habits of mind’ and the relative ease of transforming points of view than the habits of the mind (Mezirow, 2000). Transformational learning is described to occur when there is transformation in beliefs or attitudes, i.e. the meaning scheme or the entire perspective meaning ‘habit of mind’ (Mezirow, 1997, 2000). Both points of view and habits of the mind decide how the learner associates ideas in an environment where continuity of experience is possible. How we make sense of the world or learn is through a process of finding similarity

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in what we have experienced through points of view and habits of the mind. This is followed by differentiating within experiences and continuing learning experiences and activities to further fine-tune our understanding. We then find the patterns that group our varied lived experiences together. As children, we have a way of being attentive to everything around us without any special focus on an event. This means that we are capable of an awareness of everything that is happening around us without being attentive to any one thing. This way we record everything that is happening around us without storing them purposely, but keep observations available if required. Everything is recorded through the senses and, as and when we encounter something similar again, we recall our earlier experience and a connection is made through the association of ideas. This recollection does not have to be based on similar experiences or on an individual basis. Such connections and associations could be made through any of the varied sensory experiences (Jinan, 2017). What this means is that children differentiate between what they have bracketed as similar. For example, even though there is a grouping based on similarity in color there need not be any similarity in form. At another level, they differentiate between what they have bracketed as similar. This is an ongoing and an involuntary and subconscious process: connecting the similar, finding differences between the similar patterns or groupings, followed by finding what is similar in what they have differentiated, and again further differentiating, even finely, within the patterns and groupings. This is a continuous process of experience and learning that results in the self-organizing capacity in children (Jinan, 2017). Children organize information that is made available to them automatically. As a result, there is never a conscious effort in creating knowledge. What this alludes to is that there is no conscious reasoning to understand, but that reasoning works in the background effortlessly. Reasoning is a tacit

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and natural process occurring along with continuous experience and without it, the organization of knowledge would not happen. This also means that the role of the mind and senses distributed across body is there to receive the self-organized understanding (Jinan, 2017). What children engage in is non-focused attention or a non-judgmental experience. So, they do not focus attention while seeing but they engage in continuous sensing through experience and awareness. This is the process used for understanding the physical world, social world, language and even the two-dimensional world of books. Children explore the physical world – i.e. form, shape, color, function, process, structure, movement, time, space, etc. – by re-experiencing and reconceptualizing the world (Jinan, 2017). This is the mode of engagement with the social world too often called as play by adults. Children explore the world by remaking the form of things or any other attribute they have experienced. They imitate one aspect and innovate the rest in very imaginative ways. As all this happens in the real world and not in terms of language and words, there is no fragmentation or sequential construction or linearity in learning. The integral approach of integrating body, mind, senses and consciousness and the simultaneous nature of real experience keeps the children holistic and integrated (Jinan, 2017). Learning as a process also pertains to the domains of senses, intelligence of the body and human consciousness. Sensory perceptions and lived experiences cannot be turned into words; it is these lived experiences that create the framework for learning in any cultural context. For example, a story about a child helping an old man can never substitute the lived experience of a child helping an old man in a real-life situation. In the former, the child may or may not imagine the experience because the description is outside of their experience, but when one really becomes a part of the lived experience, the memory and emotion of that moment lingers forever.

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By assuming and accepting that lived experience can be easily turned into words, the current education system in India is focused on theoretical engagement and superficial learning that do not contribute or convert into civic responsibility or engagement. The following shifts from traditional rigid power-centered and teacher-centric environments to diffuse and fluid transmission between learner and facilitator enabled accelerated learning.

RECONTEXTUALIZATION OF LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS Context of learning was shifted from memorization of content to lived experience in a context. For example, in the study done by the Adhya Educational Society, there were many such instances where the context of learning had to be recreated time and again. A very powerful example is that the of the 9th grade children learning the European Renaissance. While this topic is relevant to Europe, when Indian children must learn it without any learning of art and sculpture from their own culture, this content becomes imposed from outside of lived experience. Pedagogy that is situated in the local understanding of culture and history was therefore applied. Children were asked to research and find out what was occurring in the local area during the same times as European Renaissance. They came back with inputs about Buddhist art and culture being prominent in the area. Then this learning was compared to the history from their own villages and native places. Finally, it was interpreted through European theater, Indian traditional theater and role playing to contextualize a topic that was outside of their lived experience. The form of the composition of the experience and the learning environment were aligned in content as well as context. For example, children could move several grades in just a short period, as they were able to place

the content and context together. Otherwise, the content and context were not fitting with each other and the form of the resulting learning was distorted. This distortion of form manifested in the form of a schism between physical and emotional development, with the latter lagging and rendering the content in a non-understandable condition for the child. It is imperative that the content to be learned be aligned with the cultural context for learning, the failure of which will distort an understanding of the surrounding world. In the study described in this chapter, the content provided to children through their compiled textbooks was contextualized to local culture using Indigenous pedagogy resulting in a form that was in line with the way of life of the children and their community. Not only does the distortion of form misalign children and learning, it also impacts the sublimity of the learning environment. The word ‘sublime’ has very similar connotations as an adjective and a verb. As an adjective, it refers to unparalleled excellence and beauty, while as a verb, it refers to elevation to the highest degree of excellence (Sagaram, 2017). The study also focused on creating sublime learning environments with the creation of excellent spaces and experiences that elevate learning beyond sensory perceptions. A major learning from the study has been understanding the balance of features between the arrangement of the learning environment and sublime perceptions. For instance, if the learning environment is too logical involving only convergent thinking, the arrangement of the learning process will be fantastic, but the experience will be superficial. If the learning environment is too perceptive with sublimity involving divergent thinking alone, the experience of learning will be fantastic, but the arrangement of the learning process will be in disarray (Sagaram, 2017). The balance between logic and sublime perception is the key to creating a sublime learning environment; in other words, a balance between convergent and divergent processes is key.

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FOSTERING A CULTURE OF INNOVATION AND CULTURE-SPECIFIC PEDAGOGY: PHYSICALITY TO SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT The reconceptualist Currere model, developed by William Pinar, develops learning across themes with energy and learning focused outward and inward rather than upward in a linear trajectory. Educational experience based on this nonlinear process requires autobiography, a review of one’s own educational experience, a phenomenological description of the individual’s present situation and historical, social and physical life world. An individual’s learning spread out over space and time (development) and a record of the subject’s response, associations and intellections, with relevant connections to literature, form the core of the process. The autobiographical approach that Pinar (2004) talks about is very important not only from the perspective of the individual delving into the past and imagining the future but also in that the understanding of his/her own understanding from the past, and making connections between the past and the future, is a learning experience. The autobiographical approach also helps individuals and groups understand themselves in reference to past events and with relevance to the future. In the process, an individual or group can learn from the stories, the narratives of others, and help each other in connecting the dots. Currere contextualized to Indian cultural contexts was the approach used to help teachers and facilitators gain an understanding of themselves and the hegemony they bring to the learning environment.

ADDRESSING HEGEMONY IN THE CLASSROOM: SOCIAL ASPECTS Paolo Freire and the critical pedagogy movement fostered by others that followed his work in the United States have developed the

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concept of ‘critical literacy’ as an investigation of classroom practices. The application of critical pedagogy challenges the knowledge and, thus invariably, the power of the bourgeoisie class. McLaren and Leonard (2004) state that Freire locates his pedagogical practices in a capitalist context, questioning the constitution and construction of systematic education in the overall picture of capitalist development. Capitalism as a context is essential for understanding Freire’s ideas about critical literacy and his pedagogical strategies. What this created in the context of classroom practices and pedagogy is giving students the critical capacity to understand exploitation and to challenge both capitalist culture and the authority of the bourgeoisie class (McLaren and Leonard, 2004). While Friere’s work has a worldwide appeal, it cannot be practiced as it is in many hierarchical contexts and cultures. Critical pedagogy as outlined by Friere has to become the inspiration for many other offshoots that can be culture-specific and contexualized to accommodate local contexts and social expectations. The Hyderabad study is a fine example of the amalgamation and contextualization of Friere’s critical pedagogy in the Indian context. Pluralistic citizenship and respect for diversity in all its forms is an important component that determines the quality of education (Holladay et al., 2003). Teachers who question their own assumptions will educate their students to understand and respect diversity. Also, diversity training empowered teachers and, further down the line, students, to make careful choices and decisions in understanding the social justice concepts of ‘equality’ and ‘equity’ (Ross-Gordon and Brooks, 2004). It is important for teachers and facilitators to understand that ‘one size does not fit all’ when it comes to learning and education. India is a multicultural, pluralistic society and participants (whether students or teachers) have diverse backgrounds. This diversity has an impact on the creation of all-inclusive learning environments for students. The use of a variety of teaching and learning practices

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promotes the opportunity for equitable learning for all participants in the classroom. The diverse backgrounds of students can enhance and enrich learning for everyone, including the teacher. It is important that teachers, especially those in schooling, are trained to recognize and create such all-inclusive classroom environments. Inequity exists in educational settings in India; minimizing these inequities can lead to the realization of the collective learning experience that is desirable in educational settings in India. This is exactly what was envisioned and constructed in the three-year study done by the Adhya Educational Society. Dewey (2009) described education as a continuous reconstruction of experience with emphasis on the social life of the child rather than individual subjects. It is this reconstruction of experience connecting the learning of the body, mind, senses and collective consciousness aligned with cultural contexts that created an avenue for power dynamics to shift between teacher and student as well as among the students. When children in underserved environments could access socio-cultural equivalents through education, it transformed their perspective of life. The emphasis on hands-on, real world learning experiences via the medium of place based education increased academic achievement, synergy and built stronger interrelationships within the community, with the leadership and generated a heightened commitment to service and contributing citizenship (Sobel, 2005). Because of the synergy created, both students and teachers are involved in solving real world problems, teaching and learning as knowledge creators instead of being consumers (Sobel, 2005).

CONCLUSION Mere adoption of Western ideas and practices may not be beneficial in the long run, it leads to a lack of progress and unimpressive

results. Instead, a thorough analysis of the resources available, the needs of the learners and the culture of the community is what is helpful in devising appropriate pedagogies, reconceptualized curricula and sublime learning environments. Active citizenship is rooted in a social consciousness of value and civic responsibility towards the community. When the members of the community empathize with each other, respect diversity and have compassion for all life, then the purpose of education is realized. The work done through this study in education, learning and development is at the intersection of cultural context and social consciousness. Children and schools become empowered to engage with the communities in and around them and the boundaries between schools and communities dissolve. When boundaries within communities dissolve, we can engage with diversity and develop an understanding of a different perspective. When children, teachers and schools find themselves reflected through the curriculum, they find social agency in life. The approach that was used in the study contextualized education to real-life issues, enabling connections between lived experience and the process of education while bridging the required proficiency levels in short periods of time. The engagement of schools through paradigms of transformation based on traditional wisdom and cultural contexts is what enables them to become active citizens and solution providers instead of remaining mere problem solvers. When schools become platforms for the engagement of the community at large to create a space for multiple perspectives, then real transformation happens in society. The focus of the innovation in education through this study is on the importance of education for human development with perspectives on transforming self, ideas and surroundings, and creating interdependence through an understanding of the connected world. Such an empathetic understanding forms the basis of active citizenship and responsibility

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towards social coexistence and life issues. The approach engages children and schools to transform bias, hate and prejudice into compassion through forgiveness and complicated conversations. This work with schools, teachers, parents and children is invested in translating their instincts and powers into social equivalents. The approach facilitates the formation of a learning paradigm with learning as a personal construction no matter what the social experience. It is based on the expansion of personal experience in the external world to include appreciation of all life and life forms, respect for the earth and environment, a sense of service and belonging. Because of the synergy created, schools are involved in solving real world problems, as knowledge creators instead of consumers. The approach releases creativity, imagination and a passion for education, which serves as the doorway for citizenship, the common good, and serves as the platform for educational reconstruction and reform.

REFERENCES Bagla, P. (2008). Universities: India’s education bonanza instills hope – and concern. Science, 320(5882), 1415. Chitnis, S. (1993). Gearing a colonial system of education to take independent India towards development. Higher Education, 26(1), 21–41. Dewey, J. (2009). My pedagogic creed. In D. J. Flinders & S. J. Thornton (Eds.), The curriculum studies reader (3rd ed., pp. 34–41). New York: Routledge. Greene, M. (2000). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Holladay, C. L., Knight, J. L., Paige, D. L. & Quiñones, M. A. (2003). The influence of framing on attitudes toward diversity training. Human Resource Development Quarterly, 14(3), 245–263. Jha, P., Ahamad, I., Khurana, S., Ali, K., Verma, S. & Kumar, T. (2017). Proprioception: An evidence based narrative review. Mini Review. Research & Investigations in Sports

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Medicine. Crimson Publishers. Verified 20 October, 2018. https://crimsonpublishers. com/rism/pdf/RISM.000506.pdf Jinan KB. (2017). How do children learn? Personal communication. Verified on 23rd October 2017. www.existentialknowledge foundation.org/ Mayer, R. E. (2002). Rote versus meaningful learning. Theory into Practice, 41(4), 226–232. McLaren, P. & Leonard, P. (Eds.). (2004). Paulo Friere: A critical encounter. New York and London: Routledge. Verified 20 October, 2018. http://libcom.org/files/peter-mclarenpaulo-freire-a-critical-encounter-1.pdf Menendez, A. S., Ramesh, A., Baxter. P. & North, L. (2016). Accelerated learning programs in crisis and conflict. Verified 20 October, 2018. https://thepearsoninstitute.org/ sites/default/files/2017-02/36.%20Menendez_Accelerated%20Education%20Programs_2.pdf Merriam, S. B., Caffarella, R. S. & Baumgartner, L. M. (2007). Learning in adulthood: A comprehensive guide (3rd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Mezirow, J. (1992). Transformation theory: Critique and confusion. Adult Education Quarterly, 42(2), 250–252. Mezirow, J. (1997). Transformative theory out of context. Adult Education Quarterly, 48(1), 60–62. Mezirow, J. (2000). Learning to think like an adult: Core concepts of transformation theory. In Jack Mezirow (Ed.) and Associates, Learning as transformation: Critical perspectives on a theory in progress (pp. 3–33). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Pinar, W. F. (2004). What is curriculum theory? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Rao, T. V. (2004). Human resource development as national policy in India. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 6(3), 288–296. Ross-Gordon, J. M. & Brooks, A. K. (2004). Diversity in human resource development and continuing professional education: What does it mean for the workforce, clients, and professionals? Advances in Developing Human Resources, 6(1), 69–85. Sagaram, M. (2017). Creating sublime learning environments. Proceedings of ICDPCA 2017:

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Thanima, National institute of Technology, Calicut, India (pp. 212–219). Scharfe, H. (2002). Education in ancient India (Handbook of oriental studies, Vol. 16). Leiden: Brill. Sherrington. C. S. (1910). The integrative action of the nervous system. CUP Archive. Shukla, S. (2017). Budget 2017: Spend on education sector seen falling short. Money Control. Verified on 26 October, 2017. www. moneycontrol.com/news/business/economy/ budget-2017-spendeducation-sector-seenfalling-short-1004364.html Singanapalli, B. (2017). Reimagining design pedagogy. Proceedings of ICDPCA 2017:

Thanima, National institute of Technology, Calicut, India (pp. 333–338). Sobel, D. (2005). Place-based education: Connecting classrooms and communities. 3rd edition. Barrington, MA: The Orion Society. Stinson, R. E., Wigg, P. R., Bone, R. O., Cayton, D. L. & Ocvirk, O. G. (1994). Art ­fundamentals: Theory and practice. Madison, WI: Brown & Benchmark. The Hindu. (2017). Staff Reporter. India has 31% of world’s poor kids: report. The Hindu. Verified on 26 October, 2017. www. thehindu.com/news/national/india-has-31of-worlds-poor-kids/article18709377.ece

44 (Dis)Ruptive Glocality Through Teacher Exchange: Realizing Pedagogical Love in the Chilean Context K e n n e t h J . F a s c h i n g - V a r n e r , M i c h a e l a P. S t o n e , and Marco Montalbetti Viñuela

Reading pre-note: throughout the chapter we will draw upon lyrics from Florence and the Machine’s ‘All This and Heaven Too’ (Welch and Summers, 2011) as we explore the concepts of glocality, love, and culturally relevant approaches to learning how to teach through participation in a teaching-abroad program in Chile. The lyrics are presented as ‘breaks’ and appear italicized. And the heart is hard to translate It has a language of its own It talks in tongues and quiet sighs And prayers and proclamations In the grand deeds of great men and the smallest of gestures And short shallow gasps Caroline, a 19-year-old elementary education major, hesitantly raises her hand to ask what is probably the most commonly asked question each year at our first meeting with new participants in the Teach in Chile (TiC) program – ‘Are you sure I don’t need to speak any

Spanish?’. Since 2004, 221 students have participated in this three-week teaching internship at a primary and secondary school in urban Concepción, Chile. Participants are paired with Chilean partner teachers with whom they collaborate to teach Pre-K through 12th-grade students. Each participant is also matched with a Chilean host family into whose home they are welcomed for the duration of the experience. Our participants imagine that their lack of Spanish fluency will be an insurmountable barrier to communication during their time in Chile. We have seen year after year, however, that it is precisely within the gaps of spoken language that the most profound and transformative engagements take place. When words fail, successful communication becomes an act of patience and love, relying on finding the value in unfamiliar ways of thinking, feeling, and being, as we embrace readily and universally shared human emotions. Translating between Spanish and English becomes secondary to finding meaning in the gasps, sighs, prayers, and proclamations of the heart.

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A baseline assumption of this chapter is that contexts are neither solely national nor solely international, but are always and already (int[er][ra])national or glocal (Hampton, 2010; Sharma, 2009; Wellman, 2004). The concept of glocality suggests that one’s international context is someone else’s national or domestic context, and that one’s work in their own locality can, and we strongly believe should, be informed by a broader range of contexts and ideas beyond ‘home’. Initially prominent in business, marketing, and telecommunications research, glocality is increasingly drawn upon by numbers of critical-education scholars, who acknowledge the necessity for people to not only ‘understand the interconnection of all living things, but also the inequalities and the disparities that characterize today’s world’, but also ‘have the skills to address these disparities’ (Sklad et al., 2016: 325). Common-sense ideas of what it means to live in a flat world, with constant and quick access to goods, services, and travel that historically separated people, infused with significant technological developments in a growing global economy, have created a call to understand the role of education and the potential for educational transformation that internationalization may provide (Marginson, 2006; Edwards, 2018; Held et al., 2000; Friedman, 2005; Darling-Hammond, 2012). Our interest here, however, is to ponder how the cultural competence aspect of the Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) framework (Ladson-Billings, 1994) might be enhanced through the lens of our international internship in Chile when focusing on love (hooks, 2000, 2001, 2003) as an action of wholeness and personal growth, informed by a pedagogy of thinking and feeling (Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis, 1997; Rendón, 2009). We would be remiss to omit the growing threats to culturally competent teaching from contemporary popular and political discourse. In 2018, media credibility was called into doubt on a seemingly daily basis by many of the highest-ranking members of the US government, giving platforms to pundits who had

been relegated to lurking beneath the surface during the Obama era. Neo-conservative echo chambers now overflow with implications that ‘equate a focus on social justice and multiculturalism with a lowering of academic standards’ working to ‘divert attention from the real influences on the problems in school’ which include ‘the underfunding of public education, the lack of access to affordable housing, transportation, healthcare, and jobs that pay decent wages’ (Zeichner, 2017: 50–1). As Kincheloe and Steinberg rightly argued, engagement becomes complex given that ‘individuals cannot separate where they stand in the web of reality from what they perceive, particularly since our understanding of the world and ourselves is socially constructed’ (2000: 3). Truth, as a result, cannot ‘be investigated outside of its historical, geopolitical, or sociological situatedness or contextual specificity’ (Steinberg, 2016: 154). The current moment of 2018 was marked by rampant hostility toward difference, rises in xenophobia and White nationalism, and a space where political leaders perpetuated violent resistance to a free press. Like Kincheloe and Steinberg, we believe that with the complexities of now, it is more important than ever that we ‘devote special attention to the differing ways individuals from diverse social backgrounds construct knowledge and make meaning’ (2000: 3). From our perspective, the way forward is modeled in TiC by attending to difference in a way that allows pre-service and in-service educators to explore truth and knowledge in an authentically diverse context. We write this chapter with a sense of urgency given that the intersection of these social and political times is complex and the macro-emphasis appears to move away from the engagement difference.

CULTURALLY RELEVANT PEDAGOGY Hannah, a 21-year-old student teacher participant in the 2010 TiC program, wrote in her first daily journal entry,

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I didn’t even make it through introducing myself without sticking my foot in my mouth. Gisela [her Chilean partner teacher] told me to tell the class a bit about myself. I talked about my friends, family, and hobbies, and everything was going great. Then I started to tell them what my favorite American foods were. I didn’t even make it to grilled cheese sandwiches before one of the girls raised her hand to ask me what I meant by American. I didn’t know why she didn’t understand. I told her American meant something from back home in America. I told her I was American, just like she is Chilean, and then everyone just kind of stared at me. After what felt like an eternity, Gisela finally told me that Chile is part of America, and that it is offensive to Chileans when people from the United States assume they are the only Americans. I apologized right away, but I’m kicking myself for the whole thing. I’ve taken enough social studies classes that it should have been obvious to me that thinking only people from the US can be Americans means I’m ignoring the entire continent full of people who are just as American as I am. After class, I thanked the girl who asked the question for helping me understand. As awful as it was to upset everyone on my first day, I guess I have a new way to connect with future students who see themselves as [words crossed out in Hannah’s journal] actually ARE American too.

In Hannah’s subsequent journal entries, it was clear she approached her remaining time in Chile with a heightened sense of reflection and reflexivity. Like many other program participants, she pursued ESL (English as a Second Language) certification upon her return. Even those who do not pursue such certification report a significantly altered approach to their pedagogical decisions with respect to language learning, acquisition, and a general sense of community within their classes. But with all my education I can’t seem to command it And the words are all escaping, and coming back all damaged And I would put them back in poetry if I only knew how I can’t seem to understand it Ladson-Billings (1994, 1995, 2009) introduced CRP as a pedagogical framework centered on significant expectations for academic

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achievement, cultural competence, as well as socio-political commitment, while Gay established thoughts about ‘culturally responsive approaches’ as drawing upon five essential elements including: ‘developing a knowledge base about cultural diversity … demonstrating caring … building learning communities, communicating with ethnically diverse students, and responding to ethnic diversity in the ­delivery of instruction’ (2000: 106). Both CRP (Ladson-Billings, 1994, 1995, 2009) and culturally responsive approaches (Gay, 2000, 2002) fundamentally recognize that when ­disconnection happens between teachers and students, bridging those differences requires ­ teachers to engage in a reflexive introspection. Since coming to the academic literature in the mid 1990s, much attention has been placed on invoking the label ‘culturally relevant’ both in practice and scholarship (Mellom et  al., 2018; Zygmunt et  al., 2018; Walter, 2017; Jensen et al., 2016; Thomas and Warren, 2013). What is actually revealed in practicing teachers’ approaches, however, often articulates either only vague and lofty goals of being culturally relevant without discussing means, or focuses on micro-pedagogic tools and strategies labeled culturally relevant to the exclusion of a larger practice or outcome of cultural relevance (Dixson and Fasching-Varner, 2009). As of October 2019, Ladson-Billings’ ‘Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy’ (1995) has been cited nearly 6,234 times and her book The Dreamkeepers (1994) has been cited some 9,697 times, while Gay’s (2000) Culturally Responsive Teaching has been cited over 9,890 times in academic literature. These citation statistics force us to consider why academic gains for students of color have remained stagnant and flat despite the significant scholarly attention to this pedagogical approach.

CHALLENGES TO CULTURALLY RELEVANT PEDAGOGY We recognize a fundamental disconnect between belief and commitment to CRP and

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the realities of a free-market economy that purposefully and necessarily selects and sorts (Bonoli, 2010; Terranova, 2000). Selecting and sorting is particularly pernicious in a service economy where the service often requires a cheap labor force to execute the supply-and-demand balance. As we explore our program in Chile, our hope is to focus not on the pathological aspects of modern education, but instead to show that there are options that do result in culturally relevant approaches. To accomplish that task, though, we must briefly acknowledge some of the limits and challenges to CRP to gain clarity in our exploration of what we are doing with TiC. First is the issue of the pervasiveness of stereotype threat (Steele and Aronson, 1995; Ford, 2010; Ford and Harris, 2000; Davis et al., 2006; Reed, 1988). The United States, for example, is few among nations that view knowledge of multiple languages from historically marginalized immigrant groups within deficit lenses, leading to a stereotype of English Language Learners (ELLs) as academically deficient, slow, unable to learn or process, and in need of remediation to assimilate into the United States. These stereotypes further isolate immigrants and their children from feeling connected and included. Second, we see hostility in both classroom and community interactions toward difference (Hale et al., 2011; Stevens and Stovall, 2010: Fasching-Varner and Hartlep, 2015). In the wake of this hostility there is a heightened level of confusion and anger surrounding the consequences of ­accountability – accountability designed ostensibly to help reduce gaps and divides in achievement. Teachers often blame students different from the teacher’s own identities to account for the teacher’s struggles and pressure related to odd accountability measures like standardized testing. Teachers often frame teaching as impossible and blame the population of students as inherently deficient, and ultimately resistant to learning. Third, as adults internalize their own discomfort, they often leave the classroom,

and children often end up feeling unwanted in educational spaces. Turnover and teacher apathy are significant concerns often caused by the stress of their working context, which in turn causes students to feel disconnected from adults who quickly enter and exit their lives. In the case of second language learners these issues are intensified by a series of other difficulties in adjusting to new life and language contexts. Fourth, even well meaning teachers simply lack the preparation and authentic experiences needed to connect across difference. A significant number of our participants, for example, have never left the United States and have little idea of ‘other’ contexts. What they do hear too often appears to come from filtered news sources and friends and families with their own lenses, and which may be influenced by fear, ignorance, or confusion. We struggle to imagine how teachers can teach well without having counterexperiences of their own privileges and perspectives. Teacher preparation programs appear to seldom promote or facilitate study abroad or otherwise structure experiences that help their candidates engage in necessary counter-experiences.

TAKING ACTION WITH LOVE And I would give all this and heaven too I would give it all if only for a moment That I could just understand the meaning of the word you see ’Cause I’ve been scrawling it forever but it never makes sense to me at all The language of CRP is often evoked by educators to describe their practices, even though the practices that manifest appear more as abstract ideals of CRP without action or ‘actions’ disconnected from a larger vision of the aims of the work of CRP (Dixson and Fasching-Varner, 2009; Hayes and Juarez, 2012; Fasching-Varner and

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Dodo-Seriki, 2012; Fasching-Varner, 2006). We explore how the infusion of love as a verb might provide a deeper expansion of the cultural competence that is required of teachers to engage historically marginalized students.

Cultural Competence and Love Love, structured as a verb, has the pedagogical possibility of supporting cultural competence (hooks, 2000). Love is essential to our human capacity for engagement. As an object, love is too easily commodified, minimized, and decontextualized, whereas manifesting as an action, love has the possibility to ‘nurture our own and another’s … growth’ preventing approaches that are ‘hurtful and abusive’ (hooks, 2000: 6). hooks (2000, 2001, 2003) and Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis (1997) argued that love is, in part, the ability to build caring bonds with both one’s self and with others, seeing the full potential in others, and imagining each other in likeness to ourselves as opposed to deficient, pathological, or culturally strange. Teachers who find full potential in their students or others generally draw upon a ‘participatory epistemology that connects students to the learning experience, eliciting greater awareness about the subject matter, about themselves as learners and as human beings’ (Rendón, 2009: 96). Our hope is that a pedagogical orientation to cultural compe­ tence informed by love focuses on educators  ‘seeing hope and possibility as well as  becoming compassionate humanitarians’ (ibid.: 101). Radical love, lauded and enacted by critical scholars such as Kincheloe (2008, 2011), Gómez (2015), and Freire (1970, 2002), as examples, bolsters the verb even further, characterizing it as ‘an act of courage, not fear … a commitment to others … [and] to the cause of liberation’ (Freire, 1970: 78). Kincheloe acknowledged that ‘Freire’s notion of Radical Love has permeated all dimensions [toward the] understanding of critical pedagogy’

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(2008: 178). Gómez detailed five conditions that must be met to competently practice radical love in educational contexts: solidarity, multiculturalism, coherence, knowledge, and choice of method (2015: 118). By modeling these conditions in our study abroad program, we establish a point of reference for participants who will enact radical love pedagogies in their future classrooms. Many stereotypes about groups of learners are linked to a disconnect between one’s dominant privilege and their understanding of those who do not share those aspects of their identity (Yee, 1992; James, 2011; Bodenhausen, 1990; Xiang et  al., 2017; Martinez, 2011). The less one knows about himself or herself, the more likely the person is to exhibit ignorance about groups of others (Fasching-Varner and Mitchell, 2013). A love-based approach starts by recognizing one’s own strengths and weaknesses, and building meaningful relationships as one comes to know her/his own privileges, priorities, and opportunities as a fellow human. Pedagogical love may reflect the action of how we use teaching and experience toward the project of working toward justice while embracing difference (Kirylo and Boyd, 2017). As the emotion and emphasis of love is felt, the response to the other motivates a shared space and experience of care, where once defined differences between peoples become blurry lines, and joint actions emerge that allow an individual to contribute to interchangeable events of cooperativeness within a community (Salmela and Nagatsu, 2016). As teachers attempt to make sense of students’ differences from themselves, they often widen the asymmetrical distance between themselves and students, focusing on what they perceive to be either the strength and power of their own identity or, more commonly, the weaknesses and powerlessness of the identity of the ‘other’. Because domination relies on fear many educators engage fearing the unknown in difference. Their own decontextualized reality ‘promotes the desire for separation’ from others (hooks, 2000: 83).

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Freire’s radical love closes the distances through dialogue, which ‘cannot exist … in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people. Love is at the same time the foundation of the dialogue and dialogue itself’ (1993: 89). Our potential to love ‘can happen only as we let go of our obsession with power and domination’ (ibid.: 87).

children during the teaching exchange. Beatriz, a host mother said,

Love Abroad

Participant Jessica paralleled these sentiments,

And it talks to me in tiptoes And it sings to me inside It cries out in the darkest night and breaks in the morning light Many of the participants in our study abroad program in Chile have never left the country, and for those who have left, few have been in a context where they were not retaining dominant power. Many students travel to spaces where they were still among the majority, or vacation as an outsider invoking dominant privilege. As a vacationing tourist, particularly in beach-resort-style vacations, it is unlikely that one can build caring bonds that disrupt traditional power dynamics. The TiC program is the polar opposite of a beach vacation. First, students live with host families who volunteer to host participants. The families participate because of the high value they attribute to the cultural exchange, such as listening to new perspectives in politics, education, values, and ways of life, as well as learning and exploring to understand the other. Maria, one of our host mothers, shared in an interview, We see the US on television and movies, but for three weeks my daughter gets the incredible experience of interacting with someone from that culture and I think in the end we all learn about each other – both ways, you know.

When our students arrive at the airport a family is waiting for them, total strangers, embracing them and inviting them into their homes and lives. With the exception of time at the school, all afternoons, evenings, and weekends are spent with the families and the

It is amazing how much we were able to do together in three weeks – well maybe it is BECAUSE we know it’s only three weeks, we treat it like three years. We have so little time and every minute is precious because you have this great window into someone’s life and soul and you just want to eat and drink it all in.

I’m still not sure how it’s possible, but in three short weeks I have a whole new family. Not just my host brothers and parents, but all of their extended family, too. Last night at my going away party, my host mom’s mother gave me a huge hug and called me her ‘guagua gringa’ [‘guagua’ is a Chilean colloquialism meaning ‘baby’, but it is also term of endearment between a mother and her youngest child, regardless of age]. I couldn’t love them more if we were actually related by blood.

These comments indicate that the context for these home stays is a unique combination of a desire to engage, nestled with a lovingkindness generosity that is impossible to ‘teach’ as a method in a traditional teacher preparation course our program. Many times, the child in a host family is the only person who speaks both Spanish and English. Each year as program leaders, we watch with great joy as the once dominantgroup participant becomes dependent on a child or young adolescent for nearly every aspect of communication. When they have to rely on their host sibling/s and parent/s, our participants cognitively reframe their previously held positions that students in the United States should only learn English. While we discuss the value of language as social capital in the teacher preparation program, it is difficult for the concepts to meaningfully ‘set in’ within the decontextualized setting of the preparation program itself. The candidates see the value of being multilingual and how children who serve as the language intermediary between home and school are valuable allies in this program, and they internalize a lesson about the pedagogical value of difference over its pathologizing alternative

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conceptualization. By these social forces and exchanges, participants are obliged to pay specific attention to the individual, the family, and the community’s environment, including their values, beliefs and behaviors, and, if possible, to arrive at a mutual understanding and respect for the host family. One student, Beth Ann, illustrated this point when she shared, The first two weeks Camilla was at my side and made sure I understood everything. Then it happened. Camilla was like ‘I am going out to the mall with friends’ and before I could say, ‘Okay, me too’, my host mom was like, ‘Have fun. We are going to take Beth Ann to dinner’. At first, I was stressed because Camilla always made sure I could communicate. I was terrified we’d spend the entire night just staring at each other awkwardly. There was a lot of pointing and repeating, and one time my host dad had to draw a picture, but we managed to communicate. My host parents are so patient and kind, but it was obvious we all missed Camilla there to help. It’s kind of funny that as an adult I felt utterly helpless without the support of a teenager. But the better lesson, in the shame of my own language limitations, is that so many of my future students at home will have these multilingual skills and I have to make sure I do more than acknowledge those skills but make them very valued. Camilla’s parents too gained so much respect in knowing how much their daughter knew. So, it was like the dinner of awareness where the adults walked away like, ‘Hey, there’s bunches we don’t know and so much the next generation does know’. Definitely a role reversal from what I came in thinking about how important it would be to make sure bilingual kids in my own classes quickly learn English. It’s amazing what kids are capable of when they know we trust their abilities.

Such comments have been voiced since the project started in 2004. Within this study abroad context our participants learn to love and value what a child has to offer because, and, many times, the roles of who is ‘in charge’ or the ‘knowledge possessor’ have been reversed. In the United States, these teacher candidates are in command of their own understandings and their own decisions; relying on a child as a lifesource your perspective inherently changes who that child is and what they have to offer. For our students, the time with families also means that they incorporate into the social network of the family, engaging in a variety of

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contexts where the families spend time. These contexts include daily routines and social engagements with the host families’ peer groups by going out for dinner and drinks, having friends over, participating in the families’ celebrations, and being engaged in debate and dialogue about a variety of issues. During the course of immersion in these experiences, our participants begin to understand that these families are more like their own families than they are different. Participants see the universal nature of hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Participants also see that the families are part of strong social networks where they are valued members of the community similar to how they position their biological families and personal social networks. Participants quickly learn to navigate a repertoire of cultural skills, verbal and nonverbal competencies, attitudes and behaviors, and interactional styles if they wish to push through their discomfort in this new context. In these moments, the ‘just right’ amount of tension becomes a purposeful and powerful lesson about love’s desire for inclusion and the battle between inner and outer, The inner landscape is related to self – who we are, what we hold most dear, and our sense of purpose and meaning. In education outer is what we do with our minds, and is usually associated with intellectualism, rationality, and objectivity. The inner privileges subjectivity, intuition, emotion, and personal experience. In higher education we have learned to divorce the inner from the outer. We have learned to numb our emotions and to see everything in bits and pieces disconnected from the whole (Rendón, 2009: 7).

Our participants reflect deeply about their future students in the United States, asking questions about what it must be like for students in their classrooms who are outside of dominant circles, whether based on ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, ability, or any combination thereof. No, words are a language It doesn’t deserve such treatment And all of my stumbling phrases never amounted to anything worth this feeling

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Participants in TiC engage their subjective and intuitive feelings centered within an emotional sphere. The dissonance they feel in a ‘strange place’ with a ‘strange language’ and ‘new cultural norms’ is instructive, because it gets at hooks’ (2001) conceptual urging to break down one’s own power and privilege. Participant Sarah shared, I have had to really struggle whenever my family takes me to social events. They go out of their way to include me in whatever they are doing, but I feel lost when everyone around me is speaking Spanish to each other and I don’t understand. Whenever somebody laughs, I worry that it might be about me. I just laugh too because I don’t know what else to do. Feeling so lost makes me think about the kids in our classrooms who might also feel lost. It would be easy for me to think it’s only the language learners, but this experience has also made me think about other students who just might not understand what or why something is going on in school or in their lives. I have a huge obligation as a teacher to make sure my students feel included AND understand. My family here includes me but we just don’t have the language skills for me to understand. Now that is my task, figuring out how to bridge understanding even without language.

Sarah’s response, more extended than most participants, echoed the sentiments of many participants over the course of our program. Participants value feeling loved through their inclusion in the host families’ lives, but realize that there are some profound limits to how much they can understand. The dilemma provoked by this global experience serves to significantly inform the local application of the lesson upon participants’ return. At least in part, this glocality is an experience of actively melding the global experience into the local context of one’s life and work (Voskressenski, 2016; Doyle, 2018). The lessons, insights, and experiences gained through interaction with cultural others cannot be known directly without the opportunity for actual engagement. The relationship with the host families is characterized mostly by kindness and reciprocity, and many of the participants experience love quite viscerally, beginning to see in concrete ways how their perspective prior to the experience

has been steeped in privilege, ignoring the strengths and values that the students and their families bring. For example, Mike said, Today I needed help to find a phone charger in the mall. I just kept speaking English to the clerk until another customer offered to help translate. So now when I get back I will never just walk by when I think someone is lost or needs help or wonder why aren’t you speaking English.

As previously suggested, the international context creates glocality in that it bridges a distinct global context with a local reality of how the pre-service teacher engages the act of teaching upon their return, as well as the confrontations of their own privileged standpoints. These polarities in the experience abroad contrast with their experience at home and reveal a particular ‘dynamic, integrative center, [in] which one … unveils a larger reality’ (Rendón, 2009: 68). In such an engagement we ‘surrender old belief systems and working with our growth edges … uncover a larger truth that joins two realms of reality’ (ibid.: 68). By the end of the experience, journals shift from participants’ own fear and concerns to pondering what they might have missed at home about their own students’ social contexts outside of school. For example, Cassie said, I have so much to think about when I get home – I thought I was ready to teach, and I guess I have the skills, but those skills mean nothing if I can’t connect – that is what I learned in Chile.

From a cultural-competence perspective, the love that they exhibit and receive in this experience propels a different set of exchanges with students when returning home as they grow excited about what the cultural differences will be in their classrooms, and develop empathetic approaches to working with all of their students, especially those not from the United States. CRP has continually sought to have educators embrace cultural competence (Bonner et al., 2017). This quest often falls short because the focus is on ‘others’ to the exclusion of what one needs to know about oneself both as

(DIS)RUPTIVE GLOCALITY THROUGH TEACHER EXCHANGE

a thinker and feeler – one who has the capacity for love (Warren, 2017). The combination of love within this international context places the focus on deconstructing and reconstructing one’s own sense of self, at the same time that participants develop an awareness, appreciation, and value for others. Consequently, we argue that hooks’ notion of love provides a nuanced contour and texture to the potential for educators to be culturally competent.

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peoples have existed. Still, we cannot ignore the urgency of pushing back against the divisive discourse and policies which have found increasing popular and political support in Trumpdom. If we are to resist the effects of the neo-liberally driven ‘educational reform industrial complex’, for example, we must begin to acknowledge and work against the ways in which our identities, as cultural, epistemological, and ontological standpoints, are privileged, and must actively walk outside of who we are and into who others are.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS All this heaven never could describe such a feeling as I’m hearing Words were never so useful So I was screaming out a language that I never knew existed before. Rendón suggested that ‘diverse forms of contemplative practice become conduits to elicit deep awareness, focus, compassion, social change, transformation, creativity, and inspiration, as well as intellectual understandings’ (2009: 134–5). Engaging students in any form, and particularly through a culturally relevant lens, has had roadblocks, some of which we articulated early in this chapter. The connection between our international context and Chile’s local/domestic context produces a type of culturally relevant approach that is glocalized – that is, there are profound benefits in the local or domestic contexts for each group under the umbrella of internationalization that are also a reality for both groups when interacting with different ‘local’ peoples. Stepping out of our comfort into the fully glocalized world has profound effects not only for those whom we serve, but also for ourselves. By expanding our worldview and perspectives we open new horizons for engagement. It would be disingenuous, however, to imply that educational policies currently working against CRP and pedagogies of love are a phenomenon solely of the post-Obama era – disconnects have existed for as long as differences between

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45 The Sun Never Sets on the Privatization Movement: A Return to the Heart of Darkness in a Neoliberal and Neoimperialist World Brian Dotts

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea – something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad1

In this essay, I frame the global privatization movement as a new and modern form of imperialism (neoimperialism) enveloped with a fictional subtext conveyed in Joseph Conrad’s classic literary work, Heart of Darkness. My intent is not to create an equivalence between contemporary privatization movements and the psychological madness and violence depicted in Conrad’s 1902 novel. Conrad did not and could not anticipate the imperialistic forms of privatization taking place today. Rather, my intent is to analyze the parallels that do exist between the imperialistic and ethnocentric motives behind the contemporary

global privatization movement and Conrad’s depiction of imperialistic forces infiltrating the Congo, what Lionel Trilling (1999: xli) referred to as Conrad’s ‘radical critique of European civilization’, and what Chinua Achebe (1999: xlv) intimated as ‘the image of Africa as “the otherworld”, the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization’; parallels that foreground the privatization movements taking place globally include motives to colonize new markets for profit. Without the ‘horror’ depicted in Conrad’s novel, a constant appears to be present in privatization efforts, perhaps best described by Stephen Ball who declared, ‘in policy rhetorics which laud “the private” there is deafening silence in relation to the role of the profit motive, and a systematic neglect of business failures, and of business ethics’ (2004: 3). This chapter focuses on the role of the profit motive fundamentally driving the global privatization movement, a motive intensely expounded in Heart of Darkness, but it is a motive that transcends time, place, and classic literary works.

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Hannah Arendt refers to the Western imperial project as ‘a by-product of capitalist production’, a ‘system [and its representatives] that relentlessly produced a superfluity of men and capital’ (1973: 189, 314). Being forthright, the profit motive serves as the single most essential motive in any capitalist endeavor, regardless of other motives that may exist or the consequences that may result. The search for profits serve as capitalism’s raison d’être. Even if the goal is to serve a positive and beneficial need for society, the capitalistic enterprise must eventually profit from its work in order to sustain survival. Many incorrectly perceive the economic system of capitalism as apolitical and amoral, a system composed of ‘natural laws’ (i.e., the laws of supply and demand) that operate in non-ideological ways. Such an application results from a long tradition of inappropriately applying positivistic natural science methods where they do not belong or are illsuited to providing us with the whole picture. A review of recent research focusing on the goals of the neoliberal global education efforts (the imperial project) appear to support Arendt’s conclusions while exemplifying Conrad’s literary narrative. For example, Fazal Rizvi (2017:1) asserts that ‘the neoliberal imaginary of globalization has re-cast the purposes and governance of education, viewing it in human capital terms while supporting individual self-interests in an increasingly competitive society’ (2017: 1). In other words, neoliberalism perceives students as capital investments, much like machinery, equipment, land, and real estate, and if properly trained and skilled, can serve as profitable outlays. As a result, ‘most policies and programmes of educational reform are now framed, justified, and promoted on a widely held belief that aligning educational policies and practices with the profound economic, political, and cultural changes that globalization signifies is necessary’ (ibid.: 1). In addition, while the focus of this essay is not Africa, although Nigeria is included among a variety of countries experiencing the effects of school

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privatization, my focus is on the broader neoliberal purposes motivating the privatization of schooling. I will begin by giving a synopsis of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, followed by the parallels that exist in the neoliberal movement to colonize new profitable markets in public education, today’s neoimperialist project. What makes this imperialist project new is that public schooling serves as a new marketable means to serve imperial interests. Beyond the traditional imperialistic exploitation of natural resources (described in literature like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) public schooling now serves as a new market to exploit for profitable ends, profits often subsidized by taxpayers resulting from political and corporate complicity. The global movement to privatize public schooling parallels what David Harvey describes as ‘using public resources to build appropriate infrastructures for business … coupled with subsidies and tax incentives for capitalist enterprises’ (2007: 47). In other words, ‘corporate welfare substituted for people welfare’ (ibid: 47). The market, rather than a democratic political system, serves as the focal point of neoliberalism. Moreover, the political system is utilized as a means to pursue corporate interests.

CONRAD’S CRITIQUE OF IMPERIALISM IN HEART OF DARKNESS In his literary masterpiece and critique of imperialism, Conrad’s main character, Charlie Marlow, is hired by a European company in the late 19th century (referred to in the novel simply as ‘the Company’) in order to relieve Kurtz, a well-educated, virtuous, European known for extracting ‘as much ivory as all the [traders] put together’ and whose work in the Congo made him a ‘first-class agent’ for the ‘Administration’ (1999: 50). Kurtz’s character serves as a symbol of ruthless imperialism, despite his initial good intentions. At first, Kurtz is perceived as ‘an emissary of pity

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and science and progress … a “universal genius”’ to fellow imperialists and God-like to natives. Kurtz ‘came to them with thunder and lightning … and they had never seen anything like it’ (ibid.: 30, 33, 70). During his journey to meet Kurtz in the jungle’s inner-station, Marlow comes face-to-face with the horrors of imperialism; namely, the violence and exploitation inflicted on the Congolese natives by Kurtz and Company in the extraction of ivory for profit. Marlow’s experience in the heart of darkness gives rise to his deepest psychological conflicts when the brute force of imperialism is realized in all its ‘horror’. ‘Civilized’ man, according to Marlow’s cultural construct, is represented by Europe and European culture while developing countries like the Congo are depicted as backward and savage, in need of ‘civilizing’, typical rationales for colonial and imperialistic pursuits. As the novel opens, the narrator describes a group of passengers cruising down the Thames, a river that symbolizes the height of European civilization. ‘The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway’, explains the novel’s narrator. ‘The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light’ (contrasted with the darkness of Africa), he continued. ‘The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth’, As the sun set during their cruise, the narrator declares, ‘What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! … The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires’ (ibid.: 3–5). Once a dark place, says the narrator, it is now the model of civilization, refined, commercial, diplomatic, modern, ‘an object of veneration for good men, who see it “in the august light of abiding memories”’, according to Lionel Trilling’s (1999: xliii) review of Conrad’s fiction. The Thames represents the accomplishments of civilization that had

evolved from an ancient history of Roman and Gaul barbarity. By positioning European culture as ‘evolved’ and other cultures as ‘unevolved’, Conrad sets the stage, the anecdote, for the colonial, imperialistic horror about to take place in the Dark Continent. Africa is depicted as ‘“the other world”, the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality’, according to Chinua Achebe (1999: xlv). Africa, and specifically the Congo, are depicted as the Heart of Darkness, the antithesis of light and cultural illumination. European ethnocentrism juxtaposes two races of men; one deemed ‘civilized’, the other as ‘savage’, and two societies; one with ‘the devotion to efficiency’, according to Conrad (1999: 7); the other as disorganized and chaotic. Such cultural constructs, as we know too well, rationalize exploitation, colonization, and imperialism of the Other, in this case, the ‘dark’ continent to which the cruising yawl navigates from the Thames to the Congo in 1890. Initially aloof to the depths of exploitation he would witness later in the novel, Marlow considered himself ‘one of the Workers’ for the company, ‘with a capital’, ‘something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle,’ he thought, as another person in the Company declared the missionary importance of ‘“weaning those ignorant [natives] from their horrid ways”’ (ibid.: 14–15). Nevertheless, after administrative formalities and a physical conducted by the Company’s physician, during which Marlow ‘began to feel slightly uneasy’, feeling as if ‘something ominous [was] in the atmosphere’, a ‘conspiracy … something not quite right’ (ibid.: 12), he navigated ‘upward of thirty days’ in the Company’s steamship toward the Congo along ‘a mighty big river … resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land’ (ibid.: 9). Marlow describes navigating the immense

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snake-like river through ‘the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck of the earth [which] struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion’ (ibid.: 27). And, in the innerdepths of extraction, ‘the word “ivory” rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed’, he thought. ‘You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse’ (ibid.: 27). Marlow and crew were stealing quietly into a schism inaugurated by the clash of two incompatible Worlds. Once Marlow neared the Congo, he described ‘the edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf … far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist. The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam…. in what looked like a God-forsaken wilderness’ (ibid.: 15). But as the accountant told Marlow, once he arrived at the first inner-station, their work in ivory was ‘to make money, of course’ (ibid.: 24). No matter how virtuous, how ‘civilizing’ their efforts may have been understood abstractly, ‘the devotion to efficiency’ was a hallmark of British colonialism; efficiency and making money (ibid.: 7–8). As Kurtz tells Marlow toward the end of the novel, ‘You show them you have in you something that is really profitable, and then there will be no limits to the recognition of your ability’ (ibid.: 85). ‘The conquest of the Earth’, or taking ‘what they could get for the sake of what was to be got’ was ‘something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to’ (ibid.: 85, 7–8). Conrad’s novel ends with Kurtz’s death, a high fever resulting from an unknown virus contracted in the jungle, symbolic perhaps of his ultimate downfall brought on by his merciless turn into the darkness of violence and murder, which Kurtz himself refers to in his last breath, as ‘the horror, the horror’ (ibid.: 96), committed by his (and the Company’s) imperialistic pursuit of profit in Africa. The

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character of Kurtz personifies the potential horror that can be committed when a search for profits is cloaked in the garb of ‘civilizing’ missions that objectify human beings as mere instruments in the pursuit of selfinterest. For Kurtz finally realized while dying that the entire exploration for profit became such a focus of his interest, something that he ‘bowed down to’, that he became willing to objectify, dehumanize, and kill natives in his pursuit. Despite any good intentions, despite the occasional positive outcome, and despite the humanitarian rhetoric espoused by imperialists, we should always acknowledge that whatever the effects of privatization, its motivations necessarily and fundamentally rest upon profitmaking, a requirement that must be realized for any other secondary motivation to be successful. Any policy that rests ultimately on the profit motive, regardless of any positive or negative outcomes of that policy, must remain suspect, particularly when this root motive directs public goods and public services toward those ends. The profit motive, based on seeking self-interest, which is not often equivalent to the public interest, must always remain dubious and liable to strong regulation and oversight in order to protect the public good. But even with these constraints, making education and other traditional public services susceptible to the profit motive remains doubly problematic because privatization removes public responsibility over schooling while making schools highly vulnerable to risk-taking and mismanagement. An unregulated capitalism knows only one constraint, the loss of profits.

EXAMPLES OF GLOBAL PRIVATIZATION AND UNIMPRESSIVE RESULTS The following sections provide examples of school privatization efforts in a number of countries. Since my focus is on trying to understand the underlying purposes of school

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privatization and its outcomes across a number of nation states, I provide only a brief description of each country’s involvement in this movement. The countries I chose as a focus for this chapter were listed in UNESCO’s working paper titled, The Privatization of Education in Developing Countries: Evidence and Policy Implications, authored by Pedró and Watanabe (2015: 1–11). Not all the countries listed in this report were used due to length restrictions, but I did choose five countries in order to contextualize a variety of examples: Chile, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Uganda. Moreover, the scholarly literature that I reviewed also provided occasional references to generalizations that have been made by researchers across countries and regions with other studies showing a number of patterns that have developed in underdeveloped countries’ attempts to privatize their schools.

Chile While the extraction of ivory (qua Conrad) is not the direct focus of modern-day imperialism, the privatization of schooling, often imposed by external actors in a given country, is now a fundamental activity taking place throughout the globe. Numerous countries continue to experiment and adopt privatization schemes that are focused on human capital development for the fundamental purpose of creating a workforce capable of fulfilling profitable motives. According to Dennis Beach, for example, Neo-liberal restructuring is leading to the creation of apparatuses through which education is objectified for economic accumulation through an outsourcing of functions that were formerly carried out within first domestic and voluntary, and then state arrangements to capitalist enterprises. This is part of a successive privatisation of education services for processes of capitalisation. (Beach, 2008: 195)

Recently, Naomi Klein (2018) has written about the privatization efforts underway in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria in 2017 that parallel post-Katrina in New Orleans.

Namely, privateers are using the crisis in Puerto Rico to develop charter schools and school vouchers in order to replace the country’s public education system with an apparatus friendly to privatization efforts. Privatization of education offers new territory for imperialistic opportunities whether of production or in investments. As Kurtz declares in Heart of Darkness, when ‘you have in you something that is really profitable … then there will be no limits to the recognition of your ability’ (1999: 85). Not only can the natural resources of a country be targeted for profitable consumption, privatized schooling offers new opportunities for profit-making by colonizing traditional government services. In other words, as I’ve argued elsewhere (Dotts, 2018), the notion that private education companies are operating in a free market is simply an ideological façade, an incorrect application of free-market terminology in the absence of a free market, While advocates of privatization pursue their objectives under the guise of a free market framework, there is little congruence between a free market and privatization of public schools. The privatization of public schools, not unlike the privatization of public prisons, is more accurately described as contractual agreements entered into between government entities – state agencies, legislatures, or local governmental units – and private companies. These agreements maintain public funding of schools (much like the privatization of prisons and military security operations), but the companies that manage them profit from these agreements, and the agreements are rarely subject to market competition. (Dotts, 2018: 500)

In Chile, school privatization schemes were implemented in the 1980s during the authoritarian rule of Augusto Pinochet, who began his regime after a military coup in that country in 1973 with US backing. While the research focusing on the effects of privatization show insignificant educational gains achieved by affluent Chilean families, poorer families were harmed by the changes in education reform, exasperating the already existing inequality in educational achievement in that country. This ‘growth in inequality was driven by losses by

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the least-advantaged classes rather than by gains by the most privileged’, according to Florencia Torche (2005: 225). Moreover, school privatization reform was enacted during a period of ‘retrenchment of the [country’s] safety net, coupled with an economic crisis’, which ‘resulted in growing unemployment, poverty, and inequality’. While Torche admits that privatization schemes did not ‘create … educational inequality’, she accurately points out that schooling ‘became a relevant arena in which inequality was actualized and reproduced’. In other words, Torche’s analysis illustrates ‘that school sector [privatization] adds to, rather than mediates, the effect of socioeconomic status on educational attainment’. How is this stratification amplified? According to Torche, it is related to ‘a selection effect’, which includes ‘unmeasured characteristics related to education outcomes, such as motivation, ability, or social networks, that may be higher among those who migrate to [privatized schemes of schooling] than among those who stay in public schools’, as well as possible ‘peer effects resulting from school sorting’ (ibid.: 334–5). Not only has Chile experienced greater stratification and inequality, Juan Pablo Valenzuela et al. (2014: 217– 41) have confirmed the increased segregation that has resulted from the private voucher and tuition schools that exist in that country. Martin Carnoy compared school privatization reforms in both Sweden and Chile, concluding ‘that national voucher reforms’ in both countries ‘fail to do what their proponents claim, even when the conditions demanded by the purest voucher advocates are met, such as reducing teachers’ collective bargaining power in Chile’ (1998: 335–7). Moreover, the voucher system in Sweden resulted in no change in private enrollment ‘because of the strong ideological ties Swedes have with’ (ibid: 335) their system of public education, generally. On the other hand, Chileans considered private schooling ‘as better than public [schools] before reform’ (ibid: 335) took place. According to Carnoy’s comparisons of these two countries, ‘the effect on public

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education of a voucher plan depends on the position public education holds in a society’ (ibid: 335). Interestingly, Carnoy concludes that ‘in both Chile and Sweden, vouchers for private education were intimately connected with political agendas related to public services’ (ibid: 336) the intentions of which included ‘dismantl[ing]’ public education in Chile and ‘circumvent[ing]’ the public system of education in Sweden. Unlike Chile and other countries that have attempted to implement school privatization reforms, Sweden responded to the voucher system by increasing public ‘spending on education’ and by ‘focusing on low-income students’ (ibid: 337) in its public schools. Pinochet’s regime in Chile, however, opened the doors to neoliberal interests as lobbying by ‘right-wing think tanks’ justified privatization schemes augmented by a depressed economy, according to Kenneth Saltman (2007: 9). Universities too ‘were increasingly regulated while the world of business was increasingly deregulated’, according to Carlos Alberto Torres (2011: 185). In Latin America generally, privatization schemes have not been well received, according to Juan Carlos Molleda, who points out that ‘the adoption of market-driven economies by inefficient and corrupted governments’, and the shifting of traditional government responsibilities to ‘private for-profit and nonprofit organizations’ has had more detrimental consequences among the high-poverty populations. However, many of these privatization schemes, which focus on ‘deregulation’ and ‘efficiency’ have not only made many ‘situation[s] worse’, they have also resulted in a backlash by citizens who ‘are becoming more outspoken and active in seeking a better quality of life and demanding greater participation’ (2000: 523–5). Molleda quotes Mexico’s laureate writer, Carlos Fuentes, who explains this backlash in the following way: ‘We are transferring our culture, our passion, our history, our love … to civic society organizations, to environmental and human rights groups, to labor unions and agrarian cooperatives, to universities and the press’ (ibid: 485).

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Chile’s privatization movement resulted in virtually no change in academic achievement gains among more affluent Chileans while worsening inequality in that country. Unfortunately, investing in private companies to educate more students in Chile with better results drained revenues from the public schools by redirecting them to private education companies. Gains might have been achieved had the Chilean government invested this money in its public education system. Nevertheless, the privatization movement there has been disappointing.

India The impact of school privatization reforms in India appear to be abysmal, according to Das and Singh (2014: 7), including the impact of privatization on higher education. Any benefits accruing from the privatization of schooling have been enjoyed solely by ‘the elite’, which has ‘posed greater challenges and threats’ to the education system in India. While the authors conclude that privatization schemes have ‘the potential to improve the quality of education’ while ‘reduc[ing] … cost [and] access to education for all’, they present enormous challenges in India. Other privatized methods of schooling ‘may end up becoming money-making’ strategies that have no real interest in improving ‘the quality of education’ (ibid.: 10). Sangeeta Kamat (2004: 268–71) concludes that school privatization reforms in India and elsewhere, are stunningly uniform across countries and continents and appear once again to signal the ‘end of history’, the universalization of social and economic systems and the power of international institutions to exceed those of the nation state … justified on the basis of radically upgrading access, equity and efficiency of educational services. (Kamat, 2004: 268–71)

However, rather than focusing on the neoliberal goals of school privatization, Kamat analyzes the cultural or nationalistic responses to global

neoliberalism, concluding that ‘framing the local as cultural and the global as political economic obscures the mutually constituting relation between the two levels’, resulting in ‘new nationalisms’ overlooked in other critiques that ‘romanticize … the local’. This ‘new nationalism’ in India, according to Kamat, ‘clearly grasp[s] the pivotal role of schooling in building mass culture’ (ibid: 270, 271), as illustrated by the country’s Curriculum 2000 framework, which has been used in India’s primary and secondary system of schools identifying a shift from ‘anti-colonial’ nationalism to a contemporary ‘cultural nationalism’. But what Kamat describes is a shift from post-colonial nationalism to a new nationalism, the latter is probably more prevalent throughout the global community where colonization did not occur. Specifically, this new nationalism, understood as developing ‘a national consciousness, a national spirit and national unity’ (ibid: 282), which is viewed as necessary for developing ‘national identity’, is more or less described in the United States as neo-conservatism. What Kamat describes is a common tension that has developed between the attempts to maintain traditional cultures while also trying to navigate the effects of globalization that continually weaken and fragment such social coherence, illustrating polarized objectives. Kamat appears to agree in her conclusion. India’s ‘Curriculum 2000 may be understood not purely as the ideological expression of the Hindu nationalist government but the efforts of a populist state mediating the contradictions of increased poverty and social unrest with the demands of economic liberalization’ (ibid: 282). Likewise, ‘globalization does not represent the triumphant journey of the sovereign nation state, but a traumatic ordeal for the postcolonial nation’, she declares (ibid.: 282). Beyond the 2000 Curriculum, neoliberal educational reforms have ‘supplant[ed] traditional educations’ by ‘erod[ing] traditional learning practices and promot[ing] values and knowledge at odds with young people’s own communities’, according to Rashmi Pramanik

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and Minaketan Bag (2013: 411). ‘Curricula are being increasingly geared towards global economic needs’ in the ‘hope of gaining employment’, Pramanik and Minaketan Bag assert. Furthermore, privatization’s impact on school curricula ‘marginalize[s] certain groups from the educational system, leading to high drop-out rates or poor overall performance in conventional institutions’. Paralleling the effects of school privatization reforms in Latin America, Pramanik and Minaketan Bag (2013) conclude that private schools in India have ‘become the institution of first choice for the children of the elite and even of the middle classes’ (ibid: 413), which has increased class stratification and inequality in that country. It remains to be the case following privatization efforts in India that the country still has approximately eight million children without access to elementary education, according to Geetha B. Nambissan and Stephen J. Ball (2010: 327). But despite the enormous shortfall, Nambissan and Ball argue that the interest groups who have been successful in the privatization reforms implemented in India were part of a campaign built on ‘symbolic politics’, as cited by Nambissan and Ball from the work of Keck and Sikkink (Nambissan and Ball, 2010: 329). The authors point out that these interest groups include The Heritage Foundation, the Philanthropy Roundtable, The Wall Street Journal, and the Cato Institute, all ‘interlinked through the Atlas Economic Research Foundation “Freedom Network”’ (based in Arlington, Virginia), but also involve ‘investment companies and venture capitalists looking to new market opportunities in India’. As part of the typical deregulatory process these groups seek, they attempt ‘to free education from “the control of bureaucracies and regulating bodies”’ (2010: 329–30) in the same way that they seek to deregulate government controls in markets. Moreover, in 2007, ‘the “philanthropic arm” of Orient Global, a Singapore-based investment firm, established an education fund of $100 million’ in order ‘to target the market for private schooling for children from low-income families in India’ by creating ‘a pilot chain of budget

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private schools for the poor’, based on information reported by Andrew J. Coulson, the former Director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom (ibid.: 330, 332). In fact, Nambissan and Ball include a graph in their published research that illustrates the massive and complex network of ‘intellectual entrepreneurs and advocacy organizations’ that rivals some of the largest such networks throughout the globe. According to Nambissan and Ball, ‘Atlas has launched or nurtured 275 such think tanks in 70 nations around the world’, obviously ‘a formidable network of power, influence, ideas, and money’, all of whom ‘share … libertarian values’ (339–40).

Pakistan Sajid Ali referred to the privatization practices in Pakistan with similar alarm. ‘The education policy [there] supports growth of [privatization] and discourages (or fails to improve) public provision’ for schooling, which he views ‘at odds with the principles of social justice’ (2014: 78). He defines social justice as ‘ensur[ing] the wellbeing of the individual as well as collectivity, where both are interdependent’, and that ‘justice in a society can be achieved through equitable distribution of benefits and responsibilities’ (ibid.: 81). Unfortunately, Pakistan’s privatization reforms, according to Ali, ‘became an instrument of sustaining social stratification, with the only difference of replacing colonial power with local elites’ (ibid.: 82). And today, students ‘have to go to private schools to get the kind of education that we were able to get from public schools for almost free’, and ‘the poor assessment results of public schools from official sources attest that the quality of learning has declined in [Pakistan]’ (ibid.: 83). According to Ali, an obvious contributor to this outcome is related to the fact that the Ministry of Education decreased its annual expenditure for education, in 2009 totaling approximately 1.9% of GDP, compared with previous years’ 2% of GDP, resulting in

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‘Pakistan reflect[ing] the worst performance within the South Asian region’ (ibid.: 83). He cites K. Bacchus who concludes ‘that in postcolonial countries (mostly third world) … small elite group[s]’ have ‘taken control of the power and even state machinery is being used to consolidate and maintain … hegemony’. Consequently, ‘education is being geared to legitimize stratification and power structure[s] rather than challenging [them]’, heightening the need for ‘critical teachers and [critical] teaching’. Ali proposes a challenge that most national schools face, namely, to ‘challenge the status quo and … the existing power structures of our society’ (ibid.: 84–5). Related to Pakistan’s public-private partnerships, which were established in the 1990s, Iffat Farah and Sadaf Rizvi conclude that they too contribute to class stratification, and are used most often as a ‘temporary … transition to privatization’, which ‘make them an unlikely strategy for a sustained increase in the chances of access to good-quality schooling for the poor and disadvantaged’ (2007: 339). Moreover, one of the key motivations behind this privatization scheme, which began in 1979 and is similar to charter management organizations in the United States, is to promote efficiency in the delivery of public education services managed by private companies and to improve quality (339–40, 344). These public-private partnerships in Pakistan, according to Farah and Rizvi, resulted in an unequal power relationship between local authorities on the one hand and funding agencies and non-governmental organizations on the other whereby the latter exercised greater power in ‘negotiat[ing] the terms of the various partners’, and ‘communit[ies]’ were ‘the least empowered, since [they were] obliged to receive and accept the responsibilities given, if [they] wanted a school’ (2007: 345). Moreover, while ‘a desired goal of this type of partnership’ was to empower ‘parents and women’, the latter ‘were rarely represented in Village Education Committees’ (ibid: 345) that were set up for this purpose. Other ‘local government education officers felt alienated’

as well, which created an ‘operationally weak’ (ibid: 345) and skewed partnership. Nevertheless, Pakistan’s public-private partnerships resulted in very modest educational ‘access in urban areas, where parents were able to pay a reasonable tuition fee and where experienced school operators ran schools’, but the partnerships were difficult ‘to sustain in rural areas’ (ibid.: 347). Likewise, while there were also modest gains in academic achievement in urban areas, the authors conclude that these ‘partnerships are often unequal and retain many aspects of hierarchical governance’, they tended to be ‘transitory’, and were often used to develop a full-fledged privatized school wherein a school would eventually be ‘owned, financed and managed by private or community groups or individuals’ (ibid.: 350). While the authors provide additional examples of public-private partnerships, they conclude that all of these partnerships needed to have stronger and more reliable state involvement and responsibility, at the very least, in ‘financing and quality assurance[s]’ if basic education provision is to be successful (ibid.: 352).

Nigeria According to Ige Akindele Matthew, who served as the Deputy Director in Nigeria’s Ministry of Education in 2015, ‘education has become an issue that cannot be managed and financed solely by the government’ of Nigeria. Due to the government’s inability to fund even basic schooling to meet the demands of a growing population, ‘a collaboration of government and the private sector is thus necessary to achieve its effective management and improved funding’ for education. In Nigeria, privatization of early childhood education includes a ‘majority of … schools … owned by churches, mosques, individuals, and corporate organizations’ (2015: 371, 376). As in any country, finite national budgets must compete for funds, and schools

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represent only one of many demands from the ‘manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, and health’ (ibid: 371) sectors in Nigeria, according to Matthew. The private sector has stepped in to fill the demand in schooling, which has become ‘a very lucrative business’ (ibid: 372), but the privatization of early childhood and elementary schools has also resulted in a number of problems stemming from private companies not upholding the minimum regulatory standards established by the government, including appropriately prepared teachers, curricular goals adhering to the nation’s developmental standards, nutrition, health, and language needs (English is often taught in these schools and native languages ignored), as well as the government’s inability to monitor and effectively remedy these problems. ‘Many private schools evade inspection’, and avoid paying the required government fees for licensing. ‘Some proprietors’, according to Matthew, ‘even lack the educational qualifications, experiences, and skills recommended for effective operation and management of schools’, despite the fact that these private entrepreneurs ‘charge exorbitant fees’ (ibid.: 371–3). After years of experimenting with privatized schooling in primary schools, Matthew underscores the fact that Nigeria’s system of schooling, like other countries mentioned in this chapter, have become ‘essentially a privilege for the elite, wealthy, and expatriate population’, which has made a mockery of Nigeria’s cultural belief that high quality schooling should be ‘a right for all children’ (ibid.: 373). The advantages that do exist in the provision of schooling, such as increasing access for a privileged minority, do not outweigh the fact that private proprietors are cutting costs in order to ‘maximize their financial gains’, according to Matthew whose conclusion is based on other reports published on privatization in Nigeria (ibid.: 375). ‘The caregivers in most schools lack the basic qualification while more than half have no formal education’, which violates Nigeria’s ‘National Policy on Education’. In addition,

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beyond the problematic response to public schooling generated by privatization efforts, a fundamental problem in Nigeria is rooted in the nation’s poor infrastructure, including its schools, the lack of safety this presents, and the lack of available land for school use (ibid.: 375–6). To put it in Conradian terms, ‘there were no external checks’ on the profitseeking ventures in Nigeria (Conrad, 1999: 26). Another pattern presented by school privatization in Nigeria that appears to transcend individual countries is the fact that private schooling offers financial gains for private interests with little or no improvement in schooling. While Nigeria improved access resulting from the establishment of numerous new private schools, privatization in Nigeria has evidently provided no other benefits than achieved by traditional public schools. Privatization efforts appear to significantly enhance profits for the proprietors involved. As Sharon Subreenduth concludes in her analysis of privatization in South Africa, ‘choice seems to be articulated only within the limits of one’s means and individual networks of relations’ (2013: 597).

Uganda Uganda’s interest in achieving widespread public schooling is relatively new and far from realization, particularly since schooling continues to be viewed by many of the country’s leaders as a private service enjoyed by those who can afford tuition. However, ‘Uganda is touted as making commendable progress’ in its attempts to achieve ‘Education for All (EFA)’ since implementing ‘its 1997 Universal Primary Education (UPE) policy’, according to Mayengo et al. (2015: 293). Mayengo and colleagues conducted an ethnographic study of a rural, ‘low-fee’, private school in Uganda, which was established on the basis of the World Bank’s ‘cost-sharing … educational principles’. Their research focused specifically on ‘parental choice’ within the context of privatization efforts and ‘the extent to which

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neoliberal ideas pervade parents’ and proprietors’ talk about choice in a context where choice is limited and privatization is more about hope than individual prosperity ownership’. These researchers refer to parents’ perceptions of ‘knowledge aid’ in the World Bank’s practices. Mayengo et  al. (2015: 293–4) conclude that the ‘conception of choice is simply not meaningful in rural Uganda’, where one is unlikely to find any school, public or private. Their focus on rural Uganda was intended to illustrate the limitations of private choice often celebrated in neoliberal discourse. Including similar research findings from Nambissan and Ball (2010) and Lincove (2012), Mayengo et  al. (2015) make an extremely important conclusion with regard to the privatization efforts of international organizations like the World Bank, The privatisation of schooling in Uganda and other poor countries rides on the backs of hardworking individual proprietors without business capital whilst public schools are being largely funded by supra capital [World Bank] whose inevitable ‘business’ involves investment in poorer nations. [World Bank] investment depends on the development of capital in those countries (Lincove, 2012). Thus, in very specific ways the development of education is inextricably linked with the development of capital whose fiscal mechanisms are directly linked to government-aided schools. (Mayengo et al., 2015: 295).

Because enrollments have increased significantly in Uganda’s primary schools since the passage of the UPE, ‘a rush by investors/ entrepreneurs to open up private schools’ has taken place, often with the perception that ‘entrepreneurs are … helping the government’ remedy problems (ibid.: 296). Although Mayengo et al. (2015) focus solely on one rural school in Uganda, they conclude their ethnographic study by pointing out that, (citing Molla, 2014), ‘an active endeavor to fill “the knowledge gap” from the top (World Bank) down (local instantiation of policy) rushes in to supplant the steady in-country knowledge growth more organically emerging’, and that ‘the lived contradictions of the “knowledge aid” work against what is in the

best interest of Ugandans’. Moreover, ‘the weakening of “local knowledge regimes” and the uncritical “acceptance” of neoliberal principles are unintended consequences of this knowledge aid’ (ibid.: 305). In short, the production of knowledge is occurring from a top-down approach and without the involvement of natives in the transmission and development of their native knowledge and culture. While access did improve as shown in these authors’ ethnography, UPE schools’ ‘financial indebtedness to the [World Bank] … tether public schools, rather than private schools, to market economics and the business model of privatization for profit with corporate sponsorship/ administration like we find in the West’ (Mayengo et al., 2015: 306). The authors also quote Walford, who concludes that, ‘[t]he obvious, but quite unrealistic, answer is that less economically developed countries should improve their government schools’. However, this normative expectation ‘is unrealistic simply because most of these countries are swimming in corruption so that a great deal of funding simply does not reach the schools and much of what does is misused’ (306, citing Walford, 2011). On the ground, parents often considered themselves as being responsible in ‘choosing’ their children’s education despite the fact that choice was nonexistent, illustrating an adaptation by parents of the neoliberal language of choice while no choice existed (Mayengo et al., 2015: 307).

CONCLUDING REMARKS John Kenneth Galbraith declared that, ‘When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself’ (2001: 143). Although asserted in 1973, at the beginning of the global privatization movement, Galbraith’s quote reflects

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the degree to which neoliberal thinking has saturated, if not eclipsed, the traditional functions of the nation state. Privatization, the transferring of government responsibilities and services over to the private sector has clearly spread across the globe, the impetus of which has been managed by international governmental and non-governmental organizations. For example, according to Saltman, ‘USAID [United States Agency for International Development] and the World Bank’ have ‘participate[d] in the newest incarnation of American-led imperialism’, and he provides the example of their involvement in textbook production in Iraq following the US invasion, ‘textbooks … full of vitriol and Baathist party propaganda’, as an endeavor focused on ‘selective censorship’ (2007: 102–3). Private corporations like Creative Associates, which contracts with the US government to provide educational development overseas ‘appear integral to US economic and military strategy around the world’ (ibid.: 72). This gives the impression that privatized school reforms funded by the United States are not about improving learning for the sake of learning Indigenous culture, but more about preparing a significant level of human capital available for imperialistic pursuits. Like Conrad’s depiction of ‘the Company’ throughout Heart of Darkness (1999), the corporation’s interests in profitable education ventures are typically justified by “weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways’, albeit cloaked in more subtle and affable marketable language. And Dana Burde’s 2014 book, Schools for Conflict or Peace in Afghanistan, uncovered textbook development practices funded by USAID that not only undermined US propaganda efforts in that country, but also (and more importantly) produced textbooks for Afghan children that were inappropriate and unethical. Burde quotes a USAID staff member who’s experiences in Afghanistan revealed that ‘unequal distribution of resources and development’

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among local groups ‘is not only going to cause conflicts, but it’s also going to create problems for them’ (2014: 96). But beyond the use of international government and non-governmental organizations to improve schooling worldwide, many efforts that have been successful; neoliberal ideology has developed a new ethos devoted to seeking new profitable markets in schooling, often not in opposition to government, but in cooperation with governments who have either been co-opted by market interests or for a variety of structural reasons remain dependent on them. USAID’s mission consists of ‘development’, which is one of a three-pronged approach commonly referred to as ‘the three Ds of US national security policy’, according to testimony given before a House subcommittee in 2009. The other two prongs are ‘defense and diplomacy’ (2009: 1). According to the former Deputy Administrator of USAID for Iraq and Afghanistan, James Kunder, USAID had ‘1,600 American personnel … in Africa’ alone along with ‘460 officers scattered across all of Africa’ (ibid.: 41). During the subcommittee’s hearings, USAID’s global involvement came under scrutiny and former directors of USAID’s operations were questioned. The Chair of the subcommittee, Representative Diane Watson (D-Rep), for instance, asserted during the hearing that she was ‘struck … by the number of US Government agencies that plan and implement foreign assistance programs [including education]’, which ‘have become so numerous that the Department of State and USAID control a little over half of the US foreign assistance budget’ with ‘USAID … alone … manag[ing] just over 40 percent of the total US foreign assistance programs’. The result, she continued, is ‘a patch-work of different programs with different strategic objectives’ (ibid.: 1–2) that is difficult to oversee. Another member of the subcommittee, Representative Brian Bilbray (R-Rep), was more specific in his criticism asserting,

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One of the things that I feel really concerned about is that a lot of our foreign aid goes in under the guise of teaching capitalism, teaching independence, and teaching productivity. What we end up doing, then, is teaching [host countries] corruption, mismanagement, and all the negative things that we point to [in] other countries. (USAID, 2009: 3)

Bilbray also criticized the deception that often occurs when identifying for-profit companies as non-profits, which gives the impression that the latter ‘are exempt from all the temptations that apply to for-profit [companies]’ (ibid.: 82). And Gerald Connolly (D-Rep), another member of the subcommittee, complained about the ulterior motives of these ‘humanitarian’ efforts, asserting that, ‘our foreign aid must be closely linked to our national security objectives but must not be perceived as entirely self-interested’ (ibid.: 4–5). While companies like Coca Cola have been successful in obtaining exclusive rights to sell its products in public schools globally, Coca Cola (and other corporations) is in the business of preparing pre-packaged, standardized school curricula. As Kenneth Saltman pointedly describes: Coca-Cola participates in undermining democracy by shifting power from people to corporations in four basic ways: (1) by working to privatize public goods and services, (2) by propagating ideologies favorable to corporate management of the planet, (3) by promoting the kinds education that fail to link the production of knowledge to the wielding of power, (4) by embracing curricula that actively erase the material and symbolic struggles waged by different individuals and groups over work, consumption, and culture. An example of Coke’s anti-public, pro-privatization agenda in education is its involvement in the First Book national literacy campaign (www.firstbook.org) (2004: 157).

Moreover, many of these ‘humanitarian’ efforts take place in virtual secrecy; agreements are made between governments and private companies and non-governmental organizations without much publicity until after the fact. And it is often the case that the ulterior motives driving private companies in this new, modern form of imperialism, rest upon their search for new profitable markets,

what Conrad refers to in Heart of Darkness as the ‘Eldorado Exploring Expedition’, which conducted its work in ‘secrecy’, and whose ultimate goal was ‘to tear treasure out of the bowels of the land … with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe’ (1999: 36). The examples provided above reveal patterns related to privatization efforts developed in a number of countries. The single positive outcome across all examples appears to be improvements in increasing access to education as a result of newly developed privatization schemes or through shared publicprivate ventures. But access to schooling means little to underdeveloped nations that desperately need strong systems of mass schooling. The evidence also appears to support the unfortunate conclusion that the primary beneficiaries of privatized schooling are the financial investors and entrepreneurs who either receive government funds to manage public schools or receive funds and/ or tuition fees to operate their own schools, many of which are underdeveloped, poorly organized, staffed with unqualified teachers, haphazard curricula, and lack a variety of basic requirements we usually tend to associate with good schools like safe, comfortable, and healthy environments. Children and their parents who do benefit from privatized arrangements, if at all, tend to be middle-to upper-middle-class or privileged students, a small minority of students whose parents are able to pay the fees associated with privatized education services. Furthermore, as Richard Wolff concluded, ‘the costs of controlling foreign societies are increasingly socialized’ (1970: 230), such as ‘the complex economic costs’ associated with state funding and resources that are often devoted to implementing privatization schemes, as well as tax revenues that are often sacrificed in order to incentivize private entrepreneurship today. The most effective way to respond to the educational needs of developing countries is to assist in the development of government schools and to help governments reach

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as many students as possible, and to facilitate local community involvement in those schools. If a country is going to enjoy a lasting effect in education and schooling, it must be established as a public system. Margaret Stuart astutely applies Edward Said’s work in her discussion of the totalizing narrative of human capital production in international development. ‘Government policy … require[s] special vigilance … [in] … critiquing the attitudes and perceptions such policy texts advance about a globalized world view, a universalizing of experiences that assimilate all into the one symphony’ (2016: 146). And as Stephen Ball asserts, ‘In fetishizing commodities, we are denying the primacy of human relationships in the production of value, in effect erasing the social’ (2004: 4). But the privatization movement seeks more opportunities to invest, to construct, to school, where the goals of each project and each outpost are presented as ‘a beacon on the road towards better things, a centre for trade of course, but also for humanizing, improving, instructing’, as described by Conrad (1999: 40). In Samoff’s discussion of colonial schools in Africa, ‘schools were not expected to be liberating or self-actualizing but rather to serve an instrumental colonial need’ (2012: 122). With the contemporary school privatization movement in Africa and elsewhere today, we are witnessing the same kind of instrumental efforts pursued under a new neoliberal, neoimperialistic, privatization guise. Despite any good intentions, the enormous failures to achieve mass schooling that reflect the local needs of Indigenous populations, and despite the public subsidization of private profits, students of global privatization might quietly reflect, as Marlow did in the Congo, that ‘this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect’ (Conrad 1999: 41–2, my italics). But for the profiteers, privatization of public goods rings in the air much like ‘the word “ivory” rang in the air’ in Conrad’s

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novel. The pursuit of profit is so powerful, ‘You would think they were praying to it’ (1999: 27). Perhaps Raymond Morrow said it best when he described the neoliberal hegemony that is taking over traditional public institutions, including education at all levels: The great benefactor of the desacralization of the university as a cultural institution has been the increasing penetration of market forces into higher education and the reorganization of university governance around ‘playing the game’ of academic capitalism.… In this context the market becomes the Trojan horse for undermining academic autonomy by ostensibly nonideological and noncoercive means based on the interest of the ‘consumers’ of education and research. (Morrow, 2006: xxvi–xxvii)

In much the same way that ‘all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’ neoliberalism has contributed to a cultural paradigm shift endowing the market with God-like features that bring ‘thunder and lightning’ to those who have ‘never seen anything like it’. But this new form of imperialism – the neoliberal project to privatize public goods and services – appears to be better depicted by the old parable of merely ‘putting old wine into new bottles’ (Conrad 1999: 61).

Note  1  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness & Selections from The Congo Diary with an Introduction by Phillips, C. New York: The Modern Library, 1999, pp. 7–8. All direct quotations hereafter are from this edition.

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Arendt, H. (1973) The Origins of Totalitarianism. Orlando, FL: A Harvest Book: Harcourt, Inc. Ball, S. (2004) ‘Education for Sale! The Commodification of Everything?’ King’s Annual Education Lecture. University of London, June 17. www.kcl.ac.uk/archive/events/education/ events/events-files/annualedlecture2004.pdf [accessed 16 March 2019]. Beach, D. (2008) ‘The Changing Relations between Education Professionals, the State and Citizen Consumers in Europe: Rethinking Restructuring as Capitalisation’ European Educational Research Journal. 7 (2) pp. 195–207. Burde, D. (2014) Schools for Conflict or for Peace in Afghanistan. New York: Columbia University Press. Carnoy, M. (1998) ‘National Voucher Plans in Chile and Sweden: Did Privatization Reforms Make for Better Education?’ Comparative Education Review. 42 (3) pp. 309–337. Conrad, J. (1999) Heart of Darkness & Selections from the Congo Diary. Introduction by Phillips, C. New York: The Modern Library. Das, J. & Singh, N. K. (2014) ‘Impact of Privatization on Education in India: An Analysis’ International Journal of Research in Commerce & Management. 5 (10) pp. 7–11. http://ijrcm. o r g . i n / d o w n l o a d . p h p ? n a m e = i j rc m - 1 IJRCM-1_vol-5_2014_issue-10-art-02. pdf&path=uploaddata/ijrcm-1-IJRCM-1_vol5_2014_issue-10-art-02.pdf [accessed 16 March 2019]. Dotts, B. W. (2018) Educational Foundations: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives. London, UK: Cambridge University Press. Farah, I. & Rizvi, S. (2007) ‘Public-Private Partnerships: Implications for Primary Schooling in Pakistan’ Social Policy & Administration. 41 (4) pp. 339–354. Galbraith, J. K. (2001) The Essential Galbraith. Edited by Andrea D. Williams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Harvey, D. (2007) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kamat, S. (2004) ‘Postcolonial Aporias, or What Does Fundamentalism Have to Do with Globalization? The Contradictory Consequences of Education Reform in India’ Comparative Education. 40 (2) pp. 267–287. Klein, N. (2018) The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

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Saltman, K. J. (2004) ‘Coca-Cola’s Global Lessons: From Education for Corporate Globalization to Education for Global Justice’ Teacher Education Quarterly. 31 (1) pp. 155–172. Saltman, K. J. (2007) Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Samoff, J. (2012) ‘More of the Same Will Not Do: Learning without Learning in the World Bank’s 2020 Education Strategy’. In: Klees, S. J., Samoff, J., & Stromquist, N. P. (eds.) The World Bank and Education: Critiques and Alternatives. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers. pp. 109–121. Stuart, M. (2016) ‘Out of Place: Economic Imperialisms in Early Childhood Education’ Educational Philosophy and Theory. 48 (2) pp. 138–149. Subreenduth, S. (2013) ‘Theorizing Social Justice Ambiguities in an Era of Neoliberalism: The Case of Post-Apartheid South Africa’ Educational Theory. 63 (6) pp. 581–600. Torche, F. (2005) ‘Privatization Reform and Inequality of Educational Opportunity: The Case of Chile’ Sociology of Education. 78 (4) pp. 316–343. Torres, C. A. (2011) ‘Public Universities and the Neoliberal Common Sense: Seven Iconoclastic Theses’ International Studies in Sociology of Education. 21 (3) pp. 177–197. Trilling, L. (1999) ‘Commentary’. In: Conrad, J. (ed.) Heart of Darkness & Selections from the Congo Diary with an Introduction by Phillips, C. New York: The Modern Library. pp. xli. United States. Congress. House. Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Subcommittee on Government Management, O. (2010) U.S. Agency for International

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Development: management challenges and strategic objectives: hearing before the Subcommittee on Government Management, Organization, and Procurement of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, House of Representatives, One Hundred Eleventh Congress, first session, April 28, 2009. Washington: U.S. G.P.O. U.S. Agency for International Development: Management Challenges and Strategic Objectives (2009) ‘Hearing before the Subcommittee on Government Management, Organization, and Procurement of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’ U.S. House of Representatives, 111th Congress, April 28, Serial No. 111–50. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Valenzuela, J. P., Bellei, C., & de los Ríos, D. (2014) ‘Socioeconomic School Segregation in a Market-oriented Educational System. The Case of Chile’ Journal of Education Policy. 29 (2) pp. 217–241. Walford, G. (2011) ‘Low-fee Private Schools in England and in Less Economically Developed Countries: What Can Be Learnt from a Comparison?’ Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education. 41 (3) pp. 401–413. Wolff, R. D. (1970) ‘Modern Imperialism: The View from the Metropolis’ The American Economic Review. 60 (2) pp. 225–230. World Bank (2009) ‘World Bank Approves $150 million for Post Primary Education in Uganda’ Press Release. http://web.worldbank.org/ WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:22 124165~menuPK:34463~pagePK:34370~pi PK:34424~theSitePK:4607,00.html [accessed 16 March 2019].

46 Teaching Global Affairs: Problem-posing Pedagogy and the Violence of Indifference Kathalene A. Razzano

I teach in a global affairs program at a state university with one of the most diverse student populations in the United States. Introduction to Global Affairs is offered as a universitywide elective that fulfills a general education ‘global understanding’ requirement. It is a challenging course to teach, not only given the scope and scale of the dynamics of a globalizing world, but also because we have to allow for students with a wide swath of political, cultural, and religious differences. The course is underscored by a focus on social justice and positive peace. I argue that Global Affairs, as an emerging interdisciplinary field of study, should incorporate critical pedagogy in its approaches to teaching, learning, and knowledge production. In particular, I pull from Joe Kincheloe’s complex critical pedagogy (Kincheloe, 2004). Kincheloe calls for a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the conditions and contexts under which and through which teachers teach and students learn. Such an approach also foregrounds several key concerns. These include, but are not

limited to, social justice and equality, that education is political, the alleviation of human suffering, interest in student wellbeing, and cultivating the intellect, marginalization, and resistance to dominant power (Kincheloe, 2004). These concerns are also shared by our class, both in terms of course content, but also in terms of relationships between students themselves, students and teacher, and students and their social/cultural worlds. One of the forbearers of this approach is Paulo Freire whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1970, first introduces the problem-posing model for critical pedagogy. In this chapter, I will articulate the goals and design of the ‘Introduction to Global Affairs’ course, Freire’s problem-posing pedagogy as an approach, the key concepts we use, and, finally, proffer an example of how this comes together around what I call the violence of indifference. The course is designed to acquaint students with the concept, manifestations, and experiences of globalization, as well as what it means to be a global citizen. It seeks to

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give dimension and shape to the individuals, organizations, and governments whose interactions and dependencies are intensified under globalization. We examine the role of technology – especially in terms of communication, finance, health/medicine, manufacturing, transportation, and weaponry – in facilitating the movement of people, money, ideas, and objects around the globe. And so, we should understand that these interactions and forms of global connectedness have different consequences for different people. We identify the major players in globalization including organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. We examine the economic, cultural and political processes of globalization and their effects on real people and their lives, including our own. For example, we explore the uneven consequences of neoliberal policies and ideologies that encourage the privatization of water as well as the forces which push back against those ideologies, and instead argue that water is a human right. As part of the ‘global understanding’ general education requirement, we work towards achieving the following outcomes: • Develop an understanding of global patterns and processes and their interaction with society • Demonstrate an understanding of the interconnectedness, difference, and diversity of a global society • Apply an awareness of global issues to a consideration of individual or collective responsibilities within a global society • Devise analytical, practical, or creative responses to global problems or issues

Students come into the class with a varied understanding of these processes of globalization. Some, usually immigrants, children of immigrants, or foreign students, come in with a sophisticated understanding of many aspects of globalization. Others come with a willingness and openness to have a broader understanding of global processes. And still others, who very often come with/from privileged positions are quite content with the status quo. While all my

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students’ lived experiences are enmeshed and inseparable from globalization, not all of my students are consciously aware of their relationships to the global, and that these relationships are influenced by varied forms of power, ideologies, geographies, labor, and capital. The question for the educator, then, is how to guide these students to the above general education outcomes, while also providing them with the critical thinking skills to recognize and challenge diverse, global forms of oppression, injustice, and inequality. One of the very first terms we discuss is dignity – how to honor, maintain, respect, regard, and bestow it. What might it look like, feel like, be like to lose one’s dignity? We pull from Maya Angelou’s definition of dignity as a starting point. She says: Dignity – the word itself – has come to mean different things to different people, as many words do. It doesn’t just mean always being stiff and composed. It means a belief in oneself, that one is worthy of the best. Dignity means that what I have to say is important, and I will say it when it’s important for me to say it. Dignity really means that I deserve the best treatment I can receive. And that I have the responsibility to give the best treatment I can to other people. (Azzam and Angelou, 2013)

In our class discussions we seek to maintain the dignity and humanity not only of the populations and people we encounter, but of all of us in the classroom. It is here, I argue, that we can look to the work of Paulo Freire and the field of critical pedagogy. Freire’s work provides a language and an approach to anchor ourselves in the fundamental recognition of the humanity and dignity of ourselves and others. In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire (2000) explores the relationship between ‘oppressors’ and the ‘oppressed’. He argues that both the oppressed and the oppressors are dehumanized through the violence of oppression, which can be physical, psychological, and/or institutional. The oppressors, in their acts of oppression, dehumanize themselves as they dehumanize others. Thus, the Pedagogy of the Oppressed seeks to illuminate and challenge dehumanization in all its forms:

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The central problem is this: How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they live in the duality in which to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is impossible. The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization. (Freire, 2000: 48)

He further argues that the liberation of the oppressed must also be accompanied by the return of the oppressors’ humanity. Here, Freire helps set the stage whereby students can recognize and interrogate distant oppressor-oppressed relationships, for example, post-colonial African states, but they also begin to understand their own positioning as oppressor or oppressed (or both) in local and distant contexts. In the classroom, we can see this play out with respect to students’ experiences of gender, race, and nationality, as well as students’ connections to labor, and to the people who labor to create the goods and services they use. Freire contrasts two models of education in order to demonstrate how we might develop and engage with a pedagogy of the oppressed. The first he calls the ‘banking model’. Here, we can imagine the teacher making knowledge deposits into the student. The student is not asked to examine or reflect on this material. Rather, the student’s evaluation will be based on whether she or he is able to return this deposit on an exam. In contrast, Freire advocated for what he calls a ‘problem-posing’ education. This form relies on dialogue and collaboration between the students as well as the teacher, where ‘the teacher presents material to the students for their consideration, and reconsiders her earlier considerations as the students express their own’ (2000: 81). Through this dialogic process, students begin to see the world as a set of interconnected systems and flows, and come to recognize their lived experiences as valid and important forms of knowledge. In my global affairs courses, I let students know that I do not have the answer to many of the questions I am going to ask them, but rather together we will explore and understand the complexity of some of these

global issues, tensions, and contradictions. For example, I ask my students whether human rights exist. Are they God-given and inalienable? Or are they a social construct that only exists if agreed to by people and governments? And, in either case, how do we protect and enforce them? These kinds of questions link students to larger issues of global governance, security, and privilege, as well as to actual lived examples and experiences of human rights violations. According to Freire: Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to themselves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge. Because they apprehend the challenge as interrelated to other problems within a total context, not as a theoretical question, the resulting comprehension tends to be increasingly critical and thus constantly less alienated. (Freire, 2000: 81)

Much of the pedagogical work here takes three forms. Chris Barker, borrowing from Cornel West, identifies these as deconstruction, demythologization, and demystification (2002: 179). Deconstruction works at the level of individual texts and ‘involves a reading of texts that challenges the tropes, metaphors and binaries of rhetorical textual operations … the objective of deconstruction is to open to view the operations and assumptions of texts, including their world-views or “ideologies”’ (Barker, 2002: 179). Here, I might have students look at water conservation campaigns around the globe and ask them how water is represented in these campaigns – as an object, a resource, a commodity? Are ownership claims being made? Who do the campaigns target – individual users, office spaces, industrial uses, agricultural users? Demythologization builds upon the work of deconstruction. Once we begin to see the constructedness of the metaphors, languages, and tropes in texts and their connection to particular world views, we can ‘highlight the social construction of metaphors that regulate descriptions of the world and their possible consequences for classifying the social’ (Barker, 2002: 179). The fundamental work

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of demythologization is how it ‘indicates to us the plasticity of identities’ (ibid.: 179). Students begin to make connections in and between these socially constructed metaphors, again, often when discussing race and gender, and test the flexibility and durability of these metaphors. This also opens space for alternate social and cultural constructions which might challenge the status quo and call out oppressive ideologies. Indeed, according to Freire, demythologization is one of the critical tasks of problem-posing education. He writes, ‘In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation’ (2000: 83, emphasis Freire). West introduces demystification as the macro-level critical structural analysis of culture and institutions and the ways in which the ‘cultural politics of difference’ operate in, through, and around them (1990: 105). Here, we begin to see the ways in which policy decisions made by organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) impact the everyday lives of people around the world. For instance, how do structural adjustment programs requiring privatization of water impact Indigenous populations, women, those in poverty, those reliant on natural water systems, and rural as well as urban populations? What becomes key here is that students who may have seen their place in and experience of the world as fixed and immutable now understand it as dynamic and capable of being changed. In my approach to problem-posing pedagogy, I first ask my students to think conceptually by introducing a common vocabulary. From Manfred Steger’s Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (2013), we pull three key ideas: • Globality – ‘a social condition characterized by tight global economic, political, cultural and environmental interconnections and flows that make most of the currently existing borders and boundaries irrevelant’ (8, emphasis Steger).

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• Globalization – ‘a set of social processes that appear to transform our present social condition of weakening nationality into one of globality’ (9, emphasis Steger). • Global Imaginary – concept referring to people’s growing consciousness of belonging to a global community (10).

And to these we add Campbell et al.’s concept of a global citizen: ‘People who see their local actions as having global consequences and who have accepted that they have a responsibility to work to better the conditions of the world and its people’ (2010: 4). We move forward then with the idea that global citizens should be informed, ethical, and responsible (ibid.: 26). Key here is understanding globalization as a plurality of processes rather than a monolithic, amorphous process. These processes work from the top down as well as from the bottom up, and they work to foster globality, even as globality then shapes these processes. Global imaginary and global citizen link together as a way for my students to position themselves in the world and to begin to think about their relationships with people, objects, and ideas. How do their actions and ideas impact global communities? How are they impacted by global communities? One of the ways we work through these concepts is to think about the material outputs of labor. Whose hands have touched your phone before it got to you? Who are the people involved in the development, production, distribution, and disposal of the plethora of commodities, objects, things we encounter in our everyday lives? What are the conditions of the workers’ employment (including pay, hours, workplace, laws, culture)? What are the rules of trade and the market? Who decides those rules? Under what conditions? To whose benefit? To whose detriment? These questions call for a discussion of ideology – what it is, who has it, and how it works. Freire shows us that ideology is best first presented as examples rather than by name. And so, we investigate the sites of neoliberal projects, like water privatization, to examine the participants, ideas, interests, and implications

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of these projects. Further, we can get to ideology when we discuss the role of debt, as a concept and as a material reality. Students begin to question and examine the cultural, political, and economic manifestations of debt, whether it’s nations going into debt to build dams for hydropower, or families going into debt to get clean water, or students going into debt for a college education. Using films like The Take (2006) (about factory recovery and the cooperative movement in Argentina) and Flow: For the Love of Water (2008) (about the political, economic, and cultural uses of water), we come to see how debt works at an individual, local, regional and state level. We also see how the 20th–21st century ‘financialization of daily life’ (Martin, 2002) and the corresponding explosion of debt is linked to a particular ideological project known as neoliberalism. We then examine neoliberalism, with its doctrine of privatization, deregulation, freemarket, and race-to-the-bottom labor practices, as an ideological formation and the dominant economic model of our time. Presenting material this way sometimes has its downside, however. Usually about halfway through the semester, students begin to feel overwhelmed with the challenges, contradictions, disasters, and dangers we face as a global community. For all that problemposing reveals, disrupting hegemonic ideologies comes with a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. Indeed, one semester we had a guest speaker from the development sector who gave a talk about population, consumption, and jobs. During the question portion, a student raised his hand and asked, ‘Are we all screwed?’. She replied, ‘Yes, although some of us more than others’. This speaks to the challenge of this course. What is to be done when confronted by the scope and scale of global conflicts, crises, and structural violence, and the ways these manifest in people’s lives? How, as an educator, do I keep my students, and myself, from falling into the dark abyss of indifference? Here I link their complicity to their agency through what I call the violence of indifference.

The violence of indifference argues that to know about things like human-rights violations, ecological changes/climate change, resource exploitation, and structural violence, and to do nothing makes you complicit in that violence. It defines violence broadly to include not only physical violence, but also psychological, emotional, and institutional violence. My thinking about indifference borrows from Elie Wiesel. He writes: The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies. To be in the window and watch people being sent to concentration camps or being attacked in the street and do nothing, that’s being dead. (Wiesel, 1986: 101)

Wiesel powerfully articulates the necessity of not only holding on to our compassion and humanity, but also realizing our responsibility to act, disrupt, intervene, challenge, and change. Wiesel’s ‘being dead’ here corresponds to Freire’s understanding of dehumanization. The violence of indifference refocuses us on issues of humanity and dignity. To remain indifferent erases the humanity of others as well as our own. And what are we without our humanity? Still, we live in a world overwhelmed with physical and structural violence, with genocide, disease, and land degradation, with gender-based violence, resource depletion, and corruption, with children fleeing violence across deserts and oceans seeking safety. We have to acknowledge the limits of our abilities to act. This is to say that we cannot take on every struggle, every fight. What is to be done? How do we proceed? One of the ways we might answer that question is through an engagement with Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters (1997). One of Gordon’s fundamental concepts is that of complex personhood. She writes, ‘Complex personhood is about conferring the respect on others that comes from presuming that life and people’s lives are simultaneously

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straightforward and full of enormously subtle meaning’ (1997: 5). This is our acknowledgment that people’s lives are messy, contradictory, collaborative, beautiful, joyful, violent, carefree, constrained, lonely, and heartbreaking. And in this acknowledgement, we also see that there are few simple solutions to many of the challenges facing us today; not if we want to respect the humanity and dignity of ourselves and others. Complex personhood informs and helps guide problem-posing pedagogical practice. It also insists that we acknowledge the lived experiences of the ‘other’. For example, complex personhood insists that we demythologize and demystify discourses and institutional practices that frame refugees and migrants as dangerous, malicious, infectious, and burdensome. Understanding complex personhood allows us to ground ourselves in the web of relationships, acknowledge the dynamism, and see the potential sites for intervention and change. For Gordon, ‘We need to know where we live in order to imagine living elsewhere. We need to imagine living elsewhere before we can live there’ (1997: 5). Gordon uses the metaphor of haunting to think about moments of disruption where ghosts emerge as present–not present specters. The ghosts can be labor – think again about the hands that haunt our smartphones, or all the hands that have touched the seat you last sat in, or are sitting in right now. All the people putting in the labor from resource extraction to disposal haunt these objects. Similarly, ghosts can be the resources themselves. The oil, metal, water, animals, plants, and minerals used to make our plastics, machines, food, and other commodities leave their own imprints, their own traces, on environments and on people as they move through extraction to disposal. Here we can think of the effects of pollution, of land use, and of climate change. Ghosts sometimes make themselves apparent and insist on being acknowledged, for example, the children of Flint, Michigan. Flint was a booming automobile manufacturing city until many of the factories closed due

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to downsizing and offshoring of production. Made famous by Michael Moore’s documentary Roger & Me (1989), Flint came to represent the many American industrial cities that globalization left behind – characterized by poverty, unemployment, urban decay, and structural violence. After the global economic crisis of 2008–9, Flint was deeply in debt. In 2011, the state of Michigan took over Flint’s finances. One of the cost-saving solutions enacted by the emergency manager was to switch municipal water sources. Doing so meant temporarily sourcing water from the Flint River. The management team opted not to add erosion controls (which would cost $100/day), a violation of federal law. The water from the Flint River was so corrosive it rusted pipes and leeched lead into the water. Researchers found 40% of the homes in Flint were exposed to high levels of lead, and three of Flint’s schools also tested positive for high levels of lead (CNN, 2019). At the same time, a local pediatrician found that the number of children with elevated lead levels in their blood had doubled, and in some neighborhoods, tripled (CNN, 2019). Children exposed to lead may develop a wide array of irreversible neurobehavioral changes, including diminished intelligence and behavioral conditions, as well as cardiovascular and renal dysfunction (WHO, 2010). The children of Flint haunt the city, the state, and the nation. The longterm impact on the children’s health and life possibilities is not yet known. Their existence renders apparent the workings of structural violence, of how a population can become an abstract, dehumanized object rather than a collection of actual people. Further, they provide another way to understand the importance of clean water for human dignity and health. This is an idea that links Flint to water movements across the globe, such as India, Bolivia, China, South Africa, and Palestine. But, ghosts can also be particular and specific to an individual. Sometimes a ghost may call just to you, speak to a particular aspect of your own history and experience. For example, in the Japanese film Nobody

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Knows (2004), the main character, a 12-yearold boy, is wearing a t-shirt from the boardwalk arcade I frequented as a kid on vacation in Ocean City, Maryland. In the film, this character has been abandoned by his mother and left to care for three younger siblings. I was struck by the t-shirt’s presence on the screen, in the narrative, and in the literal space of the film set captured by the camera. This ghost spurred my own interests in the global circulation of second-hand clothing. What Gordon’s conception of hauntings and ghosts offer us are starting places for our own actions in combating the violence of indifference. You start where you’re called. Find your ghost and follow it. There is enough injustice to go around. In my Introduction to Global Affairs course, I have a two-part assignment that employs problem-posing by asking students to first define the violence of indifference and structural violence. Then they are asked to take their definitions and analyze the Global Citizen website. Global Citizen’s main page states, ‘Global Citizen is a community of people like you. People who want to learn about and take action on the world’s biggest challenges. Extreme poverty ends with you’ (Global Citizen, n.d.). This assignment gives students some play with the ideas, and allows them to focus their definitions around their own interests. Some of the themes include hunger/food security, patriarchy, immigration, fast fashion, poverty, and climate change. The second part of the assignment gives them the opportunity to use deconstruction, demythologization, and demystification in assessing the Global Citizen website. I ask them a series of questions, such as whether the website is an example of the violence of indifference as they’ve defined it, or whether it combats the violence of indifference. What is the website doing right? What is it doing wrong? Does it address structural violence? How does it ground its campaign against global poverty? What cultural forms and forces does the website mobilize? Students are asked to determine whether the website is an effective campaign

against global poverty. I assign the students this website because I myself find it both hopeful and problematic. Hopeful because of its mission and its articulation of complexity. It understands the interconnectedness of our global challenges such that to end poverty means making sure everyone has access to clean water and making sure girls get an education. It is problematic in its clicktivist approach to engage global citizens. One student’s critique was that they are only engaging with people who agree with them already. Another student said they doubted whether politicians will pay much attention to a petition composed of people who aren’t their constituents. This assignment requires them to contemplate on what it means to take action, to not be indifferent. They begin to focus on the challenges, but also the possibilities. They have to account for globalization, economics, political power, and people power. The next development here is the Violence of Indifference Project. It begins with a return to global citizenship (ethical, informed, and responsible). The first step is to gather information. Students are to immerse themselves in the materials that frame and discuss their area of interest. The second step is to examine the discourse. Here we return again to the deconstruction, demythologization, and demystification model. The third step is to find sites of intervention, to change the conversation (discourse), and start project development. Even if students never get to project development, they are working towards what Gordon calls an alternative diagnostics, ‘of what has been done and what is to be done otherwise’ (1997: 18). It is an imaginative and speculative practice that is guided by the problem-posing model. I tell my students that they could become solution ambassadors and talk about gamechanging ideas to help shape the conversations. For example, we are currently seeing the discourse on single use plastics and pollution erupt into the mainstream. People are having conversations about it on social media, in the news, and in their homes and

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schools. For example, the social media movement #stopsucking takes on the plastic straw. However, those behind this movement argue that the straw acts as a ‘gateway plastic’: To us, it was the ‘gateway plastic’ to the larger, more serious plastic pollution conversation. Plus, plastic straws are social tools and props, the perfect conversation starter. In starting the conversation by pairing something playful alongside our gross human over-consumption (‘500 million consumed daily in the United States alone’) we aimed to nudge people toward understanding the issue. (Ives, 2017)

This campaign demonstrates for us how important it is to shape the discourse around solutions and the potential for solution ambassadors to have an impact. In the five years that I’ve been teaching the violence of indifference, I have found that it holds real promise in terms of getting students thinking about their relationships to people, objects, and ideas. I’ve had one student organizing a protest of Forever 21, a fast-fashion retailer based in the United States that provides cheap, fashionable clothing primarily for young women (although they now also have men’s and girls’ departments). My student was disturbed by their labor practices, and she believed her personal boycott of the store wouldn’t really challenge the violence of indifference. Her goal was to bring to light the unjust labor practices and resource exploitation involved in fast fashion. Another student, a year after taking my class, messaged me that he spent his Saturday on The Mall in Washington, DC with a group handing out information on the genocide of the Yazidis, an ethnoreligious group living in Iraq, by ISIS. The Mall is the epicenter of DC politics and tourism with the Capitol Building on one end and the Washington Monument on the other, and the Smithsonian Museum buildings in between them. The White House is also nearby. This student is an avid news consumer, but that hadn’t previously prompted him to act. Thinking of himself as a global citizen in connection with the violence of indifference provided the motivation to join this protest

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and work towards bringing the plight of the Yazidis into the public discourse. Indeed, he said the violence of indifference haunts him. In this chapter, I’ve argued for the value of critical complex pedagogy and of using a problem-posing pedagogical approach when teaching Global Affairs. This is three-fold. First, it creates a classroom environment which encourages dialogue, and collaboration as well as imaginative and speculative thinking. The classroom becomes a generative space of knowledge production rather than knowledge consumption. Students see their contributions and experiences as important and valuable. We interrogate the wold around us, conceptualize the global imaginary, and learn with and from each other. And, perhaps most importantly, it models a mode of inquiry that acknowledges Kincheloe’s complexity and Gordon’s ‘life is complicated’. This is a model that students can take with them beyond this course. Second, Freire’s articulation of the oppressed-oppressor dynamic and its foregrounding of humanity and dignity provide a framework through which we can take up the many challenges of our time – from climate change, to armed conflicts, to gender-based violence, to postconsumer waste, to global health, to refugees. It also gives us the opportunity to think about our own positionalities in oppressed–oppressor relationships. For some students, their experience as an oppressed person is validated and reframed. For other students, this is the first time they understand themselves as an oppressor. Although, I remind all my students that they have at least this one thing in common – by their very presence as a student in an American university classroom, they are among some of the most privileged people on the planet. Third, problem-posing sets the tone in which and through which I am able to propose the violence of indifference to my students. It provides a language to articulate that tension between knowledge and (in)action. It offers us ways of thinking about our local, regional, and global challenges, as well as our responsibility for and responses to these challenges.

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REFERENCES Azzam, A. (2013). Handle with care: A conversation with Maya Angelou. Educational Leadership, 71(1), 10–13. Barker, C. (2002). Making sense of cultural studies: Central problems and critical debates. London, UK: Sage. Campbell, P. J., MacKinnon, A. & Stevens, C. R. (2010). An introduction to global studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. CNN. (2019, June 14). Flint Water Crisis Fast Facts. Retrieved from https://www.cnn. com/2016/03/04/us/flint-water-crisis-fastfacts/index.html Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed: 30th anniversary edition (Myra Bergman Ramos, Trans). New York, NY: Continuum. (Original work published 1970) Global Citizen. (n.d.) Retrieved June 15, 2019, from https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/ Gordon, A. F. (1997). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ives, D. (2017, October 19). The gateway plastic [web log]. Retrieved from https://www. globalwildlife.org/the-gateway-plastic/

Kincheloe, J. L. (2004). Critical pedagogy primer. New York: Peter Lang. Klein, N. & Lewis, A. (Producers) & Lewis, A. (Director). (2006). The take [Motion picture]. United States: First Run Features/Icarus Films. Kore-eda, H. (Producer), & Kore-eda H. (Director). (2004). Nobody knows [Motion Picture]. Japan: Cinequanon/IFC Films. Martin, R. (2002). The financialization of daily life. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Moore, M. & Stanzler, W. (Producers), & Moore, M. (Director). (1989). Roger & me [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros. Studios. Starr, S. (Producer), & Salina, I. (Director). (2008). Flow: For love of water [Motion picture]. United States: Oscilloscope Pictures. Steger, M. B. (2013). Globalization: A very short introduction (3rd ed.) Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. West, C. (1990). The new cultural politics of difference. October, 53(Summer), 93–109. doi:10.2307/778917 Wiesel, E. (1986). One must not forget. (the evil of indifference to tragedy). U.S. News & World Report, 101. World Health Organization. (2010). Childhood Lead Poisoning. Retrieved from https://www. who.int/ceh/publications/leadguidance.pdf

47 Promoting Critical Consciousness in the Preparation of Teachers in Colombia1 Jaime A. Usma, Oscar A. Peláez, Yu l i a n a P a l a c i o , a n d C a t a l i n a J a r a m i l l o

INTRODUCTION Colombia is going through a crucial time in its history due to a number of political, economic, social, and educational events. The government has secured a groundbreaking peace deal with the largest leftist group of the country, promising to end a war that racked the country for more than half a century, killing tens of thousands and displacing millions. As a consequence of this already accomplished peace negotiation, Colombians are facing a crucial moment where some are optimistic and celebrate an upcoming new era appearing on the horizon, yet others lean more towards pessimism, attached to a more conservative conception of justice and a belief that the government should not be so generous in embracing such negotiation processes. These differences have led to higher levels of polarization in the country between those who are in favor of the peace process and those who are against it. Perhaps the most salient aspect of current Colombian society relates to its political transition from an

administration that was able to secure peace, to a right-wing, conservative government that is attempting to modify the most contentious components of the deal signed. During recent years, negotiations of binational trade agreements with the United States and other countries in Europe, Asia, and the rest of the Americas, as well as profound examination and restructuring of the national government to become a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), have involved the acceptance of economic and political reform packages. As is evident in recent policy documents and reform agendas in Colombia (OECD/IBRD/World Bank, 2012), current models of education and language policy in the country include the enforcement of new accountability tools and indicators, the adoption of international standards, the recognition of the Programme for International Student Assessment’s (PISA) exams as a worldwide indicator of local and transnational education quality, and the promotion and enforcement

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of English as an international language across the whole educational system. From this perspective, education and language reforms not only respond to globalized agreements on what education means today, but also to international pressures connected to economic and political agendas. At the same time, state officials have adopted international models of reform by introducing a far-reaching set of education and foreign language policies that include the National Bilingual Program 2004–2019, the National Program for the Strengthening of Foreign Languages 2010–2014, the National Law of Bilingualism in 2013, and more recently, the National English Program 2015– 2025, and Bilingual Colombia 2014–2018. Programs and policies like these have made evident the special interest of the central government in promoting, improving, and regulating foreign language teaching, learning, and certification processes in the country in an effort to look more attractive to foreign investment in times of economic globalization, transnational policymaking, and international competitiveness (Peláez and Usma, 2017). As government officials have stated, the main purpose of these policies and programs has been to educate good and competitive citizens who will be able to interact with the world through the use of a foreign language (Ministerio de Educación Nacional, 2014). These reforms contribute to the introduction of new discourses about bilingualism in Colombia; the import and definition of standards for all academic levels; the evaluation and certification of local teachers, students, and language programs according to these standards and views; and the promotion of international models for professional development within the country. Some researchers have pointed out that these reforms mainly respond to the transnational political and economic agendas that Colombia has undertaken in recent decades (Usma, 2009a, 2009b), which have generally imported monolithic and homogeneous discourses on reform (Guerrero, 2008) at

the expense of local knowledge (González, 2007). More recently, some papers have described limitations in implementing these policies in urban and rural communities (Correa et al., 2014; Maturana, 2011; Peláez and Usma, 2017; Usma, 2015), while others have emphasized the multiple challenges of imposed policies that do not recognize the active role that different educational actors should play for a more successful introduction of these reforms in the country (Bonilla and Tejada, 2016; Cárdenas, 2006; Correa and Usma, 2013; Guerrero, 2010; Peláez and Usma, 2017). According to a report written by the OECD in 2016, Colombia has made education a main priority to improve the economic and social prosperity of the country, but the challenge of achieving educational quality continues. Thus, as the country enters its historic post-conflict era, it is vital to respond to new challenges such as closing gaps between rich and poor and especially offering educational possibilities to the whole country. According to this report, the average number of years of education in rural areas is 5.5 years, while in urban areas this number goes up to 9.2 years, demonstrating inequality in the educational opportunities offered to Colombian residents. In addition to that, only two out of ten high school graduates in rural areas manage to enter higher education immediately following graduation. In the country’s transition out of decades of war and social exclusion, education plays a decisive role as it opens citizens’ minds to embrace their reality and become active actors in its transformation. The road to peacebuilding demands an education that contributes to forming citizens able to resolve conflicts peacefully, strengthening reflection and dialogue, as well as stimulating respectful coexistence. As pointed out by Paulo Freire decades ago: The time of transition involves a rapid movement in search of new themes and new tasks. In such a phase, man needs more than ever to be integrated with his reality. If he lacks the capacity to perceive the ‘mystery’ of the changes, he will be a mere pawn at their mercy. (Freire, 2005[1974]: 6–7)

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In context, teachers are called to become actors for social transformation. This situation requires analytical standpoints that move beyond the purely linguistic and technical views that characterize the field of education, encouraging us to move into critical views that examine the sociocultural, economic, and political implications of schooling and, more specifically, foreign language teaching, learning, and certification in Colombia. This calls for open spaces where alternative views can be openly discussed, and where different school actors can express their concerns, conceptualizations, and proposals in continuous connection with national and international conversations. With this purpose in mind, some universities have formulated and implemented courses on foreign language and education policy in their curricula. Through their courses, these universities have sought to explore the cultural, economic, political, socio linguistic, and pedagogical implications of the reforms while also promoting discussion and interaction among the colleagues from the different universities participating in the initiatives. This chapter reports on the universities’ endeavors, including how the language education policy courses attempt to prepare preservice and inservice English teachers as policymakers and active agents of change able to respond to the challenges posed by the current situation in Colombia. The following sections elaborate on the main concepts guiding this study, the program that was proposed and implemented in the three universities, and the findings of these programs.

EDUCATING PRESERVICE TEACHERS AS FUTURE POLICY ACTORS At a time when international reforms attempt to accommodate educational systems to economic and political demands and interests, teachers continue to play an active role in the formulation and critical appropriation of

policies across countries. As reported in multiple studies (see e.g., Ball, 1998; Ball et al., 2012; Brown, 2010; Davis, 2014; Hart, 2002; Paciotto and Delany-Barmann, 2011; PeaseAlvarez and Davies, 2012; Steiner-Khamsi, 2004; Sutton and Levinson, 2001; Tochon, 2015; Usma, 2015), more than simple implementers of official government discourses and policies, teachers act as policymakers by reshaping state social, educational, and language policies. Thus, while the government officially mandates policy in an attempt to homogenize school systems, teachers enact these discourses and plans according to the needs and possibilities of their school communities. They turn initial directives into diverse curriculum initiatives that reflect the particular conditions of the educational settings where they serve (Hornberger and Johnson, 2007; Levinson et  al., 2009; Menken and García, 2010; Ricento and Hornberger, 1996; Shohamy, 2009, 2010; Spillane, 2004; Sutton and Levinson, 2001; Usma, 2015). This is how the initially linear policymaking plan becomes a highly unpredictable and complex endeavor across countries, educational systems, institutions, and classrooms, while teachers become determinant policy actors dealing with uncertainty, complexity, and frustration as initial proposals reach the implementation stage. Teachers require both initial and continuous teacher education programs that provide them with opportunities to get familiar with the conceptual and practical tools to face increasing or changing demands. Preservice and inservice teachers need to examine the multiple implications, challenges, and possibilities available or to be explored with students, school communities, and educational actors in general. As suggested by Varghese and Stritikus, in the midst of current reforms impacting school communities, teachers are never conduits of a particular policy, while ‘teacher education and teacher training, especially in relation to bilingual teachers, must specifically address the role of teachers as policy makers’ (2005: 84). This is where the

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intentional and explicit preparation of teachers as political actors must be guided by their professional capacity as effective policy interpreters and negotiators (Heineke et al., 2015), and where an effective study of policy is more than required. As policy actors, teachers are faced with personal, political, cultural, and social decisions, and become critical agents playing a crucial role in the construction of democratic societies, for which their preparation needs to respond to these demands (Heineke et al., 2015; Menken and García, 2010). Aware of these demands and reflecting a Latin American tradition in critical teacher education and pedagogy, our approach to teacher education and language policy studies in Colombia draws on Paulo Freire’s calls for critical consciousness and action. For this Latin American thinker and pedagogue, teachers need to respond to extended oppression and societal concerns through a sustained process of critical reflection and action. From this perspective, conscientização represents the development of the awakening of critical consciousness, which does not appear naturally, but as part of an educational process (Freire, 1970, 2005[1974]). As pointed out by Freire’s education for consciousness, we all relate to our world in a critical way as we intervene in reality in order to change it. This critical process includes gaining acquired experience, creating and recreating, integrating ourselves into our context, responding to its challenges, and discerning, transcending, and entering into the domain of history and culture. In this manner, integration, as a human activity, differs from adaptation. Integration results from the capacity to adapt to the world plus the critical capacity to make choices and transform reality. In this manner, as human beings relate to the world by responding to the challenges of the environment, we master and humanize reality. From this angle, it is the role of education to develop the individual and collective capacity to develop a flexible and critical capacity to respond to the evolving nature of society. Problem-posing education thus involves a

constant unveiling of reality and the continuous search for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality. In his 2012 book on language teacher education for global change, Kumaravadivelu takes this critical approach and argues for a teacher education model that responds to contemporary needs for social transformation. He introduces the three central operating principles of particularity, practicality, and possibility and argues for teacher education programs that focus more on teacher agency, flexibility, and freedom, not just imposed acceptance of authority; that focus more on the production of personal knowledge instead of reproduction of given wisdom; that emphasize more teacher research rather than conventional knowledge that does not respond to local realities and students’ needs, lacks, and wants; and that highlights the role of teachers as transformative intellectuals, not passive technicians and language instructors (Kumaravadivelu, 2012). This approach to teacher education connects to a number of challenges and issues elaborated by Contreras (1997), Usma (2007), and Peláez and Usma (2017), as they call for teachers, as critical intellectuals, to exercise their professional autonomy and move beyond instrumental and rational notions of education, teaching, and learning, disconnected from the construction of a more inclusive society. This approach also aligns with local calls for teachers to exercise their autonomy as they act as policymakers, which requires teachers to be familiar with language policy and enactment (Usma, 2015). The following sections elaborate on how these principles are being integrated into teacher education programs in three universities in Colombia.

RESEARCH METHOD This chapter reports on a project aimed at the promotion of critical consciousness and action in the preparation of teachers as

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policymakers. The authors worked with three groups of students taking courses on language education policy and reform as part of their preservice and inservice programs in three universities in Medellín, Colombia. The courses on language education policy and reform were created and taught by two of the authors of this report, while the whole team examined the impact on students’ understanding and action at the ground level. With this project, the authors attempted to respond to the challenges faced by English teachers in the midst of standardization and market-based reforms being adopted in Colombia while at the same time teachers also need to respond to the construction of a more equitable and peaceful country at times of peace agreements, reconciliation, and quests for social justice. The authors carried out a multisite case study that systematically examined the effect of these language education policy courses on students’ critical consciousness and actions. The participants included groups of 10 students from each university who voluntarily provided information during and after the courses’ implementation. From a qualitative perspective, and in order to guarantee trustworthiness and validity in the findings, researchers incorporated different types of sources, participants, and voices in the data. Participants included inservice and preservice teachers as well as experienced and novice teachers who were connected to both public and private institutions in the city of Medellín. All the participants spoke Spanish as their mother tongue and provided their written reflections and individual and group interviews in Spanish during and after the courses. The authors translated the responses selected for the paper. To obtain effective and systematic analysis data, researchers employed NVivo 10 and combined inductive and deductive approaches to data analysis, moving from open and thematic coding to memoing, interpreting, validating, and reporting (Glaser, 1978, 1998; Glaser and Strauss, 1967). Throughout the

study, the research team observed and maintained the strictest standards of informed consent, respect, and protection of participants’ identity, integrity, privacy, and confidentiality when interacting with them and with institutions as well as when handling the data, always following the international standards of research ethics proposed by the American Educational Research Association (AERA, 2011) and the Central Ethics Committee at each university. To ensure privacy was safeguarded when the data were handled, they were protected with an access code that allowed only the research team to have access to the collected data and analyses. The final section of this report presents the findings of this study and its main contributions.

FINDINGS This section gathers the traits of the language and education policies courses and its impact on inservice and preservice teachers’ critical awareness of Colombia’s current and ongoing language and educational reforms. It also comprises a description of the actions teachers were empowered to take in terms of curriculum development as well as continuous analysis of the programs and policies that position them as active political actors in their school settings.

The Courses and Their Development The courses described in this study aimed at providing preservice and inservice language teachers with a broad overview of past and current language and education policies at the national level and the extent to which they are connected to international reform trends. In doing so, students were required to analyze policy documents, identify different dimensions of reforms, examine advances and limitations of official plans, and consider

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alternative courses of action. In this manner, the course attempted to raise awareness about the social and political role that teachers play in society and how they can act as policymakers that critically enact initial policy texts in multiple educational contexts. A number of strategies were employed by the teachers in and out of class in order to accomplish the goals of the courses. These included assigned readings, class discussions, video analysis, guest speakers, mind and concept map creations and analyses, and student projects. All these activities allowed students to make a connection between policies, literature, and the local realities; explore different perspectives towards the class topics and issues; and listen to different voices and experiences. All along the development of the courses, the teachers in charge of them in each of the three universities maintained continuous collaboration and communication in order to share advances and concerns and provide peer support to consolidate the course proposal. Course content and sequencing was focused on language education policies regarding teaching languages in Colombia, starting with an overview of international reforms in the context of globalization and moving into national and local policies and programs. During the course, initial plans for some classes were modified in order to respond to relevant political, economic, cultural, or educational events that occurred in Colombia and that warranted careful scrutiny in class. Important events such as the presidential and local elections, developments, and implications of the peace processes with Colombia’s major guerrilla groups, and economic and political reforms being proposed by the government were included as part of the course agenda. This content was accompanied by a series of reaction papers that allowed students to convey their points of view on the topics discussed in class and effectively use the arguments they were exposed to with the readings and class discussions to support their positions. Moreover, students carried

out a final project in which they analyzed a local issue affected by language and education policies. In what remains of this essay, we will describe the impact of these courses on the students’ critical awareness of reform, on their role as curriculum developers in their school settings, and on their critical response to relevant current trends.

Raising Critical Awareness about Reforms and School Realities The preservice and inservice teachers reported in their interviews that they valued the approaches, content, sequencing, and strategies proposed and implemented as part of the courses. They appreciated the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the challenges teachers face across the educational system, from public to private institutions, rural to urban schools, and language centers to universities. Participants recognized that incorporating this course content into their studies made them feel better prepared as professionals and critical intellectuals. In the words of two participants: We had a panorama of how these current language policies influence or show how English is currently perceived in our country. That is, what is English for? I would say that the course provided me with knowledge, but also criteria to know the laws and analyze them, to propose, but from arguments, being objective and not subjective, not from criticism driven by opinion. Because every time we had a discussion, a writing assignment, or even the final task, the teacher always propelled our reflections to be grounded in arguments and supported with examples drawn from the policies, books and projects. It’s through this process that a change can be proposed. How can we propose changes if we don’t know enough about these policies?

For some inservice teachers working in elite, private institutions at the time of the course, the readings, activities, and special guest speakers made them aware of how most of the schools in the city and country differed from

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the reality they were immersed in every day. They learned how to identify similarities and differences among public and private schools, thus becoming aware of how, no matter where teachers work, we are part of a broader system. Two participants shared the following: I was able to see the existing breach between the public and private sector. Well, for me, it made me more critical about this matter, so to speak, toward that ideal space where I work. So, eventually that environment grows on you and then somehow you forget about the other context that is there in the country that is not as privileged or perfect.

Teachers who were working in elite private schools also wondered what they were educating their students for: the Colombian people or the international job market. According to some of them, instead of following the national agendas, they were following international education models. Then, many of their students leave the country to study and work abroad. This is one of the reasons why teachers’ critical awareness of the current reforms in the country and school system becomes essential; it is so they can be more than functional English instructors – critical agents that reflect on the role of teachers, education, and English in Colombian society. The language and education policy course also gave aspiring language teachers a broad overview of the current and previous language and education policies in the national context and how they are connected to broader international agendas. After learning about and analyzing the global context in which Colombia and its education system exist, one of the participants ended up questioning the country’s current policy approach: These policies are not taking into account the context in which our country is immersed. They are not taking into account that these policies were adopted, without any adaptation. They were adopted, simply taken from somewhere else.

Teachers also recognized the importance of this critical awareness in teacher education

programs in Colombia. As some of them observed, teachers in different education settings not only have to understand these reforms but should also initiate conversations with their own students about them and their many dimensions in Colombia. One teacher argued that: […] students should also be aware of these policies. If we are educating students, who have a critical standpoint and who are participants in their own process, it’s good for them to know at least the generalities of the regulations which they must follow for the teaching and learning of English.

These are just a few ways in which the course contributed to the participants’ critical awareness and understanding of current language and education reforms in Colombia and how this knowledge and critical consciousness served as a basis for future actions as critical agents who need to take both an active and proactive role in the construction of a more inclusive education system and society. One of the participants shared his interpretation of this multilayered process and its implications, which confirms the importance of such endeavors in education settings. He manifested: With the Language Policies course, I also see a slightly bigger but necessary challenge, in which one must have in mind what must be taken into account for his or her own development. One should keep in mind that, from a social standpoint, we have, as members of a society, that political aspect that we cannot reject or put aside. We can’t say: ‘I’m not into politics’. It’s not about getting into politics or supporting candidate X or Y; it’s about having a critical viewpoint in regards to what’s happening politically, and not accepting everything happily, or saying ‘Yes, I believe in the National Bilingual Program, it’s good and it will work for everyone’. No! We must have the capacity of taking a step back and seeing to what point these policies that are being implemented are positive, to what point they can affect what is going on in society, and from there, see how things can be improved. I have always looked at things more from the perspective of how they can be improved, instead of saying ‘This policy is bad, this policy is good’. We should first look at what is failing and, from there, how things can begin to be constructed.

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This course provides us with a capacity for developing that type of thinking or that type of criticism, but from a constructive point of view, not from a destructive one.

The development of a more sensitive, critical, and politically active teacher starts with an effort to raise their critical awareness on these crucial matters that affect teachers, students, and education communities in their daily lives. As we have seen in the previous excerpts, a course such as the one in this study may contribute to these goals and may significantly benefit participants directly and the communities they serve indirectly. In the following section we will elaborate more on these potential benefits.

Participating in Curriculum Development The participation in the language and education policy courses allowed participants to become more qualified to participate in curriculum design and adaptation. The course provided teachers with an extensive list of official documents related to language policy and curriculum development as part of Colombia’s reforms. This can be used to strengthen future curriculum adaptation at their schools, and during the course it provided them with a number of opportunities to discuss the documents and examine their implications and possible uses across educational settings. As expressed by two of the participating teachers: What I wanted to show the teachers in my little presentation was that we could adapt those projects, that we didn’t have to follow the book step by step. Instead, depending on the audience we are teaching to, we could adapt it according to the needs and resources their institution had. In general, it was a nice experience. It was very helpful for me. I work in a school on Saturday, in a workshop they have what is called: Let’s Communicate in English, and we are currently modifying the curriculum for adolescent groups.

In other cases, teachers tried to share ideas at their schools but were rendered powerless in the face of negative answers from their managers. One teacher lamented the following situation: In fact, when I talked to my boss, I said to her, ‘Why don’t we think about doing it this way?’. She almost always said no. She said the government was the one giving us the money and that they were the ones who actually ruled.

Participants in these courses recognized the importance of the materials and activities carried out in class, and how the study of language policy and reform can be crucial for curriculum development inside schools. One teacher concluded: We have to know what’s going on beyond matters related to the didactics of language teaching. We have to know what there is and what is being talked about among those in power, so we can take that to the classroom, to implement it, for example, into a school or institute curriculum.

This is how, regarding decision making, we could evidence how the course provided teachers with the knowledge and tools that allowed them to make more beneficial decisions in terms of curriculum design and appropriation. As it is clear from these excerpts, preservice and inservice teachers’ level of participation in policymaking and their development of critical thinking skills as they pertain to their students was enhanced by their participation in the universities’ policy courses.

Responding Critically to Current Language and Education Reforms Another impact of the course was that teachers expressed that they felt more empowered to act and make decisions. They learned that it was possible to consider the environment and context in their teaching, and adapt curricula based on their students’ needs. They also learned that they can plan their classes not only with the school’s established requirements but also with new ideas of their

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own curriculum design purposes. As one participant mentioned: It shows a teacher as an active agent at the workplace, being able to act based on the knowledge they acquired from the course. I think this course helped me to be a little revolutionary and to not simply be gullible, and to know how we can adapt these policies. So, I am very thankful.

Throughout the course, students became aware of the process they went through in order to become critical intellectuals. One teacher told about how, at the beginning of his career, he focused his attention on learning the language. Then, he found out that learning the language was not enough, and he had to acquire all the pedagogical skills that would allow him to teach the language. Finally, after taking the course in this study, he concluded that learning the language and knowing how to teach it were just a technical vision of what being a teacher means. That is how he came to think about the importance of knowing about the regulations and policies that govern his practice and reflecting on them, which will help him to become a critical intellectual who both reflects and acts in order to change his practices and consequently his students. He concluded: I think that the most important thing is that it creates the necessity of being participative agents of change in the construction of policies contextualized to the needs of the citizens.

The teachers who participated in the study recognize themselves as political agents who play an active role not only in their teaching process but also towards Colombia’s language policy. They found that they became more reflective, analytical, and participative actors in the education field. Two teachers confirm that finding with the following comments: I think that we should, as students or teachers, exercise our role as policy actors. We should have a more active role in regards to this. We shouldn’t think that we’re only simply teaching English. Everything we have discussed about language policies and education reforms, national and international, helped us

to have a better understanding of our profession, and it especially contributed to helping us see beyond our noses. We were always focused on what ‘you, as a teacher, what can you do?’. So it was a reflection from a political standpoint, as teachers and political agents.

The participants also improved their ability to differentiate between being critical and being pessimistic, that the former means being able to explore further possibilities and spaces for action. In this sense, one of the participants recognized that, instead of criticizing only to find fault and becoming pessimistic about the situation the education system is in, teachers in the course started to take a more active role and consider a large number of possibilities for improving it. She expressed herself in these words: The policies provide a critical viewpoint, and when I say critical, it’s not just about criticizing as one could first think of it; instead, it’s about recognizing the good aspects and what can be improved, what has worked and what hasn’t. Also, one should have an aim towards the future as to what can be done and what can be improved.

In line with the above, preservice teachers talked about who they wanted to be as professionals and how that decision is going to impact their students. Teachers reflected on this decision not only in terms of themselves as teachers but also where and how they aimed to generate change through their practice. Thus, they decided to continue looking into the policies and their implications for: […] deciding what kind of teacher I want to be, how I want to exercise my teaching, in what places I want to do so, and, above all, what change and what level of participation I want my students to have in this process.

One of the biggest contributions this course made to the professional development of the student teachers was to get them to think about the importance of identifying and responding to the contextual needs of their students and communities. They became aware of what many

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teachers already know: although the same policies may reach them, schools, classrooms, and student situations can differ greatly. Ideally, teachers recognize the particularities in their context and adapt a given policy to it in order to make it relevant and suitable for their specific situation. One participating teacher, for example, raised a question about students with special needs and how policies sometimes exclude them. Others recognized themselves as political agents who play an active role not only in their teaching process but also towards the language policy in the country. One of the participants expressed: So, I think this doesn’t end simply in a seminar of a number of hours, not exactly; instead, it transcends, too, our own interest of change and research and also other courses because you arrive here with a discourse already and some arguments that help you position yourself in regards to teaching English in your context, in your school, in your practicum and that is tied to integral development in the university. Not just from the teaching program, but also from what we are as people – critical, democratic and participative beings. For me, personally, what I take away from this course as a reflection is that, logically, all these standards and these language policies are trying, I think, to divide societies. And what you mentioned earlier, education for the poor, and if you can reach it and, like, come out to the surface, OK, but if you can’t then you are just not going to, like, be part of this.

As previously mentioned, the courses’ impact on preservice and inservice teachers was evident from different perspectives. First of all, they raised the teachers’ critical awareness about the country’s recent reforms and policies and how disconnected they have been from Colombia’s many and varied academic contexts and realities. Thus, the course contributed to the empowerment of teachers in terms of curriculum development and by giving them tools to be active actors in their schools. Finally, the course operated as an educational process towards critical consciousness, a major component of critical pedagogy that involves awareness of the role we as teachers play in the world we inhabit and the responsibilities we inherit in contributing to the

transformation, through education, of an unjust society to a more humane and culturally sensitive place to live, especially given the opportunities Colombia finds itself with under its present circumstances.

CONCLUSION Through a systematic analysis of data gathered about language and education policy courses in undergraduate and graduate programs in three different universities, we demonstrated the importance of including language policy courses in the curricula of language teaching programs and how these courses may impact teachers’ critical consciousness and action. We have described how the courses offered in these three universities have enhanced the teaching practices of both preservice and inservice teachers with broader and deeper insights regarding their conceptualization of teaching, and the implications of such reflective studies on teachers’ praxis in the contemporary Colombian transformation. These courses have helped teachers grasp a new understanding of autonomy and how it can be used to further a commitment to the community and critical reflection by dialectically understanding reflection and action as teachers exert their agency in the quest of humanization. Contreras (1997) highlights as qualities of the teaching profession commitment to the community and professional competence. In this sense, autonomy opposes externally prescribed monitoring without understanding the meaning of what is done in the broader context, that is, without a vision of what the overarching objectives of education are. If teachers do not want their role to be that of passive reproducers of the status quo, they must create a critical distance between themselves and the objectives and purposes of education as it is established and promoted by policies and reforms. Evidence from the study showed that participants moved from analysis and study of language policies and

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education reforms to areas of contestation, where they see themselves as far beyond mere implementers of language policies or technicians of the education system to players committed to exert their power as policymakers and social actors. From this perspective, professional autonomy (Peláez and Usma, 2017) involves an aspiration to a more just, egalitarian, participative society as well as a development of relationships with others in which these values are experienced. An autonomous being, then, makes independent but justified decisions with an educational and social purpose to encourage a more dignified life for all citizens and promote their participation in public life, including education. Contreras introduces what he calls the transformative intellectual. Teachers exhibiting these characteristics exercise their autonomy as long as they promote and live out their professional duties in accordance with the search for emancipation that is the social liberation from oppression (Freire, 1970, 2005[1974]), overcoming elusively tyrannizing ideological distortions that narcotized and impeded the capacity to think disapprovingly. Critical awareness autonomy as a collective process aims at transforming the institutional and social conditions of teaching. Teachers, as expressed by Contreras (1997), exert their moral obligation which is evident in the fact that it is the teacher who has to make immediate decisions in complex situations in the classroom that require the exercise of their capacity for interpretation and judgment. This does not mean that the teacher must make decisions unilaterally, by virtue of being the expert, nor that they do not have to account for their actions. On the contrary, autonomy, like moral values in general, is not an individual capacity, it is not a state or an attribute of people, but an exercise, a quality of life that they live. We will have to speak, therefore, of processes and social situations in which people conduct themselves autonomously and, in that process, construct their ethical identity (Contreras, 1997). This is the crucial challenge, the motivation and justification for courses like the one described in this study, especially given

the fact that Colombian society, like those of other countries in Latin America and worldwide, makes its transformation contingent upon education. As we conclude, we want to introduce what a student in one of these courses expressed. As he said, being an English teacher in Colombia and abroad is not just about being a language instructor, but being a critical and integral human being. That, as he said, is what he learned in these courses: I think the most important thing was that [the course] gave us a profound insight into these policies. I had done this in other courses, but it was very shallow, so I didn´t fully understand it. I realized that, as a teacher, I am also governed under policies. What are those policies? Why are they happening? How can I adopt and adapt them? So, I liked it. I think this insight was the most important thing, and it’s a basis on policies that this course provides. We sometimes give too much importance to learning or teaching. But, what about policies? We are also political actors, and we are also social actors. The social aspect is nested inside the political one; the political aspect is nested inside the social one. Everything is permeated. So, I consider these insights to be of great value as they provided us with a different point of view. Also, something great about this course is that it invites us to, after finishing the course, look further into these topics, and it also helps you understand what happens inside schools, the reasons for the ways things are or aren’t accomplished. And it also helps to have certain ideas regarding where we can move towards bettering institutions, language learning processes, in students. What I have learned, not only with the Language Policy course, but with other courses as well, is that a teacher must be an integral construct of various aspects, and that has been the gift, so to speak, the privilege that I had in this course.

Note  1  This chapter reports on a project developed by members of Grupo de Investigación Acción y Evaluación en Lenguas Extranjeras, (GIAE) (Research Group on Evaluation and Action Research), and its research line on language education policy and school reform. It was funded by the School of Languages, Universidad de Antioquia, and Universidad Católica Luis Amigó.

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REFERENCES American Educational Research Association (AERA). (2011). Code of ethics. Available at www.aera.net/About-AERA/AERA-RulesPolicies/Professional-Ethics Ball, S. J. (1998). Big policies/small world: An introduction to international perspectives in education policy. Comparative Education, 34(2), 119–130. Retrieved from http://goo. gl/ynv5XP Ball, S., Maguire, M., and Braun, A. (2012). How schools do policy. Policy enactment in secondary schools. New York: Routledge. Bonilla, C., & Tejada, I. (2016). Unanswered questions in Colombia’ s foreign language education policy. PROFILE, Issues in Teachers’ Professional Development, 18(1), 185–201. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/qDLmO4 Brown, K. (2010). Teachers as language policy actors: Contending with the erasure of lesser-used languages in schools. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 41(3), 298–314. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/wCs5qW Cárdenas, M. L. (2006). Bilingual Colombia: Are we ready for it? What is needed? 19th Annual English Australia Education Conference 2006: Re-Evaluating Methodologies: How We Teach, Who We Teach. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/ yPBCIe Contreras, J. (1997). La autonomía del profesorado. Madrid: Ediciones Morata. Correa, D., & Usma, J. (2013). From a bureaucratic to a critical-sociocultural model of policymaking in Colombia. HOW, A Colombian Journal for Teachers of English, 20(1), 226– 242. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/KsteGK Correa, D., Usma, J., & Montoya, J. C. (2014). El Programa Nacional de Bilingüismo: Un estudio exploratorio en el departamento de Antioquia, Colombia. Íkala, Revista de Lenguaje Y Cultura, 19(1), 101–116. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/cWlRmR Davis, K. A. (2014). Engaged language policy and practices. Language Policy, 13(2), 83– 100. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/EgvuQw Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed, trans. M. B. Ramos. New York: Continuum, 2005. Freire, P. (2005). Education for critical consciousness (Revised edition). London, UK: Continuum. [First published 1974]

Glaser, B. G. (1978). Theoretical sensitivity: Advances in the methodology of grounded theory. Mill Valley, CA: Sociology Press. Glaser, B. G. (1998). Doing grounded theory: Issues and discussions. Mill Valley, CA: Sociology Press. Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Chicago: Aldine. González, A. (2007). Professional development of EFL teachers in Colombia: Between colonial and local practices. Íkala, Revista de Lenguaje Y Cultura, 12(18), 309–332. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/YcsBOn Guerrero, C. H. (2008). Bilingual Colombia: What does it mean to be bilingual within the framework of the National Plan of Bilingualism? PROFILE, Issues in Teachers’ Professional Development, 10(1), 27–45. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/eLxjmu Guerrero, C. H. (2010). Elite vs. Folk bilingualism: The mismatch between theories and educational and social conditions. HOW, A Colombian Journal for Teachers of English, 17(1), 165–179. Retrieved from http://goo. gl/B7T8qU Hart, G. (2002). Disabling globalization: Places of power in post-apartheid South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/fxUViT Heineke, A. J., Ryan, A. M., & Tocci, C. (2015). Teaching, learning, and leading: Preparing teachers as educational policy actors. Journal of Teacher Education, 66(4), 382–394. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/tl8y4u Hornberger, N. H., & Johnson, D. (2007). Slicing the onion ethnographically: Layers and spaces in multilingual language education policy and practice. TESOL Quarterly, 41(3), 509–532. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/ o4dbEj Kumaravadivelu, B. (2012). Language teacher education for a global society: A modular model for knowing, analyzing, recognizing, doing, and seeing. New York and London: Routledge. Levinson, B., Sutton, M., & Winstead, T. (2009). Education policy as a practice of power: Theoretical tools, ethnographic methods, democratic options. Educational Policy, 23(6), 767–795. Retrieved from http://goo. gl/u7kLku

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Maturana, L. M. (2011). La enseñanza del inglés en tiempos del Plan Nacional de Bilingüismo en algunas instituciones públicas: Factores lingüísticos y pedagógicos. Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal, 13(2), 74– 87. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/0JI5Fk Menken, K., & García, O. (Eds.). (2010). Negotiating language policies in schools: Educators as policymakers. New York: Routledge. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/gV9DJw Ministerio de Educación Nacional, Colombia. (2014). Programa Nacional de Inglés 2015– 2025. Bogotá D.C. Retrieved from www. mineducacion.gov.co/1759/articles-343837_ Programa_Nacional_Ingles.pdf OECD. (2016). Education in Colombia: Reviews of national policies for education. Paris: OECD Publishing. Retrieved from https://doi. org/10.1787/9789264250604-en OECD / International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank. (2012). Reviews of national policies for education: Tertiary education in Colombia 2012. OECD Publishing. Retrieved from https://goo.gl/ 2qnWtG Paciotto, C., & Delany-Barmann, G. (2011). Planning micro-level language education reform in new diaspora sites: Two-way immersion education in the rural Midwest. Language Policy, 10(3), 221–243. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/omevg2 Pease-Alvarez, L., & Davies Samway, K. (2012). Teachers of English negotiating authoritarian policies. New York: Springer. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/80QLmG Peláez, O., & Usma, J. (2017). The crucial role of educational stakeholders in the appropriation of foreign language education policies: A case study. PROFILE, Issues in Teachers’ Professional Development, 19(2), 121–134. http:// dx.doi.org/10.15446/profile.v19n2.57215 Ricento, T. K., & Hornberger, N. H. (1996). Unpeeling the onion: Language planning and policy and the ELT professional. TESOL Quarterly, 30(3), 401–427. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/JKe5RX Shohamy, E. (2009). Language teachers as partners in crafting educational language policies? Íkala, Revista de Lenguaje Y Cultura, 14(22), 45–67. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/SX9dXp

Shohamy, E. (2010). Cases of language policy resistance in Israel’s centralized educational system. In K. Menken & O. García (Eds.), Negotiating language policies in schools: Educators as policymakers (pp. 182–197). New York: Routledge. Retrieved from http:// goo.gl/gV9DJw Spillane, J. P. (2004). Standards deviation: How schools misunderstand education policy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/UhV5ki Steiner-Khamsi, G. (Ed.). (2004). The global politics of educational borrowing and lending. New York: Teachers College Press. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/7LHorh Sutton, M., & Levinson, B. A. U. (Eds.). (2001). Policy as practice: Toward a comparative sociocultural analysis of educational policy. Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/R86fnT Tochon, F. V. (Ed.). (2015). Language education policy unlimited: Global perspectives and local practices. Blue Mounds, WI: Deep University Press. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/DPdTjl Usma, J. (2007). Teacher autonomy: A critical review of the research and concept beyond applied linguistics. Íkala, revista de lenguaje y cultura, 12(18), 245–275. Usma, J. (2009a). Education and language policy in Colombia: Exploring processes of inclusion, exclusion, and stratification in times of global reform. PROFILE, Issues in Teachers’ Professional Development, 11(1), 123–141. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/myuw1L Usma, J. (2009b). Globalization and language and education reform in Colombia: A critical outlook. Íkala, Revista de Lenguaje Y Cultura, 14(22), 19–42. Retrieved from http://goo. gl/0vGfz3 Usma, J. (2015). From transnational language policy transfer to local appropriation: The case of the National Bilingual Program in Medellín, Colombia. Blue Mounds, WI: Deep University Press. Retrieved from http://goo. gl/fE4ymh Varghese, M. M., & Stritikus, T. (2005). ‘Nadie me dijo (Nobody told me)’: Language policy negotiation and implications for teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 56(1), 73–87. Retrieved from https://goo.gl/1edXHv

48 Vietnamese Students and the Emerging Model Minority Myth in Germany Nicholas D. Hartlep and Pipo Bui

ASIANS AS THE MODEL MINORITY Scholarly literature suggests that Asians or particular subgroups of Asians in the United States are often stereotyped as the model minority (Model Minority Stereotype Project, 2019). Scholars have also written about the existence of the Asian model minority stereotype outside of the United States, such as in Canada (Ho, 2015; Pon, 2000), New Zealand (Hannis, 2015), and Asian countries such as South Korea (Hartlep, 2015) and China (Fang, 2009a, 2009b). Other scholars have examined the stereotype’s existence in European countries, including Bradbury (2015), whose work examined the Asian model minority in the UK. This chapter explores the model minority stereotype vis-à-vis Asian immigrants in a different European country: Germany. Our chapter offers new information and an international perspective when examining Asians as the model minority. We examine the Vietnamese in Germany and posit that the Vietnamese have been treated as an

Asian model minority there. Acknowledged for their diligence, educational success, and inconspicuousness, they have been held up as a model of successful integration, and even called ‘Das Vietnamesische Wunder’ [The Vietnamese Miracle] (Spiewak, 2009).1 We put the stereotype of quiet, hard-working Vietnamese immigrants into a historical context and explore their strategic contributions to their collective images and impact on youth.

Model Minority A look at public portrayals of Vietnamese immigrants and youth in Germany over the past decade indicates that something akin to a model minority stereotype may be developing in Germany.2 The stereotype of a ‘model minority’ can be harmful in at least three ways: 1 It reifies the essentialist concept of ethnicity by claiming that some aspect of the minority group’s culture allows them to succeed where other groups fail.

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2 It vilifies minorities who do not fit the stereotype, placing blame on their culture and them as individuals for not fitting into the host society. This can deprive immigrants of resources and justify racist speech and actions against them. 3 It glosses over issues within the so-called ‘model minority’ group, potentially depriving people (including youth) of needed services.

It’s important and urgent to sound the alarm about a nascent model minority stereotype in Germany because the country is in the midst of integrating a million new immigrants3 from Syria and Africa. Migration is one of the hottest topics in public debate in Germany and Europe. The debate about how to respond to the dramatic migration unleashed after the Syrian Civil War has impacted national elections and contributed to the rise of far-right political parties (Galston, 2018). A model minority stereotype may harm new immigrants and youth by creating unrealistic expectations. It may hinder the chances of Germany successfully integrating them. On the other hand, a nuanced analysis of how the model minority stereotype was constructed may offer valuable lessons and pointers about how to successfully integrate immigrants into German society.4 The stakes are high: the rest of Europe is watching Germany’s integration program. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s bold assertion in August 2015 that Germany is a ‘strong country’ that can provide shelter to Syrian refugees will be tested over and over again in the coming decade. The UK’s ‘Brexit’ decision to leave the EU in part because of the mandate to integrate refugees is a cautionary tale of the price of a government not being prepared for immigration. Meanwhile, violent acts committed by asylum seekers and mass killings by suspected terrorists in public spaces in Germany, France, and the UK stimulate a climate of fear and urgency for everyone in Europe, regardless of citizenship status. The extreme opposite of the model minority stereotype is the radicalized terrorist – someone so marginalized that he or she physically attacks random members

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of the society. When terrorist attacks occur, almost inevitably someone will comment that the failed integration of an ethnic immigrant community is to blame, or that the government should clamp down on immigration. The model minority stereotype is an indicator of a society’s tendency to suppress or even criminalize difference. The first vivid outlines of model minority stereotype of Vietnamese youth in Germany appeared in a January 2009 article in Die Zeit, a highly regarded, national weekly newspaper known for its in-depth coverage and analysis of news, culture, and politics.5 The author, Martin Spiewak, is a respected reporter in the field of education. His article garnered 76 comments from registered readers, an unusually high number for articles about education at the time, which typically garnered less than 20 comments. The headline ‘Das Vietnamesische Wunder’ [The Vietnamese Miracle] and subtitle ‘Die Kinder von Einwanderern aus Vietnam fallen durch glänzende Schulnoten auf’ [The children of immigrants from Vietnam stand out due to glittering grades] highlighted the surprising accomplishments of Vietnamese high school students. The article elaborated on why these students’ educational success was so striking that it merited coverage in the premier newspaper of Germany’s progressive intellectual elite. Keine andere Einwanderergruppe in Deutschland hat in der Schule mehr Erfolg als die Vietnamesen: Über 50 Prozent ihrer Schüler schaffen den Sprung aufs Gymnasium. Damit streben mehr vietnamesische Jugendliche zum Abitur als deutsche. Im Vergleich zu ihren Alterskollegen aus türkischen oder italienischen Familien liegt die Gymnasialquote fünfmal so hoch. »Die Leistungen vietnamesischer Schüler stehen in einem eklatanten Gegensatz zum Bild, das wir sonst von Kindern mit Migrationshintergrund haben, « sagt die brandenburgische Ausländerbeauftragte Karin Weiss. (Spiewak, 2009) [No other immigrant group in Germany has more success in school than the Vietnamese: over 50 percent manage the leap into [university-bound] high school. That means more Vietnamese youth strive for a high school degree than German [youth]. Compared to their peers from Turkish or

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Italian families, the number of high school students is five times as high. ‘The accomplishments of Vietnamese students are significantly opposed to the image that we usually have of children with a migration background,’ says Karin Weiss, the Commissioner for Foreigners’ Affairs of [the state of] Brandenburg.]

Education and immigration experts were very surprised to see 50% of Vietnamese youth ‘leap into’ Gymnasium, the most academically rigorous of the three types of high school education offered in Germany. Comparable to a prep school in the United States, Gymnasia grew out of humanistic movements in the 16th century, emphasizing Greek, Latin, and other classical subjects (Hammerstein and Buck, 1996). They offer advanced curricula aimed at college-bound students. Students must apply to enter, and they typically start at age 10. During the 2009–2010 school year, just 35% of high school-aged students attended Gymnasia (German Federal Statistics Office, 2011: 13). Half of the students attending Gymnasia come from the most affluent levels of German society (Ehmke et al., 2004). Thus, Gymnasia are the proving ground of the society’s elite. The percentage of Vietnamese students entering Gymnasium was especially remarkable because testing results across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in the early 2000s had found that the children of immigrants fared less well on tests than the children of German parents. This difference was especially pronounced in Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland (Ramm et  al., 2004: 257). Furthermore, the study showed that children of Turkish and Yugoslav immigrants living in Germany did worse on the tests than the children of Turkish and Yugoslav immigrants in Austria – where school is also taught in German (ibid.: 268). Spiewak’s article mentions that the success of Vietnamese students creates new challenges for school administrators (and impacts youth), such as figuring out how to pronounce students’ names.

Relativ neu ist dagegen das Problem, die Namen der ausgezeichneten Schüler korrekt auszusprechen. Hieß die Gewinnerin in der Klassenstufe sieben nun Tran Phuon Duyen oder Duyen Tran Phuon? Und wie war es mit Duc Dao Mihn aus der Zehn? Schmidt-Ihnen steht öfter vor dieser Herausforderung: 17 Prozent der Schüler an dem Gymnasium im Stadtteil Lichtenberg stammen aus einer vietnamesischen Familie, in den unteren Klassen sind es mehr als 30 Prozent. »Gerade in den Naturwissenschaften und in Mathematik sind viele von ihnen stark«, berichtet der Rektor. Auch der Schulbeste in Mathe ist vietnamesischer Herkunft. (Spiewak, 2009) [A relatively new problem is how to pronounce the names of the outstanding students. Was the winner in Grade 7 Tran Phuon Duyen or Duyen Tran Phuon? [sic] And what about Duc Dao Mihn [sic] in Grade 10? Schmidt-Ihnen encounters this challenge often: 17 percent of the students in the Gymnasium in the Lichtenberg neighborhood come from Vietnamese families, in the lower grades, it’s more than 30 percent. ‘Especially in science and math, many of them are strong,’ says the principal. Also, the school’s top student in math comes from a Vietnamese background.]

For anyone familiar with the model minority stereotype of Asian Americans in the United States, the mention of Vietnamese youth being called ‘strong’ in science and math is eerily familiar. The theme of over-achieving students who have a special gift for math and science is strikingly similar to TIME Magazine’s cover strapline from August 31, 1987: ‘Those AsianAmerican Whiz Kids’ (Brand, 1987). The principal’s struggle to pronounce the students’ names highlights how different they are from the mainstream students. Both students’ names are misspelled in the article. When Spiewak refers to a parallel phenomenon in the United States, he points to another foreign factor: Confucian mentality. ‘Das zeigt sich seit Jahren bereits in den USA, wo überproportional viele Studenten aus asiatischen – genauer: von der konfuzianischen Mentalität geprägten – Nationen die amerikanischen Spitzenuniversitäten besuchen’ (Spiewak, 2009). [It’s been demonstrated for years in the USA, where disproportionately many students from

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Asian nations – or more precisely, nations imprinted with a Confucian mentality – are attending the top American universities]. With this reference, Spiewak could easily be describing the cover photo of a special issue of Newsweek magazine published in April 1984 (Givins, 1984). It was inscribed: ‘On Campus – Asian-Americans, The Drive to Excel’. It depicted four young people standing around a sandstone column. Three were holding books. The fourth wore a Stanford sweatshirt. The accompanying article argued that family expectations and hard work fueled Asian American success in top colleges. This article typifies the model minority perspective in 1980s American journalism (Hartlep 2013: 240). Twenty-five years later, Spiewak virtually photocopies the image of an Asian model minority from US colleges onto German high schools. Spiewak’s article further explains that the students are children of Vietnamese contract workers, many of whom experienced a dramatic plunge into unemployment and poverty as well as being the targets of racial hatred in the years following German reunification. And yet, the academic success of the young generation was beginning to compensate for those experiences: ‘Ihre Kinder jedoch sind nun dabei, mit ungeheurem Fleiß und Bildungsdrang die deutsche Gesellschaft zu erobern’ (Spiewak, 2009). [Their children, however, are in the process of conquering the German society with their industriousness and educational drive]. As noted by American commentator Smaran Dayal (2014), this kind of portrayal of hard-working immigrants climbing the ladder of social success in the host society is reminiscent of William Petersen’s 1966 (January 9) New York Times Magazine feature, ‘Success Story, JapaneseAmerican Style’, an article that was seminal in shaping the American model minority myth. Soon after Spiewak’s article was published, some Germans with Vietnamese ethnic backgrounds received attention for remarkable accomplishments. They seemed to be fulfilling Spiewak’s prediction that the next generation of Vietnamese youth would

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‘conquer’ German society. For example, Philipp Rösler, a Vietnamese orphan who was adopted and raised in Germany, became the first person of Asian descent to serve as a cabinet minister. He served as Germany’s Minister of Health in 2009, then Federal Minister of Economy and Technology, and Vice-Chancellor in 2011. Marcel Nguyen, a biracial Vietnamese-German man, competed for Germany at the 2012 London Olympics, winning two silver medals in gymnastics. At the same time, Germans with other kinds of ethnic backgrounds were also making strides and entering cherished German institutions, such as getting elected to regional and national government positions and competing on the beloved national soccer team, which won the World Cup in 2014. The German national team included Ghanaian-German Jerome Boateng, Tunisian-German Sami Khedira, and Turkish-German Mesut Özil. And yet, the idea that VietnameseGermans were special in terms of educational achievement lingered. For example, researcher and pedagogy professor Olaf Beuchling repeated the claim that the children of Vietnamese refugees were more likely to complete the Gymnasium degree than German children, or children from other immigrant groups. He attributed this difference to cultural factors including Confucianism.6 In another example, a 2015 study focused on parenting styles in ethnic German, Turkish, and Vietnamese families as a determining factor in educational attainment. This was part of a research project to investigate ‘why minorities of different origin are differently successful in the educational system’ (Nauck and Lotter, 2015). The study of 1,523 mother-child dyads found that 54% of Vietnamese mothers practiced an ‘authoritarian’ parenting style, whereas the predominant parenting styles for German mothers was ‘indulgent’, and for Turkish mothers was ‘neglectful’. This hierarchical reasoning and judgmental nomenclature aligns with the ‘Tiger-Mother’ trope popularized by Amy Chua in her 2011 memoir

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Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, in which fierce Asian American mothers are credited with their children’s educational success. As experts in educational pathways for working class immigrant children, Aladin El-Mafaalani and Thomas Kemper (2017) caution against using the label ‘miracle’ to describe the large numbers of Vietnamese students attending Gymnasium despite obstacles such as low household income, lack of social capital, and lack of household knowledge about the German educational system. They suggest that a determining factor may be how well the Vietnamese parents’ belief that students must work hard to attain success matches the attitude of the German school system. Surprisingly, although they note that the percentage of Vietnamese students attending Gymnasium varies substantially by location – with three eastern German states consistently reporting rates around 70% – they do not call for research into what schools in those states are doing differently that might drive these results. About 10 months after the publication of Martin Spiewak’s seminal ‘Das Vietnamesische Wunder’ article (2009), Germany plunged into what is now called the ‘Sarrazin Debate’ (Goebel, 2018). Thilo Sarrazin was an economist whose career encompassed positions at the state and national levels. In a long-form interview published in the culture magazine Lettre International, Sarrazin made blatantly derogatory remarks that earned him condemnation across the political spectrum, and eventually forced him to resign from his position at Germany’s central bank. Demanding that Sarrazin apologize for his comments, Zeit Online (2009) published an excerpt of the interview. Stern magazine (Schönfeld, 2009) also published an excerpt, arguing that Sarrazin was right. Ich muss niemanden anerkennen, der vom Staat lebt, diesen Staat ablehnt, für die Ausbildung seiner Kinder nicht vernünftig sorgt und ständig neue kleine Kopftuchmädchen produziert. Das gilt für 70 Prozent der türkischen und 90 Prozent der arabischen Bevölkerung in Berlin. (Schönfeld, 2009)

[I don’t need to recognize anyone who lives off of the State, rejects the State, doesn’t take sensible care of the education of their children, and constantly produces new little headscarf girls. That’s true of 70 percent of the Turkish and 90 percent of the Arabic population of Berlin.]7

While vilifying Arabic and Turkish immigrants in Germany for failing to integrate, Sarrazin praised Vietnamese and other immigrants for their willingness to integrate. Die Vietnamesen: Die Eltern können kaum Deutsch, verkaufen Zigaretten oder haben einen Kiosk. Die Vietnamesen der zweiten Generation haben dann durchweg bessere Schulnoten und höhere Abiturientenquoten als die Deutschen. (Schönfeld, 2009) [The Vietnamese: the parents could barely speak German, sold cigarettes or owned a kiosk. The Vietnamese of the second generation have consistently better grades and higher rates of high school graduates than the Germans.]

This comment demonstrates that Sarrazin was aware of the relatively high rates of secondgeneration Vietnamese immigrants attending Gymnasium. He was also aware of some of the struggles of first-generation Vietnamese immigrants. Following Sarrazin’s ouster from the central bank, he toned down his comments only slightly. By August 2010, he published his theories as a book, ‘Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab’ [Germany Does Away with Itself]. It claims that Germany’s population is shrinking and dumbing down due to a declining birthrate in the upper classes, failed schools, and an increasing population of poor, mostly Muslim immigrants whose culture drives them to refuse to integrate, while living off the largesse of the welfare state. Based on financial and demographic data drawn from Berlin, he projected that Germany would be majority Muslim within 80 years. The book sold 1.5 million copies in 2010. As of 2018, it is in its 9th printing. It has more than 900 reviews on Amazon’s German-language website. Some of the reviews are essay-length, showing the deep resonance of the debate on Sarrazin’s assertions. Various editions of the book occupy places #1, #2, and

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#4 in the multicultural section of Amazon.de. Sarrazin has been accused of making radical racist ideas palatable, contributing more to the rise of far-right parties than even the Nazi underground. In 2013, the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination reprimanded Germany for failing to carry out an effective investigation against Sarrazin (Keilani, 2013). The Sarrazin debate raged on for months in mainstream media and in political forums, with critics decrying his statistical methods, his racist, elitist, and eugenicist beliefs, his incendiary and alienating remarks. Meanwhile, Vietnamese-German intellectuals grappled with suddenly and unwittingly finding the contours of their collective experience highlighted against the backdrop of what Sarrazin called people who are ‘unwilling and incapable of integration’. The influential VietnameseGerman author and cultural commentator Pham Thi Hoai points out that the relatively small population of Vietnamese immigrants (and youth) in Germany only became noticeable in mainstream German discourse ‘because we don’t wear headscarves and we’re better at school’ (Cicero, 2014). Khue Pham (2010), a young Vietnamese-German woman, explained that the so-called Vietnamese success story is a story of sacrifice and estrangement. Thilo Sarrazin hat mich gelobt, ich bin Vietnamesin. Eine von denen, die gut in der Schule waren und Deutsch früh gelernt haben, es lag wohl an den guten Genen. Wir Vietnamesen sind ja sehr beliebt. Kaum macht einer wie Sarrazin der Fremdenfeindlichkeit verdächtig, zitiert er unseren Erfolg: ‘Guckt euch diese fleissigen Menschen an! Wenn sie sich hocharbeiten können, warum können es die faulen Muslime nicht?’ Mit seinem Lob wollte Sarrazin beweisen, dass er nichts gegen Einwanderer hat. Er hat uns wie einen Joker gezogen in seinem Gute-Migranten-schlechteMigranten-Spiel. Offentsichtlich kennt er uns genauso schlect wie sie; das vermeintliche vietnamesische Erfolgsmodell lässt sich nicht exportschlagermässig auf die Muslime übertragen. Meine Eltern, die hier in den siebziger Jahren einwanderten, brachten mir bei, dass ich besser as ’die Deutschen‘ sein müsse, um als gleich anerkannt zu

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werden. Eine Zwei auf dem Zeugnis war eine Enttäuschung. Wenn ich sagte, dass das ‘gut’ bedeutet, sagten sie zu mir: ‘Du sollst dich nicht mit den Deutschen vergleichen. Du bist anders als sie’. Es klang so wie: ‘Du bist nicht so viel wert wie sie’. (Pham, 2010) [Thilo Sarrazin praised me, I’m a Vietnamese. One of those people who are good in school and learned German early on, probably due to those good genes. We Vietnamese are very beloved. As soon as someone like Sarrazin could be suspected of xenophobia, he cites our success: ‘Look at these diligent people! If they can work their way up, why can’t the lazy Muslims?’ With this praise, Sarrazin wanted to prove that he doesn’t have anything against immigrants. He pulled us out like a joker in the game of Good Migrant–Bad Migrant. Obviously, he knows us as little as them; the supposed Vietnamese success model can’t be transposed onto Muslims like an international hit song. My parents, who immigrated here in the 70s, taught me that I had to be better than ‘the Germans’ in order to be recognized as equal. Getting a ‘2’ grade on a report card was a disappointment. When I told them that ‘2’ means ‘good’, they told me: ‘You should not compare yourself to Germans. You are different than them.’ That sounded like: you are not worth as much as them].

With dazzling irony, Khue Pham illuminates just how Sarrazin’s spotlight on Vietnamese immigrant students blindsides them, masks their struggles, and casts a shadow on both them and other immigrants. Sarrazin’s praise for the Vietnamese immigrants does not mean he knows any of them or understands anything about who they are. Instead, this kind of praise distances all immigrants, Vietnamese and otherwise. The Vietnamese immigrants are used like a pawn in a game that plays marginalized members of the society off against each other in order to uphold an oppressive racist hierarchy. Later in her essay, Pham mentions that it’s not just Sarrazin who offers praise in this manner: ‘The Germans often praise me, because I speak perfect German. These words of praise imply that I will remain different, no matter how much I try’ (2010). Back-handed praise is not the work of one notorious racist, but rather a common norm, an indicator of widely held race-based assumptions.

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The themes of diligence, hard work, sacrifice, and guilt thread throughout Pham’s essay, for example, when her parents tell her that a ‘good’ grade is not good enough. Unlike some of the Germans Pham encounters, her parents withhold praise. Their ensuing explanation is an opportunity to perpetuate internalized alienation and oppression. Their solution to the problem: work harder! This resonates with the point made by the education researchers El-Mafaalani and Kemper (2017): Vietnamese parents’ attitude that hard work is the path to success aligns well with the value that the German higher education system places on diligence. In fact, diligence turns out to be a pivotal theme for both first- and second-generation Vietnamese immigrant students in Germany. Without actually using the term ‘model minority’, Pham’s essay describes the contours of what could be considered a modelminoritizing dynamic. She notes that the supposedly successful Vietnamese model of integration is far from perfect. She says it cannot necessarily be replicated by other immigrant groups. It comes at a huge price in terms of stress, and it does not guarantee parity or closeness with mainstream society. In her discussion of the perils of positive stereotypes, journalist Tran Quynh (2017) deliberately uses the term ‘model minority’. She points out that in the United States, the term is often used to highlight immigrants who seem to have achieved above-average socioeconomic success. For Vietnamese immigrant youth in Germany, successful integration has been defined as academic success in the second generation. Any mention of economic success is very modest – remember Sarrazin’s words: ‘They sold cigarettes or owned a kiosk’ (Schönfeld, 2009: 522). Instead, successful integration is demonstrated by the inconspicuousness of first-generation Vietnamese immigrants, the ‘unremarkableness that is presumed to accompany adaptation’ (Tran, 2017: 229). In other words, it is acceptable, and even commendable, for some immigrants to be visible, to stand out – for example,

when they are achieving greater academic success than German students. It’s even possible that their success is being highlighted to goad German youngsters into working harder. On the other hand, it is commendable for their parents to not stand out, to blend in with their surroundings. Tran’s article appears in a compendium that aims to bring grassroots ‘Vietnamese-German Realities’ into the mainstream discourse. It is aptly entitled ‘UnSichtbar’ or ‘InVisible’, a reference to the inconspicuousness of Vietnamese immigrant youth in German society. The Sarrazin debate of 2009–10 seeded a thesis that grew throughout the following years, especially once hundreds of thousands of people from Syria and northern Africa began seeking refuge in Europe in 2015: the idea that Germany is being overrun by nonWhite immigrants. Although most German citizens support the idea of welcoming refugees and tolerating difference, expressions of outrage can flare up when non-Whites break social norms. For example, when young men sexually assaulted (White) women during New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne and other cities in 2015; a terrorist attack on a Christmas market in Berlin in 2016; several stabbings in small towns in early 2018; and when dozens of asylum seekers battled deportation police in Ellwangen in 2018. In these cases, the perpetrators committed violent acts, and those actions made them exceedingly visible. On talk shows and town councils, people debated how to tamp down the violence: whether to stop admitting refugees into Germany; whether to isolate them in barracks outside of towns; or whether to spread out their housing so there would be less potential for conflict in one place (Goebel, 2018). Germans may not have known exactly what they were hoping for in terms of successfully integrating new immigrants, but these hyper-visible violent incidents were definitely not it. What we can learn from the Sarrazin debate and these later incidents is that there is popular consensus building around the idea that there is a ‘right way’ for immigrants to integrate into German society.

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THE CURRENT MODEL FOR SUCCESSFUL INTEGRATION IN GERMANY What follows in this section is based on comments about Vietnamese immigrants during the 2009–10 ‘Sarrazin debate’.

Diligence + Inconspicuousness = Integration The emphasis on inconspicuousness among first-generation Vietnamese immigrants is no accident. There are very specific historical reasons why these immigrants worked hard to avoid being noticed; and when they must be visible, to show up as diligent and hard-working. In the 1990s, this representational strategy – choosing to be as invisible as possible – was the key for many Vietnamese to be able to live and work in Germany. According to the German Federal Statistical Office, there are 167,000 people of Vietnamese descent living in Germany (2017). They outnumber people of Chinese descent (157,000) but still comprise less than 1% of Germany’s total population of more than 82 million. If you ask a person living in Germany today if they know anything about Vietnamese people in Germany, chances are, they will say no. They have never noticed them. This is especially true of western Germans, because the strategy for integrating Vietnamese immigrants into western Germany was to disperse people across many small towns in order to prevent them from forming an ethnic ghetto (Blume and Kantowsky, 1988). On the other hand, in eastern Germany and eastern Berlin, Vietnamese immigrants are one of the largest groups of migrants (German Federal Statistical Office, 2017: 129–32). In fact, due to their numbers and concentration in the hospitality and retail sector, the person-of-color you are most likely to meet in this part of the country is a Vietnamese immigrant.8

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Germany – A Country of Immigrants? Germany has not historically considered itself to be a country of immigrants. Despite a long history of small Germanic kingdoms and citystates, Germany only coalesced as a nation in the 1870s. Throughout the 19th century, thousands of people from various Germanspeaking states emigrated to North and South America. In other words, Germans were immigrants in other countries. After 1945, Germany was divided into two countries – East and West Germany – and remained that way throughout the Cold War.9 Allied troops occupied Germany until the 1990s, with American, British, and French troops in the west, and Russian troops in the east. Following World War II, East and West Germany shouldered the responsibility for resettling 4.5 million ethnic Germans from eastern Europe. As the Cold War continued, West Germany accepted and even encouraged political and religious refugees from East Germany and eastern Europe to immigrate. Many of these immigrants spoke some German, shared cultural traditions, and were classified as Germans rather than foreigners. For these immigrants, West Germany created free ‘integration classes’, including language instruction and information about the German legal system, culture, and history (Goebel, 2018). German citizenship was guaranteed for those who could prove that at least one grandparent was German, so nationality focused more on hereditary than geographic qualifications. In 1965, West Germany began creating regulations to manage non-German immigrants (Gesley, 2017). Starting in the 1970s, labor shortages in both East and West Germany forced those countries to recruit foreign temporary workers, with the express intention that they would not settle in Germany. In 1990, the Act on Foreigners specifically drew on the premise that Germany was still not an immigration country, that Germany’s capacity to take in immigrants was limited and that preference had to be

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given to immigrants of German heritage, foreigners fleeing political persecution, and EU citizens taking advantage of their freedom of movement. West Germany’s constitution had guaranteed asylum to any person persecuted for political reasons, but with the end of the Cold War and the breakup of Yugoslavia, a then-record high of 440,000 people applied for asylum in Germany in 1992. This led to the Asylum Compromise of 1993, which allowed Germany to expedite asylum decisions within the transit zone of airports, and to return asylum seekers to safe third countries and safe origin countries. It was not until 2005, with the adoption of the Migration Act, that the government finally recognized that Germany had become an immigration destination. For the first time, people born in Germany to immigrant parents were granted automatic German citizenship. Before 2005, people born in Germany were not automatically citizens, even if their families had resided in Germany for generations. The Integration Act of 2016 created a two-tier naturalization system, with a fast-track to citizenship for immigrants who demonstrate willingness to integrate, and reductions in benefits for those who do not cooperate with integration efforts.

The Divided History of Immigration from Vietnam to Germany Vietnam’s divided history lay the groundwork for two different migration pathways from Vietnam to Germany in the 1990s (Bui, 2003, see also Hillmann, 2005). Ruled by feuding dynasties until the early 19th century, Vietnam was then colonized by the French. Following Japanese occupation during World War II, nationalist forces defeated French re-occupation by 1954. The peace accords divided Vietnam into northern and southern halves, with the north evolving along a Marxist–Leninist model and the south evolving through a succession of military dictators, supported by the

United States and allies. A ceasefire agreement was signed in 1973. In 1975, northern Vietnamese troops invaded the southern capital of Saigon, uniting the country as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Like Vietnam, Germany has been divided and reunified within the past century. During the post-war period, German territory was divided into four quadrants administered by each of the allies (Fulbrook, 2015). The former capital, Berlin, located deep within the Russian-occupied zone, was also divided into quadrants. In 1963, East Germany built a containment wall around their sector. Known as the Berlin Wall, it symbolized the standoff between western capitalism and eastern communism. In autumn 1989, reform movements in East Germany toppled the government and introduced democratic and market economy reforms. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall was opened. The following July, the two Germanys entered into a monetary union, and by September the eastern German states joined West Germany. Migration from Vietnam to Germany started in the 1950s, with a small number of Vietnamese citizens who participated in education and training programs in both East and West Germany (Schaland and Schmiz, 2016). Due to the Vietnam War in the 1960s, West Germans began to hear about Vietnam as a result of the worldwide student protests against American involvement in the war. East Germans, on the other hand, were urged by their schools, workplaces, and unions to gather donations and supplies to bolster the Vietnamese war effort (Spennemann, 1997). In 1973, the year of the ceasefire agreement in Vietnam, East Germany pledged to train 10,000 Vietnamese citizens within a decade, as a show of international solidarity. A few years later, West Germany offered to resettle 40,000 people (of an estimated one million) from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia who were fleeing war as well as ethnic and political discrimination. In 1980, Vietnam signed agreements with East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and other eastern bloc countries

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to provide multi-year training for large contingents of Vietnamese workers at enterprises in Europe. In 1987, the pace of the program increased dramatically, with groups of 10,000 to 30,000 per year arriving for on-the-job training in East German factories (Spennemann, 1997). By 1990, Vietnamese contract workers constituted the second-largest group of foreign nationals residing in East Germany after the Soviet occupation troops. At the time the Berlin Wall fell, there were 60,000 Vietnamese citizens in East Germany, most of whom were enrolled in the trainee contract worker program. There were approximately 35,000 people of Vietnamese origin in West Germany, most of whom had arrived as refugees. With impending German reunification and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, thousands of Vietnamese migrants from eastern Germany and Eastern Europe crossed into the West. From 1990 to 1993, an average of 10,000 Vietnamese citizens who had been working in Eastern Europe applied for asylum in Germany annually. The safe third countries regulation dramatically reduced asylum applications by Vietnamese citizens from 1994 onward (Spennemann, 1997). Meanwhile, enterprises in the former East Germany laid off the vast majority of Vietnamese participants in the labor training program in order to make their businesses viable for a market economy. By June 1991, a mere 4,000 Vietnamese citizens were still employed on their contracts, down from 60,000 a year and a half earlier (Spennemann, 1997; Hermann, 1992)! The bilateral agreement was amended to allow either the employee or employer to terminate the employment contract, providing financial compensation to the Vietnamese employee, and the choice of either returning to Vietnam with a bonus payment or residing and working in Germany for the remainder of their five-year contract. In 1993, a new regulation allowed people who had entered as part of the labor-training program to obtain a special work permit and extend their residency permit beyond the five-year period specified in their original contracts, provided they met certain conditions: they had to withdraw

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any application for asylum, demonstrate they had not returned to Vietnam with a parting bonus, and show proof of adequate earnings, living space, and a clean criminal record. These requirements were very challenging to meet, considering the massive social and economic upheaval in the early 1990s in Eastern Europe and Germany. By 1995, about 15,000 Vietnamese citizens were able to meet the requirements to become naturalized German citizens (Berger, 1996). However, about a third of the estimated 97,000 people of Vietnamese descent residing in Germany by 1995 were barred from attaining permanent residency rights and were scheduled to be deported to Vietnam (Deutscher Bundestag, 1995). These migrants were a political hot potato, between the German and Vietnamese governments for much of the 1990s. After the massive deportations from East Germany in 1990, and up until July 1995, the Vietnamese government refused to re-admit Vietnamese citizens from Germany, including those whose asylum applications had been denied and even some who wished to return voluntarily (Bui, 2003). This stance came at a time when Vietnam was busy re-integrating 70,000 people from refugee camps in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, and was scheduled to reintegrate tens of thousands more. Germany was also overwhelmed by migration challenges. Starting in 1989, West Germany received more asylum applications than at any time since World War II, peaking at 610,000 in 1992. This made German institutions eager to deport the 33,600 Vietnamese nationals on their deportation roster. To force a deportation agreement, Germany halted its development aid to Vietnam in 1994 and lobbied for a European aid embargo in 1995. A repatriation agreement was signed in 1995, but bureaucratic delays dragged out the deportation process through 1997 (Hillman, 2005). In summary, the seven years from 1990 to 1997 were tumultuous and deeply disruptive for everyone in eastern Germany, and especially for the thousands of Vietnamese citizens living there.

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Black Market Cigarettes This is the specific historical moment in which the trope of the Vietnamese cigarette seller entered mainstream German discourse in the mid 1990s. State actors seized on the idea of Vietnamese people peddling smuggled cigarettes and drew links to violent crime in order to help push through the repatriation program to rid Germany of tens of thousands of ‘illegal’ migrants (am Orde, 1996). A dramatic storyline took shape in 1996 as gang violence escalated, with Vietnamese people as both perpetrators and victims, and German law enforcement struggling to get the problem under control. This narrative helped manufacture consent for the repatriation program by highlighting the program’s promise to deport Vietnamese criminals. As an example of this discourse, a feature article in the national magazine Der Spiegel clearly drew this line of reasoning (Der Spiegel, 1996). Starting with mug shots of seven of the nine Vietnamese men who had recently been murdered in the Marzahn neighborhood of Berlin, the article explains the evolution of Vietnamese people’s involvement in the black market for cigarettes and violent crime. Die Zigaretten-Mafia is ein postsocialistisches Kriminal-Phänomen. Mitte der achtziger Jahre hatte die DDR-Regierung Zehntausende von vietnamesischen Vertragsarbeitern ins Land geholt. Mit der Wende wurde ein Großteil von ihnen arbeitslos; wer nicht das Glück hatte, etwa einen Job als Hilfskraft in der Gastronomie oder auf Wochenmärkten zu finden, nahm schnell das Angebot von Landsleuten an, künftig sein Geld mit dem Verkauf von unversteurten Zigaretten zu verdienen. … Einen Teil ihres Profits investieren die Kriminellen, ganz legal, in Immobilien, Asia-Shops oder Gaststätten. … Die Hilflosigkeit der Justiz veranlaßte einen Berliner Richter, im Herbst vergangenen Jahres in einer Urteilsbegründigung ganz offen von ‘der Kapitulation des deutschen Rechtsstaates’ zu sprechen. Weil die Strafverfolger den ‘mafiaähnlichen Einschüchterungen einiger vietnamesischer Landsleute’ wenig entegegenzusetzen hätten, könne in Detuschland ‘bedenkenlos gemordet und erpresst werden’. … In ihrer Not fordern nun Politiker wie Berlins Innensenator Jörg

Schönbohm (CDU) die konsequente Abschiebung straffällig gewordener Vietnamesen. … Allein im vergangenen Jahr sollten 2500 Vietnamesen Deutschland verlassen – bis heute wurde gerade mal 65 Menschen die Wiedereinreise in ihre Heimat genehmigt. (Der Spiegel, 1996) [The Cigarette Mafia is a post-socialist crime phenomenon. In the mid 80s, the GDR government fetched tens of thousands of Vietnamese contract workers into the country. With the Wende, many of them became unemployed; whoever was not lucky enough to find a job as an assistant in a restaurant or at a farmers’ market, quickly took on the offer from compatriots to earn money by selling untaxed cigarettes.… The criminals invested part of the profits, completely legally, into real estate, Asia-Shops or restaurants. … The helplessness of the courts caused a judge in a judgement justification made last fall, to speak openly of ‘the capitulation of the German state based on rule-of-law’. Because prosecutors have little to counteract the intimidation of some Vietnamese compatriots, it was possible in Germany to ‘murder and blackmail without a second thought’. In their distress, politicians like Berlin’s domestic senator Jörg Schönbohm (of the conservative Christian Democratic Union party) are demanding consistent deportation of convicted Vietnamese. … Last year alone, 2,500 Vietnamese should have left Germany – to date a mere 65 people have been allowed reentry to their homeland].

The argument of the article is that a sophisticated and violent mafia is manipulating and threatening the many comparatively helpless Vietnamese people living in eastern Germany and Berlin. Although the victims of violent crimes are Vietnamese people, the article contends that the violence also undermines the German justice system. By referring to the investments in restaurants and shops, which are clearly visible to German neighbors, and by mentioning that 2,500 Vietnamese are due to be deported, the article implies that more than just a few mafiabosses are implicated. It’s understandable that someone might shy away from a Vietnamese-run restaurant, after reading an article like this. The images and reasoning in articles like these were so powerful that they spilled over, leading virtually all Vietnamese people in Germany to feel branded by the

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image of the illegal, violent, cigarette seller (Bui, 2003). Not without reason: in May 1996, Berlin’s special investigative unit assigned to stamp out black market cigarettes had been renamed ‘Vietnam’ rather than ‘Tobacco’ (am Orde, 1996). As demonstrated in contemporary interviews and testimonials, mainstream press coverage of the black market in cigarettes made many Vietnamese people living in Germany, and especially eastern Germany, believe that their identity as Vietnamese had been tainted. Vietnamese organizations noted that Vietnamese people living and working legally in Berlin were exposed to discrimination, and Vietnamese snack bar and clothing stand owners reported decreased revenues following news of the 1996 murders (Berliner Zeitung, May 25, 1996). An interview with a Vietnamese family published in the east Berlin newspaper Berliner Zeitung shows how much they felt their reputation was harmed by the dominant image of a Vietnamese cigarette mafia (Berliner Zeitung, July 5, 1996): ‘Chu and Nguyen recount that the Mafia has brought all Vietnamese into disrepute. “Ever since they have struck terror in people’s hearts in Berlin, the Germans look at us with different eyes.” Chu observes this in glances “that are no longer friendly”’. In reaction, the family makes itself as invisible as possible, living in a small cheap apartment on a loud street. Chu works as a cleaning woman despite her degree in economics, opting not to have a second child for fear she might lose her job and thus the right to remain in Germany. In the short ethnography of this article, Chu and Nguyen demonstrate what it looks like to be law-abiding Vietnamese immigrants: they repudiate the criminals’ abhorrent behavior; they content themselves with less than what others have in terms of jobs, living quarters, dignity, and security; and they hope to earn their right to the lowest rung of society by working hard. Vietnamese migrants and their advocates exercised agency. Against the images propagated by state actors, they tried to

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convey their own alternative representations. They countered the image of the cigaretteselling criminal with strategic recapitulations of collective migration history. In western Germany, immigrant advocates put forth a unified history of Vietnamese ‘boat people’ who braved the open sea on rickety boats to get to the West. One example, out of many, is the following excerpt published in September 1996 in the respected Frankfurt-based newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau. It was part of a report about a celebration organized by the German human rights organization Cap Anamur, which had rescued hundreds of Vietnamese refugees in the 1980s. The little boy would probably not be alive if the German refugee ship Cap Anamur had not fished his parents out of the South China Sea 15 years ago and brought them to Germany. The fully overloaded fishing boat belonging to the southern Vietnamese had bobbed up and down for three days and nights before help arrived. Like this family, who lives in Bochum now, the ships of the Cap Anamur Committee rescued thousands of people by 1987 who fled from the Communist regime in their home onto the open sea … They all found a new home with their families in Germany – in West Germany. (Published in translation from the original German in Bui, 2003: 114–15)

This excerpt casts South Vietnamese as worthy due to the lengths they went to in order to find democracy and freedom. It casts West Germans as saviors and guardians of democracy and humanity. The storyline resonated with West Germans’ understanding of their own post-war struggle, rising from the ashes of a devastating war, rebuilding a society that values freedom, democracy, and anticommunism. In this way, the narrative of South Vietnamese boat-people refugees aligned with and affirmed the narrative of West German identity. Meanwhile, immigrant advocates in eastern Germany were also hard at work creating a history of Vietnamese migration to East Germany that cast them as worthy of residency rights and respect. For example, the organization Union of Vietnamese in Berlin and Brandenburg put together an exhibit

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about the experience of Vietnamese living in the eastern Berlin neighborhood of Marzahn. The exhibit consists of artifacts including press clippings, letters, photographs, copies of documents, and interpretive text, mounted on 11 large posters created between 1993 and 1998. Some of the posters have titles that sum up their content, including: #2 Vietnamese in the GDR – For Five Years gives details about the labor contracts; #3 Working in Berlin – Living in Berlin illuminates daily life in East German factories and dormitories which housed the workers; #5 The New Situation – shows positive developments around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also some of the racist violence in East Germany after 1990; #8 The Struggle for the Right to Stay shows photos of Vietnamese people protesting and documents demanding their rights; #10 Results points to achievements including the 1997 revision to the Immigration Act granting permanent residency rights to former contract workers; #11 Unbroken Will toward Integration highlights the enduring commitment of Vietnamese people in Marzahn to become a productive part of German society.

The titles of the posters describe the narrative arc of a story about people who came to East Germany with high hopes, who encountered heavy-handed regulations, racism, and years of active political struggle to re-gain the ability to live and work legally in Germany. It is an eloquent example of how Vietnamese people transformed themselves from migrants into immigrants, from victims of violence and repression into people who persevered through struggle to create a new space for themselves as part of German society. This story resonates with East Germans’ successful movement for reform, and transition from a socialist into a democratic model of society. The collective histories of Vietnamese ‘boat people’ and Vietnamese ‘contract workers’

are ‘immigrant origin narratives’ that clearly delineate a trajectory from place of origin to integration in the host society (Bui, 2003: 175). They leverage the theme of overcoming nearly insurmountable challenges to explain how immigrants have earned their place in the host society. They fend off the trope of the cigarette seller, while answering the perennial question posed by members of the host society to anyone they detect as different: ‘where are you from?’. Immigrant origin narratives are an epi-national strategy that inscribes Vietnamese migrants into a German national framework, against a dominant discourse that shows Vietnamese people as roving Mafiosi outlaws and marginalized petty criminals. The ‘boat people’ and ‘contract worker’ immigrant origin narratives have allowed Vietnamese migrants in Germany to affirm a sense of belonging, activate empathy, and secure rights from the host society, and also to distance the shameful stereotype of the black market cigarette dealer. The origin narrative strategy counters the stereotype by providing explanation and facts as well as an emotional appeal for empathy based on the experience of hardship and struggle.

Partial Masking While immigrant origin narratives seek to provide information to counter a negative stereotype that all Vietnamese migrants in Germany are implicated in the black market cigarette trade, a different strategy has taken shape among a subgroup of Vietnamese entrepreneurs: partially masking their ethnic identity by calling their businesses ‘Asian’ or ‘Chinese’, rather than ‘Vietnamese’. It is no accident that in the late 1990s, nearly every eastern German city boasted ‘Asian’ grocery stores, snack bars, and restaurants. The lowpriority work permits issued to former contract workers after 1990 severely hampered them from obtaining jobs in the regular labor market, but obtaining employment was a prerequisite for maintaining a residency

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permit. Starting their own businesses was the only viable option. A 1995 survey of 500 Vietnamese living in eastern Germany by the Federal Labor Ministry found that more than half were self-employed. Of those who started their own business, 68% said the reason was ‘couldn’t find any other job’. Although Asian eateries were not the most common form of self-employment for Vietnamese migrants, they were highly visible: many started out as food trucks located on public plazas. Moreover, in the eastern German landscape, ethnic cuisine was relatively rare into the late 1990s. Ethnic restaurants and grocery stores capitalize on the owners’ physical appearance of difference to market their goods. Interviews with several Vietnamese eatery owners inquired why they called their businesses ‘Asian’ or ‘Chinese’. Some responded that they thought it would be impossible to market Vietnamese food to Germans unfamiliar with that cuisine, and a few remarked that Vietnamese cuisine is too labor-intensive to be profitable. Instead, they opted for a relatively cheap menu of fried noodles and rice dishes. One interviewee explained another reason: [B]ecause Vietnamese, here is such a, I believe that was after the Wende, with this cigarette story, because not all Vietnamese deal in cigarettes. But predominantly back then, and the illegal Vietnamese, they did trade in cigarettes. There is also the story of the Mafia dealing with cigarettes or organizations and so on, and they get shortterm profits, as with drug smuggling. And so many Germans, who cannot grasp it, they think all Vietnamese deal in cigarettes. So assume that – look at my place for example, a guy outside thinks, ‘He certainly has dough from cigarette deals and then he opens up a restaurant’. That is absolutely not at all correct! And – but for Germans, just throw all in one basket. … And if Germans think: ‘Vietnamese, that is not for real’. And: ‘A Vietnamese certainly has dealings with the Mafia. Let’s not go there’. We are afraid of such a thing. Even though that is not correct. We don’t at all trade in cigarettes! My – our people, yes, but we, we business-people, not. We have nothing to do with that. We have precisely not even contacts with those people. What should we do with those people? We get into trouble if they get into our

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apartment or if we have contact with them, maybe we will get into trouble some time. We are cl- not clean people, but we do have our work. We simply cannot do that.10

The vehemence of Hung’s reaction shows how much he feels the sting of the ethnic stigma resulting from the discourse around Vietnamese cigarette dealing. It also demonstrates his fear of violence, and his strategy for attracting customers despite his own and their fears. Hung believes that if he included ‘Vietnamese’ in the name of his restaurant, passers-by would suspect that he was involved in the black market cigarette trade, a suspicion that he tries hard to dispel, both in the interview and in everyday life. The strategy of substituting an Asian identity for his Vietnamese one does the double duty of explaining Hung’s otherness to prospective customers while also distancing the stereotype of the Vietnamese cigarette mafia. The partial mask that Hung dons when he calls his restaurant ‘Asian’ instead of Vietnamese is a way to ward off fear so that German strangers will dare to cross his threshold. But Hung knows that is just the first step in a long process of getting to know one another better and justifying his place in German society. Hung hopes that he can contribute a small part to debunking the cigarette-selling stereotype by demonstrating his work ethic, something that he believes the Germans closest to him will eventually notice and respect. We must prove, I personally have to prove, so that the people think to themselves: ‘Look, he works from morning until night and every day there. And he works in the restaurant, from A to Z, he cleans up himself, cleans the windows himself, and cleans the garden himself. He goes along the street and cleans there. He does all that alone. He takes the garbage out and so on. He has worked there for years. He has nothing to do with those other people!’. … And besides, eventually some of the German people, the customers, can gradually differentiate, whether some people work sensibly or some people, who do certain deals. … I just take care of my business. And my character. And my reputation, or the reputation of all Vietnamese, yes.

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Hung hopes that by conducting their businesses in this way, he and other Vietnamese entrepreneurs will be able to work off some of the stigma surrounding Vietnamese migrants. By representing themselves in their daily activities as diligent small-business owners, by going the extra mile, picking up trash on the public street in addition to cleaning their own stores, Hung and the other owners of highly visible stores and stalls are trying to change the perception of Vietnamese migrants in Germany. Another restaurant owner, Lan, commented that she believes that Germans think of her and others like her as ‘hard-working, work all the time, even more hard-working than the Germans!’.11 For Lan and Hung, hard work is the pathway to earning respect and eventually integration in German society. By strategically deploying friendliness and diligence, they intentionally combat racism and negative stereotypes among their customers, neighbors, and eventually, the larger public. Twenty years later, it seems that they may have succeeded.

CONCLUSION Freire (2005) wrote about the importance of citizens to become critically conscious and avoiding naïve consciousness. Conscientization (or conscientização in Portuguese), according to Freire (2005) was related to achieving an in-depth understanding of the world. Although the model minority stereotype is an academic term, reading the proverbial academic word and the world, a concept developed by Freire (1985) is a necessary component to achieving critical pedagogy and also conscientization. Violent crime and black market cigaretteselling became widely associated with Vietnamese migrants in Germany in the mid 1990s, at a time when German and Vietnamese authorities clashed over deporting thousands of Vietnamese nationals from Germany to Vietnam. Eventually, the deportations proceeded, and violent crime was tamped down,

but the trope of the Vietnamese cigarette mafia remained, affecting Germans’ perceptions of Vietnamese migrants, and the migrants’ perceptions of how they were perceived. To counter their sense of ‘spoiled identity’ (Goffman, 1963: 3), rescue their dignity, and ensure their acceptance in society, Vietnamese migrants had to invent ways to deal with this ethnic stigma. Immigrant origin narratives can function as an effective strategy for identity management in the face of ethnic stigma. The narratives of Vietnamese boat people and contract workers provided a powerful advocacy tool in securing rights and services for close to 55,000 of the estimated 97,000 Vietnamese migrants in Germany in the 1990s. They helped to distinguish ‘legitimate’ categories of immigrants, distancing them from the stereotype of the black market cigarette vendor and the discourse around deporting Vietnamese nationals. The narratives also served and continue to serve in everyday interactions between immigrants and natives to explain migrants’ differences from the host society through the lens of a legitimate, accepted, collective experience. The practice of partial masking, that is, calling themselves or their businesses ‘Asian’ or ‘Chinese’ rather ‘Vietnamese’, was another strategy migrants wielded to deflect the cigarette vendor stereotype. This strategy bought Vietnamese migrants the time and space to make a more favorable first-hand impression through their hard work. This everyday management of their reputation, coupled with many conversations, helped start the process of breaking down ethnic stigma. What can be learned from the apparent success story of Vietnamese migrants, especially with a new wave of refugees seeking to integrate into German society? First, it is helpful if leaders can avoid creating an ethnic stigma. In the case of recent migrants from the Middle East, leaders must continue to emphasize that the refugees are not Islamic terrorists. They must work to ensure that refugees have a clear pathway to residency rights and work permits. Housing, direct contact with German neighbors, language courses, meaningful work, and most

VIETNAMESE STUDENTS AND THE EMERGING MODEL MINORITY MYTH IN GERMANY

importantly, a way for migrants to demonstrate their eagerness to contribute to society will go a long way toward integration. The work of shaping an immigrant origin narrative for the thousands of refugees from Syria has already begun, with the stirring images of risky crossings on the Mediterranean and the hardships of crossing southern Europe. These new immigrants and their advocates should make sure to include in the narrative some of the tropes that resonate with Germans’ own experience, such as surviving the bombardment and near-total devastation of their cities, as Germans did after World War II. Resiliency, a willingness to work hard, a high value on education, and tolerance for different views are some of the things that Syrian refugees may find will provide common ground for starting empathetic relationships with their German hosts. The phenomenon of Vietnamese Wunder in Germany today shows how the model minority stereotype of Asians is highly portable, regardless of country. As Dayal (2014) points out, the ‘“model minority” discourse […] has begun instrumentalising certain communities of colour in Germany minoritised as “Asian”’ (para. 2). It is important to push against the Asian model minority myth so that culture does not become an excuse for failing to implement sensible and equitable integration policies.

Notes  1  DW-TV’s English-language video, available on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= ag2S8sd6HV0 (Accessed March 3, 2018)) highlights the Vietnamese in Germany who are academically successful.  2  It is important to bear in mind that the term ‘minority’ has a different meaning in central Europe than in the United States. It has generally referred to Indigenous ethnic minorities whose past and current living spaces do not necessarily align with current national borders, such as Roma and Sinti (Weller, 2005). Recognized minorities are guaranteed certain rights under international agreements. In this chapter, we will use ‘minority’ to refer to a group that is non-dominant in terms of population, social status, and power.

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 3  According to the German Interior Ministry, Germany experienced a record 890,000 asylum applications in 2015; 280,000 in 2016; and 186,644 in 2017. Cited in www.dw.com/en/refugee-num bers-in-germany-dropped-dramatically… /a-42162223 (Accessed March 3, 2018). The German Federal Statistics Office put the number of Syrians in Germany in 2017 at just under 700,000. https://www.destatis.de/DE/ZahlenFakten/GesellschaftStaat/Bevoelkerung/Migration/ Integration/AuslaendischeBevolkerung/Tabellen/ StaatsangehoerigkeitJahre.html (Accessed March 3, 2018).  4  We use the general term ‘migrants’ to refer to people who have crossed an international border, and the more specific term ‘immigrants’ to indicate intention to stay permanently. German government demographers now use the term ‘people with a migration background’ to refer to people in Germany with at least one parent who was not born as a German citizen.  5  This was not the first national press on the topic of Vietnamese student success. Karin Weiss had advocated studying the phenomenon because she observed Vietnamese students attending Gymnasium in Brandenburg at rates up to 74%, as reported in 2008 in the news magazine Der Spiegel. Her intention was to show that immigrants could perform as well or better than ethnic Germans on tests. She noted the significant difference in academic achievement among children of immigrants in the eastern German states compared to western states and the national average. She called for more studies and pointed to factors outside of ethnic background that might impact academic success, such as widely available public preschool for children of immigrants (Mai, 2008).  6  This explanation is contrasted to historian Jochen Oltmer’s assertion that a proactive welcoming approach by the host society was the decisive factor (de Swaaf, 2016).  7  Unless otherwise noted, this and all other translations in the text are provided by Pipo Bui. Part of this passage appears in an English translation in Spiegel Online (2010).  8  With the exception of Berlin, eastern Germany’s population includes less than 7% migrants, compared to 34% in western Germany. In this part of the country, Vietnamese migrants are outnumbered only by Poles, Syrians, Russians, and Kazakhs.  9  The Federal Republic of Germany was commonly called West Germany. The German Democratic Republic was called East Germany.  10  Interview with Hung conducted in German on June 22, 2000. Author’s translation. Interviewee names have been changed to ensure privacy.

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 11  Interview with Lan conducted in German, on May 19, 2000. Author translation. Interviewee names have been changed to ensure privacy.

REFERENCES am Orde, S. (1996). Zwischen Vertragsarbeit und organisierter Kriminalität [Between contract work and organized crime]. ZAG: Zeitung antirassistischer Gruppen [Newspaper for Anti-Racist Groups], 6(18), 24–27. Berger, A. (1996). Ehemaliger DDR-Vertragsarbeitnehmer: Zur sozialen und aufenthaltsrechtlichen Situation [Former GDR contract workers: social and residency rights situation]. Berlin, Germany: Arbeitskreis gegen Fremdenfeindlichkeit [Working Group against Xenophobia]. Berliner Zeitung. (1996, May 25). Ausländerbeauftragte warb um Vertrauen. [Commissioner for Foreigners’ Affairs Asked for Trust]. Berliner Zeitung. (1996, July 5). Käufer von der Grossmutter bis zum Enkel. [Vendors from the Grandmother to the grandchild]. Blume, M. & Kantowsky, D. (1988). Assimilation, Integration, Isolation, Fallstudien zum Eingliederungsprozess südosstasiatischer Flüchtlinge in der Bundesrepublik Deutshland [Assimilation, Integration, Isolation, Case Studies on The Integration Process of Southeast Asian Refugees in the Federal Republic of Germany]. Cologne, Germany: Weltforum Verlag. Bradbury, A. (2015). From model minorities to disposable models: The de-legitimization of educational success through discourses of authenticity. In N. D. Hartlep & B. J. Porfilio (Eds.), Killing the Model Minority Stereotype: Asian American Counterstories and Complicity (pp. 133–149). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Brand, D. (1987, August 31). Education: The New Whiz Kids. Why Asian Americans are doing so well and what it costs them. Time. 130(9). http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/ 0,9171,965326,00.html. Cover by T. Thai: http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641, 19870831,00.html (Accessed March 3, 2018). Bui, P. (2003). Envisioning Vietnamese Migrants in Germany: Ethnic Stigma, Immigrant Narratives and Partial Masking. Münster: Lit-Verlag.

Chua, A. (2011). Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. New York: Penguin Books. Cicero. (2014). Vietnamesen in Deutschland: Die unsichtbaren Lieblinge. [English translation: Vietnamese in Germany. The invisible darlings]. https://www.cicero.de/innenpolitik/dieunsichtbaren-lieblinge/46135 (Accessed March 3, 2018). Dayal, S. (2014, January 29). ‘Don’t be evil’: Model minorities in colorblind ‘Schland. https://heimatkunde.boell.de/2014/01/29/ dont-be-evil-model-minorities-colourblindschland (Accessed March 3, 2018). de Swaaf, K. (2016, December 7). The ‘boat people’ and their children. deutschland.de https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/politics/ peace-security/the-boat-people-and-theirchildren (Accessed March 3, 2018). Deutscher Bundestag. (1995, March 29). Antwort der Bundesregierung auf die kleine Anfrage der Abgeordneten Andrea Lederer, Ulla Jalpke und der weiteren Abgeordneten der PDS – Drucksache 13/320. Drucksache 13/857 [Response by the Federal Government to the minor request by representatives Andrea Lederer, Ulla Jalpke and other representatives of the PDS]. Ehmke, T., Hohensee, F., Heidemeyer, H., & Prenzel, M. (2004). Familiäre Lebensverhältnisse, Bildungsbeteiligung und Kompetenzerwerb [Family living conditions, participation in education and achievement of competency]. In Prenzel, Manfred, Heidemeier, Heike, Ramm, G, Hohensee, F & Ehmke, Timo. PISA-Konsortium Deutschland (Eds.), PISA 2003: Der Bildungsstand der Jugendlichen in Deutschland – Ergebnisse des zweiten Internationalen Vergleiches [Educational Level of Youth in Germany – Results of the Second International Comparison] (pp. 225–253). Münster/New York: Waxmann Verlag. El-Mafaalani, A. & T. Kemper. (2017). Bildungserfolgreich trotz ungünstiger Rahmenbedingungen. Empirische Ergebnisse und theoretische Überlegungen zum Bildungserfolg von vietnamesischen Kindern und Jugendlichen im deutschen Schulsystem [Educational success despite disadvantageous conditions: Empirical results and theoretical considerations about the educational success of Vietnamese children and youth in the German school system]. In B. KocatürkSchuster, A. Kolb, T. Long, G. Schultze & S. Wolck (Eds.), UnSichtbar: VietnamesischDeutsch Wirklichkeiten [InVisible:

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1987/02/22/magazine/the-drive-to-excel. html (Accessed January 29, 2020). Goebel, S. (2018, May 3). Medial (re)produzierte Narrative und Asylrechtsänderungen. Über die Aushandlungen neuer Asyldispositive [Media (re)produced narratives and changes to asylum law. Negotiations over new asylum dispositives]. Lecture series: Institutskolloquium Aktuelle Forschungen zu Vielfalt: Auf der Flucht nach der Flucht. Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven und ethnographische Zugänge [Colloquium for Recent Research on Diversity, during and after Fleeing, Cultural Studies Perspectives and Ethnological Approaches]. Tübingen, Germany: Ludwig-Uhland Institut für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft. Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Hammerstein, N. & Buck, A. (1996). Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte. Band 1: Das 15. bis 17. Jahrhundert. Von der Renaissance und der Reformation bis zum Ende der Glaubenskämpfe [Handbook of German Educational History, Volume 1: The 15th– 17th Century, from the Renaissance and the Reformation to the End of the Religious Wars]. Munich, Germany: Beck. Hannis, G. (2015). The model minority and yellow peril stereotypes in New Zealand journalism. In N. D. Hartlep & B. J. Porfilio (Eds.), Killing the Model Minority Stereotype: Asian American Counterstories and Complicity (pp. 97–115). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Hartlep, N. D. (2013). The Model Minority Stereotype: Demystifying Asian American Success. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Hartlep, N. D. (2015). Modern em(body)ments of the model minority in South Korea. In N. D. Hartlep & B. J. Porfilio (Eds.), Killing the Model Minority Stereotype: Asian American Counterstories and Complicity (pp. 151–161). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Hermann, H. (1992). Ursachen und Entwicklung der Ausländerbeschäftigung [Causes and development of foreigner employment]. Informationen zur politischen Bildung [Information for Political Education], 237 (pp. 4–7). Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung [Federal Agency for Civic Education]. Hillmann, F. (2005). Riders on the storm: Vietnamese in Germany’s two migration systems.

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In E. Spaan, F. Hillmann & T. van Naerssen (Eds.), Asian Migrants and European Labour Markets: Patterns and Processes of Immigrant Labour Market Insertion in Europe (pp. 80– 100). London and New York: Routledge. Ho, R. (2015). Model minority convergences in North America: Asian parallels in Canada and the United States. In N. D. Hartlep & B. J. Porfilio (Eds.), Killing the Model Minority Stereotype: Asian American Counterstories and Complicity (pp. 117–132). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Keilani, F. (2013, April 13). UN rügen Deutschland wegen Sarrazin [UN remprimands Germany due to Sarrazin]. Der Tagesspiegel. Retrieved from https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/ rassismus-vorwuerfe-un-ruegen-deutschlandwegen-sarrazin/8082520.html Mai, M. (2008, October 7). Schlaue Zuwanderer: Ostdeutsche Vietnamesen überflügeln ihre Mitschüler [Clever immigrants: East German Vietnamese soar past their peers]. Der Spiegel. Retrieved from http://www.spiegel.de/ Model Minority Stereotype Project. (2019). Website. Retrieved September 30, 2018, from www.nicholashartlep.com Nauck, B. & Lotter, V. (2015). Parenting styles and perceived instrumentality of schooling in native, Turkish, and Vietnamese families in Germany. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft [Journal for Pedagogy], 18(4), 845–869. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11618-015-0630-x Petersen, W. (1966, January 9). Success Story, Japanese-American Style. New York Times. Retrieved January 29, 2019 from https:// www.nytimes.com/1966/01/09/archives/ success-story-japaneseamerican-style-successstory-japaneseamerican.html Pham, K. (2010, September 9). Integration: Der Fleiss und sein Preis [Integration: Diligence and its price]. Zeit Online. Retrieved from https://www.zeit.de/2010/37/IntegrationVietnamesen Pon, G. (2000). Importing the Asian model minority discourse into Canada: Implications for social work and education. Canadian Social Work Review, 17(2), 277–291. Ramm, G., M. Prenzel, H. Heidemeyer, & O. Walter. (2004). Soziokultureller Herkunft: Migration [Social background: migration]. In M. Prenzel et  al., PISA-Konsortium Deutschland (Eds.), PISA 2003: Der Bildungsstand der Jugendlichen in Deutschland – Ergebnisse des zweiten Internationalen Vergleiches [Educational Level of Youth in Germany – Results of the Second

International Comparison] (pp. 254–271). Münster/New York: Waxmann Verlag. Sarrazin, T. (2010). Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab. Munich: Random House. Schaland, A. J. & Schmiz, A. (2016). The Vietnamese diaspora in Germany. Eschborn: Deutsche Gesellschaft für International Zusammenarbeit GmbH [German Society for International Cooperation Ltd]. Schönfeld, G.-M. (2009, October 9). Sarrazin hat recht [Sarrazin is right]. Der Stern. Retrieved October 27, 2019, from https://www.stern.de/ politik/deutschland/integrationsdebattesarrazin-hat-recht-3448486.html Spennemann, N. (1997). Aufbauhelfer für eine bessere Zukunft. Die vietnamesischen Vertragsarbeiter in der ehemaligen DDR [Construction helpers for a better future. The Vietnamese contract workers in the former GDR]. In T. Hentschel (Ed.), Zweimal angekommen und doch nicht zu Hause [Arrived Twice and Still Not at Home] (pp. 8–20). Berlin: Reistrommel e.V. Spiegel Online. (2010, August 25). New book plunges Germany into immigration debate. Retrieved from http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/injurious-defamatory-andpolemical-new-book-plunges-germany-intoimmigration-debate-a-713796.html Spiegel, Der (1996, May 20). Wurm in der Suppe [Worm in the soup]. 21, 36–38. Available at http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/ d-8925950.html Spiewak, M. (2009, January 22). Das vietnamesische Wunder [The Vietnamese miracle]. Zeit Online. Retrieved from http://www.zeit. de/2009/05/B-Vietnamesen Tran, Q. (2017). Wenn positive Stereoptypisierung reduziert [When positive stereotyping reduces]. In B. Kocatürk-Schuster, A. Kolb, T. Long, G. Schultze. & S. Wolck (Eds.), UnSichtbar: Vietnamesisch-Deutsch Wirklichkeiten [InVisible: Vietnamese German Realities] (pp. 228–235). Köthen, Germany: druckhaus köthen GmbH & Co. Weller, M. (2005). Preface. In M. Weller (Ed.), The Rights of Minorities in Europe: A Commentary on the European Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (pp. vii–viii). New York: Oxford University Press. Zeit Online. (2009, October 1). Sarrazin muss sich Entschuldigen [Sarrazin must apologize]. Retrieved from https://www.zeit.de/politik/ deutschland/2009-10/sarrazin-aeusserungintegration/komplettansicht

49 Revisiting Hurricane Katrina: Racist Violence and the Biopolitics of Disposability Henry A. Giroux

Hurricane Katrina did not begin with a natural disaster. It began with the hatred that flared among White people in response to a civil rights movement that challenged White supremacy in American society. It began with a racist backlash that erupted with the killing of Emmett Till and continues to this day. Moreover, it made visible the predatory nature of disaster capitalism and its willingness to turn a disastrous event into a Petri dish for the forces of neoliberalism. Katrina launched a new era in the politics of disposability. The ghost of Katrina, which is more relevant today – in an era that some still describe as ‘post-racial’, even as Black men, women, and youth are gunned down in routine acts of state-sanctioned violence – than when it was first written. Moreover, Hurricane Katrina has proven prescient given the racist discourse, taunts, and insults hurled by Trump’s White nationalist administration at the residents of Puerto Rico following the death and destruction caused by Hurricane Maria in September 2017.

In the long aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, people in the United States and globally are still struggling to draw the correct conclusions and learn the right lessons from that horrific catastrophe. Initially we were led to believe that Katrina was the result of a fateful combination of a natural disaster and government incompetence. The perfect storm of bad luck provided one more example of the general inability of the Bush administration to actually govern, let alone protect its citizenry. Yet, with some distance and sober reflection, such assessment seems a bit short-sighted, a little too localized. In truth, Katrina offers a number of relevant lessons not only for US citizens, but for Canadians and citizens all over the world who must grapple with the global advance of what I call a politics of disposability. First, Katrina is symptomatic of a form of negative globalization that is as evident in Ottawa, Paris, and London, as it is in Washington DC or New Orleans, or any other city throughout the world. As capital, goods, trade, and

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information flow all over the globe, material and symbolic resources are increasingly being invested in the ‘free market’ while the social state pays a terrible price. As safety nets and social services are being hollowed out and communities crumble and give way to individualized, one-person archipelagos, especially under a Trump presidency, it is increasingly difficult to address as a collectivity, to act in concert, to meet the basic needs of citizens, or maintain the social investments needed to provide life-sustaining services. As nation-states fall under the sway of the principal philosophy of the times, which insists on the end of the era of ‘big government’ in favor of unencumbered individualism and the all-encompassing logic of the market, it is difficult to resurrect a language of social investment, protection, and accountability. Second, as Katrina made perfectly clear, the challenges of a global world, especially its growing ecological challenges, are collective and not simply private. This suggests that citizens in New Orleans as well as in Vancouver, Halifax, and Toronto – coastal and inland – must protect those principles of the social contract that offer collective solutions to foster and maintain both ecological sustainability and human survival. Certainly, Canadians have done much to ensure environmental protections, especially in comparison with their neighbours to the South, but there is much, much more that has to be done to curtail the threat of global warming and numerous ecological disasters. Third, as Hurricane Katrina vividly illustrated, the decline of the social state along with the rise of massive inequality increasingly bar whole populations from the rights and guarantees accorded to fully fledged citizens of the republic and who are increasingly rendered disposable, left to fend for themselves in the face of natural or man-made disasters. Nowhere is this more evident than in the anti-immigration policies, assault on health care, the return of the mass incarceration state, and attack on the rights of transgender people under the Trump administration.

This last challenge is difficult, for here we must connect the painful dots between the crisis in the Gulf Coast and that ‘other’ Gulf crisis in the Middle East; we must connect the dots between images of US soldiers standing next to tortured Iraqis forced to assume the additional indignity of a dog leash to images of bloated bodies floating in the toxic waters that overwhelmed New Orleans city streets after five long days of punctuated government indifference to the suffering of some of its citizen populations. If we continue to squander the world’s natural resources, prioritize free markets over free people, or beggar populations already in need because of financial debt, is it not then likely that we will have to endure more ‘natural’ catastrophes, more terrorist threats, along with media images that punctuate our own loss of humanity, whether this involves US soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq? In earlier eras, imagery of racist brutality and war atrocities moved nations to act and to change domestic and foreign policy in the interests of global justice. These contemporary images moved all of us, but only it seems for a time. Why is that? Emmett Till’s body arrived home in Chicago in September 1955. White racists in Mississippi had tortured, mutilated, and killed the young 14-year-old Black boy for whistling at a White woman. Determined to make visible the horribly mangled face and twisted body of the child as an expression of racial hatred and killing, Mamie Till, the boy’s mother, insisted that the coffin, interred at the A. A. Ranier Funeral Parlor on the South Side of Chicago, be left open for four long days. While mainstream news organizations ignored the horrifying image, Jet magazine published an unedited photo of Till’s face taken while he lay in his coffin. Shaila Dewan points out that mutilated is the word most often used to describe the face of Emmett Till after his body was hauled out of the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi. Inhuman is more like it: melted, bloated, missing an eye, swollen so large that its patch of wiry hair looks like that of a balding old man, not a handsome, brazen 14-year-old boy.1

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Till had been castrated and shot in the head, his tongue had been cut out, and a blow from an ax had practically severed his nose from his face – all of this done to a teenage boy who came to bear the burden of the inheritance of slavery and the inhuman pathology that drives its racist imaginary. The photo not only made visible the violent effects of the racial state; it also fueled massive public anger, especially among Blacks, and helped to launch the Civil Rights Movement. From the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement to the war in Vietnam, images of human suffering and violence provided the grounds for a charged political indignation and collective sense of moral outrage inflamed by the horrors of poverty, militarism, war, and racism – eventually mobilizing widespread opposition to these antidemocratic forces. Of course, the seeds of a vast conservative counterrevolution were already well underway as images of a previous era – ‘Whites only’ signs, segregated schools, segregated housing, and nonviolent resistance – gave way to a troubling iconography of cities aflame, mass rioting, and armed Black youth who came to embody the very precepts of lawlessness, disorder, and criminality. Building on the reactionary rhetoric of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan took office in 1980 with a trickle-down theory that would transform corporate America and a corresponding visual economy. The twin images of the young Black male ‘gangsta’ and his counterpart, the ‘welfare queen’, became the primary vehicles for selling the American public on the need to dismantle the welfare state, ushering in an era of unprecedented deregulation, downsizing, privatization, and regressive taxation. The propaganda campaign was so successful that George H. W. Bush could launch his 1988 presidential bid with the image of Willie Horton, a Black man convicted of rape and granted early release, and succeed in trouncing his opponent with little public outcry over the overtly racist nature of the campaign. By the beginning of the 1990s, global media

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consolidation, coupled with the outbreak of a new war that encouraged hyper-patriotism and a rigid nationalism, resulted in a tightly controlled visual landscape – managed both by the Pentagon and by corporate-owned networks – that delivered a paucity of images representative of the widespread systemic violence.2 Selectively informed and cynically inclined, American civic life became more sanitized, controlled, and regulated. Hurricane Katrina may have reversed the self-imposed silence of the media and public numbness in the face of terrible suffering. Fifty years after the body of Emmett Till was plucked out of the mud-filled waters of the Tallahatchie River, another set of troubling visual representations emerged that both shocked and shamed the nation. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, grotesque images of bloated corpses floating in the rotting waters that flooded the streets of New Orleans circulated throughout the mainstream media. What first appeared to be a natural catastrophe soon degenerated into a social debacle as further images revealed, days after Katrina had passed over the Gulf Coast, hundreds of thousands of poor people, mostly Blacks, some Latinos, many elderly, and a few White people, packed into the New Orleans Superdome and the city’s convention center, stranded on rooftops, or isolated on patches of dry highway without any food, water, or any place to wash, urinate, or find relief from the scorching sun. Weeks passed as the flood water gradually receded and the military gained control of the city, and more images of dead bodies surfaced in the national and global media. TV cameras rolled as bodies emerged from the flood waters while people stood by indifferently, eating their lunch or occasionally snapping a photograph. Most of the bodies found ‘were 50 or older, people who tried to wait the hurricane out’.3 Various media soon reported that over 154 bodies had been found in hospitals and nursing homes. The New York Times wrote that ‘the collapse of one of society’s most basic covenants – to care for the

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helpless – suggests that the elderly and critically ill plummeted to the bottom of priority lists as calamity engulfed New Orleans’.4 Dead bodies, mostly of poor Black people, were left uncollected in the streets, on porches, in hospitals, nursing homes, electric wheelchairs, and collapsed houses, prompting some people to claim that America had become like a ‘Third World country’ while others argued that New Orleans resembled a ‘Third World Refugee Camp’.5 There were now, irrefutably, two Gulf crises. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) tried to do damage control by forbidding journalists to ‘accompany rescue boats as they went out to search for storm victims’. As a bureau spokeswoman told Reuters News Agency, ‘We have requested that no photographs of the deceased be made by the media’.6 But questions about responsibility and answerability would not go away. Even the dominant media for a short time rose to the occasion of posing tough questions about accountability to those in power in light of such egregious acts of incompetence and indifference. The images of dead bodies kept reappearing in New Orleans, refusing to go away. For many, the bodies of the poor, Black, brown, elderly, and sick came to signify what the battered body of Emmett Till once unavoidably revealed, and America was forced to confront these disturbing images and the damning reality behind the images. The Hurricane Katrina disaster, like the killing of Emmett Till, revealed a vulnerable and destitute segment of the nation’s citizenry that conservatives not only refused to see but had spent the better part of two decades demonizing. But like the incessant beating of Poe’s tell-tale heart, cadavers have a way of insinuating themselves on consciousness, demanding answers to questions that aren’t often asked. The body of Emmett Till symbolized overt White supremacy and state terrorism organized against the supposed threat that Black men (apparently of all sizes and ages) posed against White women. But the Black bodies of the dead and walking wounded in

New Orleans in 2005 revealed a different image of the racial state, a different modality of state terrorism, marked less by an overt form of White racism than by a highly mediated displacement of race as a central concept for understanding both Katrina and its place in the broader history of US racism.7 That is, while Till’s body insisted upon a public recognition of the violence of White supremacy, the decaying Black bodies floating in the waters of the Gulf Coast represented a return of race against the media’s insistence that this disaster was more about class than race, more about the shameful and growing presence of poverty, ‘the abject failure to provide aid to the most vulnerable’.8 Till’s body allowed the racism that destroyed it to be made visible, to speak publicly to the systemic character of American racial injustice. The bodies of the Katrina victims could not speak with the same directness to the state of American racist violence, but they did reveal and shatter the conservative fiction of living in a color-blind society. The bodies of the Katrina victims laid bare the racial and class fault lines that mark an increasingly damaged and withering democracy and revealed the emergence of a new kind of politics, one in which entire populations are now considered disposable, an unnecessary burden on state coffers, and consigned to fend for themselves. At the same time, what happened in New Orleans also revealed some frightening signposts of those repressive features in American society, demanding that artists, public intellectuals, scholars, and other cultural workers take seriously what Angela Davis insists ‘are very clear signs of … impending fascist policies and practices’, which not only construct an imaginary social environment for all of those populations rendered disposable but also exemplify a site and space ‘where democracy has lost its claims’.9 Katrina reveals that we are living in dark times. The shadow of authoritarianism remains after the storm clouds and hurricane winds have passed, offering a glimpse of its

REVISITING HURRICANE KATRINA

wreckage and terror. The politics of a disaster that affected Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi is about more than government incompetence, militarization, socio-economic polarization, environmental disaster, and political scandal. Hurricane Katrina broke through the visual blackout of poverty and the pernicious ideology of color-blindness to reveal the government’s role in fostering the dire conditions of largely poor AfricanAmericans, who were bearing the hardships incurred by the full wrath of the indifference and violence at work in the racist, neoliberal state. Global neoliberalism and its victims now occupy a space shaped by authoritarian politics, the terrors inflicted by a police state, and a logic of disposability that removes them from government social provisions and the discourse and privileges of citizenship. One of the most obvious lessons of Katrina – that race and racism still matter in America – is fully operational through a biopolitics in which ‘sovereignty resides in the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who may die’.10 Those poor minorities of color and class, unable to contribute to the prevailing consumerist ethic, are vanishing into the sinkhole of poverty in desolate and abandoned enclaves of decaying cities, neighborhoods, and rural spaces, or in America’s ever-expanding prison empire. Under the Bush regime and extending into the Obama administration, a biopolitics that was and has been driven by the waste machine of what Zygmunt Bauman defines as ‘liquid modernity’11 registers a new and brutal racism as part of the emergence of a contemporary and savage authoritarianism. Any viable attempt to challenge the biopolitical project that now shapes American life and culture must do more than unearth the powerful antidemocratic forces that now govern American economics, politics, education, media, and culture; it must also deepen possibilities of individual and collective struggles by fighting for the rebuilding of civil society and the creation of a vast network of democratic public spheres such as

541

schools and the alternative media in order to develop new models of individual and social agency that can expand and deepen the reality of democratic public life. This is a call for a diverse ‘radical party’, following Stanley Aronowitz’ exhortation, a party that prioritizes democracy as a global task, views hope as a precondition for political engagement, gives primacy to making the political more pedagogical, and understands the importance of the totality of the struggle as it informs and articulates within and across a wide range of sites and sectors of everyday life – domestically and globally. Democratically minded citizens and social movements must return to the crucial issue of how race, class, power, and inequality in America contribute to the suffering and hardships experienced daily by the poor, people of color, and working- and middle-class people. The fight for equality offers new challenges in the process of constructing a politics that directly addresses poverty, class domination, and a resurgent racism. Such a politics would take seriously what it means to struggle pedagogically and politically over both ideas and material relations of power as they affect diverse individuals and groups at the level of daily life. Such struggles would combine a democratically energized cultural politics of resistance and hope with a politics aimed at offering workers a living wage and all citizens a guaranteed standard of living, one that provides a decent education, housing, and health care to all residents of the United States. Biopolitics is not just about the reduction of selected elements of the population to the necessities of bare life or worse; it is also potentially about enhancing life by linking hope and a new vision to the struggle for reclaiming the social, providing a language capable of translating individual issues into public considerations, and recognizing that in the age of the new media the terrain of culture is one of the most important pedagogical spheres through which to challenge the most basic precepts of the new authoritarianism. The waste machine of modernity, as Bauman points out, must be

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challenged within a new understanding of environmental justice, human rights, and democratic politics. Negative globalization with its attachment to the mutually enforcing modalities of militarism and racial segregation must be exposed and dismantled. And this demands new forms of resistance that are both more global and differentiated. But if these struggles are going to emerge, especially in the United States, then we need a politics and pedagogy of hope, one that takes seriously Hannah Arendt’s call to use the public realm to throw light on the ‘dark times’ that threaten to extinguish the very idea of democracy. Against the tyranny of market fundamentalism, religious dogmatism, unchecked militarism, and ideological claims to certainty, an emancipatory biopolitics must enlist education as a crucial force in the struggle over democratic identities, spaces, and ideals. Central to the biopolitics of disposability is the recognition that abiding powerlessness atrophies the public imagination and leads to political paralysis. Consequently, its policies avidly attack critical education at all levels of cultural production in an all-out effort to undermine critical thought, imagination, and substantive agency. To significantly confront the force of a biopolitics in the service of the new authoritarianism, intellectuals, artists, and others in various cultural sites – from schools to higher education to the media – will have to rethink what it means to secure the conditions for critical education both within and outside of the schools. In the context of formal schooling, this means fighting against the corporatization, commercialism, and privatization of public schools. Higher education has to be defended in the same terms. Against the biopolitics of racial exclusion, the university should be a principal site where dialogue, negotiation, mutual understanding, and respect provide the knowledge and experience for students to develop a shared space for affirming differences while simultaneously learning those shared values necessary for an inclusive democratic society. Similarly, both public and higher education

must address with new courage the history of American slavery, the enduring legacy of racism in the United States, and its interface with both political nationalism and the enduring market and religious fundamentalisms at work in contemporary society. Similarly, racism must be not be reduced to a private matter, a case of individual prejudice removed from the dictates of state violence and the broader realm of politics, and left to matters of ‘taste, preference, and ultimately, of consumer, or lifestyle choice’.12 What must be instituted and fought for in higher education is a critical and anti-racist pedagogy that unsettles, stirs up human consciousness, ‘breeds dissatisfaction with the level of both freedom and democracy achieved thus far’, and inextricably connects the fates of freedom, democracy, and critical education.13 Hannah Arendt once argued that ‘the public realm has lost the power of illumination’, and one result is that more and more people ‘have retreated from the world and their obligations within it’.14 The public realm is not merely a space where the political, social, economic, and cultural interconnect; it is also the pre-eminent space of public pedagogy – that is, a space where subjectivities are shaped, public commitments are formed, and choices are made. As sites of cultural politics and public pedagogy, public spaces offer a unique opportunity for critically engaged citizens, young people, academics, teachers, and various intellectuals to engage in pedagogical struggles that provide the conditions for social empowerment. Such struggles can be waged through the new media, films, publications, radio interviews, and a range of other forms of cultural production. It is especially crucial, as Mark Poster has argued, that scholars, teachers, public intellectuals, artists, and cultural theorists take on the challenge of understanding how the new media technologies construct subjects differently with multiple forms of literacy that engage a range of intellectual capacities.15 This also means deploying new technologies of communication such as the Internet, camcorder,

REVISITING HURRICANE KATRINA

and cell phone in political and pedagogically strategic ways to build protracted struggles and reclaim the promise of a democracy that insists on racial, gender, and economic equality. The new techno culture is a powerful pedagogical tool that needs to be used, on the one hand, in the struggle against both dominant media and the hegemonic ideologies they produce, circulate, and legitimate, and, on the other hand, as a valuable tool in treating men and women as agents of change, mindful of the consequences of their actions, and utterly capable of pursuing truly egalitarian models of democracy. The promise of a better world cannot be found in modes of authority that lack a vision of social justice, renounce the promise of democracy, and reject the dream of a better future, offering instead of dreams the pale assurance of protection from the nightmare of an all-embracing terrorism. Against this stripped-down legitimation of authority is the promise of public spheres, which in their diverse forms, sites, and content offer pedagogical and political possibilities for strengthening the social bonds of democracy, new spaces within which to cultivate the capacities for critical modes of individual and social agency, and crucial opportunities to form alliances to collectively struggle for a biopolitics that expands the scope of vision, operations of democracy, and the range of democratic institutions – that is, a biopolitics that fights against the terrors of totalitarianism. Such spheres are about more than legal rights guaranteeing freedom of speech; they are also sites that demand a certain kind of citizen informed by particular forms of education, a citizen whose education provides the essential conditions for democratic public spheres to flourish. Cornelius Castoriadis, the great philosopher of democracy, argues that if public space is to be experienced not as a private affair, but as a vibrant sphere in which people learn how to participate in and shape public life, then it must be shaped through an education that provides the decisive traits of courage, responsibility, and shame, all of which

543

connect the fate of each individual to the fate of others, the planet, and global democracy.16 In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the biopolitical calculus of massive power differentials and iniquitous market relations put the scourge of poverty and racism on full display. To confront the biopolitics of disposability, we need to recognize the dark times in which we live and offer up a vision of hope that creates the conditions for multiple collective and global struggles that refuse to use politics as an act of war and markets as the measure of democracy. Making human beings superfluous is the essence of totalitarianism, and democracy is the antidote in urgent need of being reclaimed. Katrina should keep the hope of such a struggle alive for quite some time because for many of us the images of those floating bodies serve as a desperate reminder of what it means when justice, as the lifeblood of democracy, becomes cold and indifferent in the face of death. Looking back over the last decade, it is clear that Katrina was not simply a natural disaster but a political disaster, one that signalled and made visible a new era in racist tyranny and the politics of disposability. The plague of racism accelerated as police violence against Black youth intensified, and with impunity. The names of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray, among others, stand as signposts to a society that after Katrina allegedly entered into the fog of what Whites were all too willing to call a post-racial society. With the current rise of the new extremism, particularly with the ongoing attacks on Muslims, immigrants, and those deemed other in the United States, Katrina stands as an early warning signal of the impending threat of totalitarianism that was emerging in the United States, marked not only by an upsurge in racist violence but also by the assault on every public sphere that provides a foundation for critical thinking, dissent, and collective action. With the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, a resurgent nationalism, racism, and discourse of hate

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have moved from the margins to the center of power. This is evident not only in terms of the increasing visibility of White supremacists and the anti-immigrant fundamentalists who back Trump, but also the inclusion in his cabinet of politicians who long to make America White again. Not only would this include former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, but also the unapologetic White supremacist, and former Chief White House advisor Steve Bannon and White nationalist, Stephen Miller, the diabolical force behind Trump’s assault on undocumented workers. At the same time, the plague of racism, White supremacy, a toxic nationalism has produced a series of policies and statements that speak to the rise of a new authoritarianism in the United States. This include the militarizing of the police, Trump’s call for violence by the police against potential criminals, the proposed revocation of immigration laws such as DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), and the attempts to bar people from entering the United States on the basis of their religion and country of origin. In the current historical moment, shades of Katrina can be found in a more ruthless politics of disposability, especially visible in the Trump administration’s slow response to the victims of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Weeks after the Category 5 storm hit, thousands of people lacked electricity, clean water, and adequate health care. As Paul Krugman observed, ‘What we’re actually witnessing, in effect, is the betrayal and abandonment of three and a half million of our own people…. The simple fact is that millions of our fellow citizens are facing catastrophe. How can we be abandoning them in their time of need?’.17 Trump responded to the misery and suffering of the Puerto Rican people by insulting them. He told them to stop complaining, indicated that they are costing the US government too much money, and to take responsibility for their own plight. At the root of these insulting Tweets and statements is the racist notion that Hispanics don’t have the character and fortitude to address the horrendous conditions they faced in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and

that they do not deserve the same level of aid, treatment, and support received my mainland White Americans. What is different at the present moment is that the politics of disposability is not seen by many people, especially the young, as simply a natural disaster. They are well aware that the real crisis is political and is the result of a savage capitalism that views the poor, Blacks, workers, immigrants, and young people as excess, expendable, and no longer worth investing in as part of the obligations of the social contract and democracy itself. The good news is that young people all over the United States and other parts of the globe are remembering Katrina not simply as a tragic historical event but as a rallying cry for developing radical social movements such as Black Lives Matter as part of a call to action to build a society in which events which followed Katrina never happen again. The memory of Katrina speaks not just to the past but to a future in which human rights matter, equality matters, justice matters, and democracy matters.

Notes  1  Shaila Dewan, ‘How Photos Became an Icon of the Civil Rights Movement’, New York Times (August 28, 2005). Online: http://www.wehaitians.com/how%20photos%20became%20 icon%20of%20civil%20rights%20movement. html (Accessed January 24, 2017).  2  Douglas Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992).  3  Dan Frosch, ‘Back from the Dead’, ALTWeeklies.com (September 28, 2005), pp. 1–3.Online: http://www.altweeklies.com/gyrobase/AltWeeklies/Story?oid=oid%3A151104 Accessed October 18, 2018  4  Cited in David Rohde, Donald G. McNeil Jr., Reed Abelson, and Shaila Dewan, ‘154 Patients Died, Many in Intense Heat, as Rescues Lagged’, New York Times, (September 19, 2005). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/19/us/ nationalspecial/154-patients-died-many-inintense-heat-as-rescues-lagged.html Accessed December 30, 2006  5  Rosa Brooks, ‘Our Homegrown Third World’, Los Angeles Times (September 7, 2005), pp. 1–2.

REVISITING HURRICANE KATRINA

Online: http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/ print.cgi?file=/views05/0907-24.htm (Accessed January 28, 2017).  6  Terry M. Neal, ‘Hiding Bodies Won’t Hide the Truth’, Washington Post (September 8, 2005). Online: http://www.washingtonpost.com (Accessed January 25, 2017).  7   For a brilliant analysis of the racial state, see David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001). On the post-racial state, also see David Theo Goldberg, Are We All Postracial Yet? (London: Polity, 2015).v  8  Eric Foner, ‘Bread, Roses, and the Flood’, The Nation (October 3, 2005), p. 8.  9  Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), pp. 122, 124.  10  Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15:1 (2003), pp. 11–40, here 11–12.

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 11  Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (London: Polity, 2000), p. 1.  12  Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 146–7.  13  Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love (London: Polity, 2003); Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Life (London: Polity, 2005), p. 14.  14  Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955), p. 4.  15  Mark Poster, What’s the Matter with the Internet? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).  16  See, especially, Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’, Philosophy, Politics, and Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 81–123.  17  Paul Krugman, ‘Let them eat paper towels’, New York Times (October 12, 2017). Online: https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/opinion/trumptweets-puerto-rico.html?_r=0 Accessed October 15, 2017

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The SAGE Handbook of

Critical Pedagogies

SAGE was founded in 1965 by Sara Miller McCune to support the dissemination of usable knowledge by publishing innovative and high-quality research and teaching content. Today, we publish over 900 journals, including those of more than 400 learned societies, more than 800 new books per year, and a growing range of library products including archives, data, case studies, reports, and video. SAGE remains majority-owned by our founder, and after Sara’s lifetime will become owned by a charitable trust that secures our continued independence. Los Angeles | London | New Delhi | Singapore | Washington DC | Melbourne

The SAGE Handbook of

Critical Pedagogies

Volume 2

Edited by

Shirley R. Steinberg and Barry Down Assistant Editor

Janean Robinson

SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road New Delhi 110 044 SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 3 Church Street #10-04 Samsung Hub Singapore 049483

Editor: James Clark Editorial Assistant: Umeeka Raichura Production Editor: Manmeet Kaur Tura Copyeditor: Sunrise Setting Proofreader: Sunrise Setting Indexer: Cenveo Publisher Services Marketing Manager: Dilhara Attygalle Cover Design: Naomi Robinson Typeset by Cenveo Publisher Services Printed in the UK At SAGE we take sustainability seriously. Most of our products are printed in the UK using responsibly sourced papers and boards. When we print overseas we ensure sustainable papers are used as measured by the PREPS grading system. We undertake an annual audit to monitor our sustainability. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019946948 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-5264-1148-8

Introduction © Barry Down and Shirley R. Steinberg, 2020 Editorial arrangement © Shirley R. Steinberg and Barry Down, 2020 Section 1 Introduction © Shirley R. Steinberg, 2020 Chapter 1 © SAGE Publications, 1983 Chapter 2 © Lilia I. Bartolomé, 2020 Chapter 3 © John Willinsky, 2020 Chapter 4 © Deborah P. Britzman, 2020 Chapter 5 © Ramón Flecha, 2020 Chapter 6 © William H. Schubert, 2020 Chapter 7 © David Geoffrey Smith, 2020 Chapter 8 © Hermán S. García, 2020 Chapter 9 © Marcella Runell Hall, 2020 Chapter 10 © Arlo Kempf, 2020 Chapter 11 © Paul L. Thomas, 2020 Chapter 12 © Christine E. Sleeter, 2020 Chapter 13 © William Ayers, 2020 Chapter 14 © Luis Huerta-Charles, 2020 Chapter 15 © D’Arcy Martin, 2020 Section 2 Introduction © Paul R. Carr and Gina Thésée, 2020 Chapter 16 © Joe L. Kincheloe, 2020 Chapter 17 © Benjamin Frymer, 2020 Chapter 18 © Soudeh Oladi, 2020 Chapter 19 © Philip M. Anderson, 2020 Chapter 20 © Rodney Handelsman, 2020 Chapter 21 © Antonio Garcia, 2020 Chapter 22 © Nathan Snaza, 2020 Chapter 23 © Cathryn Teasley and Alana Butler, 2020 Chapter 24 © Marlon Simmons, 2020 Chapter 25 © Peter Pericles Trifonas, 2020 Chapter 26 © Marc Spooner, 2020 Chapter 27 © Jane McLean, 2020 Chapter 28 © Michalinos Zembylas, 2020 Section 3 Introduction © Gregory Martin, 2020 Chapter 29 © James D. Kirylo, 2020 Chapter 30 © Robert F. Carley, 2020 Chapter 31 © Stephanie Troutman, 2020 Chapter 32 © Samuel D. Rocha and Martha Sañudo, 2020 Chapter 33 © Robert Hattam, 2020 Chapter 34 © Gresilda Tilley-Lubbs, 2020 Chapter 35 © Marta Soler-Gallart and Teresa Sordé Martí, 2020 Chapter 36 © Graham Jeffery and Diarmuid McAuliffe, 2020 Chapter 37 © Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter McLaren, 2020 Chapter 38 © Shirley R. Steinberg, 2020 Section 4 Introduction © Cathryn Teasley, 2020 Chapter 39 © Domenica Maviglia, 2020 Chapter 40 © Colin Chasi and Ylva RodnyGumede, 2020 Chapter 41 © Juan Ríos Vega, 2020 Chapter 42 © Aristotelis Gkiolmas, Constantina Stefanidou and Constantine Skordoulis, 2020 Chapter 43 © Madhulika Sagaram, 2020 Chapter 44 © Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner, Michaela P. Stone and Marco Montalbetti Viñuela, 2020 Chapter 45 © Brian Dotts, 2020 Chapter 46 © Kathalene A. Razzano, 2020 Chapter 47 © Jaime Usma, Oscar A. Peláez, Yuliana Palacio and Catalina Jaramillo, 2020 Chapter 48 © Nicholas D. Hartlep and Pipo Bui, 2020 Chapter 49 © Henry A. Giroux, 2020 Section 5 Introduction © Four Arrows and R. Michael Fisher, 2020 Chapter 50 © R. Michael Fisher and Four Arrows, 2020 Chapter 51 © Ann Milne, 2020 Chapter 52 © Jeremy Garcia, 2020 Chapter 53 © Shashi Shergill and David Scott, 2020 Chapter 54 © Jennifer M. Markides, 2020 Chapter 55 © Adrienne Sansom, 2020 Chapter 56 © Renee Desmarchelier, 2020 Chapter 57 © Perry R. James, 2020 Chapter 58 © Rose Marsters, 2020 Section 6 Introduction © Robert Hattam, 2020 Chapter 59 © John Smyth, 2020 Chapter 60 © Tricia M. Kress, 2020 Chapter 61 © Concepción Sánchez-Blanco, 2020 Chapter 62 © Sandro Carnicelli and Karla Boluk, 2020 Chapter 63 © Dana M. Stachowiak and Leila E. Villaverde, 2020

Chapter 64 © Angelina E. Castagno, Jessica A. Solyom and Bryan Brayboy, 2020 Chapter 65 © Haggith Gor Ziv, 2020 Chapter 66 © Teresa Anne Fowler, 2020 Chapter 67 © Sheryl J. Lieb, 2020 Chapter 68 © Barry Down, 2020 Section 7 Introduction © Barry Down, 2020 Chapter 69 © David Zyngier, 2020 Chapter 70 © Khadija Mohammed, Lisa McAuliffe and Nighet Riaz, 2020 Chapter 71 © Revital Zilonka, 2020 Chapter 72 © Gang Zhu and Zhengmei Peng, 2020 Chapter 73 © Phillip Boda, 2020 Chapter 74 © Guofang Li and Pramod K. Sah, 2020 Chapter 75 © Galia Zalmanson Levi, 2020 Chapter 76 © Ramón Flecha and Silvia Molina, 2020 Section 8 Introduction © Michael B. MacDonald, 2020 Chapter 77 © Silvia Cristina Bettez and Cristina Maria Dominguez, 2020 Chapter 78 © Awad Ibrahim, 2020 Chapter 79 © Maria Padrós and Sandra Girbés-Peco, 2020 Chapter 80 © Elbert J. Hawkins III, 2020 Chapter 81 © Shuntay Z. Tarver and Melanie M. Acosta, 2020 Chapter 82 © Toby Rollo, J. Cynthia McDermott, Richard Kahn and Fred Chapel, 2020 Chapter 83 © Tanya Brown Merriman, 2020 Chapter 84 © April Yaisa Ruffin-Adams, 2020 Chapter 85 © Sherilyn Lennon, 2020 Chapter 86 © Annette Coburn and David Wallace, 2020 Section 9 Introduction © Michael Hoechsmann, 2020 Chapter 87 © Jeff Share, 2020 Chapter 88 © Michael Hoechsmann and Alfonso Gutiérrez Martín, 2020 Chapter 89 © Sabrina Boyer, 2020 Chapter 90 © Brian C. Johnson, 2020 Chapter 91 © Tony Kashani, 2020 Chapter 92 © Juha Suoranta, 2020 Chapter 93 © Cherie Ann Turpin, 2020 Chapter 94 © Ki Wight, 2020 Chapter 95 © SAGE Publications, 2011 Chapter 96 © Gerald Walton, 2020 Section 10 Introduction © Leila E. Villaverde and Roymieco A. Carter, 2020 Chapter 97 © Gregory Martin, 2020 Chapter 98 © Leila E. Villaverde & Roymieco A. Carter, 2020 Chapter 99 © Judith Dunkerly-Bean and Kristine Sunday, 2020 Chapter 100 © I. Malik Saafir, 2020 Chapter 101 © Michael B. MacDonald, 2020 Chapter 102 © Claire Robson and Dennis Sumara, 2020 Chapter 103 © Peter R. Wright, 2020 Chapter 104 © Mary Drinkwater, 2020 Chapter 105 © Lalenja Harrington, 2020 Chapter 106 © Christopher Lee Kennedy, 2020 Section 11 Introduction © Shirley R. Steinberg, 2020 Chapter 107 © Douglas Kellner and Roslyn M. Satchel, 2020 Chapter 108 © Andrew Hickey, 2020 Chapter 109 © Priya Parmar, 2020 Chapter 110 © Dawn N. Hicks Tafari and Veronica A. Newton, 2020 Chapter 111 © Tony Edwards and Kerry J. Renwick, 2020 Chapter 112 © Paul L. Thomas, 2020 Chapter 113 © Nwachi Pressley-Tafari, 2020 Chapter 114 © Mark Helmsing, 2020 Chapter 115 © Teresa J. Rishel, 2020 Chapter 116 © Jo Lampert and Kerry Mallan, 2020 Section 12 Introduction © Renee Desmarchelier, 2020 Chapter 117 © Stephanie L. Hudson, 2020 Chapter 118 © Joseph Carroll-Miranda, 2020 Chapter 119 © Sarah E. Colonna, 2020 Chapter 120 © Edmund Adjapong, 2020 Chapter 121 © Jennifer D. Adams, Atasi Das and Eun-Ji Amy Kim, 2020 Chapter 122 © Shawn Arango Ricks, 2020 Chapter 123 © Constance Russell, 2020 Chapter 124 © Marissa Bellino, 2020 Chapter 125 © Jodi Latremouille, 2020

We dedicate this set of books to the notion of social justice in education…to making a difference, to causing a fracture, to reading between the lines…to criticalizing the work we do as educators. And to the memory of Paulo Freire, Joe L. Kincheloe, and Jesús Pato Gómez, who paved the way…leaving us far too early. Shirley and Barry

Contents Dedication v List of Figures xvii List of Tablesxix Notes on the Editors and Contributorsxx Acknowledgementsxxxix Introduction to the Handbookxl Barry Down and Shirley R. Steinberg VOLUME 1 SECTION I  READING PAULO FREIRE Shirley R. Steinberg

1

1

The Importance of the Act of Reading Paulo Freire; translated by Loretta Slover

3

2

Linking My World to the Word Lilia I. Bartolomé

9

3

Freire Contra Freire: An Interplay in Three Acts John Willinsky

13

4

A Note on Free Association as Transference to Reading Deborah P. Britzman

17

5

Dialogic and Liberating Actions Ramón Flecha

20

6

In the Spirit of Freire William H. Schubert

22

7

Fake News and Other Conundrums in ‘Reading the World’ at Empire’s End David Geoffrey Smith

29

8

Freire’s ‘Act of Reading’: Inspiring and Emboldening Hermán S. García

38

9

In Gratitude to Freire Marcella Runell Hall

40

10

Of Word, World, and Being (Online) Arlo Kempf

42

viii

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

11

The Critical Redneck Experience Paul L. Thomas

46

12

On Learning to Claim Text Christine E. Sleeter

48

13

‘I Am a Revolutionary!’ William Ayers

51

14

The Importance of Paulo Freire in the ‘Act of Reading’ Luis Huerta-Charles

59

15

Share and Sustain: Two Steps to Paulo D’Arcy Martin

62

SECTION II SOCIAL THEORIES Paul R. Carr and Gina Thésée

67

16

Critical Pedagogy and the Knowledge Wars of the 21st Century Joe L. Kincheloe

75

17

The Frankfurt School and Education Benjamin Frymer

94

18

The Nomad, The Hybrid: Deconstructing the Notion of Subjectivity Through Freire and Rumi Soudeh Oladi

104

The Reader, the Text, the Restraints: A Cultural History of the Art(s) of Reading Philip M. Anderson

118

19

20

Deleuzeguattarian Concepts for a Becoming Critical Pedagogy Rodney Handelsman

135

21

Specters of Critical Pedagogy: Must We Die in Order to Survive? Antonio Garcia

157

22

Critical Pedagogy Beyond the Human Nathan Snaza

173

23

Intersecting Critical Pedagogies to Counter Coloniality Cathryn Teasley and Alana Butler

186

24

Locating Black Life within Colonial Modernity: Decolonial Notes Marlon Simmons

205

Contents

25

Critical Pedagogy and Difference Peter Pericles Trifonas

26

Critical Pedagogy Imperiled as Neoliberalism, Marketization, and Audit Culture Become the Academy Marc Spooner

ix

218

225

27

Critical Pedagogy: Negotiating the Nuances of Implementation Jane McLean

236

28

Critical Pedagogies of Compassion Michalinos Zembylas

254

SECTION III  KEY FIGURES IN CRITICAL PEDAGOGY Gregory Martin 29

Meeting the Critical Pedagogues: A North America Context (Paulo Freire and Beyond) James D. Kirylo

269

273

30

Gramscian Critical Pedagogy: A Holistic and Social Genre Approach Robert F. Carley

289

31

Still Teaching to Transgress: Reflecting on Critical Pedagogy with bell hooks Stephanie Troutman

302

32

Ivan Illich and Liberation Theology Samuel D. Rocha and Martha Sañudo

310

33

From South African Black Theology and Freire to ‘Teaching for Resistance’: The Work of Basil Moore Robert Hattam

320

Coming to Critical Pedagogy in Spain Through Life and Literature: Jurjo Torres Santomé and Ramón Flecha Gresilda Tilley-Lubbs

334

34

35

Interviews with Marta Soler-Gallart and Teresa Sordé Martí Marta Soler-Gallart and Teresa Sordé Martí

346

36

Interview with Henry A. Giroux Graham Jeffery and Diarmuid McAuliffe

352

37

Interviews with Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter McLaren Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter McLaren

368

38

Influenced by Critical Pedagogy: Interviews with Critical Friends Shirley R. Steinberg

380

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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

SECTION IV  GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES Cathryn Teasley

401

39

From Theory to Practice: The Identikit and Purpose of Critical Pedagogy Domenica Maviglia

405

40

Reimagining the University as a Transit Place and Space: A Contribution to the Decolonisation Debate Colin Chasi and Ylva Rodny-Gumede

416

41

When I Open My Alas: Developing a Transnational Mariposa Consciousness Juan Ríos Vega

428

42

Critical Pedagogy and the Acceptance of Refugees in Greece Aristotelis Gkiolmas, Constantina Stefanidou and Constantine Skordoulis

439

43

Indigenous Critical Pedagogy in Underserved Environments in India Madhulika Sagaram

453

44

(Dis)Ruptive Glocality Through Teacher Exchange: Realizing Pedagogical Love in the Chilean Context 469 Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner, Michaela P. Stone, and Marco Montalbetti Viñuela

45

The Sun Never Sets on the Privatization Movement: A Return to the Heart of Darkness in a Neoliberal and Neoimperialist World Brian Dotts

480

Teaching Global Affairs: Problem-posing Pedagogy and the Violence of Indifference Kathalene A. Razzano

496

46

47

Promoting Critical Consciousness in the Preparation of Teachers in Colombia Jaime A. Usma, Oscar A. Peláez, Yuliana Palacio, and Catalina Jaramillo

505

48

Vietnamese Students and the Emerging Model Minority Myth in Germany Nicholas D. Hartlep and Pipo Bui

518

49

Revisiting Hurricane Katrina: Racist Violence and the Biopolitics of Disposability537 Henry A. Giroux VOLUME 2

SECTION V  INDIGENOUS WAYS OF KNOWING Four Arrows and R. Michael Fisher 50

Indigenizing Conscientization and Critical Pedagogy: Integrating Nature, Spirit and Fearlessness as Foundational Concepts R. Michael Fisher and Four Arrows

547

551

Contents

xi

51

A Critical, Culturally Sustaining, Pedagogy of Wh¯anau Ann Milne

52

Critical Indigenous Pedagogies of Resistance: The Call for Critical Indigenous Educators Jeremy Garcia

574

Ethical Relationality as a Pathway for Non-Indigenous Educators to Decolonize Curriculum and Instruction Shashi Shergill and David Scott

587

Flooded, between Two Worlds: Holding the Memory of What Used to Be Against the Reality of What Exists Now Jennifer M. Markides

604

Dance and Children’s Cultural Identity: A Critical Perspective of the Embodiment of Place Adrienne Sansom

630

Indigenous Knowledges and Science Education: Complexities, Considerations and Praxis Renee Desmarchelier

642

Navajo Sweat House Leadership: Acquiring Traditional Navajo Leadership for Restoring Identity in Our Forgotten World Perry R. James

658

53

54

55

56

57

58

The Navigator’s Path: Journey Through Story and Ng¯akau Pedagogy664 Rose Marsters

SECTION VI  EDUCATION AND PRAXIS Robert Hattam 59

561

A Critical Pedagogy of Working Class Schooling: A Call to Activist Theory and Practice John Smyth

677

681

60

Critical Pedagogy as Research Tricia M. Kress

694

61

Poverty and Equality in Early Childhood Education Concepción Sánchez-Blanco

704

62

Critical Tourism Pedagogy: A Response to Oppressive Practices Sandro Carnicelli and Karla Boluk

717

xii

63

64

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Queer(ing) Cisgender Normativity: Reconsidering Critical Pedagogy Through a Genderqueer Lens Dana M. Stachowiak and Leila E. Villaverde

729

Culturally Responsive Schooling as a Form of Critical Pedagogies for Indigenous Youth and Tribal Nations Angelina E. Castagno, Jessica A. Solyom and Bryan Brayboy

743

65

Feminist Critical Pedagogy Haggith Gor Ziv

758

66

Schooling, Milieu, Racism: Just Another Brick in the Wall Teresa Anne Fowler

771

67

An Existentialist Pedagogy of Humanization: Countering Existential Oppression of Teachers and Students in Neoliberal Educational Spaces Sheryl J. Lieb

68

Vocational Education and Training in Schools and ‘Really Useful Knowledge’ Barry Down

SECTION VII  TEACHING AND LEARNING Barry Down 69

Critical Pedagogy, Social Justice and Contesting Definitions of Engagement in the Classroom David Zyngier

783

797

811

815

70

Critical Pedagogy and Anti-Muslim Racism Education: Insights from the UK Khadija Mohammed, Lisa McAuliffe and Nighet Riaz

71

Pedagogy of Connectedness: Cultivating a Community of Caring, Compassionate Social Justice Warriors in the Classroom Revital Zilonka

841

Counternarratives: Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Critical Caring in One Urban School Gang Zhu and Zhengmei Peng

854

‘More than an Educator but a Political Figure’: Leveraging the Overlapping Intersections of Disability Studies and Critical Pedagogy in Teacher Education Phillip Boda

869

Critical Pedagogy for Preservice Teacher Education in the US: An Agenda for a Plurilingual Reality of Superdiversity Guofang Li and Pramod K. Sah

884

72

73

74

828

Contents

xiii

75

Teaching Social Justice Galia Zalmanson Levi

899

76

Creating Global Learning Communities Ramón Flecha and Silvia Molina

909

SECTION VIII  COMMUNITIES AND ACTIVISM Michael B. MacDonald

923

77

Moving from Individual Consciousness Raising to Critical Community Building Praxis Silvia Cristina Bettez and Cristina Maria Dominguez

927

78

Arab Spring as Critical Pedagogy: Activism in the Face of Death Awad Ibrahim

941

79

Schools as Learning Communities Maria Padrós and Sandra Girbés-Peco

950

80

Love Unconditionally: Educating People in the Midst of a Social Crisis Elbert J. Hawkins III

961

81

‘We Do It All the Time’: Afrocentric Pedagogies for Raising Consciousness and Collective Responsibility Shuntay Z. Tarver and Melanie M. Acosta

974

82

Critical Pedagogy, Democratic Praxis, and Adultism Toby Rollo, J. Cynthia McDermott, Richard Kahn and Fred Chapel

989

83

Presence and Resilience as Resistance Tanya Brown Merriman

1003

84

African American Mothers Theorizing Practice April Yaisa Ruffin-Adams

1016

85

Deploying Critical Bricolage as Activism Sherilyn Lennon

1025

86

Critical Community Education: The Case of Love Stings Annette Coburn and David Wallace

1036

VOLUME 3 SECTION IX  COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA Michael Hoechsmann

1055

87

1059

Mediating the Curriculum with Critical Media Literacy Jeff Share

xiv

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

88

Empowerment and Participation in Media Education: A Critical Review Michael Hoechsmann and Alfonso Gutiérrez Martín

1074

89

Dangerous Citizenship: Comics and Critical Pedagogy Sabrina Boyer

1083

90

It’s ‘Reel’ Critical: Media Literacy and Film-based Pedagogy Brian C. Johnson

1097

91

Critical Media Literacy Tony Kashani

1115

92

Critical Pedagogy and Wikilearning Juha Suoranta

1126

93

Diversity in Digital Humanities Cherie Ann Turpin

1139

94

Missing Beats: Critical Media Literacy Pedagogy in Post-secondary Media Production Programs Ki Wight

1146

A Shock to Thought: Curatorial Judgment and the Public Exhibition of ‘Difficult Knowledge’ Roger I. Simon

1157

95

96

In a Rape Culture, Can Boys Actually Be Boys? Gerald Walton

1175

SECTION X  ARTS AND AESTHETICS Leila E. Villaverde and Roymieco A. Carter

1187

97

Critical Public Pedagogies of DIY Gregory Martin

1191

98

OASIS – (Re)conceptualizing Galleries as Intentionally Pedagogical Leila E. Villaverde and Roymieco A. Carter

1206

99

Critical Pedagogy and the Visual Arts: Examining Perceptions of Poverty and Social Justice in Early Childhood Research with Children Judith Dunkerly-Bean and Kristine Sunday

100

Performance Pedagogy Using the Theater of Justice I. Malik Saafir

101

Thanks for Being Local: CineMusicking as a Critical Pedagogy of Popular Music Michael B. MacDonald

1220 1233

1242

Contents

xv

102

Critical Life Writing for Social Change Claire Robson and Dennis Sumara

1255

103

Towards a Critical Arts Practice Peter R. Wright

1269

104

Theorizing a New Pedagogical Model: Transformative Arts and Cultural Praxis Circle Mary Drinkwater

105

106

Through a Rhizomatic Lens: Synergies between A/r/tography, Community Engaged Research, and Critical Pedagogy with Students with Intellectual Disabilities Lalenja Harrington The Pedagogical Afterthought: Situating Socially Engaged Art as Critical Public Pedagogy Christopher Lee Kennedy

SECTION XI  CRITICAL YOUTH STUDIES Shirley R. Steinberg 107

108

109

110

1294

1313

1327

Resisting Youth: From Occupy Through Black Lives Matter to the Trump Resistance Douglas Kellner and Roslyn M. Satchel

1329

Where Does Critical Pedagogy Happen? Young People, ‘Relational Pedagogy’ and the Interstitial Spaces of School Andrew Hickey

1343

Lyrical Minded: Unveiling the Hidden Literacies of Youth Through Performance Pedagogy Priya Parmar

1358

‘They Laugh ’Cause They Assume I’m in Prison’: HipHop Feminism as Critical Pedagogy Dawn N. Hicks Tafari and Veronica A. Newton

1365

111

Young People, Agency and the Paradox of Trust Tony Edwards and Kerry J. Renwick

112

Excavating Intimacy, Privacy, and Consent as Youth in a Hostile World: A Critical Journey Paul L. Thomas

113

1279

Art and Erotic Exploration as Critical Pedagogy with Youth Nwachi Pressley-Tafari

1374

1386

1400

xvi

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

114

Youth, Becoming-American, and Learning the Vietnam War Mark Helmsing

1411

115

The Bully, the Bullied, and the Boss: The Power Triangle of Youth Suicide Teresa J. Rishel

1421

116

Pedagogies of Trauma, Fear and Hope in Texts about 9/11 for Young People: From a Perspective of Distance Jo Lampert and Kerry Mallan

1439

SECTION XII  SCIENCE, ECOLOGY AND WELLBEING Renee Desmarchelier

1451

117

Critical Body Pedagogies in Technoscience Stephanie L. Hudson

1455

118

Computer Science Education and the Role of Critical Pedagogy in a Digital World Joseph Carroll-Miranda

1464

Where the Fantastic Liberates the Mundane: Feminist Science Fiction and the Imagination Sarah E. Colonna

1476

119

120

Conceptualizing Hip-Hop as a Conduit toward Developing Science Geniuses Edmund Adjapong

121

The Crit-Trans Heuristic for Transforming STEM Education: Youth and Educators as Participants in the World Jennifer D. Adams, Atasi Das and Eun-Ji Amy Kim

1497

Who Hears My Cry? The Impact of Activism on the Mental Health of African American Women Shawn Arango Ricks

1508

Fat Pedagogy and the Disruption of Weight-based Oppression: Toward the Flourishing of All Bodies Constance Russell

1516

122

123

1486

124

Forwarding a Critical Urban Environmental Pedagogy Marissa Bellino

1532

125

An Ecological Pedagogy of Joy Jodi Latremouille

1543

Index

1559

List of Figures 43.1 The progression of association of ideas and continuity of experience in Indigenous pedagogy across India 455 43.2 The approach used to accelerate children at a rapid pace in Hyderabad, India 458 53.1 A cyclic perspective on the historical relationship of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in Canada 594 54.1 Highwood River 605 54.2 Water at the level of the train bridge 606 54.3 Mud tracked out 609 54.4 Waiting for a bin 609 54.5 Trapped moisture 610 54.6 Farewell to art 1 610 54.7 Farewell to art 2 611 54.8 Three bins in three days – throwing it all away 611 54.9 Jacked up 612 54.10 Rotting on the inside, right next door 614 54.11 Sporting goods store – facade 615 54.12 New pub and hardware store – fronts615 54.13 Delivery in 30 minutes or … never616 54.14 Dentist office, now launderette 616 54.15 Posters to mask the empty insides 617 54.16 Mmm ... noodles 617 54.17 Antiques or roadhouse? 617 54.18 Hardware – not fixing anything 618 54.19 Real art gallery, ‘not fake’ 618 54.20 Fake bake shop, (really) for lease 618 54.21 ‘WE ARE STiLL CLEANG UP PLEASE DON’T TOUCH OUR SUPPLYs AND FURNiTURE’ 620 54.22 Diner – a permanent fixture 621 54.23 Little Big Bear Gifts – a facade on a facade 621 54.24 Going nowhere 624 54.25 No news 625 54.26 Filming today 625 54.27 From hardware, to workwear – false advertising, no sales to be had 626 54.28 Roadhouse/Antiques/Roadhouse – rotating facades 626 54.29 Diner, rear view – a facade on all fronts (Markides, June 2018) 627 54.30 Low and slow 627 63.1 Intersectionality versus assemblages 737 63.2 Gender as a rhizome 740 72.1 The conceptual backdrop 856 81.1 Course activities within a Diversity of Human Services course that illustrates Village Pedagogy 982

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81.2 Preservice teacher learning activities from a literacy methods course framed around the Black Studies Critical Studyin’ pedagogical framework 985 85.1 The cycle of inquiry extending the bricolage to incorporate community activism1029 85.2 A particularly troubling and well-known local image 1031 85.3 My public critique of the logo 1032 86.1 Pat’s collage 1039 86.2 Sam’s collage 1039 86.3 Creative conversations at the collage table 1040 86.4 Collaborative dialogue at the collage table 1040 86.5 Jane’s collage 1044 96.1 The tweet of Nathaniel Prince 1179 S10.1 The interplay between art, aesthetics and critical pedagogy 1188 99.1 Money machine 1226 99.2 Pedagogy of a new childhood redesign cycle 1229 104.1 Transformative Arts and Cultural Praxis Circle (TACPC) 1282 108.1 The Bike Build workshop space 1346 108.2 Teasing-out where next to proceed 1349 108.3 A scene from a typical discussion 1349 

List of Tables 56.1 The impact of the construction of the neoliberal subject on classroom implementation of curricula inclusive of Indigenous knowledges 651 62.1 A summary of our critical rethinking of tourism education 724 87.1 Conceptual understandings and corresponding questions 1062 111.1 Purpose statements from state and national curriculum documents 1378 120.1 Students’ science-themed raps 1494 121.1 Crit-Trans heuristic1506

Notes on the Editors and Contributors THE EDITORS Shirley R. Steinberg considers herself somewhere between the 2nd and 3rd generation of critical pedagogy. Originally an American, she discovered critical pedagogy in Alberta, Canada as a student of David G. Smith and Julia Ellis. Her high school teaching career took a radical left turn after only a year and she determined to complete a doctorate based on the criticalizing of media using bricolage, a philosophical research methodology she refined with Joe L. Kincheloe (2nd generation). Expanding her idea of pedagogy into cultural studies, her work blended the critical with the pedagogical and cultural. The author and editor of many books and articles, her research interests have generated (often with Kincheloe) Critical Multiculturalism, Christotainment, Kinderculture, Critical Bricolage, and Postformal thinking. As Research Professor of Critical Youth Studies at the University of Calgary, she engages local, national, and global community work with and for youth, refugees, immigrants, and other disenfranchised groups. Barry Down is Professor of Education at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia. In 2003 he was appointed the City of Rockingham Chair in Education (2004-2013) at Murdoch University, the first such position funded by a local government in Australia. In this period, he worked on a number of Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Projects investigating issues of student engagement, school-to-work transitions and early career teacher resilience. He has co-authored seven books (with long time collaborators John Smyth and Peter McInerney) including Critically Engaged Learning: Connecting to Young Lives (2008); ‘Hanging in with Kids’ in Tough Times: Engagement in Contexts of Educational Disadvantage in the Relational School (2012); and The Socially Just School; Making Space for Youth to speak Back (2014). His most recent book is entitled Rethinking School-to-Work Transitions: Young People have Something to Say (with John Smyth and Janean Robinson). His research interests focus on young people’s lives in the context of shifts in the global economy, poverty, class, school-to-work transitions and student dis/re/engagement.

THE SECTION EDITORS Four Arrows (Wahinkpe Topa) (aka Don Trent Jacobs) is Professor, School of Leadership Studies at Fielding Graduate University and the author of numerous publications on ‘Indigenous worldview’, including Unlearning the Language of Conquest, Teaching Truly and Point of Departure. Paul R. Carr is a Full Professor in the Department of Education at the Université du Québec en Outaouais, Canada, and is also the Chair-holder of the UNESCO Chair in Democracy,

Notes on the Editors and Contributors

xxi

Global Citizenship and Transformative Education (DCMÉT)(uqo.ca/DCMT/). His latest book, with Gina Thésée, is “It’s Not Education that Scares Me, it’s the Educators…”: Is There Still Hope for Democracy in Education, and Education for Democracy?. Roymieco A. Carter is Director of the Visual Arts Program and University Galleries at North Carolina A&T State University. He teaches courses on graphic design, digital media, visual literacy and theory, and social criticism. He is a graphic designer of print, web, and motionbased media. He has written articles on graphic design education, art education, critical pedagogy, Black studies, gaming, human computer interaction and graphics computer animation. Renee Desmarchelier is the Associate Dean Learning, Teaching and Student Success for the Faculty of Business, Education, Law and Arts at the University of Southern Queensland. Her scholarly interests include Indigenous knowledges, critical pedagogy and participatory and Indigenous research methodologies. Her research has centered on how teachers negotiate Indigenous knowledges in their classroom praxis and the cultural interface between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing. R. Michael Fisher, a member of the Adjunct Faculty, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, is an educator, artist and fearologist who has been at the forefront of fear studies curriculum development for 30 years. He has published five books, including World’s Fearlessness Teachings, an original resource for leaders. Robert Hattam is the Professor for Educational Justice in the School of Education, University of South Australia and he leads the Pedagogy for Justice Research Group. His research has focused on teachers’ work, critical and reconciliation pedagogies, refugees, and socially just school reform. He has published numerous books on critical pedagogy and educational inequality in vulnerable communities. Michael Hoechsmann is an Associate Professor and the Program Chair in the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University, Orillia. His research focuses on digital and media literacies, cultural studies and education in formal and non-formal settings. He is a co-Investigator on two SSHRC (Canada) funded research grants, a board member of Media Smarts: Canada’s Centre for Digital and Media Literacy, and the co-chair of UNESCO GAPMIL North America. Michael B. MacDonald is an Associate Professor of music at the MacEwan University Faculty of Fine Arts and Communications in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. His research areas include popular music scenes, screen production research, ethnographic film theory, ciné-ethnomusicology, and audiovisual ethnomusicology. Michael is the founding program chair of the MusCan Film Series held annually at the Canadian University Music Society conference and serves on the editorial board of the journal Intersections. Gregory Martin is an Associate Professor in the School of International Studies and Education at the University of Technology Sydney. His work is transdisplinary with a focus on critical pedagogies, spatial politics and participatory methodologies, including the power of storytelling to promote learning and change. Cathryn Teasley is Assistant Professor of Education at the University of A Coruña. Her research on anti-racism, socio-cultural justice, nonviolence and gender equity in teacher

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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

education is informed by critical pedagogies, decolonial studies, peace studies, queer theory and feminisms. Her latest contribution is to the Handbook of Theory and Research in Cultural Studies and Education. Gina Thésée is Full Professor in the Department of Teacher Education, Faculty of Education, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), and is also Co-Chair of the UNESCO Chair in Democracy, Global Citizenship and Transformative Education (DCMÉT) (uqo.ca/DCMT/). Her latest book, with Paul R. Carr, is entitled “It’s not Education that Scares Me, it’s the Educators…”: Is There Still Hope for Democracy in Education, and Education for Democracy? Leila E. Villaverde is a Professor in Cultural Foundations at the Department of Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations, Dean Fellow in Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at UNCG and Senior Editor of The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy. She teaches courses on curriculum studies, history of education and critical pedagogy, gender studies, visual literacy and aesthetics, and critical inquiry.

THE CONTRIBUTORS Melanie M. Acosta is an Assistant Professor in the department of Curriculum, Culture, & Educational Inquiry at Florida Atlantic University. Her scholarship is focused on critical issues in teacher learning and preparation to support African American educational excellence. Dr. Acosta began teaching as an elementary school teacher and a community organizer for a grassroots parent empowerment group. Jennifer D. Adams is a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor at The University of Calgary holding a dual appointment in the Department of Chemistry and Werklund School of Education. She researches creativity and science, teacher identity, and informal science education and environmental education. Her work centers critical, decolonial and sociocultural approaches. Edmund Adjapong is an Assistant Professor in the Educational Studies Department at Seton Hall University. He is also a Faculty Fellow at The Institute for Urban and Multicultural Education at Teachers College, Columbia University and the author of #HipHopEd: The Compilation on Hip-Hop Education (Volume 1 & Volume 2). Philip M. Anderson is Professor Emeritus of Education at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has published extensively on reader response, the literature curriculum, censorship and cultural aesthetics in education and society. William Ayers is a Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (retired) has written extensively about social justice and democracy. His books include A Kind and Just Parent; Teaching toward Freedom; Fugitive Days: A Memoir; Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident; To Teach: The Journey, in Comics; and Demand the Impossible! Lilia I. Bartolomé is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Her research interests include the preparation of effective teachers of linguistic

Notes on the Editors and Contributors

xxiii

minority students and the exploration of teacher beliefs about minoritised students. Dr Bartolomé’s publications are extensive and include notable books such as Ideologies in Education: Unmasking the Trap of Teacher Neutrality and Dancing with Bigotry: The Poisoning of Cultural Identities (with Donaldo Macedo). Marissa Bellino is an Assistant Professor of Education at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ), where she teaches social foundations and science methods to preservice teachers. Her teaching interests include environmental sustainability and science education through a critical lens. Marissa’s research interests explore youth experiences in urban environments, environmental education and participatory research. Silvia Cristina Bettez is a Professor in the Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations (ELC) Department at The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she teaches about issues of social justice in a graduate program. Her scholarship centralizes social justice with a focus on fostering critical community building, teaching for social justice, and promoting equity through intercultural communication and engagement. Phillip Boda is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University. He holds a PhD in Science Education and an EdM in Teacher Education from Teachers College at Columbia University. Phillip’s work investigates the overlapping intersections of cultural studies/disability studies, urban teacher education and STEM education. He is the editor of the book Essays on Exclusion: Our Critical, Collective Journey Toward Equity in Education. Karla Boluk is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at the University of Waterloo. Karla’s scholarship examines how to bring criticality and creative pedagogy to the classroom in order to enhance sustainable tourism education. Sabrina Boyer is an Associate Professor at Guilford Technical Community College in English and Humanities. Her research interests include queer theory, LGBTQ2+ studies, Feminist theory, LatinX studies, critical pedagogy and media studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations and a Post-Baccalaureate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from The University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Bryan Brayboy is President’s Professor, Special Assistant to the President for American Indian Affairs, and Director of the Center for Indian Education at Arizona State University. His research focuses on the experiences of Indigenous students, staff, and faculty in institutions of higher education. Deborah P. Britzman teaches at York University in Toronto. She is Distinguished Research Professor, holds the York University Chair of Pedagogy and Psycho-social Transformations and is a psychoanalyst. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the author of numerous books and articles, with her main contribution being to the field of psychoanalysis with education. Pipo Bui holds a PhD in European ethnology from the Humboldt University of Berlin. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in communication from Stanford University. Pipo currently works as Director for Corporate and Foundation Relations at EarthCorps, a nonprofit organisation that cultivates emerging environmental leaders from more than 90 countries.

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Alana Butler is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University in Canada. She has taught in a range of settings that include preschool, English as a Second Language, adult literacy, and university undergraduate. Her research interests include the academic achievement of low-socio economic students, race and schooling, equity and inclusion, immigration and settlement studies, and multicultural education. Robert F. Carley is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and The Politics of Practice and Autonomy, Refusal, and The Black Bloc: Positioning Class in Critical and Radical Theory. Fred Chapel is a member of the faculty of the Education Department at Antioch University, Los Angeles. He was a middle school science teacher for 25 years and brings a wealth of experience in inquiry-based pedagogy to his teaching. Sandro Carnicelli is a Senior Lecturer in Events and Tourism at the University of the West of Scotland. Sandro has been developing research in the fields of tourism in Brazil, New Zealand and Scotland for over ten years. His main research interests are adventure tourism, tourism education and outdoor learning. Joseph Carroll-Miranda is an Auxiliary Professor at the Graduate Studies Department of the College of Education of the University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras Campus. He is a strong advocate of both Computer Science and STEM education as issues of social justice. His research interest include youth culture, teknoculture, hacker culture, critical pedagogy and transforming traditional classrooms as spaces of creation and innovation. Angelina E. Castagno is a Professor of Educational Leadership and Foundations, and the Director of the Diné Institute for Navajo Nation Educators at Northern Arizona University. Her teaching and research centers on equity and diversity in US schools, and particularly issues of Whiteness and Indigenous education. Colin Chasi is Professor in Communication Studies and the Head of the Department of Communication Studies at the University of the Free State in South Africa. His latest research is focused on the transformation of higher education, in view of the contemporary decolonization debate. He is rated as a nationally recognised researcher by the National Research Foundation of South Africa. Annette Coburn is Senior Lecturer and Programme Lead in Community Education at the University of the West of Scotland (UWS). Following 23 years as a community education and youth work practitioner, Annette began teaching in Higher Education in 2003. Her on-going youth and community research has examined aspects of border pedagogy, equality, social justice and well-being. Sarah E. Colonna is Associate Program Chair of Grogan College at The University North Carolina, Greensboro and Lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research interests include feminist thought and pedagogy, equity and diversity, leadership and young adult literature. Atasi Das is an educator activist and doctoral candidate of Urban Education at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research focuses on critical numeracy − a framework

Notes on the Editors and Contributors

xxv

examining numbers as social and political activity. She collaborates with Spark Teacher Education Institute on advancing a liberatory praxis − learning and doing to collectively create an equitable society. Cristina Maria Dominguez is a doctoral student in Educational Studies with a concentration in Cultural Studies at The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and serves as a graduate assistant in the department of Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations. Dominguez’s current research interests include: critical pedagogy, social justice education, and everyday relational social justice teaching, learning and action work. Brian Dotts is an Associate Professor of Educational Foundations at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Educational Foundations: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives and The Political Education of Democratus: Negotiating Civic Virtue during the Early Republic. Mary Drinkwater is a Lecturer at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto, Canada. Her research focuses on issues of arts and cultural practices for democratic and transformative education. She was lead editor and chapter author for Transnational Perspectives on Democracy, Citizenship, Human Rights and Peace Education. Judith Dunkerly-Bean is an Associate Professor of Literacy, Language and Culture and Co-Director of the Literacy Research and Development Center at Old Dominion University. Judith’s research is situated at the intersection of critical literacy, social justice and human rights. Tony Edwards has been a teacher educator in Australia and more recently Canada. He has contributed to the learning and professional development of preservice teachers in a range of contexts. His research is primarily focused on the possible impacts upon an individual student’s habitus as they are presented with support to explore possible futures. Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner is Associate Professor of Literacy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The author of over 70 publications, Varner’s expertise centers on race and critical international engagement. Ramón Flecha is Doctor Honoris Causa of the West University of Timişoara and Professor of Sociology at the University of Barcelona. He is a researcher of the projects WORKALÓ (FP5), INCLUD-ED (FP6) and IMPACT-EV (FP7). He has published in Nature, PLOS ONE, Cambridge Journal of Education, Harvard Educational Review, Qualitative Inquiry, Current Sociology and Journal of Mixed Methods Research. Teresa Anne Fowler is a doctoral candidate at Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary. Teresa’s research interests lie with Whiteness, masculinities, anti-racist pedagogy and critical pedagogy. Her doctoral dissertation explores how Whiteness reproduces in schools and how this leads to a radicalisation of White boys and manifestations of violence. Benjamin Frymer is Professor in the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at Sonoma State University, and previously taught at Columbia University’s Teachers College, UCLA, and

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Trinity College. He writes in the areas of education, self and society, and cultural studies focusing on the study of film education, contemporary alienation, violence, and ideology. Antonio Garcia is an independent researcher, founder and organizer of the International Žižek Studies Conference (est. 2012), executive director of the Žižekian Institute for Research, Inquiry, and Pedagogy, and co-editor with Rex Butler for the Žižek Studies Book Series. In addition to being a Žižek scholar, he has focused on developing his own original theoretical work called constellar theory. Hermán S. García was a faculty member at Eastern Washington University, Texas Tech University, Texas A&M University and New Mexico State University. He is currently Regents Professor/Distinguished Professor Emeritus at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces. Jeremy Garcia is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Education and is Co-Director of the Indigenous Teacher Education Project at the University of Arizona. He is a member of the Hopi/Tewa Tribes of Arizona. His research focuses on decolonisation, critical Indigenous curriculum and pedagogy, Indigenous teacher education, and critical and culturally sustaining family and community engagement within Indigenous education. Sandra Girbés-Peco is a Post-doctoral Researcher at the Department of Teaching and Learning and Educational Organisation at the University of Barcelona. She is also a researcher at the Community of Researchers on Excellence for All (CREA), where she develops work on gender studies, community involvement and educational actions to overcome poverty. Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. The author of hundreds of articles and books, including The Terror of the Unforseen and American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism. He is a columnist for Truthout. Aristotelis Gkiolmas has a BSc in Physics and a Masters and PhD in Science Education. He is member of the Laboratory Teaching Staff of the Department of Primary Education, University of Athens. He has participated in numerous international conferences on critical pedagogy and is a member of the editorial board of the journals The International Journal of Critical Media Literacy and Green Theory and Praxis. Alfonso Gutiérrez Martín is a Full Professor of Education at the University of Valladolid. (Spain). His interests are in media literacy, digital competence and teacher training. He has been involved in different European projects related to media education and he was the lead organizer of the first and third International Conferences of Media Education and Digital Competence in 2011 and 2017. Rodney Handelsman is a founding teacher of a public alternative high school in Canada. He has taught K-12 and worked in the field as a researcher, teacher educator (McGill, OISE, UKZN), pedagogical consultant and curriculum writer. Lalenja Harrington received her PhD in Educational Studies and Cultural Foundations from The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she is currently Academic Director for

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the Integrative Community Studies certificate. She is most interested in exploring the intersections between art, community-engaged research and pedagogical approaches with the potential for engaging marginalised folk as scholars and researchers. Nicholas D. Hartlep holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee in Urban Education (Social Foundations of Education). He is currently the Robert Charles Billings Endowed Chair in Education and Chair of the Education Studies Department at Berea College. You can follow his work on Twitter at @nhartlep or at his website, www.nicholashartlep.com. Elbert J. Hawkins, III is a native of North Carolina who resides in Jamestown. Currently, he is a doctoral candidate, a professional high-school counsellor, nationally certified through the National Board for Certified Counselors (National Board Certified Teacher–School Counseling/ Early Childhood through Young Adulthood). Mark Helmsing is Assistant Professor of Education and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of History and Art History and the Folklore Studies Program at George Mason University. Mark’s work uses critical theories of affect and emotion to explore how people feel about the past and how the past makes people feel. Andrew Hickey is Associate Professor in Communications at the University of Southern Queensland. Andrew publishes in the areas of critical pedagogy, public pedagogies and emancipatory social practice and has undertaken large-scale projects with departments of education, schools and community groups internationally. Stephanie L. Hudson is a Doctoral Student in educational studies, concentrating on cultural studies and women’s and gender studies, at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Stephanie is a Teaching Associate in the Cultural Foundations Program. She teaches, researches and writes across disciplines in biology, cultural foundations of education and feminist studies. Stephanie’s research interests include curriculum studies, feminist theories and pedagogies, teaching and learning in virtual spaces, feminist cultural studies of technoscience and critical body studies. Luis Huerta-Charles is an Associate Professor of Multicultural Education at New Mexico State University. He is a Nepantlero border-crosser that aims to prepare teachers as social activists in order to transform our unjust and unequal society into a more just one. Awad Ibrahim is an award-winning author and a Professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa. He is a curriculum theorist with special interest in critical pedagogy, hiphop studies and Black popular culture, cultural studies, applied linguistics, social justice, diasporic and continental African identities and ethnography. Perry R. James is an educator who lives and works in the Navajo Nation. A fluent speaker of his language, he was brought up with the traditional ways of the Ni’hokaa’ Diyin Dine’é. Currently a doctoral candidate at Fielding Graduate University, his research uses Indigenous Interpretative Autoethnography to prepare Navajo leaders. Catalina Jaramillo is a teacher educator at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Colombia and an EFL teacher in a public school. She has served as a research assistant at Grupo de Investigación Acción y Evaluación en Lenguas Extranjeras (GIAE) in the line of language and education policies at Universidad de Antioquia.

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Graham Jeffery is Reader in Arts and Media at the University of the West of Scotland. His work spans participatory and community arts practices, creative pedagogies, cultural policy, urban studies and community development. He has led numerous action research projects with diverse communities in different places around the world. Brian C. Johnson earned his PhD in Communications Media and Instructional Technology from Indiana University of PA. An avid film fanatic and scholar, his book Reel Diversity: A Teacher’s Sourcebook was recognised by the National Association for Multicultural Education’s 2009 Chinn Book Award. Richard Kahn is an anarcist educator at Antioch University, Los Angeles,whose primary interests are in researching social movements as pedagogically generative forces in society and in critically challenging the role dominant institutions play in blocking the realization of greater planetary freedom, peace, and happiness. Tony Kashani is an American author, educator, philosopher of technology, and a cultural critic. He holds a PhD degree in Humanities with emphasis on culture studies from California Institute of Integral Studies. He is the author of five books including Movies Change Lives: A Pedagogy of Humanistic Transformation. His interests are interdisciplinary scholarship and pedagogy on humanities in the digital age and social justice. Douglas Kellner is George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education at UCLA and is author of many books on social theory, politics, history, and culture. He is the author of The American Horror Show: Election 2016 and the Ascendency of Donald J. Trump, and American Nightmare: Donald Trump, Media Spectacle, and Authoritarian Populism, and the Collected Papers of Herman Marcuse. Arlo Kempf is an Assistant Professor of Equity and Education in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Arlo’s research interests include teachers’ work, anti-racism and anti-colonialism in education, and critical perspectives on educational standardisation and neoliberalism. Christopher Lee Kennedy is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York, who creates site-specific projects that examine conventional notions of ‘Nature’, interspecies agency and biocultural collaboration. Kennedy is currently Assistant Director of the Urban Systems Lab at The New School University. Eun-Ji Amy Kim is Lecturer at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia in the School of Education and Professional Studies, her area is social diversity and Indigenous education. Her research interests are Indigenous science education, ReconciliACTION through relationship-based and land-based teaching Joe L. Kincheloe was the Canada Research Chair of Critical Pedagogy at McGill University in Montreal, and the founder of The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy. Born in the mountains of Tennessee, he was raised to recognize inequities within society and became the humble champion for the oppressed. The author of 60 books and

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hundreds of articles, he is to be remembered as a rock n’ roll musician, father, partner, and friend to many. James D. Kirylo is Professor of Education at the University of South Carolina. Among other books, he is the author of Paulo Freire: The Man from Recife, Paulo Freire: His Faith, Spirituality, and Theology (with Drick Boyd) and Teaching with Purpose: An Inquiry in the Who, Why, and How We Teach. Tricia M. Kress is an Associate Professor in the Educational Leadership for Diverse Learning Communities EdD programme at Molloy College in Rockville Centre, NewYork. Her research uses critical pedagogy, cultural sociology and autoethnography to rethink teaching, learning and research in urban schools. She details this approach in her book Critical Praxis Research: Breathing New Life into Research Methods for Teachers. Jo Lampert is a Professor of Education at La Trobe University in Melbourne. While she also researches in the area of children’s literature, most of her daily work is in teacher education for high-poverty schools. Jodi Latremouille completed her doctorate in Educational Research at the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary. She is a sessional instructor in the Faculty of Education at Thompson Rivers University. She also taught high school French Immersion and Social Studies. Her research interests include hermeneutics, ecological and feminist pedagogy, social and environmental justice, life writing and poetic inquiry. Sherilyn Lennon is a Senior Lecturer in the Education and Professional Studies faculty at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. Her research interests include literacy, gender, rurality and emerging qualitative and post-qualitative research paradigms. She is the author of numerous publications including the monograph, Unsettling Research, published in 2015 as part of the Critical Qualitative Research series. Galia Zalmanson Levi is a critical pedagogy and feminist teacher educator in seminar Hakibbutzim College and in Ben Gurion University in Israel. She was co-founder of the teacher education program for social justice and peace education. Galia combines activism and leading social change in the public education system with academic research. Guofang Li is a Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Transnational/Global Perspectives of Language and Literacy Education of Children and Youth in the Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia. Her research interests are longitudinal studies of immigrant children’s biliteracy development, diversity and equity issues and teacher education for diverse learners. Sheryl J. Lieb is Adjunct Professor at Grogan Residential College and Humanities Lecturer in the Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies programme at The University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her areas of specialisation and research interests include philosophy of education, critical pedagogy, ethics and intellectual virtue development, existentialism (as philosophy and pedagogical practice) and cultural studies. Kerry Mallan is Professor Emeritus at Queensland University of Technology. Her work is cross-disciplinary, with a focus on children’s literature, youth and popular culture and digital

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media texts and practices. Kerry was the founding director of the Children and Youth Research Centre at QUT. Jennifer M. Markides is a Métis doctoral candidate in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary. Her graduate research examines the stories told by youth who have transitioned from life-in-schools to life-out-of-school within the same year as experiencing a natural disaster. She is also an educator, researcher, and author in the area of Indigenous education, and the editor of three books on Indigenous ways of knowing and research. Rose Marsters is of Cook Island descent and is a Ng¯akauologist, a practitioner who is proficient and drives a movement in Ng¯akau (heart) pedagogy and intelligence. She serves both the Pasifika and M¯aori communities including her employed tertiary role, at the Waikato Institute of Technology, Wintec. Her interest is on enhancing capabilities of practitioners in appropriate culturally responsive practice. Teresa Sordé Martí is a Serra Húnter Associate Professor of Sociology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her work focuses on the Roma ethnic minority in Europe looking at social mobilization, women’s rights, education, and health. She has worked on projects with the European Commission and is a member of CREA. D’Arcy Martin is a veteran labour movement educator, having created, administered and facilitated courses within unions across Canada and internationally for over four decades. D’Arcy has extended his popular education practice to community, policy, academic and other activist settings, and has written widely, including the book Thinking Union: Activism and Education in Canada’s Labour Movement. Domenica Maviglia is Doctor of Philosophy in Intercultural Pedagogy at the Department of Cognitive Science, Psychological, Educational, and Cultural Studies of the University of Messina. Her work focuses mainly on critical pedagogy and the theoretical and historical research in the field of pedagogy, with a particular emphasis on the philosophy of education, the history of pedagogy and the history of education. Diarmuid McAuliffe is the academic lead for Art-in-Education at the School of Education and Social Sciences, University of the West of Scotland. His research includes developing critical school art pedagogies and runs a series of public seminars in this area, most recently for the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. Lisa McAuliffe is Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for Inclusive Education in the School of Education and Social Sciences at the University of the West of Scotland. Her main research focus is the interface between inclusive education policy and practice. Lisa is particularly interested in the role of teacher education in promoting inclusion and social justice. J. Cynthia McDermott is a Professor of education and the Regional Director of two Antioch university campuses in California and is a two-time Fulbright recipient. She has been a classroom teacher K-12. Peter McLaren is Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he co-directs the Paulo Freire Democratic Project, he is Fellow of

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the Royal Society of Arts and Commerce (London, UK). He is the author and editor of over 50 books including Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education, now in the 6th edition. Jane McLean. Currently an Academic Instructor at the University of New Brunswick, Dr McLean is a retired educator with 35 years’ experience teaching English Language Arts. In 2001, she developed and implemented a critical feminist course for Grade 12 students called Women, Media, and Culture, now taught in high schools throughout New Brunswick, Canada. Tanya Brown Merriman has taught in public, parochial and charter schools; she has taught nearly every grade level from Pre-K to doctoral students; and she has served as an administrator and designer of new schools and curricular programmes. She teaches at the University of Southern California, she is the author of Those Who Can: A Handbook for Social Reconstruction and Teaching. Ann Milne is a White educator who led the Kia Aroha College community’s almost 30-year journey to resist and reject school environments which alienate Indigenous M¯aori and Pasifika learners, to develop a critical, culturally sustaining learning approach centered on students’ cultural identities and to develop their critical consciousness, which she discusses in her book, Coloring in the White Spaces. Khadija Mohammed is Senior Lecturer in the School of Education and Social Sciences, at the University of the West of Scotland. She is Programme Leader for Early Years and is also a Teacher Educator. Her doctoral work centers around race equality, exploring the experiences of Black and Minority Ethnic Teachers in Scotland. Khadija supports educators to become confident and empowered to promote equality, preventing and dealing with racism. She is also the co-founder and Chair of the Scottish Association of Minority Ethnic Educators. Silvia Molina is Associate Professor at the Department of Pedagogy at the Rovira i Virgili University and a Researcher at the Community of Researchers on Excellence for All (CREA). She has published in journals such as Qualitative Inquiry, Frontiers in Psychology and Higher Education Research & Development. Veronica A. Newton is an Assistant Professor of Race in the Department of Sociology at Georgia State University. Her research focuses on how Black undergraduate women experience gendered racism at White universities. Her research interests include Black feminist thought, critical race feminism, trap feminism, hip-hop feminism and hip-hop. Soudeh Oladi is a Postdoctoral Fellow and SSHRC Project Manager at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Dr Oladi’s foundational research focuses on interdisciplinary scholarship and is deeply rooted in critical pedagogy, philosophy of education, social justice education and Eastern and Western educational philosophies and spiritual traditions. Maria Padrós is an Associate Professor at the Department of Teaching and Learning and Educational Organization at the University of Barcelona and a Researcher at the Community of Researchers on Excellence for All (CREA). She has published in journals such as Teachers College Record, European Journal of Education and Qualitative Inquiry.

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Yuliana Palacio is a Foreign Language Teacher from the School of Languages, Universidad de Antioquia in Colombia. She completed her graduate studies in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Boston University. She is a member of the Grupo de Investigación Acción y Evaluación en Lenguas Extranjeras (GIAE) research group in the line of language and education policies. Priya Parmar is an Associate Professor of Secondary Education at Brooklyn College-CUNY. Her scholarly publications and books center on critical literacies, youth and hip hop culture and other contemporary issues in the field of cultural studies in which economic, political and social justice issues are addressed. She is the author of Knowledge Reigns Supreme: The Critical Pedagogy of Hip Hop Artist KRS-One. Oscar A. Peláez is a teacher educator and researcher. He coordinates the research field in the ELT programme at the School of Education, Universidad Católica Luis Amigó in Colombia. He is also an academic adviser to the university’s undergraduate and graduate students in the area of education language policy. Zhengmei Peng is a Professor of Comparative Education and the Director of the Institute of International and Comparative Education at East China Normal University. His expertise includes comparative education, German pedagogy, Western educational philosophy, theory of knowledge and curriculum studies. Kathalene A. Razzano holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from George Mason University. She currently teaches in the Global Affairs Program at George Mason University, and the Media & Communication Studies Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She specializes in cultural studies, feminist social theory, political economy, critical pedagogy, critical legal studies, and media studies. Kerry J. Renwick is a teacher educator with experience working with preservice teachers in both Australia and Canada. Her research interests focus on social justice experienced and developed at the personal level and in the context of the family. Nighet Riaz is an early career researcher and associate lecturer at the School of Education and Social Sciences in the University of the West of Scotland. Nighet’s research explores moral panics and the perceived disaffection of young people, with a particular focus on Black and Minority Ethnic and Muslim communities and youth. Shawn Arango Ricks is the Assistant Vice President for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and an Associate Professor of Race and Ethnicity Studies at Salem Academy and College in Winston-Salem, NC. She is an intuitive healer, licensed mental health and addictions counsellor, and life coach in private practice focused on helping Women of Color on their healing journeys. Teresa J. Rishel researches child and adolescent suicide in exploring sociocultural relationships, student alienation, bullying, diverse students, hidden curriculum and leadership roles in schools. She focuses on critical theory and pedagogy, curriculum theory, and social justice. She works with organizations interested in sharing experiences or difficulties of suicide-related school issues.

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Claire Robson’s federally funded postdoctoral research at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver) investigated the potential of arts-engaged community practices. A widely published writer of fiction, memoir, and poetry, Claire’s book, Writing for Change, shows how collective memoir writing can effect social change. Samuel D. Rocha is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. Ylva Rodny-Gumede is the Head of the International Office and Professor in the School of Communication at the University of Johannesburg. Ylva is a former journalist with experience from both print and broadcast media. Her current research focus is on transformation and innovation in higher education. Ylva is rated as a nationally recognised researcher by the National Research Foundation of South Africa. Toby Rollo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Lakehead University. April Yaisa Ruffin-Adams is an instructor in the African American and African Diaspora Studies program at The University of North Carolina,Greensboro. Her research interests focus on African American mothers, educational equity, and social justice. Marcella Runell Hall is the Vice President for Student Life/Dean of Students and Lecturer in Religion at Mount Holyoke College. She was the founding Co-Director for the Of Many Institute for Multifaith Leadership and program advisor/founder for the minor in multifaith and spiritual leadership at New York University. Marcella has written for Scholastic Books, the New York Times Learning Network, VIBE, and various academic journals, including Equity and Excellence in Education. Constance Russell is a Professor in the Faculty of Education, Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Canada. She co-edited the award-winning book The Fat Pedagogy Reader: Challenging Weight-Based Oppression through Critical Education, edited the Canadian Journal of Environmental Education from 2004–16 and currently co-edits a book series, (Re)thinking Environmental Education. I. Malik Saafir is President and CEO of The Southern Renaissance in Little Rock, Arkansas. He trains education, business, government and nonprofit leaders how to end poverty in the African diaspora. Previously, he was Visiting Lecturer of African/African American Studies at the University of Central Arkansas. Madhulika Sagaram is the founder and President of Adhya Educational Society, a nonprofit engaged in improving the quality of education in underserved government and private schools. She is also the founder of Ajahn Books and the Ajahn Center for Pedagogy. She has a vision to develop research, engaging with the theory, practice and outreach of pedagogical perspectives in education across socio-cultural diversity in India and the world. Pramod K. Sah is a PhD candidate and Killam doctoral scholar in the Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia. His research work is driven by the core values of social justice with a focus on class and ethnicity and English-medium instruction (EMI) policy in multilingual Nepal.

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Concepción Sánchez-Blanco has been Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer of Curriculum, Instruction and School Organization at the University of A Coruña since 1995 (Faculty of Educational Sciences). Her research focus is on the pursuit of justice and equity in early childhood education through ethnography, action research, case study, critical pedagogy, anti-bias teacher education, social inclusion and anti-violence. Adrienne Sansom is a Senior Lecturer in Dance and Drama at the University of Auckland. Her academic interests include social democracy, social justice and social change through the arts, and her research and writing focus on the body and embodied knowing in education, critical pedagogy and cultural studies. Martha Sañudo is Full Professor of Philosophy at Tecnológico de Monterrey at Centro de Investigación en Humanidades. Roslyn M. Satchel is the Blanche E. Seaver Professor of Communication at Pepperdine University and is an affiliate faculty in Seaver College’s Social Action and Justice Colloquium and at Pepperdine’s School of Law. Her research focuses on social justice, intersectional community organizing among marginalized groups, and critical cultural/race/media literacies — especially, as relates to law, religion, and media. William H. Schubert is Professor Emeritus of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where he held professorial and administrative positions from 1975 to his retirement in 2011. At UIC, he received numerous awards for scholarship, teaching, and mentoring. Schubert has published 18 books, over 250 articles and book chapters, and has made approximately 300 scholarly presentations. David Scott is an Assistant Professor in the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary. His scholarly work involves investigations into how educators interpret and pedagogically respond to new educational curricular mandates including calls to engage with Indigenous histories, experiences, and philosophies. Jeff Share is a Faculty Advisor in the Teacher Education Program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research and practice focus on transformative education; preparing K-12 educators to teach critical media literacy for social and environmental justice. His published work includes Media Literacy is Elementary: Teaching Youth to Critically Read and Create Media. Shashi Shergill is an Assistant Principal at Connect Charter School in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Shashi was a 2015 recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Excellence in Teaching History. Shashi is currently undertaking her doctorate in education at the University of Calgary exploring ethical and cultural relationality in forming partnerships between Indigenous and non – Indigenous schools. Roger I. Simon was Professor of Sociology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto, Ontario and founder of the Association of Critical Pedagogy in Canada. Over his forty years of teaching and writing, he influenced generations of professors and public educators in Canada. Simon authored numerous articles and seven books, the last, A Pedagogy of Witnessing: Curatorial practice and the pursuit of social justice.

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Marlon Simmons is an Associate Professor at the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary. His scholarly work is grounded within the diaspora, decolonial thought and communicative network practices of youth. Marlon’s research interests include schooling and society, governance of the self in educational settings and the sociology of education. Constantine Skordoulis is Professor of Epistemology and Didactical Methodology of Physics at the University of Athens and Academic Director of the postgraduate programme ‘Secondary Science Teachers Education’ of the Hellenic Open University. He has published extensively on issues of history of science, science education and socio-scientific issues with a critical perspective. Christine E. Sleeter is Professor Emerita in the College of Education at California State University Monterey Bay, where she was a founding faculty member. Her research, published in over 150 articles and 23 books, focuses on anti-racist multicultural education, ethnic studies and teacher education. David Geoffrey Smith is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta. His teaching and research have focussed on interculturality in curriculum through critical globalization studies. His books include: Pedagon: Interdisciplinary Essays in the Human Sciences, Pedagogy and Culture; Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth: Globalization, Empire and the Crises of Pedgogy; Teaching as the Practice of Wisdom; and CONFLUENCES: Intercultural Journeying in Research and Teaching: From Hermeneutics to a Changing World Order. John Smyth is Visiting Professor of Education and Social Justice, University of Huddersfield, Emeritus Research Professor Federation University Australia, Emeritus Professor of Education Flinders University of South Australia, Elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, a former Senior Fulbright Research Scholar and the author of 35 books. Nathan Snaza teaches English literature, gender studies and educational foundations at the University of Richmond. He is the author of Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism and the co-editor of Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies and Posthumanism and Educational Research. Marta Soler-Gallart is Full Professor of Sociology at University of Barcelona and director of CREA. She is President of the European Sociological Association and has served on the Governing Boards of the European Alliance for the Social Sciences and Humanities, the ORCID Board of Directors, and as the Expert Evaluator for the EU Framework Programme of Research. Jessica A. Solyom is an Assistant Research Professor at Arizona State University in the Center for Indian Education. Her recent publications have explored postsecondary education for American Indian and Alaska Native students, critical research methodologies, and American Indian college student activism for education rights. Marc Spooner is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina. His research interests include homelessness and poverty, audit culture and the effects of neoliberalisation and corporatisation on higher education, social justice, activism and participatory

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democracy. He is co-editor, with James McNinch, of the award-winning book Dissident Knowledge in Higher Education. Dana M. Stachowiak is the Director of the Gender Studies and Research Center and an Associate Professor of Curriculum Studies at The University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her research interests are in transgender studies, equity education, and literacy curriculum. Constantina Stefanidou was born in 1976 in Athens. She is a physicist who obtained her PhD in 2013 in History and Philosophy of Natural Sciences in Science Teaching. After 12 years in secondary education, she is currently Faculty Member at the Department of Education of the University of Athens as Teaching and Laboratory Staff. Her research interests are in science education, historical and philosophical perspectives of science and didactics of science. Michaela P. Stone is Assistant Professor of Early Childhood at the University of Northern Vermont. Her scholarly interests includes mathematics, critical disability studies and the role of differentiation and engagement in cross-cultural contexts. Dennis Sumara is Professor at the Faculty of Education at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. His areas of research include curriculum theory, teacher education and literacy education, as oriented by conceptual interests in hermeneutic phenomenology, literary response theory and complexity science. Kristine Sunday is an Assistant Professor of Teaching and Learning at Old Dominion University where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in early childhood education. She holds a PhD from the Pennsylvania State University in Art Education. Kristine draws from post-structural theories and qualitative research methods to pose questions about children, learning, and the visual arts in early childhood classrooms. Juha Suoranta is Professor of Adult Education at Tampere University. He has published extensively on critical pedagogy and public sociology. His latest books are C. Wright Mills’ Sociological Life and Paulo Freire: A Pedagogue of the Oppressed. Dawn N. Hicks Tafari is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education at WinstonSalem State University. Her research interests include Black boys in public schools, Black feminist thought, Black male elementary school teachers, hiphop culture’s influence on social and individual identity development, hiphop feminism, critical race theory, composite counter storytelling and narrative research. Nwachi Pressley-Tafari, a native New Yorker, has been a developmental educator for over 20 years and is now Adjunct Professor of Diversity, the Humanities, and College Success for ECPI University. He holds a certification in life coaching and is a licensed New Life Story coach. Shuntay Z. Tarver is an Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University in the Department of Counselling and Human Services. He is committed to social justice with a particular focus on the experiences of African Americans within various ecological systems (i.e. schools, justice systems, and families).

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Paul. L. Thomas, is Professor of Education at Furman University. He taught high-school English for 18 years in South Carolina before moving to teacher education and teaching firstyear writing. He is the author of Teaching Writing as Journey, Not Destination: Essays Exploring What ‘Teaching Writing’ Means. Follow him at http://radicalscholarship.wordpress. com/ and @plthomasEdD. Gresilda Tilley-Lubbs is Associate Professor, Social Foundations, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the author of Re-Assembly Required: Critical Autoethnography and Spiritual Discovery. Her research in Spain for a critical autoethnography examines life under Franco’s dictatorship following the Spanish Civil War. She is also investigating critical pedagogy in teacher education with colleagues in Spain and Mexico. Peter Pericles Trifonas is Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto. His areas of interest include ethics, philosophy of education, cultural studies, and technology. His books include: Deconstructing the Machine (with Jacques Derrida); International Handbook of Semiotics; Roland Barthes and the Empire of Signs; and Umberto Eco & Football. Stephanie Troutman is a Black feminist scholar, mother and first-generation college student. She is the Associate Professor of Emerging Literacies in the English Department at the University of Arizona. She serves as affiliate faculty in Gender & Women’s Studies, Teaching, Learning & Sociocultural Studies, Africana Studies and the LGBT Institute. Cherie Ann Turpin is an Associate Professor in the English Program at University of DC. Her publications include the book How Three Black Women Writers Combined Spiritual and Sensual Love, as well as articles in various journals and anthologies. She is completing Afrofuturism and African spiritual traditions, as well as Digital Humanities and Diversity. Jaime Usma is a Teacher Educator and Researcher at the School of Languages, Universidad de Antioquia in Colombia. In his recent publications and studies, he examines language and education policies being adopted in Colombia and their social, economic and political implications for different educational actors, ethnic groups and communities. Juan Ríos Vega is an Assistant Professor at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, Department of Teacher Education, where he teaches courses on English as a second language (ESL) and diversity in education. His research interests include K-12 Latinx students in education, queers of color critique, and LGBTIQ+ populations in Panama. Marco Montalbetti Viñuela is an independent scholar and photojournalist with over 20 years of experience, five of which were spent documenting the teaching-exchange programmes described in his article in this Handbook. David Wallace is lecturer in community education at the University of the West of Scotland. For the better part of 40 years he has been a passionate advocate for social justice through informal, collaborative and community-based education. His research and teaching interests have mirrored an engagement with distinctively Scottish practices in community education and with an overarching concern for social justice.

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Gerald Walton is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University in Canada. His research focuses on school-based bullying as othering and he speaks and writes on Whiteness, free speech, masculinity, gender expression and identity, sexuality, and rape culture, among other topics. He edited the 2014 collection, The Gay Agenda: Claiming Space, Identity, and Justice, published by Peter Lang Press. Ki Wight is an instructor at Capilano University in Vancouver in the Communication Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies and Motion Picture Arts programmes. Her doctoral work, at Simon Fraser University’s Equity Studies in Education Program, looks at the relationship between media education and systems of oppression. John Willinsky is Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University, as well as Professor of Publishing Studies at Simon Fraser University. He directs the Public Knowledge Project, which conducts research and develops open source scholarly publishing software in support of greater access to knowledge. His most recent book is The Intellectual Properties of Learning: A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke. Peter R. Wright is an Associate Professor of Arts Education at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia. He works across the arts with a commitment to personal, social and cultural inquiry, agency, education and expression, health and wellbeing, and Creative Youth Development. His interest is in teacher development in the Arts, Teaching Artist pedagogy, ArtsHealth, socio-aesthetic pedagogy, and social justice. Michalinos Zembylas is a Professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies at the Open University of Cyprus, and Honorary Professor at Nelson Mandela University in the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation. He has written extensively on emotion and affect in relation to social justice pedagogies, intercultural and peace education, human rights education and citizenship education. Gang Zhu is currently an Associate Professor at the Institute of International and Comparative Education, East China Normal University. His expertise encompasses teacher education, comparative education and urban education. His publications, in both English and Chinese, have appeared in Compare, Journal of Education for Teaching, The Asia-Pacific Educational Researcher and Computer-Assisted Language Learning. Revital Zilonka is currently a 4th-grade teacher at the Neve Hof elementary school in Rishon Le’Zion, Israel. She received her PhD in Cultural Foundations from The University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Haggith Gor Ziv is a Senior Lecturer Seminar Hakibutzim Teachers College of Education in the Early Childhood department Special Education Program, Tel Aviv. She teaches courses in critical feminist pedagogy, disability studies and inclusion. She has facilitated Jewish and Arab dialogue groups, and published Critical Feminist Pedagogy and Education for Culture of Peace. David Zyngier is Associate Professor at Southern Cross University, Australia. A former teacher and school principal, he has written extensively on student engagement, social justice, democracy and education and pedagogies that enhance achievement for all students but in particular those from communities of disadvantage. He established the Public Education Network in Australia.

Acknowledgements When we first proposed the idea of a Handbook on critical pedagogies, our global friends and colleagues displayed remarkable passion, inspiration and commitment that allowed the book to evolve. They generously created space in their busy lives to share something about the emotional and intellectual labor involved in doing critical pedagogy in diverse and challenging contexts. We invited over 160 colleagues from 6 continents to contribute to our project, these scholars, educators and community activists all shared a deep understanding of the radical possibilities inspired by Paulo Freire. Their stories open us up to multiple ways of knowing, interpreting and acting in the world based on context with diverse theoretical, methodological and practical approaches. We thank them for their exceptional contribution, patience and solidarity. Individually and collectively these are some of the most outstanding scholars in the field. We appreciate their willingness to support this project from conception to completion. Their contribution is a powerful illustration of the kind of solidarity that lies at the heart of critical pedagogy. Our Section Editors provided guidance and expertise in their chosen fields often at short notice. Paul R. Carr, Gina Thésée, Greg Martin, Cathryn Teasley, Four Arrows, R. Michael Fisher, Rob Hattam, Michael MacDonald, Michael Hoechsmann, Leila E. Villaverde, Roymieco A. Carter, and Renee Desmarchelier responded to our requests, assisted with reviews, collaborated and assisted our authors, often at short notice or tight deadlines…we cannot quantify how invaluable their participation was, and continues to be. Members of the editorial board have our gratitude; not an easy task, editing such diverse articles…some academic, some storied, some autobiographic, some historic: all critical pedagogies. Acknowledgment to Dara Nix-Stevenson for her early contribution to our venture. We acknowledge with reverence and respect, our dear friends and colleagues both past and present who have played a crucial role in advancing the development of critical pedagogy. Their influence has been profoundly important in shaping the lives of so many contributors to this collection. We will hear a great deal from and about them in the chapters to follow. Paulo Freire’s ground-breaking work provides our foundation, his work permeates the thoughts and actions shaping this collection. The seeds for this collection of work was sown by Joe L. Kincheloe, whose vision of tentative critical pedagogies and unique radical love paved the way for that fateful day when James Clark from Sage Publishers showed interest and faith in our massive volume proposal. There aren’t enough synonyms to thank James: his authenticity and conscientiousness in dealing with a Yank, an Aussie, and scores of global critical pedagogues for three years deserves a shout-out. We wish to offer our deep appreciation to Janean Robinson, our Assistant Editor. Janean somehow managed to deal with the idiosyncrasies of the editors, the various technologies and tracking systems, thousands of emails, hundreds of reviews and all sorts of crises but always with good humour and grace. Thank you Janean, you are loved, you are respected, you are appreciated and acknowledged. Without our families, life partners – David and Jenny, children and friends closest to us… over the past three years, without you, none of this would be possible. This has been a complex and challenging project that could not have happened without your love, care and support. Barry wishes to thank his institution, Murdoch University for providing him with the space and resources to undertake this important work.

Introduction Barry Down and Shirley R. Steinberg

THE LEGACY OF PAULO FREIRE In 1970, the first English-language edition of The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire, was published. For a half a century, the book has been translated into scores of languages, championing a call for radical change in schooling and a humane, social shift to contextual education. Henry Giroux claims that the book changed his life, and, indeed, it certainly changed his career. Giroux’s paradigm-shattering book Theory and Resistance in Education, published in 1983, named Freire’s revolutionary philosophy as critical pedagogy. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, critical pedagogy became the counter-narrative to traditional ‘banking’ approaches to education. The book challenged the epistemological foundations of transmission models of teaching and learning and the institutional structures and social practices which hold it in place. In the past 50 years, critical scholars have re-formed education through sustained

critical pedagogical analyses and discourse. Indeed, some publishing houses have centered their entire education lists around this intervention. Many outstanding books have been published on critical pedagogy, building upon Freire’s work and expanding it to include analyses of contemporary sociocultural shifts and global transformations (e.g., Britzman, 2003 Leistyna et  al., 1999; Darder et al., 2003; McLaren and Kincheloe, 2007; Duncan and Morrell, 2008; Kincheloe, 2008; Apple et  al., 2009; Giroux, 2011; Malott and Porfilio, 2011; Smyth, 2011; and Emdin, 2017). This book assembles over 160 scholar activists from 39 countries who are deeply engaged with advancing Freire’s transformational project for the purpose of creating a more humane and socially just world. In communion with Freire’s writing (e.g., 1970/2000, 1998, 2000, 2007, 2014), they share a commitment to the values of critical curiosity, democracy, dialogue, respect, dignity, humility, hope, justice, solidarity,

INTRODUCTION

commitment and compassion as the cornerstones of a new social imaginary beyond the ‘mutating’ value system of global capitalism (McMurtry, 1999). The task of critical pedagogy becomes even more urgent in these dark times (Arendt, 1973). The rise of populist authoritarianism, fascism, war, violence, poverty, hunger, slavery, genocide, Islamophobia, environmental degradation, child labour, post-truth, forced migration and cruelty have provided a point of existential crisis in the world. It is very easy to be overwhelmed by the historical, economic and social defects of the world driven by the destructive forces of global capitalism and neoliberal ideologies, including privatization, commodification, commercialization, consumerism and individualism (Harvey, 2007). It can lead to a sense of fatalism and determinism as there appears to be no alternative to the way things are (Bourdieu, 1998: 29). The absurd, irrational and cruel are normalized in an era of relentless social-media propaganda promoting a range of neoconservative and neoliberal ideologies perpetuated by what Henry Giroux (2014: 9) describes as the ‘disimagination machine’, which perpetuates antidemocratic and authoritarian forces by ‘distracting, miseducating, and deterring the public from acting in its own interests’. In this context, Freire (2004: 105) provides us with a language of both critique and possibility which involves a dialectic between ‘denouncing’ the dehumanizing conditions under which we are living as well as ‘announcing’ that another world is possible. Critical pedagogy is central to this broader political project because it helps us to question common-sense assumptions, beliefs, values, rituals and practices that serve to mask hierarchical power relations. It provides a way of interrupting the seductive power of corporate/popular culture and the effects of what Donaldo Macedo (1993) describes as ‘literacy for stupidification’. Over 70 years ago, Adorno and Horkheimer (1944/2000: 15) warned about the illusionary

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and deceptive impact of the culture industry, which encouraged people to ‘forget suffering’ and ‘the last remaining thought of resistance’. Indeed, these ‘interferences to critical thought’ (Shor, 1980: 49) only serve to depoliticize and distract people from the real task of becoming more fully human through creative practice. It is the process of reclamation of the critical, self-reflective, moral and democratic purposes of education that lies at the heart of Freire’s legacy. In response, this collection brings together an impressive global network of scholars, educators and community activists committed to the moral vision and practice of critical pedagogy to alleviate human suffering. To this end, the book attempts to provide a coherent and purposeful international conversation by moving from a singular or universal critical pedagogy to multiple pedagogies and perspectives. Freire was concerned that his work not be turned into a dogma, a paradigm or a singular methodology, hence our desire to promote a plurality of approaches and perspectives held together by the radical love of Paulo Freire. In the Foreword to Freire’s Pedagogy of the Heart, Martin Carnoy explains how Freire addresses progressives everywhere, urging them to remain ‘active, authentic, democratic, non-sectarian, and unifying’ (Freire, 2000: 8). In the Freirean tradition, he argues that progressives must continuously examine their underlying strategies. New conditions demand new answers to some of the same old difficult questions: What is the role of progressive politics in the world system, now a new global-information economy? What is the role of progressive intellectuals? And what is the role of democratic education, again now in the information age? (Freire, 2000: 8)

Addressing these kinds of questions is what animates the individual and collective work of the authors in these volumes. For this reason, we begin with a set of personal reflections from friends and colleagues

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who have worked with or been profoundly influenced by Freire’s ideas (Volume 1, Part I). We invited them to respond to a formative piece of Freire’s (1983) writing entitled The Importance of the Act of Reading. Here, Freire reflects on his own childhood in the neighbourhood of Recife, Brazil to explain how the ‘act of reading the word and the world’ are inseparable: one infers the other. For him, the act of reading cannot be separated from context or lived experience and is, therefore, ‘laden with the meaning of the people’s existential experience’ (Freire, 1983: 10). Pivotal to Freire’s work is the understanding that reading is foremost a political act, never neutral nor objective, but capable of generating ‘difficult knowledge’ (Britzman, 1998) for the purpose of resisting all forms of oppression and creating a better world. In pursing these aspirations, Freire (1974/2007: 12) believes that critical or problem-posing education places people ‘in consciously critical confrontation with their problems, to make them the agents of their own recuperation’. What Freire is advocating is the responsibility or duty to fight against fatalistic discourses that may not always be in our own best interests. In Daring to Dream: Toward a Pedagogy of the Unfinished, Freire (2007: 4–5) explains how we are called ‘to transform and re-form the world, not to adapt to it. As human beings, there is no doubt that our main responsibility consist of intervening in reality and keeping up our hope’. To this end, Freire (2007: 25) speaks about dreams and utopia as a fundamental necessity for human beings. For him, ‘There is no tomorrow without a project, without a dream, without utopia, without hope, without creative work, and work toward the development of possibilities, which can make the concretization of that tomorrow viable’ (Freire, 2007: 26). In short, Freire (2000: 100) believes that ‘Our historical inclination is not fate, but rather possibility’. Herein lies the rationale for our work and those who have contributed to it through their own unique stories, circumstances and experiences.

Our authors bring their own particular histories, experiences, languages, cultures and perspectives to the struggle for social justice. Their work (as well as that of many others not included here) is intimately grounded in the critical pedagogies which have emerged in particular social, political and cultural contexts. In reading these accounts we gain a sense of how each of the authors take up Freire’s challenge to not only ‘speak about the limits of education’ but to engage with what can be accomplished ‘where’, ‘how’, ‘with whom’ and ‘when’ (Freire, 2007: 64), and in the process we see how our work as educators ‘is not individual, but social, and that it takes place within the social practice he or she is a part of’ (Freire, 2007: 64–5). Finally, we are interdisciplinary scholars, educators and community activists who do not seek to create a unilateral doctrine; that would be antithetical to Freire’s intention. Instead, we seek to learn from traditional critical pedagogical paradigms and from those working between these paradigms, working in the tentative, the elastic, the ever-changing margins of revolutionary and scholarly pedagogy articulated so clearly and passionately by Freire.

WHAT IS CRITICAL PEDAGOGY? Drawing on the legacy of Freire and the tradition of democratic education (Dewey, 1916/1944) we bring together scholars and practitioners committed to the realization of Freire’s vision and practice of critical pedagogy. What emerges in the three volumes is the understanding that critical pedagogy is not something easily defined in terms of a particular theory, curriculum or method, which would be anathema to Freire’s problem-posing approach to education (1970/2000: 79–86). As Gregory Martin points out in his Introduction to Part III of Volume 1, critical pedagogy is ‘an umbrella term which captures a broad range of

INTRODUCTION

approaches and standpoints that have emerged in response to unjust laws, policies, issues and practice’. Like our dear friend and mentor Joe Kincheloe (2008: 8), we find it difficult to define critical pedagogy in a brief and compelling manner because it asks so much of the educators and students who embrace it. Given the complexity and breadth of the body of work in this handbook it is apparent that there is a lot to comprehend in terms of knowledge, pedagogy, politics and culture. Therefore, a reasonable starting point might be to share a set of basic concepts identified by Kincheloe in his book Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy. By way of summary, Kincheloe says critical pedagogy is: • Grounded on a social and educational vision of justice and equality • Constructed on the belief that education is inherently political • Dedicated to the alleviation of human suffering • Concerned that schools don’t hurt students – good schools don’t blame students for their failures or strip students of the knowledges they bring to the classroom • Enacted through the use of generative themes to read the word and the world and the process of problem posing – generative themes involve the educational use of issues that are central to students’ lives as a grounding for the curriculum • Centered on the notion that teachers should be researchers – here teachers learn to produce knowledge and teach students to produce their own knowledges • Grounded on the notion that teachers become researchers of their own students – as researchers, teachers study their students, their backgrounds, and the forces that shape them • Interested in maintaining a delicate balance between social change and cultivating the intellect – this requires a rigorous pedagogy that accomplishes both goals • Concerned with the ‘margins’ of society, the experiences and needs of individuals faced with oppression and subjugation • Constructed on the awareness that science can be used as a force to regulate and control

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• Dedicated to understanding the context in which educational activity takes place • Committed to resisting the harmful effects of dominant power • Attuned to the importance of complexity – understands complexity theory–in constructing a rigorous and transformative education • Focused on understanding the profound impact of neo-colonial structures in shaping education and knowledge. (Kincheloe, 2008: 10)

Thus, a fundamental feature of critical pedagogy is the preparedness to interrupt common-sense ways of seeing the world with which people have grown so comfortable (Kumashiro, 2004). At the root of critical pedagogy, then, is the willingness to confront injustices and relations of power which hold them in place. This requires a fundamental transformation in the ways in which knowledge is produced and legitimated and by whom. This critical intellectual work requires a shift, or ‘repositioning’, whereby we ‘see the world through the eyes of the disposed and act against ideological and institutional processes and forms that reproduce oppressive conditions’ (Apple et al., 2009: 3). The task of rethinking requires a new language and set of theoretical tools capable of helping us to ‘think anew, to think otherwise … away from convention and cant’ (Burbules and Berk, 1999: 60). As Arendt (1958/1998: 5) argued in her effort to comprehend the evils of totalitarianism, what the modern world requires is a ‘matter of thought’ that opposes the kind of ‘thoughtlessness’ which leads to ‘the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of “truths” which have become trivial and empty’ and remain one of ‘the outstanding characteristics of our time’. In this context, we find Kincheloe and McLaren’s (2005) notion of ‘evolving criticality’ especially useful. For them, critical pedagogy ‘is always evolving, changing in light of both new theoretical insights and new problems and circumstances’ (Kincheloe and McLaren, 2005: 306). This spirit of

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criticality seeks to comprehend diverse forms of oppression including class, race, gender, sexual, cultural, religious, colonial and ability-related concerns. Roger Simon sums it up pretty well when he states that criticality involves figuring out: why things are the way they are, how they got that way, and what set of conditions are supporting the processes that maintain them. Further … we must be able to evaluate the potential for action that [is] embedded in actual relationships. To think these tasks through requires concepts that can carry a critique of existing practice. (Simon, 1998: 380)

Of course, criticality can be sometimes ‘violent and destructive’ because it endeavors to disrupt some deeply entrenched ‘truths’ and taken-for-granted assumptions, beliefs, values and practices (Ball, 2006: 1). The contributors to this handbook do exactly this. They draw on a range of critical theories to help them challenge existing injustices and oppressive institutional arrangements as they attempt to transform inequitable, undemocratic or oppressive policies and practices. Thus, critical pedagogy involves a twofold move: first, to develop a critical sensibility about the way things are and, second, a willingness to take action to change the status quo. It is this desire to engage in forms of social criticism as well as activism that are the hallmarks of critical pedagogy. Delving into each of the chapters we gain a greater appreciation of the complexity of this work. Each of the authors, in their own unique way, draw on a range of critical theories to guide their thinking and action. While these critical theories have their own intellectual histories, points of emphasis and explanatory power, together they highlight both the commonalities identified by Kincheloe (2008) and the differences within the tradition of critical pedagogy. It is beyond the scope of this introduction to rehearse these theories in any detail, although a cursory overview does provide a sense of the rich multiplicity of theoretical influences deployed by our authors.

Most notably, the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (Giroux, 2003); progressive education (Dewey, 1916/1944; Kozol, 1967, 2005; Postman and Weingartner, 1969); schooling and the political economy (Bowles and Gintis, 1976; Harris, 1979; Apple, 1982; Carnoy and Levin, 1985); feminism (hooks, 1981/2014; Gore, 1993); anti-racism (Gillborn, 1995), critical race theory (Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995; Leonardo, 2005); Indigenous knowledges (Smith, 1999); critical media and literacy (Macedo and Steinberg, 2007); critical youth studies (Ibrahim and Steinberg, 2014); critical multiculturalism (Sleeter and McLaren, 1995; McLaren, 1997); liberation theology (Gutiérrez, 1971/1988; Freire, 1985: 121–42); and critical ecopedagogy (Kahn, 2010), to name a few. While Freire provides a set of foundational, and even necessary values (moral, ethical, political and pedagogical), critical pedagogy itself is far more expansive than his work alone. As Freire (1970/2000: 90) himself insists, critical education is a process which endeavors to continually ‘make and remake, to create and re-create’ the world in a spirit of epistemological curiosity, dialogue, humility, solidarity and love. Herein lies the major strength of critical pedagogy: it is never static, formulaic or complete but perpetually in motion, or, in the words of Horton and Freire (1990: 11), ‘a permanent process of searching’. This collection seeks to add, no matter how modestly, to a rich archive of critical pedagogy inspired by Paulo Freire around the world. We are mindful that our work builds on the spirit of generosity and hard labour of thousands of scholars, teachers and activists who engage in the struggle for social justice daily.

HOW IS THIS BOOK ORGANIZED? This Handbook consists of three volumes divided into 12 sections, four per volume. In total there are 125 chapters. The book is

INTRODUCTION

intended to be a central resource for multiple audiences, including academics, pre-service and in-service teachers, postgraduate students, educators, social workers, artists, activists and community workers. For this reason, the book offers multiple points of entry depending on one’s interests. From the seminal writing and influence of Paulo Freire and social theories to the enactment of pedagogical insights and practices in universities, colleges, schools, classrooms, communities and non-formal spaces, readers are encouraged to engage with the ideas, debates and practices in critical pedagogy. We now provide an overview of each volume and some context for each of themes that will be extended through a series of provocations by the section editors.

Volume 1 In Section I: Reading Paulo Freire, we begin with a set of 14 short personal responses to Paulo Freire’s (1983) piece The Importance of the Act of Reading. We deliberately chose this article because it provides a starting point for the conversations to follow. The notion of ‘reading the word and the world’ seems to be a pivotal moment in comprehending the power and significance of Freire’s work. Indeed, as we read these personal responses from a range of eminent scholars and activists we gain a much deeper insight into the ways in which Freire’s ideas have profoundly influenced their lives. From the moment we invited our colleagues to share something about their encounters with the writing of Freire, there was an immense sense of excitement, passion, joy, generosity and love as each of the contributors reflected on their own personal intellectual and pedagogical journey. What they describe in their own particular ways is the power of ideas, commitment, dialogue, justice and action to create a more humane and socially just world. We believe these kinds of stories reveal a great deal about two fundamental

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questions which preoccupied Freire’s work – namely, what does it mean to be more fully human and what does it mean to be educated? We are sure readers will find these encounters interesting and informative on many levels. In Section II: Social Theories, we provide an opportunity for the authors to open up a range of social theories that have shaped their thinking and practice. The intention is not to provide some kind of definitive shopping list of social theories but to indicate the ways in which the authors use different critical theories to illuminate their understanding of injustice and what might be done about it. In this sense, we begin to see how theory and practice (praxis) interface to generate new insights with which to address persistent problems, questions and concerns in multiple contexts. Importantly, it opens up opportunities to engage with a range of theoretical orientations and to appreciate how different authors respond to the challenges posed by Freire’s desire for dialogue and his acknowledgment of the ‘incompleteness’ of the human condition. In Section III: Seminal Figures in Critical Pedagogy, we examine the contribution of a number of influential thinkers in the field. For obvious reasons, this section of the Handbook presented a number of dilemmas. We are mindful of not eulogizing particular individuals over others; this would be a fraught task, as Gregory Martin points out in his introduction. Rather, we wanted the contributing authors to provide a sense of how a range of critical thinkers have influenced their own work. As such, this is by no means an encyclopedia of ‘key figures’ in critical pedagogy: it offers a number of provocations to engage with some important writers and ideas. We endeavor to extend this conversation through four additional chapters of interviews (Chapters 34–7) to provide some personal insights into the ways in which people who have worked in critical pedagogy understand the intellectual, emotional and political nature of their work, which may not

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always be accessible through normal publishing outlets. In Section IV: Global Perspectives, the focus shifts to the global context of critical pedagogy. With the emergence of ‘global capital and the new imperialism’ (McLaren and Farahmandpur, 2005), critical pedagogy takes on new and important work as it seeks to comprehend the seismic shifts in the global economy and the implications for nation states, the economy, education, teachers’ work and students. The contributors in this section draw attention to the fallout from what Sasson describes as the ‘new logics of expulsion’, which is a way of not only capturing the growing levels of inequality but ‘the pathologies of today’s global capitalism’ especially its ‘brutality’ and ‘savage sorting’. Each of the contributors in this section undertakes a critical analysis of how these forces play out for marginalized communities, groups and individuals, and in the light of these experiences they identify the kinds of pedagogical responses required to alleviate suffering.

Volume 2 In Section V: Indigenous Ways of Knowing, the editors, Four Arrows (aka Don Jacobs) and Michael Fisher, explain the synergies between the aspirations of critical pedagogy and Indigenous peoples around decolonizing and Indigenizing movements in education. In this section, Indigenous knowledge and knowing are used as a form of resistance against oppressive colonial policies and practices which have for far too long subjugated Indigenous voices and ways of knowing. As Linda Smith explains so lucidly, Indigenous peoples around the world have had ‘to challenge, understand, and have a shared language for talking about the history, the sociology, the psychology and the politics of imperialism and colonialism as an epic story telling of huge devastation, painful struggle and persistent survival’ (1999: 19). As part of

this ongoing struggle, the authors describe a range of critical pedagogies grounded in deep listening, storytelling, integration with nature, spirituality, justice, human rights and a spirit of ‘fearlessness’. In Section VI: Education and Praxis, section editor Rob Hattam frames the discussion by reminding us of the temporal nature of critical pedagogy, which is ‘an unfinished project’ on three levels: first, ‘taking up powerful diagnoses of the times’; second, ‘taking up readings of the places we live in’; and, finally, ‘responding to philosophical investigations’. Drilling down into this framework, the contributors examine the implications for understanding praxis, including the classed, racial and gendered dimensions of education. Each of them brings their own unique take on the diagnosis of the problem under investigation, its particular context and alternative strategies and tactics. What ties these takes together is an unwavering belief in the emancipatory potential of education to address unjust policies and practices, which serve to demean and denigrate the most marginalized in society. In Section VII: Teaching and Learning, the emphasis shifts to the terrain of teaching and learning in schools and communities. In the context of unprecedented levels of interference from ‘right wing’ ideologues and their prescriptions (standardization, back-tobasics, scripted lessons, high-stakes testing, accountability, competition, commodification and privatization) to fix the so-called educational crisis, teachers, schools, communities and students are under assault. These ‘backlash pedagogies’ (Gutiérrez et  al., 2002: 335) blame teachers, progressive ideas and linguistically and culturally diverse and poor children for the perceived problems of education and society. According to Giroux, this ‘pedagogy of stupidity’ is focused on ‘memorization, conformity, passivity and high stakes testing’ (2013a: 2) rather than the ‘practice of freedom’ (Freire, 1970/2000: 80). In response, the authors provide examples of alternative pedagogies based on a

INTRODUCTION

more hopeful and optimistic vision of education that draws on notions of inclusivity, engagement, social justice, connectedness, learning communities and culturally responsive pedagogies. In Section VIII: Communities and Activism, there is a fundamental recognition that the work of critical pedagogy occurs in multiple sites beyond formal institutions like schools, colleges and universities. Indeed, Freire’s (1970/2000) book Pedagogy of the Oppressed advanced the view that education can be a radical tool for social change if linked to the needs, desires and aspirations of local communities and their ‘funds of knowledge’ (Gonzalez et  al., 2004). In this context, the work of community activists like Saul Alinsky (1989) reinforces the pivotal role of community organization, Indigenous leadership and collective action in the fight for social justice. Each of the contributors to this section recognizes the necessity of building local knowledges, networks, capabilities and power through the development of critical awareness and activism, both locally and in association with wider social movements.

Volume 3 In Section IX: Communication and Media, the focus is on the proliferation of mass communication and media in shaping the identity, needs and desires of young lives, for better or worse (Rosa and Rosa, 2011). Doug Kellner and Jeff Share (2007) explain how experience and everyday life for young people in the 21st century is vastly different from that of our own childhood. They argue that today’s world is ‘media saturated, technologically dependent and globally connected’ in ways previously unimagined (Kellner and Share, 2007: 3). Therefore, it would be irresponsible not to equip students with media literacy skills and critical awareness of how ‘media construct meanings, influence and educate audiences, and impose

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their messages and values’ (2007: 4). Critical media literacy is a significant pedagogy not only in countering the pervasive influence of corporate/popular culture in producing consumer-citizens but in ‘deepening and extending the possibilities for critical agency, racial justice, and economic and political democracy’ (Giroux, 2000: 171). These critical literacy strategies are brought to life by the contributors, who draw on critical literacy theories to investigate a variety of media including film, comics, public exhibitions and Wikilearning and analyse the implications for critical citizenship and democracy. In Section X: Arts and Aesthetics, there is a turn to affect (emotions, feelings, relationships and love) to understand the revolutionary potential of artistic endeavor and aesthetics in creating a more participatory, connected, sensual, creative and humane world. There is an appreciation of what it means to be alive through creative practice. In an interview with Donaldo Macedo in 1985, Freire spoke about the things he likes to do. His response reveals a great deal about the profound importance of affect in people’s lives: “I love to eat; I love music; I love to read; I love sports; I love the sea, the beaches; I love to receive letters; I love children; I love simple things, common, everyday places; I love Elza; I love to write” (Freire, 1985: 197–8). In this short exchange, Freire manages to not only capture the essence of being human but also identify the dynamic relationship between the emotional and intellectual dimensions of knowledge production. In this section, our authors, activists, artists, educators, describe how they use arts-based processes to raise critical awareness and commitment to social justice (Beyerbach and Davis, 2011). They identify spaces and places where they can connect to young people’s lives, harness their creativity and imagination and change context. These artists/educators appreciate that there are multiple ways of knowing and interpreting reality (e.g., imaginative, creative, intuitive, empathetic, kinaesthetic and aesthetic) beyond the limitations of

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Western scientific rationality and objectivity (Kincheloe, 2008: 224–6). In Section XI: Critical Youth Studies, the contributing authors address two interrelated questions: first, how are young lives being constructed and consumed under global capitalism. Second, what kinds of counter-narratives are possible? There can be no doubt that young people today are the casualties of a period of unbridled free-market individualism and competitiveness, with devasting effects captured in the stark language of ‘collateral damage’ (Bauman, 2011), ‘cruelty’ (Giroux, 2013b) and ‘disposability’ (Giroux, 2009). In this ‘rapidly mutating and crisis-ridden world’ (Best and Kellner, 2003: 75), the authors provide a set of counter-narratives to illustrate the emancipatory potential of critical pedagogy. At the heart of this pedagogical work is a commitment to working with young people as co-researchers/ participants capable of producing knowledge relevant to their own lives and circumstances (Cammarota and Fine, 2008). These ‘warrior intellectuals’, as Kincheloe describes them, develop the ability to think critically and analytically and in the process ‘use their imagination to transcend the trap of traditional gender, racial, sexual, and class-based stereotypes and the harm they cause’ (2009: 388). In Section XII: Science, Ecology and Wellbeing, section editor Renee Desmarchelier sets the scene by calling out the challenges facing the planet, human societies, the natural environment and individuals. She goes on to argue that what is required is a fundamental shift away from dominant ways of knowing in the Western scientific tradition of positivist epistemologies and cultural imperialism and towards cultivating the different ways of knowing found in marginalized and subjugated knowledges of the oppressed. The authors in this section take up the challenge by providing a critique of the dominant approaches to science education. They use the lens of feminist readings as well as developing alternative approaches to an ecological pedagogy of joy, health and well-being.

IN READING THESE VOLUMES As editors and authors, we do not endeavor to name, define nor place critical pedagogy. Rather, we have attempted to collect the works, stories and research of those who engage within the tentative notion of criticalizing education both in and out of schools. We hope for a fluidity of thought within our work and honour Freire’s intent to create an ongoing dialogue which we continue to revise, augment, argue with, contemplate and celebrate. Critical pedagogy did not evolve to become orthodox; indeed, we embrace the unorthodox and hope to add to these pedagogies as they continue to evolve and develop.

REFERENCES Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. (1944/2000) The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. New York: The New Press. Alinsky, S. (1989) Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. New York: Vintage. Apple, M. W. (1982) Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education: Essays on Class Ideology and the State. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Apple, M., Au, W. and Gandin, A. (2009) (eds) The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education. New York and London: Routledge. Arendt, H. (1958/1998) The Human Condition (2nd edition). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Arendt, H. (1973) Men in Dark Times. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Ball, S. (2006) Symposium: Educational research and the necessity of theory. Introduction. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 27(1): 1–2. Bauman, Z (2011) Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Best, S. and Kellner, D (2003) Contemporary youth and the postmodern adventure. Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, 25: 75–93.

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Beyerbach, B. and Davis, R. (2011) Activist Art in Social Justice Pedagogy: Engaging Students in Glocal Issues through the Arts. New York: Peter Lang. Bourdieu, P. (1998) Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. (1976) Schooling in Capitalist America. New York: Basic Books. Britzman, D. (1991) Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach. Albany: State University of New York Press. Britzman, D. P. (1998) Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Britzman, D. P. (2003) Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach, Revised edition. New York: State University of New York Press. Burbules, N. and Berk, R. (1999) Critical thinking and critical pedagogy: Relations, differences, and limits, in Popkewitz and L. Fendler (eds), Critical Theories in Education: Changing Terrains of Knowledge and Politics. New York and London: Routledge. pp. 45–65. Cammarota, J. and Fine, M. (2008) Revolutionizing Education: Youth Participatory Action Research in Motion. New York and London: Routledge. Carnoy, M. and Levin, H. M. (1985) Schooling and Work in the Democratic State. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Darder, A., Baltodano, M. and Torres, R. (2003) (eds) The Critical Pedagogy Reader. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Dewey, J. (1916/1944) Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan. Duncan, J. and Morrell, E. (2008) The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities for Moving from Theory to Practice in Urban Schools. New York: Peter Lang. Emdin, C. (2017) For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood … and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Freire, P. (1970/2000) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (1974/2007) Freire: Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (1983) The importance of the act of reading. Trans. Loretta Slover. Journal of Education, 162(1): 5–11.

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Freire, P. (1985) The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Freire, P. (1998) Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Freire, P. (2000) Pedagogy of the Heart. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (2004) Pedagogy of Indignation. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Freire, P. (2007) Daring to Dream: Toward a Pedagogy of the Unfinished. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Freire, P. (2014) Pedagogy of Commitment. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Gillborn, D. (1995) Racism and Antiracism in Real Schools. Buckingham: Open University Press. Giroux, H. (1983) Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey. Giroux, H. (2000) Stealing Innocence: Corporate Culture’s War on Children. New York: Palgrave. Giroux, H. (2003) Critical theory and educational practice, in A. Darder, M. Baltodano and R. Torres (eds), The Critical Pedagogy Reader. London: RoutledgeFalmer. pp. 27–56. Giroux, H. (2009) Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability? New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Giroux, H. (2011) On Critical Pedagogy. New York: Continuum. Giroux, H. (2013a). When schools become dead zones of the imagination: A critical pedagogy manifesto. Truthout, 13 August, 2013. Retrieved 15 September 2014 from: www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/18133when-schools-become-dead-zones-of-theimagination-a-critical-pedagogy-manifesto Giroux, H. (2013b) Youth in Revolt: Reclaiming a Democratic Future. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press. Giroux, H. (2014) The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking beyond America’s Disimagination Machine. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. Gonzalez, N., Moll, L. and Amanti, C. (2004) Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities and Classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence-Erlbaum and Associates. Gore, J. (1993) The Struggle for Pedagogies: Critical and Feminist Discourses of Regimes of Truth. New York: Routledge.

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Gutiérrez, G. (1971/988) A Theology of Liberation. Trans. Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Gutiérrez, K., Asato, J., Santos, M. and Gotanda, N. (2002) Backlash pedagogy: Language and culture and the politics of reform. The Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies, 24(4): 335–51. Harris, K. (1979) Education and Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Harvey, D. (2007) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. hooks, b. (1981/2014) Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. London: Routledge. Horton, M. and Freire, P. (1990) We Make the Road by Walking. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Ibrahim, W. and Steinberg, S. (2014) (eds) Critical Youth Studies Reader. New York: Peter Lang. Kahn, R. (2010) Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy Movement. New York: Peter Lang. Kellner, D. and Share, J. (2007) Critical media literacy, democracy, and the reconstruction of education, in D. Macedo and S. Steinberg (eds), Media Literacy: A Reader. New York: Peter Lang. pp. 3–23. Kincheloe, J. L. (2008) Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy. An Introduction. Dordrecht: Springer. Kincheloe, J. L. (2009) No short cuts in urban education: Metropedagogy and diversity, in S. Steinberg (ed.), Diversity and Multiculturalism: A Reader. New York: Peter Lang. pp. 370–409. Kincheloe, J. L. and McLaren, P. (2005) Rethinking critical theory and qualitative research, in N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (eds), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd edition). London: Sage. pp. 303–42. Kozol, J. (1967) Death at an Early Age. New York: Plume. Kozol, J. (2005) The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. New York: Three Rivers Press. Kumashiro, K. (2004) Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning Toward Social Justice. New York and London: RoutledgeFalmer. Ladson-Billings, G. and Tate IV, W. F. (1995) Towards a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record, 97(1): 47–68.

Leistyna, P., Woodrum, A. and Sherblom, S. (1999) Breaking Free: The Transformative Power of Critical Pedagogy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review. Leonardo, Z. (2005) Critical Pedagogy and Race. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Macedo, D. (1993) Literacy for stupidification: The pedagogy of big lies. Harvard Educational Review, 63(2): 183–207. Macedo, D. and Steinberg, S. (2007) Media and Literacy: A Reader. New York: Peter Lang. Malott, C. and Porfilio, B. (2011) (eds) Critical Pedagogy in the Twenty-First Century. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. McLaren, P. (1997) Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the New Millennium. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. McLaren, P. and Farahmandpur, R. (2005) Teaching against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. McLaren, P. and Kincheloe, J. (2007) Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Know? New York: Peter Lang. McMurtry, J. (1999) The Cancer Stage of Capitalism. London: Pluto Press. Postman, N. and Weingartner, C. (1969) Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Rosa, J. and Rosa, R. (2011) Pedagogy in the Age of Media Control: Language Deception and Digital Democracy. New York: Peter Lang. Sasson, S. (2014) Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press. Shor, I. (1980) Critical Teaching and Everyday Life. New York: The University of Chicago Press. Simon, R. (1988). For a pedagogy of possibility. Critical Pedagogy Networker, 1(1): 1–4. Sleeter, C. and McLaren, P. (1995) Multicultural Education, Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Difference. New York: State University of New York Press. Smith, L. (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin: University of Otago Press. Smyth, J. (2011) Critical Pedagogy for Social Justice. New York: Continuum.

SECTION V

Indigenous Ways of Knowing Four Arrows and R. Michael Fisher

More than a decade ago The Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies recognized the alignments between critical inquiry, counter-hegemonic democracy and Indigenous ways of knowing. In looking at critical approaches to research as a way to counter growing Euro/Americentrism, neoliberalism and globalism, the book’s editors wrote about how emancipatory pedagogies move ‘directly into the spaces of indigenous peoples’ (Denzin et  al., 2008: 28). One of its chapters, ‘Indigenous Knowledges in Education: Complexities, Dangers and Profound Benefits’ (Kincheloe and Steinberg, 2008) is most relevant to this section of our book. Moving beyond research methodology per se, it foresaw the vital alignments that now manifest in the decolonizing and Indigenizing movements in education, while also being aware of its slippery slopes. Beyond any romantic ideation, there is the reality Indigenous knowledge too often becomes viewed by ‘agents of Empire’ as a threat and/or as a commodity.

They write about a critical ‘multilogical context’ for knowledge, in which Indigenous knowing is accessed sensitively and produced both to allow for Indigenous emancipation, while at the same time providing ‘compelling insights into all domains of human endeavor… and to provide acumen in dealing with the challenges of contemporary existence’ (Kincheloe and Steinberg, 2008: 135). Indigenous knowledge and knowing are essential steps towards the deeper core purpose of ethical and authentic epistemologies and pedagogies of understanding in a holisticintegral way (Meyer, 2008). In adjoining critical pedagogy, critical multilogicality and Indigenous worldview as contexts, Kincheloe and Steinberg advised that the purpose of Indigenous ways of knowing and contemporary Indigenous education and research overall do not get trapped in trying to ‘save’ Indigenous people but help ‘construct conditions that allow for indigenous self-­sufficiency while learning from the vast storehouse of

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indigenous knowledges’ (Kincheloe and Steinberg, 2008: 135), which are increasingly required as humanity faces impending and cascading crises on Mother Earth today. If we think of critical pedagogy as becoming critically conscious of schooling’s hegemonic goals, then we might consider Indigenous knowledges as ways to replace such goals with multi-dimensional morality on behalf of interconnectedness and reciprocity. The chapters in Section V about critical, moral, sustaining, dancing and resistive ways of knowing well embody and reflect for future generations the wisdom that guided humanity for 99% of human existence. However, they can no longer be considered as merely early warnings about such challenges ahead. Indigenous knowledges that have been ignored for far too long are now vitally needed for human survival. Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus at MIT and Laureate professor at the University of Arizona, and the leading social critic of our times, stated it bluntly in a backcover review of Teaching Truly: A Curriculum to Indigenize Mainstream Education (Four Arrows et  al., 2013): ‘[T]he grim prognosis for life on this planet is the consequence of a few centuries of forgetting what traditional societies knew and the surviving ones still recognize….This must be one of our highest values or we are all doomed’. Chomsky, a pioneering linguist, does not use the word ‘doomed’ lightly. Indeed, today many top scientists of the Anthropocene argue that even saying we are entering into a sixth mass extinction fails to capture the true extent of the problems we are facing today. For example, a 2017 study published by the National Academy of Sciences (Ceballos et al., 2017) wrote that ‘biological annihilation’ is a more appropriate term. The study reveals that a third of vertebrate animal species have seen their ranges seriously shrunk and populations diminished over the last century. Large regions in all continents have lost 50% or more of their populations of the studied mammals. In their ground-breaking study, Strona and Bradshaw (2018) described

how ‘co-extinction processes’ and ecological dependencies amplify the direct effects of environmental change on the collapse of planetary diversity by up to 10 times what has been previously predicted. Thus we offer this small section on Indigenous Ways of Knowing as part of our Handbook of Critical Pedagogies, with the reminder that our educational systems can no longer look at ‘decolonizing’ and ‘Indigenizing’ education nor at critical pedagogy and counter-­hegemonic democracy education without a serious and courageous commitment to re-adopting our planet’s Indigenous worldview. We can no longer allow legitimate concerns about misappropriating traditional ways or feel that nonIndian scholars have no right to promote them. If ever there was a reason to expand uncompromisingly the Lakota prayer Mitakuye Oyasin and its recognition that we are all related and interdependent, it is now. The ‘compelling insights into all domains of human endeavor’ that Kincheloe and Steinberg considered in 2008 are now imperative requirements for our collective survival. For all the critical pedagogues who have selected this important handbook for studying and implementing, we share this section with you to show some ways that our Indigenous wisdom is inseparable from the goals of critical pedagogy. This sense of urgency for all educators to adopt Indigenous worldview precepts without letting the challenges of the ‘dangers and complexities’ prevent so doing does not mean we recommend ignoring the rights of Indigenous Peoples. To the contrary, re-Indigenizing our systems is a both/and proposition. Indigenous rights, territories and sovereignty must be an equal commitment. Respect for those who still speak their original languages and have not lost traditional place-based knowledge demands we seek out, as priority, their counsel. However, the urgency and practicality is that all of us who are ‘Indigenous’ to this planet must move into place-based knowledges (Cajete, 1999) by starting with those common worldview precepts that the great variety of First Nations offer. For example, we refer to Indigenous alternatives

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to anthropocentrism; fear-based motivation; loss of generosity as a priority; deceitfulness; male-dominance; conflict resolution as other than return to community; complementarity, and many more that are addressed in books such as Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom: FirstNation Know-How for Global Flourishing (Narvaez et al., 2019) and Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-based Change (Mitchell and Dossey, 2018) and via resources such as the Global Center for Indigenous Leadership and Lifeways.

REFERENCES Cajete, G. (Ed.) (1999). A people’s ecology. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light. Ceballos, G., Ehrlich, P. R., & Dirzo, R. (July, 2017). Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114 (30) E6089–E6096; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/ pnas.1704949114 Denzin, N. K., Lincoln, Y. S. & Smith, L. T. (2008). The handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Four Arrows (aka Jacobs, D. T.) (with EnglandAytes, K., Cajete, G., Fisher, R. M., Mann, B. A., McGaa, E. & Sorensen, M.) (2013). Teaching truly: A curriculum to Indigenize mainstream education. New York: Peter Lang. Kincheloe, J. L., & Steinberg, S. R. (2008). Indigenous knowledges in education: Complexities, dangers and profound benefits. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln & L. Smith (Eds.), The handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies (pp. 135–48). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Meyer, M. A. (2008). Indigenous and authentic: Hawaiian epistemology and the triangulation of meaning. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln & L. T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies (pp. 217–32). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Mitchell, S., & Dossey, L. (2018). Sacred instructions: Indigenous wisdom for living Spirit-based change. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Narvaez, D., Four Arrows, Halton, E., Collier, B., & Enderle, G. (Eds.) (2019). Indigenous sustainable wisdom: First-nation know-how for global flourishing. New York: Peter Lang. Strona, G., & Bradshaw, C. (November, 2018). Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life during extreme environmental change. Scientific Reports 8 (16724). https://www. nature.com/articles/s41598-018-35068-1

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50 Indigenizing Conscientization and Critical Pedagogy: Integrating Nature, Spirit and Fearlessness as Foundational Concepts R. Michael Fisher and Four Arrows

INTRODUCTION Critical philosophy, theory and its concomitant liberation pedagogies are a wonderful means designed for good ends. Yet, when left unquestioned or unchanged they may carry dubious worldview assumptions and ideological inscriptions that do not fully serve worthy intentions, or may even undermine them. Like any emancipatory praxis, Critical pedagogy (CP) requires rigorous ongoing consideration of relationships that are not routinely intrinsic to the ‘dominant worldview’ (e.g., Four Arrows, 2016a) that birthed CP. Such relations invoke due diligent response-ability to all stakeholders, including humans, other-thanhumans, the eco-commons and the whole of the Natural world. This more holistic responsibility is inherent in the ‘Indigenous worldview’ (e.g., Four Arrows, 2016a). Four Arrows noted that ‘Christopher Columbus even while he was initiating his genocidal policies [wrote of the Indigenous people] “They are the best people in the world, and the sanest. They love

their neighbors as themselves”’ (Setién, 1999: 50; cited in Four Arrows and Miller, 2012: 9). Such neighborly embracing all relations for equitable consideration is characteristically devalued and sadly under-represented in modern technological societies, and too often by CP theory and practice. Critical theories of development and learning also require a transformation in the direction that truly values the spiritual dimension, which includes what Abram (1997: 7) refers to as ‘more-than-human worlds’ undergirding human knowing and existence on this planet. With current accelerated conditions tipping toward chaotic unsustainability of social and ecological life systems, the naming of the Anthropocene era by scientists (e.g., Davies, 2016), among other factors disturbing and violent that we witness each day, there needs to be conscious decolonizing initiatives to ensure equitable and ‘ethical space’ (Ermine, 2007) is created within CP discourses for engaging all cooperating and contesting voices and perspectives. This process includes those perspectives

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negated and relegated to the CP shadows of the hegemonic approaches to CP (e.g., Freireanbased), of which a number of critics of CP have previously described, as we reveal later. We believe, for example, Henry A. Giroux, a leading Freirean critical theorist-pedagogue, made a good recent attempt to upgrade CP by identifying five core ‘registers’ for today’s complex cultural politics and anti-oppression work (Jandric and Giroux, 2015). These also speak to our concerns as critical educators/activists. However, even these omit foundational aspects, among them the absent declaration of the crucial role of Nature, spirituality, Fearlessness, Indigenous Peoples and the more-than-human aspects that co-inhabit Mother Earth. To begin to remedy this absence, we offer a unique complementary set of five core Indigenous-based ‘precepts’, what Four Arrows (2016a: 2) calls CAT-FAWN perspective, in order to enhance CP theory and praxis, while enabling modern humans to better face the near future challenges of cascading calamity.

theory’ (Four Arrows and Miller, 2012: 6) and self-reflective ‘metacognitive device’ (Four Arrows, 2016b: 4) that describes a predator (CAT) and its potential prey (FAWN) operating with a dialectic bonding of a hyphenated form. This indicates a basic integration of opposites in complementarity – being a foundational principle of the ‘Indigenous worldview’ and its central valuation of balance and harmony as he has described (e.g., Four Arrows, 2016a). CAT refers to a heightened state of consciousness/awareness, which can be induced by varied stimuli and situations, for example, meditation, singing, dreaming and/or a shock. Fear (and/or trauma) is a large cause of CAT as well, and constitutes the ‘F’ factor/ force in FAWN. Because of his training as a hypnotherapist, animal trainer and athletic performance coach, Four Arrows, like the Indigenous Peoples of the ‘old ways’ in prepoint of departure times2, knows that when people are in CAT they are in a light-to-heavy trance. At this time, the human brain (including the brain of other-than-humans) is hardwired to attend with extra-sensory awareness OVERVIEW OF CAT-FAWN to the subtle and gestalt ‘co-conscious’ communications and realities (Jacobs, 1998: 139, CAT-FAWN consists of five primary ‘pre144) of one’s self/environment and does so cepts’ grounded in traditional understandings initially, virtually unconsciously. from Indigenous cultures operating from CAT has inherent positive potential to conwithin a general Indigenous worldview1: nect with and produce what Four Arrows calls (1) Trance-based learning and CAT = ‘primal awareness’ and/or intimate connecConcentration Activated Transformation, tivity to Nature’s teachings and wisdom. It (2) Fear (including courage and Fearlessness), catalyzes a healthy preparatory state of action, (3) External Authority (including self-­ for example, a fight–flight reaction among authority), (4) Words (including communicaother possibilities – all intended for qualtive expressions like language, art, music) and ity (non-Fear-based) ‘Defense Intelligence’ (5) Nature (through engagement with the via growth-based operations via the ‘spirit Natural world) (Four Arrows, 2016a: 2). of Fearlessness’ (see Fisher, 2010: 231, xvii, Some will intuitively recognize what CATrespectively). And bottom line, CAT catalyzes FAWN is and may use it, typically only in basic survival strategies, if needed. Instinct, part, without naming it, and often without intuition and primal awareness intertwining even knowing it. Thirty years in its developare core processes to CAT, as are hypnosis ment, according to its conceptual originator and/or ‘Trance-based Learning’ (TBL) (Four (Four Arrows aka Don Trent Jacobs), CATArrows, 2016a: chapter one). Through CAT, FAWN is a mnemonic metaphor, a new ‘thewe are heightened in potentia for transformaory of mind’ (Jacobs, 1998: 130), ‘visionary tive learning, growth, healing and survival.

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However, Four Arrows claims that the problem comes when we enter CAT (trance) without noticing or knowing what is causing it. Thus, if largely unconscious to CAT, we are highly susceptible to inputs from the environment that may condition us – that is, hypnotize us and implant ‘messages’ that are harmful to us. These trance-based messages, even when unconscious and subliminal, are deeply memorized and held in the nervous system, so goes the theory of hypnosis in a nutshell. A quick example of creating a negative CAT in the child is when a frustrated parent first scares a child, say by unexpectedly yelling at them with loud anger, and follows by telling the child they are stupid. It is unfortunately so common today. We also have the equivalent of this negative (Fear-based) CAT patterning of TBL happening in societies as a whole; for example, the media showing repetitive and traumatizing images of the 9/11 World Trade Center towers on fire and collapsing. Then media, and nation’s presidents and/or dictators, give ‘messages’ (i.e., propaganda) when people are in a shock state. They construct a cultural trance. Messages driven into our systems by these means, like most traumatic events, are very difficult to change and, worse yet, the ‘bad’ messages continue to negatively influence our general perception, affect, attitude, values, beliefs, thinking and behaviors for a lifetime in some cases. Oppression– repression dynamics, for the most part, are intimately linked with this negative (Fearbased) mostly unconscious CAT experience. The world requires a systematic restorative and transformative curriculum/pedagogy of conscious de-hypnotizing and concomitant decolonizing, which first involves better managing the TBL hypnotic messages implanted and, second, learning a ‘de-hypnotizing technology’ (e.g., CAT-FAW/N, according to Fisher, 2017a). ‘We can learn to avoid such misleading influences and use them to work for us’ (Jacobs, 1998: 148). This effort would offer a way to resist colonizing messages via re-circuiting the unwanted negative (Fear-based) TBL messages that lie. As

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well, self-empowered active agents/learners can put in place new positive (love-based) messages that speak truth when in states of CAT, and thus invigorating courage and even Fearlessness as their modus operandi. The aim is for one to learn how to bring about CAT and/or how to recognize it when it occurs spontaneously in daily life. ‘[I]t does appear that Indigenous people whose primal awareness of the CAT-FAWN concept has been sustained, generally do not expose their children to such ideas [like negative use of shock and fear as punishment]’ (Jacobs, 1998: 160). Appropriate advocacy and implementation of CAT (TBL) is not merely a technique or method but as an epistemologically ‘virtuous’3 way of critical reflection. It is held-up to the context of a ‘primal model’, as Four Arrows cautions those who are merely looking for techniques and do not look deeper and/or embrace the Indigenous worldview and its most expert practitioners, that is ‘primal people’: Using primal people to exemplify the importance of CAT awareness for significant learning is appropriate only if we agree that traditional Indigenous people were and are relatively successful in learning to live harmoniously. Some people do not agree with such assertions. (Jacobs, 1998: 148)

An eclectic life-long learner and practitioner, Four Arrows draws on several career tracks and diverse interdisciplinary knowledge, knowing and understanding to offer his findings. Although implicit CAT-FAWN dynamics are ancient, tried and true by Indigenous Peoples, the new elaborated synthesis by Four Arrows is the result of new scientific knowledge on the brain, emergency management training, psychological clinical knowledge, animal and athletic performance training, ethnographic research with Mexican Rarámuri shamans and other practices from spiritualbased Indigenous wisdom teachings combined. In this sense, CAT ought to be seen as sacred within the spiritual context of ancestors, including ‘all relations’ as teachers of how best to survive within the laws of Mother Earth. How different parenting, schooling and

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CP would be, for example, if they took shape under this respectful ancestral legacy within the Indigenous worldview. With limited space in this brief summary, we turn to the other half of the mnemonic – FAWN. Literally, F = Fear, A = Authority, W = Word(s) (and music) and N = Nature. This stands for what Indigenous Peoples of the ‘old ways’ always knew were ‘four influences on CAT’ (Four Arrows, 2016b: 7) that shape our lives, for good or ill, depending on our awareness and skillful management of them. Fear (with a capital)4 is taken as very primal (‘a major force’, wrote Jacobs, 1998: 157) in both inducing CAT and joining with CAT (e.g., CAT-Fear) as a powerful twosome able to bring about amazing courage as a virtue (for example) or just as easily to bring about panic and (Fear-based) ‘rationality’ (= irrationality) as a vice. Great character/­values are built on the former and shabby destructive values built on the latter. To reach our highest human potential(s) one has to learn to manage CAT-Fear well by ‘becoming ­connoisseurs of Fear’ (Jacobs, 1998: 156) – without doing so, this can undermine all the good potentials of the other four major forces/precepts. At the collective level, without a quality holistic-­ integral and critical Fear management/education, the result is a contaminating ‘culture of fear’ dynamic that Fisher (2007/2011), for example, has documented to be a serious concern of many critical educators today. Authority is also very powerful because it can use Words (for example) to hypnotize. Four Arrows concluded that Words are powerful. Word power, [is recognized] both [by] the Indigenous and the western approaches to language. [and] ultimately find[s] their source of power in CAT. Whether an illusion or an enhancement of reality, the potency of Words comes from their [cross-] influence on Concentration Activated Transformation [and, he cautions that coerced] persuasion or deception is most effective when used in the light of [excess] Fear and Authority. (Jacobs, 1998: 204–5)

Humans as a social species are particularly hard-wired through evolution to follow

authoritative (powerful) individuals, groups, organizations, nations and ideologies. Therefore, one has to be very aware when in a CAT state of consciousness of their relationships going on via CAT-Authority and CAT-Word, in order to ensure positive learning, growth and healing outcomes. Equally, CP has to be very aware of the pedagogue’s power-differential to learners and how CAT (TBL and hypnosis) may be un-carefully and unconsciously utilized to negatively promote CP agendas and hidden ideologies. The last of the five precepts or forces of this de-hypnotizing technology is most foundational to the entire CAT-FAW complex. Fisher (2017a) prefers to write the formula (theory) as CAT-FAW/N. Which is saying that the common denominator and most influential factor is N = Nature. It is the most encompassing macro-level benign aspect of the Natural forces that can rescue, resist and renew our being from the onslaught of Cultural oppression–­repression dynamics. And the legacy of the West’s over-­ dominating treatment of Nature has not been good, as the progressive theologian-psychologist Sam Keen once wrote: ‘One way to define modernity is to trace the process by which nature has been desacralized and God has moved indoors’ (cited in Jacobs, 1998: 224). Although the Indigenous worldview and CAT-FAWN’s ideal philosophy positions the Natural and Cultural domains as one continuum not separate, Four Arrows’ research indicates a strong trend historically that many Indigenous Peoples recognized the problematic relationship even before the point of departure. Cultural processes embedded within egocentric and/or ethnocentric consciousness (e.g., see Wilber, 1995) create potential dissociation of Culture from Nature. This easily leads to Fear-based misguided and unhealthy (even pathological) results. Four Arrows (2016b: 1) wrote: Indigenous-based virtues can better link human culture to nature rather than continuing an attitude of separation [where Cultural values and laws are privileged over Natural values and laws].

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Without more detailed reasons for articulating Nature as the common restorative denominator, many of us know how powerful it can be to connect with Nature when we are ‘offcenter’ or ‘hurting’ and/or ‘terrified’ by the human institutionalized oppressive world. Few modern non-Indigenous people go further to adopt Nature as ultimate ‘teacher’. The Natural world, in general, is our benign ‘Mother’ (Source) for earthlings. Today some eco-groups of modern people know this, as well as the Indigenous Peoples of this planet that have lived in relative harmony with Nature ‘for “99%” of human history’ (Narvaez, 2013; cited in Four Arrows, 2016b: 2), which is the basic premise supporting Four Arrows’ ‘point of departure theory’ (Four Arrows, 2016a: 5) and CAT-FAW/N praxis. In summary, humans, especially during the point of departure era, are easily unconsciously hypnotized. When FAW/N connection is utilized in ‘good’ (positive) ways for recovery, healing, growth and transformation, then we mature as integrated healthy, relatively liberated and sane humans. When FAW/N is made meaning of and utilized in ‘bad’ (negative) destructive ways for creating anxiety and oppressive control, order, manipulation tactics etc., then we shrink and remain immature and very dubious creatures with seemingly only self-centered interests and a relative floating and undependable moral compass. As authors/teachers we know modern humans can do better than fall ‘victim’ to hypnotic TBL, especially of ill-intent. We may get ‘caught’ now and then – but then catch ourselves and use the CAT-FAW/N mnemonic to recall what we need to do to unravel any potential destructive hypnosis going on, consciously or otherwise. It is not paranoid, we don’t think, to assume that most leaders of the dominant worldview already well know how to control and manipulate by creating CAT and using FAW/N negatively with it (e.g., propaganda). We invoke readers to co-participate in critically asking why they believe what they believe – as essential to the Indigenizing of CP, and envisioning a

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renewed perception of Paulo Freire’s conscientização (i.e., critical consciousness) as core to CP praxis. Four Arrows (2016b) concluded that, [i]n order to rebalance world systems, an effective solution starts with realizing why we believe what we believe.… Recognizing and implementing the ancient pre-departure beliefs will enable us to understand that we are truly connected, and allow us to realize peace, respect, and sustainability again for the benefit of all human and non-human beings. It would be a mind shift from mutually assured destruction to mutually assured survival. … Our worldview, not our technologies, can save us. (2016b: 4, 11–12)

CAT-FAW/N MITIGATES 12 GENERAL CRITIQUES OF FREIREAN-BASED CP Some of our specific concerns of the significant bias of Freirean-based CP and conscientization have, in part, been covered in critiques already published: for example, Bell and Russell (2000), Bowers and Apffel-Marglin (2005), hooks (1993), Ohliger (1995). For purposes of this article, we offer our own brief interpretations of some of these critiques of CP based on our hybrid renderings of Indigenizing and Fearlessnessizing. Overall, we identify 12 thematic interrelated critiques below, of which we briefly apply our critique via an Indigenous worldview and CAT-FAW/N. CP and Freirean-based conscientization has 1 an absence of an authentic and reliable broad ‘spiritual’ interconnectedness woven into its philosophy and psychology, which gives inadequate attention to the communications from and within the ‘invisible world’. In Indigenous thinking, the invisible world refers to power (i.e., knowledge, knowing, understanding5) accessed via dreams, ceremony, visions, intuition, spirit energies, nonexplainable feelings for decision-making based on reciprocity with the Natural world, etc. CATFAW/N offers opportunities for accessing all of these. Realizing that non-consensual reality via alternative consciousness opens doors to meditative or hypnotic beliefs can open doors not only

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to unconscious interpretations from past ‘visible’ experiences, but also from such other sources as are listed above. Additionally, reasons for Fear, acceptance of Authority figures, the power of Word vibrations and the teachings of the Natural world as represented by engaging FAW/N and its connection to CAT open doors for intentional access to a more spiritual-based partnership with critical thinking and teaching. 2 shown it believes and privileges critical rational reflections and literacy as more important than sharing traditional sacred wisdom across generations and traditions. Sacred Indigenous wisdom gives ultimate Authority to one’s own honest reflections on lived experience, including the ethical imperative for truthfulness when using Words. Sacred wisdom also reveals that quality holistic learning must take place via different brainwave frequencies and/or levels of consciousness/awareness, such as that achieved via disciplined and intentional use of ceremony. 3 an absence of a learning theory that recognizes and values Trance-based Learning (TBL) and CAT. CP relies almost exclusively on cognitive skills; although it fully recognizes the influence of hegemony and the consequences of uncritical acceptance of its message, it assumes that hegemony can be overcome by pedagogy based on critical thinking alone. CAT-FAW/N shows that both cognitive and hypnotic (or TBL) work are equally required in decolonizing not only our minds but the unconscious deeper dynamics of a colonizing worldview. 4 not critically investigated beliefs about ‘primal awareness’ and the holistic integration of the five ‘precepts’ (i.e., CAT-FAW/N) dynamic in liberation work. With a notable exception in Joe Kincheloe’s approach to CP (it is no coincidence that he deeply embraced Indigenous perspectives), there is virtually no systematic engagement with notions of primal awareness and/or TBL as a way to tap into ancient natural instincts/ wisdom for understanding and transforming oppression and injustice. Although Kincheloe (2008) wrote about ‘fourth dimension research’ that incorporated intuition and consciousness as a human construction guided by some epistemological assumptions of a Western worldview, he did not go as far as to make specific connections to TBL and its relationship to CAT-FAW/N technology in whole or in part per se. As referenced in the next critique, Bell and Russell rightly note the

problem of ignoring other-than-human aspects in CP; there is not a practical integration via unconscious learning, primal awareness, and an understanding of Fear, Authorship, Words or Nature that leads to a significant way to reduce humanism in CP. 5 been overly biased in the ‘dominant worldview’ and reflective thinking, infiltrated with and reproductive of insidious anthropocentricism. Bell and Russell (2000: 188) concluded that ‘critical pedagogy, even as inflected by certain postructuralisms, tends to reinforce rather than subvert deep-seated humanist assumptions about humans and nature by taking for granted the borders that define nature as the devalued Other’. Albeit a laudable effort to direct CP away from total dependency on the dominant worldview, there is no referencing to the ancient alternative non-anthropocentric worldview that guided us for 99% of human history. A more embracing complementarity with the Indigenous worldview is needed as relates to all five precepts of the CAT-FAW/N metacognitive/TBL tool. 6 overly supported Eurocentric humanistic-based Western Enlightenment individualism. Western and Indigenous cultures are often contrasted, with the former being considered individualistic and the latter being collectivistic. However, in actuality Indigenous cultures emphasize a strong individual autonomy and independence (self-authorship) far more than most dominant worldview cultures. The difference is that Western mainstream thinking prioritizes individualistic goals for the sake of the individual in a cultural hierarchal system, while Indigenous thinking emphasizes individualistic goals for the sake of the group in a non-hierarchal cultural system that cherishes independent thinking. CAT-FAW/N epitomizes such independent thinking by taking control of how hypnotic mandates, conscious and unconscious, from external Authority and concomitant Fear-based vulnerability, make people overly dependent on the will of others. The emphasis on the teachings and alignment with Nature, on the other hand, brings critical awareness (and a revised CP) to a place where all living beings are seen as equal and worth respecting as opposed to an exclusive emphasis on humans and their goals. 7 emphasized and inflated a ‘Solar’ (e.g., phallocentric) archetypal patterning over a ‘Lunar’ (e.g., matrixial feminine6) patterning. ‘Twin-hero’ archetypal and mythic stories in dominant cultures

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historically over-emphasize the value and power of the Solar dynamic and suppress the Lunar. The solar twin sometimes even murders the lunar, as in Cain and Abel or Romulus and Remus. Hercules is famous for his physical strength but his maternal half-twin Iphicles, who was known for the strength of his soul, is virtually unheard of in history books and today. In Indigenous cultures, twin-hero stories also abound but in them the twins work according to strong complementary partnerships, as with the Navajo story of Monster Slayer and Child Born of the Water. Such complementarity rarely emerges within CP, which tends to look at relationships involved with injustice and oppression through an ‘us versus them’ binary lens. For example, using CAT-FAW/N, whereby one asks: What Authority and practices have diminished my ‘balance’ of self-Authorizing and other-Authorizing, my balance of ego and soul, of masculine and feminine – and, what is required to restore ultimately a radical trust in the universe? The process is one of moving toward a complementary of relationships, even those that seem polarized, such as victims and oppressors. 8 assumed and supported modernism and the acceptance of a colonial-influenced conceptual imaginary of political hierarchies across evolutionary, historical and developmental strands of ontological existence. CP tends to critically conceptualize social systems as hierarchical educational hegemony, which tries to rationalize the power inequities it causes until oppressed individuals learn to recognize their false understandings or consciousness. CP thus sees problems of injustice shaped exclusively by power-politics and hegemony. The Indigenous worldview rather focuses on the powerful interactive influences (individually and collectively) of Fear, Authority, Words and Nature in regard to an ontological and epistemological basis for learning and resistance that largely relates to the problem of unawareness of TBL dynamics (CAT) in the transformation and liberation process. 9 assumed Indigenous (primal, original) cultures, as a perceived ‘marginalized’ and ‘victimized’ category/group (‘the Other’), are too distraught, unaware, disempowered (oppressed) to liberate themselves (e.g., Freire and Macedo, 1987: 55). Certainly a number of CP theorists have challenged this, notably Kincheloe and Steinberg (2008) and Grande (2015). However, in spite

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of calling for recognition of place-based understandings and honoring the power of Indigenous identity as a force to be respected, ways for accommodating both Indigenous and non-Native Peoples to actually use Indigenous worldview for such liberating transformations such as via CAT-FAW/N do not effectively emerge from such prior challenges. 10 privileged the non-Indigenous teacher-intellectual (pedagogue) over the learner in finding liberation. CAT-FAW/N distinctly challenges this general CP approach with its focus on critical reflection and pedagogical and intellectual dependence on external Authority figures (e.g., CP ‘teachers’ and ‘theorists’) for the ‘best’ way to liberation. Self-autonomy for the community, with elder ‘teachers’ of many kinds, including the invisible ancestors and Nature, are primary guides of the ‘best’ way to liberation. 11 over-emphasized the humanistic and/or Christian religious virtues of human ‘love’ and its concomitant conceptualization(s) of ‘hope’. Writing on the negative influence of colonial Christianity and the stifling of Indigenous political will, Four Arrows (2014: 4) wrote: ‘Unremitting evangelism and Christian hegemony has led to silencing or compromising authentic grassroots voices of too many Indigenous people’. Equally, ‘Probably one of the most prominent commissions in the critical pedagogical approach to education at this juncture of its formation is the lack of attention to ecological [and Indigenous] issues’, as O’Sullivan (2009: 411) concluded. Citing authors including Robert Warrior and Waziyatawin, Four Arrows (2014) made the point that the codified sanctions of species-hierarchies that place humans (and their love and hope) above non-humans in the world continue to block any legitimate liberation of Indigenous Peoples. Although CAT-FAW/N does not specifically refer to this, making the connection between Nature and use of ‘fearless’ learning from the greater-than-human other ‘teachers’ automatically mitigates the anthropocentric problems inherent in a too easy acceptance by CP with its underlying Christian affiliations and concomitant biased conceptualizations of love and hope.7 Liberation via an Indigenous way requires a deconstruction and reconstruction of such concepts, with a more nuanced and critical understanding of Fear and Fearlessness (see point 12) via CAT-FAW/N.

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12 left a paucity of specificity and nuance regarding the complex, dialectical, critical and postmodern (i.e., integral-holistic) conceptualization of Fear (‘Fear’) and Fearlessness in liberation work. With a 21st-century reconceptualist curriculum called for, within the insidious context of a rapidly burgeoning ‘culture of fear’, Fisher (2006) proposed a new field of ‘Fear’ Studies as a way to a radical ethical revision of modernist notions of ‘emotion’ generally, while offering attention to the powerful role of fear (‘fear’) specifically, in the 21st century. Despite Freire’s insistence on ‘the overriding necessity of [radical] love. … his account of emotion – and its relationship to reason [and culture] – remains underdeveloped’ (Roberts, 2010: 18–19). Fisher (2017b) posited Fearlessness as the needed trialectic aspect between CP’s binary dialectic discourses on Love and Fear. CAT-FAW/N is a potent complex and nuanced theory of Fear unlike any other available and literally and metaphorically constitutes a 21st-century ‘”fear” vaccine’ (Fisher, 2016). Fearlessnessizing CP, like Indigenizing CP, ought to involve the Indigenousbased conception of understanding, at least, that Fear is best understood as a dynamic part of a FAW/N dynamic related to CAT and TBL. Its liberation aim is: (a) a behavioral turning of Fear into a virtue, (b) taking a soul-path of becoming a ‘connoisseur of Fear’, whereby All beings, visible and invisible, dead or alive (and Nature itself), serve as our best Fear management/transformation ‘teachers’ (Jacobs, 1998: chapter eight) and (c) developing a concomitant Indigenous conception of Fear, courage and Fearlessness (Four Arrows, 2016a: chapter two). The ‘spirit of fearlessness’ (Fisher, 2010: 109), which Freirean conscientization omits (theoretically), invokes a radical trust in the universe that is the highest path on behalf of peaceful relations with All.

CONCLUSION This chapter is based on an Indigenous perspective and an underpinning sense of urgency to recalibrate Western assumptions behind CP in general. We offer 12 themes of critique with indicators of how to proceed with five ‘precepts’ (Four Arrows’ CAT-FAW/N theory/ praxis) for Indigenizing and Fearlessnessizing

CP. In doing so we realize we have targeted Freire’s foundations for CP to a large degree, in spite of a number of subsequent enhancements. Yet we believe the 12 themes incorporate a selection of issues that are problematic to CP effectiveness because they share the dominant worldview that is challenged by Indigenous worldview. Some see the diversity of Western perspectives as positive. Roberts (2010: 1), for example, suggested: ‘Freire’s work provides fertile territory for [critical] reflection and investigation from a variety of perspectives and disciplines’. Referring to a field of study allowing for ‘a variety of’ perspectives, however, does not in itself take us to any deeper decolonizing assessment of CP and its role in transformation and liberation in the cascading crises of the 21st century. Such Western modern and postmodernist expressions of ‘inclusion’ via pluralism are thus inadequate for addressing the deeper ethical problem of misguided ‘worldviews’. Pierotti (2010: 205) wrote: The future of Indigenous Peoples lies not in the greed – and fear-based concepts of the Renaissance and the ‘Enlightenment’ of Western European tradition, which are likely to lead the human species to destruction. … There is much work to be done wresting Indigenous studies programs from the underlying philosophy and worldview to which the American university typically conforms. We propose this wresting is equally or even more important as relates to all people and to all levels and kinds of education.

CP and Freirean conscientization must face the difficult reality that only one (original) worldview (the Indigenous) is a healing paradigm; all others are coping paradigms – the latter too often end up reproducing the same problems as those CP sets out to resolve. As a way to begin embracing a pragmatic shift in CP and education, we propose the metacognitive device CAT-FAW/N, which can bring an authentic place-based orientation as a way that rebalances life systems. An Indigenous (e.g., Jacobsian) conscientization complements and rebalances Freirean conscientization and CP.

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Notes  1  With acknowledgement that it is problematic to use any generic label for diverse multiplicities among Indigenous Peoples – for example, potentially stereotyping and reproducing a destructive monocultural/colonialist perception for readers of any group of peoples, their cultures, and identities – Four Arrows, as an Indigenous scholar, has carefully gathered research from many Indigenous people and scholars in order to create some universal ‘truths’ about what can be called a generic (pre-point of departure) ‘Indigenous worldview’. See Four Arrows (2016a: 3–7) for a summary of characteristics of ‘Indigenous worldview’ (contra ‘dominant worldview’), and rationale and clarifying citations from other scholars regarding the nature of ‘worldview’ as a unique category for critical analysis. 2  According to Four Arrows (2016a), this is likely around 9–10,000 years ago; see ‘point of departure theory’ (2016a: 5–8). 3  For example, ‘epistemic virtues’ for quality inquiry include (among others) open-mindedness, and tolerance of difference, conflicting views, and the unknown, strange and fearful (see Kidd, 2014). 4  ‘I use Fear in the broadest [and deepest] sense to include any feeling of risk to perceived well-being. The context in which I use this word as a major force influencing learning is not limited to its emotional context’ (Jacobs, 1998: 157). Fisher has added significantly to developing a more complex and nuanced set of postmodern (and integral) contexts in which ‘Fear’ is utilized to complement Fear used by Four Arrows. This is elaborated in Fisher (2018) but one can also consult Fisher (2010) for a complex construction of the Fear Problem and why the need to go beyond merely a Western individual psychological and/or emotional context for ‘fear’ (with small letter). Because of the dialectical nature of the pair of concepts, and Four Arrows also having used capital on Fearlessness, Fisher maintains the capitalized critical version as complex, holistic-integral and unique (e.g., Fisher, 2010) – any other use without capital is the common usage by most people.  5  See the Hawaiian Indigenous epistemology of distinction we adopt in this chapter, based on the distinction of these three aspects (Meyer, 2010).   6  The relationship of phallocentric (Solar) and matrixial (Lunar) is theorized in particular from a relationship complementary standpoint by the artist-psychoanalyst Ettinger (2005). Four Arrows first began to discuss this solar–lunar dynamic in ancient cultures in Jacobs (1998: 21–2) based on the work of his colleague Dr Howard Teich, a psychologist and mythologist.

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 7  Fisher (2010) has suggested the conception of ‘fearlessness’ is a mature and emancipatory replacement of Western notions of ‘hope’ for managing fear (2010: xxix, 40, 178, 240).

REFERENCES Abram, D. (1997). The spell of the sensuous. New York: First Vintage Books Edition. Bell, A. C., & Russell, C. L. (2000). Beyond human, beyond words: Anthropocentricism, critical pedagogy and the ‘poststructural turn’. Canadian Journal of Education, 25(3), 188–203. Bowers, C. A., & Apffel-Marglin, F. (Eds.) (2005). Rethinking Freire: Globalization and the environmental crisis. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Davies, J. (2016). The birth of the Anthropocene. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ermine, W. (2007). The ethical space of engagement. Indigenous Law Journal, 6(1), 193–203. Ettinger, B. L. (2005). The matrixial borderspace. (Ed. B. Massumi). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Fisher, R. M. (2006, Winter). Invoking ‘Fear’ Studies. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 22 (4), 39-71. Fisher, R. M. (2007/2011). ‘Culture of fear’ and education: An annotated bibliography [2nd ed.]. Technical Paper No. 28. Carbondale, IL: In Search of Fearlessness Research Institute. Fisher, R. M. (2010). The world’s fearlessness teachings: A critical integral approach to fear management/education for the 21st century. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Fisher, R. M. (July 2, 2016). New 7th ‘fear’ vaccine added. Retrieved May 2, 2018 from https://fearlessnessmovement.ning.com/blog/ new-7th-fear-vaccine-added Fisher, R. M. (June 10, 2017a). Four Arrows’ de-hypnotizing technology of CAT-FAWN. Retrieved November 1, 2017 from https:// fearlessnessmovement.ning.com/blog/ de-hypnotizing-technology-of-cat-fawn-byfour-arrows Fisher, R. M. (2017b). Radical love, is it radical enough? International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 8(1), 262–81.

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Fisher, R. M. (2018). Fearless engagement of Four Arrows: The true story of an Indigenous-based social transformer. New York: Peter Lang. Four Arrows. (2014). ‘False doctrine’ and the stifling of indigenous political will. Critical Education, 5(13), 1–12. Four Arrows. (2016a). Point of departure: Returning to a more authentic worldview for education and survival. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Four Arrows. (2016b). The CAT-FAWN connection: Using metacognition and Indigenous worldview for more effective character education and human survival. Journal of Moral Education, 45 (3), 1–14. Four Arrows, & Miller, J. (2012). To name the world: A dialogue about holistic and Indigenous education. Encounter: Education for Meaning and Social Justice, 25(3), 1–11. Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word and the world. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey. Grande, S. (2015). Red pedagogy: Native American social and political thought. Retrieved April 2, 2018 from http:// academictrap.files.wordpress.com/20/15/03/ s a n d y - g r a n d e - re d - p e d a g o g y - n a t i v e american-social -and-political-thought.pdf hooks, b. (1993). Speaking about Paulo Freire: The man, his work. In P. McLaren & P. Leonard (Eds.), Paulo Freire: A critical encounter (pp. 146–54). New York: Routledge. Jacobs, D. T. (1998). Primal awareness: A true story of survival, transformation, and awakening with the Rarámuri shamans of Mexico. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. Jandric, P., & Giroux, H. A. (2015). Pedagogy of the precariat. Retrieved May 1, 2018 from http://publicintellectualsproject.mcmaster.ca/ education/pedagogy-of-the-precariat/ Kidd, I. J. (2014). Was Sir William Crookes epistemically virtuous? Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 48, 67–74.

Kincheloe, J. L. (2008). Knowledge and critical pedagogy: An introduction. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Springer. Kincheloe, J. L., & Steinberg, S. (2008). Indigenous knowledges in education: Complexities, dangers, and profound benefits. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln & L. T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and Indigenous methodologies (pp. 135–56). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Meyer, M. A. (2010). An introduction to Indigenous epistemology. Retrieved May 8, 2018 from https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=lmJJi1iBdzc Narvaez, D. (2013). The 99 percent – development and socialization within an evolutionary context: Growing up to become ‘A good and useful human being’. In D. Fry (Ed.), War, peace and human nature: The convergence of evolutionary and cultural views (pp. 341–57). New York: Oxford University Press. Ohliger, J. (1995). Taking Freire and Illich seriously, or icons and pariahs. Retrieved May 14, 2018 from http://www.bmartin.cc/ dissent/documents/Facundo/Ohliger2.html O’Sullivan, E. (2009). Education and the dilemmas of modernism: Towards an ecozoic vision. In H. S. Shapiro & D. E. Purpel (Eds.), Critical social issues in American education: Democracy and meaning in a globalizing world [3rd ed.]. New York: Routledge. [original published in 1993] Pierotti, R. (2010). Indigenous knowledge, ecology, and evolutionary biology. New York: Routledge. Roberts, P. (2010). Paulo Freire in the 21st century: Education, dialogue, and transformation. New York: Routledge. Setién, P. A. (1999). Realidad indigena Venezolana. Caracas: Centro Gumilla. Wilber, K. (1995). Sex, ecology and spirituality: The spirit of evolution (Vol. 1). Boston, MA: Shambhala.

51 A Critical, Culturally Sustaining, Pedagogy of Wh¯anau Ann Milne

INTRODUCTION As the former principal of Kia Aroha College, the author has a deep understanding of the school’s journey to develop a critical, ‘culturally sustaining’ (Paris and Alim, 2017) curriculum and learning environment for its M¯aori and Pasifika students, an approach the school calls a Critical, Culturally Sustaining, Pedagogy of Wh a¯ nau. This chapter will describe two examples of the critical research of students, who investigated government initiatives or policies that impact their education. The findings of their research have been presented to national academic audiences by these ‘Warrior-Researchers’. In the national election in 2017 in New Zealand the government changed. The previous government had implemented sweeping neoliberal education reforms that privileged standardisation, data-driven accountability, competition, and compliance that aligned with the experience of other countries engaged

in the Global Education Reform Movement (Sahlberg, 2011). The incoming coalition government promised an end to the neoliberal agenda, the scrapping of the contentious ‘national standards’, and a focus on a broad curriculum, qualitative and formative assessment for learning and individualised learning. At the time of writing, we have yet to see how this will play out, or how much time it will take to phase in this change in direction. The student research described in this chapter was carried out in 2015 and 2017 and focused on initiatives and policies under the neoliberal regime. In 2016, M¯aori children made up 24% of the total school population in New Zealand. Although 10% of M¯aori children participate in bilingual, M¯aori-medium education, just 3.8% of these learn in Kura Kaupapa M¯aori (M¯aori-language immersion schools where the philosophy and practice reflect M¯aori cultural values) (Ministry of Education, 2016). The majority of M¯aori learners therefore are

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in Whitestream (Milne, 2013, 2016) public New Zealand schools which have systemically failed to understand or meet their learning needs and where, therefore, M¯aori learners feature at the bottom of every indicator in the country’s educational outcomes and their M¯aori identity continues to be compromised and assimilated.

students as ‘Warrior-Scholars’ – which the school defines as young people, secure in their own identity, competent and confident in all aspects of their cultural world, critical agents for justice, equity, and social change, with all the academic qualifications and cultural knowledge they need to go out and change the world.

KIA AROHA COLLEGE

¯ ¯ THE M AORI CONCEPT OF WH ANAU

New Zealand’s education system experienced a major upheaval in 1989 with the advent of Tomorrow’s Schools (Department of Education, 1988), a reform that devolved the responsibility for school governance to individual school communities through ­community-elected Boards of Trustees. As a result of this reform each New Zealand school has the autonomy to develop its own charter within the boundaries of a mandated broad national curriculum, and each community has the power to shape a school in the way they want for their children. However, very few schools break away from the colonial model. The process is deliberately convoluted, requiring consensus and determination from a school’s community to dismantle the barriers the bureaucratic system puts in the way. Kia Aroha College did push these boundaries and restrictions to become what is described in the legislation as a ‘designatedcharacter’ Years 7 to 13 (Grades 6–12) secondary school (high school) located in the community of Otara, in South Auckland, New Zealand. The aims of the special character of the school include honouring the Treaty of Waitangi1, and providing a learning environment where M¯aori and Pasifika (Pacific nations) cultural identities, custom, languages and knowledges, and the philosophy and practice of wh¯anau, are the norm. Critical, culturally sustaining pedagogy is at the heart of the school’s approach. The mission of Kia Aroha College is to develop

To translate the meaning of the Indigenous M¯aori word wh¯anau as simply ‘family’, or ‘extended family’, is to diminish the complexity and richness of the concept. As is the case for all families, in all cultures, there are many more layers and variables. In fact, a report made to New Zealand’s Ministry of Education that attempted to analyse the ­characteristics of wh¯anau in Aotearoa New Zealand found that ‘the influence of continuing social change and the general flexibility of the family structure makes an acknowledged global meaning for family a difficult if not impossible task’ (Cunningham et al., 2005: 13). Eminent M a¯ ori psychologist Sir Mason Durie (2003: 15) distinguishes three types of wh a¯ nau in contemporary M a¯ ori society: whakapapa wh a¯ nau to describe those who descend from a common ancestor, statistical wh a¯ nau referring to the practice of using the terms wh a¯ nau, household, and family interchangeably in data collection, and kaupapa wh a¯ nau to describe individuals ‘who may not be descended from the same ancestor but share a common mission and behave towards each other as if they were wh a¯ nau’. Clearly then, a school and its wider community constitute a kaupapa wh¯anau. In many schools in New Zealand the word wh¯anau is widely used. Modern learning environments often include ‘wh¯anau spaces’ to denote places where people might gather or work. The ‘wh¯anau class’ is often used as

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a descriptor for the M¯aori dual-medium bilingual class within a Whitestream school environment. However, in spite of the regular use of the word, most often school practice that is based in White supremacy and Eurocentric notions of learning and knowledge, where the adults change at the end of each year, or even during each day, is the antithesis of an authentic wh¯anau. The concept of wh¯anau, with its associated concepts of cultural principles, values, and obligations, is central to M¯aori conscientisation, resistance, and transformation, and is fundamental in the small number of Kura Kaupapa M¯aori, but seldom found in the regular Whitestream school system, where over 95% of M¯aori children learn. Smith (1995) aligns the concept of wh¯anau with knowledge, pedagogy, discipline, and curriculum in the school setting. Central to the concept is the understanding that core M¯aori values that are taken as given, and the M¯aori worldview, is reflected, normalised, and reproduced within the school. This understanding guided decisions about all aspects of Kia Aroha College’s programme and practice.

Wh¯anau at School Kia Aroha College is organised and structured to reflect what the school believes about wh¯anau, and wh¯anaungatanga (authentic relationships), in a school setting. In all parts of the school, several age levels work together throughout the day, in the same classes, and stay with the same small group of teachers for at least four years. The M¯aori concept of tuakana–teina is a key learning process – this means that older students are expected to be responsible for younger ones, more able students are expected to support less able, and learning is cooperative and collaborative, sometimes independent, but rarely individual. Teachers work across several classes of students in a flexible team-teaching organisation. Students work in small groups on tasks that are usually inquiry-based, and

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which give them a wide range of choices and options. Timetabling is also flexible and teachers typically allow time to work intensively on the current study. There is minimal whole-class, teacher-directed instruction.

Kia Aroha – Through Aroha Teachers in research by Duncan-Andrade (2007: 629) describe their decision to be a consistent presence in the school community and in the lives of the students and their families – to be in solidarity with their students, as opposed to empathy. That shift in perspective is fundamental in the concept of wh¯anaungatanga. It marks the shift from seeing students as victims, to an emphasis on empowerment and authentic caring – aroha in M¯aori terms, alofa in Samoan, ‘ofa in Tongan, aloha in Hawaiian, and aroa in most Cook Islands M¯aori dialects. It is important not to see these concepts as a ‘soft’ option. With every privilege inherent in wh¯anaungatanga comes corresponding responsibilities, expectations, and accountabilities. This understanding is implicit in the choice of the name Kia Aroha for the school. Loosely translated by the school community as ‘through aroha’, a literal translation of the word ‘kia’ is ‘be, or let be, indicating it is desirable for something to occur’ (Moorfield, 2011), as in kia kaha (be strong) and kia ora (be well). In this sense the school name makes clear that aroha is the expectation as the foundation for critical, authentic practice that sustains students’ cultural identities.

Sustaining Culture Placing culture at the centre of curriculum design at Kia Aroha College meant changing to a curriculum that is integrated, not just across subject disciplines, but with students’ lives, and realities (Beane, 1997). This integrated curriculum approach, already built around issues of social concern which are

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specifically relevant to students’ families, communities, and cultures, later widened to incorporate youth participatory action research (Akom, Cammarota, and Ginwright, 2008; Duncan-Andrade and Morrell, 2008; Romero et al., 2010), and learning through a critical, social justice framework. Two youth participatory action research projects undertaken by a group of Kia Aroha College Warrior-Researchers in 2015 and 2017 are described in this chapter. Both investigate a government education initiative or policy that impacts on them as M¯aori or Pasifika learners in regular New Zealand schools. In each project the government initiative is described first, then the students’ research is presented, much of this provided as quotes from their actual work.

WARRIOR-RESEARCHERS 2015 In 2015, the school received an invitation from the national M a¯ ori Principals’ Association, asking for a group of students to speak at their national conference in Auckland. Their short presentation was a resounding success and resulted in an invitation to submit a proposal to present their research as a 90-minute symposium at the New Zealand Association for Research in Education national conference which was to be held later in the year. The group worked together to submit the proposal, which was later accepted. The six students in the group ranged from Year 10 (Grade 9) to Year 13 (Grade 12).

The Government Strategy: ‘As M¯aori’ Durie (2003: 199) asserts that education should enable M¯aori to ‘live as M¯aori’. This goal subsequently became the vision for the New Zealand Ministry of Education’s

strategy for M¯aori education, Ka Hikitia: Accelerating Success 2013–2017 (Ministry of Education, 2013a). However, in the vision of Ka Hikitia: ‘M¯aori children enjoying and achieving education success, as M¯aori’, the two key words ‘as M¯aori’ are the words most ignored by Whitestream schools who have no understanding of what ‘as M¯aori’ might be. Inevitably, ‘as M a¯ ori’ becomes another ‘White space’ (Milne, 2016), in that it is reinvented, and seen as no different from, ‘as everyone else’, and more specifically as the dominant, White majority. The default position is to ignore the words ‘as M¯aori’, and work towards the completely different goal of ‘M¯aori children enjoying and achieving education success’ – with no attempt to explore notions of ‘success’ from a M¯aori worldview. ‘Success’ and ‘achievement’ then become interpreted as the academic outcomes of M¯aori learners. Durie (2003) is specific about the words. ‘As M¯aori’, he states, means to have access to te ao M¯aori (the M¯aori world) – access to language, culture, marae (traditional gathering places), tikanga (customs), and resources (2003: 199). He argues: If after twelve or so years of formal education Maori ¯ youth were totally unprepared to interact within te ao Maori, ¯ then, no matter what else had been learned, education would have been incomplete. … Being Maori ¯ is a Maori ¯ reality. Education should be as much about that reality as it is about literacy and numeracy. In short, being able to live as Maori ¯ imposes some responsibilities upon the education system to contribute towards the realisation of that goal. (Durie, 2003: 199, 200)

In a similar vein, the vision of the New Zealand Ministry of Education’s strategy for Pasifika education, The Pasifika Education Plan 2013–2017 (Ministry of Education, 2013b), is ‘Five out of five Pasifika learners participating, engaging and achieving in education, secure in their identities, languages and cultures and contributing fully to Aotearoa New Zealand’s social, cultural and economic wellbeing’.

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The 2015 Research Project Speaking out ‘as’ Us: M¯aori and Tongan Secondary Students Investigate Our Education System’s Vision for M¯aori and Pasifika Learners The goal of the research project was to clarify the meaning of these words, ‘as M¯aori’ or as Tongan, as Samoan, from the perspective of M¯aori and Pasifika students, families, and community. The student researchers decided on three research questions: 1 What does success or achievement ‘as M¯aori’ – or as Tongan, as Samoan, actually mean? 2 Are M¯aori and Pasifika youth really experiencing that type of success in our schools? 3 If we are, what does that look like – to us?

They conducted two surveys with students, ex-students, and staff of Kia Aroha College as well as parents, grandparents, and staff and students from other schools. The group also asked M¯aori educators and researchers what those two words ‘as M¯aori’ meant to them. They read the online reports of the 82 schools in the city of Auckland that were reviewed by the government audit agency, the Education Review Office (ERO), between February and August 2015 and analysed their responses to the ERO question: ‘How effectively does the school promote educational success for M¯aori, as M¯aori?’ The following excerpts from their findings demonstrate the depth of their research and thinking. Throughout, the students refer to their adult sources of information using M¯aori terms of respect: ‘Whaea’ (mother/aunt) and ‘Matua’ (father/uncle). Matthew looked at the difference between ‘as M¯aori’ and ‘of M¯aori’: In a 2006 paper to Treasury about M¯aori wellbeing, Sir Mason Durie makes it very clear that participation of someone who is M¯aori is different from participation as someone who is M¯aori. We think that the Government’s vision has very little to do with ‘as M¯aori’ and is mainly about the results OF us as learners who just happen to be M¯aori.

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Whaea Leonie Pihama told us that firstly ‘as M¯aori’ means that within Aotearoa there are two different societies, P¯akeh¯a society and Te Ao M¯aori. They co-exist on M¯aori land. However, they do not coexist equally. The focus for everyone is to participate in P¯akeh¯a society, with little validation of Te Ao M¯aori [the M¯aori world]. She says that what Sir Mason Durie has always advocated is that living ‘as M¯aori’ means we can ‘be M¯aori’ in any place and space in Aotearoa. As a Year 11 M¯aori learner I strongly believe those places and spaces have to include our schools. Our research shows us that is not the case. (Matthew, in Pirini-Edwards et al., 2015)

Ebony’s story, from her personal experience, described a scenario all too familiar, of low expectations, deficit, and racist attitudes towards M¯aori students: The paradox that disrupts the Ka Hikitia strategy is that we have created an education system covertly designed to fail M¯aori and marginalize indigenous knowledge. Actually, as I read more about our education history I’ve decided I need to change that word to ‘overtly’ because I don’t think it has been hidden at all. The system’s failure for us as M¯aori learners is blatantly in our faces, over generations. M¯aori achievement outcomes and our participation in education are consistently, systemically, and historically below that of non-M¯aori. There is a fundamental fault in our education system that allows this situation to continue in our mainstream schools. Let’s face it, if these results were for generations of P¯akeh¯a learners, people would lose their jobs and there would be marching in the streets! I came to Kia Aroha College at the beginning of this year – moving away from my home and my wh¯anau. Last year I was in Year 12 in a secondary school in the north, where I had completed 103 NCEA2 Level 1 credits and almost no Level 2 credits. This was due to the low expectations, and assumptions I believe teachers made about my capabilities based on my ethnicity and what they thought they knew about other members of my extended wh¯anau. Did I imagine this? Might I have been wrong? No! A teacher once told me to go home to get a pen, in spite of the fact half of the class had no pens. He added that I should call in to WINZ3 on my way home to tell them how much of a loser I was. That’s a direct quote! I was told at the end of last year that I could not be in Year 13 this year, ‘because I wouldn’t be able to handle it,’ and that I would need to repeat Year 12. At Kia Aroha College, 10 months later, I am four credits away from completing the NCEA

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Level 3 I was told I ‘couldn’t handle,’ and I will complete University Entrance requirements by the end of the year. I am here, speaking to you at a national research conference, and my applications to enrol in conjoint Bachelors’ degrees in Laws and Arts have been accepted by both Victoria University and the University of Waikato. Not too bad for the ‘loser’ my previous teacher saw! What is the difference? I am able to be M¯aori at Kia Aroha College, and my teachers have high expectations of me in everything I do. There has never been any expectation that I would fail! (Ebony, in Pirini-Edwards et al., 2015)

Gayleen concluded, from her analysis of school ERO reports, that the Education Review Office’s single focus on the literacy, numeracy, and National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) results of M¯aori learners, cancels out all of the achievement and success M¯aori students could enjoy as M¯aori. She also questioned the capacity of White ERO reviewers to make these decisions, then focused on what was omitted from the ERO reports: We’ve heard what matters to the Government, through the Ministry of Education. We’ve seen what matters and what is considered effective to ERO, but what else matters, and what matters to us? Our student surveys told us clearly that relationships matter, that cultural identity matters, that language matters – and that these matter first and matter most! However, what else matters, and what else is not mentioned in Ministry or Education Review Office reports? Two weeks ago, the New Zealand Herald ran a series of articles on equity in New Zealand schools, using Auckland schools as examples (Johnston, 2015). One article quotes the book, Twelve Thousand Hours: Education and Poverty in Aotearoa New Zealand (Carpenter and Osborne, 2014), where Massey University academics Ivan Snook and John O’Neill have concluded that home background is responsible for up to 80 percent of a child’s school success. Our Minister of Education doesn’t agree with this. In the same article, she said, that although the impact low socio-economic factors have on student outcomes is a concern, she thinks that these factors are often overstated. Our group read the articles and held a debate. The moot was: ‘Poverty matters to our learning.’ The boys took the affirmative and we girls had to argue the negative. Although I hate to say it, the boys won, because our hearts just weren’t in our side. We all agreed

in our discussion later, of course poverty matters to every one of us. (Gayleen, in Pirini-Edwards et al., 2015)

Kiwa contacted well-known M¯aori academics and elders to find out what M¯aori think ‘as M¯aori’ means. He asked, ‘What good is an education that completely diminishes your cultural right to know who you are, what you are, where you’re from and what blood runs through your veins?’ I think the Government definitions make it perfectly clear that our people are still assimilated in Whitestream schools achieving P¯akeh¯a academic standards, mostly with no clue of their cultural heritage, or little importance placed on this by their schools. But we don’t realize this because we trust that the goals for success and a better chance of wellbeing for our wh¯anau lie in our modern education system. I am not saying that people are blind to the depth of what really is happening to young M¯aori in schools, but what I am saying is that to live ‘as M¯aori’ in the education system should be to fully understand both P¯akeh¯a society and Te Ao M¯aori, and your education should enable you to continually become stronger in the knowledge of your cultural heritage and identity. In our history, the introduction of Western ideas of individualism marginalized M¯aori wh¯anau – and education was a devastating tool in this practice. Dr Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1986) refers to New Zealand’s ‘Native School’ system as a ‘Trojan Horse’ – schools built inside M¯aori communities which deliberately targeted M¯aori wh¯anau as a site of colonization. The colonization and assimilation which targeted our ancestors, and our grandparents, continued in our parents’ generation – and in ours. (Kiwa, in Pirini-Edwards et al., 2015)

‘Aisea, the Tongan member of the group, took the government’s plan for Pasifika education to task, exposing the rhetoric in that document in his research: The Pasifika Education Plan spells out what Pasifika success will look like which is, ‘demanding, vibrant, dynamic, successful Pasifika learners, secure and confident in their identities, languages and cultures.’ However, when you get to Page 7 of the Plan and the section on Schooling, the language changes. Now, it states that, ‘The focus is on accelerating literacy and numeracy achievement and gaining NCEA Level 2 qualifications as a stepping stone to further education and/or employment.’

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What happened to our identities, languages and cultures? Apparently, if we look at the Ministry of Education’s ‘Progress against Pasifika Education Plan targets’ on the Education Counts website (Ministry of Education, 2015b), they must be hiding under some of these headings: literacy, numeracy, NCEA, suspensions, expulsions, exclusions, and whether our parents are on Boards of Trustees. This sounds like the P¯alangi [the Tongan word for a European/White person] Education Plan to me. (‘Aisea, in Pirini-Edwards et al., 2015)

Jacob, the youngest member of the group, asked, ‘So how can schools counter that hegemony? That thinking that sneaks into our heads and makes us also put M¯aori or Pasifika knowledge on a lower level – or just not think about it at all?’ He presented the outcomes of the group’s student surveys, and also examined research about Kia Aroha College by independent researchers. So did our students come to school already strong in their understanding of M¯aori knowledge? Not according to our survey. In fact it seems 61% of students in our survey came into Te Wh¯anau o Tupuranga with very little understanding of their M¯aori identity and state strongly that the way we work, our wh¯anau environment, our relationships with teachers and the way we learn, strengthened and continues to develop our identity ‘as M¯aori.’ Far fewer of the students in other schools had this experience. Kia Aroha College’s special character is wh¯anaubased, M¯aori and Pasifika-centered education. It sets out how we are different from regular state schools, but I think it’s about how we are fighting to be fully human. What does being fully human mean you ask? We learned about Paulo Freire who argues that oppression relies on a process of dehumanization. Changing that, means our education has to be about full control over what we want to do, think and most of all it has to be about selfdetermination/Tino Rangatiratanga. Our graduate profiles make very clear what success ‘as’ M¯aori, looks like at Kia Aroha College. What we hope we are showing you today is the outcome of our graduate profile – Warrior-Scholars, make WarriorResearchers! (Jacob, in Pirini-Edwards et al., 2015)

Finally, Jasmine summarised the group’s findings in the form of an achievement assessment of everyone they had investigated. Their report cards on ‘the efforts and effectiveness of those who think they are

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delivering education achievement and success “as M¯aori” or “as Pasifika”’ used the Ministry of Education’s own National Standards’ assessment terminology – finding the Ministry of Education and the Government ‘well below standard’ and schools and the Education Review Office ‘below standard’.

WARRIOR-RESEARCHERS 2017 In 2017, I was in the privileged position of having retired from my role as principal, but still welcomed by the school to work with staff and students. Three of the 2015 WarriorResearcher group were still at school and immediately responded to my call for anyone interested in working on another research topic. They gave heartfelt warnings to the new members about the amount of work they would have to do. The students had been involved in a school-wide critical study on the topic of their community. Different aspects of this topic included an investigation of the ‘shopping trucks’ that prey on communities like Otara offering exorbitantly priced goods on payment plans, resulting in massive debt for many families. Other groups had explored Otara’s history as a site of struggle and protest, and provided counter-stories to the prevalent negative media attention the community regularly experiences. We wanted a research topic that extended their exploration of the idea of community, and the Government’s education initiative for ‘Communities of Learning’ (COL) was an obvious choice of a policy that impacted their learning.

The Government Initiative: COL Investing in Educational Success (IES) was an initiative announced by the New Zealand National Government at the start of the 2014 election year with an investment of NZ$359 million over four years, and then

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NZ$155 million each year after that. IES is a top-down, one-size-fits-all model which requires schools to cluster locally in COL. According to the Secretary for Education, the promise was that COL would create a system based on collaboration across the education pathway connecting students with learning and would be focused on progress and quality teaching and leadership and support to meet those needs (Cormick, 2017). Initially secondary and primary (elementary) teacher organisations were split over the policy, with 93% of primary members opposed to the idea of paying lead principals and some teachers significant additional salaries to work across the cluster of local schools. Against this strong opposition the initiative was forced to undergo fine tuning. On the surface, terminology for leadership positions changed and membership of COL became optional for schools. In practice, many schools have joined COL because of the significant funding for professional development that schools can only access once they have joined a cluster, and after the Ministry of Education has endorsed their learning goals or ‘achievement challenges’. In a model which has prided itself on the individual autonomy of schools and accountability to their unique communities, this initiative was seen as a process of control over schools and an enforced compliance with the narrow focus on literacy and numeracy, which the achievement challenges were required to target. Overwhelmingly, these targets focused on M¯aori children. In a 2017 survey by the New Zealand Principals’ Federation (Cormick, 2017), principal respondents spoke of COL being over-loaded with new functions other than professional collaboration to improve learning and teaching for young people. Several commented that in respect of COL they are ‘operating in the dark, building the plane in flight’. Many principals were struggling with the inflexibility of the leadership structure, uncomfortable with the notion of a few roles taking all the money, and the ‘rigidity of the

funding being mostly tied up in salaries’. Principals did not trust that the model was genuinely about collaboration and learning, but was rather ‘a managerial system which will completely undermine the relationship between a school and its community’. With M¯aori and Pasifika learners under the spotlight for their perceived learning deficits, and the threat that COL could certainly undermine the work the school and community had put in to develop the unique character of Kia Aroha College, the government initiative was a perfect choice for the Warrior-Researchers in 2017.

The 2017 Research Project Beyond M¯aori Boys’ Reading and Writing: Reading and Writing our World The 2017 Warrior-Researcher Group comprised nine M¯aori, Samoan, and Tongan students in Years 11 to 13. They interviewed students, teachers, and M¯aori principals of schools who were COL members or COL leaders, as well as M¯aori principals whose schools who were resisting COL membership. Students took different aspects of the research, with the overall title: Beyond M¯aori Boys’ Reading and Writing: Reading and Writing our World and the research question, ‘Who is defining our community?’ The first two groups investigated the community and the school, and the last three groups focused on the government policy and its impact.

Reading Our Community Arguing that young people need to read their world before reading the word, Freire and Macedo (1987: 127) claims that educators ‘need to use their students’ cultural universe as points of departure, enabling students to recognize themselves as possessing a specific and important cultural identity…[this] requires respect and legitimation of students’

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discourses… which are different but never inferior’. Pilisi, a Year 13 Tongan researcher, took on the task of reading the community of Otara. She wrote: In our group we have a total experience of eighty one years of life in Otara. It’s our world! Some of our wider group have been students in other secondary schools before we came to Kia Aroha College, but most of us have been students in Kia Aroha since leaving primary school and entering Year 7. This presentation explores the community of Otara as a site of struggle, and a site of resistance – the Otara that we experience, and is our daily reality. On the one hand, the struggle: colonisation, assimilation, racism, and the loss of language, culture, and cultural identity, and the symptoms of that loss we see in poverty, escalated by the gentrification of our community, and in issues like domestic violence, poor housing, homelessness and a youth gang culture. On the other hand the richness of our cultural heritage, maintained against all the odds, a pride in our community, our churches, our talented youth, our elders, and our people – and a history of fighting back. (Pilisi, in Katipa et al., 2017)

This presentation makes very clear that ‘Without our culture we have no identity, and without our identity we have no community’.

Reading Our School: A Counter Story Foloiola ‘read the world of the school’ and its difference from other Whitestream schools. She wanted to know how that difference worked for them as learners and how could the community, and the wh¯anau that is Kia Aroha College, cluster with other schools which have very different philosophies: I surveyed 60 current students of Kia Aroha College, in our Samoan and Tongan units. 21 of these students had also attended other intermediate or secondary schools prior to coming to Kia Aroha College. In answer to the question, What does success ‘as’ M¯aori or ‘as’ Pasifika (or as your own cultural group) mean to you? Fifty-five percent were very clear that success was directly connected to their cultural knowledge and their cultural identity.

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The feeling of belonging in Kia Aroha College is confirmed by 99.9% of the Pasifika survey participants, who said that they could be Tongan or Samoan or their own culture all day, every day at school and felt that is really valued. Not only that, but they shared how they felt comfortable in using their own language in any place or any setting throughout the school day. (Foloiola, in Katipa et al., 2017)

Reading The Word: Who Is Defining Our Community? COL are required to identify the ‘achievement challenges’ their cluster of schools face, by asking the questions: (1) What is our vision of success for our students? (2) What are the common challenges across our COL? (3) What do we know about possible reasons for these challenges and how do we know, and (4) What support will be needed and what resources are available to help? Their answers to these questions identify challenges, which then require endorsement by the Ministry of Education in order that the COL can access the funding to resource their targets. Matthew, a Year 13 M¯aori researcher, painstakingly worked his way through the Endorsed Achievement Challenges of 77 COL published on the Ministry of Education website (Ministry of Education, 2015a). He analysed these in terms of how many targeted M¯aori boys’, or M¯aori girls’, or Pasifika students’ reading, writing, and mathematics. Then he searched for goals that mentioned culturally responsive pedagogy or ‘as M¯aori’. Fewer than one third of COL passed his culturally responsive test, and only 18% his ‘as M¯aori’ analysis. It didn’t escape his notice that a number of COL statements began with rich descriptions of their M¯aori location, but then said nothing else that responded to that knowledge. Matthew wrote: Using the idea of whitewater rapids, Charteris and Smardon (2017) write that ‘fish don’t see the water’ and state that ‘it is difficult to recognise the machinations of neoliberalism when one is swept along in it.’ At Kia Aroha College we use the term ‘White Spaces’ (Milne 2013, 2016) to explain how

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schools don’t see the Whiteness that is all around us, and that drives our education system and alienates M¯aori and Pasifika learners. The sweeping ‘White’ water idea is used to explain that neoliberal initiatives, that treat schools as competing businesses, were firstly resisted by educators, but as schools were swept along in the rush to make change, these became accepted, normal, and ‘the way we do business around here.’ The reason for this change is not that schools suddenly changed their minds, but because we are in a system that ‘systematically dismantles the will to critique’ – in other words it becomes harder and harder to resist the white water when the initiative is presented as a ‘done deal’ with little consultation, when schools whose funding is already frozen, just can’t hold out against the funding offered as the reward for complying, and when promotion and higher salaries tempt some to join in – and others are also persuaded. Charteris and Smardon argue that educators and researchers have to be the critics and the conscience of education. From our perspective that doesn’t seem to have worked too well for us – so we are taking on that role for ourselves. (Matthew, in Katipa et al., 2017)

Matthew described himself as ‘shocked’ by the outcome of his analysis of the achievement challenges. He found that of 77 COL ‘Endorsed Achievement Challenges’ published on the Ministry of Education website, 99% target M¯aori boys’ writing, and 96% M¯aori girls’ writing. He observed: ‘It seems like our Maths ability is only slightly better than our writing, and our reading is not too great either. 87% of these COL want us to achieve NCEA Level 2.’ Now, I’m surrounded by M¯aori boys and girls in my school, and in my life. I don’t know any who can’t read and write, or calculate! I completed NCEA Level 3 a full year early at the end of Year 12 and had my University Entrance requirements early this year in Year 13. So did many of my peers. So what is going on? Where are all these non-writing, noncounting, non-reading M¯aori youth? Obviously in these 77 communities that stretch right across the country. So I have some questions: • We know we are not less intelligent than P¯akeh¯a, so how come these schools and teachers don’t know how to teach us? • You would think these 77 COL schools would ask why they are achieving these results – or do they think it’s our fault?

• Why is NCEA Level 2 the goal? Are P¯akeh¯a wh¯anau happy with that goal? • Isn’t this just racist? (Matthew, in Katipa et al., 2017)

Jacob, a Year 12 M¯aori student, conducted face-to-face interviews with five M¯aori principals who could bring together both a professional view and a M¯aori understanding of COL. Three of these principals had already joined a COL, and two of them were the lead principals in these groups. One was considering joining, after a lengthy period of holding out against the pressure to join, and one had decided he would not join his local cluster. Jacob also spoke to three M¯aori teachers who had key leadership roles across and within schools in their COL. He asked all participants about their views on COL, what had influenced them to join, or not, did they have goals for M¯aori learners beyond literacy and numeracy, and if so, what were they? He then analysed his data using the four common themes that had arisen from his interviews: 1 2 3 4

The dilemma: To join or not to join The pressure to join Inconsistencies Leading a school ‘as M¯aori’ (Jacob, in Katipa et al., 2017)

His interviewees all described the decision to join as being difficult. Those who had joined COL spoke of ‘being at the table’, and influencing other schools in their community, rather than having decisions made for them. All had faced pressure to join, both from repeated requests from the Ministry of Education, and from their dire need for resourcing and funding for teacher professional development, and feeling they could not justify not taking advantage of this funding. Of particular interest to the students’ research was the fact that some schools can form a ‘community’ if they have a common philosophy, regardless of where they are located, whereas others cannot. This is the case, for example, for Catholic Schools, and Rudolf Steiner Schools, and in some places,

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for Kura Kaupapa M¯aori. However, it is not possible for a school with a philosophy for M¯aori and Pasifika-centred learning, like Kia Aroha College, to cluster with like-minded schools in other locations. COL must be formed within the same geographical location, and provide a pathway for learners, so a secondary school must be included. This seems inconsistent and unfair. When it impacts most on schools providing differently for M¯aori, the student researchers concluded it was also racist. All of the M¯aori principals and teachers interviewed agreed that they struggled as M¯aori educators to get other schools in their communities to see the need to change their practice. Timitimi, a M¯aori researcher in Year 12, analysed COL using a tino rangatiratanga (self-determination, sovereignty) framework. He took the five guiding principles of the government’s strategy for M¯aori education, Ka Hikitia. He wrote: Ka Hikitia has five guiding principles: The Treaty of Waitangi, a M¯aori potential approach, Ako – a two-way teaching and learning process, the understanding that identity, language and culture count, and productive partnerships. So it would follow surely that initiatives from the government that impact on M¯aori learners would adhere to these principles to ensure our mana (prestige, authority, power) is upheld. Isn’t that the purpose of guiding principles – that they guide our thinking, our actions, and our behaviour? (Timitimi, in Katipa et al., 2017)

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His group had taken the questions the Ministry of Education suggests that COL ask when identifying their achievement challenges, and conducted a survey of fellow students, staff, and family members using the same questions. Timitimi reports: Our survey participants’ ideas about success included being critically conscious and having strong cultural knowledge. Their answers were diametrically opposed to those of the Communities of Learning’s vision of success in Matthew’s analysis. Our community’s version of success is ‘to be proud to be M¯aori, to be able to fluently speak Te Reo M¯aori, to question everything,’ and ‘to know who we are.’ (Timitimi, in Katipa et al., 2017)

Jasmine, a Year 13 M¯aori student, investigated how else the ‘outrageous $824 million’ invested in this initiative since 2014 could have been spent. Her survey participants opted for more equitable resourcing, making M¯aori language compulsory in schools and in teacher training, and ‘the teaching of New Zealand history, especially the oppression of 19th century M¯aori as a compulsory part of the school curriculum’. Her summary of the issue states:

He applied these principles to analyse the achievement target of 99% of COL to improve M¯aori boys’ writing, and concluded that he found:

Our group’s research has shown that from our perspective, teachers, schools, our education system, our Ministry of Education, and our government, are on the wrong track. And while this is the case, initiatives like Communities of Learning that focus intensively on the symptoms, instead of asking what the root causes are, will continue to marginalise us as learners. Writing policy and developing initiatives for us, from positions of privilege, without talking to us about our realities and our perspectives cannot become any sort of community. (Jasmine, in Katipa et al., 2017)

Zero connection to the guidelines of Ka Hikitia – the very guidelines that the Ministry of Education say are central to their vision and their strategic planning for our education: no tino rangatiratanga, no partnership – under the Treaty, or otherwise, deficits instead of potential, ako [both to learn and to teach] going one way only (what are teachers learning?) and very little sign that our identity matters. My mana [prestige, authority] does not feel enhanced. It feels belittled. (Timitimi, in Katipa et al., 2017)

Matthew spent several days trying to put his final feelings into his speech. He told me he was searching for something powerful that would sum up the personal impact his analysis of the COL achievement challenges had made on him, and answer his question about why schools are failing M¯aori learners. He finally asked me if I could help him find a quote ‘about the boot’ he had heard ‘Matua

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Jeff’ (Duncan-Andrade) make on one of his visits to the school. Matthew wrote: I’m reminded of a Matua Jeff quote about the accumulation of stress that comes from having to constantly adjust to fit into a system that wasn’t designed by us or for us, from the impact of colonisation, assimilation, and racism, from loss – of land, language, culture and identity over many generations. This build-up of stress feels to us like constantly having a boot on your neck. The answer is not to strengthen our necks – or in the case of Communities of Learning, strengthen our reading and writing, the solution is dealing with the boot that is keeping us in this position – and that boot is the why schools are failing us, and why Communities of Learning won’t make a difference. While schools continue to look to the wrong place they will continue to lose the opportunity to make any change – so my analysis of the endorsed achievement challenges, and everything else I have learned about COL leads me to think they are wrongly named. My acronym would be COLO – Communities of Lost Opportunity – not our loss, but the loss of our education system to open their minds to the truth. (Matthew, in Katipa et al., 2017)

I think Matthew sums up the situation perfectly and powerfully. How do we explain the failure of our education systems to provide equitable outcomes for all our learners? Do we think White boys have an additional writing or reading gene that our M¯aori boys missed out on? Or could it be that the whole system, the way we set up and structure schools, our teacher training, our obsession with copying failed policy from other countries which also marginalise their Indigenous learners, the knowledge we value – and measure – is also White, and it therefore benefits the children whose values match, and whose values are embedded in and reproduced by, our schools? Our M¯aori children have no reason to trust we know what we are doing, when we prove with our outcomes each year that we clearly don’t and, worse still, when we tolerate this as ‘normal’. We need to learn to read the world of our M¯aori children and craft our pedagogy around that world. It’s not M¯aori boys’ literacy that needs fixing. It’s our own, and that’s the gap in our understanding that a Critical, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy of Wh¯anau fills.

Notes 1  The Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840 between the British Crown and more than 500 M aori ¯ tribal chiefs, made New Zealand a colony of Britain and M aori ¯ became British subjects. The Treaty is generally considered the founding document of New Zealand as a nation. Despite this, the rights guaranteed to M aori ¯ have been ignored. New Zealand schools are expected to provide education to M aori ¯ that is ‘consistent with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi’.  2  National Certificate of Educational Achievement – New Zealand’s senior secondary school qualification. NCEA is a three-level process which begins in Year 11. Eighty credits, achieved through either internal moderation or examination, are required to pass each level. 3  Work and Income New Zealand – the government unemployment agency.

REFERENCES Akom, A., Cammarota, J., & Ginwright, S. (2008). Youthtopias: Towards a New Paradigm of Critical Youth Studies. Youth Media Reporter, 2(1), 108–129. Retrieved November 29, 2019, from http://www.youthmediareporter.org/ 2008/08/15/youthtopias-towards-a-newparadigm-of-critical-youth-studies/ Beane, J. A. (1997). Curriculum Integration: Designing the Core of Democratic Education. New York: Teachers College Press. Carpenter, V., & Osborne, S. (2014). Twelve Thousand Hours: Education and Poverty in Aotearoa New Zealand. Auckland, New Zealand: Dunmore Publishing. Charteris, J., & Smardon, D. (2017, August 7). Politics of whitewater – considerations for Communities of Learning | K¯ahui Ako [Blog post]. Retrieved November 29, 2019, from https://nzareblog.wordpress.com/2017/08/07/ politics-of-whitewater/ Cormick, W. (2017). Principal Matters. Issue 16. Wellington, NZ. Retrieved November 29, 2019, from http://mailchi.mp/nzpf/nzpf-principalmatters-16-22-june-2017?e=864110f103 Cunningham, C., Stevenson, B., & Tassell, N. (2005). Analysis of the Characteristics of Wh a¯ nau in Aotearoa. Wellington, NZ: Ministry of Education. Department of Education. (1988). Tomorrow’s Schools: The Reform of Education

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Administration in New Zealand. Wellington, NZ: Department of Education. Duncan-Andrade, J. (2007). Gangstas, Wankstas, and Ridas: Defining, Developing, and Supporting Effective Teachers in Urban Schools. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 20(6), 617–638. https:// doi.org/10.1080/09518390701630767 Duncan-Andrade, J., & Morrell, E. (2008). The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities for Moving from Theory to Practice in Urban Schools. New York: Peter Lang. Durie, M. (2003). Nga¯ K¯ahui Pou: Launching Maori Futures. Wellington, NZ: Huia. Freire, P., & Macedo, D. P. (1987). Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. University of Michigan: Bergin & Garvey Publishers. Johnston, K. (2015, November 8). Education investigation: The great divide. New Zealand Herald. Retrieved November 29, 2019, from http://m.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article. cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11539592 Katipa, M., Bellamy, J., Harris-Kaaka, J., Finau, F., Mafi, P., & Ropata, T. (2017). Beyond M¯aori boys’ reading and writing: Reading and writing our world. Hamilton, NZ: Symposium presented to the New Zealand Association of Research in Education (NZARE) National Conference. Milne, A. (2013). Colouring in the White Spaces: Reclaiming Cultural Identity in Whitestream Schools. University of Waikato, Unpublished PhD thesis. Retrieved November 29, 2019, from http://researchcommons. waikato.ac.nz/handle/10289/7868 Milne, A. (2016). Coloring in the White Spaces: Reclaiming Cultural Identity in Whitestream Schools. New York: Peter Lang. Ministry of Education. (2013a). Ka Hikitia – Accelerating Success 2013–2017. Wellington, NZ: Ministry of Education. Retrieved November 29, 2019, from http://www.education.govt.nz/ ministry-of-education/overall-strategies-andpolicies/the-maori-education-strategyka-hikitia-accelerating-success-20132017/ Ministry of Education. (2013b). Pasifika Education Plan 2013–2017. Wellington, NZ: Ministry of Education. Retrieved November 29, 2019, from http://www.education.govt.nz/ministryof-education/overall-strategies-and-policies/ pasifika-education-plan-2013-2017/

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Ministry of Education. (2015a). Achievement Challenges. Retrieved November 29, 2019, from https://education.govt.nz/communitiesof-learning/teaching-and-learning/achievementchallenges/ Ministry of Education. (2015b). Progress against Pasifika Education Plan Targets. Retrieved November 7, 2015, from https://www.ed ucationcounts.govt.nz/statistics/pasifikaeducation/progress_against_pasifika_ education_plan_targets Ministry of Education. (2016). Student Numbers. Retrieved November 29, 2019, from https:// www.educationcounts.govt.nz/statistics/ schooling/student-numbers Moorfield, J. (2011). Te Aka M¯aori-English, English-M¯aori Dictionary and Index (3rd ed.). London: Longman/Pearson. Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2017). Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World. New York: Teachers College Press. Pirini-Edwards, E., Tukutau, A., Katipa, M., Ropitini-Fairburn, K., Harris-Kaaka, J., & Bellamy, J. (2015). Speaking out ‘as’ us: Maori ¯ and Tongan secondary students investigate our education system’s vision for M¯aori and Pasifika learners. Whakatane, NZ: Symposium presented at New Zealand Association for Research in Education (NZARE) Conference. Romero, A., Cammarota, J., Dominguez, K., Valdez, L., Ramirez, G., & Hernandez, L. (2010). ‘The Opportunity if not the Right to See’: The Social Justice Education Project. In J. Cammarota & M. Fine (Eds.), Revolutionizing Education: Youth Participatory Action Research in Motion (pp. 131–151). New York: Routledge. Sahlberg, P. (2011). The Fourth Way of Finland. Journal of Educational Change, 12(2), 173–185. Smith, L. (1986). Is Taha Maori in Schools the Answer to Maori School Failure? In G. H. Smith (Ed.), Nga Kete Waananga: Maori Perspectives of Taha Maori. Auckland, NZ: Auckland College of Education. Smith, G. (1995). Whakaoho Wh¯anau: New Formations of Wh¯anau as an Innovative Intervention into Maori ¯ Cultural and Educational Crises. He Pukenga Korero: A Journal of M¯aori Studies, 1(1), 18–35.

52 Critical Indigenous Pedagogies of Resistance: The Call for Critical Indigenous Educators Jeremy Garcia

My story is really the story of the making of an Indigenous teacher by reclaiming an Indigenous heritage of thinking, teaching, and learning. My story is also about the quest to regain the Indigenous voice of teaching in the context of community and its ecology of soul. (Cajete, 2015: 13)

I begin this chapter with reflections on what it is we are after within Indigenous1 education. I am privileged to have been invited to share, to be with, and learn from many Indigenous communities to discuss the strengths, challenges, and aspirations of education for Indigenous youth, families, communities, and nations. It is within these dialogues that I have witnessed the goals of engaging an Indigenous education that is rooted in community, land, language, and culture. It is an education that includes ceremony in relation to knowledge and values affiliated with community and sacred sites. It is an education that embodies the socio-political realities that shape the context of our contemporary Indigenous identities. It is a critical form of education that leads to sustaining and protecting what our2

ancestors have gifted us. As I replay the stories shared with/by youth, elders, teachers, leaders, and community members, I am reminded of Gregory Cajete’s point that such stories are about ‘reclaiming an Indigenous heritage of thinking, teaching, and learning….[and are] a quest to regain the Indigenous voice of teaching in the context of community and its ecology of soul’ (Cajete, 2015: 13). Given this stance, what then must be the process by which we begin to think about how Indigenous knowledge and values sustain, revitalize, and promote the well-being and lifeways of our communities? Can critical Indigenous pedagogy enact spaces of empowerment to restore, and revitalize, how Indigenous communities will respond to ongoing pressures of corporatization and settler colonialism? To begin thinking about these questions, I find it essential that we consider stories of emergence and humanizing relations to land as a way to contextualize a worldview that defines our existence. Thereafter, I highlight several key environmental issues challenging

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Indigenous connections to sacred landscapes which inform the urgency for engaging critical Indigenous pedagogies. In relation to the environmental issues, I provide a brief analysis of how critical Indigenous pedagogy provides a restorative lens that opens our spirit and minds to engage a critical and community consciousness that is decolonizing. The chapter concludes with key aspects that inform the making of a critical Indigenous teacher who embodies the notion of Indigenous teachers as Nation-builders. Before I engage this work, I would like to clarify the use of the term educators. Within Indigenous cultural contexts, educators are inclusive of community members with multiple roles and responsibilities, such as elders, parents, aunts, uncles, clan and cultural advisors, and relatives serving Indigenous youth. Western systemic processes have made clear distinctions of who can be a teacher (e.g., individuals who have met state certification criteria). Considering the premise of critical Indigenous pedagogies, I use the term educators to be inclusive of the broader community of educators, with a particular emphasis on teachers working in classrooms serving Indigenous youth, families, and communities.

HUMANIZING EPISTEMOLOGIES: RELATIONSHIPS, RESPECT, RECIPROCITY, RESPONSIBILITY Stories of Emergence and Relations to Land Matter Indigenous peoples are defined by their connection – their stories – to place, land, the cosmos, and sacred sites. These stories of place hold the power of our existence. For Indigenous peoples, they are both ancient and contemporary. Contemporary in the sense that in any given space that I find myself (ourselves) in the United States, I am walking among footprints that have been left

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before me. I am among a landscape that has seen many forms of life and has answered prayers before my existence. There are markers or symbols that tell the stories of how Indigenous peoples thrived and continue to thrive. Understanding the connections to place is the core of being a critical Indigenous educator. How will we know what it means to be a critical Indigenous educator if we don’t know our stories of emergence and our stories of survivance? Stories of emergence matter: Hopi. For the Hopi people, our epistemology is generated from understandings of how we came into living within this fourth world. At this time, we entered agreements with Màasaw – a belief that we hold with high regard. Dennis Wall and Virgil Masayesva (2004) offer an extended narration of this: After their Emergence into the Fourth World, the clans that would one day comprise the Hopi people approached the Guardian Spirit, Masaw, in the region that is now northwest Arizona and asked his permission to settle there. Masaw recognized that the clan people’s former life, which they knew was not bringing them happiness, had been given over to ambition, greed, and social competition. He looked into their hearts and saw that these qualities remained, and so he had his doubts that the people could follow his way. ‘Whether you can stay here is up to you,’ he told them. Masaw warned the clan people that the life he had to offer them was very different from what they had before. To show them that life, Masaw gave the people a planting stick, a bag of seeds, and a gourd of water. He handed them a small ear of blue corn and told them, ‘Here is my life and my spirit. This is what I have to give you.’ (Wall and Masayesva, 2004: 435)

This was the beginning of what would shape our epistemological orientations to what is now the Hopi tutskwa (land-base). Certainly, there is more that underlies this narrative of entering this world, and in many respects, it is held close to specific clans, societies, and sacred sites. Stories of emergence matter: Anishinaabeg. In her reflection on stories of being on the front lines for environmental justice, Winona LaDuke (2016) begins her work by centering

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her relation to the place of the Anishinaabeg. She writes: Long ago, during the time of prophecy, the Anishinaabeg were told to follow Migis shell which appeared in the sky, and from our eastern homeland, along the great water, we would stop seven times, ending finally at Moningwunakaauning Minis [home of the golden-breasted woodpecker]. It is here on this island that we flourished and spread our wings as Anishinaabeg people. (LaDuke, 2016: 7)

LaDuke further notes, ‘Moningwunakaauning Minis became a center of our Midewewin Society, our most powerful religion which connects us to the four layers beneath the Earth and the four layers above’ (2016: 8). Stories of emergence matter: Diné. In reclaiming Diné history, Jennifer Denetdale (2007: 10) centers the Diné origins in relation to the four sacred mountains that cross states in the southwest: ‘Sisnaajini in the east; Tsoodzil in the south; Dook’o’osliid in the west; and Dibe nitsaa in the north’. She expands on the Diné origins: We Diné trace our origins into Dinetah by a journey from the First World into this present one. The Holy People created the world as we know it today. From the Holy People, the Diné received knowledge, material gifts, and rituals and ceremonies for a proper life. The Holy People also provided knowledge on proper relationships between the world and all beings. (Denetdale, 2007: 10)

It should be noted that the creation stories shared here are extremely condensed versions of much deeper and complex systems of coming to be. There are many beautiful stories of emergence that matter across Indigenous communities. They are the beginning orientations to thinking critically and centering notions of sustaining cultural protocols that give life to communities. Such relations reaffirm our epistemological and ontological existence. ‘Place name makes theoretical notions concrete; they offer us tacit meaning. Stories, like name-place legends, give comfort and grounding, and offer a warmth of belonging’ (Kovach, 2009: 62). This ‘warmth of belonging’ is what draws

many of the Indigenous communities to push forward in thinking about how they will not only continue to transfer Indigenous knowledge to the next generation, but to do so in ways that reaffirm an identity that embodies deep accountability to land, relationships, people, and ways of being.

Indigenous Knowledge: Sustaining and Revitalizing Our Relations Learning comes from being related, and being related brings learning. (Cajete, 2015: 197)

As we seek to know more about our reality as Indigenous peoples, it requires that we work to sustain, rebuild, and consciously engage with our Indigenous communities by drawing upon expressions of epistemology unique to our communities. ‘Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas have developed a number of symbolic-metaphoric expressions that reflect the metaphysical, ecological, and cultural constructs of Indigenous epistemology’ (Cajete, 2015: 205). Indigenous epistemology is contingent upon the interrelationships that come with being members of respective clans, villages, sacred societies, and spiritual landscapes that inform and define our existence – an Indigenous ontology. Considering the deep nature of our reality is embedded in relationships, we must understand the degree of respect and reciprocity that comes with being good stewards of Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies that have been offered to shape our reality and identity. For me, in honor of conceptualizing the significance of activating critical Indigenous pedagogy within Hopi teachers, I use the philosophical framework of the Hopi people – kyaap-tsi, na-mi-na-ngwa, paa-sína-ngwa, and su-mí-na-ngwa – to signify a formal commitment that defines and guides Indigenous education with (and for) Hopi people. Kyaap-tsi is contextualized as respect.

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Na-mi-na-ngwa is taking care of yourself and helping others without being asked. Paa-sína-ngwa is being intentional/cautious about what you do. Su-mí-na-ngwa is helping one another for the good of all the community/ interdependence (cited in Black Mesa Trust, 2009). Kyaap-tsi, na-mi-na-ngwa, paa-sí-na-ngwa, and su-mí-na-ngwa suggest a deeper commitment to honor the spirit of our ancestors who worked tirelessly to create a space grounded in hope and survivance (Vizenor, 1994) of our own Indigenous epistemology, ontology, language, and education. ‘The survivance narratives of Indigenous peoples are those that articulate the active recovery, reimagination, and reinvestment of Indigenous ways of being’ (Grande, 2015: 243). When we work mutually and inclusively, we c­ reate a level of moral responsibility grounded in strong partnerships, hope, sacrifice, good intentions, and a shared commitment to coexist collectively. The intentions to (re)conceptualize Indigenous education is not an isolated effort but is inclusive of the voices, concerns, struggles, and optimism shared by fellow Indigenous peoples and educators – past, present, and future – working to define our own destination for our own reasons and conditions. In this process, Cajete’s point of ‘Learning comes from being related, and being related brings learning’ (2015: 197) is essential to understanding the complexities of where Indigenous knowledge rests and the layers of responsibility and accountability embedded within. We can begin to observe the intersection of our creation stories, stories of emergence and survivance, and relationality as a source of sustaining Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies through various Indigenous community efforts to protect what is sacred and to resist on-going pressures to disrupt what defines our existence. Unfortunately, many of our sacred sites and items are under threat of being destroyed and exploited. While protecting what is sacred to

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us is a space of resistance, it is also a space of learning that reinforces our relations and responsibilities in safeguarding our land and connections to ancestral knowledge, which I turn to next.

SITES OF RESISTANCE, PRAYER, UNITY, AND KNOWLEDGE Within this section, I briefly highlight a key environmental issue that is impacting Indigenous communities – the Bears Ears National Monument. Certainly, this is not the only space of resistance. It is within these contexts that we witness why it is critical for our Indigenous youth to be given a space to dialogue and engage in meaning making around various environmental and sociopolitical issues impacting their communities. Within these sites of resistance, it makes clear the pedagogical implications for seeing Indigenous education (and the spaces where learning takes place) as a sacred landscape (Garcia and Shirley, 2012), which is a sacred space of engagement shaped by Indigenous knowledge systems, values, languages, prayer, and unity. Hoon’Naqvut, Shash Jáa, Kwiyagatu Nukavachi, Ansh An Lashokdiwe: Bears Ears National Monument: Rising from the center of the southeastern Utah landscape and visible from every direction are twin buttes so distinctive that in each of the native languages of the region their name is the same: Hoon’Naqvut, Shash Jáa, Kwiyagatu Nukavachi, Ansh An Lashokdiwe, or ‘Bears Ears’. (Obama, 2016)

On December 28, 2016, President Barack Obama recognized The Bears Ears InterTribal Coalition’s proposal for the Creation of a Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. The Inter-Tribal Coalition includes the Hopi, Navajo, Uintah and Ouray Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, and Zuni Tribal Governments.

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Pursuant to the Antiquities Act of 1906, President Obama ‘set aside 1.35 million acres for permanent protection’ (Obama, 2016: 1). This was a momentous decision that would protect ancestral sites, petroglyphs and pictographs, migration trials, access to medicine, sustaining the creation stories, and protecting 3,500-year-old Hopi and Zuni villages. Several statements referenced below from the Proposal to President Obama for the Creation of Bears Ears National Monument (Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, 2015) capture the relationship and responsibility of being good stewards of the land from an Indigenous perspective. I find this knowledge from Indigenous community members and elders to hold an abundance of value and it deserves to be recognized at length. If we pay close attention, we can begin to understand the power of being in relation to a place. Malcolm Lehi, Ute Mountain Ute We don’t manage land. The land manages us…. We can still hear the songs and prayers of our ancestors on every mesa and in every canyon. (2015: 3)

Phillip Vicenti, Zuni The importance of Bears Ears for our people is through our ancestral sites that were left behind eons ago by our ancestors. They documented the sites by using oral history, pictographs, and by leaving their belongings. When we visit Bears Ears, we connect with our migration history immediately without doubt. With that, we must preserve, manage and educate our future generations. (2015: 10)

Herman Honanie, Hopi The Hopi people made a solemn covenant to Maasaw to protect the land by serving as stewards of the Earth. The land is a testament of Hopi stewardship through thousands of years, manifested by ‘footprints’ of ancient villages, migration routes, pilgrimage trails, artifacts, petroglyphs, and the buried hisatsinom, ‘the People of Long Ago,’ all of which were intentionally left to mark the land as proof that the Hopi have fulfilled their covenant. The Hopi ancestors buried in this area continue to inhabit the land, and they are intimately associated with the clouds that travel out across the

c­ ountryside to release the moisture that sustains all life. (2015: 35)

Joseph Suina, Cochiti Pueblo We go with offerings to our sites. We knock on that wall and say our names – just like you should – you make your entry properly, and address those that reside there as grandmothers and grandfathers as they are. There is no dimension of time in the spirit world. It’s good to come here to the sites, to your grandmothers’ homes, you remember how it was to be there. With an offering, perhaps some corn meal, you identify yourself, you sing a song and the children dance, and we just speak our language. Your name, your clan, your kiva. (2015: 9)

Ruby Ross, Navajo My grandmother told me the story about how my grandfather took them hunting for deer around Bears Ears. My family members still hunt the area near Bears Ears and I was taught the different medicinal plants; this was my classroom, I am now a Navajo traditional herbalist (2015: 3)

Across each of these stories of being in relation to Bears Ears, there is a powerful connection to sustaining identity in relation to land, spiritual beings, symbols, and history that remind us of who continues to be affiliated with this landscape. It is where Indigenous peoples return to as a source of knowing, to offer prayers, and to reaffirm their identity. On December 4, 2017, Donald Trump would reverse Obama’s decision by reducing these protected lands by 85% (1,150,860 acres) (Trump, 2017). Once again, this would lead to protectors rising in solidarity and releasing official statements of resistance and legal action from tribal nations. The Native American Rights Fund is supporting the InterTribal Coalition’s lawsuit3. In addition, nine conservation organizations are being represented by Earthjustice in a lawsuit against this decision4. This decision to remove the protection of 85% of the proposed land-base endangers Indigenous ancestors, epistemologies, histories, and the natural ecosystems; it allows for increased vandalism of petroglyphs and looting of ancient artifacts.

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A RESTORATIVE LENS: CRITICAL INDIGENOUS PEDAGOGY When we consider the struggles and points of resistance to the exploitation of sacred landscapes by settler colonialism and corporatization, it is without question that Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies are about sustaining worldviews that underscore the value of being stewards of the land. There is a powerful message inherent in examining injustices occurring in places like Bears Ears (#SaveBearsEars), Oak Flat in San Carlos Apache (#SaveOakFlat), and Lake OaheMissouri River of Standing Rock Sioux (#NoDAPL). It is clear our Indigenous struggles are about protecting and sustaining our right to exist. Though such struggles can be contextualized within notions of inequities and injustice, we must also acknowledge the strength inherent in our reactions to rise up and protect. In Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s conceptualization of Indigenous struggles for social justice she notes: ‘Struggle is a tool of both social activism and theory. It is a tool that has the potential to enable oppressed groups to embrace and mobilize agency, and to turn the consciousness of injustice into strategies for change’ (2012: 199). If we look closely across these spaces of resistance, we not only see elders, knowledge keepers, and community members enacting agency, we also find Indigenous youth offering their interpretations and perspectives. For example, I had the opportunity to learn from and be in support of Alayna Eagle Shield, founder of the Mní Wičhóni Nakíčižiŋ Owáyawa (Defenders of the Water School) located at the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ Camp during #NoDAPL at Standing Rock Sioux. Coincidentally, we met a year just before the protectors began resisting the pipeline in Standing Rock. I would soon be reconnected with her due to this moment of resistance. The creation of Mní Wičhóni Nakíčižiŋ Owáyawa emerged as a result of the children and youth who joined their families in solidarity to resist the Dakota Access

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Pipeline. While the students were not heavily involved in the direct action on the front lines, they were witnessing a movement that would activate a critical Indigenous consciousness (Lee, 2006). I continue to be moved by Mní Wičhóni Nakíčižiŋ Owáyawa student Kenji Chambers’ (Rosebud Sioux’s) reflection: The people who are doing that [praying and at the frontlines], in my opinion, they’re making a big difference and they’re helping stop the pipeline. So we’re not going to use our fists and use like all those weapons to get it off our land, we’re going to have to use peace…We don’t want to use our hands. We’re tired of it. It’s not the old days, it’s the new days. We need to start using our words, we need to start praying.…We stand with many Nations as one…we’re going to stop this. We stand behind Standing Rock to kill the black snake….we got to defeat that thing. (CATV 47 news clip, October 26, 2016)5

Kenji, along with other Indigenous youth such as Naelyn Pike6 and Autumn Peltier7 have a critical Indigenous consciousness that is reflective of the learning contexts they have encountered within sites of resistance. Much of this is at the crossroads of traditional knowledge, stories, language, and education that is grounded in/with the land (L. Simpson, 2014). Within Western schooling spaces, education for Indigenous youth, generally, has not reflected the deep connections to Indigenous epistemologies rooted in community-based contexts and landscapes. Even more so, Indigenous youth may have limited interactions with critical Indigenous pedagogies that offer a restorative lens on how they see the world. A restorative lens that opens our spirit and minds to engage a critical and community consciousness (Cajete, 2015; Freire, 2002; Lee, 2006) that guides our pathways to decolonization and informs how we respond to our contemporary struggles and sites of resistance. Resistance in this context is built on preserving, sustaining, and reclaiming the Indigenous values, languages, and worldviews that have been dehumanized, altered, and, in many cases, exploited for material and corporate gain. Earlier works by Donna

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Deyhle, Karen Swisher, Tracy Stevens, and Ruth Trinidad Galván (2009) suggest: Strategic resistance evident in Indigenous communities across the globe has been to reclaim educational theory and practice by creating or adapting curriculum and pedagogies that better reflect Indigenous worldviews, that maintain Indigenous culture, and that resist assimilating cultural and political forces. (2009: 336)

Indigenous scholars continue to expand this notion of engaging strategic forms of resistance to settler colonialism through critical Indigenous studies of Red Pedagogy (Grande, 2015), Safety Zones Theory (Lomawaima and McCarty, 2006), Tribal Critical Race Theory (Brayboy, 2006), Decolonization (G. H. Smith, 2000, 2003; L. T. Smith, 2012), Indigenous knowledge systems (Cajete, 2015; Battiste, 1998, 2000, 2008, 2013), Critical and Culturally Sustaining/Revitalizing Pedagogy (McCarty and Lee, 2014), and Indigenous Social Justice Pedagogy (Brayboy and McCarty, 2010; Shirley, 2017). Though each have differing origins, these proposed critical Indigenous theories inform our collective consciousness and assist in moving our communities in the direction of an education rooted in decolonization and transformative possibilities. Critical Indigenous pedagogy ‘understands that all inquiry is both political and moral….and it seeks forms of praxis and inquiry that are emancipatory and empowering’ (Denzin and Lincoln, 2008 2). However, John Tippeconnic (2015) reminds us that, while such critical theories are essential, ‘there remains a noticeable disconnect between critical theory and kindergarten to twelfth-grade education in public and BIE [Bureau of Indian Education] schools’ (2015: 40). This disconnect is a call for efforts to continue to engage critical Indigenous pedagogy in K-12 education to restore, revitalize, and sustain how Indigenous communities will respond to ongoing pressures of corporatization and settler colonialism – in essence it calls for the emergence of critical Indigenous teachers.

CRITICAL INDIGENOUS EDUCATION AND PRAXIS: THE CALL FOR CRITICAL INDIGENOUS TEACHERS What then is the potential of education as an instrument, or technique of consciousness, that can stretch beyond the curricular and into personal and political zones of responsibility and service, to each other and to land? (A. Simpson, 2015: 80)

Engaging in critical Indigenous pedagogy and praxis creates a pathway that embraces Indigenous epistemologies and the struggles and spaces of resistance, thus generating a pedagogy of hope, agency, and commitment to our relations. It offers a restorative lens that makes clear the (un)known tensions that we feel as we witness and experience the exploitation and unjust circumstances impacting Indigenous communities. It offers a unique and empowering space for Indigenous youth and communities to engage in dialogue about their own struggles, goals, and aspirations. For Indigenous peoples, these efforts are not limited to the individuals, but involve the collective consciousness and solidarity of educators and communities (Cajete, 2015; Grande, 2015; G. H. Smith, 2004, 2017). By utilizing the conceptual tools and analysis critical Indigenous theories offer, we can begin to see a resurgence (L. Simpson, 2014) of Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies guiding our curricular and pedagogical choices. Guided by Nishnaabeg intelligence, Leanne Simpson suggests: We simply cannot bring about the resurgence of our nations if we have no one that can think within the emergent networks of Nishnaabeg intelligence. We cannot bring about the kind of radical transformation we seek if we are solely reliant upon state sanctioned and state run education systems. (2014: 13)

Herein lies the challenge posed to Indigenous educators, schools, community members, and tribal nations. The calling to do this work is not easy but it is a beautiful (re)awakening to be in relation with Indigenous knowledge,

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ancestors, spiritual beings, ceremonies, and land that have been waiting for us to return; not only as a simple act of physically being present but to do so in ways that enact lessons learned to facilitate survivance and sustain the vibrancy of Indigenous peoples. The following are key aspects that I suggest inform the making of a critical Indigenous teacher.

Knowing and Living Our Creation Stories: Indigenous Epistemologies and Ontologies To begin, the strength and value of knowing our creation stories or stories of emergence set in motion the spirit of this work. When Indigenous teachers begin with conceptualizing what it means to be of place through such stories, it offers a renewed relationship to their community. Such stories embody the roots of what it is to be Indigenous in relation to place. It is a different history, a different story, that predates our colonial encounters. Returning to the homelands of Bears Ears, Alfred Lomahquahu of the Hopi nation reflects: Cedar Mesa is a part of our footprints, a path that tells a story. History is crucial to man because it tells us of who we are. Those who lived before us have never left. Their voices are part of the rhythm or heartbeat of the universe and will echo through eternity. (cited in Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition Proposal, 2015: 10)

This notion of ‘history telling us who we are’ and that ‘their voices…will echo through eternity’ is the beginning of shaping a critical consciousness that leads Indigenous teachers on the path to being intentional about privileging Indigenous knowledge and values in their curriculum and pedagogy. Such stories define our relations as a community and most certainly how we interact within schooling spaces. For example, it is common to find Hopi and Diné students acknowledging their clan affiliations within the classroom. In this case, when/if Hopi and Diné teachers contextualize such relations in our creation stories,

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we can see a powerful space of engagement among the youth that reclaims our relations in humanizing ways. I am reminded of our8 efforts to support Indigenous teacher candidates in the process of engaging critical Indigenous pedagogies and notions of decolonization. The Indigenous pre-service teachers within our Indigenous Teacher Education Project were asked to generate a curriculum that emerged from an environmental issue facing their home community. As they prepared to develop the curriculum projects, the preservice teachers found themselves engaging in critical analyses of how they would engage youth in thinking about certain environmental injustices. In each case, they could not see themselves engaging their curriculum projects without beginning and returning to our creation stories. They collectively valued the notion that in order for Indigenous youth to understand the injustice occurring in their Indigenous community, the youth needed to know their relations to land through such stories of emergence.

Understanding the Context: Problematizing Western Schooling Systems It is important to understand the varying contexts of where Indigenous students learn and the schools they attend. Within the United States, according to the National Indian Education Association, there are approximately 644,000 students in K-12 systems, with about 90% of American Indian/Alaska Native students attending public schools and 4% attending Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) schools (National Indian Education Association, 2018). If we are to reach these students, there are several points of analysis that Indigenous teachers must take into consideration. The initial being that there is a great need for Indigenous teachers to bring critical Indigenous pedagogies to public schooling systems. This includes BIE or

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tribally controlled schools who are operating under Western schooling constructs – when in fact they should be the spaces where notions of self-determination and sovereignty are modeled. Given this context and knowing that schools were the colonial tactic and tools used to erase and replace Indigenous languages and value systems (Lomawaima and McCarty, 2006), there is a great urgency to reconceptualize how Indigenous teachers can enact agency within such educational systems. Thus, it is critical that Indigenous teachers work to understand the ways in which their curriculum and pedagogy can disrupt the hegemonic structures of schooling.

Contemporary Spaces of Resistance: Curriculum and Pedagogy as Sacred Landscapes Let’s take a moment to reflect on what we know about the injustices occurring across Indigenous lands. Consider the spaces of resistance occurring at Bears Ears, #NoDAPL at Standing Rock, #SaveOakFlat in San Carlos Apache, and #SaveTheConfluence in the Grand Canyon. Braided across each of these contexts, there is a clear premise to why Indigenous peoples are moved to Defend the Sacred. It is an act of agency that is informed by Indigenous epistemologies. It is an indication that our identities in relation to such places are thriving. However, it is also a concern that our spaces of prayer and the stories that emerge from within are also in need of continued protection. Jim Enote of Zuni assists us in understanding the significance of defending the sacred. He shares, ‘We hope to go to Bears Ears to learn. Our history lies within the landscape and when we go there we find missing chapters of our book’ (cited in Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition Proposal, 2015: 19). These are chapters that cannot be found on the shelves of our public schools. I return to a point made earlier, in that when we engage these sites of resistance, it makes

clear the pedagogical implications for seeing Indigenous education (and the spaces where learning takes place) as a sacred landscape (Garcia and Shirley, 2012). A sacred space of engagement shaped by Indigenous knowledge systems, values, languages, prayer, and unity. Elsewhere, I continue to expand on the concept of Indigenous education and schools as a sacred landscape (Garcia, forthcoming) through the guiding questions of: What do current forms of resistance to exploitation of natural resources, land, and sacred sites mean for schools, curriculum, and pedagogy serving Indigenous youth? Can defending sacred sites be the impetus for redefining how Indigenous educators and schools conceptualize curriculum? For Indigenous teachers, this is the space of hope and liberation. Much like we witness Indigenous peoples on the frontlines protecting what is sacred, for Indigenous teachers, the frontlines are rooted in sustaining a critical Indigenous consciousness (Lee, 2006) that embodies decolonizing pedagogies and is generative of curriculum that honors Indigenous knowledge systems and values, and engages youth in enacting agency. By drawing upon sites of resistance and sacred sites, Indigenous teachers are encouraged to identify how Indigenous epistemologies are activated, and inform/become curriculum and pedagogy. In doing so, Indigenous teachers can begin to see, as Cajete suggests, how ‘Indigenous epistemology guides our pedagogy, and our pedagogy models our epistemology’ (2015: 204).

Indigenous Teachers as Nation-builders: Reciprocity through Accountability [Indigenous accountability] is rooted in Native principles of sovereignty and self-determination – the belief in the right to determine locally the direction and method of delivery of education to native students and communities, whether these students attend mainstream public or tribally controlled schools. (Tibbetts and Faircloth, 2008: 153)

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Indigenous teachers have the capacity to impact the next generation of care takers of our Indigenous communities and tribal nations. This process requires a working conceptualization of what it means to strengthen our cultural identity and ways of being while focusing on relationships through the Indigenous principles of sovereignty and self-determination. Indigenous teachers serving Indigenous students can be the catalyst by which sovereignty, self-determination, and self-education can be endorsed as they strive to find autonomy in regards to the learning experiences (i.e., curriculum, pedagogy, Indigenous knowledge) they create for Indigenous youth. Consequently, such a level of accountability extends beyond the Western canon of state standards and testing measures. I encourage Indigenous teachers to reclaim what it means to be accountable to our Indigenous nations and to see the deep relationship it has to reciprocity. It is an Indigenous accountability that moves our Indigenous youth to see themselves as transformative change agents who contribute to Nation-building. Importantly, Bryan Brayboy, Amy Fann, Angelina Castagno, and Jessica Solyom suggest: ‘Indigenous nations cannot successfully engage in nation-building projects that are driven by sovereignty and self-determination unless they develop independence of the mind by taking action to restore pride in their traditions, languages, and knowledge’ (2012: 15). The notions of ‘independence of the mind’ and ‘restoration of pride’ are inclusive of Indigenous teachers embodying a critical Indigenous consciousness, a restorative lens, that guides their pedagogical decisions to lead youth on the path toward Nation-building. Indigenous teachers are contemporary knowledge keepers who – in partnership with Indigenous elders and youth – can sustain the vibrancy and well-being of our Indigenous communities in ways that engage the truth-telling practices (Shirley, 2017) of our histories and injustices, and are guided by the trust in our knowledge systems.

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CONCLUSION I’ve been able to run for not just myself, but I’ve been able to run for water. Our fight for clean water here on Hopi. I’ve been able to run for advocacy around all our natural resources and sacred sites. And of course, for the health and well-being of individuals and our people. It’s very important to me and helps to balance the work that I do. Because a lot of the work that I do is not just educating in the classroom but educating outside of the classroom in our community awareness events. So I just really feel that it’s a large part of who I am and continues to guide me and be there for me. (Samantha, research participant)

In closing, I wish to honor the critical Indigenous educators, like Samantha and other Hopi/Tewa educators, I have had the privilege to learn with as we navigated critical dialogues regarding Indigenous education. In the opening passage, Hopi/Tewa community educator and 2nd-grade teacher Samantha provides insight to the intersections of running and critical Indigenous pedagogies within a tribally controlled school. Samantha’s running and prayers for water led her to address a student’s question of ‘why does my grandmother have to buy water? We have a faucet; why can’t we use that water?’. The community in which she lives and works is suffering from high arsenic levels in the water. Eventually, the 2nd-grade class led an initiative to draft and deliver a letter to the Hopi Tribal Council requesting this issue be addressed – they listened and efforts to confront the issue have started. Indigenous educators, like Samantha, are tirelessly working the educational frontlines on behalf of our Indigenous communities. I believe Samantha is speaking firmly to Sandy Grande’s notion of reciprocity. Grande states: ‘Through the ethic of reciprocity, we need to remind ourselves that accountability to the collective requires a commitment to engage, extend, trouble, speak back to, and intensify our words and deeds’ (2018: 61). Many Indigenous educators are engaging Indigenous youth in decolonizing pedagogies that speak to revitalizing our Indigenous

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Nations through community projects that activate an understanding of what it means to be Indigenous. They are disrupting the pressures of state mandates that dismiss the knowledge, values, and history found in our relations to land, our knowledge systems, ceremonies, and cultural practices.

Notes 1  I use the terms Native American, Native, American Indian, and Indigenous peoples interchangeably throughout this proposal. Native American and American Indian refer specifically to Indigenous peoples of the United States. Indigenous peoples reflects people joining in the global effort to decolonize their worldviews and reposition our epistemology and ontology. 2  Throughout this work, I include myself and my Indigenous Hopi community within the phrases of ‘we’, ‘I’, ‘our’, and ‘us’ to include ourselves in the context of Indigenous peoples. 3  See Bears Ears Complaint, Case 1:17-cv-02590, filed December 4, 2017. 4  See Bears Ears Complaint, Case 1:17-cv-02606, filed December 7, 2017. 5  CATV 47 visits Mni Wiconi School at Standing Rock, October 26, 2016. Retrieved November 1, 2016 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu. be&v=AZwhq1z11Nw&app=desktop 6  Naelyn Pike has been an active youth protecting the San Carlos Apache sacred site located on Oak Flat. 7  Autumn Peltier is a Canadian youth advocating for water. She addressed the United Nations General Assembly in the spring of 2018. 8  In this case, I am referring to my colleague Dr Valerie Shirley, who is the Director of the Indigenous Teacher Education Project at the University of Arizona. I serve as the Co-Director.

REFERENCES Battiste, M. (1998). Enabling the autumn seed: Toward a decolonized approach to Aboriginal knowledge, language, and education. Canadian Journal of Native Education, 22(1), 16–27. Battiste, M. (2000). Reclaiming indigenous voice and vision. Vancouver, Canada: University of British Columbia.

Battiste, M. (2008). Research ethics for protecting indigenous knowledge and heritage: Institutional and researcher responsibilities. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, & L. T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies (pp. 497–509). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Battiste, M. (2013). Decolonizing education: Nourishing the learning spirit. Vancouver, Canada: University of British Columbia Press. Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition. (2015, October 15). Proposal to President Barack Obama for the creation of Bears Ears National Monument. Retrieved June 5, 2018 from https://www. bearsearscoalition.org/wp-content/ uploads/2015/10/Bears-Ears-Inter-TribalCoalition-Proposal-10-15-15.pdf Black Mesa Trust. (2009). Hopi Kuuyi Curriculum: Kuuyit oovi Suuvotumala. Unpublished. Brayboy, B. (2006). Toward a tribal critical race theory in education. The Urban Review, 37(5), 425–446. Brayboy, B. & McCarty, T. L. (2010). Indigenous knowledges and social justice pedagogy. In T. K. Chapman & N. Hobbel (Eds.), Social justice pedagogy across the curriculum: The practice of freedom (pp. 184–200). New York: Routledge. Brayboy, B., Fann, A., Castagno, A. & Solyom, J. (2012). Postsecondary education for American Indian and Alaska Natives: Higher education for nation building and selfdetermination. ASHE Higher Education Report, 37(5). San Francisco: Wiley Cajete, G. A. (2015). Indigenous community: Rekindling the teachings of The Seventh Fire. St. Paul, Minnesota: Living Justice Press. Denetdale, J. N. (2007). Reclaiming Diné history: The legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito and Juanita. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Denzin, N. K. & Lincoln, Y. S. (2008). Introduction: Critical methodologies and Indigenous inquiry. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, & L. T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies (pp. 1–20). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Deyhle, D., Swisher, K., Stevens, T. & Trinidad Galván, R. (2009). Indigenous resistance and renewal: From colonizing practices to selfdetermination. In F. M. Connelly, M. F. He, & J. Phillion (Eds.), The Sage handbook of

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curriculum and instruction (pp. 329–348). Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Freire, P. (2002). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Garcia, J. (Forthcoming). Decolonial praxis: Hopi/Tewa educators engage critical Indigenous theories and pedagogy. In J. Tippeconnic & M. J. Tippeconnic Fox. (Eds.). On Indian Ground: The Southwest. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing Garcia, J. & Shirley, V. (2012). Performing decolonization: Lessons learned from Indigenous youth, teachers and leaders’ engagement with critical Indigenous pedagogy. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 28(2), 76–91. Grande, S. (2015). Red pedagogy: Native American social and political thought (10th anniversary edition). New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Grande, S. (2018). Refusing the University. In E. Tuck & W. Yang (Eds.), Toward what justice? Describing diverse dreams of justice education (pp. 47–65). New York: Routledge. Kovach, M. (2009). Indigenous methodologies: Characteristics, conversations, and contexts. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press. LaDuke, W. (2016). The Winona LaDuke chronicles: Stories from the front lines in the battle for environmental justice. Ponsford, MN: Spotted Horse Press. Lee, T. (2006). ‘I came here to learn how to be a leader’: An intersection of critical pedagogy and Indigenous education. InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 2(1), http://escholarship.org/uc/ item/92m798m0 Lomawaima, K. T. & McCarty, L. T. (2006). ‘To remain an Indian’: Lessons in democracy from a century of Native American education. New York: Teachers College Press. McCarty, T. L. & Lee, T. S. (2014). Critical culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy and Indigenous education sovereignty. Harvard Education Review, 84(1), 101–123. National Indian Education Association. (2018). Information on Native students. Retrieved June 8, 2018 from http://www.niea.org/ourstory/history/information-on-native-students/ Obama, B. (2016, December 28). Presidential Proclamation: Establishment of the Bears Ears National Monument. Retrieved June 5, 2018

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on https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ the-press-office/2016/12/28/proclamationestablishment-bears-ears-nationalmonument Shirley, V. J. (2017). Indigenous social justice pedagogy: Teaching into the risks and cultivating the heart. Critical Questions in Education, 8(2), 163–177. Simpson, A. (2015). At the crossroads of constraint: Competing moral visions in Grande’s Red Pedagogy: Response 1. In S. Grande (Ed.), Red pedagogy: Native American social and political thought, 10th anniversary edition (pp. 79–82). New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Simpson, L. B. (2014). Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3), 1–25. Smith, G. H. (2000). Protecting and respecting Indigenous knowledge. In M. Battiste (Ed.), Reclaiming indigenous voice and vision (pp. 209–224). Vancouver, Canada: University of British Columbia Press. Smith, G. H. (2003, December). Kaupapa Maori Theory: Theorizing Indigenous transformation of education and schooling. Paper presented at the ‘Kaupapa Maori Symposium’ NZARE/AARE Joint Conference, Auckland, NZ. Smith, G. H. (2004). Mai i te Maramatanga, ki te Putanga Mai o te Tahuritanga: From Conscientization to Transformation. Indigenous Education, 37(1), 46–52. Smith, G. H. (2017). Preface. In P. Whitinui, M. Rodríguez de France, & O. McIvor (Eds.), Promising practices in Indigenous teacher education (pp. ix–x). Singapore: Springer. Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies (2nd edition). New York: St. Martin’s Press. Tibbetts, K. & Faircloth, S. (2008). Looking forward. In M. Benham (Ed.), Indigenous educational models for contemporary practice: In our mother’s voice volume II (pp. 153–154). New York: Routledge. Tippeconnic, J. (2015). Critical theory, red pedagogy, and Indigenous knowledge: The missing links to improving education: Response 1. In S. Grande (Ed.), Red pedagogy: Native American social and political thought, 10th anniversary edition (pp. 35–41). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Trump. D. (2017, December 4). Presidential Proclamation: Modifying the Bears Ears National Monument. Retrieved June 5, 2018 from https://www.whitehouse. gov/presidential-actions/presidentialproclamation-modifying-bears-ears-nationalmonument/

Vizenor, G. R. (1994). Manifest manners: PostIndian warriors of survivance. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Wall, D. & Masayesva, V. (2004). People of the corn: Teachings in Hopi traditional agriculture, spirituality, and sustainability. American Indian Quarterly, 28(3/4), 435–453.

53 Ethical Relationality as a Pathway for Non-Indigenous Educators to Decolonize Curriculum and Instruction Shashi Shergill and David Scott

Following the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) on Indian Residential Schools (2015a), provincial and territorial jurisdictions of education in Canada have been called on to undertake curricular reforms that make the history of residential schools, Treaties, and the historical and contemporary contributions of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples to Canada a mandatory educational requirement for all K-12 students (Call to Action 62.i). Established in June 2008 with a mandate of five years, the TRC sought to provide public forums for survivors to share their stories, whereby the greater Canadian public could bear witness to the profoundly destructive legacies of the residential school system. Over the last decade, jurisdictions of education in Canada have introduced a range of curricular initiatives explicitly responding to the TRC’s calls to action (Alberta Education, 2019; Ontario Ministry of Education, 2019; British Columbia, 2019). But despite these positive developments, research suggests that

teachers feel a great deal of ambivalence and uncertainty towards such curricular directives (den Heyer and Abbott, 2011; Donald, 2009b; Kanu, 2005; Milne, 2017; Scott, 2013; Scott and Gani, 2018; Tupper & Cappello, 2008). Specifically, research has found that many educators choose either to ignore curricular mandates to engage Indigenous knowledge systems, ways of knowing, and histories, or address them in a largely tokenistic manner, where aspects of Indigenous culture are explored in superficial and trivial ways. In a study examining how teachers in the province of Manitoba were addressing Indigenous history and experiences in the classroom, Kanu (2005), for example, found that although there is an ‘expressed openness among teachers to include Aboriginal perspectives into the school curriculum, in practice little headway was being made except in a few unique cases’ (2005: 57). Research suggests that little has changed in the ensuing decade. A more recent study suggests that while teachers, in this case in the province of Ontario, wanted to teach

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about residential schools and Indigenous culture, they were uncertain about what to teach and how (Milne, 2017). These findings should not come as a surprise. The teachers in Canada – the vast majority of whom are of Euro-Canadian descent (Johnston et al., 2009: 2) – now being directed to teach the unique philosophies, historical memory, and traditions of specific First Nations, Métis, and Inuit nations are products of an educational formation that has ill prepared them for this task. An extensive body of literature has documented the ways mainstream systems of education have either ignored Indigenous participation and presence in Canadian society (Donald, 2009b), or, when included, positioned Indigenous peoples as frozen in the past (Francis, 1992), or an impediment to European progress (Clark, 2007; Manitoba Indian Brotherhood, 1977). Murray Sinclair, chair of the TRC, affirmed this point, noting that at the same time residential schools were working to eradicate the culture and language of Indigenous peoples, Canadian students were being told that Indigenous people ‘were inferior, they were pagans, that they were heathens and savages’ (Sinclair, as cited by Kennedy, 2015: para. 7). During the unveiling of the TRC’s recommendations in Ottawa, Commissioner Marie Wilson articulated the specific omissions that have taken place in Canadian classrooms: Think about your Canadian history classes. Did the story of Canada begin only shortly before Europeans came up the river this city is built on? … How frank and truthful are we with Canadian students about the history of residential schools and the role our governments and religious institutions played in its systematic attempt to erase the cultures of Aboriginal people? (Wilson, as cited in Curry and Galloway, 2015: Education section, para. 2)

Educators now confronted with a mandated responsibility to address the reality of Canada’s colonial inheritance are, as Donald (2009b: 4) noted, ‘naturally finding it difficult to relinquish the more comfortable stories of Canada that they have been told and grown accustomed to telling’. In this regard,

the teaching of the histories, memories, and experiences of Indigenous peoples has meant that educators must now grapple with ‘difficult knowledge’ (Britzman, 1998: 2) related to histories of colonial practices that disrupt popular narratives of Canada as a raceless society and human rights leader, which are central to many educators’ personal sense of identity (Mackey, 2002). Wishing to place Indigenous memory, histories, and experiences at the center of curricular and pedagogical classroom engagements, an increasing number of non-Indigenous educators are actively seeking to counter this destructive legacy of exclusion and misrepresentation. In what follows we outline one such attempt to undertake this work involving a month-long inquiry into the historical relationship among Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in the place now called Canada. Seeking to better appreciate what it might mean to teach for reconciliation, we outline the differing ways this term is understood in the literature, including in the TRC’s final report (2015a, 2015b). Highlighting key resistances educators have had towards carrying out curricular mandates aligned to the TRC’s (2015a) calls to action, we demonstrate how the work of Indigenous scholarship (e.g., Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples [RCAP], 1996; King, 2003, 2012), and in particular Donald’s notion of ethical relationality (Donald, 2009a, 2009b, 2012), offers a conceptual framework for nonIndigenous educators to carry out this work in ways that are relational, implicative, and critical. As part of this process, we surface the key principles that guided our work over the course of this month-long inquiry.

POSITIONING OURSELVES IN THIS WORK We would like to give thanks to the people of Treaty Seven including the Blackfoot Confederacy made up of the Siksika, the Piikuni, and the Kainai, as well as the Tsuut’ina

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and the Stoney Nakoda First Nations, whose traditional territories we are privileged to live and work on. We additionally acknowledge that the territory on which we reside is home to Métis Nation Region III. Before proceeding, it is also necessary to position ourselves in this work. The first author of this chapter is I, Shashi, a settler of East Indian origin from the northern region of Punjab. Born in England, I lived the majority of my life in the West Midlands region up until 17 years ago, and have since made Alberta, Canada my home. Upon arriving in Canada, I quickly understood that amidst the beauty and charm of the landscape of this country lay the entangled roots of European colonization. Forging a path towards decolonizing education, and the pursuit of a more just and democratic society, is where I find my place in the conversation on reconciliation. These efforts are empowered partly by my own personal and professional experiences through transformative moments that have contributed to an ongoing understanding of the complexities of what it means to teach for social justice. The second author of this article is I, David. I can most accurately be described by Mackey’s (2002) term Canadian–Canadian: an English speaker of European descent who, having limited connection to their European ancestry, identifies first and foremost as Canadian. As a White Canadian, the process of teaching for reconciliation has involved coming to terms with the historical reality that it only became possible to live in this place I call home through a historic chain of events, perpetrated by my ancestral forbearers, involving theft of land and a trail of broken promises. As a teacher educator involved in this work for the last decade, I have been fortunate to gain insights from Elders and Indigenous scholars who have provided guidance on how to take up this work in a good way.

Terminology Throughout this article the use of the term Aboriginal is consistent with language used

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in the province of Alberta’s social studies program (Alberta Education, 2005), as well as the Constitution Act of 1982 where Aboriginal people are defined as First Nations (Indian), Métis, and Inuit peoples (Government of Canada, 2015: 2). It is important to note, however, that many Indigenous people are increasingly rejecting the term Aboriginal. The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, along with the Anishinabek of Ontario, have recently argued that the term is an English one that has been imposed on their people. In this regard, they note that although most people assume Aboriginal means first inhabitants, the Latin prefix ‘ab’ means ‘away from’ or ‘not’, and therefore could equally mean ‘not original’ (as cited in Marks, 2014: para. 4). As a consequence, when speaking to the Canadian context, rather than Aboriginal, when not referencing particular documents, we adopt the term Indigenous; or where appropriate, the names of particular Indigenous nations such as the Blackfoot and Plains Cree. Throughout this article, when we use the term Indigenous, we refer to members of communities, not only in the place now known as Canada, but all over the world, who have inhabited particular territories for long periods of time (Dei, 2000: 114).

THE CONTESTED NATURE OF RECONCILIATION As has been well documented in the literature, based on a belief that Indigenous cultures and traditions were ‘primitive’ and inferior, in 1876 the Canadian government introduced the Indian Act (Canadiana, 2015), which gave the Ministry of Indian Affairs the legal basis to forcibly remove First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children from their families and communities and intern them in church-run residential schools (Miller, 1996). The pernicious and assimilationist intentions of these schools were expressed in 1920 by Duncan Scott, the deputy minister of Indian Affairs,

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who asserted: ‘Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian department’ (as cited in Miller, 2004: 35). By 1920, attendance at residential schools was compulsory for all status ‘Indian’ children. When the last school was closed in 1996, it is estimated that 150,000 First Nation, Métis, and Inuit children went through the Canadian residential school system (TRC, 2015a: 2). Following many years of pressure from Indigenous peoples and activists, in 2008 the then Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, made a historic statement of apology in the House of Commons to former students of Indian residential schools. During the government’s official apology, Harper stated: ‘The government now recognizes that the consequences of the Indian residential schools policy were profoundly negative and that this policy has had a lasting and damaging impact on aboriginal culture, heritage and language’ (Government of Canada, 2010: para. 4). As part of this apology, the Harperled government promised a settlement package to compensate First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people who had experienced emotional, physical, or sexual abuse as a result of the residential school system. In addition, the government launched the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada to provide a public forum for survivors to share their stories around the profoundly destructive legacies of these schools. While a large number of Canadians saw these measures as a significant step forward towards a new era of reconciliation between Indigenous people and settlers, many Indigenous activists, scholars, and writers have argued otherwise. The Indigenous writer Thomas King (2012), for instance, contended the official government apology was quite limited: ‘there was nothing about treaty violations. Nothing about the theft of land and resources. Nothing about government incompetence, indifference, and chicanery. Nothing about the institutional racism that Aboriginal

people have endured and continue to endure’ (2012: 122–3). More recently, the notion that Canada is genuinely in an era of reconciliation was further troubled by the rise of the Idle No More movement in 2012 protesting the Federal Government’s legislative abuses of Indigenous treaty rights. In addition, the recent government inquiry into the high numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls came under intense criticism from the victims’ families, who felt they had not been adequately consulted (Clancy, 2017). For many Indigenous activists, the actions of the federal government and the greater Canadian society reflect misrecognition of what reconciliation entails. Indigenous scholar and activist Haydon King, for instance, argued that popular understandings of reconciliation suggest that ‘we can all get along if we hold hands’ (as cited in Andrew-Gee, 2017: chapter 5, para. 17). He contrasts this with what Indigenous communities need. Namely, significant transfer of land and resources, as promised in treaty agreements, that would work to address structural poverty, grossly inadequate social services, and substandard living conditions on many reserves. Ultimately, such work would involve re-establishing rights of sovereignty and self-determination of Indigenous nations. For Alfred (2017), undertaking this work will require Canadians to ‘ask themselves some hard questions and be prepared for some serious sacrifices if we are ever going to free ourselves from the grip of the past and the racism and patriarchy that the Indian Act represents and perpetuates’ (2017: para. 9). The contested nature of reconciliation was similarly present within the TRC (2015b) itself. The commission noted that Elders and knowledge keepers asserted that there was no specific word for reconciliation in their languages. However, pointing to Indigenous understandings of reconciliation, the Elders shared many words, stories, as well as sacred objects, such as peace pipes and wampum belts, ‘used to establish relationships, repair

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conflicts, restore harmony, and make peace’ (TRC, 2015b: 12). Flowing from these ancient understandings, the Commission defined reconciliation as ‘an ongoing process of establishing and maintaining respectful relationships. A critical part of this process involves repairing damaged trust by making apologies, providing individual and collective reparations, and following through with concrete actions that demonstrate real societal change’ (2015b: 11). Noting that education is key to reconciliation, in the summary report the Commission called on provincial and territorial jurisdictions of education to work with Indigenous communities and organizations to develop and introduce age-appropriate curriculum on the history and impact of residential schools and Treaties, as well as First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples’ historical and contemporary contributions to Canada (TRC, 2015a: Call to Action 62.i).

ETHICALLY RELATIONAL POSSIBILITIES FOR TEACHING FOR RECONCILIATION While ministries of education across Canada have made substantive moves to carry out the TRC’s calls to action for education, research suggests that many educators in Alberta (den Heyer and Abbott, 2011; Donald, 2009b; Scott, 2013; Scott and Gani, 2018), and in other jurisdictions of education in Canada including Manitoba (Kanu, 2005, 2011) and Ontario (Milne, 2017), have resisted such efforts. One of the key themes around why this has occurred involves an argument that because educators are not Indigenous, it is inappropriate for them to engage their students around themes outlined in the TRC’s calls to action. In a study with teachers from Alberta, for instance, one participant asserted: ‘And there’s always that danger, right? I’m an Irish Canadian talking about Aboriginal perspective. Am I really the best person to do that?’ (as cited in Berg, 2017: 156). This belief

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system is reflective of what Donald (2009a: 32) termed the ‘cultural disqualification’ argument, where teachers ‘retreat behind the comforting shelter of real or passive ignorance’ that disqualifies them from participating in curricular mandates designed to engage with Indigenous histories and ways of knowing. The cultural disqualification argument points to tensions that arise when the majority of teachers tasked with carrying out curricular mandates aligned with the TRC’s calls to action are themselves not Indigenous and have, moreover, received very little formation around the philosophies and histories they are expected to teach. This argument additionally points to concerns that, in attending to this mandate, a primarily non-Indigenous teaching population is in danger of taking possession of the knowledge of Indigenous peoples in the same way Europeans once took possession of their territories (Kanu, 2005: 59). Grounded in a belief that discussing Indigenous issues constitutes a dangerous minefield of identity politics, educators in Canada have expressed concerns that their attempts to represent Indigenous philosophies and memory will lead to accusations that they are culturally insensitive, and even racist. Donald (2009a, 2009b, 2012, 2013), a descendent of the Papaschase Cree, has provided substantive insights into the source and origins of this common justification for not attending to Indigenous curricular mandates. Donald (2009b) traces the cultural disqualification argument to stories of Canada generations of students have been taught in schools that have worked to deny and marginalize the historical, temporal, spatial, and legal relationship among Indigenous peoples and settler populations. As a result of this dynamic, many educators have come to see Indigenous ways of knowing and being as something that is fundamentally unknowable to outsiders, and thus incompatible with formal public education (Donald, 2009a: 36). Along these lines, Donald (2009b: 20) maintained that manifestations of what he terms ‘colonial frontier logics’ deeply inhabit

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mainstream systems of education, curriculum documents, and current approaches to teaching Indigenous perspectives. For Donald (2009b: 20), colonial frontier logics involve ‘those epistemological assumptions and presuppositions, derived from the colonial project of dividing the world according to racial and cultural categorizations, which serve to naturalize assumed divides and thus contribute to their social and institutional perpetuation’. One of the key teachings of colonial frontier logics is that Indigenous peoples and Canadians live in different worlds. To explain how this situation has come about, Donald (2009b) draws on the prominence of the fort as an image that has become a mythic symbol in Canada. Recounting his experience of visiting Fort Edmonton Park, Donald explains how the fort, regardless of its location in Canada, ubiquitously separates Indigenous peoples and the newcomers. Recounting his experience, Donald (2009b: 2) notes that the space outside the fort walls where the Indigenous people were located ‘was clearly an anthropological realm – a museum-like exhibit’, whereas the inside of the fort inhabited by Europeans ‘was a more industrious place where newcomers labored in the interests of civilizing a country and building a nation’ (2009b: 2). As a result of this process, Donald (2009b) contended that the logic underpinning the fort creation story has fostered a social and spatial organization – demarcated by the palisades of the fort walls – that positions Indigenous peoples as outsiders and settler communities as insiders. In seeking a model whereby Indigenous memory, traditions, and experiences could be engaged within classroom contexts in ways that refuse the colonial frontier logics of the fort, Donald (2009a: 24) has called for a ‘decolonizing form of curriculum that conceptualizes Aboriginal and Canadian perspectives as relational, inter-referential, and mutually implicative’. To realize this relational vision, Donald (2012) draws on Ermine’s (2007) notion of ethical space. According to Ermine (2007), ethical space

constitutes the area between two entities. Like two trees growing close to each other in a forest, ethical space can be seen as the points of contact where their root systems entangle and enmesh. For Donald (2012), these points of contact hold the potential of becoming a meeting place where Indigenous peoples and settler communities can ‘revisit and deconstruct their shared past, and engage critically with the realization that their present and future is similarly tied together’ (2012: 44). In this way, ethical space is predicated on an ecological understanding of the world that seeks to appreciate more deeply how our different histories, life experiences, and perspectives position us in relation to each other (Donald, 2012: 45). An ethical space that honors the organic continuance of Indigenous traditions only becomes possible for Donald (2012), however, if Indigenous and Euro-Western knowledge systems, perspectives, and worldviews are treated as distinct. Insights from Donald share affinities with the work of Indigenous scholars and allies in other contexts (Four Arrows, 2013; Kuokkanen, 2007; Snelgrove, Dhamoon, and Corntassel, 2014). Following an ethically relational orientation, Snelgrove and colleagues (2014) highlight the importance of a more relational and self-implicative approach to decolonizing education. In this regard, they argue that non-Indigenous educational allies must reject the Free Tibet Syndrome, whereby they magnify and focus on the impacts of colonialism (e.g., the disposition of land) in other far-off places, but fail to engage how they, as settlers, are complicit in colonial processes in their local context (Snelgrove et  al., 2014: 22). Calling on educators to attend to the important question regarding ‘how are you entering Indigenous homelands?’, they argue for an educational commitment to Indigenous resurgence involving the ways Indigenous nationhood and sovereignty can be regenerated, and ultimately restored (Snelgrove et  al., 2014: 4). Paralleling colonial frontier

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logics, Four Arrows (2013) argues that nonIndigenous educators cannot respectfully and authentically Indigenize curriculum and instruction without understanding what he terms ‘anti-Indianism’ (Four Arrows, 2013: 20). Evident in the way the United States still honors Christopher Columbus with a national holiday, Four Arrows (2013: 20) asserted that such policies and practices foster an ‘educational hegemony designed to maintain status quo benefits for the ruling elite [which] is by definition a form of anti-Indianism’. Taken as a whole, this work shares many commitments of critical pedagogy. For instance, through the concept of multilogicality, Kincheloe and Steinberg (2012: 341) argue that educators require deep encounters with diverse knowledge systems that can counter ‘the hegemonic and oppressive aspects of Western education’. Through helping students better appreciate the emphasis of Indigenous knowledge systems on ‘relationships of human beings to both one another and to their ecosystem’, educators can counter Western scientific understandings of the world (Kincheloe and Steinberg, 2012: 342). This concept of critical multilogicality affords teachers and students with the ability to challenge previously held knowledge, whereby ‘the single photograph of Cartesian thinking is replaced by the multiple angles of the holographic photograph’ (Kincheloe and Steinberg: 2012, 345).

ALL MY RELATIONS INQUIRY In what follows we examine how a set of key principles guided our collaborative work over the course of a month-long grade 9 inquiry into the historical relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in the place called Canada. Entitled ‘All My Relations’, the inquiry was situated within the Alberta social studies program of study (Alberta Education, 2005), which explicitly calls for the teaching of Aboriginal perspectives in relation to larger thematic

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topics examined at specific grade levels. The program states that ‘for historical and constitutional reasons, an understanding of Canada requires an understanding of Aboriginal perspectives [and] Aboriginal experiences’ (Alberta Education, 2005: 4). As part of this process, all K-12 teachers are directed to help students ‘appreciate and respect how multiple perspectives, including Aboriginal … shape Canada’s political, socio-economic, linguistic and cultural realities’ (2005: 2). Under the larger organizing topic of collective rights, the grade 9 program (Alberta Education, 2007) specifically directs educators to address, among other elements, ‘the various effects of government policies on citizenship and on Canadian society’ (2007: 3), along with the ways ‘Treaty 6, Treaty 7 and Treaty 8 recognize the status and identity of Aboriginal peoples’ (2007: 4). Through investigating historically significant events that have impacted Indigenous and nonIndigenous relationships over time, the unit sought to deepen students’ understanding of Indigenous perspectives, especially the affirmation of collective rights grounded in historic treaties. The title of this inquiry was inspired by the work of Indigenous author Thomas King (1990), who wrote: ‘all my relations is at first a reminder of who we are…it also reminds us of the extended relationship we share with all human beings’ (1990: ix). Framed in this way, we drew further inspiration from the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples’ (RCAP, 1996)1 understanding of the historical relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in Canada. Asserting that the historic relationship has gone through a down cycle, a low point, and then an up cycle, as represented in Figure 53.1 (RCAP, 1996: 40), the RCAP (1996: 41–4) identified four main stages in this relationship: (1) Separate Worlds, (2) Contact and Cooperation, (3) Displacement and Assimilation, and (4) Negotiation and Renewal. Conceptualized through this cyclical and relational framework, a series of curricular

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Original Rela�onship

Up Cycle

Down Cycle

Low Point

Figure 53.1  A cyclic perspective on the historical relationship of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in Canada Source: Reprinted from Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996: 40). Copyright 1996 by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.

encounters were created to help students better understand the various phases of this historic relationship. This included a series of blog reflections and classroom discussions in response to provocative videos and guest speakers, including a presentation by Dr Dwayne Donald. In the final task, students were invited to work in small groups to identify one significant event, along with a series of four adjectives, which were emblematic of a particular stage in the historic relationship. These two elements then formed the basis for a final artistic representation presented at an endof-unit showcase where students shared their insights with pre-service teachers at two local universities. It is important to note here that the classroom teacher (Shashi Shergill) had worked with this group of students for nearly two years when the inquiry began. Throughout that time, a way of being in the classroom had

been established, grounded in trusting and respectful relationships. This allowed for the emergence of a space for conversations where students could make sense and meaning of difficult histories and stories that have been too often hidden and occluded from view.

KEY PRINCIPLES GUIDING OUR WORK Over the last two decades Indigenous scholars have sought to identify and enact more culturally relevant and authentic forms of curriculum and pedagogy for Indigenous students (e.g., Battiste, 2013; Cherubini, 2014). This is important work. However, in our reading it is primarily focused on contexts with high numbers of Indigenous students, and therefore provides limited guidance

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for educators teaching in contexts, including the one where this inquiry took place, where there are no Indigenous students. Thus, in this inquiry, rather than a focus on culturally relevant or responsive pedagogies, we drew on our still emerging understanding of Donald’s theorizing around colonial frontier logics and ethical relationality to guide our work. This scholarship points to a number of key principles around how non-Indigenous educators can carry out the TRC’s calls to action in ways that are critical, implicative, and potentially transformative. These principles overlap and interrelate with one another, and share, in many instances, common themes. Thus, rather than seeing these principles as separate and distinct, we understand them as, to use Marker’s (2011: 98) metaphor, ‘intersecting paths up a mountain’. Honoring Indigenous voice through a storied approach. Following Donald’s (2009a, 2009b, 2012) insights into ethical relationality, the first principle that guided our work included the necessity to honor the voice of Indigenous people in ways where we do not attempt to speak on their behalf or for Indigenous communities or people. In seeking an authentic voice not filtered through our own settler subjectivities, where possible, we invited knowledge keepers and community members to come speak to our students. In upholding this principle, we were additionally aided by the work of Indigenous ­writers, ­artists, and journalists, who, through documentaries, art, newspaper articles, and books, offered rich insights into the nature of Indigenous philosophies, worldviews, and experiences. In bringing this work into our classroom, we were conscious of the ways in which stories, and storytelling, offer one of the primary means that Indigenous people and traditions impart important teachings (Archibald, 2008). In line with Indigenous story telling traditions, many of the stories presented to students had no ‘discrete beginnings, middles, and endings that readers expect of written literature’ (Schorcht, 2003: 31). Adopting a storied approach where the logic of linearity was refused, in the early stages of the inquiry we listened to excerpts

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of the audio book The Truth About Stories by Thomas King (2003), which takes up themes around who and what has value, and why. In ‘What Is It About Us You Don’t Like?’ (King, 2003: 121), through interwoven narratives using a classic expository format interspersed with personal stories, King highlighted the ways the Canadian and American governments have sought to legislate Indigenous people out of existence. In an earlier chapter, we engaged in a discussion around the analogy and symbolism used when Coyote, the trickster, lies to the Ducks in order to steal their magnificent feathers (2003: 14–18). In line with exposing students to stories recounting the historical relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people through narratives devoid of a EuroWestern gaze, we also watched the documentary Muffins for Granny (McLaren, 2007), which weaves the unvarnished stories and experiences of six residential school survivors, alongside the filmmaker’s own journey trying to come to terms with the experiences of her late grandmother in residential schools. Offering her audience glimpses into the schoolhouse of the residential school system, McLaren juxtaposes traditional songs and stories against fragile and painful vignettes of an ongoing colonial reality. In another instance, we showed the TED talk by poet and author Chimimanda Adichie, titled The Danger of a Single Story (2009). Through the use of personal examples and a discussion on colonialism in relation to the African context, Adichie alerts audiences to the critical misunderstandings and danger that arise from only hearing a single narrative. For many students, this was a transformational piece of storytelling and a turning point in their understanding, as it challenged the ways in which they themselves had constructed the story of Indigenous people they had come to believe. This message allowed classroom conversations to emerge that aligned with King’s (2003) insight concerning how stories shape who we are, and how we understand and relate to one another. Through this process, students

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gained a deeper understanding and insight into the history and experiences of Indigenous people and how this history has shaped the relationship today. It further provided students the opportunity to ‘reread and reframe’ the stories that shaped their understanding of Indigenous people (Donald, 2009b: 4). Drawing on King’s (2003) reoccurring phrasing within The Truth About Stories, in seeking to realize this possibility, we sought to message to students: ‘Don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now’ (King, 2003: 29). Learning from Indigenous experiences and philosophies. Bringing an authentic Indigenous voice into the classroom allowed us to see the introduction of curricular initiatives seeking to realize the TRC’s calls to action as an opportunity to ‘to learn from Aboriginal perspectives rather than as a government-imposed requirement to learn about Aboriginal peoples’ (Donald, 2009a: 29). This conceptualizing of the ethical place and nature of Indigenous voice in the classroom stands in contrast to the commonplace desire to integrate or infuse Indigenous perspectives within classroom contexts. Reflecting colonial frontier logics, Donald (2013) has argued that the language of infuse and incorporate – ‘a process or action whereby a smaller component of something is put into a larger body or component’ (2013: para. 5) – reflects the assumption that Indigenous perspectives must be brought inside the fort walls of the classroom so that they can be understood and reconciled within Euro-Western lenses. In seeking to avoid the underlying logics of an infusion and integration model of engagement, we were careful to avoid the equally common tendency among many non-­ Indigenous educators to defer all the responsibility of mediating Indigenous philosophies and memory to invited guests such as Elders and knowledge keepers. When this occurs, educators ultimately position this work as living outside themselves and the sole responsibility of those who are Indigenous. However, in seeking to genuinely engage with Indigenous

philosophies and histories, we were forced to abandon the Euro-Western assumption that we as educators must be experts in full control of the information we present to our students. Rather, we strove to position ourselves as colearners standing alongside our students in ways that signal that together we have much to learn from Indigenous memory, experiences, and traditions. Distinct from EuroWestern ways of knowing, this included insights from Indigenous philosophies and ways of knowing passed down by Elders whose ‘teachings [have] remained constant in the ways of their people’ (Treaty 7 Elders and Tribal Council, 1996: 15). Learning from Indigenous memory also involved encountering difficult narratives involving colonial histories that challenge many popular ideas of Canada as a beacon of moral progress and a raceless multicultural society. However, learning from these stories and histories ultimately offered possibilities for re-conceptualizing and renewing Indigenous-Canadian relations in more ethical ways (Donald, 2009b: 4). These themes were evident at a number of key curricular moments over the course of the inquiry. Early on in the inquiry, students were shown the 8th Fire documentary series where, in the episode ‘Whose Land Is It Anyway?’ (CBC, 2015), Wab Kinew argues that land is at the heart of almost every conflict between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. Here, students were able to see some of ways that First Nations have achieved economic prosperity through business relationships with settler communities that reflected constitutional recognition of Aboriginal rights on their traditional territories. It also shows the bleakest possible picture of what can happen when a First Nations community – Attawapiskat – is denied these collective rights. These episodes enabled students to see examples and models of successful attempts to renew and repair Indigenous–Settler relations in Canada, while highlighting that there is still much work to be done. Beyond videos, we were fortunate to access the insights of two Indigenous scholars who

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countered a predominantly colonial narrative that most students had encountered in schools. Hearing from Indigenous scholars further disrupted colonial narratives by introducing students to Indigenous people in roles beyond stereotypical depictions. Blackfoot scholar Terri-Lynn Fox was invited to speak to students, who offered insights aligned with the relational and decolonizing approach through which we sought to take up this inquiry. Terri-Lynn Fox’s presentation introduced students to Blackfoot understandings of the spirit and intent of treaties including the ideas that the Numbered Treaties of 1877, from the Blackfoot perspective, are not an ancient artifact of no relevance to contemporary society, but an ongoing bond that requires rights and responsibilities to be assumed on both sides. Deepening student’s understandings of these themes, Dr Donald facilitated a symposium at the school for all of our grade 9 students, and a contingent of pre-service teachers from the University of Calgary, where, through images, stories, and provocative videos, he interrupted the official history of Canada with the experiences, memories, and stories of Indigenous peoples (Donald, 2009a: 31). This included showing clips from the Making Treaty 7 Cultural Society video (2015), where the opening scene begins with a Tsuut’ina mother, speaking to her baby in 1877 about the positive change that would come about by entering into the Treaty with the newcomers. The scene then abruptly shifted to the same women today, homeless on the street, begging for change. This brought forth questions around how this situation had come about, and on what basis the Canadian government has sovereignty over the land where this discussion was taking place. This provocation led to discussions around Blackfoot and Plains Cree understandings of treaty relationships, which according to Donald (2013: 2), call on Indigenous and settler communities to work together in ways that bring benefits to all people who live together on this land. Here, he

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highlighted the notion that such treaty relationships offer an ethical space for two different peoples, worldviews, and knowledge systems to live together (Donald, 2015: Classroom Lecture). In highlighting this point, he emphasized that Blackfoot and Cree traditions understand treaties as stretching beyond only human relationships, but also with the network of more-than-human relationships that sustain us and give us life (Donald, 2015: Classroom Lecture). Implicative learning. Flowing from our emergent understanding of foundational Indigenous philosophies and worldviews, we have sought to create curricular engagements that go beyond the acquisition of facts and information, which by its nature creates a distance and a sense of detachment. Drawing from the work of Britzman (1998), Donald (2009a: 30) asserted that, in contrast, learning from Indigenous knowledge requires educators to implicate themselves in such knowledge. In this regard, Donald (2009a: 34) suggested that if educators ‘could come to see that they, as Canadian citizens, have a personal and family history that already implicates them in Aboriginal issues, then the realization and interpretation of these inherited relationships could begin to break down these resistances’. Implicative curricular encounters in this regard seek to access what Indigenous scholar Ottmann (2010: 29) termed ‘the affective domain of teaching and learning’, which contrasts with the more rational qualities of knowledge and skill development. Ottmann (2010: 30) wrote: ‘While the cognitive and psycho-motor domains of learning represent the knowledge and skills taught and achieved in the classroom, the affective domain represents aspects such as feelings, attitudes, and values’. In adopting this stance, we sought to challenge students’ preconceived thoughts and ideas on their relationship with a group of people they knew very little about. In a classroom activity designed to implicate what students already know about Indigenous people, students were asked to write down on sticky

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notes, and post on the board, what they knew about Indigenous people. Through this process, three typologies emerged. Firstly, many students saw Indigenous people frozen in the past, invoking an image of fur trappers. Secondly, many students invoked images of the imaginary Indian (Francis, 1992) – the romanticized notion of spiritual people and protectors of the land. Finally, many students were honest in putting forth the negative stereotype that many Canadians hold about Indigenous people. For example, a number of students spoke to a group of people who do not pay taxes and survive on government handouts. The question was then posed where they had learned these things about Indigenous people. Most students admitted that they had limited relational contact with Indigenous populations within their school, home, or wider community. Although one student remembered having a boy on his hockey team one year, not a single person in the class had an Indigenous friend or acquaintance, or had visited an Indigenous community. Despite this, they had very strong representations of what they understood, or perceived to have understood, about Indigenous people. This in turn provided an opening into the veracity of the beliefs they held. Over the course of the inquiry, each student was asked to set up a reflective blog as a way to give voice to how they were making sense and meaning of these topics and to reflect upon their learning. Through the use of prompts and guided questions students were able to share personal and critical perspectives, rather than just a retelling or summarizing of events and activities. In this way, they were able to articulate and document their evolving understanding around a series of major themes. Due to the sensitive nature of the discussions we chose to keep the blogs private and students only shared them with their teacher and, if they wished to, their parents. This process of ongoing debriefing and reflection was integral to their emerging understanding and provided an outlet for students to articulate the difficult histories and stories to which they

were being introduced. Through some of the discussions and reflections students had many more questions; some were upset about what they themselves described as a superficial understanding of Indigenous people. They had learned about the buffalo, and the fur trade, and thought they had understood what residential schools were. Others questioned whether their own families were implicated in any of this history. Through reflecting on the ideas and insights presented by guest speakers and provocative videos curated for this inquiry, many blog post reflections demonstrated a realization that the opinions students had held about Indigenous people were misguided. After watching Muffins for Granny (McLaren, 2007), one student commented that ever since he was old enough to form opinions for himself he had viewed himself as being superior to Indigenous people. He revealed that these opinions had been formed from stereotypical depictions he had heard from family and friends. He acknowledged that although he knew little about them he had believed the story that had been told to him. Similarly, another student shared that his relationship with Aboriginal people (or lack thereof) had been influenced by the attitude of his father, and other relatives, commenting that was just how he was raised. These blog posts also began to surface the ways Indigenous philosophies and perspectives are different from Euro-Western ones. In reflecting on their understanding of treaties, a student noted, for instance, that for Indigenous people, these agreements were not just a document or piece of paper, but a promise that both parties in the relationship would care for the land and have a mutual peace. This sentiment was further reflected in another blog post where a student recounted how the Canadians saw the land as a commodity and something that could be owned, whereas Indigenous people saw the land as a communal and public space that belonged to everyone and should be shared. In these examples, students were demonstrating a

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shift beyond a sense of detachment created by only accessing knowledge as facts and information, towards developing understanding through a more ethical and empathetic lens. Historical consciousness. Insights from Indigenous notions of time suggest that teaching for reconciliation requires a profound attunement to the historical legacies that continue to shape Indigenous and nonIndigenous relationships in the place called Canada. As the RCAP asserted: It is impossible to make sense of the issues that trouble the relationship today without a clear understanding of the past….We simply cannot understand the depth of these issues or make sense of the current debate without a solid grasp of the shared history of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people on this continent. (RCAP, 1996: 36)

In seeking to attend to this insight, we were additionally conscious of how, within Indigenous notions of time, ‘the past occurs simultaneously in the present, and deeply influences how we imagine the future’ (Donald, 2012: 39). In this way, we were attempting to have students understand the relationship between the events of the past, and the impact that these events have on the relationship today. As Donald (2009b: 7) asserted, it is an ‘ethical imperative to recognize the significance of the relationships we have with others, how our histories and experiences are layered and position us in relation to each other, and how our futures as people similarly are tied together’. This is at the heart of what we were trying to achieve through this work. In positioning ourselves (students and teachers) through an approach that involved vulnerability, openness, and honesty, it was an acknowledgement and recognition of the methodology through which we can take up this work in ethical ways. To achieve this curricular vision of historical consciousness, students were invited to consider the historical context of treaty rights through engaging in a timeline activity requiring them to consider both the perspective of

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the Canadian government and Indigenous people in relation to the Number Treaties. In exposing students to differing interpretations of the past, we sought to deepen their appreciation of how, as articulated by the Métis scholar Gaudry, within the context of the Plains, Indigenous histories tell a story where the newcomers ‘were invited into pre-existing territories as treaty partners, as brothers and sisters to share in the bounty of the land, to live peacefully with one another and to envision relationships where we all benefitted’, which ran counter to what actually occurred, involving ‘a settler colonial dynamic where Canadians have benefitted largely at the expense of Indigenous peoples, our territory and the value that our territory generated, which comes with monetary wealth’ (as cited in University of Alberta, 2017: para. 11). While this activity may have reinforced Euro-Western chronological and linear notions of time, throughout the unit we attempted to introduce students to Indigenous understandings of time and temporality where the past, present, and future are seen as intimately connected (Donald, 2009b, 2012; Marker, 2011; RCAP, 1996). As noted, the final task in the inquiry was orientated around critically examining the cyclical stages of the historical relationship as outlined by the RCAP (1996).2 Working in small groups, students were specifically tasked with identifying one event within their assigned historical period that was significant to the relationship at that time. Further, students were asked to identify four adjectives that described the relationship during this period. These two elements then formed the basis for a final artistic representation. Through this activity, students came to appreciate that during the Contact and Cooperation phase of the relationship, according to the RCAP (1996: 12), ‘Aboriginal nations in most circumstances welcomed the first newcomers in friendship’, and moreover, in many cases the Europeans would have died without the aid of Indigenous communities and people. As further reflected in the RCAP

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(1996), during this period Indigenous nations and the newcomers were able to recognize ‘each other as equal, coexisting and self-governing nations and govern their relationships with each other by negotiations, based on the procedures of reciprocity and consent, that… [were] then recorded in treaties and treatylike accords’ (Tully, 2008: 226). Surfacing this period of the relationship in turn helped students connect to the peaceful, harmonious, and sacred nature of how Indigenous people understand treaty agreements; a model that could guide relationships in the present. Ultimately, we hoped that students were able to better understand their role in this relationship, specifically that ‘we are all treaty people’ (Chambers, 2012).

CONCLUSION Throughout this article, we have attempted to show how Donald’s (2009b, 2012) notion of ethical relationality offers a viable pathway for non-Indigenous educators to attend to Indigenous memory, experiences, and philosophies in ways that seek to meaningfully carry out the TRC’s (2015a) vision for teaching for reconciliation (Call to Action 62.i). In undertaking this work, it is essential that educators honor the voice of Indigenous people, but also avoid the tendency to position this work as living outside themselves and the exclusive responsibility of those who are Indigenous. Through outlining this project, we hoped to show the ways critical scholarship could be guided by Indigenous philosophies that continually emphasize the ways we are all related. By emphasizing the historical nature of the relationship through the lens of Indigenous memory, we were able to have students grapple with colonial stories of displacement and assimilation. However, Indigenous memory and philosophies equally offer viable models both past and present, concerning how settler communities can more ethically act and relate to Indigenous

people and nations in the present. The need for this relational ethic to guide this critical work stems from the reality that, as Blackfoot elder Andy Blackwater said, the first peoples and the newcomers all ‘live together in the same place and their tipis are held down by the same peg. Neither is going anywhere’ (as quoted in Chambers and Blood, 2012: 50).

Notes 1  According to King (2012: 170), ‘The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was formed in 1991 … [and] was originally budgeted at $8 million for three years, but the research ran to five years at a cost of $58 million. The commission visited 96 communities, [and] held 178 days of hearings around the country on reserves, in community centres, and in jails’. 2  This included: (1) Separate Worlds, (2) Contact and Cooperation, (3) Displacement and Assimilation, and (4) Negotiation and Renewal (RCAP, 1996: 41–4).

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Andrew-Gee, E. (2017, August 4). The making of Joseph Boyden. Globe & Mail. Retrieved from https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/arts/ books-and-media/joseph-boyden/article 35881215/?ref=http://www.theglobeand mail.com& Archibald, J. (2008). Indigenous storywork: Educating the heart, mind, body, and spirit. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press. Battiste, M. (2013). Decolonizing education: Nourishing the learning spirit. Saskatoon, SK: Purich Publishing. Berg, A. (2017). Alberta teachers’ perceptions on including multiple perspectives in elementary social studies: A qualitative case study (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB. British Columbia Ministry of Education. (2019). Aboriginal Education in British Columbia. Retrieved October 19, 2019, from https:// www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/educationtraining/k-12/aboriginal-education Britzman, D. P. (1998). Lost subjects, contested objects. Albany, NY: State University New York Press. Canadiana. (2015). Acts of the Parliament of the Dominion of Canada relating to criminal law and to procedure in criminal cases: Passed in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th sessions of the third parlia­ ment. Retrieved from http://eco.canadiana.ca/ view /oocihm.9_02041/56?r=0&s=1 CBC. (2015). 8th fire: Whose land is it anyway? Retrieved from http://watch.cbc.ca/doc-zone/ season-6/8th-fire–whose-land-is-itanyway/38e815a-009e5b4cf24 Chambers, S. (2012). ‘We are all treaty people’: The contemporary countenance of Canadian curriculum studies. In N. Ng-A-Fook & J. Rottmann (Eds.), Reconsidering Canadian curriculum studies (pp. 23–38). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Chambers, C., & Blood, N. (2012). Love thy neighbour: Repatriating precarious Blackfoot sites. One World in Dialogue Journal, 2(1), 38–51. Retrieved from http://ssc.teachers. ab.ca/SiteCollectionDocuments/OneWorld I n D i a l o g u e / O n e Wo r l d % 2 0 i n D i a l o g u e %202012%20v2n1.pdf Cherubini, L. (2014). Aboriginal student engagement and achievement: Educational practices and cultural sustainability. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press.

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Clancy, C. (2017, November 9). ‘She belonged to us’: Families testify at inquiry into murdered and missing Indigenous women. Edmonton Journal. Retrieved from https:// edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/ she-belonged-to-us-families-testify-atinquiry-into-murdered-and-missing-indigenous-women Clark, P. (2007). Representations of Aboriginal people in English Canadian history textbooks: Toward reconciliation. In E. A. Cole (Ed.), Teaching the violent past: History education and reconciliation (pp. 81–119). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Curry, B., & Galloway, G. (2015, June 2). Truth and Reconciliation report calls for steps to improve First Nations’ lives. The Globe and Mail. Retrieved from http://www. theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/truthand-reconciliation-report-calls-for-broadrecommendations/article24761778/ Dei, G. (2000). Rethinking the role of Indigenous knowledges in the academy. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 4(2), 111–132. doi:10.1080/136031100284849 den Heyer, K., & Abbott, L. (2011). Reverberating echoes: Challenging teacher candidates to tell and learn from entwined narrations of Canadian history. Curriculum Theory, 41(5), 610–635. doi:10.1111/j.1467-873X. 2011.00567.x Donald, D. (2015, January 21). On what terms can we speak? (Classroom lecture). Donald, D. (2009a). The curricular problem of Indigenousness: Colonial frontier logics, teacher resistances, and the acknowledgment of ethical space. In J. Nahachewsky & I. Johnston (Eds.), Beyond ‘presentism’: Re-imagining the historical, personal, and social places of curriculum (pp. 23–41). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Donald, D. (2009b). Forts, curriculum, and Indigenous Métissage: Imagining decolonization of Aboriginal–Canadian relations in educational contexts. First Nations Perspectives: The Journal of the Manitoba First Nations Education Resource Centre, 2(1), 1–24. Retrieved from http://www.mfnerc.org/resources/fnp/ volume-2-2009/ Donald, D. (2012). Forts, curriculum, and ethical relationality. In N. Ng-A-Fook & J. Rottmann (Eds.), Reconsidering Canadian

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curriculum studies (pp. 39–46). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Donald, D. (2013). Teachers, aboriginal perspectives and the logic of the fort. Edmonton, AB: The Alberta Teachers’ Association. Retrieved September 12, 2017, from http://www.teachers.ab.ca/ Publications/ATA%20Magazine/Volume-93/ Number-4/Pages/Teachers-aboriginalperspectives.aspx Ermine, W. (2007). The ethical space of engagement. Indigenous Law Journal, 6(1), 193–203. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle. net/1807/17129 Four Arrows. (2013). Teaching truly: A curriculum to Indigenize mainstream education. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Francis, D. (1992). The imaginary Indian. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press. Government of Canada. (2010). Indian Residential Schools statement of apology – Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Ottawa, ON: Indigenous and Northern Affairs. Retrieved from https://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/ 1100100015677/1100100015680 Government of Canada. (2015). Constitution Act, 1982. Ottawa, ON: Justice Laws Website. Retrieved from http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/ eng/Const/page-15.html Johnston, I., Carson, T., Richardson, G., Donald, D., Plews, J., & Kim, M. (2009). Awareness, discovery, becoming, and debriefing: Promoting cross-cultural pedagogical understanding in an undergraduate education program. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 55(1), 1–17. Retrieved from http:// eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ838669 Kanu, Y. (2005). Teachers’ perceptions of the integration of Aboriginal culture into the high school curriculum. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 51(1), 50–68. Retrieved from http://ajer.journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index. php/ajer/article/view/498/487 Kanu, Y. (2011). Integrating Aboriginal perspectives into the school curriculum: Purposes, possibilities, and challenges. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Kennedy, M. (2015, May 29). Teachings about aboriginals ‘simply wrong’, says Murray Sinclair. Ottawa Citizen. Retrieved from http://ottawacitizen.com/news/politics/

teachings-about-aboriginals-simply-wrongsays-murray-sinclair Kincheloe, J., & Steinberg, S. R. (2012). Indigenous knowledges in education: Complexities, dangers, and profound benefits. In S. R. Steinberg & G. Cannella (Eds.), Critical Qualitative Research Reader (pp. 341–361). New York, NY: Peter Lang. King, T. (1990). All my relations: An anthology of contemporary Canadian native fiction. Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart. King, T. (2003). The truth about stories: A native narrative. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. King, T. (2012). The inconvenient Indian: A curious account of native people in North America. Toronto, ON: Anchor Canada. Kuokkanen, R. (2007). Reshaping the university: Responsibility, Indigenous epistemes, and the logic of the gift. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press. Mackey, E. (2002). The house of difference: Cultural politics and national identity in Canada. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Making Treaty 7 Cultural Society. (2015). Change 1 and 2. Retrieved from http://www.makingtreaty7.com/videosandtools/ Manitoba Indian Brotherhood. (1977). The shocking truth about Indians in textbooks. Winnipeg, MB: Author. Marker, M. (2011). Teaching history from an Indigenous perspective: Four winding paths up the mountain. In P. Clark (Ed.), New possibilities for the past: Shaping history education in Canada (pp. 97–120). Vancouver, BC: UBC Press. Marks, D. (2014, October 2). What’s in a name: Indian, Native, Aboriginal or Indigenous? CBC News. Retrieved from http://www.cbc. ca/news/canada/manitoba/what-s-in-aname-indian-native-aboriginal-or-indigenous1.2784518 McLaren, N. (Director). (2007). Muffins for granny [motion picture]. Toronto, ON: Feather Productions. Miller, J. R. (1996). Shingwauk’s vision: A history of Native residential schools. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Miller, J. R. (2004). Lethal legacy: Current Native controversies in Canada. Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart.

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Milne, E. (2017). Implementing Indigenous education policy directives in Ontario public schools: Experiences, challenges and successful practices. The International Indigenous Policy Journal, 8(3), 1-20. doi: 10.18584/ iipj.2017.8.3.2 Ontario Ministry of Education. (2019). Aboriginal Education Strategy. Toronto, ON: Author. Retrieved October 18, 2019, from http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/aboriginal/ elemStrategies.html Ottmann, J. (with Pritchard, L.). (2010). Aboriginal perspectives in the social studies curriculum. First Nations Perspectives, 3(1), 21–46. Retrieved from http://www.mfnerc. org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/5_ OttmanPritchard.pdf Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. (1996). Vol. 1. Looking forward, looking back. Ottawa, ON: Author. Schorcht, B. (2003). Storied voices in Native American texts: Harry Robinson, Thomas King, James Welch and Leslie Marmon Silko. New York, NY: Routledge. Scott, D. (2013). Teaching Aboriginal perspectives: An investigation into teacher practice amidst curriculum change. Canadian Social Studies, 46(1), 31–43. Retrieved from http:// www.educ.ualberta.ca/css/Css_46_1/CSSVol-46-1-complete.pdf Scott, D. & Gani, R. (2018). Examining social studies teachers’ resistances towards teaching Indigenous perspectives: A case study of Alberta. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority

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Education, 12(4), 167–181. doi: 10.1080/ 15595692.2018.1497969 Snelgrove, C., Dhamoon, R. K., & Corntassel, J. (2014). Unsettling settler colonialism: The discourse and politics of settlers, and solidarity with Indigenous nations. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(2), 1–32. Retrieved from http://www.corntassel.net/ Unsettling.pdf Treaty 7 Elders and Tribal Council. (1996). The true spirit and original intent of Treaty 7. Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015a). Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to action. Retrieved from http://www.trc.ca/websites/ trcinstitution/File/2015/Findings/Calls_to_ Action_English2.pdf Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015b). The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Toronto, ON: Lorimer Publishers. Tully, J. (2008). Public philosophy in a new key. Vol. 1: Democracy and Civic Freedom. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Tupper, J. A., & Cappello, M. (2008). Teaching treaties as (un)usual narratives: Disrupting the curricular commonsense. Curriculum Inquiry, 38(5), 559–578. doi:10.1111/j.l467-873X. 2008.00436.x University of Alberta. (2017, June 21). Resisting 150. Retrieved from https://medium.com/ ualberta2017/resisting-150-f14c5e0939b4

54 Flooded, between Two Worlds: Holding the Memory of What Used to Be Against the Reality of What Exists Now Jennifer M. Markides

PREAMBLE re – (preposition): with regard to : on the subject of : regarding or concerning re – (prefix) 1: again : anew re –  (prefix) 2: back : backward : back to an original place, condition, etc. (entries compiled from Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, re, 2019)

I have chosen to use re throughout this work to signal the turning to and returning to experiences, stories, and interpretations relating to my experience of the 2013 High River flood. Each day, I am forced to (re)visit, (re) member, (re)press, (re)live, (re)story, (re)tell, (re)embody, (re)interpret, and (re)negotiate aspects of my life from before, during, and after the event. In so many ways – as a survivor of a natural disaster – I (re)experience the trauma again, anew. Attending to ‘re’ is not a new idea. In Kathy Absolon and Cam Willett’s (2005) discussion of location within Indigenous

research, ‘re’ became a salient part of their discussions around why positioning oneself is an integral part of Indigenous research. In their words: ‘Re’ means to redo; look twice, and is the teaching of respect in the West direction of the Medicine Wheel. In our dialogue and through our process of considering knowledge creation and research, we found ourselves inadvertently returning to the notions of respectful representations, revising, reclaiming, renaming, remembering, reconnecting, recovering, and researching. All of these ideas are associated with looking again to uncover, unlearn, recover, and relearn how and why location is a fundamental principle of Indigenous research. (Absolon and Willett, 2005: 108)

Further to my pronounced location as an Indigenous researcher (Markides, 2018a), the physical location of my place in High River has become integral to my learning about the experience of living through a natural disaster. Through photography, I unwittingly entered into dialogue with my surroundings. In this way, I acknowledge location as both a

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Figure 54.1  Highwood River (Markides, June 2017)

situating of self, and as a dynamic partner in my research conversation. Akin to Ted Aoki’s (1986/1991/2005) notion of indwelling, where teachers live between the two worlds of curriculum-asplanned and curriculum-as-lived, I use ‘re’ as a way of demarcating the liminal space between past and present, where flood survivors live between the two worlds of a townas-remembered and a town-as-exists. ‘Re’ signifies the in-between – a space of flux and change, with the conscious recognition of movement: sometimes smooth and effortless, and sometimes jarring.

(RE)POSITIONING From an Indigenous methodological perspective, I know that it is important to introduce myself, upfront – to put one’s self forward (Absolon and Willett, 2005; Kovach, 2009) – sharing who I am and where I come from in relation to the research. The practice

of situating myself is the basis for forming relationships, deepening connections, and promoting accountability. I am Métis, with connection to the Red River settlement from the early years of colonization. Much of my family immigrated to Canada from Scotland, England, Sweden, Ireland, Wales, and Belgium; they came here in search of a better life. Some of my ancestors were here much longer. My Cree and Coast Salish relatives are the descendants of peoples who have lived on this land – Turtle Island – since time immemorial. I was born in Prince George, British Columbia at the confluence of the Nechako and Fraser Rivers; and raised in the town of Smithers, nestled beside the Bulkley River. Since 2010, I have been a resident of High River in the province of Alberta. My home is one block from the Highwood River. The river last overflowed its banks in June 2013. This catastrophic flood put our town into a state of emergency, resulting in a mass evacuation order and a large-scale rescue

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Figure 54.2  Water at the level of the train bridge (Markides, June 2013)

effort (see 2013 Alberta Floods, n.d.: ‘High River’, n.d.; Massinon & Fraser, 2014). I was one of the last people to cross the bridge at the centre of town that day, as north- and south-bound traffic were rerouted to the highway shortly thereafter. The water was higher than I had ever seen it – high enough for me to stop to take a picture.

(RE)ORIENTING On June 19th, 2013, I became a flood victim – displaced and broken. Years later, I am still (re)living the losses of the flood – the damage lingers. Though I survived, my life and town have changed forever. High River, as remembered – while ravaged, under repair, and in renewal – is the site of my research, the central focus of my doctoral studies. I am concerned with the experiences of natural disaster, both personal and shared.

In preparation for this journey, I consider my-self fully in this work and my deep connection to this research. I am both researcher and research site, carrying the lived – and living – experience (Husserl, 1970) with me in every encounter, question, conversation, interpretation, and presentation. I am inextricably bound to the experience of the flood – I cannot be outside it. Therefore I seek to acknowledge and examine my subjectivity at the outset and throughout my work (Peshkin, 1988). What are my emotional responses to the stories I share about myself and my community? Employing bricolage (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018; Kincheloe, McLaren, Steinberg, & Monzó, 2018; Steinberg, 2012), I use the methods that best suit my research purposes. As bricoleur, I piece together images, stories, and literature to form and inform my understanding of living through the flood. I take up a critical, autobiographical, arts-based approach in this chapter.

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I have been a critical and reflective practitioner throughout my life and teaching career, to the point where my engagement in generative cycles of critical reflection and action are deeply entrenched in my way of being and are indicative of how I make sense of and react to my experiences in the world. Through a praxis informed by critical pedagogy – based in Marxian practices of bringing to light the cross-purpose workings of political structures and societal needs – my research attempts to raise critical consciousness by naming hegemonic structures and oppressive powers, addressing inequalities, and confronting the insidious culture of domination (Freire, 1970/1993). In terms of the 2013 High River flood, I look at the relationships of power that emerge in the wake of disaster, specifically regarding insurance companies, government buyouts, and the politics of capitalism. As one of the main data sources and research sites, I begin by sharing pieces of my flood story. In critical self-interrogation, I (re)visit the experiences and encounters that pushed, frustrated, and haunt me to this day. I do not wish to avoid the hard truths, nor do I want to be self-indulgent. To the contrary, I am naming the moments, entities, and remembrances that hold power over me in the hopes of gaining emancipatory insights, for myself and others. In Joe Kincheloe’s (2005) discussion of post-formal autobiography, he describes how autobiography that is taken up through critical ontology brings together aspects of William F. Pinar’s (1994) currere – a purposefully reflective process that leads to the critical construction of consciousness – and complexity theory, informed by the work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1987), such that ‘postformal autobiographers can begin to build theoretical pathways to get around the Cartesian limitations on the ontological imagination’ (1987: 14). Taken in this way, post-formal autobiography holds promise to uncover and open up new pathways of understanding towards a greater flood literacy.

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Through critical accounting and recounting, I put forward my contextually relevant interpretations of life in High River since the flood; I unpack my experiences and question the lingering sediments of tribulation that have rendered me hardened and/or powerless; I consider the ways the flood eroded my sense of security in relation to place, and how it undermined the buildings and businesses within the community, physically and financially; and I explore the tensions and optics of control in the flood recovery process. All this in an effort to better understand the challenges that victims of natural disasters face and to bring about positive change for the survivors in my community.

(RE)AWAKENING Community-based researchers offer something quite different because they are so well placed within a community to document what is happening at a local level over long periods of time. They have the advantages and disadvantages of being eye witnesses to events and their aftermath; they lend a different kind of evidentiary authority because of the immediacy of their context. (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012: 224–5)

As a resident of High River, I am well situated as an insider (Innes, 2009; Madden, 2010; Tuhiwai Smith, 2012) to share my observations and insights through autobiography. I combine aesthetic elements of photographs and story with critical engagement (Greene, 2001) to deeply interrogate the power structures at work on myself and my community, as victims of disaster. By (re) orienting my self to the town, I am able to question my beliefs, biases, and presuppositions about the post-flood experience. I seek to navigate the space between self and culture (Denzin and Lincoln, 2018) – between my self and the post-disaster culture of my community. I recount, (re)interpret, and (attempt to) reconcile my experiences – pressing in and projecting out.

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When I started taking the photographs, I did not know that they would become such an integral part of my research. The photo I took from the bridge (Figure 54.2) was one that became a touchstone for me; it symbolized a foreshadowing and hindsight of sorts. I took the picture knowing (and not knowing) how very powerful the river had become. The river’s full force was both revealed all at once, and then recurrently – in each new emergence and remembering – over time. The image of Hudson Sports (Figure 54.11) was one I took out of sheer excitement and anticipation of a new store in the bleak downtown. I texted it to family and friends as the signs were being hung outside. Within days it became clear that it was not a real store, and the emptiness set in, again – loss anew. Looking back, I understand that these ruminations were the beginnings of my photographic study of High River in the wake of the floods. Susan Finley (2012) states: At the heart of arts-based inquiry is a radical, politically grounded statement about social justice and control over the production and dissemination of knowledge. By calling upon artful ways of knowing and being in the world, arts-based researchers make a rather audacious challenge to the dominant, entrenched academic community and its claims to scientific ways of knowing. (2012: 72)

Arts-based inquiry opens spaces for dialogue and exists in the liminal margins between art and social science, ‘people and politics, imagination and action, theory and activism’ (Finley, 2012, p. 73). For people who have experienced flood, this liminal space has echoes of living in the tension between what once was and what is now. For residents of High River, we had been living with a (false) sense of security, along a peaceful river that betrayed us. Some victims of the flood were let down by their insurance companies, where loopholes and fine print clauses protected the companies from paying out – though they still want you to keep paying in, and rates continue to climb if you have been deemed part of the flood fringe.

Insurance companies are recouping their losses and profiting, while amplifying the damages sustained by their clients. Homes on the floodway were bought up. Buyouts were smaller for smaller homes – considered lucky to get anything really; their fault for building on a floodplain. Buyouts were bigger for bigger homes – the ‘government buyouts’ were in the millions for the millionaires. Not surprisingly, there was a lot of money given to a few, and a little money given to many. After the flood, losses were more than monetary. People lost jobs, homes, support systems, loved ones, businesses, community, and faith. Everyone experienced loss differently, but we all lost.

RECALLING In the days after the flood and mandatory evacuation, it seemed as though time stood still. We did not know if our house had taken on water, or not. We watched a lot of news, but the reel did not change often enough. We found ourselves watching the same footage used again and again across multiple news hours and over many news channels. Even if I leaned in, straining to see a new angle, the camera panned George Lane Park and the Highwood River, with our neighbourhood just out of view. Why didn’t the cameraman shoot more footage? Why didn’t the networks show more of the town? Why didn’t they film the damages street by street?

(RE)ORGANIZING Life after disaster involves a multi-faceted recovery. Some aspects are within our hands, such as renovating our houses, replacing possessions, and choosing to stay or to move. Money becomes a determining factor of one’s post-flood autonomy. People with resources have more control over the speed and shape of their recovery.

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Figure 54.3  Mud tracked out (Markides, July 2013)

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Those with less means are at the whim of social programs and charitable supports. Other facets of flood recovery are out of the hands of individual community members; these include repairs to the roads and infrastructure, rehabilitation of stores and the local economy, and the influx of people coming into the town for financial gain. The one constant is change; but rather than the regular ebbing and flowing that gradually (re)shapes communities over time, High River changed in and after a torrent. The slow changes of a place are usually influenced by choices and needs, industry and people. Natural disasters do not consider what communities need or want, what businesses exist or who lives in which homes. The forced changes are undiscerning and indiscriminate. It happens in a blink. I ask, how might survivors – living through disaster – navigate between the world they remember and the one that exists now? How do they negotiate the aftermath, dealing

Figure 54.4  Waiting for a bin (Markides, Canada Day 2013)

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Figure 54.5  Trapped moisture (Markides, 2013)

with the pieces that are within their control and those that are not? I am the site, source, and curator of my flood residues. Some of the damage was forcibly exposed and then further brutalized by the insurance company – recount your losses and get nothing. Other violations are more easily suppressed like mud-soaked keepsakes – love letters, photographs, and childhood artefacts – covered over in silt and buried deeper with time. The emotional deposits range from prolonged anger incited by the former, to lingering sadness quelled by the latter. I took some pictures before throwing cherished items away – an old badge and certificate from my husband’s Beavers troop, my children’s finger paintings done on canvas, a cluster of wrestling medals, a Roy Henry Vickers print and a signed Sue Coleman print I had won curling, and waterlogged Christmas ornaments that had been gifts from my students. This art was not therapeutic. Capturing each image served as a

Figure 54.6  Farewell to art 1 (Markides, 2013)

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Figure 54.7  Farewell to art 2 (Markides, 2013)

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solemn send-off for my ill-fated belongings – invaluable. At every stage, it has been easier to take photographs of the town. I did not want to write a list of what was lost, because I knew that it would be inherently incomplete. Little did I know that I would be remembering the losses for years to come. I would see Disney DVDs on a shelf in a classroom during a school visit and think, I have…had those. My momentary excitement would be replaced with deep sadness over the most trivial of personal items. Insurance refused to cover two claims. The company – TD Meloche Monnex – chose our sewer backup policy valued at 50,000. I changed our plan mere weeks before the flood. At the end of May, I had called to add contents insurance to our plan as we were storing all of our life’s possessions in the basement, and renting our house out while we planned to teach overseas for two years. After waiting most of an hour to speak

Figure 54.8  Three bins in three days – throwing it all away (Markides, 2013)

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with an agent, I finally got through. The lady on the other end asked what we estimated the total value of our contents to be. Engaging in a brief discussion, we settled on 80,000 to cover the value of all furniture, housewares, sporting equipment, tools, electronics, etc. Then, she said, I think that I can save you some money on your plan. You have a platinum (or gold) level sewer backup policy which covers 100,000 dollars in the event of sewer backup; if you want, I can change it to the silver-level policy which would cover 50,000 dollars for repairs to your home. Would 50,000 be enough to cover the damages if the sewer backed up into your basement? I consulted with my husband again and we determined that 50,000 would be enough to cover the cost of repairing damage caused by sewer backup, in addition to the 80,000 for contents if anything were ruined in the storage; we felt confident that we could make the change to our plan. But before I gave the woman the go ahead, I asked: But what if there is a flood? She quickly replied that

Figure 54.9  Jacked up (Markides, July 2013)

it wouldn’t matter because nothing would be covered in the event of a flood. No insurance carriers offered flood insurance, so it would not matter. She summarized the changes to our policy: we were adding 80,000 in contents insurance, and reducing our sewer backup from 100,000 to 50,000 – correct? I thanked her for saving us the extra money just before we hung up. The call haunts me to this day. The flood happened. The government pressured the insurance companies to honour their policies. We received the sewer backup policy, but nothing for our contents. Thank you for saving us money. Thank you for saving us from having an additional 50,000 dollars in coverage that would have helped replace our contents, when all was lost. Your money-saving suggestion was one I would never have thought about, and now it is one that I will never forget. Media shots of boats on train tracks, houses askew, and dramatic rescues proliferate the Internet. The images are sensational

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and shocking. Despite the prevalence of images already, I was compelled to take my own shots. Initially I documented the scenes that were obviously sublime, such as a railway tie wedged under a car that showed the sheer force of the moving water. Over time, my subject matter became less overt. In the year after the flood, we moved away from High River. It felt as though we were living in a state of suspended animation, waiting to return to the town and to our home, waiting to rebuild after the loss and to begin living again. Upon returning, we entered into a state of hyperreality; our town had become a vibrant landscape of facades, with a struggling smattering of businesses. There is a tangible tension between the desire for the town to look thriving and for it to actually be thriving. How does this wear on the emotions of the town’s residents as they work to rebuild their lives? I have taken pictures in and around the town, walked the streets, lived in and against the backdrops of construction, movie sets, and interminable disrepair. I have collected narrative accounts and formed understandings over time. These support my sense making of the disaster.

RECOUNTING Some stories I tell and retell – polished and smoothed in the telling like river rocks worn over time (Strong-Wilson, 2008). Others, I shy away from; consciously or unconsciously, I do not want to relive them. I consider my audience. Do they really want to hear my story, or have they asked as a pleasantry? If someone asks me, how long have you lived in High River?, I know that they are really asking me, were you there for the flood? I can give them/me an out by saying: not long. This response satisfies most people. They asked: I answered. Moving on. I have likened my flood stories to those of a person with a broken arm. How many times do they

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want to explain how it happened? The story gets really slick in the retelling – empty and repetitious. They might have multiple versions: the short version and the long version. How much time do you have? How detailed of an account do you want to hear? There are times when I go to retrieve something from the basement to find that it is gone – a thing I remember having, but forget losing. It feels like it is still there, until I am forced to see that it is not. These losses are like metaphoric phantom limbs. Each time I realise that something is not there, the pain of that loss washes back over me. I live between two worlds where everything exists in memory, and little survived in actuality. When I tell my story – with all of the dripping details – my voice wells with emotion and loss. The telling pains me. It is not slick or smooth or empty or easy.

(RE)INTERPRETING The house beside us is still boarded up. One neighbour shovels the sidewalk in the winter and mows the front grass in the summer, but the house sits empty – lifeless on the inside. There are more birds and squirrels in the backyard these days, without the dogs to chase them away. Living through the flood, I see things that people from other places might not see. I see storefronts sitting vacant where merchants and service providers used to be – our dentist’s office, the jewellers, a clothing store, a flower shop, a u-brew wine shop, two bakeries, two clothing stores, my old hairstylist’s salon, and so many more businesses that lined our downtown streets, gone – closed or moved on. There is an overabundance of space for lease. New businesses open: an antique shop, two second-hand furniture stores, many new restaurants, a dollar store, a gift shop, a reclaimed furniture shop, and various others; some make it, some don’t.

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Figure 54.10  Rotting on the inside, right next door (Markides, August 2016)

Like many other High River residents, I hold the memory of what used to be, against the reality of what exists now. In the years since the flood, the town of High River has seen widespread rebuilding, recovery, and revitalization. The renewal is visible, in private residences and public parks, replacement of sewer drainage pipes and perpetual road re-construction. For long-time residents, these projects are reminders of the loss and devastation that swept through the town. The sight of some new development also holds the memory of what was there before, in our town and in our homes. Adding to the sense of reality disjunction, the downtown’s storefront facades create another layer of hyperreality. The film industry has long used the town’s quaint streets and historic buildings as sets and backdrops for television and movies. The influx of activity in the flood-ravaged vacancies has formed a Baudrillardian simulacra (1988) of a new and vibrant town against which the town’s inhabitants simulate living.

RECONCILING In a dialogic manner, the town of High River speaks to me. Each day I leave my house: to walk my boys to school, to drive to the university, or to simply carry out the tasks of a typical day in a typical life. I drive or walk through town – as we all do, as we all must – and face the daily remembrances of flood, damage, and loss. In the two blocks between my house and the downtown, I pass the empty lots where seven houses once stood. One is now a parking lot for the church. One was kept as a garden – the plants in the yard survived, but the house did not. Lots have ‘FOR SALE’ signs, others have been sold and sit empty. The roads still do not have a top lift, but instead have deep dips and grooves. There are tall metal fences around the vacant commercial lots – the buildings torn down, but not replaced. Empty storefronts line the streets – ‘FOR LEASE’ or ‘FOR SALE’ – having been foreclosed or abandoned. The sidewalks sprawl out as they make High River the most walkable

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Figure 54.11  Sporting goods store – facade (Markides, November 2015)

Figure 54.12  New pub and hardware store – fronts (Markides, September 2016)

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town in Alberta, with very little to walk to, from, or between. I used to walk to the coffee shop regularly. I shopped locally for most clothes, gifts, and housewares. Those familiar shops are gone, and the services too. Our dentist moved her practice to the next town. The optometrist closed up shop and moved across town. Sometimes it looks like businesses are moving in, with elaborate signage and new paint – these are mostly just facades – a veneer of renewal over a reality of ruin. The film industry has come to shoot movies and television series in High River for years. Producers and directors now take advantage of our empty buildings to create settings for imagined lives, while residents of High River carry out their real lives against the backdrop of an imagined world. What effects might this have on the people living here? Of course, I recognize that the movie industry must be good for the town, economically speaking. The people who own and lease the buildings

are certainly making money; in fact, they must make enough money that they do not need to lease or sell their buildings between filming engagements. The large movie trucks and trailers fill vacant land and parking lots, and the crew members increase the lines in coffee shops and local restaurants, though most of the food on the sets is catered by outside companies. In truth, the industry people do not really need our hotels, restaurants, or services, but they must be boosting the economy in fits and spurts, or at least one coffee at a time. During filming, the town appears more industrious and bustling. The ‘new’ businesses look promising. What are the emotional costs of seeing revitalization that is not really there? I wonder deeply about the impact, as I get excited for the new: roadhouse, trading post, pizzeria, noodle house, sporting goods shop, hardware store, massage parlour, liquor store, launderette, and more – overpromised and undersold.

Figure 54.13  Delivery in 30 minutes or … never (Markides, September 2016)

Figure 54.14  Dentist office, now launderette (Markides, September 2016)

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Figure 54.15  Posters to mask the empty insides (Markides, September 2016)

Figure 54.16  Mmm … noodles (Markides, September 2016)

Figure 54.17  Antiques or roadhouse? (Markides, June 2017)

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Figure 54.18  Hardware – not fixing anything (Markides, June 2017)

Figure 54.19  Real art gallery, ‘not fake’ (Markides, June 2017)

Figure 54.20  Fake bake shop, (really) for lease (Markides, June 2017)

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For the real businesses that open in the empty spaces in-between, they are quick to put up signs reading: ‘not a movie set’ and ‘not fake, real gallery’. Despite their clear signage, most of the businesses that open up between the facades struggle to stay open. More have closed down within the first year than remain open now. I know that there are other factors at play in this scenario. People in our community might have less financial means to support the downtown businesses than they did before. However, the need for the businesses to advertise their real-ness speaks to their experienced obstacles of being on set. For many residents and business owners, the act of living in High River means (re) experiencing the losses every day and dwelling in remembrance – both subconsciously and consciously. People are trying to rebuild amidst the empty reminders of what once was…a vibrant town. How does this help to heal, restore, or erode one’s spirit? How might we see our town anew – to (re)build – from imagined to real? As the years pass, I note that in my photographs I am seeing the same ‘new’ stores again and again – series contracts renewed for another season – and it begins to feel that the project of actual downtown renewal may never happen. Looking for High River for answers, I wonder what can be learned from other communities that have experienced disaster?

(RE)FACING DISASTER Disaster is never terribly far away. Knowing how people behave in disasters is fundamental for knowing how to prepare for them. And what can be learned about resilience, social and psychological response, and possibility from sudden disasters is relevant as well for the slower disasters of poverty, economic upheaval, and incremental environmental degradation as well as the abiding questions about social possibilities. (Solnit, 2009: 22)

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In her book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, Rebecca Solnit (2009) describes phenomena that occur in the aftermaths of disasters, including the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, the 1917 Halifax Explosion, the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake, the 2001 September 11 attacks (also known as 9/11), and the 2005 Hurricane Katrina. She tells of the resilience of people as they create camps and communities to serve the most basic of human needs. These places become larger than the losses, remembered as joy-filled sanctuaries given playful names on makeshift signs. People finding love amidst the devastation. Other accounts are less rosy, as Solnit describes the effects of martial law and senseless killings that take place in areas where people – seen as unruly and mob-like – seek ways to meet their basic needs. Corruption and opportunism are also exposed as common occurrences in the wake of disasters. Solnit writes how the ‘unfulfilled promises of evacuation and aid day after day turned Katrina into a social crisis’ (2009: 239), also noting that: Many of the people left behind in New Orleans were elderly, ill, or otherwise frail, mothers and young children or extended families who couldn’t bring themselves to split up for an evacuation or leave some members behind. Though much blame was heaped upon those who did not evacuate, many lacked the resources to do so: a car, or gas money, or a place to go. (Solnit, 2009: 239)

Solnit’s work points to many of the issues underlying these crises, but does not name the perpetrators. Specifically, the government failed the people through inaction; worse yet, the government took a ‘blame the victims’ mentality which caused greater hardship for the survivors as many citizens felt justified in ignoring those in need. She touches on the issue of racism, without naming ‘racism’, as she recounts: Many trapped in the city believed they had been left to die, some believed that it was because they were black [sic]. There was some truth to those beliefs.

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Figure 54.21  ‘WE ARE STiLL CLEANG UP PLEASE DON’T TOUCH OUR SUPPLYs AND FURNiTURE’ (Markides, March 2017) Even television news commentators noted that an affluent white community would not have been left to suffer for so many days while the federal government dithered. (Solnit, 2009: 239)

While the political climate and race relations of Canada may appear less hostile, the prioritization of aid to support the predominately wealthy, predominately white victims of the 2013 Alberta floods is apparent in the disproportionate government spending to buy out the luxury homes in Calgary’s elite neighbourhoods (CBC, 2014). In this example, the aid was dispensed swiftly and decisively for a few, while the majority of flood survivors were tasked with providing itemized lists of their losses not covered by insurance and waiting for decisions of monetary allotments from the Disaster Relief Program. Government buyouts of homes were not an option for the vast majority, with the exception of the Wallaceville neighbourhood in High River. The request for government buyouts was initiated by the town and the overall process took years to complete. The inequity is apparent; but like most issues of power,

the people with the power benefit and those without power are helpless to change the situation – even in our fair and just country.

(RE)NAMING DISASTER POLITICS In his online article ‘The Politics of Disposability’, Henry Giroux (2006) revisits the lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina’s devastation in New Orleans, from one year after the event. He compares the racism exposed in the brutal killing of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 with the media images of waterlogged dead bodies taken in the aftermath of the 2005 hurricane and flood disaster. Giroux described the victims of the latter as ‘the bodies of the poor, black, brown, elderly, and sick’ (2006: para. 20, line 2), left lying in the streets or found deceased in care facilities, such as nursing homes and hospitals. Although many people like to believe that society has become less racist since the 1950s, Giroux counters with examples of the ineffectual

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Figure 54.22  Diner – a permanent fixture (Markides, October 2015)

Figure 54.23  Little Big Bear Gifts – a facade on a facade (Markides, February 2018)

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government response and failed humanitarian efforts to save or show dignity for the most vulnerable populations in New Orleans – poor people of colour, especially the elderly. While Giroux’s perspective is bleak, it is honest and telling of the societal view towards marginalized and demonized groups as disposable people. Much of his article focuses on events in the United States but he cautions that many Canadian cities are also at risk, and ‘must protect those principles of the social contract that offer collective solutions to foster and maintain both ecological sustainability and human survival’ (2006: para. 4, line 2). Giroux’s work shows the power that government and media have to tell stories about people – to paint groups in a certain light – to develop narratives that serve their goals and purposes, whether these plans are to cut funding for social programs or to perpetuate fear and hatred of various races and cultural groups. In writing about my experience with the insurance company, accounts of government buyouts, and photographic encounters with the film industry, I am providing supplemental narratives of the flood. My stories might, at times, trouble the existing mainstream narratives. Prominent media stories focused primarily on financial losses and large government payments, including the buyouts in the wealthiest neighbourhoods; heroic rescues; acts of altruism and volunteerism; conspiracy theories of why it took so long for residents to be let back into the community; and mud-covered photo ops from government officials and television personalities. In the case of the latter, I am more attuned to these opportunistic publicity events, as they happen again and again in other communities hit by disaster. I now see through the veneer of the politicians’ and celebrities’ efforts to aid in disaster relief. Images of their momentary ‘work’ on the ground takes attention away from the sustained efforts needed for recovery. The media propaganda creates a false sense that aid is

being given from people in power, when in reality they are gone before any real work has been done.

(RE)ENGAGING COMMUNITY Looking next to the work of John Ackerman, Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, Bridie McGreavy, and Leah Sprain (2016), ‘The Skunkwork of Ecological Engagement’ provides an example of insights gained from informal spaces of community engagement after a flood disaster. As the authors describe, ‘ecological engagement is about attending to the possibilities of dwelling in a place; skunkwork is a way of orienting this dwelling’ (2016: 75). Specifically, the term ‘skunkwork’ is used ‘to describe informal spaces of learning, creativity, self-coordination, and transformation’ (2016: 77). Using conference workshops as sites of informal research with resilient communities, Ackerman, Druschke, McGreavy, and Sprain explore proximity, movement, ecological narration, and weak theory as four emergent attributes of skunkwork for ecological engagement that may inform academic scholarship and community engagement advocacy. Within the scope of proximity, the authors ‘disturb the obviousness and thus invisibility of dwelling near water, in pipe or stream, an obviousness that points to an endangered condition in late modern life’ (2016: 80). Water is endangered, commodified, and monitored by various jurisdictional organizations for different purposes. Through the workshops, different groups came together and found that they had common interests in sustainability and flood recovery. In the dwelling in place study, movement was taken up similarly to the Aristotelian sense of peripatesis of learning while walking beside a sage; in this study, the creek became the sage that the researchers and participants were learning alongside. In their words: ‘Peripatesis, by necessity, reveals an

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authority given place, and there could be the inklings of a kind of ecological wisdom learned over time then re-acquired through movement near, through, and toward earthly and worldly ecologies’ (2016: 84). Walking along the creek became an integral part of the workshops and a touchstone for the learning that extended beyond the experience. Considering ecological narration, the authors noted that participants wanted to tell stories of similar happenings from their personal histories or connections to their home communities. Extrapolating from their ideas and respecting that they could not share the experiences of the participants from the workshops, Ackerman and colleagues (2016) offer examples of ecological narration from their own lives. Each account is descriptive and centred around a single place; their stories are layered as they grow first from a single memory, to a sense of the place over time; and the sharing moves from personal reflections and learning, to reflexive practices where societal implications are explored. The idea of weak theory is described by Gibson-Graham (as cited in Ackerman, et al., 2016) as the demystifying of power in favour of recovering diverse, local economies. With regard to the skunkwork of ecological engagement, weak theory represents the movement away from structure-bound, strong theories with one way of doing and knowing, towards community-engaged practices that invite multiple approaches and understandings; specifically, the skunkwork ‘dislodges the self and the arrogance of mastery over either social or ecological scenes’ (2016: 89). As a point of commonality, the Boulder Creek flood that is central to the skunkworks article happened the same year as the High River flood that is central to my research; both floods took place in 2013. The idea of proximity resonates with the reality of a river as an ever-present but often over-looked danger, as waters flow through many communities. Communities build near waterways, to be near the resource needed to sustain life.

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Property near water is also desirable for the natural views. The ‘obviousness’ and ‘invisibility’ of place-dangers is also echoed in the name of our community, ‘High River’, an irony that many poked fun at in light of the flood event – the name is an obvious indication of the potential dangers, yet the joking becomes an all-too-painful reminder of the previously invisible truth it revisits. With the notion of movement, the scholars make reference to peripatesis as an experience of learning from the ecology of place. Moreover, the idea of being attentive to and learning from the land has been known to Indigenous peoples and practised for thousands of years. Relationships with land require attention, care, and effort, like other kinds of relationships. Being in a relationship brings an innate sense of responsibility as well. Julie Cruikshank (1990) speaks to the power of place to signal memories of teachings and stories. For many people, we have forgotten to pay attention to our surroundings in any deep or meaningful way, which gets in the way of our ability to read the signs, to learn from place, and to remember what the land has taught us over time. The Blackfoot knew the area as Ispitzee, which means ‘place of high trees along running water’ (High River, n.d.: ‘History’ para. 1). The ‘high trees’ are black cottonwood trees, which are known to grow along floodplains. Why was no one listening to the land? The concept of ecological narration became particularly salient for me as it relates to my interest in taking images of the river and gathering stories of the flood – stories told about a specific place where the learning speaks back to society in meaningful ways. McGreavy writes of the low pools of water that formed in the spring behind her childhood house near the Saco River. She recalls the chorus of frogs, and later learned about a phenomenon that she now associates with these memories. As McGreavy describes: Big Night is that evening when we step out into the rain and can feel spring seep into our lungs.

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This is the night when we can, in a bodily way, remember the movement of our planet around its sun. This remembering is, as I imagine it, similar to how frogs, salamanders, and other sentient beings remember their migrations: navigating by stars and smells and other sensate cues. When frogs sense the seasons shift, they start to sing. The chorus, for me, has become one way of keeping time following a different rhythm: embodied, sonic, cyclical. (Ackerman et al., 2016: 85)

McGreavy’s story is personal, educational, and memorable; it speaks beyond the context of eastern and western Maine, highlighting our interconnectedness with the rhythms of Mother Earth. Stories of flood factor heavily into Sprain’s ecological narration. She notes that her connection to floods began four years before she was even born, with Colorado’s deadliest flash flood. When she married in late August 2013, it was a time of historic rainfall. The friends and family who gathered wore newly purchased rainboots. The ‘2013 flood “ravaged”

the riverside park where [she] got married … the park has not yet reopened’ (Ackerman et al., 2016: 88). Sprain’s experience of post-flood life echoes with my own. She writes, ‘dwelling in Colorado now means talking about the flood, rebuilding and recovering, recognizing how flood damage has not been shared equally’ (2016: 88). She goes on to note that not everyone returned home after the flood. This was also true for the residents of High River. Each person’s experience was different, damage varied from home to home, and some people choose never to return to the town. With regard to weak theory, Ackerman, Druschke, McGreavy, and Sprain acknowledge that there is wisdom in the world beyond written texts, and propose ‘radical listening to everyday places. The rare birdcall…. The flash flood. The interruption that opens your ears and minds. [They] suggest that academia

Figure 54.24  Going nowhere (Markides, June 2018)

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(RE)IMAGINING The research ideal of benefiting society is an important ideal. Interestingly it is a very activist notion because it implies that societies will change, that they will be improved and that lives will get better. Research is expected to lead to social transformation. (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012: 226)

Figure 54.25  No news (Markides, June 2018)

has a too highly developed sense of talking and a less fostered sense of listening’ (2016: 91). Since the flood, I have been practising my radical listening along the berm in High River (Markides, 2018b). It is with a similar belief about academic work – focusing too highly on speaking, rather than listening – that I humbly conduct my research, from a weak position. I have not entered into post-disaster study to follow a well-charted map or path, or to act as a guide that shows others the way. Instead, I maintain an openness, as I continue to learn from the flood stories told by survivors, images, and my ongoing encounters within and between locationalities. Through radical listening and by exploring multiple pathways of experience, I hope to contribute to the critical discourse of disasters, speak truth to power as it relates to immediate responses and long-term recoveries, shed light on the beliefs and happenings of post-flood life from multiple perspectives, and build on the skunkwork of ecological engagement as it pertains to flood ravaged areas.

Through my critical autobiographic and arts-infused (re)counting, (re)interpreting, and reconciling, I share the conscious choices I have made in the telling of my stories, and the pain these stories can revisit upon me; the insider perspective of having ever-present markers of what existed before and is now gone; and the emptiness at the heart of town, not readily apparent from an outsider’s perspective. My stories and interpretations may or may not have bearing on the experiences of others; perhaps, my personal narratives will help validate the experiences of others – to know that they are not alone.

Figure 54.26  Filming today (Markides, March 2018)

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Figure 54.27  From hardware, to workwear – false advertising, no sales to be had (Markides, May 2018)

Figure 54.28  Roadhouse/Antiques/Roadhouse – rotating facades (Markides, June, 2018)

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Figure 54.29  Diner, rear view – a facade on all fronts (Markides, June 2018)

Regardt J. Ferreira, Fredrick Buttell, and Sandra B. Ferreira (2015) contend that research conducted with disaster-affected populations may be of significant benefit, as a means ‘for participants to reflect on their personal growth and resilience, and to articulate their disaster-experience narrative’ (2015: 34). In this way, my work may hold promise – at least for me – to bring greater awareness of my evolving relationship with the town over time. I continue to negotiate the tensions between opening up and shutting down, much like the businesses around me. Is it safe for us yet? Will we be supported? Or become empty once more? From massive floods and raging fires, to truth and reconciliation, natural and manmade disasters create deep scars and devastating legacies. The traumas carry forward in the stories that are told, echoing of prolonged hardship, hope, and healing. For many community members whose lives have been touched by disaster, the challenges of daily life are amplified immensely.

Figure 54.30  Low and slow (Markides, September 2016)

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As the occurrences of severe weather events and natural disasters increase each year, the long-term processes of recovery should be considered on both the individual and community level. Is it better for the devastation and recovery to be visible – longterm reminders of what is lost? Prolonged vacancies are obvious and visible to potential inhabitants and visitors. By way of facades, High River appears bustling to outsiders, while posing an empty veneer for those living through the flood. With further study, I will seek to understand the potential benefits and/or damaging effects of living between two worlds. Do vibrant simulacra (Baudrillard, 1988) stand in for a thriving town – as placeholders – and/ or subsume the town’s potential for renewal? Or, are they a more-than-real reminder of what once was? By understanding the relationship between pre- and post-disaster worlds – remembered and real – and the power struggles and imbalances involved in recovery, I hope that we might better shoulder the extraneous debris and reinforce the weary supports for other survivors and their communities.

REFERENCES 2013 Alberta floods. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved May 26, 2019, from https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Alberta_floods Absolon, K., & Willett, C. (2005). Putting ourselves forward: Location in Aboriginal research. In L. Brown & S. Strega (Eds.), Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous, and Anti-Oppressive Approaches (pp. 97–126). Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars’ Press. Ackerman, J., Druschke, C. G., McGreavy, B., & Sprain L. (2016). The skunkwork of ecological engagement. Reflections on Sustainable Communities and Environmental Communication 16(1), 75–95. Aoki, T. T. (1986/1991/2005). Teaching as indwelling between two curriculum worlds. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum

in a New Key: The Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki, (pp. 159–165). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Baudrillard, J. (1988). Simulacra and simulations. In M. Poster (Ed.), Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, (pp. 166–185). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). (2014, October 7). Flood buyouts for 11 Calgary homes cost province $33M, documents show. CBC News Calgary. Retrieved May 26, 2019, from https://www.cbc.ca/ news/canada/calgary/flood-buyouts-for11-calgary-homes-cost-province-33mdocuments-show-1.2790028 Cruikshank, J. (1990). Life Lived like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2018). Introduction: The discipline and practice of qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (5th ed.), (pp. 1–35). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ferreira, R., Buttell, F., & Ferreira, S. (2015). Ethical considerations for conducting disaster research with vulnerable populations. Journal of Social Work Values and Ethics 12(1), 29–40. Finley, S. (2012). Arts-based research. In J. G Knowles & A. L. Cole (Eds.), Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues (pp. 72–82). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by M. B. Ramos. London, UK: Penguin Books (original work published 1970). Giroux, H. A. (2006, September 1). The politics of disposability. Dissident Voice. Retrieved May 26, 2019, from http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Sept06/Giroux01.htm Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a Blue Guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. High River. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved September 29, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/High_River Husserl, E. (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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Innes, R. A. (2009). ‘Wait a second: Who are you anyways?’ The insider/outsider debate and American Indian Studies. The American Indian Quarterly 33(4), 440–461. Kincheloe, J. L. (2005). Autobiography and critical ontology: Being a teacher, developing a reflective persona. In W.-M. Roth (Ed.), Auto/Biography and Auto/Ethnography: Praxis of Research Method, (pp. 155–174). Rotterdam, NL: Sense Publishing. Kincheloe, J. L., McLaren, P., Steinberg, S. R., & Monzó, L. D. (2018). Critical pedagogy and qualitative research: Advancing the bricolage. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (5th ed.), (pp. 235–260). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kovach, M. (2009). Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Markides, J. (2018a). Being Indigenous in the Indigenous education classroom: A critical self-study of teaching in an impossible and imperative assignment. In E. R. Lyle (Ed.), Fostering a Relational Pedagogy: Self-Study as Transformative Praxis, (pp. 35–44). Leiden, NL: Brill | Sense. Markides, J. (2018b). Making peace with the Highwood River: One year in contemplative photographs and flows. In P. Richardson, S. Walsh, & B. Bickel (Eds.), Special Issue: Artizein: Arts & Teaching Journal 3(1), 61–73. Madden, R. (2010). Being Ethnographic: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Ethnography. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Massinon, S., & Fraser, D. (2014, June 19) More than 150 rescued from rooftops in High River. Calgary Herald. Retrieved May 26, 2019, from http://www.calgaryherald.com/ health/More+than+rescued+from+rooftops +High+River/8553169/story.html Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1987). The tree of knowledge. Boston, MA: Shambhala. Peshkin, A. (1988). In search of subjectivity: One’s own. Educational Researcher 17(7), 17–21. Pinar, W. F. (1994). The method of ‘currere’ (1975). In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Autobiography, Politics, and Sexuality: Essays in Curriculum Theory 1972–1992, (pp. 19–27). New York, NY: Peter Lang. re. (2019). In Merriam-Webster.com. Retrieved May 24, 2019, from https://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/re Solnit, R. (2009). A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. New York, NY: Penguin Books. Steinberg, S. R. (2012). Critical cultural studies research: Bricolage in action. In S. R. Steinberg & G. S. Canella (Eds.), Critical Qualitative Research Reader, (pp. 182–197). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Strong-Wilson, T. (2008). Bringing Memory Forward: Storied Remembrance in Social Justice Education with Teachers (Vol. 23). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2012). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Zed Books.

55 Dance and Children’s Cultural Identity: A Critical Perspective of the Embodiment of Place Adrienne Sansom

INTRODUCTION Employing the concept of place as a conceptual framework and using a critical and phenomenological lens, this chapter proposes to convey how children who attend a M¯aorimedium early childhood center maintain their cultural heritage and assert their Indigenous rights through dance during their embodied encounters with place. Concomitantly, the chapter endeavors to explore the underlying tensions and critical perspectives inherent in working toward a bilingual and bicultural nation as illustrated by the M¯aori-medium center’s Kaupapa M¯aori philosophy, to confront the oppressive regimes of colonialism that still pervade both society and education and impact the revitalization of M¯aori ways of knowing and doing. In so doing, the chapter addresses the teachers’ (kaiako) adherence to creating a place where the children (tamariki/ mokopuna) and their families (wh¯anau) can stand (their tuˉrangawaewae) and declare, and how this may be achieved in some way

through dance, including M¯aori dance such as haka, a dance form that was once (and conceivably still is) seen as grotesque from Westernized perspectives. Does engagement in dance, together with an affiliation with the spiritual or Indigenous perception of place, promote a deeper understanding of cultural heritage and help M¯aori to re-affirm their beliefs and values that have for so long been denied under the guise of colonization? In a similar vein to Freire (1970), who championed the development of a critical consciousness or conscientization for the purpose of achieving democracy and freedom through liberatory literacy, M¯aori have also fought for their right to speak their own language and pursue their cultural traditions and art forms. As bell hooks asserts: ‘Representation [whether this is through dance or other art forms including language and literacy] is a crucial location of struggle for any exploited and oppressed peopled asserting subjectivity and decolonization of the mind’ (1995: 3), and I would add, the decolonization of land and culture.

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AN OPENING VIGNETTE – THE HAKA A small group of children aged between two and five years of age slowly enter the auditorium where an award function is about to take place. The auditorium is filled by adults, mostly international students from Japan and their teachers, together with other family members both local and international. The children, who come from the M¯aori-medium early childhood center located nearby on the university campus, are accompanied by several teachers (kaiako). They edge toward a side wall near the front of the auditorium and, on instruction from the teachers, sit down on the floor – sometimes looking around at others in the auditorium, sometimes looking down at the floor or at each other. The children have been invited (as they are often invited from this center) to perform a M¯aori haka for the guests. When it comes to their turn to perform the haka, one young M¯aori boy takes the lead using a call-and-response mode – ‘ka mate, ka mate, ka ora, ka ora’ – and his voice fills the entire room, loud and strong, defying his age and size, dwarfed as he is by those around him. As he leads the haka you can sense the confidence he emits, not only in his voice but also in his body actions, stamping his feet (waewae takahia), and performing the strong thrusting actions in forward and downward directions using his arms and hands (ringa ringa). The other young children join in the haka and chant, some with great energy, others a little less so, seemingly still daunted by the number of adults in the room and the awesomeness of the occasion. Some of the children pick up on the confidence of the leading boy, who knows every word and every action of the haka. Performing the haka as part of an award ceremony is a great honor. It is also a traditional custom long held by M¯aori, and the center and the teachers uphold these traditions (tikanga) as part of the Kaupapa M¯aori philosophy of the center. If a child takes on the role of leading the haka, it becomes part of the tikanga and the kaupapa that is followed,

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whether it is for a powhiri (ceremony to welcome people into a place and honor one’s ancestors), hui (meeting), or mihi (greeting) for manuhiri (guests or visitors).

¯ THE M AORI-MEDIUM CENTER AND ¯ KAUPAPA MAORI PHILOSOPHY As mentioned earlier, the children and teachers in the above scenario come from an early childhood educational center that is located on a university campus. The early childhood center is described as a M¯aori-medium early childhood center because it focuses on all things M¯aori (tikanga and te reo M¯aori) but is not full-immersion te reo M¯aori, or M¯aori language, which, therefore, differs from K¯ohanga Reo, which are early childhood centers with full-immersion te reo M¯aori. The M¯aori-medium early childhood center operates under a Kaupapa M¯aori philosophy or framework, which encompasses the concepts of wh¯anaungatanga (responsibility and reciprocal obligations toward others), manaakitanga (caring for others), kaitiakitanga (stewardship over land and resources), wairuatanga (spiritual interconnectedness), tuakana/teina (looking after each other), and mana tangata (being able to stand confidently in both worlds) (Pohio, Sansom, and Liley, 2015; Ritchie, 2015). The principles of Kaupapa M¯aori encourage mokopuna (the young children) to become committed learners using te reo me ng¯a tikanga M¯aori me ng¯a akoranga o te ao wh¯anui (holistic learning for all – or more accurately, the wider world – in this case, the P¯akeh¯a/tauiwi world). In te ao M¯aori, the M¯aori world, the values of aroha (love) and manaakitanga imply an obligation to care for other people, while kaitiakitanga extends this same expectation to the natural world or the places in which one lives. A Kaupapa M¯aori philosophy creates a program that elevates M¯aori beliefs and values, which become the basis of teaching and learning and underpin all facets of the curriculum,

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including visits to local landmarks of significance such as the nearby mountain that overlooks the center, noho marae or M¯aori meeting places or communities where people live or stay, and environments such as native bush and forests, lakes, oceans, and historical M¯aori sites. The relationship between the environment and those who inhabit the space, in this case the children and teachers, together with their wh¯anau (family), creates a ‘pedagogy capable of embodying ways of knowing and being [which] requires a sense of consciousness, a union of mind and spirit, the mauri (life force) and wairua (spirit)’ (Penetito, 2009: 20, cited in Ritchie, 2011: 57). As outlined in Te Wh¯ariki, He Wh¯ariki M¯atauranga m¯o ng¯a Mokopuna o Aotearoa, the early childhood curriculum of Aotearoa New Zealand, a Kaupapa M¯aori philosophy draws on Kaupapa M¯aori theory, which focuses on: M¯aori ways of knowing and being [and] assumes the normalcy of M¯aori knowledge, language and culture. It gives voice to M¯aori aspirations and expresses the ways in which M¯aori aspirations, ideas and learning practices can be framed and organised. … Kaupapa M¯aori theory is situated within the land, culture, history and people of Aotearoa New Zealand, constituting a distinctive, contextualised theoretical framework driven by wh¯anau, hapu¯ and iwi understandings. (Ministry of Education [MoE], 2017: 61)

The above-mentioned M a¯ ori values and beliefs, drawn from the te ao M¯aori world, underpin New Zealand’s early childhood curriculum, Te Wh¯ariki (MoE, 1996, 2017). The conceptualization of the curriculum is discussed in the following section together with Te Whatu P¯okeka, the M¯aori assessment framework, which acts as an accompanying guiding document.

¯ TE WHARIKI AND TE WHATU POKEKA ¯ The advent of Te Wh¯ariki came into being during a time of social, economic, and

political change during the 1980s and 1990s. The strong early childhood union voice at the time was instrumental in advocating for the first national and international bicultural early childhood curriculum (Pohio et  al., 2015). As a bicultural and bilingual curriculum, Te Wh¯ariki supports tino rangatiratanga (self-governance or self-determination) for all M¯aori people (Ritchie and Rau, 2010), while at the same time affording all children in Aotearoa New Zealand the right to experience not only the bicultural nature of the curriculum, but also the multicultural society in which children and their families or wh¯anau live. This is made clear in the New Zealand early childhood curriculum, which states that ‘all children should be given the opportunity to develop knowledge and an understanding of the cultural heritage of both partners to Te Tiriti o Waitangi’ (MoE, 1996: 9). The Treaty of Waitangi is an important part of the history of Aotearoa New Zealand (as referred to later in this chapter) and the early childhood curriculum reflects this partnership in its composition. In addition, the 2017 version of Te Wh¯ariki states that ‘the Treaty has implications for our education system, particularly in terms of achieving equitable outcomes for M¯aori and ensuring that te reo M¯aori not only survives but thrives’ (MoE, 2017: 3). A particularly significant contribution to the formulation of the curriculum was from M¯aori. The principles upon which Te Wh¯ariki is founded, especially the overarching principle of empowerment, were decreed by M¯aori educators Tamati and Tilly Reedy (Hill and Sansom, 2010), occasioning ‘a national curriculum whose conceptual framework was based on the cultural and political beliefs of the minority Indigenous people’ (Te One, 2003: 36). It is the principle of empowerment (whakamana), in association with the other principles of holistic development (kotahitanga), family and community (wh¯anau tangata), and relationships (ng¯a hononga) that provides an essentially M¯aori focus to the early childhood curriculum. The title of the

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curriculum, Te Wh¯ariki, meaning mat, was suggested by Tilly Reedy as a metaphor – a wh¯ariki, which was seen ‘as a woven mat for all to stand on’ (Te One, 2003: 33). Te Wh¯ariki acts as an important conceptual and philosophical framework for a reconceptualizing of the early years curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand, especially when making connections to the land and culture as indicated under the strand of Exploration or Mana Aot¯uroa: • familiarity with stories from different cultures about the living world, including myths and legends and oral, nonfictional, and fictional forms; • working theories about Planet Earth and beyond; • a knowledge of features of the land which are of local significance, such as the local river or mountain; • theories about social relationships and social concepts, such as friendship, authority, and social rules and understandings; • a relationship with the natural environment and a knowledge of their own place in the environment; • respect and a developing sense of responsibility for the well-being of both the living and the nonliving environment; • working theories about the living world and knowledge of how to care for it (MoE, 1996: 90); and • a sense of responsibility for the living world and knowledge about how to care for it (MoE, 2017: 47).

In addition, identity, language, and culture are particularly important, as indicated in the 2017 version of Te Wh¯ariki: Learner identity is enhanced when children’s home languages and cultures are valued in educational settings and when kaiako are responsive to their cultural ways of knowing and being. For M¯aori this means kaiako need understanding of a world view that emphasises the child’s whakapapa connection to M¯aori creation, across Te Kore, te po, ¯ te ao m¯arama, atua M¯aori and tipuna. All children should be able to access te reo M¯aori in their ECE setting, as kaiako weave te reo M¯aori and tikanga M¯aori into the everyday curriculum. (MoE, 2017: 12)

Te Wh¯ariki offers early childhood educators in Aotearoa the opportunity to heighten the

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focus on ecological sustainability and an ethic of caring for self, others, and the environment. Te Whariki, ¯ He Whariki ¯ Matauranga ¯ mo¯ nga¯ Mokopuna o Aotearoa, the New Zealand early childhood curriculum (MoE, 1996), contains a vision for early childhood care and education pedagogies that implicitly serves an ethic of social, cultural and ecological justice. (Ritchie, 2015: 41)

In conjunction with Te Wh¯ariki, the M¯aori assessment framework, Te Whatu P¯okeka (MoE, 2009), provides another avenue to address the ecological ideals stated above. A whatu p¯okeka is a baby blanket made of muka (fiber) from the harakeke (flax) plant. Albatross feathers are carefully woven into the inside of the blanket to provide warmth, comfort, security, and refuge from the elements. The p¯okeka takes the shape of the child as it learns and grows. It represents a metaphor for all the experiences a child becomes involved in where the development of what occurs is determined and shaped by the child. The principal focus of Te Whatu P¯okeka is the assessment from a M¯aori perspective of children’s ways of knowing. This approach ensures that the children’s voices are heard and their cultural heritage is acknowledged (Pohio et al., 2015). Embedded within Te Whatu P¯okeka are the M¯aori principles of Te Wh¯ariki (MoE, 1996, 2017). One key principle – wh¯anau tangata – acknowledges the relationships children have with place and their cultural and historical inheritances. This takes the form of ‘making links to everyday experiences and to special events celebrated by families, wh¯anau, and local and cultural communities’ (MoE, 2017: 20). In accordance with the principles and strands/goals outlined in the early childhood curriculum Te Wh¯ariki, the center at the heart of this chapter explores practices that support social, cultural, and ecological justice. A particular component of its program is regular visits to the nearby mountain (maunga) that overlooks the center. It was because of these excursions to the mountain, which occurred

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every second week, that I became acquainted with the kaupapa of the center through participating in these visits as part of a research project. The visits to the mountain provided prime opportunities for engaging with the land and space and enabled the young children to literally embody the environment. In particular, the art forms of dance, drama, music, and visual arts became pivotal conduits as modes of rediscovering the history, stories, and sensations of the maunga, as well as the actual physical space of the mountain. The land provided enriching variances in terrain, materials, textures, climatic conditions, vistas, and people – all prime catalysts for art-making endeavors. Before embarking on encounters with dance as observed during the visits to the maunga undertaken by the children, teachers, and wh¯anau of the center, a brief overview of the history of Aotearoa is presented to situate both the M¯aori and colonial history of New Zealand and to explain how this history becomes a significant factor when affiliated with the land and the oppression of M¯aori culture, their tino rangatiratanga or selfdetermination. Incorporated within this history are the origins of M¯aori dance.

THE HISTORY OF AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND As previously indicated, M¯aori have a strong affiliation to the land and the places they occupy or live in. This has been important throughout history, from the time M¯aori settled in Aotearoa in the 1700s. M¯aori cohabited the land alongside the flora and fauna and, thus, the land provided a form of spiritual solace that serviced their physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being (Penetito, 2009, in Ritchie, 2015). When M¯aori became the first settlers on the shores of Aotearoa, the transmission of traditional M¯aori knowledge and practices was conveyed orally through the M¯aori language

(te reo M¯aori). This was until New Zealand came under foreign rule by the British Crown in 1769 and was colonized by missionaries in 1814, who converted M¯aori to Christianity (Hill and Sansom, 2010). In 1840, the Treaty of Waitangi (Te Tiriti o Waitangi) was written and signed by British representatives of the Crown and M¯aori chiefs to signify a partnership between the people of Britain (the colonizers) and M¯aori in Aotearoa New Zealand. As signified earlier, the Treaty of Waitangi is an important part of the history of Aotearoa New Zealand because it was written as a contract between the M¯aori people and the British Crown, which in return for New Zealand sovereignty guaranteed specific rights for M¯aori (Hill and Sansom, 2010). The Treaty of Waitangi continues to be a crucial document, not only as a political treatise for the everyday functioning and future aspirations of Aotearoa New Zealand as a bicultural and, consequently, multicultural nation, but also as a reminder of a nation’s ethical and moral obligation to all children and their education. A component of those rights was the acknowledgement and appreciation of M¯aori ways of knowing or cultural epistemologies and ways of being (Ritchie, 2001); rights that have only been partially honored. Despite this promise to acknowledge M¯aori ways of knowing (including the use of Te Reo M¯aori), by 1840 the English language became an enforced requirement in both education and society (Ritchie, 2015), which imposed difficulties for M¯aori to uphold not only their language, but also their traditional knowledge and practices. It was not until the 1980s that the revitalization of the M¯aori language began its resurgence, thanks to M¯aori elders who refused to let their language die. Together with the resurrection of the M¯aori language, a renaissance of M¯aori traditions and associated values and beliefs began, although this did not happen without the absolute determination of the M¯aori people. One of these initiatives was the development of K¯ohanga Reo, or full-immersion M¯aorilanguage early childhood centers (Hill and

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Sansom, 2010). These centers ensured that the M¯aori language would be re-introduced into young children’s lives with the aim that the children would become bilingual speakers using both M¯aori and English. In 1987, te reo M¯aori was declared an official language in Aotearoa New Zealand by the M¯aori Language Act, which brought about a new challenge for the nation and especially for those involved in education. As pointed out by Ritchie (2015), educators were now required to learn about M¯aori traditions and stories related to the land, including stories of Papat¯ua¯ nuku, the Earth Mother, and M¯aori cosmology, which sees all living creatures as descendants from Papat¯ua¯ nuku and Ranginui the Sky Father. These stories also pertain to the waiata (songs) and haka (dances) for the whenua (land) and the tamariki/mokopuna (children/grandchildren) and include learning the M¯aori language, which connects people to the land and their ancestors.

¯ THE ORIGINS OF M AORI DANCE One way of becoming acquainted with M¯aori traditions is through dance, especially haka. Haka is steeped in history and tradition – it calls upon some of the deepest roots of ancestors together with other forms of M¯aori dance, e.g. taiaha, poi, and waiata-¯a-ringa. From a te ao M¯aori or M¯aori world view, the interconnection between all living things, whether human, animal, plant, earth, or sky, is inseparable. Everything M¯aori are involved in, and that includes dance, maintains this interconnection to the life force or mauri of all living things past and present. Although there has been a burgeoning connection to the environment through dance and other areas of learning in latter or contemporary times, dance has always been an expression of the whenua (land and people) for M¯aori. M¯aori see themselves as the kaitiaki (guardian or caretaker) of the land, from which some M¯aori dance originates. For instance,

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M¯aori dance incorporates a form of symbolism such as the wiri, or quivering of the lower arms and hands, sometimes referred to as aroarowhaki, to simulate the shimmering waves of heat coming up from the ground, or ‘the attitudes and movements representative of the whole process of planting the potato, and afterwards of digging them out of the ground’ (Shennan, 1984: 2). M¯aori dances were often performed to honor the M¯aori gods, such as Tane Mahuta, god of the forest and bush, or Tangaroa, god of the sea or ocean. Other M¯aori dances depict the rowing of a waka or canoe, and incorporate slow, intense, but graceful movements related to the action of rowing, sometimes also illustrated through the use of the poi. The term kanikani, meaning dance, evolves from the word kani, which means dancing, or, ‘in the figurative sense, dancing through life’ (Shennan, 1984: 6). The M¯aori dance form of haka is probably the best known internationally because of the immense exposure given to the haka being performed before every rugby game played by the New Zealand Rugby team, the All Blacks. The haka is synonymous with the All Blacks and rugby. But what does the haka mean to M¯aori? According to Potatau Te Wherowhero, ‘haka exemplifies … the coming and merging of the “many nations”, represented by the “black, white and red threads”, into the “eye of a needle”, Aotearoa’ (cited in Kaiwai and Zemke-White, 2004: 140). Traditionally, the haka (as with other forms of M¯aori dance) was learned alongside more experienced elders, often on the marae, but these opportunities to learn haka could occur almost anywhere and were certainly not learned in a more formal or conventional way. Jan Bolwell (1998) cites Keri Kaa (a M¯aori expert in traditional forms of M¯aori dance), who explains the process of learning M¯aori dance, which was handed down through the generations: We sing and dance because we must … and you learn because your granny teaches you, or your grandad, and you soon learn to keep the beat when the old lady pinches your leg and says ‘E tu

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(stand), dance now.’ … Who taught me? Nobody taught me; I just listened and watched by being part of the scenery. (Kaa, quoted in Bolwell, 1998: 82).

As Bolwell (1998) articulates, the M¯aori art form of dance is a holistic venture not separated from voice, chant or song and, thus, the use of te reo M¯aori. These dances go beyond the physical or creative expression to become a means of identifying one’s tribal (iwi) and family (wh¯anau) connections, and become strong markers of identity. Other more recent accounts also reiterate these beliefs. Wiremu stand still. Stop fidgeting around. I want a straight back, chest out, chin up, legs apart. Boy don’t you dare look at the ground or else! Look at the audience and be strong. You are a descendant of a chief, show me that you are. Look at the audience and single one of them out. Stare at them. Show them how good you are. Show them how manly you are. When you pukana, ¯ big eyes, tongue out, gritty teeth. And stop smiling! Haka is not about smiling. If you want to smile I’ll put you in the front row of the women and give you a poi. Do you want that? So there I was being like my brothers, staunch and proud, with my eyes to the front, chest out, straight back and standing tall. (Barbour, 2011: 112)

As indicated by Matthews (2004: 10, as cited in Barbour, 2011: 114): ‘The portrayal and attainment of ihi is considered to be the achievement of excellence in performance. Ihi is a psychic power that elicits a positive psychic and emotional response from the audience’. Furthermore, as Wiremu continues: You know that feeling, when your body is amped, muscles flexed, staunch, sharp actions, intensity, speed, precision … and your back is straight, head held high and chin parallel with the floor, giving it all. You can’t captivate the crowd without having excellent movement. Us men pride ourselves on our staunchness and showing the body and our muscular attributes. No one would believe you, even if your words were good, if you looked like an idiot. ‘Kia korero ¯ te katoa o te tinana’ (the entire body has to speak). (Barbour, 2011: 115)

As referred to earlier, with the arrival of the European settlers in the 1700s, M¯aori customs, culture, and the rich resources of the

land and sea were both plundered and confiscated by the colonizers under the auspices of the British government, with continued assimilation occurring well after 1840, which was a clear breach of the Treaty of Waitangi. As a result, there was a significant loss of M¯aori culture, including the origins of haka. From the co-mingling of ‘new threads’ in the early 1900s, the dance form of kapa haka evolved, combining M¯aori and European influences. Thus, ‘Kapa Haka can be seen as a new form of structured concert dance that developed in response to colonial musical influences, rather than being “traditional” in the sense of ritualized marae practices’ (Barbour, 2011: 116). Kapa haka, therefore, is an amalgamation of M¯aori and Occidental cultural influences. As further substantiated by Kaiwai and Zemke-White (2004: 140); ‘This mediation of M¯aori and Occidental cultural influences was an important dynamic in the sustainability of M a¯ ori language, values, and customs – and these cultural practices continue to exist in song and dance.’ The advent of kapa haka can be seen as a way to express cultural identity in an innovative fashion, or as a form of reverse appropriation, while coming to terms with cultural loss (Kaiwai and Zemke-White, 2004). Kapa haka is a generic term used today to describe M¯aori-associated musical traditions, which are based around the performance of haka (dance), the modern poi (the poi dance), and waiata-¯a-ringa (action song). Haka is defined as dance, or a song accompanying a dance. Kapa is a rank or row; thus kapa haka is performed in a line (men standing in one row and women in another row). This combined form of kapa haka is a more recent construction (Kaiwai and Zemke-White, 2004). Cultural dances can become fused or blended with other popular dance forms, which establish ‘an embodied social identity that we are not always conscious of’ (Barbour, 2011: 118) – a type of dance fusion. In the past, the preservation of M¯aori traditions was often maintained because of remoteness, where certain tribes resisted or

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contested being assimilated into P¯akeh¯a society. Colonization threatened traditional M¯aori customs such as haka (dance), as well as other customs including whaik¯orero (formal speech usually made at a powhiri), waiata (song), and poi, which were performed in wharenui (meeting houses) on the marae. As referred to previously, haka was viewed as grotesque from a European viewpoint and more often than not, tourists were offered performances of waiata– a¯ -ringa and poi, because they were seen as less threatening and appeased the growing local and tourism markets (Kaiwai and ZemkeWhite, 2004). The propagation of kapa haka was firmly established in the 1920s to 1940s and became a flourishing art form, bringing together both M¯aori and European musical styles and aesthetics. Following World War II, professional refinements became more and more evident among kapa haka groups in a growing climate of kapa haka competition. Because of the increased migration to urban areas especially in the 1950s and 1960s, M¯aori found themselves dispossessed from their land and cultural traditions; thus kapa haka became a potent symbol for M¯aori youth as an experience that enabled M¯aori to rekindle their cultural heritage. As noted by Kaiwai and Zemke-White (2004): Tradition has been essential to M¯aori cultural sustainability by ensuring cultural continuity and pride. This repositioning of M¯aori cultural traditions and consequent development is vitally important to a rethinking of New Zealand’s colonial history, making any future M¯aori cultural development tasks a holistic and embodied process. (2004: 157)

In this sense, the phenomenon of kapa haka spans the past and the present. Dance practices like haka and poi have their roots in m¯atauranga M¯aori or M¯aori knowledge and beliefs. ‘Songs and chants were used to record tribal histories and genealogies’ (Kaiwai and Zemke-White, 2004: 157). As a consequence, kapa haka has become an important symbol of M¯aori identity. Kapa haka, as a musical and kinesthetic expression, is evidence of this proactive initiative and

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thrives today in kapa haka competitions, which are held nationwide every year during Polynesian Dance Festivals. The fusion evident in areas such as kapa haka raises further questions about the ‘intercultural appropriation of dance by one culture, and its propensity to appear as emergent in form and/or expression from the borrowed culture’ (Ashley, 2012: 161). However, this is only one component of acculturation. Innovation or appropriation of cultural dance forms also originate from within cultures themselves, and thus can be viewed as intracultural. As outlined by Linda Ashley (2012: 161–2), ‘In the development of competitive forms of M¯aori performing arts, the issue of how much tradition to disregard and how much to take forward was raised by M¯aori scholar and kapa haka authority Pita Sharples (2005)’. When aligned with the performance of the haka by the New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks, it is clear to see how the M¯aori haka provides an example of cultural misunderstandings. As stated earlier, the perception of the haka as grotesque or aggressive (a trait which is particularly evident in the haka performed by the All Blacks before a rugby game) did a disservice to the origins and purposes of the haka, which centered around important cultural traditions and customs or occasions such as marae powhiri (welcomes) or gatherings, harvest, births, and deaths, as well as for battle. Charles (2005: 4, as cited in Ashley, 2012: 232) provides a fitting description of haka, aligning the haka with the concept of an orchestra: ‘It’s an ensemble of hands, slapping, body movement, voice projection, tongue and eyes and they all coalesce and form this nexus to produce this beautiful thing called haka’. Today, haka plays a vital role in helping youth who may otherwise be failing in the education system or society to reconnect with their heritage or ancestry, which goes far beyond the more menacing view of haka as seen on the rugby field or the grotesque account of haka decreed by early British

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arrivals to the shores of Aotearoa. There are significant social and cultural meanings inherent in the haka and other M¯aori forms of dance, which can be easily overlooked, such as pertaining to the wiri, as discussed earlier. Another example is a traditional waka-­hauling chant used as a haka powhiri to welcome people onto the marae. This haka symbolizes the pulling of the waka (canoe) out of the water so that the visitors arrive safely on land. The same haka chant was also used more recently to welcome a new population of endangered tuatara (New Zealand native lizard) onto an island free of predators as part of a conservation initiative (Ashley, 2012). Haka represents togetherness and an awareness of the te ao M¯aori, or M¯aori world, and has sacred significance.

THE MAUNGA – A PLACE TO LIVE AND DANCE For all of the reasons mentioned above, it is not surprising that the haka features largely in the young children’s dance experiences at the M¯aori-medium early childhood center, as depicted in the opening vignette. For the young children from the M a¯ ori-medium early childhood center, the haka and other forms of embodied engagement take place on a regular basis, especially when connected with place or land via the center’s regular trips to the nearby maunga (mountain) and other places of significance such as noho marae. M¯aori traditional dance such as haka can create an opportunity for ecological and spiritual (ancestral) connections. This burgeoning connection to the environment and dance links back to early dance, especially for M¯aori, which occurred in the open, at maraes on the atea (open area where gatherings take place), and has always been about the whenua (land and place) and people. It seems fitting, therefore, that the children perform haka and other traditional M¯aori dance forms such as poi and taiaha out in the

open environment and on the mountain during their visits as a form of gifting to the mountain for its protection, sustenance, and spiritual presence or life force. The M¯aori cultural dances provided a ritualistic form of thanks to the mountain. These dance experiences engendered a connection between the children and the mountain and thus strengthened the children’s cultural identity, helping them to develop a sense of belonging (mana whenua) and wellbeing (mana atua) or wairuatanga, which is ‘a source of spiritual and emotional well-being’ (Ritchie, 2015: 43). The children were often heard to say when dancing on the mountain, ‘This is my mountain’, and to raise their voices in chanting ‘ka mate, ka mate, ka ora, ka ora’ while performing the haka. Connectedness with the earth as the source of life and as a place to honor one’s ancestors has been an unceasing value for the M¯aori people. This aligns with Nel Noddings’ (2003) focus on an ethic of care, whereby there is a relational understanding of people and their alliance with all things living, and with those who have lived and are not forgotten. Hence the obligation to act responsibly, and to care for the other, becomes an essential component of the children’s consciousness during their visits to the mountain and other places of importance; a consciousness that can provide intuitive, mystical, and spiritual understandings that arise through dance. As a consequence, this provides the opportunity to fulfill the Kaupapa M¯aori philosophy of the center, which encourages tamariki/ mokopuna (the young children) to become engaged learners using te reo and tikanga M¯aori (M¯aori language, protocols, and customs), as well as the possibility to thwart the specters of colonized oppression as the children learn to embrace their cultural identity. These include the sharing of a special karakia or prayer for the mountain and the observance of the aforementioned M¯aori values and beliefs of ‘wh¯anaungatanga (responsibility and reciprocal obligations towards others), manaaki (respectful relationships), tuakana/

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teina (to look after each other), and mana tangata (to be able to stand confidently in both worlds)’ (Pohio et al., 2015: 105), which are all inherent in the concept of relatedness. It is because of the teachers’ belief in the value of drawing on te ao M¯aori perspectives that a sense of relatedness to all living things – to the earth, the planet, and the cosmos – enables children and their wh¯anau to become kaitiaki, or stewards of the earth. As stated at the beginning, this chapter proposed to convey how the children maintain their cultural heritage and assert their Indigenous rights through dance during their embodied encounters with place. In order to capture something of the essence of how the children’s cultural identity, and thus Indigenous rights, could be seen manifested in dance, I finish with a phenomenological interpretation of a child dancing on the mountain. One young boy had a distinctive style of dance that he would perform during his visits to the mountain. In his dance, there were M¯aori haka-like movements, such as waewae takahia (stamping actions) and strong downward arm movements punching outward and toward the ground as he took command of his dancing on the mountain. There was a sense of freedom or liberation in his movement as his entire body became energetically engaged in the full-bodied actions of the haka. In recalling this event I return to the questions posed earlier: Does engagement in dance, together with an affiliation with the spiritual or Indigenous perception of place, promote a deeper understanding of cultural heritage and help M¯aori to re-affirm their beliefs and values that have for so long been denied under the guise of colonization? Can children enhance their own cultural identity through their embodied engagement in dance and, in particular, reverse the colonial cloak of oppression to proclaim their Indigeneity and self-determination through M¯aori dance such as haka? Whether or not I can answer these questions with the absolute conviction that the answer is yes, I can attest that the young boy’s rendition of the haka in the

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opening vignette and my phenomenological interpretation of the boy’s dance on the mountain are testimony to the legacy and place of M¯aori dance such as haka as a living and culturally significant event in these children’s lives. Indeed, hopefully this can be the case in the lives of all children who have this opportunity to experience an embodied relationship with their land (whenua), their t¯urangawaewae, and cultural connections to their ancestors. At the same time, it is important to ensure that these cultural connections offer M¯aori the opportunity to become empowered in order to affirm their tino rangatiratanga or self-determination for the purposes of attaining freedom, democracy, and equity, as promised in the Treaty of Waitangi.

GLOSSARY OF MĀORI TERMS aroha–love atea–open space atua–god belonging–mana whenua haka–M¯aori dance form hap¯u–sub-tribes or wider extended families harakeke–flax hui–meetings or gatherings ihi–energy iwi–tribe kaiako–teacher kaitiaki–guardian or caretaker kaitiakitanga–stewardship over lands and resources kanikani–dance kapa haka–M¯aori dance in a line karakia–spiritual incantation or prayer/worship kaupapa–focus, topic, subject, philosophy kaupapa M¯aori–M¯aori philosophy Ko¯ hanga reo–full-immersion M a¯ ori early childhood centers k¯orero–to speak kotahitanga–holistic M¯aori me ng¯a akoranga o te ao wh¯anui– holistic learning for all mana aot¯uroa–exploration

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mana tangata–to be able to stand confidently in both worlds manaakitanga–caring for others manuhiri–visitors marae–traditional M¯aori meeting place m¯atauranga M¯aori–M¯aori knowledge maunga–mountain mauri–life force mihi–greeting mokopuna–grandchildren muka–fiber ng¯a hononga–relationships noho marae–Maori meeting place where people live or stay P¯akeh¯a–European, White person Papat¯ua¯ nuku–the Earth Mother poi–small ball on string powhiri–welcoming ceremony p¯ukana–facial expression Ranginui–the Sky Father (Papa) ringa ringa–arms and hands taiaha–spear takahia–to stamp tamariki–children Tane Mahuta–god of the forests Tangaroa–god of the seas or oceans tauiwi–foreigner te ao M¯aori–the M¯aori world te ao m¯arama–natural light/day te kore–creation te p¯o–night te reo M¯aori–M¯aori language tikanga–M¯aori culture and values tino rangatiratanga–self determination, self-governance tipuna–ancestor tuakana/teina–to look after each other t¯urangawaewae–place where one stands waewae–legs/feet waiata–song waiata–¯a-ringa–action song wairua–spirituality wairuatanga–spiritual interconnectedness waka–canoe whaik¯orero–formal speech usually made at a powhiri wellbeing–mana atua whakamana–empowerment

whakapapa–genealogy wh¯anau–families wh¯anau tangata–family and community, people wh¯anaungatanga–responsibility and reciprocal obligations toward others wharenui–meeting houses wh¯ariki–mat whatu p¯okeka–baby blanket whenua–land wiri–quivering of the lower arms and hands, sometimes referred to as aroarowhaki

REFERENCES Ashley, L. (2012). Dancing with difference: Culturally diverse dances in education. Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense. Barbour, K. (2011). Dancing across the page: Narrative and embodied ways of knowing. Chicago, IL: Intellect. Bolwell, J. (1998). Into the light: An expanding vision of dance education. In S. B. Shapiro (Ed.), Dance, power, and difference: Critical and feminist perspectives on dance education (pp. 75–95). Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Hill, D., & Sansom, A. (2010). Indigenous knowledges and pedagogy: A bicultural approach to curriculum. In D. E. Chapman (Ed.), Examining social theory: Crossing borders/reflecting back (pp. 259–270). New York: Peter Lang. hooks, b. (1995). Art on my mind: Visual politics. New York: The New Press. Kaiwai, H., & Zemke-White, K. (2004). Kapa haka as a ‘web of cultural meanings’. In C. Bell & S. Matthewman (Eds.), Cultural studies in Aotearoa New Zealand: Identity, space and place (pp. 139–160). Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press. Ministry of Education. (1996/2017). Te wh¯ariki: He wh¯ariki m¯atauranga mo¯ ng¯a mokopuna o Aotearoa; The early childhood curriculum. Wellington, New Zealand: Learning Media. Ministry of Education. (2009). Te whatu pokeka: ¯ Kaupapa Maori ¯ assessment for learning. Wellington, New Zealand: Learning Media.

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Noddings, N. (2003). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education (2nd ed.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pohio, L., Sansom, A., & Liley, K. (2015). My past is my present is my future: A bicultural approach to early years education in Aotearoa, New Zealand. In L. R. Kroll & D. R. Meier (Eds.), Educational change in international early childhood contexts: Crossing borders of reflection (pp. 103–122). New York: Routledge. Ritchie, J. (2001). Reflections on collectivism in early childhood teaching in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In S. Grieshaber & G. S. Cannella (Eds.), Embracing identities in early childhood education: Diversity and possibilities (pp. 133–147). New York: Teachers College Press. Ritchie, J. (2011). Ecological counter-narratives of interdependent wellbeing. International Journal of Equity and Innovation in Early Childhood, 9(1), 50–61.

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Ritchie, J. (2015). Social, cultural, and ecological justice in the age of the Anthropocene: A New Zealand early childhood care and education perspective. Journal of Pedagogy, 6(2), 41–56. DOI 10.1515/jped-2015-0012 Ritchie, J., & Rau, C. (2010). Kia mau ki te wairuatanga: Countercolonial narratives of early childhood education in Aotearoa. In G. S. Cannella & L. D. Soto (Eds.), Childhoods: A handbook (pp. 355–373). New York: Peter Lang. Shennan, J. (1984). The M¯aori action song. Waiata a ringa, waiata kori, no whea tenei ahua hou? Wellington, New Zealand: New Zealand Council for Educational Research. Te One, S. (2003). The context for te wh¯ariki: Contemporary issues of influence. In J. Nuttall (Ed.), Weaving te wh¯ariki: Aotearoa New Zealand’s early childhood curriculum document in theory and practice (pp. 17–49). Wellington, New Zealand: New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) Press.

56 Indigenous Knowledges and Science Education: Complexities, Considerations and Praxis Renee Desmarchelier

INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGES AND SCIENCE The push to teach Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing through school curricula is not new. Many colonizer countries have government-based initiatives to purportedly ­ better cater for Indigenous students through including Indigenous knowledges and perspectives in curriculum and pedagogy or to promote more understanding relationships between non-Indigenous and Indigenous populations. In particular, New Zealand, some jurisdictions in the United States, Australia and Canada have official initiatives that include Indigenous knowledges in the science curriculum (Aikenhead and Michell, 2011). These initiatives may receive large rhetorical support but little action and implementation in classrooms, particularly in ‘Whitestream’ (Grande, 2000) classrooms catering largely for non-Indigenous student populations. As stated in the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (United

Nations General Assembly, 2007), Indigenous peoples have the right to have the dignity and diversity of their cultures appropriately reflected in education (Article 15/1). The representations of Indigenous knowledges/cultures/peoples in education in colonized countries often requires a largely non-­Indigenous teacher workforce (such as myself) to effectively and respectfully engage with knowledge systems they may be unfamiliar with. Opportunities for students to come to understand the historical and social contexts that have marginalised Indigenous knowledges and peoples can potentially be deployed in Whitestream classrooms inclusive of Indigenous ways of knowing. The potential of this curricula inclusion to make tangible contributions to Indigenous sovereignty movements cannot be overlooked (Aikenhead and Michell, 2011). The profound benefits and complex challenges of including Indigenous knowledges in education have consistently been recognized across multiple educational sectors and

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national contexts for the last two decades. In the opening pages of Semali and Kincheloe’s (1999) edited volume What is Indigenous Knowledge?, the authors acknowledge the contested and complex nature of social, cultural and political contexts surrounding Indigenous knowledges in the academy. Indigenous knowledges have been represented as ‘the primitive, the wild, the natural’ (1999: 3) and viewed with condescension by Western observers. Despite recognition that the study of Indigenous knowledges can place academics ‘on dangerous terrain’ (1999: 3), Semali and Kincheloe encouraged embracing this uncertainty, saying ‘we perceive the benefits of the study of Indigenous knowledge sufficiently powerful to merit the risk’ (1999: 3). The richness of Indigenous knowledges is seen in providing multi-dimensional intellectual evocation that challenges and encourages interaction between Indigenous and Western epistemologies for the purpose of finding new ways to produce knowledge. The richness of Indigenous knowledge systems lies in their ability to address everyday challenges of human survival (Sefa Dei, 2011) and interrelate knowledge, cultural beliefs and history to enhance lives (Semali and Kincheloe, 1999), while making no claims to universality that attempts to validate other ways of knowing (Kincheloe and Steinberg, 2008). Indigenous knowledge systems have been accumulating observations over extremely long periods of time (Dentzau, 2018). Such knowledge systems are dynamic and undergoing constant renegotiation as people and communities exist in complex relations with land, culture and society (Sefa Dei, 2008). The ever-changing trends of modernity and post-modernity have influenced Indigenous knowledge systems to evolve in line with contemporary challenges (Sefa Dei, 2011). Sefa Dei (2011) describes that Indigenous knowledges are found within the contexts of Indigenous communities in story, myth and folklore, as well as in forms of material culture like symbolic ornaments, body wear and cultural artefacts. In addition,

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Sefa Dei includes pharmacology, food sustainability and environmental management, as well as cultural norms, systems of social organization and cultural ceremony/festivals as examples of Indigenous knowledge. The term Indigenous Knowledge is not without contention. An artificial division between Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science is often proposed (see Agrawal, 1995), and there is recognition that both are constructed categories that emerge from particular, often colonial, historical constructs (Ramnath, 2014). As Smith et al. (2016) point out in relation to m¯atauranga M¯aori (Indigenous knowledge in Aotearoa New Zealand), there is an easy tendency to oversimplify the way IK m¯atauranga is defined in opposition to western knowledge and science and then to make claims about how IK m¯atauranga is produced. Hierarchies of knowledge and knowing also re-inscribe false binaries between one form of knowledge and another, and therefore between one kind of indigenous subjectivity and another. (2016: 133)

Smith et al. (2016) highlight that the knowledge that sits behind practices such as ‘mediating the material and spiritual world, escorting a spirit on a physical and spiritual journey, binding ancient genealogies with contemporary realities, sustaining relationships while healing collective grief, seeking visions and teachings from our ancestors, or cleansing people and spaces’ (2016: 32) has historically been the subject of research rather than being applied to knowledge creation in the academy. Notwithstanding the recognition of false dichotomies, it is often a clash in epistemological and ontological roots (Kincheloe, 2009) that is cited as driving perceived incompatibilities between Indigenous knowledges and science. The central role of Cartesian dualism in science allows for the separation of the knower and the known and the separation of humans from nature, leading to the possibility of observing objective reality (Semali and Kincheloe, 1999). This allows for science’s internally endorsed validation system – if

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science is objective and logical, how can it be wrong? This could be viewed as a reduction of reality to that which is accessible to Western science, because as Nandy (1992) contends, from an Indigenous perspective it negates the possibility of unobservable spiritual and metaphysical forces. Through dualism, objectivism and colonialism, science has become a system of domination that is privileged in public spheres because of people’s media and educational socialization into accepting its authority or power. For science (and other) teachers to chart a course through such contested ground remains a challenge in most educational contexts. Epistemological conflict in terms of science and Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing is only one of the challenges facing teachers grappling with classroom implementation. Enacting critical pedagogical praxis based on multiple cultural understandings requires a political consciousness and will to teach in emancipatory ways as well as willingness to engage with ideas about what science ‘is’.

A ‘Standard Account of Science’ In order to consider different cultural ways of understanding the natural world, it is first necessary to consider what science ‘is’. In the modern era science claims a collective perceiving of rationality via the scientific community and the authority, though scientific method, to produce universal knowledge in the form of scientific theories. Implicit in an understanding of science are quantitative data, hypothesis testing and causation (Dentzau, 2018). Western Modern Science (WMS) operates on the basis of a Cartesian materialistic world that is both reductionist and mechanistic (Ogawa, 1995). The acronym WMS has also been taken to represent ‘White Male Science’ (Pomeroy, 1994, as cited by Aikenhead, 1996), reflecting its Eurocentric, male history. Cobern and Loving (2001: 58–60) have attempted to define a ‘standard account of

science’. These authors contend that science is a ‘naturalistic, material explanatory system used to account for natural phenomena that ideally must be objectively and empirically testable’ (2001: 58). Contained within this statement are the ideas that science describes nature in a way that is empirically testable, that is objective, and that provides a systematic explanation of natural phenomena. Cobern and Loving take these ideas further to define science as ‘grounded in metaphysical commitments about the way the world “really is”’ (2001: 60, emphasis in original). This statement acknowledges science’s presupposition of the possibility of knowledge about nature and the existence of order and conformity in nature, as well as the essential premise of cause and effect. In conjunction with these points, the authors also acknowledge the role of consensus within the scientific community in determining what science ‘is’ and what qualifies as science. Scientific theories describe widely accepted laws, methods, applications and foundations that have been formulated and can apply to situations other than those in which they were derived (Rosenberg, 2006). That is, the theories are universally applied, and operate independently of human thought. This universalist view can recognize that there may be some cultural considerations that influence science; however, these do not determine the truth claims of science (Matthews, 1994). For example, culture, gender, race, ethnicity or sexual orientation of the knower is irrelevant, as the knower and the known are separated (Stanley and Brickhouse, 2001). Working in this way, science constructs theories and the behavior of the natural world is seen as the ultimate proof of these. Cobern and Loving’s presentation of the ‘Standard Account of Science’ is one that provides a basis for the operation of the scientific community, science in educational institutions and in the public domain. It represents a view of science that is part of the public consciousness.

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Science and Indigenous Peoples The history of scientific knowledge production about Indigenous peoples has served to rationalize an array of liberal capitalistic practices worldwide (Nakata, 2008). Early anthropological documentation of Indigenous peoples used extensive empirical field data to describe the physical, mental and social characteristics of Indigenous peoples on a comparative basis to people in Western communities (Nakata, 1998, 2002, 2008). These studies are an example of the cultural embeddedness of science and how a particular knowledge achieves legitimacy and authority at the expense of other knowledge systems (Nakata, 2002). There has been a shifting basis of inquiry about Indigenous peoples but ‘knowledge production about Indigenous people still works within a wider set of social relations that rationalize, justify and work to operationalize a complicated apparatus of bureaucratic, managerial and disciplinary actions that continue to confine the lives of Indigenous people’ (Nakata, 2008: 189, my emphasis). While Indigenous knowledge systems are increasingly acknowledged in scientific areas of study, especially in regard to sustainable development practices, often these enterprises have everything and nothing to do with Indigenous peoples (Nakata, 2002). Western scientists claiming value in Indigenous knowledges can often tacitly decontextualize and relegate it to a lower order of knowledge (Semali and Kincheloe, 1999) through suggestions of a lack of rigor and imprecision (Dentzau, 2018). By labelling Indigenous knowledge systems as ‘ethno-science’ such as ethnobotany, ethnopharmacology, ethnomedicine and so on, Indigenous ways of knowing are situated as culturally grounded, while Western science is represented as transcultural or universal (Semali and Kincheloe, 1999). In addition, categorizing Indigenous knowledges in Western scientific terms fragments the holism inherent in Indigenous ways of understanding the natural world.

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The documentation and storage of Indigenous knowledges in databases located within academic institutions (for example, gene banks and electronic networks) from an Indigenous standpoint may look similar to former colonial enterprises that took possession of land, resources and labor for economic self-interest (Nakata, 2002).

Intersecting Knowledges Indigenous knowledges and science do not have to sit in opposition and can be seen as complementary rather than separate realities (Aikenhead and Michell, 2011). In seminal work, Agrawal (1995) argues that to commit to a dichotomy between Indigenous knowledge and science is to reproduce the dilemmas of earlier debates, where anthropologists such as Malinowski were able to relegate Indigenous knowledges to primitive status through showing their distance from Western scientific knowledge. It is important to understand what happens to Indigenous knowledges when they are conceptualized simplistically and opportunistically from the perspective that they are everything that is not science (Nakata, 2008). Aikenhead and Michell (2011) offer a way of understanding the two systems as differing primarily in terms of knowing and experiencing nature: ‘this cultural difference may be expressed as follows: the way scientists see the world can clash with the way Indigenous Elders inhabit the world’ (2011: 8). With these considerations, Nakata’s (2002) notion of the cultural interface becomes a useful way of conceptualizing the interactions between Indigenous and Western systems of knowledge: This notion of the Cultural Interface as a place of constant tension and negotiation of different interests and systems of knowledge means that both must be reflected on and interrogated. It is not simply about opposing the knowledges and discourse that compete and conflict with traditional ones. It is also about seeing what conditions the convergence of all these and of examining and

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interrogating all knowledge and practices associated with issues so that we take a responsible but self-interested [from an Indigenous standpoint] course in relation to our future practice. (Nakata 2002: 286)

OFFICIAL KNOWLEDGE, CURRICULUM AND IDEOLOGY In order to effectively engage the synergies and intersectionalities of WMS and Indigenous knowledges in science teaching, an understanding of the ways in which knowledges are structured in curricula is necessary. Principles of social and cultural control are strongly related to which knowledges become important in classroom settings (Apple, 2004). Some knowledges achieve the status of ‘official knowledge’, being defined as worthwhile to be passed onto future generations (Apple, 2000b). Recognizing the power these knowledges then hold within schooling, and therefore society more broadly, is important to the context of considering Indigenous knowledges in curricula. Problematizing the ideological basis of curriculum construction is a necessary step to reveal the power imbalances between Western and Other knowledges in schools. In this respect, Apple’s (2004) questions about the selective tradition of knowledge in curriculum are important: ‘Whose knowledge is it? Who selected it? Why is it organized and taught in this way? To this particular group?’ (2004: 6). These ‘simple questions’ speak to the complex and at times contradictory relationships ‘among “legitimate” (and at times “sacred”) culture and “popular” (and at times “profane”) culture’ (Apple, 2018: 63). The mere act of asking these questions is not sufficient, however. One is guided, as well, by attempting to link these investigations to competing conceptions of social and economic power and ideologies. Apple denies the supposed neutrality of curriculum generated through institutional

epistemologies. He contends that there is ‘evidence that the institution of schooling itself is not a neutral enterprise in terms of its economic outcomes’ (Apple, 2004: 7). Apple recognizes that there it is more than economic capital at stake; schools also distribute and preserve cultural capital. In this way, dominant groups do not have to resort to overt methods of domination as schools can create and recreate official knowledge that preserves hegemonic culture and elicits social control. All curricular reforms are rooted in particular histories and are driven not only by ‘technical considerations, but also profoundly by cultural, political and economic projects and by specific and often unquestioned ideological and valuative visions of what schools should do and whom they should serve’ (Apple, 2018: 63). However, importantly Apple (2000b) reminds us that ‘the powerful are not that powerful. The politics of official knowledge are the politics of accords or compromises’ (2000b: 10). These compromises occur at different levels, through political and ideological discourse: at the level of state politics, at the level of what is taught in schools, at the level of the daily activities of teachers and students in classrooms, and at the level of how we are to understand all of this. As such, they are not impositions but represent how dominant groups try to create situations where the compromises favor them.

Indigenous Knowledges in Science Education The culturing of knowledges within science education has been recognized in literature since at least the mid 1990s (Agrawal, 1995; Aikenhead, 1996; Bechtel, 2016; Chigeza, 2007; Lewis and Aikenhead, 2001; Roth, 2009). Drawing on Phelan et al.’s (1991) definition of culture, Aikenhead (1996) categorizes canonical scientific knowledge as cultural ‘beliefs’ and recognizes science as ‘itself a subculture of Western or Euro-American

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culture’ (1996: 9). Science has its own set of values, terminology and way of discussing, publishing and engaging in research (Bechtel, 2016). When science is recognized as a subculture, learning science can be viewed as cultural acquisition. Aikenhead argues that, as a sub-culture, science exhibits a well-defined system of symbols and meanings that have their origins in a Western male history. The project of acquisition of the sub-culture of science may necessitate a cultural ‘bordercrossing’ (Aikenhead and Jegede, 1999). For people from non-Western cultures, making the crossing into Western science requires assimilation that can marginalize or replace their own worldview. Similarly, those of a Western background are also required to cross cultural borders between their life-world and the world of science (Aikenhead, 1996, 1998). Treating science as a cultural enterprise represents a radical shift in thinking for some science educators (Aikenhead, 1996). The argument for the cultural nature of science is succinct: ‘Science does have norms, values, beliefs, expectations, and conventional actions that are generally shared in various ways by communities of scientists’ (1996: 9). School science is a sub-culture which expects students to acquire these norms and values and make them part of their world to varying degrees. Often, school science provides stereotypical images of science that are suggestive of an ability to generate absolute truth through socially sterile, non-humanistic methods. This form of scientism acts like a hidden curriculum, emphasizing the need for students to think like scientists (Aikenhead, 2001). The goal of science education’s cultural transmission runs into ethical problems when Western culture in the form of science is forced upon students who do not share its system of meanings, resulting not in enculturation but assimilation and a form of cultural imperialism (Aikenhead, 1996). This does not deny that border crossings are also necessary for many Western students who identify with sub-cultures that are non-masculine, humanities orientated and non-Cartesian.

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Given the emphasis that science has in curricula and in the jobs market, Aikenhead’s (2001) position is particularly salient because when students reject the assimilation into the Western culture of science, they become alienated from science, which is a major global influence on their lives. When students do not attain the cultural capital associated with scientific understanding, they are limited in their ability to participate effectively in Western society (Aikenhead, 2001). Often in the case of Indigenous students (or other marginalized groups) this perpetuates a ‘discourse of deficit’ around educational, social and economic achievement.

UNDERSTANDING THE COMPLEXITIES OF CLASSROOM IMPLEMENTATION Teachers often have concerns about their abilities to successfully deliver classroom teaching inclusive of Indigenous knowledges and perspectives. There are some well-­ documented teacher apprehensions that are common across different national contexts. For example, some teachers (usually nonIndigenous teachers) feel they do not have the relevant knowledge and expertise about Indigenous knowledges and cultures to incorporate these into their teaching in a nontokenistic way (Baynes, 2016; Baynes and Austin, 2012; Kanu, 2011; Quince, 2012). Students coming into Initial Teacher Education programs tend to have low levels of content knowledge about Indigenous issues or histories which may not be added to significantly or effectively through their studies (Moodie, 2019). Where teachers do not see science as a cultural enterprise, it is difficult not only to see the curricular connections between Indigenous knowledges and science but also to mitigate the cultural border crossing necessary to not relegate Indigenous knowledges to lower status than science (Bechtel, 2016). Schooling system level decisions and attitudes can also influence

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teachers’ confidence in implementation. Where teachers feel alienated from discussions around integration and lack resources or struggle with a lack of school support and perceive racist attitudes in students, colleagues and administration, implementation is stifled (Desmarchelier, 2016; Kanu, 2011). At the level of the teacher, a range of factors influence the ways in which a teacher might choose (or not) to engage with Indigenous knowledges in their teaching praxis. As already outlined, epistemological clashes can exist between scientific and Indigenous worldviews. The impact of such clashes on teaching is often cited as a major contributing factor to how/if teachers reach classroom implementation (Baynes, 2016; for an in-depth discussion of scientific epistemological positioning see Cobern and Loving, 2008). However, advancing to classroom implementation, or choosing not to implement, depends on more than just a teacher’s scientific epistemology. Considering the interconnectedness of epistemology, pedagogy and politics offers a way of understanding how and why teachers might come to particular strategies for praxis (Desmarchelier, 2016). A more multifaceted understanding of epistemology drawn from diverse theoretical fields – like scientific considerations, personal epistemology and critical epistemology – contributes to a more nuanced understanding of teacher positioning. Linking these with pedagogical approaches, and understanding the need for teachers to have the will to act politically, can result in a deeper appreciation of what it takes for a teacher in a school to deploy a critical educative approach to Indigenous knowledges in science education (Desmarchelier, 2016). Considering how teachers’ personal epistemologies influence their approaches to curriculum and pedagogy in the classroom is central to understanding how teachers may engage with curriculum initiatives that contain unfamiliar knowledge and epistemologies. Schraw and Olafson (2003) offer a general definition of epistemology from

a personal epistemology perspective: ‘the study of knowledge and knowledge acquisition’ (2003: 180). There is a growing body of psychology and educational psychology literature that quantitatively and qualitatively analyzes and describes teachers’ personal epistemological stances and relates these to how they teach in the classroom (Brownlee, 2001; Schraw et  al., 2011). Where teachers are positioned epistemologically relates not only to their perspectives on what knowledge ‘is’, but impacts their willingness to include diverse ways of knowing in the classroom. From a critical epistemological perspective, knowledge is never neutral or objective but ordered and structured in particular ways. What constitutes ‘official knowledge’ is connected to the powerful position of dominant cultures in a society (Apple, 2000b; McLaren, 2007). A critical epistemology is intimately related to the ability to deploy critical pedagogical approaches. In order to enact a critical epistemology of practice, Kincheloe (2010) recognizes that there must first be a rich, nuanced, historically grounded understanding of the self. This type of self-reflection allows for an examination of how practice is shaped by our own, and others’, socio-cultural conditions. This position embraces the complexity of the nature of being in the world, rather than seeking to reduce this complexity to its constituent parts. The impact of this type of self-analysis for teachers is social and pedagogical transformation through thinking in new ways. A critical perspective holds that all decisions about what knowledges are taught and how such knowledges are taught represent political choices (McLaren, 2007). Being political in this context does not mean engaging in party politics or participating in the electoral process, but instead relates to recognizing the power in our actions, thinking and social conventions (Carr, 2008). As Freire (1985) reminded us, ‘washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerless and the powerful means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral’ (1985: 122). Being able

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to critically analyze the power dynamics at play in knowledge production is a necessary first step to being able to deploy a critical epistemology (and therefore pedagogy) in teaching inclusive of Indigenous knowledges (McGinty and Bang, 2016; Moodie, 2019). Pedagogical change inspired by curriculum change contains inherent risks for teachers. In the case of the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges, some of this risk is associated with taking a political position about the construction of knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, which might be questioned by colleagues, students and their families, particularly if these parties do not see their own positions as political (Desmarchelier, 2016). Risk is a socially constructed phenomenon that different teachers will consider differently in terms of what is seen as a risk and to what degree (Le Fevre, 2014). In the case of pedagogical change that is linked to a specific political and epistemological context, and designed to have socially just outcomes, the perceived risks in increasingly conser­ vative and neoliberal schooling systems may be high. Engaging with Indigenous knowledges may lead to discussions of Indigeneity and racism, and acknowledging the existence of racism in the classroom may disrupt a teacher’s sense of self (Carson, 2005). This is of particular salience when Indigenous content and perspectives are mandated through curriculum. Where teachers are reluctant to engage politically with an issue, finding an epistemologically and politically safe space may influence their pedagogical choices. In this case, a pluralist approach where Western science acts as ‘gate-keeper’ and other knowledges are used as examples (Chigeza, 2007) is a likely result. This gives a teacher safe ground through not compromising the perceived integrity of a dominant knowledge system, in this case science, or necessarily needing to confront issues such as racism and privileging of certain ways of knowing. This approach has the potential to lead to tokenism if it results in a ‘bolting-on’ of Indigenous

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knowledges to already established pedagogical approaches. In order for teachers to be successful in implementing classroom praxis inclusive of Indigenous knowledges in science education, all three areas of epistemology, pedagogy and politics need to be engaged appropriately and their interactions considered (Desmarchelier, 2016). Critical epistemologies, influenced by scientific and personal epistemologies that are open to multiple ways of knowing the natural world, need to be embraced in order for critical pedagogies to occur in the classroom. Critical pedagogies rely on a personal political stance that motivates teachers to work in a critical way, a school political environment that allows teachers to enact critical pedagogies, and the national-level political environment to produce policies that give legitimacy to this praxis.

NEOLIBERALISM, CURRICULUM AND BACKLASH Giroux (2004) described neoliberalism as ‘one of the most pervasive and dangerous ideologies of the twenty-first century’ (2004: 495). At its core, neoliberalism holds the market as the central organizing principle, and that individuals within a society should be able to manage their own lives in a way that can lead to personal profits based on fair and equal competition (Kanu, 2011). In a similar way to the internal validation system of science (if science is objectively constructed, how can it be wrong?), neoliberalism is validated through its own assumptions and perspectives in relation to market forces and the value of goods and services (Morgan and Cole-Hawthorne, 2016). This leads to the focus of the individual to be generating wealth and consuming, and the role of schooling being narrowly defined as to ‘get a job’ (Down, 2009). Neoliberal tenets informing science education has profound implications. The focus

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of equity in science education becomes the freedom to participate in an educative process focused on developing good neoliberal subjects (Tobin, 2011). Where the focus of schooling is to ‘get a job’, and systemic racism exists within that job market, such a science education reinforces current inequalities and privileges particular types of students to succeed in economically defined ways. Science education and curriculum could instead be harnessed to promote a more widely defined freedom and democracy through connecting and privileging Indigenous ways of knowing in understandings of environment, protection of species (including humans) and protection of collective rights (to name a few). The narrowing of science curricula through a neoliberal framing can make focus more about human capital production and competitive national and global economies (Carter, 2017). From the 1990s there has been a shift in focus within science from the public good to the market good (Krishna, 2014). Krishna argues that ‘public good versus market good are based on two different opposing logics: that of open disclosure of research and thus enabling free circulation of knowledge; and that of suppressing information from reaching the public for making a profit’ (2004: 141). This focus on the production of wealth works to further marginalize those already oppressed politically, socially and economically to maintain the status quo in terms of wealth and knowledge distribution. Neoliberalism frames how curriculum initiatives to include Indigenous knowledges and perspectives are situated in a schooling system. The neoliberal state holds a particular view of schooling in which marketdriven values are produced and legitimated (Giroux, 2004). Through the implementation of accountability measures, schooling is exposed to market forces in terms of more parental choice and competition between schools as accepted ways of driving up standards (Lingard, 2011). Down (2009) argues that this type of restructure shows instrumentalist values and results in a narrowly

conceived version of education. Some curriculums operate from the explicit position that students need to have desirable skills and dispositions as global citizens and workers in an interconnected global community, placing curricula within a neoliberal frame (Camicia and Franklin, 2015; Lingard and McGregor, 2014). In order to be able to change lived realities in humanizing ways, Freire (2009) outlined the imperative to ‘name the world’ (2009: 88). It is through naming the forces of power that reside in a society that it becomes possible to reflect upon them and act otherwise. Naming is a precursor to dialogue. Without naming the world, there is no way to engage in the act of creating a new way of being, that is, enacting praxis. Denouncing reality through naming it also announces the possibility of a better world (Freire, 2004). As such, it is important to recognize and name the overarching influence of neoliberalism as one that can act to confine and constrain teachers’ abilities to implement different ways of knowing in the classroom. Davies (2005) contends that there are several definable elements of individuals ‘appropriately subjected within neoliberal discourses’ (2005: 8) (in italics in the following discussion). The first is consumption, seen as the definition of the self in terms of income and the capacity to purchase goods, which constitutes subjects’ identities in term of their jobs. Second is the notion of individual responsibility leading to the possibility of each person within a society being responsible for their own wealth generation. Coupled with this is a removal of individuals’ dependence on, and links with, the social. This results in individuals being set adrift from values, and with the focus on individual responsibility, less commitment is generated for outcomes linked to the social good. The development of a humanist self is less important than individual skills for survival linked to generating income. Within this neoliberal constitution of self, surveillance becomes key due to a lack of trust between

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individuals generated by ‘the heightened emphasis on the individual’s responsibility and the de-­emphasizing of inner-values and commitment to the social good’ (2005: 10). However, an illusion of autonomy is created. While the emphasis is on individual responsibility, more surveillance is introduced in forms such as accrediting bodies. Davies summarizes her view of neoliberalism as: • a move from social conscience and responsibility towards an individualism in which the individual is cut loose from the social; • from morality to moralistic audit-driven surveillance; • from critique to mindless criticism in terms of rules and regulations combined with individual vulnerability to those new rules and regulations, which in turn press towards conformity to the group. (2005: 12)

Drawing on Davies’ (2005) characterization of the neoliberal subject, Table 56.1 outlines specific examples of the influence of neoliberalism on teachers’ engagement with Indigenous knowledges and perspectives in education.

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(This analysis is drawn from Desmarchelier, 2016.) In colonizer countries where Indigenous populations represent relatively small percentages of national populations, emphasis in classrooms on the neoliberal purpose of education to ‘get a job’ can result in overshadowing of initiatives to include Indigenous knowledges. Where teachers perceive their role as primarily to assist students to individually achieve economic wealth (consumption), through participation in the workforce, initiatives that are linked to the ‘collective good’, such as reconciliation between non-Indigenous and Indigenous populations, may not be prioritized. Where the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges is linked to advancing one particular group of students – Indigenous students – who are a small minority or perhaps even absent from Whitestream classrooms, it may be even less likely that school administrations and teachers see such initiatives as important. Combining the push to make students jobready with increased accountability and surveillance measures, teachers may experience

Table 56.1  The impact of the construction of the neoliberal subject on classroom implementation of curricula inclusive of Indigenous knowledges Davies (2005) category

Explanation

Factors impacting classroom implementation

Consumption Individual responsibility

Defining self in terms of capacity to purchase (wealth) Responsibility primarily for self and own wealth generation

Set adrift from values

Focus on individual responsibility over collective good

Surveillance

Lack of trust in individuals, leading to increased accountability measures

Illusion of autonomy

Autonomy in classrooms overshadowed by accountability measures

• Focus on Indigenous economic outcomes • Education framed as ‘to get a job’ • Pathologisation of Indigenous students’ lack of educational achievement – it is an individual’s responsibility to successfully engage in education • Reluctance to implement curriculum inclusion when perceived as for one particular group • Suspicion of the intent of such curricula inclusions • Difficult for some teachers to be seen as acting politically • Focus on teachers’ responsibility to educate to ‘get a job’ rather than for the greater good • Prioritizing of other initiatives over the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges • Lack of time for teachers to work towards implementation due to need to produce accountability evidence • Acts to shift teachers’ concerns from social good to their own individual responsibility of reporting • Threat of deskilling through enforced unit/lesson plans • Invisibility of influence of accountability on teachers’ own professional choices

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internal pressure to meet their individual responsibility to ensure students do well on standardized tests, meet standardized curriculum and receive mandated reports. This can place significant time pressures on teachers. Once teachers feel pressed for time, the illusion of autonomy can be created through teachers seemingly choosing to privilege attention to accountability measures to meet their individual responsibility. The time spent on accountability due to the surveillance measures teachers are subjected to then means there is less opportunity to engage in the often significant amount of professional learning required to feel confident in teaching Indigenous knowledges in science classrooms. While, on the face of these measures, some teachers persist with such inclusions to successfully deliver critical pedagogical approaches to Indigenous knowledges in science education, the neoliberal education system acts to confine and constrain their determination.

PRESERVING THE KNOWLEDGE STATUS QUO Through returning to Apple’s (2000b) point that official knowledge is the politics of accords and compromises, the rhetorical inclusion but practical marginalization of Indigenous knowledges can be theorized. Curricula inclusion of Indigenous knowledges and perspectives show where dominant groups have seemingly taken the concerns of the less powerful into consideration. Without specified institutional funding and support, which are often not given, these inclusions may be nothing more than rhetoric. The pressures of a neoliberal schooling system often outweigh teachers’ intentions to commit to the collective good through critical pedagogical approaches to Indigenous knowledges in science education. The conflict between rhetoric and practical implementation and the impact of sustaining the curricula knowledge status quo can also be

theorized through the work of Freire (2009) and Darder (2011). Apple (2000a, 2000b, 2004) points to the importance of recognizing the context surrounding educational practice and policy and the impact on which knowledges are being legitimized. Also important is Freire’s (2009) concept of ‘false generosity’, where those in power profess sympathy for oppressed peoples but fail to address the structural forms of inequality present in the system. Extending on Freire’s concept of false generosity, Darder (2011) recognizes the political backlash that happens when mainstream ideologies are threatened. Each of these theoretical frames has relevance when considering the positioning of Indigenous content and perspectives in curricula. When considering the politics of ‘official knowledge’, powerful groups maneuver educational policies to promote their knowledge as legitimate knowledge. The construction of the ‘right type’ of neoliberal subject as described by Davies (2005) relates to the type of knowledge that is considered legitimate and worthy in many Western curricula. The knowledge selected for inclusion in curricula may be framed by concerns of globalization while showing recognition of a diversity of cultures. The vision of what science education can be with the inclusion of Indigenous ways of knowing is in the educational imagination (and sometimes in the actuality) of teachers and schools (Baynes, 2016). However, as Apple (2000a) attests, ‘while the construction of new theories and utopian visions is important, it is equally crucial to base these theories and visions in an unromantic appraisal of the material and discursive terrain that now exists’ (2000a: 229). It is important to recognize the ‘openings for counter-hegemonic activity’ (Apple, 2000b: 10) that have been created through the ‘compromise’ of the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges in curricula. The possibility of change only exists with the tactical analysis of knowledge and power relationships and what is necessary to actually bring about pedagogical change in the classroom. If we fail to contest power

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and the neoliberal stance, listening to diverse standpoints can only be seductive and end up actually affirming the dominance of particular forms of knowledge (Sefa Dei, 2011). False generosity can be seen in the gap between rhetoric and classroom implementation. Where teachers are lamenting their lack of knowledge about Indigenous knowledges/ peoples/cultures, systematic and institutional support is necessary in order to progress to implementation. Often, there is a dearth of information available to educators to assist with practical unit and lesson planning activities (Moodie, 2019). Teacher capacity in terms of knowledge, attitude and pedagogical considerations can be the largest determining factor in successful classroom implementation (Kanu, 2011). Without structural support from education authorities and sustained commitment to providing guidance to these aspects of curriculum, teachers may struggle to understand what was required of them. Attacks on the perceived legitimacy of Indigenous knowledges in science education may be read as a politics of backlash. Faludi (1991) identified backlash in terms of reactions against feminism and described how insidious politics framed the issues of women’s rights in its own language. Darder (2011) identifies that ‘the response to losing power as a consequence of shifting entitlement and privilege within schools can elicit a feeling of threat or displacement’ (2011: 152). Moves to be more inclusive of Indigenous issues, knowledges and ways of knowing can threaten the legitimacy of a purely Western way of considering the world. Darder also argues that these types of biased and uncritical responses are rooted in radicalized notions of intelligence, extending in this case to the legitimacy of knowledges produced by Indigenous groups. In this way, the renormalizing of the reproductive function of schooling is achieved (Hattam et al., 2009). In addition, policies that aid in ‘expanding institutional opportunities to diverse populations’ (Darder, 2011: 153) threaten the neoliberal system through potential positive class and economic impacts for marginalized

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populations. In these ways, a context can be created that does not value teachers’ implementation of Indigenous knowledges as being equally important as other curriculum areas. This can be apparent in the overshadowing of such initiatives by neoliberal educational demands linked to ensuring students are ready for the workforce, particularly in a canonical subject such as science which is seen as a cornerstone of the modern economy.

CHALLENGING TEACHER IDENTITY FOR PRODUCTIVE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT Recognition of the pervasiveness of neoliberalism, the politics of official knowledge, false generosity and backlash does not negate the hope and successes of some schools and classrooms in including Indigenous knowledges in science education. The possibility is still present for teachers to be agentic, to resist the neoliberal discourses and to implement different ways of knowing in the science classroom. Examples of successes in Indigenous majority and minority classrooms can be found (for example, Aikenhead and Michell, 2011; Cajete, 2000, 2008a, 2008b; Chigeza, 2007; Gondwe and Longnecker, 2015; Jacobs, 2013; Kim, 2016). Teachers’ re-interpretation of who they are professionally and the roles they are expected to play enables them to cope with educational changes (Le Roux, 2011). In many curriculum change initiatives, teachers are seen as the subjects in educational reform. This reduces teachers to being only the installers of curriculum, rather than the originators of curriculum (Carson, 2005). Allowing extended professional development (for example, through engagement with Action Research and Participatory Action Research) has been highlighted as a way of enabling teachers to regain some agency in terms of their pedagogies related to curriculum initiatives (Burridge et al., 2012; Moodie, 2019).

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By attending to the question of identity in this process, Carson (2005) argues that we begin to shift discourse away from ‘the what’ of what is to be implemented, i.e. the change as ‘some-thing’ (in the form of an idea, policy, theory etc.) to be put into practice. Instead, we come to a notion that change involves a conversation between the self (identity) and new sets of circumstances that are external to the self. For educators, these new circumstances come into play from a variety of directions, only one of which is the official curriculum. (2005: 3)

Applying Carson’s (2005) point to the idea of engaging with teachers’ epistemology, pedagogy and politics, extended professional development programs may be able to engage teachers to renegotiate their identities (Kanu, 2011). Teachers’ subjectivities are formed through their own personal and national histories and these factors impact on how a teacher will engage with the curriculum to affect the desired change (Carson, 2005). Teachers’ identity positions are constructed within social norms and school structures. This often results in maintaining and giving authority to Western cultural values and ways of knowing (Kanu, 2011). Unease with epistemological, pedagogical and political issues has the potential to challenge teachers in terms of understanding their own identity and their identity locations within the education system. This challenge may be what is necessary to engage positively within the Cultural Interface, stand up to neoliberal pressures and be able to plan science lessons with Indigenous knowledges and perspectives without lapsing into tokenism. Of course, the challenge in this approach is to find (perhaps subversive) ways to get the neoliberal system to provide the financial and educational resources to support such teacher professional learning.

REFERENCES Agrawal, A. (1995). Dismantling the divide between Indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge. Development and Change, 26(3), 134–137.

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Kanu, Y. (2011). Integrating Aboriginal perspectives into the school curriculum. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kim, M. (2016). Indigenous knowledge in Canadian science curricula: Cases from Western Canada. Cultural Studies of Science Education, advance online publication. doi:10.1007/s11422-016-9759-z Kincheloe, J. L. (2009). Critical ontology and Indigenous ways of being: Forging a postcolonial curriculum. In Y. Kanu (Ed.), Curriculum as cultural practice (pp. 181–202). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kincheloe, J. L. (2010). Knowledge and critical pedagogy. New York, NY: Springer. Kincheloe, J. L., & Steinberg, S. R. (2008). Indigenous knowledges in education complexities, dangers, and profound benefits. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, & L. T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies (pp. 135–156). Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Krishna, V. K. (2014). Changing social relations between science and society: Contemporary challenges. Science, Technology & Society, 19(2), 133–159. doi:10.1177/ 0971721814529876 Le Fevre, D. M. (2014). Barriers to implementing pedagogical change: The role of teachers’ perceptions of risk. Teaching and Teacher Education, 38, 56–64. doi:10.1016/j.tate. 2013.11.007 Le Roux, A. (2011). The interface between identity and change: How in-service teachers use discursive strategies to cope with educational change. Education as Change, 15(2), 303–316. doi:10.1080/16823206.2011.619142 Lewis, B. F., & Aikenhead, G. S. (2001). Introduction: Shifting perspectives from universalism to cross-culturalism. Science Education, 85(1), 3–5. doi:10.1002/1098-237X(200101)85:1 3.0.CO;2-2 Lingard, B. (2011). Changing teachers’ work in Australia. In N. Mockler, & J. Sachs (Eds), Rethinking educational practice through reflexive inquiry: Professional Learning and Essays in honour of Susan GroundwaterSmith (pp. 229–245). Dordrecht: Springer. Lingard, B., & McGregor, G. (2014). Two contrasting Australian Curriculum responses to globalisation: What students should learn or become. The Curriculum Journal, 25(1), 90–110. doi:10.1080/09585176.2013.872048

Matthews, M. R. (1994). Science teaching: The role of history and philosophy of science. New York, NY: Routledge. McGinty, M., & Bang, M. (2016). Narratives of dynamic lands: Science education, Indigenous knowledge and possible futures. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 11(2), 471– 475. doi:10.1007/s11422-015-9685-5 McLaren, P. (2007). Life in schools (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson. Moodie, N. (2019). Learning about knowledge: Threshold concepts for Indigenous Studies in education. The Australian Educational Researcher, advance online publication. doi:10.1007/s13384-019-00309-3 Morgan, E., & Cole-Hawthorne, R. (2016). Applying shared understanding between Aboriginal and Western knowledge to challenge unsustainable neoliberal planning policy and practices. Australian Planner, 53(1), 54–62. doi:10.1080/07293682.2015. 1135815 Nakata, M. (1998). Anthropological texts and Indigenous standpoints. Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2 (Fall), 3–12. Nakata, M. (2002). Indigenous knowledge and the cultural interface: Underlying issues at the intersection of knowledge and information systems. IFLA Journal, 28(5–6), 281–291. doi:10.1177/034003520202800513 Nakata, M. (2008). Disciplining the savages: Savaging the disciplines. Canberra, ACT: Aboriginal Studies Press. Nandy, A. (1992). Traditions, tyranny and utopias. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ogawa, M. (1995). Science education in a multiscience perspective. Science Education, 79(5), 583–593. doi:10.1002/sce.3730790507 Quince, S. (2012). Coral Secondary School. In N. Burridge, F. Whalan, & K. Vaughan (Eds.), Indigenous education: A learning journey for teachers, schools and communities (pp. 49–62). Rotterdam: Sense. Ramnath, A. (2014). ‘Indigenous knowledge’ and ‘Science’ in the age of globalization. IIM Kozhikode Society & Management Review, 3(1), 101–107. doi:10.1177/2277975214532180 Rosenberg, A. (2006). Philosophy of science: A contemporary introduction (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Roth, W. -M. (Ed.) (2009). Science education from people for people: Taking a stand(point). New York, NY: Routledge.

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57 Navajo Sweat House Leadership: Acquiring Traditional Navajo Leadership for Restoring Identity in Our Forgotten World Perry R. James

Many experiences have influenced my life and shaped my character. The most important, however, have occurred in traditional Navajo ceremonies, especially one of the most important ceremonies, the Nihook’áá Diyin Dine’é bi Táácheeh (The Navajo Sweat House). Throughout my life, learning the Táácheeh (Sweat House) practice has served as a purpose for my life and has also influenced my life in many ways. I know it has made me the leader I am today. Through Táácheeh learning about discipline, preparation, manhood, leadership, songs, prayers, and spiritual experiences, I have developed a better understanding of how to live a good life; how to respect ecological systems; and how to know my authentic self. According to Navajo philosophy, such knowing comes from the heart and the head. Understanding multi-faceted truths, rejecting falsities, accepting the mysterious, and always walking with Hózhó, the Navajo concept of balance and beauty on behalf of all, is the Nihook’áá Diyin Dine’é (Navajo) way of living life.

I give appreciation to my family for putting me on this path that includes the Táácheeh (Sweat House). I was trained by Shi Cheii (my grandfather), a man who spoke no word of English but spoke only his Navajo language. He had great knowledge about Táácheeh and lived according to it. I have been blessed to learn about the life of my Cheii (grandfather) in different times and places and have much gratitude for his introducing me to his Nihook’áá Diyin Dine’é philosophy. His philosophy, built from the traditional elements of his life, embodies how to make sense of and understand life, oneself, leadership, land, and the world. In other words, he taught me the Indigenous Nihook’áá Diyin Dine’é worldview. Redfield (1956), considered to be the first social anthropologist (from the University of Chicago), states: ‘Worldview’ differs from culture, ethos, mode of thought and national character. It is the picture the members of a society have of the properties and characters upon their stage of action. … ‘Worldview’ attends especially to the way a man in a particular

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society sees himself in relation to all else. It is the properties of existence as distinguished from and related to the self. It is in short a man’s idea of the universe. (Redfield, 1956: 30)

Ultimately, my Cheii was fostered to exist in a world guided by spiritualism where the sacred was not separated from all else. Eventually, Cheii expressed this worldview to me at Táácheeh. Although my Cheii has passed on, I still practice the Táácheeh regularly, and it has become an integral part of my life as a leader. Through his leadership of teaching, I came to appreciate the authentic knowledge about Táácheeh leadership, songs, prayers, and the meaning of life. I believe, considering the out-of-balance lives of so many people in my nation and throughout the world, it is important for me to share this knowledge. In particular, I write this with hopes that our Navajo leaders might return to the traditional Sweat House teachings about leadership so they might be more effective in helping bring balance back to our People and prevent loss of language and traditional ways. I believe my story and ideas about this approach to learning leadership will help address the many problems on Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é Bikéya (Navajo Nation) and those that exist in most First Nations owing to the misguided lifeways that surround them. So what learning and learning processes dependent on the traditional Táácheeh should be relevant to Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é leaders? And why, in spite of the potential of Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é traditional ways that have been essential for my living a balanced, healthier, and meaningful life, do many Navajos reject these ways? One major reason for the rejection relates to a loss of Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é identity and is one of many problems facing our society. The term Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é, as stated by Shi Cheii (my grandfather), a traditionalist, is defined as ‘The Sacred People of the Land’. Denny, a traditional Navajo medicine man, validates this: ‘I am Nihokaa’ Diyin

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Dineé. I am proud to say my mind is still of the Diné framework. I haven’t been brainwashed (Lerma, 2017: xiv). Today, as a society, Navajo identify themselves as ‘Diné’ only and exclude ‘Nihookáá Diyin’, the most important element of the name that was given us by Diyin Dine’é (Holy People). This is where the confusion arises. Too many seem to no longer see the Diné worldview as sacred and ourselves as sacred human beings. Certainly much of this comes from a long history of oppression and colonization but it continues with state education and media influences that reflect a different worldview, one that leads to unhealthy practices such as: • personal health: according to a 2018 public health assessment of the Navajo Nation, serious health problems including substance abuse, mental health, and suicide were among top concerns. For example, ‘In 2016 the rate of deaths related to alcohol in Navajo County was four times higher than the rate for Arizona’ (Singleton, 2018: 7); • harmful extraction of resources from Nihoosdzáán Nihimá (our Mother Earth) (Jalbert, 2011); • rejecting the Diné language or using it in disrespectful ways (Allan, 2015); • profiting from sacred ceremonies (Crank, 2018); and • violence against women (Wilson, 2007).

I propose these can be reversed if we return to regular use of our traditional beliefs and ceremonies. Our individual identity and leadership roles as Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é men and women are clearly defined at Táácheeh and play a powerful role in guiding our people toward a more sacred view of self, others, life, ecological sustainability, and the Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é way of living. For example, the epic stories of the twin brothers Naayéé’ Neizghání (Killer of Monsters); Tóbáyizhchíní (Born of Water); ‘Asdzᾴᾴ Nádleełii (Changing Woman) mother to Naayéé’ Neizghání; and Yoołgaii Asdzaan (White Shell Woman) mother to Tóbáyizhchíní, who are all considered leaders of heroes and heroines for protecting our people from harm

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and danger long ago, are taught at Táácheeh. Epic oral traditions of stories such as the above are characters I learned about at Táácheeh to combat modern-day battles (alcoholism, obesity, sickness, poverty, deceit, and domestic violence) with fearlessness, which serves as a practice embedded in oral traditions. One of the epic stories I acquired at Táácheeh is when Naayéé’ Neizghání and Tóbáyizhchíní (Twin Brothers) journeyed to Jóhonaa’áí, the Sun, their Father. Their fear of the journey increased their awareness and physical avoidance of many dangerous obstacles encountered to reach the home of Jóhonaa’áí. Jóhonaa’áí, himself, was an obstacle once they arrived at his home. He imposed on them four sets of challenges to their fear before entering His home. At the first entrance of their Father’s home were two Tłiish Tsoh (Big Snake) who shook their rattlers and showed their fangs and would not allow them to enter. The Twins’ fearlessness acknowledged Tłiish Tsoh by their sacred names, introduced themselves, and offered prayers and songs to honor them. Tłiish Tsoh calmly responded to the songs and prayers and laid their heads down and allowed the Twins to enter the second entrance. Next, two Átsintłiish (Lightning Bolt), flashed, struck, and shook the ground at the entrance. Again, the Twins acknowledged them by their sacred names, introduced themselves, offered prayers and songs to honor them, and allowed to them to enter the third entrance. Third, two Nashdóii Tsoh (Mountain Lion) displayed their growl and sharp fangs and whipped their tails. Again, the Twins acknowledged them by their sacred names, introduced themselves, offered prayers and songs to honor them, and allowed them to enter the fourth and final entrance. At the final entrance, two Ma’ii Tsoh (Big Wolf) displayed their growl and sharp fangs and whipped their tails. Again, the Twins acknowledged them by their sacred names, introduced themselves, offered prayers and songs to honor them, and were finally allowed to enter the home of Jóhonaa’áí.

The fact of just entering their Father’s home with fearlessness became an element in practicing great virtues of generosity, courage, patience, fortitude, humility, and honesty. Through the journey of the Twins, many such lessons are taught. In the above episode, the Twins’ fear increased their awareness and physical avoidance of many dangerous obstacles. Second, they also showed how our spiritual authority subdued the fearsome creatures. Third, the Twins’ words of prayers and songs were powerful and were carefully utilized to express generosity; and fourth, the Twins saw the importance of Nature, in this case the cosmos, the home of their Father the Sun, which demanded their respect. In learning this epic story, I recall my grandfather saying that this story is about leadership responsibilities. He told me that as a leader you must constantly be aware of the people you are leading; you must let spirituality guide you; you must pray and sing for your people; and you must remember that everything is connected to nature, and learn from what nature has to offer. I learned this is why leadership is considered sacred and demands respect. In this way, the concepts for living a balanced, healthy, and meaningful life can be appreciated and achieved. The Twin Hero stories at Táácheeh served as a setting for traditional education to instill in me my identity and leadership roles and responsibility to my family, community, and nation. They taught me about fear and how it can either cause us to react in ways that are unhealthy, or with courage we can allow it to be a teaching. This idea of knowing and respecting fear is expressed by Four Arrows in his text Point of Departure: Returning to Our More Authentic Worldview for Education and Survival (2016): Indigenous views of fear are [sic] quite different. First, we do not let go of any critical faculties and are aware of the potential of hypnotic influence. Second, once the emotion of fear stimulates awareness and immediate physical avoidance of a danger, fear becomes a catalyst for practicing one of the great virtues such as generosity, courage, patience, fortitude, humility or honesty. (2016: 36)

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Four Arrows talks much about Indigenous approaches to fear and how the dominant worldview understanding of fear, authority, use of words, and attitude toward nature has essentially hypnotized modern man into a life of imbalance and offers non-Indian educators a way to learn Indigenous precepts that reverse this (Four Arrows, 2013: 252–3). R. Michael Fisher has written an entire book analyzing Four Arrows’ work on how an Indigenous understanding of these concepts can put us back into balance (2018). In it they dialogue about the idea of ‘fearlessness’ and how in traditional ways once courage to act is undertaken, the traditional Indigenous teachings allow for individuals to be able to move into a ‘trusting of the universe’ such that they no longer need to maintain courage, but rather are fully committed to action. I think this is what my grandfather was teaching me in his own way when he said that spirituality should guide me. Shi Cheii’s epic narration of Naayéé’ Neizghání and Tóbáyizhchíní’s fearlessness offer a chance for all Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é to acquire traditional knowledge and leadership that is different from the current mainstream leadership utilized by most Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é. The epic story and definition above are accurate, and Shi Cheii and Four Arrows make no distinction between man and nature, or between nature and the spirit world. It is all one world, made up of nature and filled with spirits as well as people. Learning the practice of Táácheeh allows me to share this unique culture with all people as well as giving me a sense of personal reward beyond words. Moreover, the leadership skills I learned from the practice help me to orchestrate my life and the need to negotiate two worlds. They have helped me in my military experience, as a teacher, as a father, and hopefully as a leader of my People to find myself and undergo and understand my personal transformations. Lerma, in his interview with Denny (2017), takes a Navajo traditional perspective in dealing with ‘Ha’at’iish be anáhóóti’ (translated

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as ‘What is the problem?’). I propose this to be an excellent approach for ‘Indigenous critical pedagogy’. It first identifies the problem and determines whether it is at home or in the larger community context. It then assumes that the answers are to be found in the Diné epic oral traditions to problem solving that are still available for access today. Denny states, ‘I say the answers to our questions are already in place’ (Lerma, 2016: xvii), and ‘It is up to humans to pay attention, be patient, and learn from plants, animals, and the Four Sacred Elements, which are fire, water, air, and pollen (2016: xvii). I learned these sacred elements at Táácheeh. They are geared toward traditional leadership principles in how I govern myself. Several examples are: rising early every day and praying to acknowledge the elements, and running for mental and physical strength to face daily challenges and be victorious. The mental conception is, if I do not acknowledge all life and take care of myself, how could I possibly care for others? Individual traditional leadership principles then transcend into leading siblings, family members, and livestock; producing crops; tending to the land; attending ceremonies for spiritualism; organizing the home setting; constructing the home; and Táácheeh. Such formulations above must then be blessed and protected with blessing and protection songs learned at Táácheeh. Again, if I cannot care for myself and lead at home, how could I possibly lead my community or tribe? Individual principles of traditional leadership teachings further define the sovereignty of the Navajo Nation. Our culture embedded in language, leadership, ceremonies, spiritualism, and identity earned us the status of sovereignty since time immemorial. Serving as a basis for my argument, it is important to restore Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é traditional identity for state to state, nation to nation, and global relations to improve the lives of all people, especially Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é. If we do not utilize the Four Sacred Elements of our culture at home, community, and tribal level,

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our sovereignty will be diminished to the fullest extent of extermination. McPherson (2012) writes about the Holy People such as First Man, Talking God, House God, Black God, and First Boy, as well as about the many animals in human form met in the Táácheeh. He explains how they shared their thoughts about the future and how things should operate. Such Táácheeh stories discuss leadership and planning for the future and how things should be done today. They teach how our sacred mountains still serve as our leaders today. In the course of the present day, our Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é leaders do not protect, bless, sing, pray, listen, give stability, give life, and serve us. They cannot withstand any obstacles. I submit that this is why our current Diné leaders have not achieved sufficient goals for the Nation. Ultimately, if our current leaders want to solve issues plaguing our people, they will come to remember that within Táácheeh, the answers are there waiting. In my studies at Fielding Graduate University I hope to show how and why this authentic ancient practice of Táácheeh has been largely rejected and relegated to obscurity by too many Navajo political leaders today. As a result, Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é are not able to find simple solutions to combat and correct identity and leadership issues from a traditional perspective. The irony is that the current and past administrations of the Navajo Nation have stressed the importance of restoring and revitalizing the Diné culture. Arviso (2006) writes that the Navajo Nation’s government continues to preserve Navajo language and culture. However, I contend that our government’s actions too often contradict this goal. For example, the Navajo Nation currently owns and operates a coal mine and extracts natural resources from Nihoosdzáán Nihimá (Our Mother Earth), thereby desecrating our fundamental respect for Her. Also, President Ben Shelly signed legislation clearing the way for the Navajo Transitional Energy Company to buy the Navajo Coal Mine located on the Navajo Nation (Locke, 2014: A1). I hope and pray that

my words in this piece along with the other chapters in this section will help bring about transformation that will prevent such contradictions and more in the near future, not only for Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é society but for all Indigenous nations. Moreover, with the growing evidence that our original Indigenous worldview and the great variety of place-based, laws-of-Nature-oriented Indigenous cultures are a solution to the growing climate and extinction-rate problems, I hope Indigenous leadership via the traditional values I describe can help guide all nations back into balance. I close with a reference to my having recently hosted an amazing guest whose Indigenous culture was successful in its own counterhegemonic decolonizing efforts. My guest, a 50-year-old man named Girardo Tununbalá, from the Misak Nation of Columbia, stayed at my house and participated in Táácheeh ceremony with me. He is a Spiritual leader of his 11,000 or so people and came to speak at an educational conference at Window Rock, Arizona. In the 1970s, during a time when oppression and attacks on Indigenous Peoples in Colombia all but destroyed their original spiritual ways of being in the world, the Misak organized peaceful resistance and decolonized their educational systems. Early on, leaders were assassinated but they continued to fight for sovereignty over their own education. Today 95% speak their language and have revitalized their traditional land-based knowledges. They now have more wellness, more productive agriculture and husbandry, and happier people with more hope for the wellbeing of future generations (Tununbalá, 2019).

REFERENCES Allen, E. (2015, May 21). Reasons why I did not learn Diné Bizaad. The Navajo Times, pp. A1–A2. Arviso, C. (2006). Revitalization of Navajo language and culture. (Master Thesis). Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertation and Theses Global. (UMI No. 10679879).

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Crank, J. (2018, April 20). Traditional Navajo sweat lodge. Seed of life institute LLC organization. Fisher, R. M. (2018). Fearless engagement of Four Arrows. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Four Arrows (2013). Teaching truly: A curriculum to indigenize mainstream education. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Four Arrows (2016). Point of departure: Returning to our more authentic worldview for education and survival. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Jalbert, K. (2011, August 23). Navajo nation energy industry. GK12 Triple Helix Program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. Retrieved from www.3helix.rpi.edu/?p=2653. Lerma, M. (2017). Guided by the mountains: Navajo political philosophy and governance. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Locke, K. (2014, January 7). Navajo energy company buys coal mine. Navajo-Hopi Observer, p. A1.

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McPherson, R. S. (2012). Dinéjí na’nitin: Navajo traditional teaching and history. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado. Redfield, R. (1956). Peasant society and culture: An anthropological approach to civilization. University of Chicago Press. Singleton, L. (2018, December 4). Substance abuse, mental health, suicide and poverty top issues. White Mountain Independent. https://www.wmicentral.com/news/latest_ news/substance-abuse-mental-health-suicideand-poverty-top-issues/article_a924cd89b829-5084-b848-b3ac3e94b406.html Tununbalà, G. (2019, April 15). Educación propia Misak. https://youtu.be/CxT31vxrPxMUNDP Wilson, S. J. (2007). Navajo warriors, men and women, fight domestic violence. Indian Country News. https://www.indiancountrynews. com/index.php/culture.food-health/1084navajo-warriors-men-a-women-fight-domesticviolence-8-01

58 The Navigator’s Path: Journey Through Story and Ng¯akau Pedagogy Rose Marsters

Ru is a superhero known through Polynesian oral history. He was the chief navigator of his people in Avaiki (ancestral lands). The stories of Ru are clearly strewn across the Pacific. Like all stories about superheroes, his tales shared incredible feats such as separating the earth and sky, his partnership through travel with his sister Hina and leading over 200 people across challenging seas to settle in a new land; they involve descriptions of his characteristics, skill, strategic planning, communication, forward thinking and transformative action. Ru was multi-skilled and he knew the sea. Oral history shared by tumu korero (tutor in wisdom) stated, ‘I, Ru, know all the secrets of the sea’ (Low, 1934: 17). Ru was a symbol of entrepreneurial performance, resilience, fortitude and creative genius. The recipient of generational trans­ mission of knowing and spiritual pedagogy through living and lived experience – transformed into a Polynesian spearhead for evolution and change. My introduction to Ru was through my grandmother Tutanna Nelio Marsters (N¯ena).

She explained in ‘maroro M¯aori’, a broken English mixed with home-grown language intonation and words. She had been taught about Ru, just as her mother had been taught that the ‘Onu (turtle) represented Ru and all our ancestors before us; the word ‘Onu can be used in both a singular or plural context that captures all or one ancestor. N¯ena said we could talk to them about anything, especially things that would benefit our people, our k¯op¯u tangata (extended family). When being told this story I do remember thinking how cool it would be to come back to life, be a turtle or share the same strengths as my ancestors including Ru. It is profound to think that what I know, who I am and how I do things could influence the development of an epistemological and pedagogical framework determined by my past, people, events and environments I have experienced, right back to stories of Ru. The ‘Onu provides a solid philosophical framework in my practice, Ngaki ma te kai – caring for others through food. The symbol

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of my Indigeneity that links together key aspects of my Indigenous practice; it provides a clear link to the land and sea that announces my akapapa’anga, or genealogy, my knowing and identity. ‘The turtle’s evolutionary history stretches back to the late Triassic period, over 200 million years ago, when the world was a very different place than the one we know today (Jackson, 2011: 4). Key elements to my Indigenous philosophical framework also stretch back generations and have evolved into my current practice with people. My philosophical framework depicted in the symbol of an ‘Onu is one that incorporates the view of an Indigenous practitioner working within a Western construct. The framework of the ‘Onu also incorporates areas of focus, Manako (mind), Ng¯akau (heart) and K¯op¯u (belly). My aim in developing the framework is to try to encapsulate as much knowledge as possible within lessons provided by my k¯op¯u tangata (immediate and extended family) and intrinsic messages received by a cosmic force known only to me through my thoughts, senses and dreams. It can be noted that this philosophical framework has a fluid and flexible diversity. It promotes a productive pedagogy that extends in the four dimensions described by Chapuis (2003), who had over 25 years of teaching experience in humanities and integrated curricula. Chapuis (2003) discussed the relevance to pedagogy under the titles of intellectual quality, relevance and connectedness, supportive environment and the recognition of difference. The argument here could be that this pedagogy would have related more toward teaching children as opposed to adults in the form of andragogy. My rebuttal is, we are the children of Tangaroa and Hinemoana (Polynesian deities of the sea) and evidence of these pedagogical practices have been productive in teachings for and to generations. The practice principles to be discussed have guided, facilitated and provided seen and unforeseen lessons for me in my Indigenous practice. They are innate, born out of a knowing, similar to that described by Pale Sauni,

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who is of Samoan heritage, in his efforts to describe his ‘sixth sense’, his knowing as Lagona (lah-ngor-nah) when validating what works and does not work when alongside M¯aori and Pasifika students in education. Sauni states: Lagona describes an indigenous and time-validated way of knowing and learning. Where there is intrinsic knowledge about the cultural principles, mores and processes for making teaching and learning accessible, Lagona illuminates these learning structures by intuitively validating the unseen and subtle cultural spaces that students are armed with when they reach the classroom. Lagona guides pastoral care and supports the retention and success of Pasifika students in higher education. (2014: 135)

The vehicles or processes of ‘Piri’anga (connection in relationship), Ngaki (care) and Aro’a (love) in fact validate my lessons. All are practices that guide many Indigenous practitioners in their caring frameworks. Practice-based frameworks that have been developed through time, experience and wisdom developed in these principles by those who have come before us, those who reside by us, and those who are yet to come. It must be noted here that reference and relevance to practice, both in Cook Island M¯aori, M¯aori theories, and context, support the author’s current role. It also reinforces the commitment made to these communities in relation to the current practice of serving others. The development of my role hinges on the fact that as a ‘home-grown’ practitioner there may be subtle differences between me and ‘our relations’ when working alongside and serving others. ‘Our relations’ in the context of this contribution is the word I use to identify those who would be seen as nonM¯aori or non-Pasifika peoples. I prefer the term ‘our relations’ as I can connect with, relate to, or have a relationship with a ‘relation’ which is relevant when this contribution involves topics and information important to three communities: Cook Island M¯aori, M¯aori, and my tertiary institute, which has diverse cultures of people.

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It is the transmission of knowledge from my ancestors and experiences that has supported my current knowing. It is this combination of learning developed through home-grown theory that enables me in my practice. This knowing that provides me with the foundation skills to work alongside and serve diverse communities. This is what makes my practice unique in comparison to our relations. I feel, utilizing my knowing, as opposed to just applying logic and reasoning. I explore the motivations of others and can challenge their intentions. I am not afraid to fail as it gives me opportunity to succeed. I do not fit the stereotype of the conventional lecturer in tertiary education who delivers content. The practice principles that support this pedagogy are pivotal foundations for protocol in action. Piri'anga is about people, time spent, endured, invested in each interaction, and time in context. Through this approach a developing culture could occur where both home-grown and our relations could walk together in the best practice interests of all students. A focus on M¯aori and Pasifika achievement within tertiary institutes, practising with integrity, humility and shared responsibility through Ngaki to serve others, in a gifted practice and reciprocity. Its delivery determined by the strength and wise practice of the home-grown practitioner born into the experience nurtured by knowledge passed down, and knowing. A practice I have delivered adhering to the etiquette and protocol shown to me by my k¯op¯u tangata (extended family) and mentors. Aro’a is a layered concept and practice that involves self and others. A practice steeped in spirituality and protection. Protection for self and for others, of knowledge and knowing and ever evolving. My grandmother was an excellent role model of these principles in practising this Indigenous Pasifika pedagogy. Tutanna Nelio Marsters, my grandmother, was a jack of all trades and the disciplines required in the field of learning; she was a vessel of knowing and knowledge. Lotte Hughes, a Kenyan researcher who

is of African descent, stated in relation to Indigenous peoples that ‘people often practice mixed livelihoods; someone may be pastoralist as well as a hunter-gatherer and cultivator, and cash in other ways too’ (2003: 25). My grandmother was a teacher, a scholar in Indigenous or home-grown knowledge and literature. Indigenous knowledge is transmitted through oral tradition in societies, ‘not written down [directly]’ (Maurial, 2002: 64). She could share her philosophical lessons with me. These lessons are multilayered in approach and define my worldview, knowing and identity. Developing a confidence in identity, through knowledge and wisdom defined in the practice of utilizing love, Aro’a, is a key element to building relationships with others, including our relations. As Manulani Aluli Meyer, an Indigenous Hawaiian woman and Doctor of Philosophy has stated, ‘Love is imperative to one’s physical, mental and emotional welfare’ (Meyer, 2014: 163). Meyer discusses the holistic nature in which the principles in Indigenous practice are presented. She also refers to the practices of knowing that have an intuitive nature and differ from the aspect of knowledge. Meyer supports my practice style in having a holistic view and approach when working with my students and my peers. This is also supported by Joe Kincheloe (2004) when exploring the impassioned critical educator and the use of love: ‘Critical pedagogy uses it [love] to increase our capacity to love, to bring the power of love to our everyday lives and social institutions, and to rethink reason in a humane and interconnected manner’ (2004: 3). Having insight into an individual’s strengths and understanding their needs provides a gateway for them to accept ideas and options of support that have had divine intervention or an intuitive prompt. It promotes a relationship built on trust. It can also cater to the pastoral needs that may influence positively on their potential teaching and learning opportunities and critical pedagogy. Dr Rangimarie Turuki Rose Pere (1982), a M¯aori elder of Tuhoe descent, writes about

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Ako, kaupapa M¯aori principles and practice that form educational pedagogy. Ako principles and practice gives life to a framework called Te Wheke, an octopus. Pere states: ‘Aroha is the commitment of people related though common ancestry; loyalty; obligation; an inbuilt support system; stability; selfsufficiency; and spiritual protection’ (Pere, 1982: 6). Pere’s work resonates with my own understanding and experience. For example, Pere describes clearly how the principles that are put into practice interweave and have clear outcomes determined by self, relationships and responsibilities with others, and wairua or spiritual component, an overarching umbrella that envelops all the Indigenous principles required to serve others. My grandmother told me how I would need to think, use my mind, manifest the power of Manako, to determine the best course of action in relationships, and facilitate a sixth sense that would connect Manako, Ng¯akau and k¯op¯u. This connection would confirm my course of action. Confirmation can come with simple decisions about whether we should enter an environmental space or not. The shiver down the spine happens in situations like this; then the second thought that would prompt the question: Is this the best idea? She could also tell a story through a massage technique through touch of my k¯op¯u, a practice I was wary of, that had an uncanny and spiritual connection to those around me, those who fed me, or those I needed to feed. Of course, this context was not necessarily by feeding through a physical kai (food) source. This too had a connection to Manako (kai for the mind), Ng¯akau (kai for the heart) and Vaerua (kai for the spirit). Kenny (2012) cites Archibald: ‘Stories provide many of the guiding lights to show us our way on Earth – to lead truly good lives (Archibald, 2008)’ (Kenny, 2012: 4). My grandmother was a proficient leader in utilizing stories to support wellbeing. She would tell tumu korero (oral traditions) while completing daily tasks like mixing a bowl of poke (por-keh). A professor

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of social and political relations, a ta’unga (expert) on reciprocity, her lessons brought forth ng¯akau aro’a (loving heart), ng¯akau tiratirat u¯ (honest heart), ng¯akau t¯a’aka’aka (respectful heart), ng¯akau maru (kind heart), ng¯akau parau (proud heart), ng¯akau tae (generous heart) and ng¯akau toa (courageous heart). Similarly, Douglas R. D. K. Herman who wrote about the Indigenous Anishinaabe tribe (from Canada and the United States) and their traditions of the Seven Grandfather Teachings, told about a boy and his journey. Herman stated: ‘Seven grandfathers in animal form teach the boy important lessons for being fully human: love, honesty, respect, truth, bravery, humility, and wisdom’ (Herman, 2013: 61). Although my grandmother’s philosophical lessons rarely presented through animals, I do see our similarity of connections with environment. Whether it be in the form of stones from the garden, or stones that form the marae (gathering place) on our enua (land), there are similarities. The use of story, the weave of grandparent teaching the grandchild, developing values, its practices and protocol, in my own experience resonates with what Herman has shared. My k¯op¯u that connects to my current family who are present with me today, the k¯op¯u tangata (extended family) that are connected with those passed, current or yet to come. Environmental connection through that of the banana gifted from mother earth to make the mix of poke. That kaikai (food) that feeds people and brings them together. The connection is there. My return to Aitutaki, Cook Islands led this philosophical inquiry and search to understand the spiritual pedagogy presented to me through my a¯ nau. It was a return to my roots, and what my father’s family, our knowledge, history, land, experiences and Indigeneity have introduced to me. I return to where our ‘Onu (turtles) come to talk to us. I think about my grandmother and her return to me in that form. By giving due weight to the traditions of the Anishinaabe and their philosophy, such as: ‘Deceased family members can be deified

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and in turn can manifest as sharks, owls, and other forms, and this appearance of the spiritual in the material is not abnormal’ (Kimmerer, 2013: 69), I see how our ‘Onu has always had significance in our Indigenous stories. The stories of our home, journeys, practices and values are our symbol of our Indigenous or home-grown significance. I think about the sharing by my grandmother, in oral history, practice, in being, and agree: ‘In Indigenous epistemologies, knowledge is derived mainly from, and is rooted in, individual and collective experiences’ (Kuokkanen, 2007: 18). I am a product of an Indigenous system. Our collective has endured many challenges presented by a mainstream discourse in my time, my grandmother’s time and those who have come before her. The mainstream is a migration away from an enua (land) that was rich and fertile not just with the means to live, but that also provided sustenance and energy that supports identity and a space and place to be. ‘Many Indigenous communities claim in their histories and myths to have either literally sprung from their lands, and thus to have been created by or from the land, or to have themselves created their territories’ (Ross et  al., 2010: 22). Clifford stated that ‘In the most straightforward formulation of the term, “Indigenous” peoples are “native” to a particular place, original to their lands rather than having migrated from elsewhere (Clifford 2007)’ (as cited in Ross et  al., 2010: 21). We know that the land holds an akapa’anga (genealogy) of generations of Indigenous people, their journeys, their trials and tribulations. There are connections with the atua (higher beings) and those passed generations. ‘Indigenous knowledge is almost invariably informed by reference to elusive spiritual beings such as gods, ghosts and ancestors’ (Ross et al., 2010: 35). Through history, and stories, the land was never set apart from the sea. The sea connected with all lands of other people. My people are Indigenous or home-grown through their akapapa’anga

(genealogy) to the sea. Navigators of the tides, children of Tangaroa. This is my truth, a truth validating Indigeneity. We are navigators, like the ‘Onu led by a spiritual connection that mimics the sea in practice; that is felt, like the throbbing waves that keep us afloat or can submerge us. To navigate the depths the eyes cannot see but can be felt by an undercurrent that shifts a person’s direction, similarly to the Western processes and systems set to determine our success or failure. Nicole Bell (2013) has a Master’s in Education and is a Doctor of Philosophy and Anishinaabe for First Nations. Home-grown peoples in Quebec shared elements of her experience that reflect and compare well with my regard for the philosophies, facilitated by my grandmother. Bell (2013) notes that lessons could be led and created by others in the community who were kin, and those who were not. Learning begins with vision – of self, of goals, of the whole, of the direction a task is to go in. It is a process that goes through the stages of ‘seeing’ (vision), ‘relating’ to what it is, ‘figuring it out’ with heart and mind, and ‘acting’ on findings in some way (behavior). (Bell, 2013: 93)

My Indigenous practice is Ngaki ma te kai – caring for others through food. This is not just food in the physical sense, but food for teaching, learning and practice facilitated by the gift of reciprocity. ‘In anthropology, the gift is usually treated as a mode of exchange between groups (or individual representing groups)’ (Kuokkanen, 2007: 51). Kuokkanen indicates that a gift may be of a material nature. In my practice, the gift may be in the act of reciprocity itself. I share my practice, my knowing, by supporting individuals to explore who they are, define their own strengths and capabilities, and grow in a selfdetermined confidence of expressing who they are. A natural exchange of stories, ideas, opinions and experiences, with a purpose to connect, takes place. We make connections with ourselves, our k¯op¯u tangata, the land,

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the sea and the universe – supporting the statement that ‘in indigenous worldviews that foreground multilayered and multidimensional relationships with the land, the gift is the means through which the sociocosmic order is renewed and secured’ (Kuokkanen, 2007: 58). In my Indigenous practice within the Western constructs of my teaching and learning institution, I recognize how the philosophies of Manako, Ng¯akau, k¯op¯u and Vaerua have manifested in different time, spaces, places and experiences. I am not the first home-grown practitioner to speak to the Western hegemonic discourse that questions who I am and why I practise the way I do. Although I am aware that I can be categorized in context as ‘they’, referring to the homegrown peoples, I am unique; my experience echoes the view that ‘Indigenous peoples are generally referred to in the plural. There are many different groups who make up the entire global tapestry of Indigenous peoples’ (Hughes, 2003: 11), but it is also here that I can articulate the philosophies in practice within my Western institution that can support me in defining my own particular Indigeneity. ‘In this context it is important to avoid the essentialist tendency to lump together all Indigenous cultures as one, yet at the same time maintain an understanding of the nearly worldwide oppression of Indigenous peoples and the destruction of Indigenous knowledges’ (Semali and Kincheloe, 2002: 17).

MANAKO (MIND) Manako as a philosophy is stimulus of selfdetermination; a self-determination that comes with knowledge and knowing who you are in your home-grown culture, identity and belonging. A self-determination that promotes being motivated, proactive and engaged in our own learning journeys, and hinders being influenced by the constructs of our relations through process or protocol.

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A self-determination set in our minds, through a transmission of knowledge. ‘It is through the decolonization of our minds and the development of political clarity that we cease to embrace the notion of Western versus Indigenous knowledge, so as to begin to speak of human knowledge’ (Macedo, 2002: xv). My grandmother’s lessons regarding self, and determining the best practice options when dealing with people, involved sharing strong epistemological practice and pedagogy enveloped in the values passed on through the generations. Being able to function in both worlds of Indigeneity and Western constructs allows a practitioner to develop the true Indigenous leadership qualities that can promote change, whereby ‘being self-critical and reflexive as well as open to new ideas and change can allow Native peoples to be conservatively progressive’ (Fermantez, 2013: 109). The conservative progression presents in just living the practice of looking inwardly, as opposed to open ‘rocking the boat’ opportunities. Being proud of who you are and where you come from can be presented }in quiet practices of reciprocity in serving others. ‘Fundamental to the Anishinaabe world view is the link between individual responsibility and community well-being’ (Bell, 2013: 99). The hope is that through home-grown practices of reciprocity a paradigm shift occurs with our relations positioned in a Western framework: ‘The logic of the gift foregrounds a new relationship – one that is characterized by reciprocity and by a call for responsibility toward the “other”’ (Kuokkanen, 2007: 28). Anne Ross, whose research relates to anthropology and archaeology, refers to Milton (1996): Milton develops an alternative paradigm for understanding how people see the world: [N]ot everything that exists in people’s minds is ‘constructed’. At least some of what we know, think and feel about the world comes to us directly through our experience, in the form of discovered meanings …. these meanings, these ‘perceptions’ are part of culture. (Ross et al., 2010: 27)

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My home-grown practice exists in facilitating a paradigm shift with others, strengthened by an epistemological framework of self-­ determination, steeped in values and belief. ‘In order to transform one’s own way of being, let alone that of an organization or a whole social movement culture, one must have clear leadership intentions, intentions that strengthen and sustain their commitment’ (Gutiérrez, 2012: 102). A framework facilitated through a practice of self-­determination, invigorated through Manako, and connected to Ng¯akau, k¯op¯u and Vaerua.

¯ NGAKAU (HEART) Carolyn Kenny, of Choctaw and Ukrainian descent, is a professor of human development and Indigenous study with a focus on leadership and change. She shares in her writing regarding leadership theories and the power of story that ‘Stories are bridges that connect our histories, our legends, our senses, our practices, our values and, in essence, our sustainability as people’ (Kenny, 2012: 7). It is possible that Kenny’s tupuna (ancestors) shared their story in the same way as my grandmother did with her tupuna. The stories of Ng¯akau shared are clear foundations in my Indigenous practice. These stories highlight the gift of reciprocity and responsibility. There is varied context spread between my teaching and pastoral practice with the students within my Western tertiary institute. Connections between seen and unseen elements when connecting people with places and experience, needs consideration. ‘People make sense of their experiences, claim identities, interact with each other, and participate in cultural conversations through storytelling’ (Langellier and Peterson, 2004: 2). In this philosophical practice, story provides avenues to expose Ng¯akau. Enabling our relations to support a paradigm shift in home-grown pedagogy, just by purely participating: ‘Teaching protocols and cultural

values, even when applied within a limited timeframe enhance student’s experiences as they begin to develop their own leadership potential’ (Young Leon, 2012: 62). Maximizing every interaction with others, the environment and the unseen, and having the opportunity to facilitate v¯ananga, or events to share knowledge on marae stays (Maori gathering space) for students, provides the opening for me to facilitate this learning. To facilitate opportunities for them to understand service to others, responsibility, to develop a confidence in one’s self and one’s capabilities. It also provides experience in being part of a collective, as opposed to catering solely to an individual need. It is a courageous effort for any person to practise from Ng¯akau, let alone one who has a home-grown ancestry working within our relations’ construct. Essentially, a practice of a political stance within our relations’ worldview. Home-grown practitioners can determine the social norms required as an educator and official pastoral carer in a home-grown context as opposed to our relations’ context. In my experience, it takes a courageous heart to do this as the consequence of this action is formulated in questions around professional conduct and capability. As Ashcroft et al. (1995) stated: ‘To refuse to operate out of fear of Europeanization reflects a view of Indigenous culture as an authentic, uncontaminated artifact that must be hermetically preserved regardless of the needs of living Indigenous people’ (as cited in Semali and Kincheloe, 2002: 21). I practise with unique tools provided to me through story, shared in space, time and experience. However, I am also mindful that before the academy can recognize the gift of indigenous epistemes, it will have to profoundly transform itself; it will not be enough merely to include indigenous epistemologies (i.e., indigenous systems of knowledge or ways of knowing) in pedagogies and curricula. (Kuokkanen, 2007: 28)

Ng¯akau gives premise to a pedagogy in teaching, learning and practice that is

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home-grown and Indigenous, multilayered in its outcomes of delivery and multidimensional with its connections. One is driven by emotion yet can be harnessed by experience. ‘Today it is accepted (in academic world at least, if not in folk perceptions) that emotions play an important role in “rational” thinking and in positive social interactions’ (Corcoran and Tormey, 2012: 197). The pedagogy of Ng¯akau, a skill identified as emotional intelligence by our relations, has always been a gift acquired by the home-grown, an innate instrument that connects. A layered and textured gift handed down by our ancestors through a transmission of knowing and knowledge, one that can be shared with our relations. Lessons in Ng¯akau pedagogy can be provided in different contexts; it is a fluid and flexible pedagogy that provides transformative learning opportunities that can shift the direction of someone’s learning journey. We have all had a time in our life when someone, a Kaveinga (car-veng-ar) Ng¯akau (authentic facilitator of heart), has enabled a learning moment that has made a significant difference in the way we say, see, share or practice. A meaningful moment, that made us look at ourselves and how we impact on the world. An experience that becomes part of our living narrative, one that we can recite to others and share an animated retelling or reflection of the venture, the journey lived through Ng¯akau pedagogy.

Ng¯akau Aro’a (Loving Heart) Practising Ng¯akau aro’a provides opportunity to action meaningful engagement, build rapport and retain connection with people. A genuine, intimate engagement can only be done in Ng¯akau aro’a as it announces an integrity in nature and authenticity of character. It sets foundations for relationships that are intended for life, not just for the set part of a learning journey. This pedagogy in practice provides a vulnerable versatility in strength

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that disarms people as it is their senses that leave them wondering: is this person for real? Authenticity is the key here. Being your true self is required. ‘That is, when individuals come to know and accept themselves, including their strengths and weaknesses, they display high levels of stable, as opposed to fragile, self-esteem’ (Walumbwa et  al., 2008: 6). The key in practice is that with every interaction Ng¯akau aro’a takes precedence and leads in thought, speech and actions.

Ng¯akau Tiratirat u ¯ (Honest Heart) Taking ownership comes to mind when considering Ng¯akau tiratirat¯u. It is a practice where there is a need to be responsible, walk the walk and take ownership of challenges and/or issues that occur due to your participation, or lack thereof. Understanding your responsibility extends far beyond the person or people you are interacting with in the present moment. Every word, thought and action leaves an accountability and responsibility to your family, extended family and community and those of your generations that are yet to come. A farfetched concept for some to even consider how their current daily contributions may affect their future generations, but a consideration that determines the practice of Ng¯akau tiratirat¯u.

Ng¯akau Ta’aka’aka (Respectful Heart) ‘Ākono’anga is a word in Cook Island language to describe customs or protocols. These are determined by culture and values attached to practices that provide systemic procedure of how things are and should be done. When Hirini Moko Mead (2003) discussed tikanga (protocol), he stated: ‘tikanga M¯aori controls interpersonal relationships, provides ways for groups to meet and interact, and even determines how individuals identify themselves’ (2003: 5). To practice

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Ng¯akau ta’aka’aka (respectful heart) is to be disciplined in your own protocol of understanding yourself and what your role is while performing said custom, etiquette or protocol. The role in question is not the one you are employed to do. The role in question is the one your tupuna (ancestors) have prepared you for. This is determined through stories provided through your family, the narrative of your own story, or a combination of both.

Ng¯akau Maru (Kind Heart) Modelling and integrity are crucial to Ng¯akau maru (kind heart). To be kind in the context of Ng¯akau pedagogy provides an opportunity in relationships with all living things, spaces and places to promote an organic reciprocity. Ng¯akau maru is transformative in nature. It provides insight into understanding how all things are connected, and how all things can re-connect. It is sensory and simplistic in its examples, yet more complex to describe. To be kind in practice as an example means to consider, when interacting with one individual, the impact that interaction has on others who are present or observing. Modelling in consistency with Ng¯akau maru declares an unconditional acceptance of an individual, who they are and what their contributions are. The definition of contribution is not determined through how small or large, as this concept does not exist when practising Ng¯akau maru. The reciprocity comes through an acceptance of receipt of any contribution.

Ng¯akau Parau (Proud Heart) Being true to self and having a voice are crucial features of Ng¯akau parau. Understanding the evolution of self comes with both professional and personal growth and provides occasions to be open to new learning. Ranga’ao (research) provides avenues to explore your self, your practice, and the needs of your community. The methods

involved are in informal contexts by surrounding yourself with other human resources that position themselves to challenge, extend and motivate growth. Prospects that are more formal also involve sharing voice – an Indigenous voice. ‘Knowing why we are carrying out research – our motive – has the potential to take us to places that involve both the head and heart’ (Kovach, 2009: 120). Establishing and locating yourself and your sense of belonging in any context, including within a Western construct, can be practised through Ng¯akau parau.

Ng¯akau Tae (Generous Heart) Ng¯akau tae, the opportunity to share. Although the focus may be on sharing information, as a collective, Ng¯akau tae focuses on the attempts or action of sharing itself. The means to share or to connect in different ways with other individuals supports the developing symmetry that occurs with shared knowledge between a diverse collective. Sharing is not limited to or exclusive of information, energy, presence, or action. To share through Ng¯akau tae confirms that there exists a mutual power and understanding and acknowledgement of knowledge.

Ng¯akau Toa (Courageous Heart) Ideas and Strategies Ng¯akau toa encapsulates the moments that resonate with our minds, hearts and soul when an epiphany occurs and an idea is seized; a creation that sparks a new strategy, invents a new tool, or consolidates a plan for a new creative outlet. ‘We talk about story, purpose, self, and the relevance of being holistically true to one’s worldview’ (Kovach, 2009: 120). Ng¯akau toa gives permission to be different, to be diverse and unique. Ng¯akau toa is the most inspiring element within Ng¯akau pedagogy, as it means actioning your truth in areas of indifference; the spaces that

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encourage the norm, where Western constructs say it must be done this way – so you go ahead and do it your way. Ng¯akau toa thrives on diversity, creativity and change. A true measure of transformative praxis and driver of self-determination.

¯ U¯ (BELLY) KOP Jay Johnson, of Cherokee descent, is an associate professor of geography and Indigenous studies, one of his many Indigenous foci on cultural survival. He observes that ‘in an Indigenous context, introducing one’s self is place-based, and sharing knowledge is often accompanied by protocols that take more time than the fifteen-minute presentation and five-minute question and answer sessions’ (Fermantez, 2013: 111). I smile when I read the wisdom of other Indigenous practitioners who have been able to articulate clearly a problem in connection between people and places. I relate to this insight in my Indigenous practice, taking time, the protocol required to connect akapapa’anga, a place to connect with, or facilitate a connection, a defined genuine intent to connect with people, and determine their needs to best serve through the gift of reciprocity. I have a clear sense of who I am through my connections of akapapa’anga and the people connected to this, my a¯ nau. Although I am not versed in the structure of all the relationships that have formed to create me, I am versed in the practices of serving others. I am aware that within our relations’ context it is common practice to be labelled and to categorize roles and responsibilities. Taylor’s (1994) work states: Our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. (Taylor, 1994: 98)

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My practice negates the distortion and promotes an acknowledgement that is homegrown. It fosters a connection with others that supports their identity and enhances their self-determination. Sometimes simply a connection with names in introductions leads to storytelling about place, or places, significant to that individual. I think about my grandmother’s words to me regarding an interaction with a person. A clear reminder that when connecting with that person you not only address who is in front of you physically, but those who have passed, and those who are yet to come. In practice, I provide places for people to gather. Places that can promote a sense of belonging. The use of kai as the physical learning source facilitates the connection of k¯op¯u in practice. In a teaching, learning and pastoral context with the students, I support my tertiary institute, noting, however: ‘It’s always amusing to go to academic gatherings where there is food, because in the native context there is a different understanding of what food is and means’ (Fermantez, 2013: 111). Providing open events to gather as a collective and share stories. To build strength in developing a self-­determination with individuals who are exploring, enhancing and/or developing journeys for their Indigenous identity also. We do this because we can. ‘Indigenous peoples themselves claim the right to define who they are, and reject the ideas that outsiders can do so’ (Hughes, 2003: 11). Utilizing the environment as a third teacher or natural resource gives the premise to be as creative as possible to connect with each other. This is similar to the works discussed by Bell (2013) in relation to the ‘sacred tree teaching’: ‘regardless of the method of teaching, spirituality was embedded in each strand of the learning process’ (2013: 92). Through the gift of reciprocity and responsibility, nonIndigenous people can participate and benefit from this practice. Phyllis Blumberg cited Fink (2003) when exploring how to enhance and improve teaching skills: ‘When students

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reflect together, they also build a sense of community, which enhances the quality of the learning experience (Fink, 2003)’ (Blumberg, 2013: 37). Developing a sense of family can support the holistic needs of a student and provides a foundation for teaching and learning moments through story. ‘Family is a human communication practice – as much a way of “doing things with words” as it is a set of ties and sentiments’ (Langellier and Peterson, 2004: 34). Stories will lead to life lessons brought forward through inquiry and experience and supported in reflection, both facilitated and natural. ‘Reflection – unlike reasoning, which requires a systematic process that is evidence based – allows the students to engage in mental inquiry meant to help develop self-discovery rather than help them arrive at the correct answer’ (Kanoy et al., 2013: 5). This is why I practice in reflection.

VAERUA (SPIRIT) Reflection has fuelled the path of my learning journey. An emotional journey, where ‘emotions matter in learning, in teaching and in learning to teach’ (Corcoran and Tormey, 2012: 197). Whether we are engaged in laughter or tears with the people we serve, I realize this is my strength, my area of ‘intelligence’. Encouraging, promoting and facilitating learning moments through emotion. These are the lessons learnt through a cultural transmission facilitated by my tupuna. Moments facilitated through Vaerua. Vaerua is the food of spiritual nutrition that connects a pathway to my ancestors in the past, and to my world today, that provides understanding and enlightenment. It holds a consciousness of being aware, and being present. It protects the opportunity to talk about moemoea (daydreams) and akairo (signs/ omens) that support a determined action and decision. Vaerua has been the key binding ingredient in the recipe for developing a

teaching, learning and practice framework steeped in a spiritual pedagogy. I believe a movement is required. I believe we need to encourage a move away from the metaphoric monument that educators hide behind with their stand-and-deliver techniques and practise the freedom required to support home-grown learners. Developing and implementing a teaching practice that engages and promotes a learner’s knowing, I believe Ng¯akau pedagogy can facilitate meaningful learning moments for both teacher and learner. ‘Self-knowledge is one of the most powerful influences on productivity for academics in all three major responsibilities of teaching, research, and service (Blackburn and Lawrence, 1995)’ (as cited in Blumberg, 2013: 51). It is here in my reflections that I realise, like Ru, that convincing the masses to join me in a journey of unknown waters takes courage, resilience and time. My roles and responsibilities lead me to present resilience, drive and fortitude. I am the mokopuna (descendent) of a people that were fearless in their travel across the seas; how could I not take on the challenges required to support my growth and learning as well as that of others? The need to role model this action to my mokopuna is imperative. The necessity to rise up in adversity is non-negotiable. The requirement to continue my action within the practice is inevitable. Authentic and emotional intelligence leadership develops my knowing to a space where I just know. A space where knowledge has become wisdom. A space immersed in navigated Ng¯akau intelligence, an intelligence layered with the elements of a cosmic order only home-grown people understand. It advances a confidence in who, what and how I do things. It supports the narrative of my people, my a¯ nau and my communities through a transformative pathway of teaching, learning and care. We need to ‘live the practice, practice the living’ (personal communication, Kowhare, 5 November 2016). I complete this writing with a response shared by my ‘Yummy Darling’ when I posed

¯ THE NAVIGATOR’S PATH: JOURNEY THROUGH STORY AND NG  AKAU PEDAGOGY

a question provided by my kaiako (teachers) who facilitated my learning journey. The question was provided to stimulate thought in philosophy and practice. What is the difference between living and being alive? My husband’s response: ‘having lived’. Through my lived experience, I am a practitioner of Manako, Ng¯akau, K¯op¯u and Vaerua. Like the ‘Onu, I am a navigator of my experiences. I move swiftly in the depths of the sea, diving deeper to discover meaning and purpose and, like the ‘Onu, I still tread cautiously on the land of our relations.

REFERENCES Bell, N. (2013). Anishinaabe Bimaadiziwin: Living spiritually with respect, relationship, reciprocity and responsibility. In Kulnieks, A., Longboat, D. R., & Young, K. (Eds), Contemporary studies in environmental and indigenous pedagogies: A curricula of stories and place (pp. 89–107). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Retrieved from ProQuest database. http://site. ebrary.com/lib/wintec/detail.action?docID=10 721218&p00=bell+kulnieks Blumberg, P. (2013). Assessing and improving your teaching: Strategies and rubrics for faculty growth and student learning (1). John Wiley & Sons. Retrieved from ProQuest database. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/wintec/ detail.action?docID=10763033&p00=blumb erg+2013 (Accessed: 26 April, 2017). Chapuis, L. (2003). Pedagogy: Embedding learning technologies. Australian Capital Territory, Education and Training. Retrieved from http://isq3.wikispaces.com/file/view/1.0_ Pedagogy.pdf (Accessed: 20 April, 2017). Corcoran, R. P., & Tormey, R. (2012). Developing emotionally competent teachers: Emotional intelligence and pre-service teacher education. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften. Fermantez, K. (2013). Rocking the boat: Indigenous geography at home in Hawai‘i. In Johnson, J. T., & Larsen, S. C. A deeper sense of place: Stories and journeys

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of indigenous-academic collaboration (pp.  103–126). Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press. Gutiérrez, R. D. (2012). Indigenous grandmas and the social justice movement. In Kenny, C. B., & Fraser, T. N. (Eds), Living indigenous leadership: Native narratives on building strong communities (pp. 97–113). Vancouver, Canada: UBC Press. Herman, R. D. K. (2013). In the canoe: Intersections in space, time and becoming. In Johnson, J. T., & Larsen, S. C. A deeper sense of place: Stories and journeys of indigenousacademic collaboration (pp. 55–72). Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press. Hughes, L. (2003). The no-nonsense guide to indigenous people. Oxford, UK: New Internationalist Publishing. Jackson, D. C. (2011). Life in a shell: A physiologist’s view of a turtle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kanoy, K., Book, H. E., & Stein, S. J. (2013). The student EQ edge: Emotional intelligence and your academic and personal success: Student workbook. John Wiley & Sons. Retrieved from ProQuest database. http:// site.ebrary.com/lib/wintec/reader.action? docID=10653586&ppg=1 (Accessed 25 April 2017). Kenny, C. (2012). Liberating leadership theory. In Kenny, C. B., & Fraser, T. N. (Eds), Living indigenous leadership: Native narratives on building strong communities (pp. 1–14). Vancouver, Canada: UBC Press. Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). The fortress, the river and the garden: A new metaphor for cultivating mutualistic relationship between scientific and traditional ecological knowledge. In Kulnieks, A., Longboat, D. R., & Young, K. (Eds), Contemporary studies in environmental and indigenous pedagogies: A curricula of stories and place (pp. 49–77). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Retrieved from ProQuest database. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/wintec/detail.action ?docID=10721218&p00=bell+kulnieks (Accessed: 24 April, 2017). Kincheloe, J. L. (2004). Critical pedagogy primer. Second Edition. New York: Peter Lang. Retrieved from https://books.google. co.nz/books?id=aqttLW1Zdf8C&printsec=fr ontcover&dq=critical+pedagogy+primer+pa

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per&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi3svLqta7l AhVafSsKHSmCBccQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage &q=critical%20pedagogy%20primer%20 paper&f=false Kovach, M. (2009). Indigenous methodologies: Characteristics, conversations and contexts. Toronto, Canada: University Toronto Press. Kulnieks, A., Longboat, D. R., & Young, K. (2013). Contemporary studies in environmental and indigenous pedagogies: A curricula of stories and place. Vancouver: UBC Press. Retrieved from ProQuest database. http://site. ebrary.com/lib/wintec/detail.action?docID=1 0721218&p00=bell+kulnieks (Accessed: 25 April, 2017). Kuokkanen, R. J. (2007). Reshaping the university: Responsibility, indigenous epistemes, and the logic of the gift. Retrieved from ProQuest database. http://site.ebrary.com/ lib/wintec/detail.action?docID=10214472& p00=kuokkanen+2007 (Accessed: 23 April, 2017). Langellier, K., & Peterson, E. E. (2004). Storytelling in daily life: Performing narrative. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Low, D. (1934). Traditions of Aitutaki, Cook Islands. 1: The story of Ru’s canoe and the discovery and settlement of Aitutaki. The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 43(169), 17–24. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/ stable/20702530?seq=1#page_scan_tab_ contents (Accessed: 23 April, 2017). Macedo, D. (2002) Decolonizing Indigenous knowledge. In Semali, L., & Kincheloe, J. L. (Eds), What is indigenous knowledge?: Voices from the academy (pp. xi–xvi). Routledge. Marsters, R. (2016). The navigator’s path: A teaching, learning and pastoral model for tertiary education driven by Manako (mind), Ng¯akau (heart), Kop ¯ u¯ (belly) and Vaerua (spirit). (Unpublished Master’s exegesis). Te Wananga o Aotearoa. Aotearoa, NZ. Maurial, M. (2002) Indigenous knowledge and schooling: A continuum between conflict and dialogue. In Semali, L., & Kincheloe, J. L. (Eds), What is indigenous knowledge?: Voices from the academy (pp. 59–78). Routledge. Mead, H. M. (2003). Tikanga m¯aori: Living by M¯aori values. Wellington, NZ: Huia Publishers.

Meyer, M. A. (2014). Indigenous epistemology: Spirit revealed. In New Zealand Qualifications Authority. Enhancing m¯atauranga M¯aori and global indigenous knowledge (pp. 151–166). Wellington, NZ: NZQA. Pere, R. R. (1982). Ako: Concepts and learning in the M¯aori tradition. (Working Paper No. 17). Hamilton: Department of Sociology, University of Waikato. Ross, A., Pickering Sherman, K., Snodgrass, J. G., Delcore, H. D., & Sherman, R. (2010). Indigenous peoples and the collaborative stewardship of nature: Knowledge binds and institutional conflicts, Routledge. Retrieved from ProQuest database (Accessed 24 April, 2017). Sauni, P. (2014). My sixth sense tells me… . In Tuagalu, C., Cram, F., Sauni, P., & Phillips, H. (Eds), Diversity in higher education: Maori and Pasifika horizons (pp. 135–147). Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing. Retrieved from ProQuest database. http://site.ebrary. com/lib/wintec/detail.action?docID=108573 12&p00=higher+education+fiona+cram (Accessed 23 April 2017). Semali, L., & Kincheloe, J. L. (2002) What is Indigenous knowledge and why should we study it? In Semali, L., & Kincheloe, J. L. (Eds), What is indigenous knowledge?: Voices from the academy (pp. 3–58). Routledge. Taylor, C. (1994). The politics of recognition. In Heble, A., Pennee, D. P., & Struthers, J. R. (Eds) (1997). New contexts of Canadian criticism (pp. 98–132). Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. Walumbwa, F., Alvio, B., Gardner, W., ­Wernsing, T., & Peterson, S. (2008). Authentic leadership: Development and validation of a theory-based measure. Journal of Management, 34(1), 89–126. Retrieved from https:// pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d65c/aca5313e2b7febd6e40feaeb88d65a2c3472.pdf (Accessed 23 April 2017). Young Leon, A. (2012). Elders’ teachings on leadership: Leadership as a gift. In Kenny, C. B., & Fraser, T. N. (Eds), Living indigenous leadership: Native narratives on building strong communities (pp. 48–63). Vancouver, Canada: UBC Press.

SECTION VI

Education and Praxis Robert Hattam

This Handbook, or course, loudly asserts that critical pedagogy studies is an unfinished project. And unfinished in multiple ways: (i) critical social theory is always partial, flawed and lagging in both diagnosis and hope; and (ii) social change demands that we keep open the question: what is an ethicopolitics for our time? In which case, critical pedagogy studies, as that immense archive of commentary on the relationship between education and struggle for more just societies, can never be finished per se and requires ongoing rejuvenation, both theoretically and practically, and also demands reformation of policy. Theoretical rejuvenation for critical pedagogy takes different modalities, which include: (i) taking up powerful diagnoses of the times as provocation for educators;

(ii) taking up readings of the places we live in; and (iii) responding to philosophical investigations. Some diagnoses of our times, that I am especially moved by, include the following: • Under neoliberal political philosophy, which is so dominant now, there is a trend towards de-democratisation (Brown, 2015) and authoritarian forms of governmentality (Lazzarato, 2015). • There is now growing economic inequality and intensification of precarious work (Standing, 2014), which manifests differentially and has a more profound impact on those regions that have a history of socio-economic disadvantage (Bauman, 2004). • Old and new forms of colonisation are very active in countries such as Australia (Povinelli, 2002), and continue to rely on (neo)racism as a key strategy (Balibar, 2014).

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Some readings of schooling in my place that are provocations for my thinking about critical pedagogy (Hattam, 2018) include: • Schooling in the regions of Adelaide that I study is still working well, if we assume that schooling as a system functions to produce social stratification and hence educational inequality (Teese, 2000). It is through schooling that the nation organises all manner of sorting and sifting of its young people, with the inevitable result that ‘educational inequality is the proper business of schools performing their function of reproducing an unequal social order’ (Connell et al., 1982: 189–90). • Privatisation of teacher professional learning and curriculum work; schools now mostly buy in market solutions for curriculum development and teacher professional development (Hogan et al., 2015). • Residualisation of public schools; the policy of school choice in Australia is now residualising public schools (Vickers, 2015). • Teachers are now confronted with super-diverse classrooms in Australian public schools and hence the usual white-washed curriculum and pedagogy is now failing too many young people (D’warte, 2016).

Some philosophical investigations that are rejuvenating critical theory/pedagogy include the following: • The relational turn in the social sciences: against a mechanistic version of reality, the social sciences has turned to think about phenomena in relational terms, and hence the emergence of relational onto-epistemologies, renewed interest in Indigenous and religious cosmologies, and or processual philosophies, and theories of networks, assemblages and ecologies of practices. • The affective turn in the social sciences: against a western Enlightenment, hyper-rational rendering of the human being, an affective turn is enabling us to rethink the subject (or subjectivity) in terms of both cognition and affect; to put back together thinking/feeling; and to make sense of social life through consideration of what’s happening on the terrain of affect.

On the policy front, unfortunately, our times are characterised by a serious dissonance between the logic of education policy,

understood here to be framed up by the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM; Ball, 2012), and the existential challenges of the times. The GERM, put simply, is a nasty aggregation of the Tefloncoated axioms of neoliberalism, in cahoots with the School Effectiveness and School Improvement paradigm (SE/SI) (Thrupp and Lupton, 2006). Neoliberalism, which has no claims to educational knowledge, asserts dangerous propositions such as: market competition is the best way to improve outcomes; private schools are better than public schools; and capitalist managerialist forms of leadership work in all contexts. And the SE/SI paradigm provides a dangerous version of mostly positivist educational evidence-based policy – a policy of ‘what works’ (Biesta, 2007) – that now shapes curriculum, pedagogy and assessment through discourses that: (a) define the what (intended curriculum) in terms of narrowly defined outcomes; (b) pushes teachers towards highly scripted forms of pedagogy (ritualised forms of practice that disavow the unique and singular character of every classroom) (Hayes et  al., 2017); (c) assert standardised versions of the ‘good’ teacher that inform performance management and promotion (Connell, 2009); and (d) force ‘cruel accounting’ (Thomson, 1998) onto schools and teachers through pernicious forms of national testing and school reviews (Au, 2008). Put more bluntly, this regime offers decontextualised knowledge that purports a disembodied objectivity whilst offering little insight into schools that actually exist. By way of examples, education policy fails to respond in any meaningful way to rising economic inequality (Piketty, 2014), as policy further entrenches the ways schooling contributes to social stratification. Perversely, this policy regime has little evidence that it improves learning outcomes (even on its own terms) and, in fact, ignores the evidence that this regime actually advances the social stratifying function of schooling in multiple ways, including: asserting a market solution whilst ignoring the fact that most parents

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cannot choose; dumbing down the system; residualising public schooling; narrowing what counts as literacy; asserting weak versions of citizenship; and reframing inequality as an individual problem and hence those without choices get to blame themselves. Meantime there are also global outbreaks of various forms of ethno-nationalism that are supported by elected politicians and given voice in the public sphere by the likes of the Murdoch press (Thussu, 2007; Gitlin, 2013), often in the form of dog whistle politics (Manning, 2004), which shift the blame for economic inequality onto cultural diversity, hence further entrenching racism in everyday life, the workplace and the way realpolitik gets played. Equality gets reframed as the right to be a bigot; we’re forced to give up our freedoms for national security; and support for ‘Judeo-Christian civilisation’ is now a front for mainstreaming White supremacy. By way of a hopeful conclusion, some colleagues and I (Hattam et al., 2018) have recently outlined a manifesto that can be borrowed for thinking about critical pedagogy studies into the future. We argued for this programme: • Building an international community committed to ‘just education’ • Intervening in the ways in which education contributes to social stratification • Supporting the professional autonomy of teachers • Researching with educators • Supporting students as researchers of their own communities • Supporting ‘educational’ leadership in educational institutions • Reforming teacher education programmes.

REFERENCES Au, W. (2008). Unequal by Design: High-stakes Testing and the Standardization of Inequality. New York: Routledge. Ball, S. J. (2012). Global Education Inc: New Policy Networks and the Neo-liberal Imaginary. London: Routledge.

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Balibar, E. (2014). Equaliberty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bauman, Z. (2004). Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Biesta, G. (2007). Why ‘what works’ won’t work: Evidence-based practice and the democratic deficit in educational research, Educational Theory, 57(1), 1–22. Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books. Connell, R. (2009). Good teachers on dangerous ground: Towards a new view of teacher quality and professionalism, Critical Studies in Education, 50(3), 213–229. Connell, R., Ashenden, D., Kessler, S. & Dowsett, G. (1982). Making the Difference: Schools, Families and Social Division. Sydney: George Allen & Unwin. D’warte, J. (2016). Students as linguistic ethnographers: Super-diversity in the classroom context. In Cole, D. R. & Woodrow, C. (eds) Super Dimensions in Globalisation and Education. Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education, vol 5. (pp. 19–35) Singapore: Springer. Gitlin, T. (2013, February). An interview with Todd Gitlin, http://publici.ucimc.org/2013/02/ interview-with-todd-gitlin-full-version/ (Date accessed: 12/12/2018) Hattam, R. (2018). Researching the ‘North’: Educational ethnographies of a (sub)urban region. In S. Gannon, R. Hattam, & W. Sawyer (eds) Resisting Educational Inequality: Reframing Policy and Practice in Schools Serving Vulnerable Communities. (pp. 214–224) London: Routledge. Hattam, R., Gannon, S. & Sawyer, W. (2018). Reclaiming educational equality: Towards a manifesto. In S. Gannon, R. Hattam, & W. Sawyer (eds) Resisting Educational Inequality: Reframing Policy and Practice in Schools Serving Vulnerable Communities. (pp. 294–301) London: Routledge. Hayes, D., Hattam, R., Comber, B., Kerkham, L., Lupton, R. & Thomson, P. (2017). Literacy, Leading and Learning: Beyond Pedagogies of Poverty. London: Routledge. Hogan, A., Sellar, S. & Lingard, B. (2015). Commercialising comparison: Pearson puts the TLC in soft capitalism, Journal of Education Policy, 31(3), 243–258.

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Lazzaroto, M. (2015). Govening by Debt. California: Semiotext(e). Manning, P. (2004). Dog Whistle Politics and Journalism: Reporting Arabic and Muslim People in Sydney Newspapers. Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, University of Technology, Sydney. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Povinelli, E. A. (2002). The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Standing, G. (2014). The precariat and class struggle. http://www.guystanding.com/files/ documents/Precariat_and_Class_Struggle_ final_English.pdf (Date accessed: 12/12/2018). Teese, R. (2000) Academic Success and Social Power: Examinations and Inequality. Carlton South, Victoria: Melbourne University Press.

Thomson, P. (1998). Thoroughly modern management and a cruel accounting: The effects of public sector reform on public education. In A. Reid (ed.) Going Public: Education Policy and Public Education in Australia. (pp. 9–17) Canberra: Australian Curriculum Studies Association. Thrupp, M. & Lupton, R. (2006). Taking school contexts more seriously: The social justice challenge, British Journal of Educational Studies, 54(3), 308–328. Thussu, D. K. (2007). The ‘Murdochization’ of news? The case of Star TV in India, Media Culture Society, 29(4), 593–611. Vickers, M. (2015). Neglecting the evidence: Are we expecting too much from quality teaching? In H. Proctor, P. Brownlee, & P. Freebody (eds) Controversies in Education: Orthodoxy and Heresy in Policy and Practice. (pp. 81–9) Heidelberg: Springer International Publishing.

59 A Critical Pedagogy of Working Class Schooling: A Call to Activist Theory and Practice John Smyth

INTRODUCTION This chapter unfolds around six moves. First, there is a brief excursion into the political economy of exclusion as a way of seeing into the deep ruptures being caused by unrestrained capitalism. Second, we confront directly the imperative to name what is being made increasingly invisible – the matter of social class. Third, it follows that the increasing social stratification occurring around the world is gouging some lives, leaving them deeply scarred by the way schools are being used to serve the needs of capitalism. Pursuing this a little deeper, in the fourth move, I point to a number of quite specific ways in which the artifice of the neoliberal school demonstrably works against the interests of working class children. The fifth move presents some of the unique dispositions of working class life that might inform a reinvention of schooling. Finally, in making a call for an activist theory of working class schooling, the chapter concludes with the

beginnings of a geography of a ‘set of conditions’ that place the educational interests of working class children first. In sociology, as in life more generally, we have a huge unresolved issue around social class, and we can see this being given expression in its most grotesque form in Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. This is a not inconsiderable issue in the way it impacts schooling, and it requires our urgent attention. As Reay (2006) poignantly put it, class is the ‘zombie stalking’ our classrooms, and if left unattended it will remain the ‘troublesome undead’ that will become a ‘monster that grows in proportion to its neglect’ (2006: 289). The standout message from Reay (2006: 288) is that ‘social class [is] a central concern within education and we continue to ignore it at our peril’. After more than half a century of blaming the victim and the mischievous misconstrual of the nature of problem, the fiction about working class schooling is no longer sustainable. Blaming working class children, their

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families, backgrounds, neighbourhoods and communities for their increasing failure to succeed at school is being exposed for the gigantic hoax that it is. Working class children do not succeed at school, not because of the reasons just cited, but because schools actively conspire against working class children. Schools are only one of the social institutions that have been captured in recent times by elites in wealthy western countries, but the working class has had enough and is speaking back forcefully to their exclusion by elites. It is not really possible to meaningfully understand a critical pedagogy of working class schooling, without first having some familiarity with the wider political economy at work, in the form of Brexit in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the United States – and similar nascent populist revolts underway in other countries.

A SHORT EXCURSION INTO THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF EXCLUSION In their editorial introduction to a discussion forum in the Socio-Economic Review (O’Reilly et al., 2016), the editors argued that the ‘unprecedented geopolitical shift resulting from Brexit [and we might add Trump] reflects deep socio-economic fault lines’ which both Brexit and Trump have ‘brought to the surface in a way that has given ‘public voice to socio-economic divisions that were deeply embedded, sometimes illogical, but until now had either been ignored or hushed out of “respectable” public debate’ (O’Reilly et al., 2016: 807). Often typified in terms of ‘taking back control’ (O’Reilly, 2016: 812), especially in respect of migration by groups who feel they have increasingly been ‘left behind’ (Froud et  al., 2016: 816), Warhurst (2016) argues that ‘unpacking [this] toxic mix’ (2016: 820) has more to do with the long proliferation of ‘bad jobs’ (Froud et al., 2016: 815) that have

increasingly become ‘skewed towards… the worst jobs’ (Warhurst, 2016: 820) that are low paid, menial, insecure, zero-hours contracts – or what Taylor (2017) typifies as ‘demeaning’, ‘stressful’, ‘high surveillance’, ‘call centre work’ that has been fostered and co-exists, at least in Britain, within ‘the shadow welfare state’ (Davies, 2016: 1). Warhurst (2016: 820) points to ‘job polarization’ and the increase in ‘non-standard employment generally’ when he referred to the inevitability of ‘a change gonna come?’ (2016: 824): Brexit may have been accidental but it was an accident waiting to happen. Jobs have been created in the UK post-crisis but the quality of those jobs has been ignored by government. Too many bad jobs are being created and which, in themselves, are also getting worse. Moreover too many UK born workers are getting stuck in these jobs alongside migrant workers to the UK. (Warhurst, 2016: 824)

One of the more colourful tropes is that of the ‘excluded’ who are portrayed as being engaged in ‘a mutiny against the cosmopolitan elite’ (Calhoun, 2016). According to Calhoun (2016: 5), both Brexit and the election of Trump were phenomena ‘driven by resentment, frustration and anger…’. They were both ‘emotional and expressive’ and part of a ‘wider populist surge that expresses frustration with radically intensified inequality, stagnant incomes and declining economic security for middle class and working class people in ostensibly prosperous countries’ who see themselves as having been ‘bypassed by globalization’ (2016: 5).

A Caveat – Class as a Verboten Topic One of the main reasons class has become largely invisible in polite conversation, except in its more recent political eruptions, is that it is not a respectable topic to talk or write about. As Skeggs (1997: 77) says, to take on the process of investigating how class

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works is an ‘emotional’ process because it is a reminder of ‘social positioning’ – it is much less discomforting to claim to be ‘classless’. Rather than face up to the discomfort, Skeggs (1997: 77) says that people engage in ‘refusal’, ‘denial’ and ‘disidentification’, but the effect of this is to obscure how power works, and as Skeggs puts it, ‘class is primarily about inequality and exploitation’ (1997: 75). What we need, she says, are analyses of ‘how inequalities are consolidated, reproduced and lived as power relations’ (1997: 75). Skeggs (1997) says that writing about class is an ‘excruciating’ process because of the way in which it is so heavily ‘invested in respectability’ (1997: 15). Nobody wants to confess to inferiority, and to acknowledge that one is working class – except, as Skeggs says, perhaps academics (acknowledging colleague Lynne Pearce), who have the luxury of being able to tout their working classness as a badge of honour ‘once they [have] been given middle class citizenship [enabling them to] … take pride in one’s roots and not be ashamed because “what I was is not what I now am”’ (1997: 97). All of this having been said, ‘talking about class, is somewhat different from living it’ (Skeggs, 1997: 77), and in what follows I want to draw attention to some of the ways in which working class education is ‘lived’ in the context of schooling. Schools have become quintessentially neoliberal institutions – that is to say they have become pre-occupied with acquisitiveness, or as Skeggs (2011: 508) puts it, places in which students exploit the opportunities to ‘load … themselves [up] with value that is convertible into capital for themselves and [the economy] more generally’. Within neoliberalism, and the neoliberal school in particular, ‘the person is now a key unit of value’ (2011: 508) – meaning, that the raison d’etre of schooling has become an exchange relationship in which students don’t just leave school equipped to sell their ‘labour power’, but rather they come to the ‘exchange already loaded with capacities and potential for finding and increasing value across a number of

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domains’ (2011: 508). The significance of this is that students have to make themselves ‘more amenable to capital’, but they are doing this in a context in which the process by which this occurs has become ‘hidden and psychologised’ (2011: 508). What is equally disturbing about this process is that not all people want to engage in, or can access, the value practices necessary for becoming a capital loaded fetish form of value. They may have better things to do with their time and energy. (Skeggs, 2011: 508)

This latter point is a sobering reminder that when working class children reject school, it is because they largely see schools as irrelevant places in which to do identity formation (see Smyth et al., 2000, 2004). The challenge then, to give the final word to Skeggs (2011) for the moment, is how to ‘build a picture of an autonomist workingclass set of values that produce different relationships, different forms of attention, very different desires and very different value practices’ (2011: 507) as these might be expressed in schooling. This might, for example, take forms that focus more on ‘personal integrity and the quality of personal relationships and a very different form of sociability’ to the grotesque displays demanded by the neoliberal school of ‘self-centredness, conceit, pretentiousness and exploitation’ (Skeggs, 2011: 507) that foster an entrepreneurial self. But before I go there, I need to do some ground clearing that focuses somewhat more on the dysfunctional aspects of extant schooling for working class children.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH EDUCATIONAL POLICY AND SCHOOLING FOR WORKING CLASS CHILDREN? What is occurring more widely in prosperous societies, as exemplified in Brexit and Trump, is not leaving young people and their schooling unaffected. To borrow from and build

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upon Mills (1971 [1959]), there is a kind of ‘sociological imagination’ (Mills, 1971 [1959]) going on in schools that is occurring behind the screen, out of sight, and largely unacknowledged, in contrast to the main game. The real game is being made invisible and obfuscated by the dominant neoliberal educational policy trajectory that schools exist primarily to do economic work, and that ‘failing schools’ and ‘failing students’ are endangering national security because of the way they are impeding international economic competitiveness. To invoke Bright (2016) and Gordon (2004, 2008 [1997]), there is a kind of ‘social haunting’ going on in respect of the education of working class children, in which aspects of the past are being hidden or repressed for political reasons. Gordon (2008 [1997]: 7) argues that in order to study social life we ‘must confront the ghostly aspect of it’, and she proffers by way of illustration Taussig’s (1992: 4) claim about ‘the phantom objectivity of capitalist culture’ (p. 31, emphasis in original). Gordon describes ‘social haunting’ as the ‘turmoil and trouble’ that occur when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something very different from before, seems like it must be done. (Gordon, 2008 [1997]: xvi)

In other words, in order to sustain its claim to legitimacy, capitalist culture and its attendant neoliberal paradigm needs to be engaged in what Gordon (2008 [1997]) calls ‘distractions’ (1997: 31), ‘pretence’ (1997: 32) and ‘transference’ (1997: 42). Capitalism needs to construct a fictional narrative, and schooling is a fertile place within which to do that. If we start with Skeggs’s (2011) idea that class is a phenomenon that is constructed through images and formations of ‘personhood’, then even a cursory glance reveals schools pay scant attention to notions of working class personhood, erasing them instead with a

middle class palimpsest that celebrates competitive and ‘possessive individualism’ (2011: 498), citing Macpherson (1962). To put these notions another way, schools are adept at constructing what is deemed to be valuable, in terms of individuals who are seen to be capable of ‘stand[ing] outside of [themselves]’ (2011: 498), as evidenced by success in developing the capacity to acquire skills and forms of knowledge that enable them to ‘make something of themselves’. We see this frequently rehearsed, for example, in the often heard refrains of teachers who chastise their working class students as being ‘a waste of space’, as being incapable of ‘making anything of themselves’, and who teachers regard as being feckless and indolent, destined to become ‘failures’. These kind of comments are more than mere frustrated utterances on the part of teachers – they are symbolic of a deeper institutional view held by schools towards those students it regards, because of family background and upbringing, as not having been properly socialized into the middle class norms of domestication, docility, abstraction and a willingness to delay gratification – that is to say, students who are variously labelled as ‘at risk’, ‘vulnerable’, from ‘low socio-economic background’, or ‘disadvantaged’ – all of which are codes, masks or euphemisms for ‘working class’. To extrapolate from what Skeggs (2011) is saying – attributes of diligence, aspiration, self-discipline and institutional docility, and compliance to regimes of testing, sorting, sifting, verification and subjugation are all educational markers indicative of the kind of ‘performance of personhood’ expected to be displayed by students who have developed the qualities with which to ‘publicly legitimate themselves as good and worthy subjects’ (2011: 496) according to the rubric of the school and as legitimated by the dominant society. Students who present as troublesome, disruptive, disengaged, recalcitrant, or who distinguish themselves by ‘speaking back’ to what they regard as the irrelevance of the curriculum or the stupidification of the

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pedagogy of the school, are positioned ‘outside’ of, or exiled from, school literally and metaphorically. In Skeggs’s (2011) schema, working class students are positioned outside the ‘theoretical imaginary’ (2011: 496) of the ‘dominant’ symbolic culture of personhood that schools are trying to construct. That is to say perforce, the school as an exclusionary social institution is making ‘personhood’ an ‘exclusive resource predicated on construction by exclusion’ (2011: 496). Schools are, therefore, active players involved in multiple processes ‘where limits define the norm, the margins the centre, and the improper the proper’ (Skeggs, 2011: 496). Working class students thus find themselves being defined, and defiled, in terms of the inherent pathologies they bring with them to schools, and that they demonstrate while there, that warrant their exclusion from ‘the possibilities of accruing and attaching value to themselves, [and] who are positioned outside of the dominant symbolic as the constitutional limit for the proper self’ (2011: 496). Unpacked, what this means is that when working class children fail to acquiesce to or comply with the values of mainstream school, then they are demonstrating publicly their circumscribed capacity to develop the appropriate ‘conditions for [a middle class] personhood’ – which is to say, a ‘proper self’ in terms of the school (2011: 496). Quite simply, they have failed to develop an appropriate learning identity. One of the most tangible effects, Skeggs (2011) says, is that the working class are ‘filtered out of the education system’ in circumstances where ‘jobs rather than careers are a more likely temporal imaginary’ (2011: 506). Publicly funded schools – that supposedly exist for all students – are able to ‘residualize’ working class students in various ways, including through the use of visible highstakes testing. But there are less visible and more sinister ways in which the ‘neoliberal school’ – which is the dominant version in many western countries – can do this. In the marketized times we live in, the prevailing

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policy expectation is that schools will operate like businesses, engaging in the competitive cut and thrust to secure ‘market share’ – that is to say, getting students through the doors, with schools being rewarded financially on the basis of numbers of students they attract. This is an inevitable and intended outcome of requiring that schools embark upon a competitive urge in the way they envisage themselves and the ways they organize their activities. What becomes crucial in this business-­ oriented turn is that schools have to operate in ways that sustain, maintain and enhance their positional image in the education marketplace, when ‘choice’ of school is the primary animating force. Preserving and constructing an image of the school which is attractive to middle class parents involves constructing a narrative of the school around success, merit, rigour and discipline as features that will enable the progeny of the middle class to be amply rewarded in later life as a result of wise parental choice. The corollary of this press for consumerist standardization is that schools have to be purged of any students likely to impugn this market image – or to put it most directly, ‘the kids who make the place appear untidy!’ Most frequently, the ‘untidy kids’ are those from working class backgrounds who may have encountered interferences to their educational pathways, have learning difficulties, may come from homes where there are no educational role models, or who are variously labelled by the school as incapable or trouble makers. Whatever the explanation, these are the children who have to be made ‘invisible’ lest their presence and underperformance will undermine the school’s marketing strategy. An example from the state of Victoria, Australia, the place that has led the push to the neoliberal school, reveals something about the insidious class-based process that ensues. Like other places, Victoria has for some time had educational pathways for students who find it difficult or stressful to handle the competitive ethos of mainstream schooling. What these students are offered instead are educational experiences and credentials that

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may be more vocational in nature and, while seemingly more humane and user-friendly to these students, they end up nevertheless being terminal forms of education in that they do not allow students to proceed with further education that will give them access to university entrance and higher-paying occupations. Where this process is becoming unravelled is that these lesser pathways are being used as places in which to dump students whose educational performance, if they were in academic strands, would be likely to reflect badly on or impugn a school’s performance rankings in league tables – and schools obsess over these rankings as if they were stock market indices. As a consequence, schools use various strategies to countenance less able working class students out of academic strands, advising them not to take up academic subjects, or simply refusing to allow them to enrol. By not having these students included in the school’s published competitive test scores, schools are able to propagate a false and rosy picture of the school, but at the expense of degrading the options available to ‘supposedly’ less able working class students. In other words, these ‘students are lock[ed] out’ (Jacks and Cook, 2017) of any possibility of educational mobility, but the reputation of the school is sustained and kept intact, under the ruse that less able students have been hived off to pursue educational options better suited to them. Reality is, of course, that this is a thinly veiled classbased form of exclusion designed to maintain institutional reputational status, at the expense of the lives of these students. The ‘marketized school’ clearly works against the interests of working class students.

HOW DOES THE NEOLIBERAL SCHOOL MILITATE AGAINST THE INTERESTS OF WORKING CLASS STUDENTS? I am not aware of anyone who has actually coined the term the ‘neoliberal school’, but I shall invoke that term here as a heuristic with

which to discuss how mainstream schooling is being re-invented against the interests of working class students. To be clear, I am not referring to the much more specific examples of publicly provided schools that have effectively been totally privatized, in the form of academies, free schools, or charter schools. Rather, my concern is with what the neoliberal reform policy process is doing to ordinary publicly provided schools that are making them inhospitable places for working class children. To discharge the definitional issue as expeditiously as possible, Wendy Brown (2015) has portrayed neoliberalism as the ‘stealth revolution’ that is undoing democracy. Brown (2015) argues that in its most expansive form, neoliberalism is a ‘peculiar form of reason that configures all aspects of existence in economic terms’ (2015: 17). The organizing logic of neoliberalism is that it is a form of governmental and social rationality that espouses the ‘deregulation, marketization and privatization of all public goods’ through ‘a forthright attack on the public sector’ by recasting all ‘human endeavour and activity in entrepreneurial terms’ (Brown, 2011: 118). In other words, individuals are regarded as being ‘entrepreneurs of their own needs and desires’ (Brown, 2011: 118), and they consume and invest accordingly. Neoliberal rationality, therefore, ‘disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities… and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors…’ (Brown, 2015: 31, emphasis in original). There are a number of qualities or dispositions that mark out the neoliberal school, and I will adumbrate those, while seeking after that to try and disentangle how it is they are damaging working class children. Here are 13 qualities or dispositions of the neoliberal school that I have been able to discern: 1 The primary focus in the neoliberal school is upon the unit of the individual and individualism.

What this means: is that individual students and schools are directly responsible for their

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own success or failure however that is measured. Whether they succeed or not is an indicator or marker of how good students and schools are at constructing and deporting themselves as effective players in the educational marketplace – whether that be in promoting and selling themselves, what they have available, or in consuming what is on offer to them. 2 Competition is the source of all individual and institutional inspiration and improvement.

What this means: is that competing against others academically is the animating or driving force which provides the impetus with which to innovate, excel, and that distinguishes oneself from others who are less meritorious. 3 Delayed gratification is crucial in the production of meritocratic rewards in the future.

What this means: in the neoliberal school satisfying immediate urges clouds or obscures the potential rewards or benefits that accrue as a result of carefully crafting and contriving longer-term goals. Immediacy in the neoliberal school is code for profligacy or licentious behaviour, and this kind of labelling is applicable to students as well as their families. 4 Failure follows from lack of effort, application and individual dysfunction – it is deserved.

What this means: is that whether we are referring to students or the school as a larger collective, success is measured in the extent to which there has been a serious application of effort, application and innovative verve – failure is due to the absence of these qualities. 5 Privatization of the self is the way out of the mediocrity of the collective and the way to foster innovation.

What this means: is that when individuals and institutions strive for ‘excellence’ and to be ‘the best they can’, as stand-alone entities, by out-competing others, then this kind of demeanour extirpates ‘group think’ which is

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the true enemy of innovation. Privatization, as the epitome of pursuing one’s own selfinterests, is the means by which to move beyond a dulling of the senses, and thus constitutes the true hallmark of ‘quality’. 6 There is no such thing as an unlevel playing field – only opportunities forgone or lack of aspiration.

What this means: according to this disposition, is that there is no such thing as socially constructed obstacles or impediments – merely an impoverishment of thinking about how to productively grasp opportunities and turn them into personal/institutional successes. 7 The engine for sorting out educational worth and value resides in the exercise of choice.

What this means: is that in the neoliberal school, the only meaningful arbiter of worth or value is the extent to which students, their families and the school avail themselves of choices – whether that be the selection of an appropriate school, subject choices within the school by students, or the choice by students of career pathways for the future. 8 Education has to be future-focused rather than becoming mired in immediacy or acquiescing to emotionality.

What this means: is that the neoliberal school quintessentially regards itself as acting objectively and rationally, in which case students’ (and their families’) emotional lives have no place in the school. Issues that bring immediacy, and that have a history, are deemed irrelevant in the neoliberal school. 9 Stratification is a desirable, crucial and inevitable outcome of the differential application of effort.

What this means: is that the neoliberal school proudly proclaims its transparency in revealing rankings, because without hierarchies choice is not possible – by parents of schools, by students with regard to their desired futures, further education providers in selecting the most able, or by potential employers in recruiting workers. Such hierarchies are a

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direct reflection of the past application of diligence and effort. 10 Educational context is unimportant – place is a neutral concept of no educational significance.

What this means: is that in the neoliberal school, social forces are regarded with scepticism. While there are attempts, at the margins, to ameliorate ‘disadvantage’, any such measures are highly circumscribed, and only for the most ‘deserving’ minorities. 11 The way to deal with differences in ability is to sort individuals into tracks or trajectories best suited to innate ability – hence the importance of calibration and measurement.

What this means: is that sorting students into pathways such as ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’, and even school types, is the only feasible way of handling differences in ability, aspirations and application. Testing and measurement are the neutral means by which discriminations have to be made and legitimated. 12 The final stage in any attempt to sort, rank, compare and contrast value involves providing a sobering lesson to those who are deemed ‘unfit’ because of their ‘market failure’, and the unequivocal message it gives on where they sit in the constructed hierarchy. The takeaway lesson is on the necessity of them ‘fitting into place’ (Taylor, 2012).

What this means: is that the neoliberal school regards the hierarchical ordering it produces as being the consequence of deliberate individual action/inaction, and the message must be heeded. 13 Lastly, the neoliberal school creates the space within which leaders are freed from bureaucratic shackles and are able to exercise ‘heroic’ leadership (Kulz, 2017) in acquiring all of the visionary benefits that come from having autonomy.

What this means: hovering above all of this – indeed, implicit in everything that the neoliberal school does – are leaders who understand how to avail themselves of the autonomy granted to them, and how to create a commensurate school culture for students,

teachers and parents. Such leaders are seen as being ‘heroic’ in the way they unleash the unbridled potential of everyone in the school. This rough parody caricature of the neoliberal school provides a robust basis from which to look at how the existential lives of working class students ‘speak back’ to an entity that is essentially alien to their being. The basis of my argument is that the dispositions of the neoliberal school are not only inconsistent with young working class lives; indeed they are highly antagonistic to them, in manifest ways.

WHAT THEN OF A WORKING CLASS EDUCATIONAL SENSIBILITY? Crafting a critical pedagogy of working class schooling requires that we get up close to what it is that is unique about working class lives, and the implications this might hold for working class schooling. Michèle Lamont (2000), in her study of US working class males, refers to what I am pitching towards as ‘dignity’, or the way the working class does ‘boundary work’ in constructing and affirming who they are. Dignity is a good way of suturing together what I have depicted (Smyth and Simmons, 2018) as an ‘ensemble of working class dispositions’. Central to Lamont’s (2000) notion of dignity is the ‘work ethic’ and sense of ‘responsibility’ that is given expression in the working class drive to ‘make it through’, which is to say, surviving and ‘keep[ing] their world together in the face of economic uncertainty…and the general unpredictability of life’ (2000: 23). We hear much the same refrain expressed by Lisa McKenzie (2015) in her study of working class informants living on council estates in Britain, expressed as ‘getting by’. Because they are continually ‘preoccupied with issues of security’ and do not have the luxury of a ‘buffer’ from the unexpected in hard times, it is not surprising to find a strong sense of what Lamont (2000: 36) refers to as

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‘straightforwardness’ and ‘personal integrity’ that takes the form of ‘standing up for oneself’ (2000: 37) – this straightforwardness often comes across as not pussyfooting around, and facing issues directly. The notion of ‘dignity or ‘respect’ (Sennett, 2003), or their opposite ‘disrespect’ and ‘lack of recognition’, Honneth (2007) argues resides at the heart of inequality – and for our purposes here this is a helpful point of entry into what lies at the centre of any attempt to devise a critical pedagogy of working class schooling. In its essence, Honneth’s (2007) argument is that any approach that purports to be a critical theory of society must have as its ‘normative core’ notions of justice that are ‘always constituted by expectations of respect for one’s own dignity, honour or integrity’ (2007: 71). Put another way, what Honneth is saying is that when ‘human subjects are denied the recognition they feel they deserve’ then what they experience are moral feelings of ‘social disrespect’ (2007: 71). All of this feeds precisely into my argument here that what is occurring with the middle class institution of schooling, which has been radically recast in the form of the neoliberal school, is that it has been made alien, inhospitable and disrespectful of the histories, cultures and experiences that working class students and their families bring to the school. Indeed, the tenets of the neoliberal school operate in ways that ride over the lives of these children, refuse to accord them recognition, are derogatory, demeaning and disparaging, and in the end seek to accommodate them by giving them a middle class makeover. There are several notions in particular that can be used to exemplify my point. First, notions of individualism, atomism and self-responsibilization, in the animating sense it is propagated and celebrated in the neoliberal school, may not be immediately recognizable to working class students who have a much stronger relational connection to immediate family (fractious though that might be in some instances), than their middle class peers. Working class children, often

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regardless of how traumatic their lives, still have a strong sense of affinity, belonging, connectedness and loyalty to family, which also extends to neighbourhood and community. These strong relational bonds of affiliation and belonging are qualitatively different from the sense of a highly individualistic and self-responsible self being propagated by the neoliberal school. We often see this, for example, in what is called ‘postcode pride’, where working class children and their families express strong pride in their communities, even when widely disparaged by the middle class in all manner of derogatory ways. So, place and locality are seen as being crucial in the framing of a working class persona – something not always understood by schools that are trying to cultivate a more cosmopolitan albeit atomistic agenda. Second, because they have to continually live and survive with the vicissitudes of immediacy, uncertainty, unpredictability and insecurity that so strongly frame their existence, these factors militate against their formation of long-term views, except in unrealistic or fanciful ways. A good example of this is the way many children come to school unfed and hungry. Schools try to ameliorate the worst instances of this by providing things like breakfast programmes. Other students suffer from the insecurity of not knowing whether they have a home to go to at the end of a school day, because of family dysfunctions or domestic violence, and sometimes have to be placed in short-term refuges. Under these conditions, the immediate demands over-ride the agenda of the school in trying to formulate longer-term goals. Third, issues of dignity, pride and a strong sense of the necessity to ‘speak back’ to perceived injustices that are personal in nature, along with a predilection to call things for what they are – viz. honesty and straightforwardness – do not always co-exist well with school rules and regulations that require conformity, that are often formulated in ways in which there is no participation, and where the rationale behind their formulation

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remains opaque. Often matters of fairness and justice as expressed forthrightly by working class children are not well-understood by the school, and the perpetrators are labelled as ‘trouble makers’. The response to this deep cultural trait is rather too individualistic. Sometimes, children have been raised in families where the adults are continually having to deal with what they see as the authoritarianism of government welfare agencies, and they witness at first hand the way adults around them respond in muscular fashion. Fourth, the whole issue of ‘choice’, which so powerfully frames the rationale of the neoliberal school, amounts to a ‘poverty of choice’ (Woodcock and Toscano, 2016). For starters, working class parents, at a pragmatic level, have neither the time nor the vehicular resources with which to ‘shop’ their children around schools so as to get the ‘best deal’. Furthermore, exercising choice of school requires a modicum of skill and the ability to locate, access, process, interpret and act upon the ‘liquified forest of metrics’ (Woodcock and Toscano, 2016) required to feasibly exercise choice – something that is simply beyond the realm of the practical for most working class parents. Under these conditions, the notion of working class students as ‘client-consumers’ immersed in a ‘landscape of metricised competition’ (Woodcock and Toscano, 2016) is simply a nonsense. There may be a rhetoric of choice, but such rhetoric has a completely hollow ring to it for the working class – reality is rather a poverty of choice.

A CALL FOR AN ACTIVIST THEORY OF WORKING CLASS SCHOOLING By this point, it is time to look at the more general architecture of what a critical pedagogy of working class schooling might look like, and here I want to frame this around questions, rather than prescriptions or answers. Taking the lead from Paulo Freire, the approach will be to give precedence to a

‘pedagogy of the question’ over the ‘pedagogy of the answer’. As Bruss and Macedo (1985), in an interview with Paulo, put it: The pedagogy of the question requires that [we] distance [ourselves] from [our] bureaucratic daily existence, while [we] become more aware, through reflection, of the mythical facts that enslave [us]. (1985: 8)

As I have argued elsewhere (Smyth et  al., 2014), it is a more ‘humbling experience’ and ‘takes a lot more courage’ to come up with questions and perplexities rather than provide answers. What I have to say next in terms of the ‘conditions for working class schooling’ should therefore be treated as provisional and as ideas to be tried and debated in practice – which is not to say that being provisional and democratic is to accept a situation where anything goes. Far from it! Taking a lead from Patrick Finn (1999), working class schooling needs to position itself as taking a stand against the dominant status quo, through what he calls ‘literacy with an attitude’. In other words, it needs to be informed by a ‘defiant imagination’ (Kenway and Fahey, 2009: 9) in which working class schooling consist of more than teaching children to ‘sit still and listen’ (Finn, 1999: chapter 9). In his quite raunchy book, Finn (1999) argues that for the working class to reclaim their rights to a meaningful educational experience, a number of things need to occur: literacy needs to be ‘made dangerous’ (chapter 13); there needs to be an upending of the ‘entrenched school’ (chapter 6); notions of neutrality and detachment need to be jettisoned in favour of an avowed process of ‘taking sides’ (chapter 14); there needs to be a pervasive intent on constructing an ‘oppositional identity’ (chapter 4); and in the end, there needs to be an interruption to the situation of schools continuing to serve only the middle class, and the working class needs to get ‘as mad as hell’, maintaining the rage, and loudly proclaim that they are ‘not taking it any more’ (chapter 15).

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Here are some starting points for a set of conditions. • Place and context are important in working class education: rather than expunging, ignoring or demeaning the importance and immediacy of place in these young working class lives, along with history and culture, the educational experience might be significantly enriched if context is used as an orienting focus. Questions that might be asked might include: {{ what kind of community do we live in? {{ how did it come to be like this? {{ what are its strengths? {{ how does it differ from other communities? {{ how might we celebrate its differences? {{ what would learning look like that started from within working class lives? • Relationships are important in working class education: given what we know about the crucial role relationships play in working class lives, some pedagogical questions that might inform learning could include: {{ who are the most important people in our lives? Why? {{ what do we know about how these people came to be important to us? {{ how does knowing about these relationships help us? {{ what do we need to know more about? {{ do all people have relationships like ours? {{ how do we relate to other people, and how do they relate to us? How does this feel? {{ are relationships at the centre of what happens in this school? How? {{ is there anything we would want to be different about our relationships? {{ what would the world be like if we changed…? • Success-oriented learning: one thing middle class schooling does is that it persistently reaffirms hierarchical ordering, and for working class students, their families and communities, the repeated lesson is that they are on ‘the lowest rung’ (Peel, 2003). The strategy that lies behind this is that of artificially rationing educational success (Gillborn and Youdell, 2000), and the means for doing that is educational testing. Puncturing this cruel hoax requires starting from a different position: that working class children have strengths that need to be acknowledged, celebrated and rewarded. They need to be given agency rather

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than accorded victim status through continual failure. Orienting questions might include: {{ what strengths do these students bring to school? {{ how might the school actively recognize and affirm these working class cultural assets? {{ what form would a more socially just and inclusive curriculum take? {{ what might a different form of assessment take that does not have competitive individualism as its singular focus? {{ how might the school reinvent itself so that it actively endorses and rewards the success and achievements of working class students rather than highlighting, solidifying and entrenching their deficits? • Acknowledging the place of emotions: students and their families have emotionally laden lives, and these are often not left at the school gate or the classroom door, and for working class students directness and honesty means emotions are never far from the surface. Schools often attempt to handle emotional issues by recasting them as behavioural issues requiring ‘behaviour management policies’. Questions that might give a different inflection might include: {{ when a school responds to what it regards as emotional issues, whose interests are really being served? {{ how might the school handle emotional issues as a ‘curriculum’ issue rather than a ‘behaviour management’ issue? {{ what then might a more educative approach to deal with emotions look like that goes beyond ‘management’ and what would this mean for working class students?

Finally – • Authentic rather than thin synthetic forms of leadership: leadership in middle class schools has become obsessively pre-occupied with manufacturing images, impressions and deceptions around forms of self-aggrandisement largely for marketing purposes. Some questions to interrupt this unproblematic trajectory might include: {{ how can schools detach themselves from synthetic processes of image and impression management? {{ what would it mean to a school if resources currently wasted by schools trying to improve their ‘market share’ were able to be used

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{{

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instead to improve the learning of the least advantaged students? indeed, what would a radical and provisional view of leadership look like that took seriously the need to actively listen to the community in which the school was located? instead of a top-down view of leadership vested in high office, how could leadership be recast so as to be exercised by whoever possessed expertise on a particular issue?

Conclusion Anything less than the kind of analysis presented here can only continue to leave a grossly distorted education system uninterrupted, with working class students continuing to be pushed to the educational margins – something that is surely unacceptable and unsustainable!

REFERENCES Bright, G. (2016). ‘The lady is not returning!’: educational precarity and a social haunting in the UK coalfields. Ethnography and Education, 11(2), 142–157. Brown, W. (2011). Neoliberalized knowledge. History of the Present, 1(1), 113–129. Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. New York: Zone Books. Bruss, N., & Macedo, D. (1985). Toward a pedagogy of the question: conversations with Paulo Freire. Journal of Education, 167(2), 7–21. Calhoun, C. (2016, 27 June). Brexit is a mutiny against the cosmopolitan elite. Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craigcalhoun/brexit-mutiny-elites_b_10690654. html Accessed 21 February 2017. Davies, W. (2016, 24 June). Thoughts on the sociology of Brexit. http://www.perc.org.uk/ project_posts/thoughts-on-the-sociology-ofbrexit/ Accessed 14 February 2017. Finn, P. (1999). Literacy with an attitude: educating working-class children in their own self-interest. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Froud, J., Johal, S., & Williams, K. (2016). Multiple economies: before and after Brexit. Socio-Economic Review, 14(4), 814–819. Gillborn, D., & Youdell, D. (2000). Rationing education: policy, practice, reform and equity. Buckingham & Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press. Gordon, A. (2004). Keeping good time: reflections on knowledge, power and people. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Gordon, A. (2008 [1997]). Ghostly matters: haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Honneth, A. (2007). Disrespect: the normative foundations of critical theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Jacks, T., & Cook, H. (2017, 20 February). The reason schools lock students out of VCE. The Age. Kenway, J., & Fahey, J. (2009). Globalizing the research imagination. New York: Routledge. Kulz, C. (2017). Heroic heads, mobility mythologies and the power of ambiguity. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 38(2), 85–104. Lamont, M. (2000). The dignity of working men: morality and the boundaries of race, class and immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Macpherson, C. (1962). The political theory of possessive individualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McKenzie, L. (2015). Getting by: estates, class and culture in austerity Britain. Bristol: Policy Press. Mills, C. (1971[1959]). The sociological imagination. Harmondsworth: Penguin. O’Reilly, J. (2016). The fault lines unveiled by Brexit. Socio-Economic Review, 14(4), 808–814. O’Reilly, J., Froud, J., Johal, S., Williams, K., Warhurst, C., Morgan, G., … Le Galès, P. (2016). Forum: Brexit: understanding the socio-economic origins and consequences. Socio-Economic Review, 14(4), 807–854. Peel, M. (2003). The lowest rung: voices of Australian poverty. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Reay, D. (2006). The zombie stalking English schools: social class and educational inequality. British Journal of Educational Studies, 54(3), 288–307.

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Sennett, R. (2003). Respect in a world of inequality. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Skeggs, B. (1997). Formations of class and gender. London: Sage. Skeggs, B. (2011). Imagining personhood differently: person value and autonomist working class value practices. Sociological Review, 59(3), 496–513. Smyth, J., Down, B., McInerney, P., & Hattam, R. (2014). Doing critical educational research: a conversation with the research of John Smyth. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Smyth, J., Hattam, R., Cannon, J., Edwards, J., Wilson, N., & Wurst, S. (2000). Listen to me, I’m leaving: early school leaving in South Australian secondary schools. Adelaide: Flinders Institute for the Study of Teaching; Department of Employment, Education and Training; and Senior Secondary Assessment Board of South Australia. Smyth, J., Hattam, R., with Cannon, J., Edwards, J., Wilson, N., & Wurst, S. (2004). ‘Dropping out’, drifting off, being excluded: becoming somebody without school. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

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Smyth, J., & Simmons, R. (2018). Where is class in the analysis of working class education? In R. Simmons & J. Smyth (Eds.), Education and working class youth: untangling the politics of inclusion (pp. 1–28). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Taussig, M. (1992). The nervous system. New York: Routledge Taylor, J. D. (2017, 7 February). The working class revolts. New Statesman. Taylor, Y. (2012). Fitting into place? Class and gender geographies and temporalities. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Warhurst, C. (2016). Accidental tourists: Brexit and its toxic employment underpinnings. Socio-Economic Review, 14(4), 819–825. Woodcock, J., & Toscano, A. (2016, 19 July). On the poverty of student choice. The Sociological Review https://www.thesociologicalreview. com/blog/on-the-poverty-of-stu…a4&utm_ m e d i u m = s o c i a l & u t m _ s o u rc e = t w i t t e r. com&utm_campaign=buffer Accessed 2 March 2017.

60 Critical Pedagogy as Research Tr i c i a M . K r e s s

INTRODUCTION In my explorations of the literature about critical pedagogy and in my interactions with students and colleagues, I have noticed a common misconception about the origins of Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy. It is often assumed that Freire’s literacy project in which he taught 400 Brazilian workers to read was the starting point of critical pedagogy, that he somehow thought up this method, and then tried it out with adult workers, yielding tremendous success. However, this abbreviated version of Paulo Freire’s work takes his philosophy and practice out of the context of his biography, which imparts a false mysticism upon critical pedagogy as a philosophy and a false sense of instrumentalism about critical pedagogy as a method. Less widely known is the story of how Paulo Freire came to his philosophy of critical pedagogy, which he then implemented in his famous literacy circles. Prior to this notable event, Paulo Freire worked for the Social Service of Industry

(SESI), an organization that provided social services and education for workers and their children in Recife, Brazil. It was during this time, what Freire calls his ‘formative time’ (Freire, 1996), when his ideas about dialogue, praxis, and conscientization began to emerge as he engaged in inquiry as the head of the Department of Education and Culture. For Freire, naturalistic inquiry was fundamental for developing his knowledge in order to improve upon the educational opportunities SESI provided for workers and their children. This early inquiry, what Freire (1992) called learning with the people, was not only foundational to the development of his famous philosophy and practice, but also remained essential for developing his praxis throughout his life after his famous literacy circles had concluded. Indeed, throughout Freire’s writings, critical pedagogy was described as an inquiry process for teachers, learners, and leaders alike. When writing of his work at SESI, he frequently uses words like ‘research’, ‘observe’, ‘evaluate’, and ‘theorize’ (Freire, 1996). Yet it is

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atypical for critical pedagogy to be categorized as a research method.1 It is also atypical for research to be thought of as a pedagogical project; even though, for Freire, this was exactly the purpose of his research. By positioning himself as a researcher, he was assuming the stance of a learner alongside those for whom he served as teacher or administrator. This early iteration of Freire’s dialogic learning was firmly rooted in naturalistic inquiry. For Freire, critical pedagogy and educational research were not separate and discrete activities. As a researcher of critical pedagogy and urban education and a doctoral professor, I have come to understand this phenomenon – the divide between ‘doing’ education and ‘doing’ educational research – as part of a legacy of modernist tendencies toward classifying and categorizing organic parts of human life into tidy categories that can be easily examined via Western conceptualizations of ‘scientific research’. The goal of research of this type is to feed into the larger Western humanist project of ‘progress’, that is, seeking out the ‘truth’ of phenomena in order to replicate, perfect or otherwise ‘fix’ processes that either ‘work’ or are ‘inefficient’ or ‘broken’. This particular logic is predicated by a legacy of Enlightenment thinking that prioritizes instrumentality, reductionism, distance, disinterest, and, ultimately, sameness.2 Research methods built upon these logics are artificial and can be a hindrance to scholar-practitioners who wish to conduct more organic, immersive, practice-based research. They also run counter to the tenets of critical pedagogy as a way of being, which encourage an inquisitive, relational ontology through which to develop new understandings of self and other with and in the world. In this regard, conceptualizing research about critical pedagogy paradoxically disallows the organic, embodied knowledge of being a teacher–learner–inquirer in a critical pedagogy learning context/relationship to enter into and influence the research process. Likewise, the research process is divorced from the organic teaching–learning–inquiry

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process, which becomes objectified, or in Freire’s term, dehumanized, in order for it to be examined and then worked upon from the ‘outside’. This creates an epistemological schism for scholar-practitioners of critical pedagogy who do not see their work as bifurcated in this way. The resulting contradictions between how scholar-practitioners understand themselves as teachers–­learners– researchers and hegemonic assumptions about what it means to embody and enact scholar versus practitioner personas delimit who is considered knowledgeable, what can be known, and how one comes to know (Kincheloe, 2003). In the sections that follow, by using Paulo Freire’s firsthand accounts of his time of inquiry at SESI3 in parallel with recollections from my own work as a teacher-researcher with urban youth, I trouble this false binary of doing critical teaching–­learning and researching about critical ­teaching–­learning. By providing examples of how inquiry is simultaneously within and about critical teaching–learning, I blur the modernist boundaries between subject and object and offer an alternative view of critical pedagogy as a methodological–­pedagogical praxis that includes and values complex, holistic, and embodied scholar-practitioner knowledge.

TEACHING-RESEARCHING FROM THE ‘INSIDE-OUT’: INQUIRY AS ITERATIVE PROJECTS My inquiry about the Young Researchers Club began well before the after-school club was even conceived of. I was invited by one of my doctoral advisees to co-teach an elective class in his high school. The class, Social Activism, was designed to engage students in thinking critically about society by introducing them to various theoretical texts and guiding them in conducting critical social research. The students read Ain’t No Makin’ It (MacLeod, 2009), kept personal journals, and discussed social reproduction theories that were described in the book. After this reading and writing, the students worked collectively to

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generate a research topic and questions that they would then investigate by using various ethnographic research methods. The topic they chose was, ‘Why do students come to Urban High School?’ They created and administered surveys to students and teachers in the school and they conducted individual interviews with students and faculty. After their data was analyzed, they presented their findings to the school in a town hall forum. The class was very successful, and students were engaged and energized by their work. However, at the end of the school year when the school was restructured because of its failing status, the class was eliminated. Thus was born the idea for the Young Researchers Club, an after-school inquiry group to fill the gap left by the cancellation of Social Activism. My co-teacher and I knew that some powerful learning had taken place in the class, and the after-school club was an opportunity to continue that learning and to document it.

In Letters to Cristina: Reflections on My Life and Work, Paulo Freire (1996) describes in detail the ‘projects’ that he and others engaged in as they sought to reform the education and service provisions of SESI. His goals were very pragmatic but also very ambitious – he wanted to democratize the organization from top to bottom, including the daily administrative activities and the working relationships between employees. His vision for a democratic education went well beyond the classroom walls because he believed that no education could ever be truly democratic if the organization in which it was embedded was undemocratic and did not value and include the knowledge of its workers. So with the help of others he worked with, Freire would target a particular place where he wanted to make changes and begin to implement reforms. Every time his team would initiate one of the reform projects, he would engage in a detailed process of documenting and evaluating what happened. He would then discuss the results of these activities with his collaborators, and they would reflect on the experience and engage with theoretical literature to think not only about what happened but also why it happened; what were the underlying theories that guided

their decisions? With this knowledge, he and his collaborators were able to reveal the hidden philosophies that guided their commonsense assumptions and actions, which often ran counter to their professed goals of democratic participation. His recollections about his own missteps are refreshingly honest as he recounts the ways that reform was, at first, undemocratic, though steeped in good intentions. For example, he refers to professional development for teaching staff and workshops for parents that were designed to meet these groups’ needs and address topics that would be useful to them, but only actually met their needs coincidentally because they were not designed with parents’ and teachers’ direct input. Through trial and error, Freire and his team came to realize that they needed to educate themselves while also being systematic in documenting and critically reflecting on their reform efforts. It was through his team’s inquiries – what he refers to as ‘observations’ and ‘evaluations’ – that they were able to gain the knowledge they needed in order to authentically engage parents, teachers, and co-workers in reforms that emerged from various stakeholders’ interests and desires as participants in the learning or working environment and in society more broadly. It is important here to note that when Freire refers to these inquiry activities, they were not separate from the day-to-day workings of the reform projects. Each project depended upon generating relational knowledge in dialogue with various SESI stakeholders. Freire explains how his co-worker Heloisa Bezerra, a social worker for SESI, would document these dialogues, and this documentation served as the data that informed their critical reflections and enabled them to amend their theories and practices such that the two became better aligned. Never did he discuss an a priori plan to collect and analyze data. Instead, engaging in the dialogue groups and documenting and reflecting on this dialogic knowledge exchange was the research, and it was this

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research that informed Freire’s praxis. As he explains in detail, I was convinced during that time, and my lived experience later confirmed my belief, of the fundamental importance of education in the process of change. In other words, knowledge guides change. Thus, it became necessary to add educational practice to our attempts to expand the sphere of decision making within the SESI clubs. This educational practice was informed by the stimulus of epistemological curiosity. It was necessary to keep our eyes open to avoid the development of dichotomies between doing and thinking, between practice and theory, between acquiring skills and knowing the raison d’etre behind the technique, between politics and education, and between information and education. (Freire, 1996: 99)

Freire did not parse out research as something that happened outside the larger reform efforts. Rather, research and dialogue to Freire were one and the same. The documentation allowed a means of capturing what happened so that it could be reflected upon later as he and his collaborators continued developing their praxis. Most research genres, or at least the way research genres are explained in methods texts, do not account for the natural inquiry processes that educators engage in on a daily basis (Kress, 2011). Teachers observe, ask questions, document, reflect, make hypotheses, try out experiments, and make adjustments to their practice (Kincheloe, 2003). They do this, often, without even thinking about it because it is engrained in their ways of being as teachers who want to create positive and productive learning experiences for their students. Typically, these actions are more like a reflex, an enacting of one’s habitus (Bourdieu, 1990), rather than intentional and discrete research activities that are easily categorized as ‘research’. As such, these inquiry practices are necessarily messy, improvisational, and entangled in teachers’ day-to-day lives in schools. In fact, they are very much like teaching itself. Even though a teacher might enter the classroom with a lesson plan, it is often necessary to improvise in order to meet students’ needs in the moment.

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In this regard, critical pedagogy as research method mimics Freire’s ‘project’ approach to education reform. Teachers pick a spot where they want to make change and they work on finding out more about it so they can improve it, but this happens in the moment, and the process is ongoing and iterative, organically leading the teacher-researcher into the next ‘project’ as classroom life unfolds. As a result, one of the greatest challenges of a teacher-researcher who wishes to do research in the academy is trying to disentangle teaching and research. In my own example above, like in the discussion of Freire’s ‘projects’, research is ongoing and always both within and about teaching and learning. My teaching-researching within and about the Social Activism course turned Young Researchers Club (YRC) started from the moment I set foot in the Social Activism classroom and I began listening to and interacting with the students. Not all of these students wound up being part of the club, but the learning I engaged in with them greatly informed my later work with the YRC. As a university faculty member and a doctoral professor, I have been trained and likewise train my students to think of research as having a beginning and a conclusion and being located in particular research ‘sites’. Classic research conceptualizations start with either the identification of a problem or the generation of a hypothesis, and then a population and/or practice is examined in order to make truth claims about them/it to draw forth implications for further research. Yet my own experience with teacher-research and my secondhand experience working with doctoral students who are teacher-researchers illuminates the artificiality of these geo-spatial–temporal boundaries that we are asked to identify. Research, like teaching, is bound up in our histories, present, and multiple possible futures, and so as we attempt to ‘see’ our inquiry projects through the eyes of researchers, we will still always ‘see’ through our teachers’ eyes as well. This is why what I saw from working in the Social Activism course, specifically

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how very capable the students were of doing intellectual work despite the fact that they were attending a ‘failing’ school, led me to wonder what would happen if students were provided with opportunities to engage in this type of intellectual work outside the boundaries of the typical school day. Just like Freire and his co-workers would see each ‘project’ as contributing to their knowledge and leading into their next project, such was the case for me with the YRC. Contrary to the more traditional means of beginning research with a problem or hypothesis, that starts from the outside and looks in on the learning environment, this kind of research begins from inside the teacher by locating their purpose. The teacher-researcher considers what he or she wants to accomplish – in my case this was providing a space where students’ knowledge was valued and honored while doing scholarly work – and then they work from the inside-out to ask questions about that work and its significance. The work is very personal because it requires the teacher to be fully present as a co-participant in all aspects of the teaching–learning–research process.

ATTENDING TO THE AFFECTIVE DIMENSIONS OF RELATIONAL ONTOLOGY I sat in the back of the classroom while my research group students sat at desks configured in a horseshoe. The students were proud to be sharing their work with the Assistant Superintendent of the school district. Spock narrated their slideshow, which detailed their research questions, data collection, analysis, and findings. The data showed that most students attended the school because they wanted to learn and get an education. Most teachers wanted to teach and to support their students in their learning. Yet the students and teachers both felt that they didn’t care about one other or about the students’ education. This gave rise to an interesting question: if they shared the same goals, why did they think they didn’t care about each other or about teaching and learning? Clearly, there was a problem with communication and connection. Students and faculty both

expressed feelings of being ‘disrespected’. When Spock was finished speaking, she sat in the horseshoe with her research team, and the Assistant Superintendent, who was working on his own doctoral research at the time, stood up to address the group. As he began speaking, the students’ proud expressions began to change. My stomach clenched as I felt the anger starting to swell amidst the group. The administrator began to lecture the students in research basics. He asked them, ‘how many of you know what quantitative means? Do y’all know that word ‘quantitative’?, stressing the last word and sounding it out in an exaggerated way. The students sat in silence. ‘Come on now, does anyone know?’ he asked again. Spock set her jaw and looked away. Kirk pushed his chair back, leaned his elbows on his knees, put his head in his hands, and looked down at the floor. Of course they knew. They had been conducting mixed-methods research for the better part of a year. They had just presented their quantitative data from a school-wide survey they had designed, administered, compiled, and analyzed, and yet he somehow missed it. Afterward, the students and I debriefed, and I tried my best to temper their anger and disappointment. Spock, especially, was furious. ‘How can he just do that?’ she asked. ‘Like we’re a bunch of stupid kids! Like, yo, that wasn’t even normal! Who talks like that?’ Who indeed, I wondered, as I held back anger and disappointment of my own.

While I have published several articles about the YRC, this is the first time I am recounting this particular incident in a publication. Throughout my work with the YRC, we shared with each other not just our ideas about education, research, and social justice, but our feelings about how these things impacted our lives in very real ways. Over time, we developed a deep respect for each other and saw each other as both teachers and learners, and all of us together were inquirers of the world. On more than one occasion, I invited YRC students to be guest lecturers in my doctoral seminars where they taught doctoral students, all in-service teachers and administrators, about critical social theory and ethnographic research. Outside the club, Spock worked with me independently on theorizing about the nature of knowledge production. So imagine our surprise when the Assistant Superintendent failed to

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recognize the depth of their knowledge of research, even as they presented their research to him. The students received this lack of acknowledgment as a form of disrespect, which immediately caused them to shut down. His behavior triggered disappointment, anger, and deep sadness. They thought this man was supposed to be both a research peer and an adult role model, but instead he showed himself to be no different than any other adult who viewed them as deficient. Teaching and learning, whether in a formal classroom setting or in an after-school club like this one, is an emotional process. Teaching critically and dialogically is especially so because of the ‘all-in’ way that teachers and students learn to connect with each other in their quest for social justice through education. Conducting research about this type of relational experience can be equally charged with emotion that in modernist conceptualizations of research would cast doubt on the research quality, positioning the work as ‘unreliable’ and ‘invalid’ because it is ‘biased’.4 In part, this is why I have not written about this incident before. Yet, many years later, the pain is still palpable; this moment lives on, as Freire (1996: 94) has said, in ‘my body’s memory’. In his reflections about his work at SESI, Paulo Freire (1996) repeatedly invokes the significance of relationships, emotions, and embodied knowledge. First and foremost, he recognized that people’s lived experiences mattered and had a significant impact on the day-to-day functioning of educational organizations, which impacted classroom teaching and learning. The sensations of the body when people are living in poverty, when children are attending dilapidated schools, and when workers are treated as insignificant, are important. Furthermore, the emotions evoked by these day-to-day experiences cannot be removed from teaching, learning or working in these organizations. Freire wrote in great detail about the impact other people’s embodied experiences had on him while in SESI. For instance, in Letters to Cristina,

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published more than 30 years after he worked at SESI, he wrote, ‘If I were a painter I could easily draw some of those pained faces, whose strong traits reappear in my memory’ (1996: 94). In one specific example of a reform project where emotions proved significant, Freire described the professional development dialogue in which Francisco, a janitor, spoke about his daily experiences with others in the workplace. Freire recounts Francisco’s story about how he was treated as insignificant by others, which evoked emotions that forced his co-workers to come face-to-face with their own acts of elitism and dehumanization. He writes: One could sense in the silence, in the fidgeting of bodies on chairs, the discomfort that Francisco’s comments had caused those who had never said good morning to him or thanked him for his services. (1996: 97)

For Freire, incidents like these, ones that ‘moved’ him, were important to recollect because they indicated a shift in knowledge and a direction for transforming practice. And while he is careful to express that he tried not to let emotion cloud his recollection of the details of events, he does not downplay the role that the affective dimension has on engaging in inquiry for transformative praxis. Indeed, attending to emotions was central to developing strong relationships through which learning and change could take place. Given the interconnected relationship between teaching–learning–inquiry in the critical pedagogy classroom, teachers and learners become invested in each other and their collective learning and well-being. In traditional conceptualizations of research, there is no room for the intense affective knowledge that emerges from working closely with students in a teaching–learning–research relationship. Yet teacher-researchers will know that some of the most profound moments of learning and insights for research occur in these emotional spaces. Before even discussing what happened in the incident with the Assistant Superintendent, I had a

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pretty good idea of what the students were feeling and why. This is because we had come to know each other pretty well, and I understood their feelings about how they were often treated as if they were stupid by adults in schools. I shared their sadness and disappointment, which further solidified my commitment to them long after they had graduated from their school. To this day, I am still in contact with some of them, and the emotional connection we shared re-emerges when I see updates about their accomplishments as adults. This type of embodied knowledge is traditionally seen as detrimental to using research to identify ‘truth’ about the students’ experiences in school. But in critical pedagogy as research, while accurate reporting of what happened is important, identifying ‘truth’ is almost beside the point. What happened and how we felt in that moment and throughout the research and beyond is our truth, and it necessarily has impacted us from thereon. These moments were often catalytic, informing what we did next and why, and because memories reside in and re-emerge from the body in our emotions, they have had a lasting impact in our lives outside of the school and beyond the timeline of this particular project.

DISRUPTING TEACHING– RESEARCHING BOUNDARIES: CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AS RESEARCH METHODOLOGY Part of me felt like an imposter. I knew what ‘real’ research was supposed to look like. I preached about it in my doctoral courses and held my students to textbook descriptions of ‘research quality’. But that was definitely not what I was doing in my own research. As I went to the high school to work with my ‘participants’ after school, I knew when I got there that in my own practice as a teacher-researcher, these research quality criteria would quickly dissolve. I could not step outside what it meant for me to enter into this space. I could not ‘bracket’ my own history and deflect the impact it would have on how I would see and

know the young people I worked with and their school. First and foremost, I was in a teaching– learning relationship with students who lived very different lives from what I had lived as a young person. Like them, I grew up in an urban area, but as a White middle-class female living in a relatively affluent area of the city, I didn’t experience the emotional and physical hardships they dealt with daily. I could not know what it meant to have brown skin in a historically racist and deeply segregated city. I could not know what it meant to live in poverty and work a part-time job after school in order to pay my family’s electric bill. I could not know what it felt like to be silenced because my first language was devalued in a classroom. I could not know what it felt like to pretend I was stupid in order to get a passing grade in a class that was ‘dumbed down’ and beneath my academic capabilities. All this, as I traveled through a decrepit school building with metal detectors at the front door, non-working bathrooms, broken windows, and an ancient heating system that often broke down in the cold and damp New England winters. Because I could never know these embodied experiences, I needed to better come to know how my students experienced these things. And they needed to know me too, as a person, a teacher, a researcher, and as someone they could trust to not reproduce these very same experiences they had been subjected to throughout their histories in school. This relational knowledge was secondary to my research objectives as described in my application to my university’s Institutional Review Board, but as a critical teacher-researcher, they needed to be my foremost priority.

There is a significant emotional burden that comes along with prioritizing practitioners’ natural ways of engaging as inquirers in the world because ‘traditional’ research genres disregard this type of inquiry as ‘not research’ or ‘not scholarly’ enough. Traditional research is supposed to be disinterested and tidy. Data collection is supposed to be systematic and orderly. But any teacher knows that learning environments are unpredictable; moreover, not everything that is worth knowing about the classroom is located within the walls of the classroom and not everything worth knowing about learning is located in students’ brains. Teachers’ and students’ lives outside the classroom cannot be separated from the learning that happens inside the classroom

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and what happens inside the classroom necessarily impacts our lives outside. As I worked with the young people in the example above, my instincts as a teacher often led me to set aside the detailed research plan I had crafted for the Institutional Review Board and to instead allow us space for dialogue and learning even though I knew this was not what I ought to be doing as a researcher. My needs as a researcher could not usurp the needs of the collective because if they did, I would be reproducing oppressive circumstances in these young people’s lives. What’s more, if I shoehorned a detailed research plan into our learning environment, I would force an artificial distance between myself and my students. If collective learning was our goal, I couldn’t allow my personal research goals to stand in the way. Even upon our first meeting, I could tell this would be a mistake that would ultimately cost all of us an opportunity to engage in democratic learning together. I could not be an effective researcher of this learning environment if I was an ineffective participant in the teaching and learning relationship. As I reflect upon Paulo Freire’s work at SESI and his description of his philosophy of critical pedagogy in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 2007), I cannot help but wonder how much is missed by thinking about critical pedagogy in an abstract, philosophical way and thinking about research methods as external to the process of teaching and learning. Pedagogy of the Oppressed is undoubtedly inspiring. It is a text I go back to over and over, and each time I see something new and I learn more from it. It helps me to think about and then rethink what I presume to be true about teaching and learning for social justice. Yet if we think about Pedagogy of the Oppressed in the context of Paulo Freire’s biography, we cannot ignore the fact that this was written out of context. This is significant because in 1964, nearly 20 years after his foundational time at SESI, Freire was imprisoned and forced into exile. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, written while

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Freire was in Chile, is an abstraction of the philosophy embedded in his practice when he was in Brazil. It necessarily needs to be recontextualized by readers in order to put his ideas into practice. Likewise, any methods text that teacher-researchers read are also decontextualized; they are manuals in which researchers say ‘why’ and ‘how’ to use particular research approaches, and they must be recontextualized as teacher-researchers attempt to conduct their own research. In this case, both critical pedagogy and research methods are assumed to be processes that start from the outside-in rather than the inside-out, which runs counter to Freire’s philosophy: critical pedagogy always starts with the learner as a knowing subject who reads the word and the world. The teacher-researcher becomes ‘thingified’ (i.e., dehumanized) (Macedo, 1994) when research methods are construed as ‘tools’ that are imparted upon them from a text. This is parallel to what Freire called the ‘banking method’ of learning (Freire, 2007). Yet, when my doctoral students sit in front of me in my philosophy of research class, most assume that research is something that happens before, after, in addition to, and outside of daily practice. Even research genres that are by nature more organic, for instance narrative genres like autoethnography or portraiture or participatory methods, still seem to absorb the modernist logics of ‘scientific research’ once they are positioned within genres and subgenres and classified as particular research methods. For example, as I ask my students to develop systematic research plans, I have already asked them to remove the act of research from what they do on a daily basis as educators. Their research methods might not be fundamentally different from activities they perform in their daily practice, but they are extracted from their context, reorganized, and systematized into operationalizable data collection and analysis techniques. Through this process of distillation, much of the power of organic inquiry practices gets lost, and much of the knowledge that is generated through the relational processes of teaching

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and learning or engaging in dialogue with others goes unaccounted for or is cast aside as ‘biased’ or tangential. What’s more, certain activities that are designed to ensure that students know how to conduct ‘high-quality’ research are built into the academic culture and have high stakes for doctoral students. Doctoral benchmarks, dissertation proposals, and the like can prove to be impediments for students whose research desires are not easily abstracted from their professional identities and day-to-day classroom practices. This is because teacher-researchers are asked to look at their very personal work from the outsidein and in fractured ways that are fundamentally oppositional to their ways of knowing and being as teachers. This can easily result in research plans that are inauthentic and artificial because they are divorced from their values as teachers. As I consider the relationship between methods imparted from the outside in and what Freire called ‘banking education’ (i.e., when teachers deposit outside knowledge into learners’ brains), a number of questions arise that could prove useful for generating more holistic scholar-practitioner identities and practices: • How might research be more authentic and meaningful if teacher-researchers were encouraged to think about critical pedagogy as research? • What would happen if instead of looking outside their classrooms for methods, teachers looked inside? • What are the practices that teachers use to make sense of their worlds and how might we leverage them to afford new knowledge about teaching and learning?

By asking these questions, I don’t mean to imply there is nothing that teachers can learn from methods texts, just as Freire’s conceptualization of dialogic learning did not imply that students had nothing to learn from their teachers. Throughout Freire’s life leading up to Pedagogy of the Oppressed, his practice and inquiries were so closely intertwined that they led him to writing this famous book

which was, essentially, the ‘findings’ of decades of teaching and learning. Perhaps attending to these questions would allow teacher-researchers and doctoral advisers like me to embrace the messiness of practitioner research and the impossibility of disentangling research and practice, especially for the practitioner-researcher who is striving toward developing a critical praxis. Perhaps this messiness is not a problem but an indication that the work is deeply embedded in teaching and learning, and is therefore having a direct impact on the lives of all those involved in the pedagogical-research project. This more organic conceptualization of critical pedagogy as research methodology is immersed in pedagogy as pedagogy is immersed in research, affording a holistic teacher–learner– researcher identity in the classroom.

Notes 1  There are some notable exceptions of authors who have written about research as or for praxis, including Lather (1986), Kemmis (2010), Kincheloe et  al. (2011) and Kress (2011) (among others). However, the discussions of critical pedagogy as a form of research in its own right have not yet been articulated to date. Rather, texts tend to deal with critical research and critical pedagogy as separate activities that at times intersect or work in tandem. 2  In this chapter, I did not draw distinctions between quantitative or qualitative research. While typically reductionist tendencies in research are associated with quantitative research, it would be false to say that qualitative methods are less problematic for critical pedagogy researchers than quantitative methods. The position I am taking here is less about the particular methods a researcher chooses and more about the purpose that drives that person’s choices. Qualitative and quantitative methods are both useful for engaging in critical pedagogy as research because the world is not easily divided into qualitative and quantitative phenomena. Likewise, both kinds of methods can be used for extractivist purposes that artificially divorce research from practice and data from world. 3  While there were several moments in Freire’s life that may have yielded robust points of analysis for this chapter, I selected his time at SESI for two

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primary reasons. First, Freire himself identifies SESI as especially significant for the development of his philosophy articulated in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire’s work at SESI was a catalyst for everything that he developed thereafter. Second, he discusses his work at SESI at length in numerous writings spanning nearly 30 years after he was exiled from Brazil, which indicates the significance of this time for his thinking in 1964 and beyond. The extent to which he discusses this period in his life, above any other, also provides extensive data from which to generate claims about the role of research in Freire’s work. 4  The tensions that arise from a relational ontology in research have long been taken up by feminist researchers (see for example Fonow and Cook, 1991, among others). In this chapter, I choose to focus on critical pedagogy as a philosophy and potential research methodology in its own right because it allows for a theoretical dexterity that feminism doesn’t. Critical pedagogy starts from the student’s, teacher’s and/or researcher’s worldview, which leaves room for innumerable identities which may or may not reflect a feminist worldview. The points of entry into unpacking and dismantling oppression therefore may look different and may or may not engage with gender as a primary lens. While there are points of overlap and resonance with feminist research methodologies, critical pedagogy as research could start with gender as a focal point, but this may not always be the case.

REFERENCES Bourdieu, P. (1990). The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Fonow, M. M. & Cook, J. A., eds. (1991). Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholarship as Lived Research. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Freire, P. (1992). Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Freire, P. (1996). Letters to Cristina: Reflections on My Life and Work. New York, NY: Routledge. Freire, P. (2007). Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary Ed. New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Kemmis, S. (2010). Research for praxis: knowing doing. Pedagogy, Education and Praxis, 18(1): 9–27. Kincheloe, J. L. (2003). Teachers as Researchers: Qualitative Inquiry as a Path to Empowerment, 2nd Ed. New York, NY: Routledge. Kincheloe, J. L., McLaren, P., Steinberg, S., & Monzó, L. D. (2011). Critical pedagogy and qualitative research: Advancing the Bricolage. In N. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln, eds. The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, 5th Ed., pp. 235–260. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kress, T. M. (2011). Critical Praxis Research: Breathing New Life into Research Methods for Teachers. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Lather, P. (1986). Research as praxis. Harvard Educational Review, 56(3): 257–278. Macedo, D. (1994). Literacies of Power: What Americans Are Not Allowed to Know. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. MacLeod, J. (2009). Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low Income Neighborhood, 3rd Ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

61 Poverty and Equality in Early Childhood Education Concepción Sánchez-Blanco

INTRODUCTION In Spain, as in the rest of Europe and the world, families fall victim to the injustices of a global capitalist system that is founded on social Darwinism. The financial problems experienced by families as a result of structural unemployment and/or unstable employment undermine their well-being and their ability to meet their most basic needs. Often, the neoliberal policies supposedly designed to alleviate recessionary suffering have divided the poor and set communities against each other in the scramble for ever more limited financial supports. In public education, underprivileged children from different social groups find themselves at greater risk of conflict owing to competition between families for financial assistance from public and private institutions, thus fuelling economic racism and negative stereotypes among the poor themselves. The effect of this is to mask the fallout of a perverse economic system of unrestrained waste and consumerism, in

which subjects are simultaneously deprived of the means to achieve their materialistic ambitions (Klein, 1999; Kravets & Maclaran, 2018; Sánchez-Blanco, 2018). These tensions are merely a smokescreen, however, used to deflect attention and debate away from the real problem: the threat posed by the increasing socialization of children in the ethos of market consumerism, and the worsening situation of economic inequality and injustice among them (Macrine et al., 2010; Shor, 1996; Steinberg, 2011). When young children bring objects of their own to school, a situation of exclusion and economic discrimination can be the result. It is vital, therefore, that schools pull together in the initial stages of education to guard against the construction of economistic subjectivities from the earliest years of childhood. Early childhood education requires critical pedagogical projects committed to social change and the development of critical thought and practice among young children and teachers (Agnello & Reynolds, 2016). Poor children deserve

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to have their stories heard, as does anybody who has known hardship and deprivation in their lives. Creating a debate in schools around their experience would help to alleviate the intense distress associated with the ‘derivative fear’, vulnerability and insecurity described by Bauman (2006) of a population living under the constant threat of dire poverty or, at a minimum, exclusion from consumption.

THE PROJECT: PARTICIPANTS AND OBJECTIVES The group chosen for this study consisted of a class of 17 boys and girls aged 4–5 years from a public sector primary school in a coastal town in the province of A Coruña, Galicia (Spain). In a community already hit hard by unemployment, the years of the project saw levels rise to an alarming high of over 60%, which affected families and pupils alike. The recession has resulted in a general increase in the number of families requiring state and/or family assistance to survive. In order to protect the anonymity of participants, all names have been changed and no details have been given that might reveal the specific identity of the school involved. One of the concerns voiced by the teacher, ‘Lucía’, was the kind of values that might be filtering into her early childhood education class through her own lessons on poverty, and the extent to which she might inadvertently be contributing to the development of economistic subjectivities among her pupils. Despite concerted efforts to teach her pupils about values of justice and fairness, socioeconomic inequality remains a shaping influence in the children’s lives. This is especially true of pupils from more disadvantaged backgrounds, whose vulnerability has increased as a consequence of cutbacks in education which have reduced schools’ ability to provide for the specific needs of their pupils, and the simultaneous slicing of social welfare assistance for families.

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The research methodology adopted for this project was a combination of case study, ethnography and action research, in which my role was that of radical-critical facilitator (Somekh, 2005; Elliott, 2007; Kemmis, 2008; Schostak & Schostak, 2008; Kincheloe, 2011; Steinberg & Cannella, 2012; Smyth et  al., 2014a). The data were compiled using qualitative research techniques: participative observation; videorecordings of the tasks proposed during everyday activities; informal interviews held with the teacher, pupils and family members; and analysis of programmes, projects and materials (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011). The project frequently found itself face to face with situations of domination and established values, which brought home the prevalence of power dynamics in everyday life and their influence on how our relationships are formed and conducted (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 2005). The objective of the study was to reappraise and challenge radically the situations of discrimination of all kinds witnessed in the classroom; not least among these, the feelings of inferiority, anxiety and insecurity caused to children and families by their economic circumstances (Schostak & Schostak, 2008; SánchezBlanco, 2009b; Schostak, 2012; Parnell & Iorio, 2016). Classroom assemblies were transformed into spaces capable of empowering children to deal with the injustices they face on a daily basis, both at home and at school. The assemblies gave the children the opportunity to change the class rules and create a constitution of sorts of their own that set out the equal rights and duties of all (Yelland, 2005; Brown, 2008; Iorio & Visweswaraiah, 2012; Down, 2016; Sánchez-Blanco, 2016). Strategies like this act as an antidote to the sense of hopelessness around attaining social justice which can become instilled in children from early on (Freire, 2014). The discussions were aimed at encouraging a more liberating dynamic for the teacher and the pupils in her class, and among the families

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and myself as the facilitator of the project (Sánchez-Blanco, 1997, 2015). The teacher’s involvement helped her to achieve a more critical awareness of the values conveyed through her teaching practices, and the extent to which injustice can be imposed involuntarily (Nussbaum, 1997).

SCHOOLING FOR THE POOR OR POOR SCHOOLING? When Caritas Europa published its second monitoring report on the impact of austerity measures on the countries hit hardest by the recession in Europe, Spain had the thirdhighest child poverty rate in Europe, exceeded only by Romania and Greece (Leahy et  al., 2015). The economic solutions to national poverty and inequality should never come in the form of the kind of colonial directives criticized by Bhabha (2013), designed merely to preserve an unequal dual economy that concentrates wealth in the hands of a few and purports to alleviate the problems of the majority even as it excludes them. Analogous forms of segregation are reproduced in schools when well-meaning teachers attempt to tackle pupils’ problems on a case-by-case basis, instead of adopting a more comprehensive school-wide approach to combating and eradicating economic racism. Educational projects of this kind are crucial in today’s globalized world, in which anyone among us could be cast off or out at any time, even disappear without a trace, and never be missed (Bauman, 2008). Educators should realize that they, no less than anybody else, are subject to the same culture of vulnerability and disposability. In times of crisis, when human beings are reduced to the status of mere goods to be bought and sold, the rich not only stay rich but become even richer, buying while prices are low and fomenting the economic fantasy that greater wealth for the wealthy minority is in everybody’s best interests (Stiglitz, 2012).

For many schools, the argument seems to make sense, with private benefactors supplying the deficiencies and failures of the public system. What this fiction actually achieves, however, is to inculcate schools, pupils and families with the values of White, western, neoliberal capitalism, to the exclusion and delegitimization of all others (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 2004). The 21st century has witnessed the emergence of a new patrimonial capitalism and the unabashed amassing of immense personal fortunes under the fiscally permissive eye of the state (Piketty, 2013). As far as fiscal justice goes, the wealthy minority imposes its own rules on the game, using economic threats and/or conscience-salving donations to worthy causes to mollify dissent. According to Sassen (2015), the problem is not money in itself, but the self-reinforcing rationale of finance and profit which has succeeded in penetrating all sectors of the population and colonized minds to view it as a natural guiding principle in their lives. That success is due in no small part to the standardization of education systems worldwide as agents of economic indoctrination. Schools, however, have a duty to resist the imposition of economistic subjectivities and promote in their place the principles of social justice, quality of life and the common good as the foundations of all human activity (Sen, 2009; Acosta, 2013; Felber, 2015). Education should act as a counterweight to market forces, epitomized by consumption and debt, and the stigmatization and marginalization they leave in their wake. Conversely, in their neoliberal zeal, many states actually profit from the situations of need created by market capitalism, commodifying ‘welfare management’ and outsourcing it to private bidders of all descriptions. It seems paradoxical for schools to be presented as just and fair, when the world around them is based on a capitalist socioeconomic system so unjust and unfair as to condemn whole swathes of its own citizens to a life of poverty and exclusion. In societies beset by economic misfortune and the social

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problems created by economic inequality, the kind of equality of opportunity promised by education is often no more than a convenient fiction (Dubet, 2009). Government plans in relation to non-compulsory schooling, as in the case of early childhood education in Spain, are announced with a politically correct veneer of freedom of choice and honest intentions, in an attempt to disguise the neoliberal instrumentalization of education behind a much more palatable discourse of equality (Moss, 2014). The idea that early learning can eradicate social inequality by equipping young children with the same skills and abilities from the outset, and creating a level playing field for all to make of what they may, is a widely accepted fallacy (Sánchez-Blanco, 2008; Gimeno Sacristán, 2008). Much repeated by advocates of skills-based targets and curricula, this unnuanced theory presupposes that differences in learning outcomes between pupils are due to the different skills levels achieved during the early and/or compulsory stages of their education. What it fails to take into account, however, is the enormous, often insuperable disadvantage at which the inequalities born of a child’s sociocultural and/or socio-economic background can place them. Educators on the ground need to conceptualize and understand poverty in all its complexity, and look beyond the simplistic conclusions offered by education authorities and schools which see education as both the cause of and the solution to the problem. ‘Lucía’, for example, was firmly opposed to the assumption expressed by many of her colleagues that failure by pupils to achieve learning outcomes at primary level was directly linked to underperformance at the early learning stage. In order for schools to offer children genuine equality of opportunity, we must first reconsider what equality actually means and ask whether teachers are doing enough to ensure that all pupils are treated in a fair and equal manner (Dubet, 2009; Smyth et al., 2014b). Equal treatment and opportunity means recognizing the diversity of the school

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population, with children from sociocultural and minority backgrounds of all kinds, and families living on limited resources and/or in situations of poverty. It requires a constant commitment to establishing a hybrid culture of debate and exchange based on equality and the rejection of prejudice in all its forms, in which all voices are listened to with equal patience, attention and respect. Genuine equality of opportunity comes from creating liberating processes to deconstruct what Lipovetsky & Serroy (2010) term the ‘cultureworld’: the universalized techno-capitalist culture that has taken hold of our social lives, lifestyles and almost every other aspect of our existence. It is up to schools and other social institutions to stem this consumerist tide, and protect society and themselves from commercial domination and the culture of economic racism it brings with it. The world we live in is a rich tapestry of people and voices of all kinds, not the monochrome uniformity imagined by transnational corporations (Davis, 2007). The special way in which young children look at the world and the possibilities it contains is a constant reminder to us of the value and importance of that diversity.

A TEACHER’S DILEMMAS: Haves and Have-nots at School As a consequence of the recession in Spain, a growing number of schools have found themselves having to deal with situations of poverty and economic disadvantage among their pupils, and coordinate with overstretched, under-resourced social services in an effort to alleviate the strain on families and children. In the school visited for this study, some families refused even to acknowledge the dire financial situation in which they found themselves owing to the stigma attached to such an admission. While some children were warned to keep quiet at school about what was happening at home, other

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families tried to protect their children from the reality of their circumstances by pretending there was nothing to worry about (Sánchez-Blanco, 2000, 2018). Some children were actually incapable of sitting still during the showing and sharing assemblies, so great was the stress of not talking about the personal information they had been warned, on pain of punishment, to keep to themselves. One child went so far as to put his fist into his mouth to keep in the secrets he was not allowed to share. One way of giving these children back their voices was to provide them with alternative forms of expression with which to explain their experience, such as drawing or physical movement, and inviting them, where possible, to share with the assembly in that way. The same sensitivity was required of the families themselves, who were made aware of the duty and need to respect the confidentiality of the stories brought home from school by their children (Smyth et al., 2010). From a very young age, children affected by this kind of economic turmoil are at risk not only of material deprivation, but also of a vast spectrum of negative feelings and emotions which can lead to a sense of inferiority and, more dangerously, to the idea that their rights are somehow innately more limited than those of their better-off classmates. The teacher encouraged her pupils to reflect upon and discuss different types of experiences, in order to help the children to realize that everybody is entitled to the same rights and responsibilities. She also attempted to get them thinking about positive discrimination and to understand why their classmate ‘Saúl’, for example, was allowed to take off his shoes in class while the others were not, because the shoes he gets from the clothes bank often do not fit him properly. Being poor and feeling poor do not always go hand in hand in a social setting like a school. Sen (2009) defines poverty as the inability to pursue reasonable life goals, the antidote to which is to enable people to take back control over their own lives. Real progress towards a

fair and inclusive education system can only come about by working with children from a very young age to find out how they feel about and are affected by economic deprivation, disadvantage and marginalization, and examining critically the educational policies and strategies adopted in response. Through her participation in the project, ‘Lucía’ found herself increasingly conscious of the classist values and prejudices inherent in certain aspects of the curriculum and the elitist behaviours they seem to reinforce: from the admiring descriptions of the rich and powerful pharaohs, priests, kings and queens of Ancient Egypt as part of a class history project, to story time tales of princes and princesses, or poor people and their quests for riches and a happier ever after. In one memorable spiral of reflection, she spoke of the way in which adults at children’s birthday parties are treated as servants of the birthday king or queen, a status underlined by the crown worn by His or Her Majesty. It was significant as well to note the hierarchical relationship with peers, according to which the child with the birthday makes all the rules while the friends do as they are told, since he or she is monarch for the day. Children should be exposed to more stories and biographies of everyday lives; ordinary people from the past and present who overcame poverty and disadvantage to make a difference for themselves and others. Frequently these stories connect closely with pupils, particularly when they tell of relatives who sought to escape from poverty by emigrating, for example, and all the hardship they experienced; real-life heroes and heroines who stood up to prejudice and exclusion and refused to recognize themselves in labels like ‘lazy’, ‘stupid’ or ‘incapable of learning’ (Nieto, 2015). Protecting children from poverty as a right of childhood means protecting their parents and families as well, by creating fair and decent working conditions that allow them the time and resources to support their children’s different care and education needs. There is a blithe hypocrisy in measures that

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claim to tackle child poverty while turning a blind eye to the family poverty from which it stems. Supplying children’s basic needs while ignoring the need to stimulate an economic system capable of providing families with fair employment opportunities merely reinforces the neocolonialist relationships of domination and dependence that determine how we live as a society. Families should stand up for the right to give their children a proper upbringing, and schools should stand shoulder to shoulder with them, encouraging and supporting their claims. ‘Lucía’ has worked tirelessly in this regard to establish a collaborative network with parents to combat injustice at the school and outside of it, encouraging a culture of cooperation through critical engagement with school practices and decision-making (Smyth et  al., 2010). Initiatives such as ‘Lucía’s’ are a vital way of breaking down walls of scepticism and suspicion, so that families can begin to see the school as a space for them and their children to act and speak freely, and where minority and low-income communities are empowered (Munn & Lloyd, 2005; Kincheloe, 2008). Efforts to build trust and inclusion are often frustrated, however, by a spirit of unbridled capitalism within public sector schools. In the case of school trips costing more than many families can afford to pay, as witnessed by ‘Lucía’, the solutions offered by her school, however well-intentioned, only added to the social injustice. In some instances, families or teachers donated the money for children who could not afford to go, or a system of instalment payments was agreed with the parents, with the teacher footing the immediate cost; as a final option, funding was sought from an NGO to cover the cost outright. The events recounted by the teacher led to a discussion around whether the payment alternatives offered to parents were actually legitimating a de facto demand on families to live beyond their means. Questions were likewise raised as to the educational value of such trips in the first place. ‘Paloma’s’ father’s feelings on the subject were clear: he had no

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desire to spend money on sending his daughter to a wildlife park because, in his view, it created a false sense of what families like theirs could afford. He was determined that his daughter should be able not only to understand that fact, but also to talk about their situation and tell the difference between fair and unfair. Besides, he added, there was nothing she could see at the park that she could not see at home on the television. The objections raised by this father merely highlighted the power schools have over their pupils, creating new needs and wants that ultimately have less to do with the children’s growth and development than with the grip and influence of capitalism on society and all its institutions. Certainly, some of the activities promoted by schools seem far more geared towards transforming children into insatiable wanters and the individualistic, classist customer base of a powerful and lucrative new commercial sector, both here in Spain and across the rest of the world (McLaren, 1995; Schor, 2005). Extreme examples of this include outings to water parks or fashionable farm schools (with macrobiotic lunch included), ski trips (with full kit included), expensive horse-riding courses, and zoo visits with special add-ons, such as spending a night with the sharks or sitting in on a dolphin-training session. What these extracurricular activities reveal is the same ‘fear of missing out’ that characterizes and fuels the phenomenon of tourism as a form of secular pilgrimage (Agamben, 2005). Public education should be focused on teaching children about social justice, not escapism or superficial entertainments. There is a vast range of alternatives for schools to choose from in this regard, including employment agencies, community kitchens, real working farms and allotments, old people’s homes, special education centres, factory assembly lines, homeless shelters and food banks, as well as other spaces in which the children can encounter people who have been ignored, discriminated against and pushed to the margins by neoliberal society.

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Market Colonialism The discourse of children’s rights and the advocacy of supposedly emancipatory practices can, involuntarily, end up being instrumentalized as a way of ‘civilizing’ the economic south with northern values (Grosfoguel, 2011; de Sousa Santos, 2014), or inculcating poorer people with the affluent First World ideology of hyperconsumerism and waste. In this way, the discourse of child rights becomes a means of destroying the very thing it purports to defend. Constant vigilance is needed to guard against imperialist ideologies that seek to colonize opinion and destroy the unique characteristics and ways of seeing needed to stand up to domination and exclusion. The right to play is invoked to justify the shipment of toys and games from White, western, welfare state societies to distant corners of the planet, or to disadvantaged communities closer to home, such as the school involved in this study. These ostensibly humanitarian campaigns receive massive media coverage and generally coincide with festive periods such as Christmas. The Christmas campaign in particular, however, nourishes the perverse myth that the number of toys children get (from Santa or the Kings in this instance) is based on how well they have behaved. The dangerous reverse of this, the idea that bad children get fewer presents, is most likely to affect children from poorer families, magnifying even further the economic racism against them. The toys themselves may also be problematic, involving production processes that contribute to global warming or the exploitation of workers, including children (SánchezBlanco, 2009a, 2013a). Alternatively (or additionally), they can stifle childhood creativity and the traditional, local forms of play that provide children with a link to their past. It is this knowledge and sense of the lives and legacy of past generations, the history of their community and its place in the larger scheme of history, that enables children to discuss, analyse, deconstruct and resignify

the present based on their own experience, in order to continue the narrative of an age-long quest for social justice. The globalization of exchange should never represent a threat to cultural diversity, which, as Mattelart (2005) argues, should be treated as ‘world heritage of humanity’ and as vital to sustaining human life as biodiversity. There is an urgent need to examine how identities are manipulated and moulded from earliest infancy by the economistic logic of capitalism. Child-culture companies and corporations have forged a multimillion-euro industry by sowing the seeds of compulsive mental and physical need for consumer goods of all kinds among even very young children (Lipovetsky and Serroy, 2010; Steinberg, 2011). Sophisticated marketing techniques are used to shape infant consumer behaviour and expectations, in relation not only to specific products but also to the larger brand, in an attempt to lock in and grow brand awareness and loyalty from birth (Klein, 1999; Sánchez-Blanco, 2013b, 2015). Children begin to take their lead from adults from very early on. Barber (2007) dates to the 1990s the emergence of what he terms an ‘infantilist ethos’, which has acted as the catalyst for a new political identity in which consumer brands represent a more powerful way of defining who we are than race, religion or other more established markers of identity. Even very young children nowadays habitually nag their parents and other adults to buy them the latest must-have object to make them feel like they fit in and are part of a select group, particularly on special occasions such as birthdays and Christmas, or at critical times in the parents’ lives. One pupil named ‘Dani’ told me that his mother was going to buy him three Hot Wheels cars when he learnt how to ride a bicycle. When I asked him if he would still be learning how to cycle if he was not getting the toys, he replied that he would, and added that his mum had said that she would buy them for him because the Kings had not brought them at Christmas. I then proposed the following scenario to him:

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‘The thing is, you don’t actually need the Hot Wheels cars to learn how to cycle, so imagine that your mum only has enough money for one thing: if she buys the Hot Wheels, she won’t be able to afford food for breakfast. Which would you choose: breakfast or Hot Wheels?’ ‘Hot Wheels,’ came the answer, without a moment’s hesitation. Little Pati, by contrast, shocked by ‘Dani’s’ impractical response, protested: ‘But you can’t eat a Hot Wheels!’ Even basic necessities such as food can be affected by this commercialist scheme of values. During my time at the school, I have witnessed a child crying inconsolably because he had never been given an Actimel (yoghurt drink) in his lunchbox, and secretly drinking the dregs left by his classmates or rescuing bottles from the recycling. Others would sweep up the crumbs from fancy branded biscuits brought by other children, or squash their own banana and pretend it had got spoiled by accident, in order to get a biscuit from their classmate. Schools must ensure that these kinds of values and behaviours are intercepted early and eradicated at source, starting with teaching practices that create an association between particular products and brands and a sense of belonging within the school. Not least among these are the lists of textbooks and school supplies imposed on families each year, and the unsparing brand culture these prescriptions can provoke. One area in which this brand-based system of exclusion and inclusion is very apparent is cosplay. Brands have infiltrated cosplay trends across all age groups, leading to the creation of urban tribes and elitist children’s clubs (Peppler, 2017) that many dream of but only the privileged few actually become part of. Cosplay, for the most part, magnifies existing biases, prejudices and inequalities, particularly in relation to class and gender (Teasley, 2016). It also robs children of part of their childhood, denying them the chance to experience the full wonder of growing up by forcing milestones upon them before time. The precociousness and even impertinence of the dualistic, classist, money-driven, market-designed stereotypes of masculinity

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and femininity promoted by cosplay are a case in point: little girls dressed as Barbies, Hello Kitties and Lolitas; little boys plucked from Mario Brothers, Marvel and Pokémon; Hannah Montana lookalikes and her oldersister incarnations by Calvin Klein and Benetton. The unifying principle in all cases is a cultish pursuit of the stereotypically perfect body, decked out in the latest fashion, as the sine qua non of social status and recognition (Dorsey Wanless, 2001). The dichotomous representation of gender in cosplay is a far cry from radical, disruptive analyses of the concept and associated queer theory research into interpersonal relationships and teaching practices in early educational spaces (Butler, 2004; Gowlett & Rasmussen, 2014). Children in assemblies were seen showing off their toys, brand-name shoes and media tie-in biscuits, or opening their smocks to reveal the latest must-have superhero t-shirt underneath. The fashionably torn jeans sported by some of the pupils mimic cruelly the worn-out clothes of poorer classmates. Some of the children with few or no toys of their own seized upon the toys and materials provided by the school and tried to hold onto them or hide them in their clothes. The children’s fascination with these objects was so great that it gave rise to tensions in activities like the assembly, where the pupils found it incredibly hard to focus on anything other than their desire to play with the toys. Serious attention should be devoted by schools to teaching children about the use and exchange of objects, as well as the use of physical force to obtain them (Sánchez-Blanco, 1997, 2000). Learnt behaviours, such as the buying and selling of favours and privileges, bartering of items for profit, use of one’s own possessions to provoke and thwart the desires of one’s peers, or the privatization of communal objects, simulate and habituate children to marketplace cultural values from early on. To push against that influence, schools should work to imbue pupils with the importance of being rather than having: responsibility, not waste; inclusion, not exclusion; reflection, not speculation.

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Advertising targets children using false promises, unrealistic comparisons and myriad other forms of manipulation. Teachers like ‘Lucía’ should analyse how advertising affects children’s perceptions and judgements, and equip them with the criticalthinking skills they need to deal with media messages (Schor, 2005; Buckingham, 2011). The best way to help pupils like ‘Saúl’, ‘Miguel’, ‘Braulio’ and ‘Luis’ to overcome the anxiety caused by not having toys at home or fashionable snacks in their lunchboxes is to analyse the way these products are advertised and marketed, along with the packaging, taste, smell and ingredients, to expose and defuse their many smoke-andmirror lies and seductions. Through her contact with the children, the teacher realized that her own affluent First World attitude to the waste and rubbish from her classroom was very different from those of her pupils. Where she saw litter, the ­children – often led by the poorest among them – saw the makings of play, fun and learning. ‘Saúl’, for example, rescued some newspaper pages from the recycling bin and asked for permission to take them home; his classmates soon followed suit. Likewise, the Egyptian mummy they had created out of toilet paper and newspaper provided by the families was in the process of being dismantled and thrown away until a group of pupils (mainly from poorer families) pointed out that much of the toilet paper could be reused in class, while the scraps of newspaper contained interesting stories for the children to share and discuss in class. ‘Lucía’ took these insights and observations further. The children the year before had built a cabin out of milk cartons which by this time had started to fall apart; she proposed that the current class use the same milk cartons to create something new. She extended her repurposing project to include lollipop sticks, bottle tops, corks and used paper, put the children into teams, and set them the task of creating an object to solve some real-life problem. The effect was to foreground and

strengthen the traditionally working-class values of thrift and economy. Experiences that teach children the value of food and taking care of school equipment, materials and other items should be part of their everyday education. Schools should promote an ethics of consumption that highlights and celebrates the respect, resourcefulness and responsibility typically found in lower-income households, and teachers should make a conscious effort to nurture and sustain these counter-values in the face of the growing commercialization of everyday life. Neither should schools overlook children’s inborn ability to attach emotional value to objects irrespective of their material worth. It is the emotional connection, not the objects’ newness or novelty value, that they prize the most. Their example is in stark contrast to that of market society, which feeds and encourages the faddishness and false desires that are the lifeblood of extreme consumerism. The possibility of a more equitable ethics of consumption was illustrated well by the incident of a toy squirrel with a broken leg. One day it occurred to one of the more underprivileged children to ask if he could take the toy home. With flawless marketplace logic, he imagined that none of his better-off classmates would mind if he took something that was broken and hence worthless. How wrong he was! As soon as he expressed his desire to take the toy home, a chorus of protest arose requesting to do the same. All of a sudden, against all commercial odds, this broken, battered old toy had become the focus of all of the children’s desires, whether because they had developed an attachment to the toy without the teacher’s realizing it, or because the desires of one child had ‘inflated’ its perceived value among the others. The teacher decided to focus on the first hypothesis and encouraged the children to find out more about the toy and what it might have meant to different people during its lifetime. When they discovered that the original owner was the older brother of one of their classmates, they asked him to tell them about his memories

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of the toy and playing with it. Finally, the children agreed to take it in turns to take the squirrel home with them, so that everybody got their wish. This ability in children to invest objects with meaning based on their emotional associations, not because of how new, expensive or fashionable they may be, is a valuable quality that should be cherished and protected against the waste and excesses of consumer culture (Kravets & Maclaran, 2018). A different incident involving a packet of biscuits was similarly instructive. ‘Lucía’ was sharing out the biscuits in strictly mathematical proportion to the number of children. However, by conceptualizing the biscuits in purely arithmetical terms, she had inadvertently obstructed a perfect opportunity for critical reflection on the idea of equality. It was a little girl called ‘Carmen’ who drew her attention to the omission, questioning the teacher’s apportioning system with the emancipating argument that the children who had not had any breakfast and were therefore hungrier than the others should surely be entitled to receive a bigger share. ‘Carmen’s’ intervention made ‘Lucía’ aware of how the circumstances of her own life as someone with a stable, well-paid job could cause her to overlook the different needs and experience of others (Bénard & Tilley-Lubbs, 2016).

CONCLUSION The construction of the problem of poverty in schools as one of child behaviour which may be diagnosed and treated on a case-by-case basis represents a dangerously simplistic and short-sighted pathologization of a much more complex injustice (Simpson et  al., 2015). According to the reductionist view shared by many educators, the problem comes down to one of troubled home life and bad behaviour, which may be solved by a series of behaviour modification techniques. Low-income families are perceived as poor in spirit as well as

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possibilities: reluctant to work and incapable of looking for a job and/or managing their own finances; while their children are portrayed as spoilt, neglected and undisciplined. Our teacher took a stand against the prejudices and stereotypes she observed among staff and management at the school, and was harshly criticized for doing so. She spoke out, in particular, against the unfair and hypocritical targeting of poorer mothers. Her colleagues’ criticism of these women’s spending on cigarettes, for example, ignored not only the causal and/or aggravating relationship between addiction and socio-­ economic status, but also the fact that many of the teachers themselves were guilty of the same poor lifestyle habits and spending choices. Simplistic arguments such as those contended by ‘Lucía’s’ colleagues are grist to the self-justifying mill of neoliberalism. Our teacher, by contrast, understood that poverty and the inability of families to provide for their most basic needs is a much more complex problem. The challenge for schools is to recognize this reality and act accordingly: to generate experiences that help children to throw off the sense of impotence and passivity that poverty brings, and empower and inspire them to take their destiny in their own hands (Apple, 2013). Through her own work with the pupils and their families, the teacher succeeded in transforming her classroom into a space for justice which, in turn, helped parents to see the school as an ally in their common struggle to create a better, fairer world. Schools must work to promote an image of the victims of exclusion as active citizens, fighting to make the world a fairer place, subvert privilege and claim their rights (Wise and Case, 2013). Schools must become sites of civil resistance, transgression and transformation (Kirylo, 2013), allowing people in situations of disadvantage to take social justice into their own hands and eradicate once and for all the image of the poor as passive, faint-hearted, lazy, conformist or undeserving.

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62 Critical Tourism Pedagogy: A Response to Oppressive Practices Sandro Carnicelli and Karla Boluk

INTRODUCTION In the last 30 years many fields have appropriated the concept of critical pedagogy. Disciplines such as health (Martinson and Elia 2018), criminal law (Menis, 2016), music education (Hess, 2017), and sport (FernándezBalboa, 2015) are among study areas that have drawn on critical pedagogy as a way to equip students with the ability to view the world with a critical lens. Critical pedagogy is ‘a means by which the oppressed may begin to reflect more deeply upon their socio-economic circumstances and take action to improve the status quo’ (Johnson and Morris, 2010: 77). Furthermore, critical pedagogy demands that knowledge claims, specifically ideologies and discourses, are evaluated for their truth content, and simultaneously recognized ‘as part of systems of belief and action that have aggregate effects within the power structures of society’ (Huckle, 2017: 72). Tourism studies only recently started to emphasize the importance of critical

pedagogy (e.g., Belhassen and Caton, 2011; Boluk and Carnicelli, 2019; Carnicelli and Boluk, 2017; Fullagar and Wilson, 2012; Grimwood et  al., 2015; Higgins-Desbiolles and Powys-Whyte, 2013; Mair and Sumner, 2017). Such research has encouraged a deeper discussion about the introduction of critical pedagogy in tourism education in order to foster a critical appreciation of tourism systems. This chapter will begin by presenting a discussion on the practice of tourism reflecting oppressive tendencies, specifically towards minority and marginalized groups. In this way, we will draw attention to tourism as a tool representing and reinforcing power relationships and sovereignty of one social group over another, as well as a system compliant with neo-colonial and neoliberal practices contributing to injustice. The reflections in this chapter will provide the backdrop for a discussion on a more emancipatory approach to tourism pedagogy, demonstrating that tourism may be used as a tool for education as well as development of

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cultural and social awareness, and embrace an essential part of critical pedagogy praxis. In exploring current discussions regarding critical pedagogy in tourism education, we will highlight how the concept and ideas have been appropriated in the field. Moreover, we signal that the notion of critical pedagogy may be instrumental, and thus needed, in order to propel the changes required in the practice of tourism, which are highly exploitative in nature and unsustainable. Therefore, recognizing tourism as a social force, not just an industry (HigginsDesbiolles, 2006). Finally, this chapter will discuss new approaches to re-thinking tourism as a social force and tourism education as a means to contest privileges, and, ultimately, change behaviours and oppressive attitudes.

THE OPPRESSIVE PRACTICE OF TOURISM An emphasis on the various social, economic, and environmental impacts of tourism has received plentiful attention in the tourism scholarship (e.g., Butler, 1980). A focus specifically on impacts has resulted in the theorization of discourse and language used to describe tourists, their actions, and behaviours, resulting in a tourist/traveller dichotomy, the former representing hedonistic individuals, and the latter representing more conscious individuals, interested in cultures and learning. Research later determined that the dichotomy did not actually exist and they were pretty much the same people behaving the same way (Birkett, 2001), causing resentment among host communities. The prominence of human–environment issues has led to an interest in one’s responsibility leading to sustainability in tourism. Specifically, scholars such as Fennell (2009) argue that considerations will not be successful without reflecting on one’s actions and behaviours and situating such decisions in moral theory. The literature on tourism impacts has also led to a recognition that tourism may be

regarded as an important economic industry and a social phenomenon (United Nations World Tourism Organization [UNWTO], 2018). Tourism is recognized as the thirdlargest export industry in the world following chemicals and fuels (UNWTO, 2018). Given its size, tourism is recognized as a significant transformative force, which may bring about an array of positive and negative impacts. As a social force tourism may promote intercultural exchange, reconciliation, and global understanding (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2006); however, damages to peoples, places, and cultures are a concern of tourism. This section will detail some of the oppressive practices recognized in the tourism industry by drawing on a number of examples; clearly recognizing the need for criticality in tourism pedagogy. Exploitative approaches used by the tourism industry fuelled by mass tourism have generated concerns for local communities. Krippendorf (1991) noted colonialist characteristics of tourism such as robbing local populations of autonomous decisionmaking. In this conflicting environment the local community may resent tourists due to the economic gaps and because of their constant attempt to impose their own behaviours (McIntosh et al., 1995), which may oppress and/or destroy local cultures. Trask’s (1999) work refers to the notion of ‘cultural prostitution’ in drawing reference to the exploitative nature of corporately driven mass tourism in Hawaii. A focus on the economic importance of tourism then has created conditions whereby native peoples can no longer afford to live in Hawaii, and are thus forced to flee the islands seeking more affordable states on the mainland. In this vein, Higgins-Desbiolles (2006) argues that a reconsideration of how we understand tourism is necessary because accepting an ‘industry’ discourse will impact our ability to recognize tourism as a force for contributing to social good. Tourism has been seen as a tool to ‘know’ the world, but also as a strong element in the oppressive strategy of post-colonial approaches (McGehee, 2012). A critical contribution on

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Indigenous tourism research is recognized in Nielsen and Wilson’s (2012) work, which offers a typology of Indigenous peoples’ role in tourism research. Specifically, they highlight that while Indigenous tourism has recently become an academic interest, it is motivated by the priorities of non-Indigenous peoples. The authors identified four types of participation roles of Indigenous peoples in tourism research: invisible, identified, stakeholder, and Indigenous-driven. Such research, while shedding light on a marginalized population, may continue to reinforce post-colonial ends. The notion of invisibility is of particular relevance to Peters and Higgins-Desbiolles’ (2012) work as they utilize an Indigenous critical lens in their research highlighting the absence of Indigenous people as tourists both actually and potentially. The authors recognize the prominent role of Indigenous peoples as a focus for marketing materials rather than occupying roles of engaged tourists and they offer a number of other areas needed for further investigation. Some of the areas that require further research are related to the social motivations (e.g., income and time) and notions of disadvantage in accepting Indigenous peoples as legitimate tourists, investigating the types of travel which may be of interest to Indigenous peoples, factors which inhibit engagement in tourism, and potential ways to overcome barriers (Peters and Higgins-Desbiolles, 2012: 82–3). The authors draw attention to the absent voices recognized in the tourism literature, illustrating that some voices seem to matter more than others. While tourism scholars considered ways of doing tourism differently, a number of responsible approaches have been introduced, such as ecotourism, sustainable tourism, and pro-poor tourism. However, critical analysis of these various types of tourism offerings determined several shortcomings. Hutnyk (1996), for example, illustrated how backpacker travellers constructed themselves as better travellers given their decisions

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to participate in charity work in Calcutta. Similarly, moral justifications exist in the realm of slum tourism; however, important questions are overlooked regarding who benefits and, specifically, the impressions of local peoples (Frenzel et al., 2015). McGehee’s research exploring proposition modelling for volunteer tourism put forth that ‘the signs/signifiers of volunteer tourism, including images, language, and discourse of volunteer tourism organizations, reflect the dominant hegemony, which in turn (re) produces the social construction and perpetuation of volunteer tourism’ (2012: 97). Those who promote volunteer tourism often propose cross-cultural understanding (Raymond and Hall, 2008), as well as opportunities to learn about the complex socio-cultural and political issues at the heart of inequalities in host communities, aligned with critical theory. However, volunteer tourism exists in a commodified environment, and thus prioritizes serving the needs of paying tourists with an economic advantage and thus perpetuates inequality (McGehee and Andereck, 2008), similarly recognized in the slum tourism literature. McGehee (2012) argues that volunteer tourism operator websites for example, influence social constructions regarding authority, the prioritization of voices, othering, and dependency perpetuating the status quo. Slum tourism and volunteer tourism contexts are constructed as places of poverty and in need of help. This is problematic, and requires attention, concerning post-colonial discourse. According to Tribe (2008), many of the tourism industry’s oppressive practices are connected to the ideology of managerialism focusing mainly on the profitability of businesses. An example used in Tribe’s (2008) work is the case of Uluru in Australia, which was chosen to demonstrate a scenario where visitor satisfaction could be understood and managed and at the same time ignoring discussions regarding place appropriation, cultural construction, power, and ideological conflicts embedded in tourism practice.

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In this sense Tribe (2008) calls for a more critical approach to tourism practice in general, and tourism research in particular, that will lead the field not only based in management and governance but in a more holistic perception of the issues, taking into consideration multiple stakeholders, businesses, and tourists. In line with Tribe’s work, Belhassen and Caton (2011) put forward the social responsibility of tourism programmes, suggesting that in order for programmes to be successful, graduates must leave equipped with technical skills, as well as the aptitude for navigating morality within occupational areas. The issues of native peoples unable to afford tourism-dominated environments such as Hawaii, the misappropriation of Uluru, and the implications of alternative forms of tourism such as slum tourism and volunteer tourism provide a few examples of the oppressive consequences of tourism illustrating impacts on minorities and under-represented communities. Sex tourism and its connections with human trafficking; mass tourism and its impacts on local communities and local cultural practices; mega-events tourism and the segregation of poor communities and violation of human rights provide additional examples of how tourism has been used as a tool to maintain, reinforce, and accelerate oppression and power hierarchies within societies. Jeffreys (1999) and Walters and Davis (2011), to give just two examples, have analysed the exploitative elements in sex tourism. Indeed, the sex industry has become ‘immensely profitable, providing considerable resources, not just to individuals and networks involved in trafficking women, but to governments who have come to depend on sex industry revenue’ (Jeffreys, 1999: 179). Activities such as prostitution have been fortified by the development of sex tourism, resulting in violence and promoting feelings of humiliation, degradation, defilement, and dirtiness (Giobbe, 1991), representing another oppressing and de-humanizing

act that should be challenged in tourism education. The literature on mega-events and sport tourism provides further examples of tourism as an oppressive tool for neoliberal and neocolonial practices. Indeed, discussion of issues such as human-rights violations, community exclusion, and segregation that have been caused by mega-events such as the Olympic Games and the men’s FIFA World Cup is becoming prolific in tourism and events research. Authors such as Ivester (2015), Horne (2018), and Carrington (1998) have discussed concerns such as the temporary social and cultural cleansing during the hosting of mega-events that has been carried out in order to promote an improved image of destinations to tourists via televised event coverage. In many cases such oppressive behaviour has been imposed by both national governments and international bodies in order to guarantee the ‘safety’ of the event, as well as the commercial agreements (and legacies) between sport organization and hosting country. These examples of exploitative and oppressive practices demonstrate the necessity to educate society about the implications of the actions, behaviours, and attitudes connected to the development and practice of tourism. To this point, ‘tourism can be both a tool of the powerful elite to dispossess, oppress and exploit others; and, paradoxically, it can also undermine power elites and empower the marginalized under certain conditions’ (Blanchard and Higgins-Desbiolles, 2013: 6). The next section will explore critical tourism educational practices.

TOURISM AS AN EDUCATIONAL PRACTICE The oppressive tendencies and capability of reinforcing post-colonial practices have been recognized within tourism scholarship. Such tendencies set up a paradox in preparing students for an industry that is highly

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exploitative. This paradox has served as an impetus to explore ways to engage students in a socially transformative way of thinking. Explicitly identifying the pitfalls of tourism activity, some scholars have distinguished the opportunities of the industry as a tool for learning and emancipation (Pritchard et  al., 2011). Moreover, tourism can be seen as a ‘tool of the powerful elite to dispossess, oppress, and exploit others and paradoxically can also undermine power elites and empower marginalised under certain conditions’ (Blanchard and Higgins-Desbiolles, 2013: 6). In this identity conflict Higgins-Desbiolles (2006) prefers to consider tourism as a social force instead of an industry, mainly because an emphasis on tourism as an industry may have a delimiting effect and overemphasize the economic discourse and corporatized attributes of business. Tourism is more than this. Tourism is also about the well-being of the tourist and communities, it is about the preservation of cultures in a globalized and homogenized world, it is about education regarding eco-­ systems and diversity of environments to be preserved, and it is about promoting peace and understanding between people and societies (Blanchard and Higgins-Desbiolles, 2013: 1–16). Realising the importance of tourism beyond just appreciating it as an economic driver and industry is important and likely only possible by utilizing a critical lens. Here we focus specifically on tourism as an essential element in education and learning. We concur with Blanchard and HigginsDesbiolles (2013), who argue that tourism does indeed matter and it may be used as a tool for cultural exchange, reconciliation, and empowerment of marginalized groups. However, we also believe that tourism can and should resist the exploitative discourse recognized in neoliberal agendas of the westernized business sector and, as such, develop a comprehensive and outreaching tourism education programme based in a critical pedagogy approach. Despite the recent growth in interest, critical pedagogy in tourism is still embryonic.

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Tourism scholars have been encouraging a deeper discussion about the introduction of critical pedagogy in tourism studies which could cultivate a different way of practising tourism and improve tourist behaviour (Boluk and Carnicelli, 2019; Fullagar and Wilson, 2012; Higgins-Desbiolles and Powys-Whyte, 2013). In recent years several tourism-driven networks mutually supporting and driving critical pedagogy in theory and practice have been developed. For example, Building Excellence for Sustainable Tourism Education Network (BEST EN) was founded in 1999 as ‘an incubator for a variety of activities aimed at encouraging the adoption of sustainable practices’. Operating as an inclusive and collaborative network, it emphasizes the ‘creation and dissemination of knowledge to support education and practice in the field of sustainable tourism’ (BEST EN, 2018). Critical Tourism Studies (CTS) is an international network of scholars who are mutually interested in understanding and promoting social change in tourism from the perspectives of scholarship, education, and practice. The CTS bi-annual conference series was initially launched in 2005 (CTS, 2018) and has since established continental branches in North America and Asia-Pacific. It is important to note that a few of the founders of CTS put forth the notion of hopeful tourism, ‘a values-led humanist approach based on partnership, reciprocity and ethics’ aiming to cocreate ‘learning and which recognizes power of sacred and Indigenous knowledge and passionate scholarship’ (Pritchard et al., 2011: 949). Hopeful tourism has been critiqued by scholars, most notably Higgins-Desbiolles and Powis-Whyte (2013), who identified the troubling absence of critical theory which is needed in order to mutually challenge power and privilege, as well as try and understand those who are oppressed by tourism systems. Another initiative emerging is the Tourism Education Futures Initiative (TEFI). TEFI is recognized as a social movement comprising educators, scholars, industry representatives, and community members who mutually seek

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an alternative type of tourism that is mutually sustainable and just, and sets the flourishing of communities at its centre (TEFI, 2018). The notion of care is central to TEFI’s network, in opposition to neoliberal rhetoric associated with quantitative reporting constructs. TEFI has provided a venue for tourism educators to showcase their research and displays critical pedagogical approaches in its various conferences and publications. Earlier work by Jost Krippendorf (1991), in response to a plethora of alternative forms of tourism that continue to emerge in the marketplace, paved the way for considerations regarding how we may progress sustainable tourism dialogue. Specifically, Krippendorf noted what is required are ‘not different ways to travel but different people’ (Krippendorf, 1991: 105). As such, a new society has the potential for producing new tourists and stakeholders who are more likely to assume responsibilities for their actions. Emergent from Krippendorf’s work, tourism has since been recognized as a tool for education (Pritchard et  al., 2011). Specifically, Pritchard et al. (2011) put forth an intent to consider tourism as a tool for learning and emancipation. Belhassen and Caton (2011) argue that the inclusion of critical pedagogy in tourism could result in a series of benefits, including personal awareness of one’s power in shaping decision-making and outcomes, contribution to social justice outcomes, and enhanced productivity. Tribe’s (2000, 2001, 2002, 2008) work has analysed the business leanings of tourism curriculum, promoting liberal instead of vocational training to enhance reflection in line with critical pedagogy. Accordingly, Tribe (2000: 21) recommended a scaffolding approach, offering key critical teachings on critical theory guiding students to evaluate assumptions and ultimately ‘contemplate ethical issues in tourism’. Tribe’s (2000) suggestions are aligned with Freire’s (1970) notion of conscientization, which emphasizes an in-depth understanding of the world, recognizing social and political contradictions,

and upon such realisation recognizing one’s role in responding to oppression. Fullagar and Wilson (2012) draw attention to the need for reflexivity within critical pedagogy in order to bring awareness to our perspectives and create knowledge in tourism and hospitality studies. Agency considerations are still largely missing in much of the contemporary tourism scholarship on critical pedagogy. Albeit distinct to the above work making a case for tourism critical pedagogy in the classroom, Carnicelli and Boluk (2017) provide a number of extracurricular service learning examples reflecting transformative critical pedagogy cultivating student social change agents. Additionally, Mair and Sumner’s (2017) work on tourism as public pedagogy supports the role of critical pedagogy outside the classroom. To radically transform tourists, host communities, and their relationship, the authors believe that there is a need to develop a critical tourism pedagogy which will merge concepts of ‘solidarity and participation mixed with the potential for critical inquiry’ (Mair and Sumner, 2017: 202). Sheldon et  al. (2011) propose a need for changing the way tourism studies are taught to respond to the challenges faced by the industry. Ateljevic et  al.’s (2013) call for a ‘critical turn’ in tourism studies has advocated the need for our curriculum to better respond to contemporary problems as an outcome of the production and consumption of the industry. One way to implement a critical turn in tourism studies may be to consider the transformative learning approaches put forth by Mezirow (2000) and Coghlan and Gooch (2011) that require a radical shift in consciousness to change how people see their place in the world. In their work on volunteer tourism, Coghlan and Gooch (2011) believe a transformative learning approach as suggested by Mezirow (2000) may lead tourists to be conscious of themselves as part of a larger political, economic, socio-cultural, and spiritual environment. Here the ‘conscientization’ process that is

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suggested is similar to what was also advocated by Freire (1970) in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Another option suggested by Pitman et al. (2011) is a lifelong learning framework for educational tours that help to develop critical thinking. Importantly, this draws attention to Falk et al.’s (2012) point in regard to the relationship between travel, tourism, and learning, which has not received much attention in the tourism literature. Past literature such as Crompton’s (1979) work suggested that learning was one of the pull factors for a meaningful travel experience, while IsoAhola (1982) believed that escape from daily routine and psychological rewards such as learning may encompass the main factors when deciding upon a leisure activity such as travelling. In this context of travelling as a learning opportunity, and following Aristotle’s philosophical approach, Falk et  al. (2012) argue that travelling provides opportunities for Episteme (theoretical knowledge), Techne (practical skills), and Phronesis (practical wisdom). ‘Phronesis extends beyond skills and technique to include reflexivity. Praxis, or the practice of phronesis occurs when individuals live and perform social and ethical actions which become a part of living a good and virtuous life’ (Falk et  al., 2012: 916). Phronesis and Praxis have received limited attention in the tourism scholarship, with the exception of Tribe (2002), who promotes an action-oriented tourism curriculum; Jamal (2004), who specifically advocates a praxisoriented curriculum focused on generating an appreciation for sustainable tourism, and practice guiding good action and conduct; and Jamal et  al. (2011), who refer to an academic-community collaboration involving students, public and private stakeholders, and rural residents to examine a local cultural heritage concern. Praxis seems to be the link between tourism, travel, and critical pedagogy, a neglected research area in tourism scholarship (Falk et al., 2012). As such, as we have done here,

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we believe that exposing students and communities to the adverse impacts created by the tourism industry is important, but a further step is introducing critical pedagogy in order to equip students with the tools necessary to respond to the concerns they witness. Indeed, critical pedagogy may mutually facilitate the time and space to reflect on their role in addressing the adverse impacts of the tourism industry, thus enacting tourism as a social force.

RETHINKING TOURISM PRACTICE AND EDUCATION As previously discussed, tourism has on the one hand been used as a tool for oppression, and on the other has been used as an educational tool facilitating liberation. Accordingly, it is timely to swing the activity to expose the oppressive neoliberal roots, and pave roads leading to better engagement with critical pedagogy. Such engagement may lead to a more responsible and liberating tourism, encouraging students and teachers alike to challenge privilege, power relationships, and economic considerations in light of progressing sustainability. How is this possible in an industry that is driven by multinational corporations inclined to maintain capitalistic and neoliberal approaches? How may we shift power relationships, swapping control and positioning local communities and marginalized groups in positions of power? The answer is to empower such groups to gain control over the tourism activities that directly affect their cultures and environments (Higgins-Desbiolles et  al., 2019). In this section we propose a number of ways in which we may critically rethink tourism education. Table 62.1 summarizes our examples and the potential outcomes, which will be discussed in more depth below. We believe that the shift in tourism practice will only be possible with a new pedagogical approach. A critical education of

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Table 62.1  A summary of our critical rethinking of tourism education Example number

Examples of our critical rethinking of tourism education

1

The Youth Together Project (Henze et al., Educating youth about their privilege and community inequality 1998) educating youth to become activists could lead to more critical tourists being informed about to address local racial violence. power and seeking alternatives to mitigate impacts. ‘Educate to travel’ (Higgins-Desbiolles and Critical pedagogical practices are important in higher education, Powys-Whyte, 2013) in higher education. and specifically undergraduate programmes, as our graduates can become agents of change and take an active role in influencing change in the tourism system. Critical tourism education needs to Starting critical tourism education earlier could enhance commence in the early years of the recognition that tourism has a positive force to play, education. facilitate reflexivity regarding the implications of one’s actions, and equip citizens with the tools to be responsible consumers and employees – recognizing implications outside of tourism. Deliver tourism education to young people in Targeting both privileged and deprived young people will both privileged and deprived communities encourage them to critically assess their privilege and those considering formal and informal who are deprived to recognize the power they possess. education. We envision this approach to contribute to the massification of critical skills. Mobilize instrumental tourism networks and These networks could be enhanced if they collectively groups such as BEST EN, TEFI, and CTS incorporated critical pedagogical approaches to foster a in the processes of tourism education conscientization of tourism as a social force and liberation. beyond the academy.

2

3

4

5

Potential outcomes for and beyond tourism

agents is required which empowers those who have been previously neglected in decision-making and who are oppressed ­ by the system. Recognizing positions of power and privilege inherent in the act of researching and/or engaging in tourism that may generate oppression is needed in formal education. Henze et al. (1998) point out that programmes and curricula attempting to build greater student and teacher awareness regarding privilege and inequalities have the potential to inform strategies to contribute to a more equitable society, even if they are still rare. Henze et al. (1998) cite the example of the Youth Together project in Oakland, California as an example of educating youth to become activists to address racial violence in the local area. Here we believe that educating youth regarding privilege and inequality may lead to more critical tourists who will understand the power relationships associated with their practices and look for alternatives to mitigate negative impacts.

In their response to Pritchard et al. (2011), Higgins-Desbiolles and Powys-Whyte wrote: Pritchard et al. write of hope in teaching tourism to tourism students, but these students are largely in positions of privilege being trained to go out for the most part to fill positions of privilege in a tourism industry itself that caters to tourists in positions of privilege […] We argue that people of privilege, such as tourism academics and tourism higher degree students, must respond to calls to interrogate positions of privilege and embark on projects where power is handed over. (Higgins-Desbiolles and Powys-Whyte, 2013: 431)

While we agree with Higgins-Desbiolles and Powys-Whyte (2013), we also believe that the necessity to ‘educate to travel’ should start not at the higher education level, but much earlier in the educational process. Starting tourism education earlier could enhance the recognition of tourism as an important social force with powers beyond economics. Furthermore, our proposition has the potential to impact all citizens who may

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engage in tourism-related activities either as tourists or as those who may inform decisionmaking. Engaging in critical tourism pedagogy early on has the potential to encourage people to think through the implications of their actions, providing them with the tools to make responsible decisions as consumers and hopefully as employees; therefore such education has implications outside of the realm of tourism. We believe that tourism education should go beyond the development of a curriculum for tourism students in undergraduate degrees. We advocate that tourism education based on critical pedagogy and in the understanding of oppression, privilege, and power relationships should start in the early years of education. We believe that the discussion is also important in undergraduate programmes as many higher education students will become the agents who may help to transform products and services offered, as well as develop an agenda helping to educate tourists and broader tourism systems. But it is important to go beyond that and take tourism education to the younger generations, to both privileged and deprived communities, to other platforms of formal and informal education. We believe in the importance of promoting a ‘massification’ of critical skills that will help students to recognize oppression and power relationships generated by tourism. Critical pedagogy in this context of tourism education expansion becomes instrumental to the questioning of the process of cultural invasion (Freire, 1970). Cultural invasion (that can be inflicted by tourism activities) was identified by Freire (1970: 152) as an ‘act of violence against the persons of the invaded culture, who lose their originality or face the threat of losing it’. The invaders are the authors and actors, while those they invade become objectified and moulded by the demands placed upon them. In tourism education, the praxis based on action and reflection developing a critical understanding of neo-colonial practices by the industry becomes essential to create

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narrative and actions to resist cultural invasion. Here, networks and groups previously mentioned such as BEST EN, TEFI, and CTS become instrumental in the processes of tourism education that should go beyond the walls of academia. These groups with their own singularities, aims, and objectives can incorporate critical pedagogical approaches in order to help develop a conscientization of tourism as a social force, tourism as a potential for education and liberation. The increase and spread of social actions and activism from scholarly tourism groups is urgently needed. BEST EN, TEFI, and CTS are already taking a more sustainable and socially just approach to their conferences, events, and activities, including a stronger engagement with local communities and marginalized groups in the places where they meet. But still more needs to be done to apply the ‘knowledge’ created in academia to the groups that have been oppressed by the tourism industry. In this way, we recommend that future studies should follow what we previously proposed in Boluk and Carnicelli (2019), specifically considering the development of a tourism curriculum that does not aim to indoctrinate students about the economic benefits of the industry but rather helps them to critically understand their role in shaping and adapting tourism, as a social force.

CONCLUSION The recognition of tourism as a complicated and extremely paradoxical phenomenon is needed if transformation is to take place. The problematic aspect of tourism as a drive for hyper-globalization, cultural invasion and homogenization, and ethnic cleansing and oppression of marginalized groups and minorities should be urgently addressed by scholarly community, governments, and groups such as UNWTO. Here we claim that one of the alternatives to resist the oppressive approach of the industry is to draw on the educational

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benefits it may generate. Indeed, the sector has been recording significant forms of alternative tourism that could serve as a counternarrative to the exploitative neo-colonial and neoliberal approaches previously discussed. The work of Higgins-Desbiolles (2013a, 2013b) in Palestine and with aboriginal communities in Australia as well as Blanchard (2013) in Timor-Leste have demonstrated that alternatives to mainstream tourism are feasible and possible. As such, we believe it is possible to empower communities and tourists to critically understand their roles and their relationship with and to each other. In this chapter, we hope to have opened a new avenue for tourism as a social force to resist oppression and neoliberalism. We have highlighted some of the current discussions in the tourism literature but also presented some of the significant steps taken by academic groups to promote a more socially just form of tourism. In this sense we see as a natural step towards the ‘massification’ of tourism education that has the potential to reach outside academic walls and permeate community groups, informal educational practices, and the early stages of formal education. This will take tourism researchers and educators out of their comfort zones and will require a deeper engagement with scholars from other fields, embracing opportunities for collaboration and interdisciplinary work. Critical pedagogy will provide the framework necessary to discuss and de-construct the concepts of privilege, laying the foundations where a more socially just and aware type of tourist and tourism may flourish. We believe that some of the critical academic forums such as BEST EN, TEFI, and CTS need to play an even more pro-active role in making tourism more human and less ‘industrialized’. We believe that tourism academics with the support of critical pedagogy as a framework can develop processes, dialogues, and educational platforms which will direct tourism towards its socially just path. We believe a liberating tourism education to all is the way forward.

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Jeffreys, S. (1999). Globalising sexual exploitation: Sex tourism and the traffic in women. Leisure Studies, 18(3), 179–196. Johnson, L., & Morris, P. (2010). Towards a framework for critical citizenship education. The Curriculum Journal, 21(1), 77–96. Krippendorf, J. (1991). The Holiday Makers: Understanding the Impact of Leisure and Travel. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. Mair, H., & Sumner, J. (2017). Critical tourism pedagogies: Exploring the potential through food. Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport & Tourism Education, 21(Part B), 195–203. Martinson, M., & Elia, J. P. (2018). Ecological and political economy lenses for school health education: A critical pedagogy shift. Health Education, 118(2), 131–143. McGehee, N. (2012). Oppression, emanci­ pation, and volunteer tourism: Research propositions. Annals of Tourism Research, 39(1), 87–107. McGehee, N. G., & Andereck, K. (2008). ‘Pettin’ the critters’: Exploring the complex relationship between volunteers and the voluntoured in McDowell County, WV, USA and Tijuana, Mexico. In S. Wearing & K. D. Lyons (eds) Journeys of Discovery in Volunteer Tourism: International Case Study Perspectives. Oxfordshire, UK: CABI. McIntosh, R. W., Goeldner, C. R., & Ritchie, J. R. (1995). Tourism: Principles, Practices, Philosophies (7th ed.). New York: Wiley. Menis, S. (2016). Non-traditional students and critical pedagogy: Transformative practice and the teaching of criminal law. Teaching in Higher Education, 22(2), 193–206. Mezirow, J. (2000). Learning to think like an adult: Transformation theory: Core concepts. In J. Mezirow & associates (eds) Learning as Transformation: Critical Perspectives on a Theory in Progress (pp. 1–33). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Nielsen, N., & Wilson, E. (2012). From invisible to indigenous-driven: A critical typology of research in indigenous tourism. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, 19(1), 67–75. Peters, A., & Higgins-Desbiolles, F. (2012). De-marginalising tourism research: Indigenous Australians as tourists. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, 19, 76–84.

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63 Queer(ing) Cisgender Normativity: Reconsidering Critical Pedagogy Through a Genderqueer Lens Dana M. Stachowiak and Leila E. Villaverde

INTRODUCTION Kincheloe (2012: 148) urged critical pedagogues that ‘a vibrant, relevant, effective critical pedagogy in the contemporary era must be simultaneously intellectually rigorous and accessible to multiple audiences’, with much to learn from minoritized people. His focus was specifically on our failure to engage ‘subjugated knowledges of the African, African American, Asian, and Indigenous peoples’ (2012: 149), and while we agree that a major problem of critical pedagogy is that it is a ‘White thing’, we argue that it is a ‘cisgender thing’. Even as the visibility of transgender and genderqueer individuals has increased in both the media and in research (particularly, gender studies and queer theory), critical pedagogy lags far behind in being a body of research and knowledge that does not center cisgender voices. While there has been and continues to be important work stemming from critical

pedagogy to eradicate class, race, and gender hierarchies and inequities, there is little to no work being published within critical pedagogy on the interrogation of the oppression created by Westernized binary language related to cisgender normativity. In particular, the current language used around the gender binary (i.e., male and female) ‘is dichotomous thinking [that] encourages oppression and marginalization of those who do not conform to the norms or are seen as lesser in, or outside of, the hierarchy of the gender binary’ (Stachowiak, 2012). A specific concern lies especially with those who identify as genderqueer, whose gender ‘identity has permeable boundaries’ (Adams et al., 2010: Appendix 10A), and thus, one that necessarily lies outside of the boundaries set by our societal system of the male/female binary. An argument in this chapter is that current rhetoric about gender, as situated in critical pedagogy, is dominated by very limiting binary analyses that work to reify the oppressions that it strives to dismantle. Thus, we

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seek to shift toward a more critical paradigm using genderqueer experience as a critical (and missing) lens. We begin by examining the problematics of the binary language of gender and emancipation within the field of critical pedagogy, and the address the ways in which the experiences of genderqueer individuals can offer the field a more inclusive, more dynamic lens for countering hegemony.

THE PROMISES AND PITFALLS OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY The tenets of critical pedagogy set up a particular landscape of promise for people who are marginalized and those who work for social justice (Darder et  al., 2008; Giroux, 2010), but there are also ways in which the language of critical pedagogy restricts and oppresses.

Emancipation as a Promise Critical pedagogy is hinged on a transformational potential that it promotes, with a framework that values personal experiences and critical dialogue (Giroux, 2010; Freire, 2003; Shor, 1999; McLaren, 1994). A hope is that working through a critical pedagogical stance will help forge a new consciousness among both oppressed and oppressors that will create equity across lines of difference. This ‘conscientization’, as Freire (2003) describes, demands that we seek a critical understanding of the word and the world, particularly regarding the influence of the social constructs and hegemonic powers that exist to oppress. As such, critical pedagogues seek ‘to construct alternative or counter-hegemonic forms of knowledge, and therefore power’ (Cho, 2010: 311). It is within this framework of Freirean praxis that critical pedagogues advocate for the emancipation of minoritized people from hegemonic structures as the ultimate goal of critical pedagogy.

With a focus on the emancipation of people who are oppressed and marginalized in some way, the work of critical pedagogy relies on their experiences in society through the use of critical reflection, narratives, and critical dialogue. This is premised on the notion that people who are oppressed will ‘question the system they live in and the knowledge being offered to them, to discuss what type of future they want’ in a manner that is both empowering and liberating (Shor, 1999: 28). The hope, then, is that this critical reflection and questioning will invoke the sharing of personal stories of and dialogue about oppression and marginalization. It is an aim of critical pedagogy that through these means, people who are oppressed will decenter the current hegemonic discourse in ways that re-center and redevelop knowledge that focuses on equity across races, classes, and genders. This work of critical pedagogy, then, is a ‘means [of] bringing the laws of cultural representation face to face with their founding assumptions, contradictions, and paradoxes’ (McLaren, 1994: 218). This puts the hope of critical praxis in the hands of both the oppressed and the oppressor, as the praxis of reflection, dialogue, and action requires transmission across and within hierarchical laws of society. Critical pedagogy thus ‘provides the capacities, knowledge, skills, and social relations through which individuals recognize themselves as social and political agents’ of change and emancipation (Giroux, 2010: 480).

Emancipation as a Pitfall: The Pervasiveness of Binary Thinking Where the promise of emancipation is hopeful in critical pedagogy, the binary language of critical pedagogy is a significant pitfall. Pervasive in both Westernized thinking and critical pedagogy (which Kincheloe (2012) would argue is a Western-only philosophy), however, is the reliance on dichotomous

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frames of reference regarding gender and emancipation. Gender as a binary. People most often use gender to describe a person’s sex as male or female, creating a binary that imprisons a rigid definition of gender. Although Butler (1994: 3) asserts that ‘gender is produced through overlapping articulations of power’ that force individuals to acquire and perform related social norms, our society operates through a hegemonic and heteronormative discourse that gender is biologically fixed to match a person’s biological sex. This gender binary asserts that a person is either male or female, but never both, interchanging, or neither. This dichotomous thinking encourages oppression and marginalization of those who do not conform to the norms or are seen as lesser in the hierarchy of the gender binary. Inside this binary are cisgender individuals, while outside of this binary lie genderqueer individuals, yet another binary. Cisgender individuals are those whose gender identity matches their biological sex, and genderqueer individuals are those whose gender identity is more fluid (Stachowiak, 2017). Although often used interchangeably, gender and sex are not the same thing. ‘Sex is generally considered biological, and gender is considered cultural’ (Stryker, 2008: 8–9), and gender is assigned at birth to parallel with a person’s sex. Sex is related to one’s anatomical make-up, and in Western cultures, this is either male or female. As such, these two genders identified by feminine and masculine characteristics are expected to coincide with female and male genitalia, respectively. Thus, female gender coincides with feminine characteristics and having a vagina; and male gender coincides with masculine characteristics and having a penis. As Stryker (2008: 11) emphasizes, however, ‘the important things to bear in mind are that gender is historical (it changes through time), that it varies from place to place and culture to culture, and that it is contingent (it depends on) a lot of different and

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seemingly unrelated things coming together’. The Western view of two genders creates an oppressive gender binary of severe inequalities and prohibitive stereotypes (e.g., only men have short hair, and only women have long hair). This binary system ‘implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it’ (Butler, 2006: 6). Systemically, the gender binary supports inequality among the two genders and stereotypes that can be exclusionary. Gender becomes a much ‘more complicated topic when you start taking it apart and breaking it down’ (Stryker, 2008: 7). While complicated and evolving, an understanding of the complexities of gender can aide in an understanding of the genderqueer participants in this study, as well as an understanding of the oppression these individuals face as a result of the gender binary. Dismantling the gender binary within critical pedagogy, then, involves not only recognizing the power of these social practices that work to keep the binary system in place, but also recognizing that these same social practices shape genders that do not fall within the binary system. Then, instead of looking at these existing social practices as oppressive only, we can reclaim the power of the practices in ways that activate new social relations, such as those produced by genderqueer individuals. The binary language of emancipation. Binary structures are dangerous because they essentialize the values of one category over the other. In the gender binary, for example, male is elemental, and the masculine characteristics that make a person male are viewed as the standard. This puts the female gender and feminine characteristics as inferior because they are not the standard by which to live. In other words, the male is the oppressor, and the female is the oppressed. The binary of teacher/student can be viewed in much the same way, with the teacher’s knowledge as superior to the student’s knowledge. Freire (2003) counters

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this by offering what he calls ‘problemposing education’, where the teacher and student are seen as co-constructors of knowledge. This is the type of educator that critical pedagogues envision playing a part in critical pedagogy. There are still the teacher and student roles within critical pedagogy, but instead of those labels, ‘the teacher is unequivocally [the emancipator] while “the oppressed” are presented as a distinct group’ needing emancipation (Galloway, 2012: 179). Even though the teacher and students engage in sharing of narratives and engaging in critical dialogue in critical pedagogy, there is still the notion that students need the emancipator-teacher to lead the way to emancipation. This creates an unnecessary and prevalent binary that still puts the emancipator-teacher in a superior role. In conjunction with this binary, Bingham et  al. (2010: 31) also note that ‘although emancipation is oriented towards equity, independence and freedom, it actually installs dependency at the very heart of the “act” of emancipation’. The emancipation binary suggests that the students cannot emancipate themselves without the involvement of the teacher. Thus, in much the same way that the male/female binary creates a dependency for females (and gender nonconforming individuals) on masculine characteristics as the standard by which to live, the emancipator/emancipated binary creates a dependency on the characteristics of the emancipator for the soon-to-be-emancipated (Galloway, 2019). Understanding the function of dependency within emancipation to which Bingham et  al. speak takes an interrogation of the literal meaning of emancipation. It ‘literally means to give away ownership’ of oneself or of something (Bingham et  al., 2010: 27). In the case of emancipation in critical pedagogy, then, it requires a reliance on the already emancipated consciousness of someone else (i.e., the teacher) by the oppressed (i.e., the student). The language of emancipation does eliminate the language of the oppressor/

oppressed, and this puts the teacher in a more positive light: instead of the oppressor, s/he is the emancipator – there to do good works for people who are oppressed – who helps others to the path of being emancipated. However different this language, though, it does not negate the fact that the concept of emancipation sets up a binary system that fosters hierarchies and dependence. Because of the binary and dependency created through the language of emancipation, Orner (1992: 75) argues that ‘student voice, as it has been conceptualized in work which claims to empower, is an oppressive construct’ because it ‘perpetuates relations of domination in the name of liberation’. The emancipator has a level of superiority in the emancipator/emancipated binary because of the use of critical pedagogy as a way to lead people who are oppressed to empowerment and emancipation; this situates their voice as dominant. They, as the emancipator, are privy to information and knowledge to which people who are oppressed are not yet. The reliance on a pedagogical method of emancipation ‘presupposes ready-made hierarchical worlds of sense in which individuals form intentions, make choices, and carry out actions in the ready-made terms of those worlds’ (Lugones, 2005: 86). If the emancipated are dependent on the emancipator for learning how to speak for empowerment, how can we be sure that the voice of the emancipated is authentic? How can we be sure that their individual unconscious subjective relations to and assumptions of power are being examined without any influence of the dominant voice of the emancipator? And, in turn, how is the emancipator/emancipated relationship different in the least from the colonizer/colonized relationship that has repeatedly been named as supporting a society built on hierarchy and inequity? And, does the binary nature of the language of critical pedagogy actually oppress some individuals in new or different ways than they are already oppressed?

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WHAT QUEER THEORY AND GENDERQUEER CAN TEACH CRITICAL PEDAGOGUES Queer Theory works to queer the society’s ‘rigid normalizing categories’ and our ‘takenfor-granted assumptions about relationships, identity, gender, and sexual orientation’ (Meyer, 2007: 15). This critical approach offered by Queer Theory creates possibilities to dislocate hegemonic structures, and is more focused on the actions that occur as a result, not the philosophy. Queer Theory, thus, is presented ‘as a pedagogy’ (Britzman, 1995: 153) that is both critical and encourages the use of everyday narratives in order to destabilize normalizing constructions. As critical pedagogues, we need to queer our current frames of thinking about gender in ways that challenge and press against hegemonic structures of analyzing, defining, and evaluating lived experiences in relation to more than gender alone. We need to move from only acknowledging the social construction of gender (both inside and outside the binary), to acknowledging the social process of becoming. Genderqueer people claim a space, an identity that does not adhere to norms, but rather to how their body feels; oftentimes, either the male or female gender is not a felt aspect for a genderqueer individual. Rather, some genderqueer individuals claim an in-between; thus, they dislocate norms as they navigate this claimed space. While we argue that people of all gender identities navigate this in-between space at some point(s) throughout their life, we believe this space is acknowledged and claimed most often by gender non-conforming individuals almost by default. As such, this in-between space is what makes genderqueer individuals unique and valuable in the study of critical pedagogy.

Gender as a Felt Sense: Disidentification and In-Between Spaces Genderqueer individuals, as implied by the very name, queer gender constructs and

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activate new social relations because the ‘reality’ of their gender as genderqueer is produced by the fiction of the gender binary. In this way, genderqueer individuals disidentify, meaning that they ‘neither opt to assimilate within [the binary] structure nor strictly oppose it’ but instead disidentify as ‘a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology’ (Muñoz, 1999: 11). Genderqueer individuals often both do and don’t do what society expects or accepts – a person may have a beard (e.g., he is perceived as male, so that’s accepted) and wear make-up (e.g., he is not perceived as female, so that’s not accepted). Although not everyone chooses to disidentify, disidentification is not limited to genderqueer individuals or those who do not fit within societal norms. Any time a person goes against dominant ideology in order to restructure thinking, they disidentify, creating a space where ‘binaries begin to falter and fiction becomes the real’ (Muñoz, 1999: 20), thus activating new social claims and relations and dismantling dichotomous thinking. Disidentifying dismantles oppression and creates agency through the acts of individuals seeking to ‘activate their own sense of self’ (Muñoz, 1999: 5). It is both informed by and in opposition to dominant ideology, but should not be used as support that we completely dismiss the importance of gender as a social construction. Salamon (2010: 76) argues that ‘what we feel about our bodies is just as “constructed” as what we think about them, and the power of social construction as a model of understanding embodiment stems from its insistence that these categories are not separate but always intertwined’. This is what Salamon refers to as the ‘felt sense’ of our body. Some individuals who queer gender choose alternative labels, such as genderqueer, because they feel as though they do not fit in their assigned gender. That said, a genderqueer body shows us how the deep-seeded nature of gender is, in fact, fictive, but also that the social construction of gender offers ‘a way to understand

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how…felt sense arises’ (Salamon, 2010: 76). This felt sense manifests through our lived experiences in relation to the social construction of gender and the attributes that are socially linked to what mediates masculinity, femininity, androgyny, and so forth, and is ‘highly contextual and personal’ (Stachowiak, 2017: 535). The ways in which we either identify or disidentify with these socially constructed ideals are attached to the multiplicity of our identity. Felt sense of gender essentially translates to a critical embodiment of self, driven by both the corporeal body and the psyche, and the impact of social, cultural, and institutional theories of hegemony on both the body and the psyche. The felt sense of genderqueerness for ascribing individuals places them in a liminal space. It is a space that is ‘a positionality of divine betweenness’ (Alexander, 2005: 252) that is more than being caught in between borders of male and female. It is a state of being both outside and inside the borders, continuously, independently and/or simultaneously. It is about being in a place where we recognize that we are free to embrace our identities in any way imaginable or necessary. And although this can be a frenzied feeling to knowingly (and unknowingly) embrace all of our identities, having a critical consciousness of the freedom, the lack of borders and binaries, and the potential for selfhood within this liminal space is powerful (Koshy, 2011; McMaster, 2005; McLeod, 2000). As such, this liminal space is an important piece of genderqueer identity that can work to inform the ways critical pedagogues approach knowledge and teaching. While there are many ideas about and definitions for the liminal space (e.g., Pötsch, 2010; Turner, 1995), the definition we use in this work focuses mainly on the in-betweenness. Typically, queer identified people (i.e., either by self or society) are labeled as a marginalized group in society. We think an underlying importance, though, is a move to see genderqueers as a group that is in between, to see them in a liminal space, versus in a

space that is ‘on the edge’ or ‘just outside’ of the norm. Similarly, Muñoz’s (1999) writing on a ‘theory of migracy’ and Lugones’s (1987) writings on ‘“world”-traveling’ both suggest that people of a minority status (genderqueers, in this case) spend a lot of time ‘traveling back and forth from different identity vectors’ (Muñoz, 1999: 32), continually evaluating and reevaluating experiences and interactions. While neither a theory of migracy nor ‘world’-traveling exclusively cite liminality, this movement indicated within both theories certainly does invoke thoughts of the time spent and negotiations made while in a liminal space as people are traveling back and forth. Simultaneously connecting and disconnecting from the social constructs that define individuals, moving freely within/out of borders, empowers genderqueers to judiciously analyze hegemonic structures, reject hierarchical thinking, and claim our own selfhood and voice. Having this critical consciousness in the liminal space allows individuals to ‘see double, first from the perspective of one culture, then from the perspective of another’ (Anzaldúa, 2002: 549), and the information gained from these multiple perspectives allows us to see the fabrication of our hegemonic society and gives us the liberty to construct our own knowledge. As such, we can begin to ‘question, refashion, or mobilize received ideas’ in a way that empowers us ‘to act as an agent of change’ (McLeod, 2000: 219) in transforming old knowledge to new, socially just, and equitable knowledge. Thus, we move from being mostly passive actors in our identity formation to active participants. As such, exploring the terrain of genderqueer individuals’ experiences offers valuable insight into the potential of liminality. The potential here is that the liminal space allows individuals to challenge and/or dislocate established structures and ‘the key recursive and interrelated social practices through which meanings are constructed’ (McKay et al., 2005: 279).

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According to Pötsch (2010), a ‘liminal space is inherently disruptive’, and thus presents a call to do something about the disruption of hegemonic structures that seek to embrace the liminal space – not as limiting, but as dynamic and with interchanging borders. Liminality offers interwoven sites of awareness, resistance, and movement in everyday lived experiences. This attention to liminality carries privileges of (1) awareness of the multiplicity of self, (2) resistance to hegemony and related forms of oppression, and (3) lateral and connecting (versus hierarchical and dichotomous or binary) movement. Individuals need to be genuinely grounded in the self in order to stay in ambiguity and to work as a collective. An awareness of one’s occupancy in liminal spaces offers a sense of self and a comfort with ambiguity that supports collective action and agency against established structures and power. The collective that is driven by an awareness of liminality allows for individuals to feel equally invested in dislocating hegemonic structures, empowered through autonomy that is only possible as a collective, and enabled by both individual and shared voice.

Gender as Rhizomatic: Intersectionality, Assemblages, and Becoming Genderqueer individuals do not fit into the gender binary sometimes by choice, but also because this ‘dichotomous model of gender fail[s] to capture the complexity, diversity, and fluidity of the [genderqueer] experience’ (Diamond and Butterworth, 2008: 366), and this leads to a disruption in the hegemonic structure of the male/female gender binary. Due to this often contested, challenged, and oppressed disruption in binary thinking caused by the emergence of genderqueer as a gender identity, it is important to understand gender ‘in the context of power relations embedded in social identities’ (Shields, 2008: 301). Intersectionality

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helps to disrupt binary thinking, but only for brief interrogations. The benefits and limitations of the framework of intersectionality. Intersectionality was introduced by Crenshaw (1989) and Collins (1990) as a means to interrogate places of both privilege and oppression as a result of social power relations within the meeting of different identities. Acting as ‘a lens’ (Patrana, 2010: 55) to inform such analysis, the framework of intersectionality works to magnify the multiple ways in which pieces of an individual’s identity meet, or intersect, and examines what happens and interrogates why at that point of intersection. The framework leads to the understanding and naming of new or previously silenced identities, as well as a closer understanding of dominant identities, including a space for the discussion and visibility of genderqueer identity that has been carved by the framework of intersectionality. However productive the space created by the framework of intersectionality, the term intersection is problematic in that it implies that only certain factors must align in order for two or more of our identities to come together and have significance over our situations and experiences (Stachowiak, 2017). Because the ‘intersectionality theory directs us to researching the standpoint of those identities located at the site of intersection’ (Rahman, 2010: 951), it asserts that the different aspects of our identity can be turned off, ignored, or simply managed. Intersectionality necessarily privileges certain identities. For example, if we are interested in understanding the oppression experienced by gay genderqueers, the lens of intersectionality reveals the two intersections of gay and genderqueer, but neglects to consider the impact that each individual’s race, ethnicity, or class may also contribute to the oppressions they experience. Thus, it is safe to say that ‘the prevailing view of social identities [becomes] one of uni-dimensionality and independence, rather than a true intersection’ of identities (Bowleg, 2008: 313).

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Of course, more constructs can and do meet at one intersection, but rather than see all of a person’s social constructs as making them a whole person, the framework of intersectionality privileges a view of just the parts of a person’s whole being. As a result of this privileging of certain social constructs of a person’s identity, the framework of intersectionality becomes an additive versus interdependent framework that ‘conceptualizes people’s experiences as separate, independent, and summative’ (Bowleg, 2008: 314). Aside from it being problematic that this additive approach does not consider an individual as a whole being, it is also problematic because it eliminates the possibility of other related and important narratives, such as those related to being a gay genderqueer. The leaving out of such narratives when analyzing an individual’s experiences undoubtedly silences significant pieces of who they are as a human being. With this, it’s important that we ask, ‘How do [our] intersections matter?’ (Pastrana, as cited in Stachowiak, 2017: 535). This question is significant because it encourages us to consider how intersectionality ‘helps to maintain hegemonic structures of hierarchy and power by forcing classification of social constructs’ (Stachowiak, 2017: 535). Hierarchical organization of identities ‘impact[s] people’s lives in concrete and devastating ways and justif[ies] a sliding scale of human worth used to keep humankind divided’ (Anzaldúa, 2002: 541). Think, for instance, of a Muslim American: the framework of intersectionality coerces the Muslim American (and others, for that matter) to decide which part of their identity – the Muslim or the American part – is most significant, most advantageous. This causes the person to hide (if they can) or silence/ deny the Muslim part of their identity when it is not safe to reveal it in America. Yet again, we see that a piece (or pieces) of the individual’s identity is (are) ‘taken-for-granted’ (Puar, 2007: 206), rendered invisible, and silenced. A sense of falseness to identity is

also rendered here because choosing either/ or denies a full and truthful sense of self. It seems as though the framework of intersectionality continuously leads us down a path of limited understanding of motionless identities, as well as a broadening of subjugation and oppressions (Bowleg, 2008; Shields, 2008; Puar, 2007). As a consequence of the framework of intersectionality, imaginary lines are created between identities, and thus individuals are necessarily fenced inside the borders that the language of the framework creates. Both Anzaldúa (2007) and Bhabha (1994) speak to the notion of living in the borderlands, the in-between spaces that separate, join, and straddle different cultures. While the borderlands of identity put an individual in an advantageous space of ‘both/and’ living (e.g., they allow room for one to embrace their whole being), they also imply a sense of entrapment; these imaginary borders are similar to our physical borders that are difficult to cross and from which to gain full acceptance. Living in the borderlands of different cultures is thus similar to living in a mind frame of intersectionality. Like different cultures, our identity is seen as singular and frozen inside the phony lines, only intersecting with other pieces of our identity on occasion (Morris, 2002). And, because we are multidimensional beings, these borders only work to confuse us, and to create contradiction and ambivalence. Fraught with the choice of either/or rather than the option both or many, we ‘undergo a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war’ (Anzaldúa, 2007: 78) that leaves us heavily burdened. The borders created by intersectionality force us to choose which identity to which we lean and which identity we contest or ignore. Within this, we are often stuck, trapped, and, as a result, we are not truly whole beings. Genderqueer individuals most certainly occupy the borderlands of gender identity because they feel both male and female, sometimes neither, and sometimes one or the other. But because of the borders set up

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by society, it is often difficult and dangerous for genderqueers to slide back and forth between, as well as through, male and female identity. In much the same way, because of a reliance on choosing either/or identity, the framework of intersectionality supports a binary system that poses particular issues for genderqueer individuals. Even while a space for genderqueer voices to be heard may be a result of analysis through intersectionality, the fact that the framework continues to uphold a binary philosophy means that genderqueers face systemic oppression. Since genderqueers do not fit neatly into the male/ female binary, a dependence on any binary system poses a threat to the ultimate dismant­ ling of binary thinking. Considering a framework of assemblages. We have argued that genderqueer individuals carry this privilege in an inbetween space of gender, with benefits of fluidity and a critical consciousness of self and identity. Fluidity within identity requires a

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paradigm shift of our current thinking around identity because intersectionality necessarily privileges certain identities. For this, we argue that we come as a package, as an assemblage, which is more attuned to interwoven forces that merge and dissipate time, space, and body against linearity, coherency, and permanency (Puar, 2007: 212). Where intersectionality privileges stability of socially constructed and accepted parts of our identity, assemblages embrace the fluidity and uncertainty of all parts of our identity. Figure 63.1 is a visual to represent this difference between the two frameworks. Through this visual, it is obvious how complicated and messy the framework of intersectionality can become. Part (a), Intersectionality – Simple shows a distinct privileging of two identities that can happen as a result of intersectionality. It also shows how borders are created between the two identities, gay and genderqueer. But more telling of the confusing and burdensome

Figure 63.1  Intersectionality versus assemblages

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borders that intersectionality establishes is part (b), Intersectionality – Complex. The space in between the gay and Christian identities, for example, is the confusing borderlands of which Anzaldúa (2007) and Bhabha (1994) speak; it is clear in the figure where the border lines are drawn. The visual also makes it quite evident how only certain experiences are privileged while others are excluded, specifically in part (c) Intersectionality – Exclusionary. There are other even more confusing borders and borderlands. While part (d), Assemblages looks chaotic and messy, it clearly shows that ‘assemblages are collections of multiplicities’ that require a recognition of ‘other contingencies of belonging (melding, fusing, viscosity, bouncing)’ as a part of one’s whole being (Puar, 2007: 211). One can see that assemblages work in ways that emphasize a deviation from and discord with hegemonic structures of power. Figure 63.1 also depicts how a framework of assemblages embraces an exponential number of connections throughout different features of our identity. Simply put, ‘there are no points or positions [within a framework of assemblages]; there are only lines’ (Deleuze and Guattari, as cited in Puar, 2007: 196) that traverse and re-traverse in multiple and immeasurable ways. With that, assemblages necessarily ‘deprivilege binary opposition[s]’ (Puar, 2007: 205), which, as we know, is the complete opposite of intersectionality, and this makes a framework of assemblages an incredibly productive philosophy. This bodes well for a desire to disband hegemonic structures and advocate for equity and social justice. This is especially promising for genderqueer individuals and other minoritized groups because it assures a prominent and continual space for voice and agency. A framework of assemblages reminds us that all of the pieces that make us up come with us in every situation, every circumstance. I (Dana) am always queer, although it may be in the forefront of my performance in some situations, it sits quietly (but not invisibly) in the background in others.

Intersectionality implies that pieces of your identity come together at a certain point only; assemblages embrace the liminal, fluid space of identity – that same space occupied by genderqueer people. While the liminal space of genderqueer identity is not the same as assemblages of identity, the two are certainly interwoven and contingent. Moving the conversation from intersectionality to assemblages creates a place, a visibility for genderqueer, as well as all forms of identification. One concern with a framework of assemblages is the possibility that people will take advantage of the messy nature of the philosophy and find it a reason to not take responsibility for change and transformation. Puar (2007) reminds us that ‘intersectional identities and assemblages must remain as interlocutors in tension’ because ‘intersectional identities are the byproducts of attempts to still and quell the perpetual motion of assemblages, to capture and reduce them, to harness their threatening mobility (2007: 213). As we have already learned, intersectionality does provide us with a closer look at experiences, and for that, we need to continue to keep intersectionality in sight. This will work against those who seek complicity rather than transformative actions within a framework of assemblages. Where intersectionality seeks to dismiss a step to thinking in terms of assemblages is where our work to dismantle hegemonic structures is threatened. A continuously critical conscious mind for assemblages is needed here. A move from thinking in terms of intersections to thinking in terms of assemblages takes work. It requires a critical consciousness that is not readily a privilege to most people who embrace a comfortable place among a binary. Because of their outright rejection of claiming a binary status as either male or female, genderqueer individuals are incessantly aware of their occupancy within the liminal space. This puts genderqueers in a unique position; they are already ‘gifted

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at coping with liminality and could perform work involving the reconciliation of multiple points of view’ (McMaster, 2005: 105) and the teaching of the work necessary to begin dismantling hegemonic structures. The framework of intersectionality does not allow for the opportunity to do such work, leaving us with a ‘lack of language to describe’ (Diamond and Butterworth, 2008: 373) our experiences. A framework of assemblages allows us opportunities and the language. Even as the idea of assemblages suggests disarray that looks similar to life in the borderlands, the difference of this liminal space remains salient. Within a framework of assemblages, we are not forced to choose either/or/both; we are free to embrace ‘all’. Because of assemblages, we are thrust into this liminal space by design. Intersectionality gives us a false sense of rooted identity, one that is socially constructed and given unchosen rank and status. Assemblages give us liminality; liminality gives us a truer sense of selfhood; and together, assemblages and liminality give us a space we can choose to call ‘home’ (Anzaldúa, 2002). In his writings on identities, McLeod (2000), references the work of Paul Gilroy in relation to what we call home and how we arrive there. Recognizing the multiple places and cultures he calls home, Gilroy struggles to find his roots. Instead, he speaks of the routes he has taken and continues to take throughout life. In the end, he deems the routes as the most important aspects of his experiences because they have caused a transformation in his self and his beliefs. We like to think of intersectionality as roots and assemblages as routes: roots are meant to fix us, to keep us in one place; routes are meant to take us places and challenge us in transformative ways. As we continue to consider and understand the inner-workings of assemblages, a hope is that additional ways in which a framework of assemblages reifies power and privilege through social, cultural, and institutional theories of hegemony will be more clearly

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exposed. As such, we strove to keep intersectionality, assemblages, and liminality in tension throughout this study. Gender as a rhizome. Pairing a framework of assemblages with thinking in terms of gender as rhizomatic further lessens the limitations imparted by our current binary forms of thinking. According to Linstead and Pullen (2006: 1302), rhizomes are based on connections; heterogeneity; multiplicity; ruptures, breaks, and discontinuities; and experimentation. Thus, if we think of gender as a rhizome, we can read gender as a state of becoming versus a state of static being. Connections are being made all the time based on our lived experiences that are mediated through the bringing together of the different social constructions of who we are and our life stories and/or moments. As such, a move toward thinking of gender as a rhizome is inherently a move toward the recognition of the connectivity of our multiplicity and a move away from binaries and socially constructed labels. Like Salamon (2010), however, Linstead and Pullen emphasize the importance of the influence that gender as a social construction has on gender as a rhizome. The heterogeneity that comes with reading gender as rhizomatic pulls together different levels of connections, and as such, emphasizes the individuality of a single moment; no one rhizome is the same, as each connection is contextual. Likewise, the multiplicity of rhizomes in this manner of thinking emphasizes that the knowledge gained from one moment can and often does collide with other moments to create the story of our own gender. Unlike binary thinking, rhizomatic thinking thus allows for ‘the possibility of the other and different connections’ through the intentional or unintentional ruptures, breaks, or severing of connections (Linstead and Pullen, 2006: 1302). In this sense, those who ascribe to the genderqueer identity (or other non-normative identities) rupture the hegemonic notion of gender and create space for others and different modes of non-normative

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thinking. As people make and sever connections, they are essentially experimenting with the idea of queering the norms of their own stories of reality of gender and the stories of others’ reality of gender. When we read gender as a rhizome, it ‘offers possibilities of the other, possibilities of change and transformation, and possibilities for freedom and emancipation that go beyond the constraints of biological sex and socially ascribed genders’ (Linstead and Pullen, 2006: 1303). Within this connectivity of rhizomatic thinking, we can also see the relationships between intersectionality, multiplicity, and assemblages, and, thus, identify the multiple liminal spaces which we occupy throughout our lived experiences. Figure 63.2 depicts these relationships. Liminal spaces are not labeled, as they are re/un-fashioned within the movement created throughout the rhizome. Recognizing the rhizomatic nature of gender thrusts our thinking into understanding gender as a process.

Figure 63.2  Gender as a rhizome

CONCLUSION Because the experiences of genderqueer individuals offer insight into the rhizomatic nature of identity, this lens can provide critical pedagogues a new way of considering, not only the language we use, but also the experiences we choose to center in our research and work. Our argument is that having a critical consciousness of the rhizomatic nature of gender leads to a breakdown of hegemony and creates a possibility of transformational and socially just thinking in regards to gender. But even more astutely, we do not hesitate to take this one step further, advocating for a critical consciousness of the rhizomatic nature of identity as a whole. We define identity as undoubtedly fluid, not monolithic, most importantly multidimensional, and always in the process of becoming (Britzman, 2010). In this way, we can see how gender becomes a part of the multiplicitous identities within the assemblage of our identity, and another part

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of our identity can take the helm as a central piece we may also negotiate. Thus, the movement within the rhizome is highlighted, and even more possibilities of breaking down hegemonic structures become available, not just in regards to the social construction of gender, but also in regards to other social constructions of reality. It is important to note a critical consciousness of the rhizomatic nature of our identity is not the answer to ending injustices; rather, it is a tool that we can use to begin to breakdown injustices. Keeping this in mind is important in preventing, not only the reification of norms, but also the hierarchical categorization of social constructs, such as race and class.

REFERENCES Adams, M., Blumenfeld, W., Castañeda, C. R., Hackman, H. W., Peters, M. L., & Zúñiga, X. (Eds.) (2010). Readings for diversity and social justice (2nd edition). New York, NY: Routledge. Alexander, B. K. (2005). Embracing the teachable moment: The black gay body in the classroom as embodied text. In E. P. Johnson & M. G. Henderson (Eds.), Black queer studies: A critical anthology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 249–265. Anzaldúa, G. E. (2007). Borderlands/La Frontera: The new Mestiza (3rd edition). San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Anzaldúa, G. E. (2002). Now let us shift…the path of conocimiento…inner work, public acts. In G. E. Anzaldúa & A. Keating (Eds.), This bridge we call home: Radical visions for transformation. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 540–579. Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. New York, NY: Routledge. Bingham, C., Biesta, G., & Rancière, J. (2010). A new logic of emancipation. In C. Bingham & G. Biesta (Eds.), Jacques Rancière: Education, truth, emancipation. New York, NY: Continuum, pp. 25–48. Bowleg, L. (2008). When black + lesbian + woman ≠ black lesbian woman: The

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methodological challenges of qualitative and quantitative intersectionality research. Sex Roles, 59(5–6), 312–325. Britzman, D. (2010). On the madness of lecturing on gender: A psychoanalytic discussion. Gender and Education, 22(6), 636–646. Britzman, D. (1995). Is there a queer pedagogy? Or stop reading straight. Educational Theory, 45(2), 151–165. Butler, J. (2006). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, NY: Routledge. Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. New York, NY and London: Routledge. Butler, J. (1994). Against proper objects. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 6(2/3), 1–26. Cho, S. (2010). Politics of critical pedagogy and new social movements. Educational Philosphy and Theory, 42(3), 310–325. Collins, P. H. (1990). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (10th anniversary edition). New York, NY: Routledge. Crenshaw, K. (1989). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. Darder, A., Baltodano, M. P., & Torres, R. D. (Eds.) (2008). The critical pedagogy reader (2nd edition). New York, NY: Routledge. Diamond, L. M. & Butterworth, M. (2008). Questioning gender and sexual identity. Dynamic links over time. Sex Roles, 59 (5–6), 365–376. Freire, P. (2003). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary edition). New York, NY: Continuum. Galloway S. (2019) Rancière, Freire and Critical Pedagogy. In S. Cowden & D. Ridley (Eds.) The Practice of Equality: Jacques Rancière and Critical Pedagogy. New Disciplinary Perspectives on Education, 1. Oxford; New York: Peter Lang, pp. 21–43. Galloway, S. (2012). Reconsidering emancipatory education: Staging a conversation between Paulo Freire and Jacques Rancière. Educational Theory, 62(2), 163–184. Giroux, H. A. (2010). On critical pedagogy. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic. Kincheloe, J. L. (2012). Critical pedagogy in the twenty-first century: Evolution for survival.

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In M. Nikolakaki (Ed.), Critical pedagogy in the new Dark Ages: Challenges and possibilities? New York, NY: Peter Lang. Koshy, K. (2011). Feels like ‘carving bone’: (Re)creating the activist-self, (re)articulating transnational journeys, while sifting through Anzaldúan thought. In A. Keating & G. González-López (Eds.), Bridging: How Gloria Anzaldúa’s life and work transformed our own. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 197–203. Linstead, S. & Pullen, A. (2006). Gender as multiplicity: Desire, displacement, difference and dispersion. Human Relations, 59(9), 1287–1310. Lugones, M. (2005). From within germinative status: Creating active subjectivity, resistant agency. In A. Keating (Ed.), Entre mundos/ Among worlds: New perspectives on Gloria E. Anzaldúa. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 85–100. Lugones, M. (1987). Playfulness, ‘world’-travelling, and loving perception. Hypatia, 2(2), 3–20. McKay, J., Mikosza, J., & Hutchins, B. (2005). ‘Gentlemen, the lunchbox has landed’: Representations of masculinities and men’s bodies in the popular media. In M. S. Kimmel, J. Hearn & R. W. Connell (Eds.), Handbook of studies on men and masculinities. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 270–288. McLaren, P. (1994). Multiculturalism and the post-modern critique: Toward a pedagogy of resistance and transformation. In H. A. Giroux & P. McLaren (Eds.), Between borders: Pedagogy and the politics of cultural studies. Routledge. New York, NY, pp. 192–224. McLeod, J. (2000). Beginning postcolonialism. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. McMaster, C. (2005). Negotiating paradoxical spaces: Women, disabilities, and the experience of nepantla. In A. Keating (Ed.), Entre mundos/Among worlds: New perspectives on Gloria E. Anzaldúa. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 101–106. Meyer, E. J. (2007). ‘But I’m not gay’: What straight teachers need to know about queer theory. In N. M. Rodriguez & W. F. Pinar (Eds.), Queering straight teachers: Discourse and identity in education. New York, NY: Peter Lang, pp. 15–32. Morris, M. (2002). Young man Popkin: A queer dystopia. In G. E. Anzaldúa & A. Keating (Eds.), This bridge we call home: Radical

visions for transformation. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 137–144. Muñoz, J. E. (1999). Introduction: Performing disidentifications. In J. E. Muñoz (Ed.), Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1–34. Orner, M. (1992). Interrupting the calls for student voice in ‘liberatory’ education: A feminist poststructuralist perspective. In C. Luke & J. Gore (Eds.), Feminisms and critical pedagogy. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 74–89. Patrana, Jr., A. (2010). Privileging oppression: Contradictions in intersectional politics. The Western Journal of Black Studies, 34(1), 53–63. Pötsch, H. (2010). Challenging the border as barrier: Liminality in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line. Journal of Borderlands Studies, 25(1), 67–84. Puar, J. K. (2007). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rahman, M. (2010). Queer as intersectionality: Theorizing gay Muslim identities. Sociology, 44(5), 944–958. Salamon, G. (2010). Assuming a body: Transgender and the rhetorics of materiality. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Shields, S. A. (2008). Gender: An intersectionality perspective. Sex Roles, 59(5–6), 301–311. Shor, I. (1999). Education is politics: Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy. In P. McLaren & P. Leonard (Eds.), Paulo Freire: A critical encounter. New York, NY: Routledge. Stachowiak, D. M. (2017). Queering it up, strutting our threads, and baring our souls: Genderqueer individuals negotiating social and felt sense of gender. Journal of Gender Studies, 26(5), 532–543. Stachowiak, D. M. (2012). Not bound by stupid binaries: Dismantling gender in public schools through a new consciousness and claiming of agency. In P. L. Thomas (Ed.), Becoming and being a teacher: Confronting traditional norms to create new democratic realities. New York, NY: Peter Lang, pp. 189–202. Stryker, S. (2008). Transgender history. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press. Turner, V. (1995). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

64 Culturally Responsive Schooling as a Form of Critical Pedagogies for Indigenous Youth and Tribal Nations Angelina E. Castagno, Jessica A. Solyom and Bryan Brayboy

Culturally responsive schooling (CRS) has proven useful to enhance academic engagement for Indigenous youth by promoting culturally relevant programming, linguistic diversity, culturally conscious service delivery, and program evaluation. At its most comprehensive implementation, CRS addresses discriminatory attitudes prevalent among community service providers, teachers, school administrators, and other students and promotes asset-based culturally relevant and respectful pedagogical practices for diverse students. For Indigenous communities, this means CRS can facilitate ongoing interaction and cooperation among key stakeholders including federal government officials, tribal and community agencies, families, students, teachers, and school administrators to promote self-determination for tribal nations. Many scholars have advocated for similar approaches in the schooling of historically underserved racialized youth (see, for example, Gay, 2000; Ladson-Billings, 1994, 1995a, 1995b; Ladson-Billings and Tate,

1995; Paris, 2012; Paris and Alim, 2014). Yet, contrary to what some believe, utilizing CRS to educate Indigenous students is not new. Indigenous communities have used culturally relevant and responsive practices to prepare their youth to be engaged citizens of their tribe – from early childhood education through adulthood – since time immemorial (Romero-Little, 2010). However, academic discourse of the benefits of CRS in mainstream, state, and federally controlled schools began to steadily increase in the 1960s as research on the benefits of CRS showed positive outcomes in enhancing educational experiences and achievement for diverse students. In other words, research has found that when CRS is engaged, students excel academically and display enhanced well-being, selfefficacy, and self-esteem (McCarty, 2009). The result allows students to develop healthy identity formation, be more self-directed, politically active, and have a positive influence on their tribal communities (Kana‘iaupuni et al., 2013; Siekmann et al., 2017).

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This Handbook of Critical Pedagogies illustrates the many overlapping issues and calls to action that resonate with diverse lived experiences and communities. The unique presence of treaties signed between sovereign Indigenous nations and the US federal government means CRS for Indigenous youth must acknowledge the history and trust responsibility of the US federal government with tribal nations. It must also engage the particular regional and local histories and ties to land that intimately inform educational opportunities for Indigenous youth. Although this chapter is mostly focused on the context of Indigenous education in the United States, globally many of the same patterns and calls to action are present. A primary argument we advance is the central role of place in CRS. Thus it would be contradictory for us to attempt to generalize our comments to all Indigenous First Nations peoples across the globe. We do, of course, hope that our writing holds some resonance in various and multiple contexts. The guiding thesis throughout this chapter is that truly culturally responsive schooling for and with Indigenous youth is a highly complex endeavor that requires systemic change within and across a number of levels of schooling. Our work draws from the work of critical pedagogy scholars who urge us to consider the socially constructed nature of education and understand that education processes, policies, and practices are neither accidental nor natural but, rather, the result of the social, historical, and political processes that have shaped them. We argue that an important way to respond to some of the tensions and concerns raised by critical pedagogy is through consistent and ongoing use of CRS. CRS shares the required complexity of Critical Pedagogy; both involving much more than shifts in pedagogy and curriculum. They require consistently high expectations for students; the facilitation

of meaningful learning, engagement, and capacity-building; and a curricular and pedagogical approach that allows students to deeply analyze power, marginalization, and resilience within their own and other communities. Because CRS is an important aspect of critical pedagogies, it requires us to reconceptualize success so that community-based and traditional knowledges are valued alongside mainstream academic knowledges. Both CRS and Critical Pedagogies share a commitment to the fact that place and context matter. Like the community-based legacies of Critical Pedagogies, CRS has been advocated by community leaders and scholars since at least the 1960s, but given its focus on place and context and particularly on land, language, and shared historic cultural knowledge, CRS is an educational approach that has been engaged by Indigenous communities for much longer. Key elements of this approach include that tribal sovereignty and self-determination are explicitly and consistently addressed in the teaching and learning process, that the racism experienced by Indigenous youth is acknowledged and remediated, and that Indigenous Knowledge Systems are deeply embedded into curriculum and pedagogy. Educators and scholars must move away from the essentializing identities, generalizations, and easy anecdotes referenced in the bulk of extant academic literature. Instead, educators, administrators, and education advocates must move toward engaging in genuinely culturally responsive learning for Indigenous youth. In other words, if the decolonizing and anti-racist vision to which critical educators aspire is to be attained, schooling must explicitly acknowledge and resist both historic and contemporary efforts to ‘kill the Indian and save the man’. The next section presents an expanded overview of CRS, especially its links to both colonization and Whiteness in Native schooling policy and practice.

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THE IMPERATIVE FOR CRS Considered both a racial group as well as a political group, American Indians are one of the most unique groups in the United States. This dual status is the result of Native peoples entering into over 371 treaty agreements with the United States, which resulted in Indigenous peoples exchanging approximately one billion acres of land for a series of promises tied to peaceful interactions between themselves and the federal government. Over 100 treaties were signed that explicitly note education as a trust responsibility of the US federal government. While the federal government agreed to provide educational opportunities for Indigenous students, this exchange was not without substantial cost to Indigenous communities. The existence of treaty agreements set the conditions for the creation of reservations that, in many cases, forcibly displaced Native peoples from their ancestral homelands to defined land masses held in trust by the federal government. Reservation lands were expected to remain pastoral lands and were traded for promises of the health, education, and general well-being of Indigenous peoples. As just one example, Article VI of the 1868 Navajo-US Treaty stated: In order to insure the civilization of the Indians entering into this treaty, the necessity of education is admitted, especially of such of them as may be settled on said agricultural parts of this reservation, and they therefore pledge themselves to compel their children, male and female, between the ages of six and sixteen years, to attend school; and it is hereby made the duty of the agent for said Indians to see that this stipulation is strictly complied with and the United States agrees that, for every thirty children between said ages who can be induced or compelled to attend school, a house shall be provided, and a teacher competent to teach the elementary branches of an English education shall be furnished, who will reside among said Indians, and faithfully discharge his or her duties as a teacher. (Article VI of the 1868 Navajo-US Treaty)

This agreement demonstrates an established trust relationship between the Diné (Navajo

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tribe) and the US federal government as it related to schooling. It also illustrates how education and political control was siphoned from local, tribal communities to the federal government. The promise that ‘the United States agrees…’ to provide ‘a teacher competent to teach the elementary branches of an English education…’ meant that education would now be administered by federal government employees or, when necessary, by Christian settler missionaries. Unbeknownst to Indigenous peoples, in an effort to strengthen the White US nation-state, many of these treaty agreements resulted in schooling that is deeply rooted in federal, state, and local government’s desire for assimilation and colonization (Brayboy, 2005a; Deyhle and Swisher, 1997; Lipka, 2002; SkutnabbKangas and McCarty, 2008; Lomawaima and McCarty, 2006). The resulting education, concentrated on Anglo-Saxon Protestant values and lessons, advanced violent cultural and epistemological practices that marginalized, silenced, or destroyed the presence of Indigenous knowledges and practices in educational environments. In 1892, US Army Captain Richard Pratt delivered a now infamous speech at George Mason University where he espoused ideas that became the driving force for the development of the Carlisle Indian School (founded in 1879) and other boarding schools across the country. Pratt argued education should be used to ‘Kill the Indian, and Save the Man’, meaning its goal was to ‘civilize’ and ‘Americanize’ the Indian. Pratt ran his schools like a military unit, sometimes implementing corporal punishment for students who expressed desire for their Indigenous languages, spiritual practices, families and even their styles of dress. Under Pratt, schooling became a tool and weapon to assimilate Native students beyond their ability to identify with their tribe or traditional languages, practices, ways of thinking, and ways of being. Yet this was not at all what most Indigenous nations had in mind when

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they entered into treaties and other schooling agreements. Although the federal government no longer forcibly removes Indigenous students from their homes to physically and epistemologically violent boarding schools, the effects of historic trauma resulting from Pratt’s assimilatory and pernicious schooling remain and may manifest in a deep distrust of federal and local education systems. Pratt’s ideology may also influence teacher and administrator expectations of schooling and may become manifest in low teacher and administrator expectations of Indigenous students. Today, education disparities persist throughout all age ranges for Native students. Compared to non-Native peers, American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian students score lower on standardized exams, have lower college enrollment, and experience lower graduation rates at the secondary and postsecondary levels. Native students are more likely to be mislabeled for special education and less likely to graduate high school, experiencing a 67% graduation rate, the lowest of any racial/ethnic demographic group (Kena et  al., 2016; Stetser and Stillwell, 2014). They are more likely be referred to as ‘at-risk’ and framed as dysfunctional and prone to violence and substance abuse (US Department of Education, 2008). Such framing means Native students are more likely to be referred to discipline officers or experience premature ‘push out’ from academic institutions than to be placed on a collegetrack. And although there was a 39% increase in the overall American Indian/Alaska Native population from 2000 to 2010, college enrollment and degree attainment continues to be at or below 1%. The presence of historic trauma faced by many Native communities and their youth may negatively influence students’ present academic expectations and experiences (Chan and Bambico, 2016). Native students are more likely to report elevated feelings of isolation, confusion, and despair. While some researchers argue feelings of isolation and

confusion may be connected to loss of cultural identity, particularly for Native men and boys, what is important to note is that Native students are more likely to feel unwanted or like they do not belong in schooling systems than to report they feel supported, understood, and welcome (Brayboy et  al., 2017). This education context means Native children continue to fall further and further behind in a system which, according to McCarty (2009), leads ‘underperforming’ schools to teach to the test, remove ‘low-performing’ students from the testing pool, eliminate or curtail non-test subjects like art and social studies, and artificially manipulate test scores and drop-out rates. All these factors contribute to a pervasive deficit-oriented mindset of Native student potential. There has, of course, been resistance to efforts to ignore, ‘push-out’, or assimilate and colonize Native students. Perhaps the first officially recognized call for CRS in the United States came in 1928 with the publication of the Meriam Report (Meriam et al., 1928; Prucha, 2000). In the 1960s and 1970s, tribal nations and urban Indian communities increased pressure on the federal government to facilitate educational change and greater tribal control over the education of Indigenous youth. These efforts led to a number of important pieces of legislation and federal investigations related to Indigenous education and, specifically, the role of tribal languages and cultures in schools serving Indigenous youth. In 1969, the US Senate issued a report titled Indian Education: A National Tragedy – A National Challenge, which was the beginning of a series of important events (Special Subcommittee on Indian Education, 1969). The Havighurst Report of 1970 offered data on the academic performance of Indigenous youth and the lack of curriculum that supported tribal languages and cultures in schools (Fuchs and Havighurst, 1973; Havighurst, 1970), the Indian Education Act of 1972 included opportunities and funding for creating tribal culture and language programs for schools and

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support for increasing the number of Native educators, and the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 facilitated the development of schools and educational programs that were tribally controlled (Demmert and Towner, 2003). In the 1980s, the educational anthropology literature exploded with a focus on CRS (called by a number of names; see, e.g., Brown, 1980; Deyhle, 1986; Greenbaum and Greenbaum, 1983; McLaughlin, 1989). This scholarship, combined with related work in the fields of education and multicultural education, seemed to bring the discussion of CRS into the mainstream. In the 1990s, another series of federal legislation and reports were issued relating specifically to Indigenous youth in schools. The Native American Languages Act of 1990/1992 formalized the importance of the federal government’s role in preserving, protecting, and promoting the rights and freedoms of tribal language use and preservation. In 1991, the US Department of Education issued a report titled Indian Nations at Risk: An Educational Strategy for Action Final Report (US Indian Nations at Risk Task Force, 1991), and in 1992, the White House Conference on Indian Education and a follow-up report were completed (White House Conference on Indian Education, 1992). In 1998, then-President Clinton issued Executive Order 13096 on American Indian and Alaska Native education, which included recognition of the ‘special, historic responsibility for the education of American Indian and Alaska Native students’, a commitment to ‘improving the academic performance and reducing the dropout rate’ of Indigenous students, and a nationwide effort among tribal leaders and Indian education scholars to develop a ‘research agenda’ guided by the goals of self-determination and the preservation of tribal cultures and languages (American Indian and Alaska Native Education, 1998). This Executive Order includes the goals of evaluating ‘promising

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practices used with’ Indigenous students, evaluating ‘the role of Native language and culture in the development of educational strategies’, and assisting ‘tribal governments in meeting the unique educational needs of their children, including the need to preserve, revitalize, and use native languages and cultural traditions’. However, a new Executive Order (13336) signed into law on April 30, 2004, did not include the final of these three goals (American Indian and Alaska Native Education, 2004). Instead, 13336 focused attention on Indigenous students meeting the goals established in No Child Left Behind (2002). This is a significant change and highlights concern that schools are moving further away from providing an effective, high-quality, and culturally responsive education to Indigenous youth. This hyper-focus on test scores and other standardized forms of assessing educational success is, of course, part of a much larger trend highlighted throughout this volume on Critical Pedagogy. Like Critical Pedagogies in general, CRS forces a reorienting of how educators, policy makers, and other key stakeholders conceptualize success. According to CRS, success is about both academic school-based learning and achievement and community-based and self-determined learning. This definition includes contributions to one’s family, community, and tribal nation. This both/ and understanding of success is consistent with the many calls for CRS by scholars, tribal communities, and Indigenous educational leaders (Beaulieu, 2006; Beaulieu et al., 2005; Demmert, Grissmer et al., 2006; Demmert, McCardle et al., 2006; Dick et al., 1994; Klump and McNeir, 2005).

A NOTE OF CAUTION Although the plethora of writing on CRS reviewed here is insightful, it has had little impact on what teachers do because it is too

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easily reduced to essentializations, meaningless generalizations, or trivial anecdotes – none of which result in systemic, institutional, or lasting changes to schools serving Indigenous youth. Indeed, the reason CRS is so often reduced in these ways is because of the way Whiteness shapes and structures education (see, for example, Castagno, 2008; Gillborn, 2005; Leonardo, 2009; Vaught, 2011; Vaught and Castagno, 2008). Whiteness refers to the structural arrangements and ideologies of racial dominance within the United States. Racial power and inequities are at the core of Whiteness, but all forms of power and inequity create and perpetuate Whiteness (Castagno, 2014). In the context of the schooling of Indigenous youth, Whiteness is most directly manifest through colonization and assimilation, as well as race-based inequities and aggressions. Whiteness, colonization, and assimilation collectively attempt to maintain and legitimate inequitable schooling and marginalization of Indigenous youth, knowledge, and sovereignty. Three topics that are rarely included in discussions of CRS are racism, sovereignty, and Indigenous knowledges or epistemologies. Racism is a pervasive and consistent element in the schooling experiences of Indigenous youth. Students experience racism in a number of ways and from a variety of sources, including paternalism, prejudice, harmful assumptions, low expectations, stereotypes, violence, and biased curricular materials (see, e.g., Deyhle, 1995; HicklingHudson and Ahlquist, 2003; Sparks, 2000; Ward, 1998). Racism also contributes to the culture of Whiteness that predominates in most US schools. Whiteness is manifest in the predominantly White educational faculty, the social relations, the norms and expectations, and the inequitable access to resources and quality education within our school system (see, e.g., Castagno, 2014; Lee, 2005; Sleeter, 1996). These are just a few of the reasons it is critical that educators attempting to engage in CRS understand the dynamics of racism and the ways in which racism

and oppression affect efforts at providing a high-quality CRS to Indigenous youth. The Critical Race Theory scholarship (see, e.g., Bernal, 2002; Delgado and Stefancic, 2001; Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995; Tate, 1997) offers a broader discussion of the pervasiveness of racism in society, and Brayboy’s (2005a) work on Tribal Critical Race Theory along with Grande’s (2004) Red Pedagogy shed light on the various forms of colonization affecting Indigenous students (see also Castagno, 2005; Castagno and Lee, 2007). While CRS must engage issues of race, it must also be driven by the sovereign status of tribal nations and concomitant political identity of Native people in the United States. Tribal nations have inherent rights to determine the nature of schooling provided to their youth. For many Indigenous communities, achievement in education is believed to be critical for redressing the systemic inequities impacting Native communities nationally. Although tribal communities have a strong sense of the connections between education, sovereignty, and self-determination, these connections are rarely recognized among mainstream educators or educational policy makers. Educators must therefore work in agile organizational environments to promote self-determination for tribal nations. This means ensuring that teachers are familiar with the political status of Native students and aware that Native students may be engaged academically with a larger goal to serve their community. Such dedication and commitment to schooling as a way of serving their community means education needs to be relevant to the current context and needs facing Indigenous communities. CRS programs may need to influence and personalize curriculum to prepare the student with relevant knowledge and skills needed to advocate for his/her community (Bequette, 2016). Lastly, some understanding of epistemological and ontological concerns is important for educators hoping to engage in CRS for Indigenous youth because an individual’s epistemology and ontology are fundamental

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to how s/he understands knowledge and how s/he individual engages the world. Epistemology refers to ‘ways of knowing’ while ontology is situated as ‘ways of being’ (Castagno and Brayboy, 2008). This does not mean educators must give up their own epistemologies and ontologies and adopt those of the community in which they teach. Such an approach to CRS may be neither possible nor appropriate. Instead, educators must come to know that multiple epistemologies and ontologies exist and that their students may come to school with a very different worldview than they themselves have grown up with. Infusing Indigenous knowledges and epistemologies into CRS may additionally mean recognizing important roles or life stages for members of the community and developing awareness of cultural expectations or duties associated with each stage (Bequette, 2016; Ross, 2016; Siekmann et al., 2017). Battiste (2002: 2) notes that ‘Indigenous knowledge comprises the complex set of technologies developed and sustained by Indigenous civilizations’ and that these knowledges are ‘passed on to the next generation through modeling, practice, and animation’. Other Indigenous scholars note that these knowledges serve as threads, which, once woven together, make up the cultural cloth of particular communities (Meyer, 2001). There are components of these knowledge systems that include a central focus on communities (Battiste, 2002; Deloria, 1970), a sense of relationality (Burkhardt, 2004; Marker, 2004; Meyer, 2001), notions of responsibility to self and community (Basso, 1996; Burkhardt, 2004; Deloria, 1970; Medicine and Jacobs, 2001), a rootedness in place (Barnhardt and Kawagley, 2004, 2005; Basso, 1996; Cajete, 2001; Marker, 2004; Okakok, 1989), and a responsible use of power (Basso, 1996; Stoffle et al., 2001). CRS is rooted in Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the recognition of racism and the pernicious impact of Whiteness, colonization, and assimilation on tribal nations and Indigenous peoples. Thus, CRS for and

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with Native youth must be aimed at increasing and deepening students’ awareness of the history of oppression both locally and globally. Here again, we see how CRS intersects with core principles of Critical Pedagogy. Both Critical Pedagogy and CRS require analysis of the ways that power, marginalization, and resistance shape history, beliefs, policy, law, and knowledge production. But this learning must not be left in the past; students must critically examine how these patterns continue in the present day and collectively consider how they might promote anti-colonial, anti-racist, and emancipatory strategies within and across their communities. When CRS is engaged, students excel academically, display enhanced well-being, develop healthy identity formation, are more self-directed and politically active, and have a positive influence on their tribal communities (Kana‘iaupuni et  al., 2013; Siekmann et al., 2017).

CRS IS SITUATED IN PLACE CRS rests on understanding what David Wilkins has referred to as the 4 T’s: treaties, trust, territory, and tribal sovereignty. Treaties form the basis of a trust relationship with the United States, making the federal government responsible for the health, education, and general well-being of Native peoples, on and off reservations. Trust refers to the unique relationship between the US federal government, tribal sovereigns, and individual tribal members. Rooted in treaties and allotment, the Trust relationship entitles tribes (through tribal governments or individuals) to traditional rights guaranteed by treaties (e.g., hunting, fishing, and water rights) and preserved by the inherent sovereignty of tribes. As trustee, the federal government is required to act in the best interest of the beneficiaries: tribal sovereigns and tribal members (Deloria and Wilkins, 2010; Wilkins and Lomawaima, 2001).

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As suggested earlier, efforts to educate American Indians are and have been primarily funded by the federal government. These monies are set aside as part of the education and interior budgets (with supplements coming from agriculture and health and human services); although, originally, the belief was that the monies would come from revenues earned from natural resource extraction in communities and leases of lands held in trust. Territory refers to the role of land and the importance of place to Indigenous peoples. Finally, tribal sovereignty is the inherent right of tribal nations to direct their futures and engage the world in ways that are meaningful to them. CRS draws on other educational approaches, including culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995a,b), culturally relevant curriculum (Siekmann et al., 2017), and environmental or place-based education (Pewewardy and Hammer, 2003). All are educational approaches that are place-based and specific to the location and communities where students reside. These approaches incorporate aspects of the student’s and community’s geographic location, language, identity, and heritage into the curriculum and pedagogy. Pedagogy encapsulates how we think about both teaching and learning; it requires responsibility, respect, and humility. Fundamentally, a culturally responsive pedagogy requires that educators and schools ‘invest in the intellectual resources present in local communities’ (McCarty, 2009: 22). This means that schooling specific to the needs and experiences of Native students recognizes that education and school matter significantly in the quality of life of Indigenous students. CRS roots approaches to improving student success to their communities and culture and recognizes that education goes beyond the formal and Westernized notion of schooling to also include learning within Indigenous communities. Such learning often is family-, community-, and environmentally based, connecting students to their ancestral

homelands and allowing for important ceremonies and sacred practices to take place. As mentioned in the previous section, while CRS must engage issues of race, the sovereign status of tribal nations and the concomitant political identity of Native people in the United States also requires the engagement of sovereignty and self-determination in the schooling of Indigenous youth. Hundreds of treaties and thousands of constitutional rulings, executive orders, and legislative acts have acknowledged and reaffirmed the sovereign status of tribal nations, the unique government-to-government relationship between tribal nations and the federal government, and the trust responsibility of the United States to tribal nations (Wilkins, 1997, 2002; Wilkins and Lomawaima, 2001). The ramifications on education for Indigenous youth are both wide and deep in scope, but they include – at a minimum – that tribal nations have inherent rights to determine the nature of schooling provided to their youth. This right is more threatened than ever given the current conditions on schooling in the United States, high-stakes accountability, and standardization (Lomawaima and McCarty, 2006). Although tribal communities have a strong sense of the connections between education, sovereignty, and self-determination, these connections are rarely recognized among mainstream educators or educational policy makers. An important exception resides in the Coolongatta Statement on Indigenous Rights in Education, which is an international effort among Indigenous peoples from a number of countries to reassert their identities as tribal nations and the status of education as a human right (King, 2005).

CURRICULAR + SYSTEMIC FOCUS CRS comes largely out of the cultural difference literature, and it assumes that

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a firm grounding in the heritage language and culture indigenous to a particular place is a fundamental prerequisite for the development of culturally-healthy students and communities associated with that place, and thus is an essential ingredient for identifying the appropriate qualities and practices associated with culturally-responsive educators, curriculum, and schools. (Alaska Native Knowledge Network, 1998)

This educational approach requires a shift in teaching methods, curricular materials, teacher dispositions, and school–community relations. In other words, CRS is complex and systemic; it must inform all levels of the educational system. While much of the writing about cultural responsiveness focuses on curriculum, curricular materials alone cannot lead to the sort of systemic change that is required to truly serve Indigenous youth effectively. Curriculum must be paired with policy, teacher professional development, discipline approaches, relationships with families and elders, and leadership. Because curriculum is a critical component of CRS, attention to culturally responsive curriculum must be considered. In our work with teachers and schools in Native communities, we often hear about the desperate need for curricular material that is culturally responsive. We do not advocate for a standard set of curricular materials since this would contradict the fundamental principles we’ve outlined regarding the importance of place and local knowledge. But we do offer the following principles that can guide the development of culturally responsive curriculum: • A culturally-responsive curriculum reinforces the integrity of the cultural knowledge that students bring with them. • A culturally-responsive curriculum recognizes cultural knowledge as part of a living and constantly adapting system that is grounded in the past, but continues to grow through the present and into the future. • A culturally-responsive curriculum uses the local language and cultural knowledge as a foundation for the rest of the curriculum.

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• A culturally-responsive curriculum fosters a complementary relationship across knowledge derived from diverse knowledge systems. (Alaska Native Knowledge Network, 1998) • A culturally-responsive curriculum situates local knowledge and actions in a global context. (Alaska Native Knowledge Network, 1998)

Culturally responsive curriculum must be connected to students’ lives, represent their cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and present accurate images of both the past and present (Agbo, 2001; Skinner, 1999). It will tap into students’ curiosity and engage them in topics that are interesting to them; it does this without watering down, but rather by strengthening the quality of learning materials (Cleary and Peacock, 1998; Sparks, 2000).

RELATIONALLY, CULTURALLY, AND ACADEMICALLY ACCOUNTABLE CRS focuses on sustained engagement with crucial academic subject matter and standards. Often, CRS efforts that ‘work’ include an obvious connection to language and culture. The inclusion and engagement of language and culture, however, does not – nor should it – come at the expense of academic success. Simultaneously, while the academic, schooling parts of this are crucial, they must not completely override the linguistic and cultural components of CRS. Indeed, when done well, the schooling should complement the linguistic and cultural and vice versa. Parents and tribal leaders do not argue that academics are unimportant; rather, most have suggested that schools are responsible for teaching their children how to read, write, do math, think critically, and be ready for an ever-changing world. There is a commitment to seeing that young people must engage the world around them; as a result, CRS rejects deficit-oriented education. Schooling and its processes must be accountable.

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Accountability is not about pointing out where children or schools have failed; accountability is about making sure that schools and the schooling process do what they say they are doing. This happens, in part, when schools are able to incorporate local standards of success in context with communities. Communities have specific ideas of what constitutes a successful education for their children, and it is never rooted in deficits. It is critical that teachers and educational leaders have high standards for Native children, schools, and communities. CRS creates opportunities for teachers to engage as critical thinkers and doers and to open up the power of students’ minds and capabilities. Teachers – as culturally responsive and critical pedagogues – facilitate the process of student learning, engagement, and capacity-building. Effective CRS contributes substantively and positively to learners’ personal well-being and their academic and ethnic identities. CRS promotes positive relationships. Academics are vitally important, but attention to the whole child is also vitally important. As such CRS allows and facilitates students’ abilities to be both ‘good Indians’ and ‘good students’ (Brayboy, 2005b). These identities of being a good student and a functional participating member of one’s community are not contradictory. All of this requires that teachers and educational leaders ‘facilitate learners’ self-efficacy, their critical capacity, and their intrinsic motivation as thinkers, readers, writers, and ethical social agents’ (McCarty, 2009: 22). CRS requires educators and administrators to consider how we engage in relationships. If we are responsible for the well-being of our students, we are careful, reflective, and thoughtful. When we are driven by the well-being of those with whom we are in relationships, the learning process is two-way, productive, and modeled in an arena of respect. And we teach to the possibilities of excellence, moving away from

teaching to the bottom denominator. It is clear that teachers and educational leaders are crucial to this process. Teachers, educational leaders, and students (and their communities) are all in relation with each other and with curriculum. CRS for and with Indigenous youth can only be accomplished by building relationships with local tribal education agencies and community members to promote Indigenous self-determination (Siekmann et  al., 2017). This requires consultation and review of school policies and student handbooks to ensure discriminatory policies and procedures are mitigated. It also requires engagement with place (localized and context-specific). Educators must understand and believe that students’ language and culture are assets, rather than deficits; and schooling must be viewed as an investment in the intellectual resources of local communities. Lastly, CRS requires learning the history of the local Indigenous people, including the sacred and historically significant places within the community, state, or region. Listening to the stories that students share about their families, life experiences, and histories is important because it allows us to imagine new possibilities through students’ perspectives. The goal should be to facilitate learners’ self-efficacy and bolster their critical capacities and intrinsic motivation as thinkers, readers, writers, and ethical social agents (McCarty, 2009), since education must be relevant to the current struggles facing youth and must aid in learning about policies, rights, and status of Indigenous peoples (and their nation) so they can aid in nation building.

STRENGTHS-BASED AND CAPACITY-BUILDING TOWARD NATION BUILDING CRS is strengths-based in that it focuses on the promises and possibilities of people,

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their communities, and their homelands. For Indigenous students, strengths-based schooling draws on the collective, with an eye toward creating a community of interdependent learners to address challenges. It sees wisdom in intergenerational exchanges of knowledge that produce culturally and linguistically vibrant communities. Community-based methods of learning have increasingly been used to improve performance within CRS classrooms. For example, some school programs have utilized monthly talking circles to engage truant students, provide a space to learn, and provide feedback for one another (First Nations Development Institute, 2016). This approach to education specifically invites the presence of Native adults who serve as role models or elders that imbue important cultural teachings and knowledges. The inclusion of elders, especially for male students, helps to provide mentorship, establish and reinforce stronger ties to community, and teach how American Indians see the role of one another in relation to themselves, family, and the community at large. These teachings contribute to the process in which student identities are defined, redefined, and decolonized. As Gay (2000: 3) has noted, ‘culturally responsive education recognizes, respects, and uses students’ identities and backgrounds as meaningful sources for creating optimal learning environments’. CRS includes cultural practices in intervention(s), personal and emotional influences, and other individualized details regarding educational access, persistence, and attainment. And it recognizes the importance of place. Research on CRS approaches in particular communities reports elevated levels of student achievement and student education satisfaction (Lipka et  al., 2008; McCarty et  al., 2010). Practitioners have talked at regional and national meetings about how incorporating aspects of their students’ culture and environment has positively impacted student success and, in some

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cases, brought elevated professional satisfaction for the teacher. CRS requires a focus on practice and supporting teacher development. CRS recognizes teachers as change makers and supports their professionalism. Part of the importance of CRS as we’ve conceptualized it is that it allows for the preparation of the next generation of teachers and leaders in Native communities. CRS is generally talked about in terms of its immediate impacts on youth, but we want to suggest that it is also about young people who will grow to become teachers, principals, and community leaders – it is, therefore, a capacity-building endeavor that can lead to systemic change away from colonization and Whiteness and toward self-determination and tribal nation building. There are over 560 federally recognized tribes in the US nation-state, each with their own history, cultural practices, knowledges, and, in some cases, languages. With this diversity comes a diverse way of thinking about schooling and education. CRS cannot, therefore, be thought of as a generalizable or one-size-fits-all ‘magic bullet’ to improve the schooling of Indigenous youth. The inclination of the general public has been to ask for details on how to replicate critical pedagogies, including CRS approaches, that they hear about or see in other communities. But what works for one community may not translate and work as successfully in another because localized knowledge is just that – localized. When CRS is engaged in standardized or generalized ways, it cannot possibly happen in place and it cannot possibly begin to engage the capacity-building that also happens in unique ways within communities. Our articulation of CRS should thus be thought of as providing principles that can then be engaged uniquely with particular communities. Honoring diverse knowledge systems by locale, context, and protocol is required for CRS. In short, we are suggesting that place matters, and context matters.

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Ladson-Billings, G. (1995a). But that’s just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy. Theory Into Practice, 34(3), 159–165. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995b). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491. Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African American children. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. (1995). Toward a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record, 97(1), 47–64. Lee, S. (2005). Up against whiteness: Race, school, and immigrant youth. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Leonardo, Z. (2009). Race, whiteness, and education. New York, NY: Routledge. Lipka, J. (2002). Schooling for self-determination: Research on the effects of including Native language and culture in the schools. Charleston, WV: ERIC Clearinghouse on Rural and Small Schools. Lipka, J., Hogan, M. P., Webster, J. P., Yanez, E. Adams, B., Clark, S., & Lacy, D. (2008). Math in a cultural context: Two case studies of a successful culturally based math project. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 6(4), 367–385. Lomawaima, K. T., & McCarty, T. L. (2006). ‘To remain an Indian’: Lessons in democracy from a century of Native American education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Marker, M. (2004). Theories and disciplines as sites of struggle: The reproduction of colonial dominance through the controlling of knowledge in the academy. Canadian Journal of Native Education, 28(1/2), 102–110. McCarty, T. L. (2009). The impact of highstakes accountability policies on Native American learners: Evidence from research. Teaching Education, 20(1), 7–29. McCarty, T. L. with Brayboy, B. McK. J., & Silver, K. M. (2010). The role of Native languages and cultures in American Indian/Alaska Native student achievement. The Puente de Hozho case study. Policy paper prepared for Kauffman and Associates, Inc., under contract with the US Department of Education Office of Indian Education, Washington, DC. McLaughlin, D. (1989). The sociolinguistics of Navajo literacy. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 20(4), 275–290.

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65 Feminist Critical Pedagogy Haggith Gor Ziv

INTRODUCTION The goal of feminist critical pedagogy (FCP) is to create equal educational opportunities for boys and girls, women and men. FCP identifies educational practices that create gender inequality and seeks to transform them. FCP initiates multi-dimensional change in educational institutions involving subject matter, student–teacher relationships, instruction methods, school organization, learning spaces, holidays and public events and language and texts used in schools. It addresses both formal and informal education and focuses on the roles and status of women and girls in education and society. It examines the way traditional women’s roles ensure that school leaders and teachers are often women and also looks at the role of mothers and other important female figures in the lives of children. When I attended elementary school, there were separate craft lessons for boys and girls. Girls learned embroidery, while boys learned

carpentry. Twenty-three years later, Gal Harmat, a younger FCP colleague, tells of her memories of learning to cook while the boys did carpentry. She already knew how to cook, so asked to join the boys; she was refused and told ‘girls don’t do carpentry’. FCP has developed out of the theoretical and socio-historical insights of the feminist movement. FCP practices originally emerged in the context of women’s groups and feminist activism and organizations. Since then, FCP has become part of the academy, in dialogue with other schools of critical pedagogy. Initially feminist pedagogy was highly critical of other streams of critical pedagogy, as it was observed that they seemed to ignore women’s oppression. As a result of these critiques critical pedagogy has expanded its perspective to incorporate a feminist perspective. Today, the primary differences between critical pedagogy and feminist pedagogy are questions of emphasis and which issues are the primary topics of discussion. FCP represents the convergence of feminist pedagogy

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and critical pedagogy into one school, which has occurred gradually as a result of reciprocal influence and practical and conceptual sharing as a consequence of dialogue between the two streams.

both were involved in struggle to expand their possibilities as women in society. Their struggle for equality along with thousands of other women of their generation has transformed my life.

MY NARRATIVE HISTORY OF FCP

The Beginnings of Feminist Pedagogy

The Feminist Revolution The feminist revolution was one of the most significant revolutions of the modern period and perhaps the only revolution to occur through education rather than bloodshed. Women’s lives have been affected by this transformation and, certainly, in the West, we believe we have greater freedom than our grandmothers did. My father’s mother, my grandmother, never worked or completed formal studies even though she believed in equality for women. She was an educated woman who read a lot. Her brothers graduated university with doctorates and managed a factory. She expressed her intellectual talents at home, educating her son and grandchildren. My other grandmother worked her whole life. She came from a poor family in Poland and raised my mother alone as a single parent in Czechoslovakia, where lower-class women always worked. She made wigs for religious women and hoped that my mother would become a hairdresser so that she would never be dependent on a man. She survived harsh labor in Auschwitz, with the hope to reunite with my mother. She exercised the right to vote for the first time, already halfway through her life, when she came to the State of Israel, following my mother. The status of my two grandmothers did not reflect their talents, nor the social status of the men with whom they were connected. They were marginalized. Born when women did not have voting rights, my two grandmothers were independent women who did not see themselves as feminists, although

The practices and approach of FCP emerged from women’s consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s. These groups were a forum for women to discuss their experiences with one another and to find commonalities between them. They became essential for discussing the division of labor in the family, women’s role in society, women’s employment and other issues. The discussions were both emotional and intellectual, providing both information and support to the participants. The groups were premised on the idea that knowledge was shared by all members of the group and this became a basis for feminist pedagogy’s alternative model of learning, which looks at both teachers and learners as partners in the creation of knowledge. These groups were also attentive to the unique ‘ways of knowing’ amongst women that might be overlooked in conventional educational frameworks. While these groups were the starting point for feminist pedagogy as an organized set of ideas, there were important forerunners in the early history of feminism, in particular, the activism of Jane Addams and Margaret Sanger. Jane Addams (1860–1935) founded the Settlement House movement and the first Hall House in the slums of Chicago. She offered women medical treatment, legal aid, childcare, English language courses and job training. The house itself was managed as a cooperative by the immigrant women it served. This gave women the opportunity to gain experience in public administration as well as training in management positions that were at the time still closed

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to them. John Dewey was amongst the academics who came to teach at the Settlement Houses founded by Addams. Dewey was a philosopher, psychologist and educator who wrote about the school as a social center for children and supported the development of creative thinking as opposed to rote learning. Dewey credited Jane Addams with many of his progressive ideas which he had learned from her. Another example of early feminist pedagogy is found in the activism of Margaret Sanger (1879–1966). Margaret Sanger taught poor women about fertility, pregnancy and birth control by setting up a health care center in the slums of New York. She provided women with contraceptives at a time when this was still illegal. The women who Sanger helped had no access to birth control, giving birth nearly every year, at considerable physical, personal and economic price. The education which they received from Sanger allowed them to take control of their lives; however, Sanger’s activities were considered to be illegal and immoral. She was hunted by the police and sentenced to prison. Sanger and Addams are prime examples of pioneers in the field of feminist pedagogy, practitioners of its principles long before the term was coined. Their work was influential in the struggle for suffrage and in the battle for women’s rights.

University Gender Studies and Feminist Pedagogy Through the introduction of women’s studies and later gender studies, feminist subject matter and research methods have penetrated academia across all faculties. The integration of gender studies departments in universities is significant as it allows feminist thought to proliferate and to increase its influence throughout academia. Within academia, feminists have challenged the truth of many of the hallowed foundations of Western

thought. Indeed, feminist thought has itself influenced the culture of academia in many significant ways. While feminist thought has infiltrated and influenced the academy, academic teaching methods, even within gender studies departments, have remained largely traditional in their approach, continuing conventional teaching practices that are known to be harmful to women and other marginalized groups. Gender studies departments have been faced with the serious task of justifying their existence within academia and not able to simultaneously lead a revolutionary change in academic pedagogy. Therefore, while the ideas and concepts circulating in gender studies departments might be radical, teaching and pedagogy have retained the repressive and hierarchical ‘banking’ model of education (Regev, 1997). In this model, hierarchy, authority and discipline are maintained, learning is perceived as a linear process, evaluation encourages competition, and the teacher has the knowledge while the students are more passive. FCP attempts to use politically aware teaching methods to replace oppressive processes and structures. It seeks to reveal the divisions of power both within and outside the classroom and to politicize the observed reality. Many gender studies departments do not apply feminist pedagogy and instead preserve the academic structure intact, along with its many oppressive aspects. As a result of the growing influence of feminists in academia and in gender studies specifically, certain feminist practices and principles have been assimilated into academic culture. For example, feminists have ensured the acceptance of qualitative research methods that are based on empowering interviewees, as well as other methods that advance the interests of the researched communities. Using these methods, a generation of activist researchers have sought to transform injustices (Fine and Weis, 2004; Reinharz, 1992).

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Women’s Activist and Consciousness-Raising Groups in the 1960s and 1970s Despite significant achievements, educational frameworks used in university gender studies departments are sharply different from those developed in the consciousnessraising groups of the 1960s and 1970s. These groups inserted feminist insights directly into their pedagogy, developing new ways of learning and generating knowledge, techniques which were demonstrated at a range of high-profile feminist events and conferences, like the Greenham Common Peace Camp in Britain, a protest against nuclear armament. Women who participated in these events shared their thoughts and gave voice to personal experiences and developed accounts of the common threads in their lived reality. Through story and sharing they created insights and generalizations that challenged prevailing views and beliefs about power relations between women and men.

Feminist criticism of critical pedagogy Initially, feminist scholars engaged in pedagogy were highly critical of the field of critical pedagogy, specifically, the writings of Paulo Freire, as primarily critiques on the basis of class and examples of the oppression of White lower-class men by White men of higher social classes. Over time, feminist critiques led to an eventual synthesis of critical and feminist pedagogy. Both approaches share much common ground, rooted in progressive education theory, drawing on the life’s work of Addams and Dewey. The approaches share a common commitment that school is life itself and not a preparation for ‘real’ life that happens after school. As a result of collaboration and sharing, feminist pedagogy has synthesized many of its key insights into the field of critical pedagogy, making the latter a more robust and powerful critique of existing power structures.

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In her book Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks writes that while reading Freire’s work she was constantly aware of his sexist language (hooks, 1994). She criticizes Freire for basing his views on a ‘phallocentric paradigm’ of liberation, in which freedom is always understood from a male perspective. In addition to his use of the word ‘man’ to refer to all human beings, Freire refers only to class oppression of men by other men. Nonetheless, hooks felt a great intellectual closeness to Freire and wrote about the powerful experience of reading his books. hooks was impressed by Freire himself, having met him when he gave a lecture at the University of Santa Cruz, where she taught. By the time she learned of his lecture, all the tickets were ‘sold out’, which she later found out was a tactic to deliberately keep her from participating in the event. Undeterred, hooks managed to get into the lecture hall, where she attempted to ask a question about Freire’s refusal to recognize women’s oppression. The professors and students in the hall tried to silence her, but Freire would not cooperate. He heard her out and admitted her claims were just. He suggested that they begin an ongoing dialogue in which she would help him to become more aware of and sensitive to women’s inequality. This demonstrated powerfully the possibility of dialogue in which both learner and teacher grow together and create knowledge through this process. In Freire’s later writings, we do not see a greater awareness of women’s oppression, although he does use slightly less patriarchal language in his later books. Even after this event, it was still possible for some to note that Freire didn’t just ignore women in his discussion of oppression, he simply didn’t mention them at all. However, Freire delivered a keynote speech at the American Educational Research Association in the early 1990s discussing his use of masculine language, in which he also noted he had not been as aware of feminist ways of seeing and offered his apologies. The work of bell hooks makes a powerful case for understanding the multiple aspects

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of oppression, something which Freire does not succeed in doing. Her research develops the idea that we must consider the different identities of women and multiple sites of oppression that can operate in the life of the same woman. In Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, hooks describes a moment of awareness in her own life where she understood this connection between the components of multilayered oppression: We were on the freeway, going home from San Francisco. He was driving, we were arguing. He had told me repeatedly to shut up. I kept talking. He took his hand from the steering wheel and threw it back, hitting my mouth – my open mouth, blood gushed, and I felt an intense pain. I was no longer able to say any words, only to make whimpering, sobbing sounds. … I called the dentist the next morning and made an appointment. When the female voice asked what I needed to see the doctor about, I told her I had been hit in the mouth. Conscious of race, sex and class issues, I wondered how I would be treated in this white [sic] doctor’s office. I was hit by my companion at a time in life when a number of forces in the world outside our home had already ‘hit’ me, so to speak, made me painfully aware of my powerlessness, my marginality. It seemed then that I was confronting being black [sic] and female and without money in the worst possible ways. My world was spinning. I had already lost a sense of grounding and security. The memory of this experience has stayed with me as I have grown as a feminist, as I have thought deeply and read much on male violence against women, on adult violence against children. (hooks, 1989: 84, 85)

As feminist pedagogues, we must be sensitive to the social and cultural differences that exist, not only between men and women, but also between all races, rich and poor, people who are able-bodied and people who are disabled. We must be conscious of intersectionality and the way in which oppression of individuals and groups operates through multiple layers. Kathleen Weiler (1994) argues that in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire assumes that in the struggle against oppression, the

oppressed regain the humanity that the oppressor had attempted to deny them. However, he does not discuss the various forms of oppression, in particular, the way in which the experience of oppression differs between various marginalized groups. Freire makes universal claims about liberation and political change, but he does not investigate or question his own privileges as a White, middle-class man or address how liberation can operate in complex and contradictory ways amongst and between different groups. This absence of selfreflection was a failing from a feminist standpoint. Feminist scholars such as Elizabeth Ellsworth (1989) criticized critical pedagogues’ patriarchal practices and theories and stirred intense dispute. While Freire himself has become the subject of much debate in the feminist community, feminist critique has come to greatly influence critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy has expanded its horizons and improved substantially as a result of input from feminist scholars. Key academics in the field of critical pedagogy, including Ira Shor, Peter McLaren, Henry Giroux, Michael Apple and other White men, follow developments in feminist theory, study it and incorporate it in their writings. Male editors of critical education books give fair representation to gender issues; examples can be found in the article collections of David Gabbard (Gabbard, 2007; Saltman and Gabbard, 2003). Nonetheless, hooks’ critique of the phallocentric paradigm in critical pedagogy was and is valid, as is Carmen Luke’s and Jennifer Gore’s (1992) critique of the undisputed centrality of men in critical pedagogy. Internal group dynamics between male figures in the radical education field remain powerful, despite the field’s many critiques of elitist groups in other contexts. Inherent biases continue to contribute to the marginalization of women as thinkers and writers in the field of critical pedagogy and White men remain its undisputed center.

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THE CHARACTERISTICS AND PRACTICE OF FCP Implementation of FCP FCP involves a transformation of the basic components of teaching practices and represents a significant change from the conventional modes of study used in most educational institutions. In FCP, the focus is placed on the needs of the learners and teachers do not hold all the power in the classroom, they share ‘power’ with the learners, allowing them to influence both the learning process and materials used. Power is not based on rules and regulations, but on dialogue between learners and teacher. The teacher’s FCP outlook allows an ability to accept the goals of the learners and to enable the learners to look into their own lives, ask questions, analyze their experiences and derive from them generalizable theoretical principles (Shrewsbury, 1994: 8–16; Weiler, 1991: 449–74). In the FCP classroom there is an egalitarian relationship between the learners and the teacher; learners are encouraged to explore power relations in society and amongst the learners in the classroom. Their opinions are highly valued. The students themselves are seen as sources of knowledge and the learning process integrates activism to influence and improve student’s lives in a specific socio-political reality. The learning process encourages learners to advocate for marginalized groups, and in the FCP classroom there is a sense of struggle towards change. There is a recognition of the importance of both theory and practice and both teacher and students act against the alienation and distance that is prevalent in various forms of education (Welch, 1994). Educational processes connect social theory with the learner’s personal experience. In FCP, the personal is political. Some characteristics of FCP include: group learning, peer teaching and evaluation, balance between psycho-physical, affective and cognitive learning, use of the five senses,

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various alternative methods of learning, use of arts in learning, music, visual art, materials, engaging in listening, talking, writing, singing, practicing, manipulating, building playing, socio-dramatic play, case study, analysis and synthesis, indoor and outdoor excursions. Placing high levels of credit, belief and trust in the learners is essential. Yet some of these techniques and characteristics might exist in other forms of good education. FCP, however, is distinguished by its focus on raising consciousness regarding the social structures in learners’ lives and orienting education towards social justice and equality. These are the primary features of FCP, which distinguish it from other kinds of pedagogy.

THE UNIQUE CHARACTERISTICS OF FCP The Concept of the ‘Self-Evident’; What is ‘Natural’ and ‘Normal’? FCP attempts to deconstruct the worldview that maintains inequality between men and women as a natural, normal and inevitable condition. FCP exposes the interests that are served by this worldview, as well as how various mechanisms of oppression are maintained by our conceptual understanding of the world. We are educated to believe that people are unequal in their talents and abilities and that there is a direct connection between abilities and social and economic success. This leads to the belief that those who are talented succeed, and those who do not have the necessary abilities fail. We adopt these beliefs as an explanatory framework for understanding poverty and social inequality, believing, for example, that economic inequality is a feature of all societies and part of a natural and proper order of things. This leads people to feel less responsibility towards the poor; for example, when we see a homeless person on the street, while we feel pity, we do not feel responsible for their

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condition. We have been educated to see people who are born beautiful, healthy, wise and rich as successful, and people who have been born differently abled as having been dealt a cruel fate, for which we are in no way responsible. We shake our heads in sorrow when we encounter a person who is deaf, blind or disabled in other ways; however, we believe that their marginalization is not created by society. It also seems natural to many that young girls be dressed in pretty dresses, even if these clothes prevent them from playing and getting dirty. Many still don’t see this as an oppressive practice of male domination that actively constructs the marginalized place of girls in our society. FCP tries to identify these practices in the educational system and change them from within. FCP sees the ostensibly ‘natural’ social divisions as evidence of learned social constructs that disguise patriarchy. FCP aims to dismantle these social constructs and replace them with a sensitivity to all populations. Breaking down the structures of oppression is necessary to prevent educators from further entrenching them within the educational system by silencing the suffering of marginalized groups. Education teaches a certain way of understanding the world, through the lens of existing culture. FCP challenges the aspects of existing culture that harm women and other marginalized populations. An education for liberation is one that facilitates the critical assessment of the silenced stories of marginalized groups. By creating space for these stories, FCP seeks to bring about a changed consciousness as well as activism for social change. If girls are given cooking lessons and told not to dirty their dresses and boys are taught carpentry and given the opportunity to play freely, what is the chance that as young adults these men and women will be able to establish egalitarian relationships, where domestic and care responsibilities are evenly shared? FCP points out aspects of oppression that are common to all marginalized groups but also points out the unique characteristics of

different populations. From an FCP perspective, the rights of deaf children to study in sign language, or the rights of an Arab child to attend a neighborhood preschool despite its status as Jewish, are regarded as feminist issues, as are the rights of a girl to study highlevel mathematics in an all-girls school, or of a young woman to choose to study aeronautics in a prestigious technical school.

Canonical Knowledge In FCP, the Western canon of knowledge that dominates traditional education is replaced by an understanding of social and cultural conventions and values. The role of FCP is to expose for students the processes and mechanisms that help preserve dominant groups and ensure their control over knowledge. FCP allows for the voices of women and other marginal groups to penetrate existing knowledge and to establish new bodies of knowledge based on their experiences. FCP attempts to create a multicultural, egalitarian and just educational agenda that allows for various otherwise silenced voices to be heard. Giving expression to these voices incorporates the knowledge and experience that these groups bring (Jackson, 1997). In the opening class of a subject I teach on FCP, I play a short art film entitled Pan created by Tirtza Even (1995). The film depicts a group of people strolling on a promenade on the seashore. The frame is divided into two panels; one section does not move and the other, which occupies a third of the screen, moves slowly from left to right across the frame. Due to the slow movement of the pan, the boardwalk disappears for a few seconds within the line connecting the two panels. For a few moments the people walking are ‘swallowed up’ in the line between the panels. After watching it, I ask my students: ‘Which groups are swallowed up in our society? Who disappears from the screen of our awareness?’ We then usually create a long list of marginalized populations and systems of

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knowledge that fall outside the canonical and conventional ways of knowing. We discuss bodies of knowledge that have disappeared and ask questions like whose history is not taught, which languages are not respected and which cultures disappear from discourse. Schools teach canonical knowledge that doesn’t leave space for other histories. Consequently, the history of the feminist revolution is not taught in schools in Israel, for example, and the history of the Sephardic Jewish communities who immigrated to Israel from Arab countries has only a marginal place in the curriculum. The history of various peace agreements and movements for social change is not taught, while wars and battles feature prominently. Catherine Weiler (1991) writes that FCP challenges canonical knowledge and the idea that there is only one truth. FCP instead argues that it is possible for us to redefine knowledge and learning more generally. bell hooks (1994) adds that FCP creates cracks in the conventional systems of learning and destabilizes the bourgeois educational structure. She does not see a distinction between FCP and critical pedagogy more broadly. Sandra Harding (1986) and Donna Haraway (1991) criticized the canonized body of scientific knowledge, citing the prevalence of male prejudice and bias in scientific research. They challenged the very idea of objectivity and the ability of researchers to reveal absolute truths. Instead, they tried to promote a worldview that opposes racism, class oppression and sexism. Harding pointed out the need to reconstruct the concept of objectivity in science and pay attention to the way that science in Western cultures strengthens some populations and weakens others, in particular people in the ‘Third World’, the poor and women. Harding claims that through certain projects, feminist science may be able to create positive change in many areas such as addressing militarization, ecological issues and workers’ rights. An example of this kind of feminist deployment of science can be

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seen in the story of the Mayo Plasa mothers’ and grandmothers’ movement which used genetic testing to reunite mothers and grandmothers with the children that had been born to their kidnapped daughters during the Dirty War (Guerra Sucia 1976–1982). Genetic testing was used to establish a blood relationship with the children who had in ensuing years been given to military families to raise, an example of how science has aided in feminist struggles.

Use of Narratives A feminist perspective of writing and research maintains that all researchers and writers operate within their own subjective worldview that influences what they see and how they research. From a feminist perspective, it is appropriate for researchers to express their perspectives openly when they write and to acknowledge how it influences their research in the academic world. Personal narratives told openly are a good starting point for this kind of contemplation and thought. Feminist researchers often write about the processes that they went through to arrive at their current stance. They don’t place themselves outside of the research; on the contrary, they bring their own experiences to the writing process and create connections between theory and practice, between their personal histories and their written ideas. Bernice Fisher (2001), for example, interweaves her personal narrative into her theory and history of activism for social change. Feminists use the concept of positioning to refer to this exposure of the human experiences that connect the writer and the subject that they write about. Indeed, critical pedagogical writing in narrative for both genders has become increasingly acceptable. Narrative exposes the lack of objectivity inherent in academic research and avoids placing the researcher in the position of disguised objective expert. Positioning also

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integrates both the affective and cognitive aspects of human experience; it challenges intellectual discourse that claims to be detached from emotion and pretends that feeling has no root in reality. Carol Cohn (1987) writes about this in her research undertaken amongst male nuclear scientists, whom Cohn observed using distancing tactics in their language and speech to avoid addressing the emotional consequences of their research, which was connected to the development of nuclear weapons. I integrate personal stories that describe the social processes that shape my personal history and motivate my FCP practice. My interests in class stratification and inequality based on gender, ethnicity and disability have been shaped by my own childhood experiences of injustice in the neighborhood in which I grew up. My own experiences in the educational system continue to shape me. In addition to this, my work experience has further enriched my understanding of these issues and placed me in many difficult dilemmas where I have had to clarify my principles and values. Integrating personal voice in FCP research does not stem from the psychological need for self-promotion or exposure, but rather from an awareness of the connection between the personal and the political and my desire to make this clear to the readers of my writing. Part of FCP practice is thus to tell the personal stories of individuals and groups and to find the common threads within them, always attentive to the insights they provide on deeper analysis. Every writer, researcher and teacher brings interesting views shaped by their own experiences. Academic writing that ignores this and claims objectivity covers this up (Stanford Friedman, 1998). Authors like Sue Middleton and bell hooks consciously reveal their starting points and do not pretend to have knowledge of the ‘absolute truth’. They integrate their arguments and their views with their personal histories and their standpoint, trying to make observations in alternative ways and to incorporate different

points of view, including the personal. In this way, they enable a critical examination of their own writing and invite a critical dialogue with students in which the learner’s views are equal in value to the teacher’s views. FCP gives voice to women and to men of marginalized groups. It is a pedagogy of diverse narratives that strives to give expression to varied identities and to enable them to find their unique place. Elizabeth Ellsworth (1993) positions herself in her feminist writings through the use of the first-person pronoun (I) and by eschewing the plural pronoun (we) that seems to refer to a non-existent collective that dominates the conversation. Ellsworth discusses the necessary dialogue that must take place in a liberation-focused education, arguing that ignoring identity in language obscures the existence of identity in the public sphere. Many women, both those who identify as feminist, as well as those who do not, share the experience of having had a White male speak on their behalf, without first understanding their position, certain that his generalizations must be correct. I had one such experience at a conference in Turkey, where during a presentation about the exploitation of children in the chocolate industry, a male lecturer presented a website that he and his students had created. The illustration accompanying the presentation was a woman’s lips, with red lipstick, sensuously sucking a long chocolate bar in a barely veiled reference to fellatio. These images are common in chocolate advertisements, but it was a slightly pornographic image that contributed to the objectification of women. Speaking to a mostly female audience, this lecturer proceeded to mansplain what ‘we’ all know about the problem, unaware of the distinct lack of ‘we’ experienced by his audience as a result of his sexist choice of image. There was a murmur of dissent about the choice amongst the women in the room, who resented the equation of men’s lust to the craving for chocolate. However, out of respect for the lecturer, this dissent found voice only around the coffee table during the break.

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Gendered Power Relations in Education FCP examines the construction of power relationships between boys and girls in education. It doesn’t focus exclusively on the empowerment of women and girls, but it does emphasize these issues, study them and offer various ways to transform the lives of women and girls. The educational system does not discriminate against women and girls on purpose. Rather, it is merely a reflection of the society in which it is located and its customs, beliefs and unequal practices, making it an extremely powerful means of maintaining the social order. It is simultaneously a powerful means of transforming the social order and inspiring change. As the educational system is structured and its learners are ‘captive’ in it for 12 years or more, it can function to simply recreate unequal power relations between male and female students. Yet, with socially aware actions taken over a long period of time, the educational system can be used to break down unequal power structures. There is a great need to enhance teachers’ social consciousness and to offer them the means and tools to begin acting differently. The first step is to create gender awareness, which involves identifying the socialization of females and males and how this directs them into unequal gender roles. Curricula send both overt and covert messages to boys and girls about gender roles, which are transferred directly and indirectly through books, texts, songs, teaching practices, interactions of children and teachers, visual texts, language and non-formal cultural products (Gor, 2005). Starting at a very young age, children are exposed to unequal power relations between genders. Textbooks can still contain gender stereotypes. Boys occupy most of the schoolyard at recess, with girls often pushed back to use a limited space (Karsten, 2003). Sexual harassment is even considered childish mischief, and by older ages, girls don’t dare to complain

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about it, often not having language to name these disturbing behaviors. Many schools are still not aware of these issues and teachers refrain from reacting to these kinds of social interactions. Studies still show that teachers address boys more than girls in class, they compliment boys more than girls, and girls are disciplined more strictly than boys. These are just some of the complex mechanisms that create inequality in schools (Sadker and Sadker, 1995). FCP teaches educators how to identify these phenomena and gives them tools to bring about change. It offers curricula to empower girls, teacher training for consciousness-raising and analysis of school content through the lens of gender. It sets concrete goals for changing the power structures between boys and girls and creating equal opportunities for all.

FCP IN PRACTICE SNDT University in Mumbai Mumbai’s SNDT Women’s University was established in 1916 at a time when women were not allowed to study in universities. The goal of the institution was primarily to provide women who could serve as an educated companion to their husbands. While today that sounds rather sexist, in 1916 it was radical. Today, the goal of the university is to empower women through education. Fifty thousand women study each year at the university’s different campuses in four languages: Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and English. I taught two classes at the Mumbai campus; it was an educational experience full of enriching encounters with the learners and I learned far more than I taught. I was most thoroughly impressed by the university’s commitment to initiatives and community projects for social change. The university runs programs in poor neighborhoods that are managed by students as a

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requirement of their BA programs. Students cannot graduate without having participated in activism for social change. I visited one of the projects in a poor area near the university. Here, students and local women worked together and established nursery schools for young children. The social status of women went up as a result of the new role created for them in their community. The change of status that came with the job training gave the women a new sense of value and the respect of their communities. The project also saw increased recognition of the importance of early childhood education for the success of children in later years of school. SNDT University also has a public health project in the community, where students are active in promoting health education and providing first-response medical treatment. The university also initiated a project in which women use their handicraft skills to work in collectives that create embroidery, bags and saris that are then sold to provide the women with a livelihood. The cooperative work takes place in women’s homes, in small groups, with children playing around them. It operates with empathy for and understanding of the economic and gendered oppression facing these women and aims to help empower them economically. The experience at SNDT inspired me to start sending my own students to volunteer in organizations for social change. Later, along with two colleagues I established the program of Education for Social Justice, Environmental Justice and Peace Education at my college, Seminar HaKibbutzim Teacher College. Part of the program requirements involved educational activism. In 2008, the whole college adopted community service as a requirement for the Bachelor of Education program (Gor Ziv, 2012).

Women Physicians in Nepal Every time I have traveled to Nepal, I have met with impressive women and activists for

women’s rights. One of them was an organization of medical doctors who educated about AIDS prevention in rural areas where talking about sex is taboo. Discussing the need to use condoms to prevent AIDS requires a lot of courage. Organizations of female physicians became alarmed that AIDS was spreading in rural areas, as poor families fell into the trap of sex trafficking, with traffickers telling families that they would send their girls to get a good job in India. Once the women returned with the money they earned, many of them went on to get married and spread HIV to their husbands and children. These physicians’ organizations try to educate the villages while also creating employment for the young women so their families are not deceived by the traffickers who promise good jobs in India. Another organization I have worked with in Nepal helps women with childcare while they work by establishing childcare cooperatives. We climbed up a mountain for half a day to a village with no mobile phone access to see a childcare center built from local materials, with handcrafted toys for the children. Prior to the establishment of the center, women used to tie their babies to the main pole in the hut, causing accidents. In the co-op, each woman cares for the children one day a week, while the other days she is free to work, knowing her children are well cared for. We met a woman in a remote village who improved her economic situation by purchasing a goat, using a loan she obtained from a bank. She told us how she returns the money slowly and how her children don’t have to suffer hunger anymore. I asked for her opinion regarding the improvement of women’s conditions and she said decisively that there is a need to cut down more trees to create rice paddies. The law forbids this, as the forest is preserved to protect the ozone layer. This well-intentioned policy is imposed disproportionately on poor women and prevents them from meeting their needs. Another organization of female lawyers help women to stand up for their rights in

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the legal system. In the past women couldn’t inherit property, which caused many women to starve. This organization fought to change the law so women could inherit their father’s or husband’s land. However, many women remain unaware of their new rights and need to get access to these benefits. This organization of women lawyers helps educate women about their legal rights.

Early Childhood Educators in Zimbabwe I gave a training workshop to Zimbabwean early childhood educators. These were big women who were not victims of the Western anorexic perception of beauty, full of selfconfidence and committed to the welfare of families and children. They work in poor villages helping women to create early childhood centers. With no government support, many parents have no money to pay the teachers. They found an unusual solution in using drama for a play at the training session. Each parent, on a rotation, cultivates the land owned by the teacher while she takes care of the children. This allows the teacher to take care of the children and derive an income from the land. The word feminism or critical feminist pedagogy was not mentioned once during the training program. There is one school in Jerusalem that operates according to the principles of FCP. It takes marginalized poor children at junior high school and prepares them to finish high school and fulfill the requirements for university entrance. Certainly, we are beginning to see more global examples of FCP employed in communities and schools.

CONCLUSION FCP is still not widely implemented, either in theory or practice, as it challenges existing power structures and is involved in the struggle for a different reality for

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marginalized groups. Today, we have seen tremendous improvement in the conditions of women and other marginalized groups. Women have more opportunities than ever to participate in the workforce and schools are increasingly recognizing the role of education in the production of gender roles and creating gender-inclusive policies. In many classrooms, males and females enjoy a formal equality of opportunity that generations ago would have been inconceivable. However, there are serious challenges that continue to demonstrate the pressing relevance of FCP practice and theory in the 21st-century classroom. We live in a profoundly paradoxical gender reality, where opportunities seem to be expanding at the same time as oppression is intensifying. We see this in the role that the internet now plays in the lives of young people. While the internet provides a unique forum for females and other marginalized groups to find voice and solidarity, it also provides a platform where boys and girls from a young age are exposed to pornography that is often representative of the worst atrocities of the sex industry. Conventional education does not prepare young people to face these com­ plex  gendered realities and conventionally trained educators lack the tools to provide meaningful guidance and support. FCP is uniquely placed to provide educators and learners with the consciousness and awareness to continue feminism into the next generation.

REFERENCES Cohn, Carol (1987, June). Slick ’ems, glick ’ems, Christmas trees, and cookie cutters: Nuclear language and how we learned to pat the bomb. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 4(8), 17–24. Ellsworth, Elizabeth (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myth of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, 59(3), 297–325.

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Ellsworth, Elizabeth (1993). Claiming the tenured body, in Delese Wear (Ed.), The center of the Web: Women and solitude. New York, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 63–74. Even, Tirtza (1995). Pan, Video Art. MoMA, https://vimeo.com/199384791/1858ef95a6 Fine, Michelle, & Weis, Lois (2004). Working method: Research and social change. New York, NY: Routledge. Fisher, Berenice Malka (2001). No angel in the classroom: Teaching through feminist discourse. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Gabbard, David A. (2007). Militarizing class warfare: The historical foundations of the neoliberal/neoconservative nexus. Education Policy Futures, 5(2), 119–136. Gor, Haggith (2005). (Hebrew) Militarism in early childhood education, in Haggith Gor (Ed.), Militarism and education. Tel Aviv: Babel Publishing. Gor Ziv, Haggith (2012). (Hebrew) Critical feminist pedagogy and education for culture of peace. Tel Aviv: Mofet. Haraway, Donna J. (1991). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century, in Donna J. Haraway, (Ed.), Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 149–181. Harding, Sandra (1986). The science question in feminism. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Harding, Sandra (1991). Whose science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from women’s lives. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. hooks, bell (1989). Talking back: Thinking feminist, thinking black. Boston, MA: South End Press. hooks, bell (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York, NY and London: Routledge.

Jackson, Sue (1997). Crossing borders and changing pedagogies: From Giroux and Freire to feminist theories of education. Gender and Education, 9(4), 457–467. Karsten, Lia (2003). Children’s use of public space: The gendered world of the playground. Childhood, 10(4), 457–473. Luke, Carmen, & Gore, Jennifer (Eds.) (1992) Feminisms and critical pedagogy. New York, NY: Routledge. Regev, Ofra (1997). (Hebrew) Cathedra of your own, in Lunim Bahinuch vol. 2, series 2. Haifa: Haifa University. Reinharz, Shulamit (1992). Feminist methods in social research. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Saltman, Kenneth J. & Gabbard, David A. (Eds.) (2003). Education as enforcement: The militarization and corporatization of schools. New York, NY: Routledge. Sadker, Myra & Sadker, David (1995). Failing at fairness: How our schools cheat girls. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Shrewsbury, Carolyn M. (1994). What is feminist pedagogy? Women’s Studies Quarterly, 21(3/4), 8–16. Stanford Friedman, Susan (1998). Mappings: Feminism and the cultural geographies of encounter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Weiler, Kathleen (1991). Freire and a feminist pedagogy of difference. Harvard Educational Review, 61(4), 449–474. Weiler, Kathleen (1994). Freire and a feminist pedagogy of difference. In Peter McLaren & Colin Lankshear (Eds.), The politics of liberation: Paths from Freire. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 12–40. Welch, Penny (1994). Is a feminist pedagogy possible? In Sue Davies, Cathy Lubelska & Jocey Quinn (Eds.), Changing the subject: Women in higher education. London: Taylor & Francis, pp. 149–162.

66 Schooling, Milieu, Racism: Just Another Brick in the Wall Te r e s a A n n e F o w l e r

Teachers are often among that group most reluctant to acknowledge the extent to which whitesupremacist thinking informs every aspect of our culture including the way we learn, the content of what we learn, and the manner in which we are taught. (hooks, 2003: 25)

Institutional racism in schooling is not a new concept and continues to live and breathe well. Minor disruptions caused by students that do not fit in with this monolith of schooling do little but identify themselves as moving against the grain or current or other metaphor that depicts difference and exclusion. Young people that are traditionally marginalized in society unfortunately find these same circumstances, or worse, within the walls of schools. People of colour, non-Christians, non-cisgender or straight, low-socioeconomic status, immigrant or refugee, or any youth that does not fit a predetermined identity that mirrors the status quo as established through the historic accounts of schooling find themselves travelling on a

different pathway. Although this list of differences resembles a typical class list in school, these students are still having to navigate a system that requires a certain typology of student in order to continue to be regarded as successful. Successful schooling is all but symbolic, a remnant of the past when patriotism and assimilation were the goals, and schooling was good at meeting these outcomes. Many marginalized young people now find themselves in the school–prison pipeline, dropped/pushed out of school, everywhere but in the learning environments that ought to be ‘inclusive’ for all students, instead schooling now generates educational gaps that are not based on achievement, but access. Schooling tries to address these gaps through imposed initiatives in the name of inclusion through governmental orders and curriculum redesigns; however, the gaps remain because the system of schooling itself often remains isolated from these initiatives. Scholars, practitioners, and young

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people have long been living in this space, this space where schooling and those that ought to be in school are asked to vacate and yet schooling continues. Schooling is successful for those that can fit and causes suffering for those that do not, or they must have a psychological diagnosis to fit. Schooling has become ‘commonsensical’ (Kumashiro, 2015: 1) in that it still has relevance in the production of an educated society and students are being produced; however, schooling has been reproducing a status quo that a majority do not identify with/as. How then do we intentionally disrupt schooling in order to reduce gaps (halt the production of the gaps) and truly educate all children? How do we engage with schooling rather than let it remain a quiet dictator? Working from the outside in only seems to benefit those that are running for electoral positions or those that profit off band-aid solutions that attempt to reduce the gaps. Canned programmes to improve results, standardization of curricula and teaching, armies of psychologists, and elected officials all have an agenda to fix the disrupted student, not the system. An alternative approach shifts to inside the system, revealing institutional racism to pre-service teachers with the hope that they will be reoriented to use their pedagogy to better align with the class list in front of them, not the class list that the system desires. By revealing how schooling perpetuates an ideal outcome, pre-service teachers have the opportunity to do what those on the outside intend on doing and that is to reduce the gaps and provide learning environments conducive for all. Drawing on Freire’s critical pedagogy to reflect and act as a means to transform (Freire, 2014), this chapter will explore a means to disrupt racism in schools through unpacking schooling, the milieu (Eisner, 1967), and racism and the ways in which pre-service teachers can remove the bricks of oppression in schools.

SCHOOLING Social essence is the set of those social attributes and attributions produced by the act of institution as a solemn act of categorization which tends to produce what it designates. (Bourdieu, 1991: 121)

Schooling exerts power. Schooling, through acts of performance, prescribes an accepted identity that is a determinant of success (Bourdieu, 1991). Boundaries are established and those that reside on one side, the side of success, accrue advantages and capital, while those that are prevented from crossing the boundary are displaced based on categories of marginalization. This displacement is common practice, regarded often as good practice in the name of individuality in schools. Divisions, by way of ability groupings, are seen as a means to increase success for the social agents in that space. However, schooling reproduces a dominant identity, uses ability groupings as instruments of domination that not only exclude based on categories, but reinforce to students who they ought to be and what identity they need to take on (Bourdieu, 1991). Students are divided into knowledge classes through streaming within ability groupings and this is justified because society needs people with various levels of capital to function well. Professional elites, middle-class desk jockeys, and labourers are all required, and schooling remains the means in which to produce these individuals. The complacency, on which schooling relies, of those working within schooling allows for these tools of domination to continue to displace young people, reinforcing their future place in the world. Through learning experiences in schools, inequalities persist and what constitutes success dominates based on an unequal distribution of capital (Shilling, 1992). Schooling presents credentials to students based on their accrued capital. Some graduate with a high-school diploma, others are marginalized towards expulsion or receive educational outcomes

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based on where the tools of domination made them fit. Students that fit the marginal identity fill these spaces as their bodies and ideologies are not of the same make-up on the favoured side of the boundary. Idealizations of a dominant identity are manifested through schooling as well as other socially structured systems and the corporate media. The perpetuation of a dominant discourse in which one identity is idealized can be seen through the statistics identifying marginalized people as overrepresented in high-school non-completion, occupying the justice and welfare systems, as well as in careers that are not in positions of power such as executive positions in corporations. Even in schooling, positions of power such as principals and superintendents are often occupied by White cisgender males. The environment that young people who are marginalized live within and embody is modelled by those that also have been tooled to fit a category of other. In addition to home environments, young people are bombarded with images and messages via social media that also contribute to categories of others. The Twilight Saga movies depicted Indigenous people as werewolves constrained to a reservation, Disney propagates gender stereotypes such as the dominator male and submissive female, professional sports perform an ideal hyper-masculine identity of gender and violence, music videos profit off pornography, and people of colour are delegated to gangsterist roles including drug dealers and thieves. Status through these categorical media insertions into the lives of young people is also modelled to reinforce identity; that to be successful, despite circumstances of place and identity, there can be a reprieve if a young person takes on the role of the chiselled football player or the submissive female. If schooling cannot provide an escape, then perhaps another role can be carved out. Institutional racism thus thrives within schooling and the ways in which marginal identities are socialized in young people’s lives. Tools of domination and forms of

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symbolic power are left to operate without acknowledgement other than as forms of good practice (Bourdieu, 1991). The use of the tools of domination by schooling has become commonsensical in that professionals cannot see that common practice such as ability groupings are but a means to (dis) place students on arbitrary sides of the success boundary. As young people have embodied a delegated marginal status, schooling as an institution has embodied racism and reproduction of a dominant identity. This form of reproduction becomes an invisible force that is not acknowledged for what it does, as many that continue to propagate its work were successful products and to question this becomes an exercise in critical reflexivity (Bourdieu, 1991). Schooling can no longer continue to allow institutional racism to be a dominant discourse, as not only are young people remaining entrenched in racialized identities and have little hope, but another crisis among youth is emerging. Suicide rates and mental health concerns have been percolating (Statistics Canada, 2012) along with the continued reinforced marginalization of young people, and those that are aware of the complacency of the system need to bring others in so that change can take hold.

THE MILIEU The concept of subjectification tells us that they are shaped – but that they simultaneously shape whatever they are shaped by. (Højgaard and Søndergaard, 2011: 7)

Before beginning work from the inside and only looking at the outcomes of racialized schooling, I now turn to Barad (2003: 824) and ask, ‘Where do the issues of responsibility and accountability enter in?’. Currently, students are at fault for failing in schools; either they do not perform as expected or they need a deficit label to justify their disperformances. The other social agent at play for the gaps is the teacher. The teacher that

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has been successful with the navigation of the system now is in a position of power over those that match the teacher’s identity or the identity expected by the teacher. There does not seem to be a need to ask what role schooling has in this as this is the way things have always been done and things are going well. Students that enter the schooling system in Kindergarten often do finish on time in Grade 12, but for the ones that do not or the ones that waver, something must have been wrong with them or they had a bad teacher causing them to not meet success on time. Tools of reproduction have become so invisible, they are not even in the realm of possibilities to be questioned. If, however, we ask what agency schooling has, what role schooling has in allowing institutional racism to flourish, something changes and schooling becomes agentic. Schooling has an accountable role in this process of reproduction as a ‘non-human phenomena’ (Højgaard and Søndergaard, 2011: 12). Those in the milieu of schooling are now not only in relation with each other, but the system is also a part of this process (Højgaard and Søndergaard, 2011). Schooling joins the process of reproduction as an active participant, one that is actively reproducing the dominant identity of the status quo and what is valued by society. We can see how this has manifested throughout schooling’s lifetime. Schooling first was only offered for White males of the clergy so that they could read the Bible and share the gospel with those under them. Reading was a privilege and needed only by a select few members of society; the rest did not require this activity in their lives as they needed to provide for others through agrarian practices. Those that were not members of the privileged class had to trust and believe that what was spoken in service was honest and true. Schooling then broadened to benefit elite males as society now needed those that could read, such as lawyers, doctors, and other professional roles which extended beyond the church. As society shifted from agrarian

towards industrial, a more educated citizen was needed and schooling became accessible to all members. However, segregation and gentrification were allowed to keep schooling fixated on what identity was valued over others as schooling moved from an elitist to a racialized phenomenon. These racialized processes continue to appear and reappear to ensure the production of value is maintained, producing a gap between those that perform well and those that do not perform as prescribed. Ability groupings and streaming in schools each continue to separate what identity needs to be performed to be successful. As social agents, both human and nonhuman, entangle in this space with each other, one identity often surfaces as more beneficial to society than the racialized Other. What represents the dominant identity, what is valued and given more time and resources and access to is what schooling values and this identity ‘seems inescapable’ (Barad, 2003: 806). This shift towards schooling as a non-human phenomenon with agency opens up space to disrupt its influence and enactments on the milieu and begins to let the milieu also influence it to disrupt institutional racism in schools. Schooling has enacted racialization and marginalization using cultural reproduction. Ahmed (2012: 44) describes institutional racism as being a ‘collective failure’ to meet the needs of those that do not identify with this dominant idealized identity in schools. Giroux (2010) describes schools as a ‘dead zone’ (2010: 715) and that schooling has become ‘subordinated to a corporate social order’ (2010: 715). Dewey (2008: 26) suggested that a change was/is needed ‘in the attitude of the school’ and this attitude was one that privileged ‘schooling to reinforce dominator values’ (hooks, 2003: 1). This environment the milieu is expected to exist in really is but ‘a complicitous educational system’ (Block, 1997: 2) that fails racialized Others while benefiting those that craft solutions to bridge gaps, all while leaving the responsibility of schooling out of

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the conversation. If ‘being is measured by doing’ (de Certeau, 1988: 137) and schooling is ‘a doing, a congealing of agency’ (Barad, 2003: 822, emphasis original), then what measurement is of value when we shift schooling to that of an agent in the milieu? Freire (2014: 71) stated that ‘education is suffering from narration sickness’, so perhaps it is time to bring schooling into the conversation and hold schooling accountable with ending the collective failure racialized and Othered students are suffering from.

(UN)DOING SCHOOLING AND REMOVING THE BRICKS Agency is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has. (Barad, 2003: 826–7)

Pre-service teachers have one thing in common and that is they were successful at navigating schooling. For many, they have found success with their performances in school and now want to reside in a place they felt comfort. Some like the allure of job security in a society where this runs thin as well as the summers off and high peak vacation times. Others have not found success in the greater world so fall on the old saying – those that can do, and those that can’t teach. Within this milieu of higher education, certain factors must have been met to find a place in this space and this often involves their common success in secondary education. Many thus share the same ideology that remains valued in schools and may find fault/ blame on those that do not share this identification. Courses in pre-service teaching programmes also often have some commonality in subject matter such as ethics, law, curriculum (subject matter) studies, psychology, special education, and so on. Progressive post-secondary programmes have begun to combat institutional racism by waking preservice teachers up to the ways in which racism permeates in schools through courses

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in Indigenous and Diversity education. The question in these courses becomes how to waken those that flourished in a racist system in a manner that calls them to act against those forces. How do we look at the role schooling has had in this process? When pre-service teachers first scan their course syllabus and see topics such as racism, sexism, Christian privilege, Indian Residential Schools, and White supremacy they often, before they enter the classroom, have already opened themselves up to resistance against the course. This resistance to understanding these ideologies comes from a need to engage in critical reflexivity on pre-service teachers’ identities and the success they experienced with schooling, but offers a means to examine the ‘deep roots’ (Sensoy and DiAngelo, 2012: xi) the racialized outcomes of schooling has/have. Those with a critical social justice narrative or those that have experienced being racialized in their schooling experience, however, tend to approach the syllabus differently as these pre-service teachers tend to feel validated in that now their identity has value. Engaging in this dismantling we need to not look directly into the lives and experiences of pre-service teachers, as in order to make change from within, they themselves need to overcome feelings of resistance as they too have been dominated by an identity that is valued above others (Freire, 2013). But they need to be awakened to the ‘greatest tragedy of modern man’ (Freire, 2013: 5) if they are to disrupt schooling and counter institutional racism. What does it mean to be a teacher? In order to wake, being woken ought to be done in a manner that does not reinforce resistance. Where pre-service teachers look forward to engaging with students, it is important for them to recognize that they were themselves once ‘absorbed by the system’ (de Certeau, 1988: 1), subjected to the reproduction undertaken by schooling. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in 2009 spoke about ‘The Danger of the Single Story’ and this single story, (Adichie, 2009) the mechanism schooling

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has used to reproduce ideal performances, offers a starting place in diversity courses. This identity that she speaks to in her talk is the identity that permeates from places and spaces in schools. The banners in the gym and trophies in the front entry display case that glorify athleticism, the wall of graduating classes that line hallways, often depict homogeneity, in the school office portraits of past principals (often White males) penetrate the space, and special classrooms for life skills or social emotional spaces forced to the back of the buildings all represent which story is of most worth. Ngozi Adichie warns us that the conversation is not whole, that only one side of the story is being expressed and heard and this is also true with the role of schooling as schooling has not been actively held accountable. Introducing pre-service teachers to their being absorbed by only one side of the story reduces the resistance and opens them up to engage with learning about the role that schooling has played in their successes. Their own experiences in schools have often neglected acts of reflection or critical conscious questioning of experiences in schools (Freire, 2013). The cultural reproduction through performances of value and physical posturing in spaces is so commonplace no one thinks to consider if this is an exercise of racism. These active practices of the nonhuman agency of schooling thrive because those living within the system are not awakened to the agency of schooling. Schooling and institutional racism remain successful because of the ‘complicity’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 164) of those that reside in that space as they are unaware of how ‘they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it’ (1991: 164). This wakening then must not only begin an awareness of the role of schooling in institutional racism, but also counter how pre-service teachers met success within their schooling experiences and reduce feelings of resistance during their course work. The measurements of success for them reinforced their ability to do and be,

despite this causing racialized Others to not measure up enough. Schooling as a non-human phenomenon needs to be considered in order to dismantle and disrupt institutional racism in schools. This collective failure that displaces racialized Others while benefiting corporate creators of quick fixes may be better addressed when we have a plan for supporting inclusive strategies that include addressing schooling. The power of schooling needs to be recognized as the relationship between those ‘who exercise power and those who submit to it’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 170), including schooling as an agent exercising power. As a nonhuman phenomenon, it too has a role in this relationship of reproduction and the permeation of racism. To not engage with schooling as agential remains ‘anti-dialogical’ (Freire, 2013: 100) and it will continue to emerge and thrive using its tools and band-aids. Engaging in critical pedagogy with pre-service teachers works ‘to understand how power works through’ (Giroux, 2010: 717) the ways in which knowledge is disseminated in schools and gives space for pre-service teachers to become ‘informed subjects and social agents’ (2010: 717). Critical pedagogy in the pre-service classroom offers a means to converse with schooling and the social agents that reside(ed) in that space while reducing the resistance to an awakening and disruption to single stories. Pre-service teachers must work through the historicity of how this story has influenced their experiences in schools, and only then can they recognize how, as teachers, they will either counter these dominant ideologies or reinforce them. As many teachers I have worked with identify as non-racialized individuals, starting this conversation needs to also work through layers, one being resistance. This gentle disruption starts with sports. The depiction of Indigenous people as objects on jerseys not only rallies a deepseeded connection to the identity of a team and illusions of masculinity but, for those that have not regarded logos as depictions of

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human beings, immediately reinforces a wall of resistance. Let us forget about the corporate and capitalistic desire for sports logos to be and exist, and instead look at the ways in which logos dehumanize people and reduce people into objects (Freire, 2013). This is problematic for those that have been indoctrinated by the system as this indoctrination has placed logos as more meaningful to the concept of team and camaraderie than the human depicted in the logo. More often than not, these logos portray Indigenous people as warriors, aggressors, stuck in a time and place based on adornments of feathers and warpaint. Add to this depiction how Indigenous people are modelled in mainstream media as animal-like characters in movies or as the savage needed to be saved by the White male renegade. Working through this resistance by showing example after example of displaced depictions of Indigenous people in the media slowly dismantles the wall of resistance, although of course no one can agree that change is needed because of the investment in jerseys and ball caps that fill closets. Social constructions of how Indigenous people and other marginalized people are viewed is one of the main enactments of schooling. Understanding this power needs to include not only the outcome of those enacting and enacted, but that power exerted by schooling is also an ‘active factor’ (Barad, 2003: 810) in this social construction. Another site of resistance for pre-service teachers falls on sexism. Many pre-service teachers identify as female and as such they have first-hand experiences of the ways in which sexism has impacted and influenced their lives, but they often do not see the subtle actions played out in schools in their experiences. Sensoy and Di Angelo (2012) outline three dimensions to work with pre-service teachers to better understand how social construction of knowledge, of what is valued, is enacted in schools. These same dimensions apply to the ways to waken pre-service teachers and include looking at knowledge as a universal and objectified truth, engaging in

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critical self-reflection, and reengaging the system through acknowledging the role of the system. Sexism offers the same space of universal and objectified truths. One only needs to look at the gender of most teachers to see that education is a female-dominated profession. This domination of female gender in schools partly leads to a reasoning behind why the profession is less respected by society (Myrick, 2015). Within the profession, many seats of power are occupied by the male gender including principals, viceprincipals, directors, and superintendents. Even subjects are gendered – hard sciences such as physics, chemistry, and maths are often taught by male teachers, whereas the soft subjects of the humanities and arts are taught by female teachers. Elementary teachers that are male often find that their sexual identity is questioned and those females that do occupy positions of power or teach a hard subject must confront racialized notions of gender in these roles. Physical education teachers are more often male and the sexist locker-room banter often extends into these spaces occupied by male teachers. This is no surprise to pre-service teachers, of both genders, and in fact many can find teachers that confront these stereotypes and often speak to them as the exception to the norm, such as female principals or male cisgendered grade three teachers. However, it is not until we confront these universal truths that our innate biases are revealed. Sexism is deeply ingrained as a non-human agent, it manifests in ways that may go unchallenged such as the wall of resistance surrounding school dress codes. The female body, objectified in the media through both historical and popular culture, is a contested site. Females, Indigenous people, and other racialized individuals have been stripped of their agency and made objects that need to adapt to their environment in order to survive (Freire, 2013). This adaptation becomes a part of the dehumanizing of the subject and they are not then permitted to be in dialogue

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with others. Women’s bodies in schools are a distraction from learning – distracting boys from learning; therefore, to better the experience for boys, female students must adhere to a dress code fit for learning. Female students must conform to benefit others in the school community. Those that craft the dress code, often male administrators, base such conforming decisions on space and place. School is not the place for bare shoulders, schools are not the space for short skirts/shorts, and yet school is the place for school sports uniforms to violate the classroom dress code. Lean bodies, athletic bodies are privileged and able to be seen as active and valuable, supporting the socialization of what it means to be a desirable female. Like masculinity and athleticism, females are depicted as privileged and of more value if they contribute to an ideology that promotes this privileged form of sexism. Everybody in schools is exposed to social construction of knowledge, and schooling is an active participant. So much so that persons in that space, each social agent no matter their level of power, have become so entrenched that they do not recognize they have been ‘expelled from the orbit of decisions’ (Freire, 2013: 5). However, to live and be in schooling that actively reproduces a dominant idealized identity and racializes means that one must be awakened to use the agent to benefit rather than fail the racialized human in that space. To do this, pre-service teachers must now begin a process of self-reflexivity on how they have benefited by this system and how they are now ethically bound to interrupt how the system reproduces racism. Foucault (1997) states that we are at risk of perpetuating this domination of others if we have not taken care of ourselves. To care for ourselves means we need to critically reflect on how we have benefited by an agent that socialized us to perform a specified way and now pre-service teachers are on the verge of reinserting themselves into this relationship with an agent of power. How do they engage in a dialogue with the system?

As pre-service teachers work through these ideological moments in their future classrooms, they begin to critically self-reflect not only on how they have benefited, but how they have used their places of privilege at the expense of others. These moments that happen around the dinner table with family over a large stuffed turkey offer one of the hardest challenges, but most opportunity for growth. Now they come to realize not only their own social construction in schools, but how deep social construction and cultural reproduction go when their parents espouse racist ideologies. As children, many of us have grown to adopt and adhere to the ideologies of our parent(s) which they themselves learned though their conversations with schooling. The system reproduces and reappears on many levels in our classrooms, our homes, and supported by the corporate media. We are swimming in ideologies that have become commonly habitual (Ahmed, 2012). When pre-service teachers enter into these conversations with a critical reflexive perspective, their relation to themselves and experiences shift and some can no longer consider entering their own classrooms without including schooling as a factor in the racialization of individuals. How do they begin dialogue with the system?

ACTION AS PRAXIS Education is an act of love, and thus an act of courage. (Freire, 2013: 34)

As pre-service teachers emerge from discovering the active role schooling played in their successes as well as making a critical reflection on the universality of some truths, apprehension sets in. How do they engage in critical action while trying to find a job in a system that is actively racializing young people? Even to discuss love and the role of love in their practice sets up more debates. Biases are revealed again when gender

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differences between student and teacher find ways to justify not engaging in acts of love in classrooms. Immediately minds wander to sexualized forms of love and then onwards to the repercussions of such violations of the teacher/student relationship. So much so that touch, caring, and compassion have become sexualized and therefore considered to not have a place in classrooms. When did love become sexualized and wrong? When gender prevents a teacher from having a conversation with a student, schooling uses tools of domination to call love taboo, gender as a barrier to human interaction and an obstacle to building relationships (Bourdieu, 1991). Acts of love have moved from embraces to fist pumps and caring is only enacted by soft female teachers or male teachers that, by appearance’s sake, do not care. Have we set up pre-service teachers by awakening them to the dissonance between a symbolic ideal of what schooling should be and the genuine form of schooling that currently lives (Ahmed, 2012)? How ought reality to play out within the walls of their classrooms? By considering the ways in which schooling actively racializes the identity of many students, pre-service teachers need to engage with activities and pedagogies that reorientate the enactments of schooling. Pre-service teachers need to know their curriculum, the mandated subject matter they need to use as the centre of their practice. Too often, however, pre-service teachers do not even know where to find curriculum or the ways in which they can utilize these outcomes. Understanding firstly that curriculum they use in their classrooms needs to move away from the banking model of knowledge (Freire, 2014) and not just ‘insert it into the file cabinet minds of students’ (Kincheloe, 2016: 615). Engaging is this type of pedagogy opens up space for the deficit model of education that identifies students as the problem through psychological diagnoses and externalizing acts of defiance that lead to entrance to the discipline cycle. Instead, pre-service teachers need to consider their curriculum

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as learning experiences and opportunities their students are exposed to in their classrooms (Eisner, 1967). Every moment in the classroom presents a learning opportunity stemming from the explicit outcomes; therefore, if pre-service teachers know these outcomes they have the ability to connect critical moments and questions back to these mandated files. They can also critically examine what is left out of the curriculum which leads to uncovering how social construction is used as a mechanism for schooling (Kincheloe, 2016). The implicit ways in which curricula are developed and redesigned, or interventions chosen, need to be examined and classrooms offer a clear space to engage in this reflexive thinking. Classrooms can also be spaces to confront and challenge the implicit forms of curriculum such as school dress codes vs school costumes or why are school athletes allowed to be absent from school while the student that is working to support their family is not? Another tool pre-service teachers need to take with them is a means to examine resources and materials that they find in their schools. Are the textbooks culturally appropriate or do they continue to depict stereotypes and objectified portrayals of humans as objects? What great icons of historicity are being studied? Are they all great White men or are they icons of the civil rights movement, women’s suffrage, or great Indigenous chiefs? When does history begin? Within their praxis, pre-service teachers can move beyond Cartesian thinking, this dualism that allows space for there to always be an Other, a less-than which is a centre pillar of White supremacy (Barad, 2003; hooks, 2003). Inclusion is not a practice, but needs to be a way of doing. Inclusion, as decided by schooling, currently is framed as access to spaces and places but what inclusion needs to do is remove the dualistic us/them and become ‘both/and thinking’ (hooks, 2003: 39). Instead of studying one single story as told by one gender and race, open this up to reflect the realities of our communities and

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disrupt these universal notions of truth. Preservice teachers are less restricted to use textbooks and novels that are so old the pages are yellow and torn and should be free to bring in voices that share narratives that induce both/and thinking. Of course, they need to be mindful of a potential response by the agential symbolic school to force them back to the us/them mentality and that an approved reading list may appear on their desk. However, this controlling act stemming from fear also empowers this work to keep moving forward and to prepare for schooling’s responses to maintain the status quo. Pre-service teachers also can begin to incorporate social justice practices into their lesson plans and engage with experiential learning opportunities. Lesson planning that aligns with curricular outcomes can include aspects of social justice to better understand social construction and the mechanisms used to do this. Lesson planning that engages the deeper issues to form a more inclusive dialogue needs to be done in a manner where each student has a voice and opportunity to be heard. This then requires the teacher to be flexible and available to give students space to express their thoughts. This practice should be modelled in post-secondary classrooms as well to demonstrate how one assessment and rubric can be utilized for a variety of expressions rather than a standard reflective essay. I have in the past had students paint a picture of their learnings in Indigenous education, create a small art instillation that depicted the ways that LGBTQ+ youth are excluded from schooling, and perform a spoken word piece – all assessed by the same rubric. Focusing on the process of learning rather than the outcome becomes a means to not only unschool pre-service teachers but also to show them that it is possible to be inclusive with evaluation rather than simply filling in a scantron. Lessons and assessments offer pre-service teachers powerful places to broaden away from the tools of domination and they then become no longer complicit members of the system.

Experiential learning moves children to outside their four walls of confinement and also may incorporate social justice actions. Volunteering at a local non-profit while learning curricular outcomes offers students and teachers a means to connect with their local communities and work past boundaries that have been established on their behalf. Students that may not fit the athletic identity may find themselves creatively engaging and discovering themselves in identities that are valued outside of the influence of school. When students are able to take part in both/and thinking rather than us/them thinking, they no longer become ‘deviants’ (de Certeau, 1988: 191), excluded and marginalized by schooling, but instead schooling must now adjust and make room for them. For as pre-service teachers have been engaging in work that acknowledges the power the nonhuman body of schooling has had in their lives, schooling risks reorienting its reproductive racializing power towards a power that empowers. The surge outside of schools to value and recognize the diverse enactments and performances of young people can no longer be displaced within schools by that of a deficit way of regarding our youth. Preservice teachers, with courage to continue to challenge complicity, need to find likeminded colleagues and use their own tools to work against domination.

CONCLUSION But while traditional arts of historical consciousness attempt to put the past in order, distinguishing the innovative from the retrograde, the central from the marginal, the relevant from the irrelevant or merely interesting, the photographer’s approach – like that of the collector – is unsystematic, indeed anti-systematic. (Sontag, 1977: 77)

In writing this chapter, I recognize I have pieced together ideologies and scholars that may have not otherwise shared a photo album. In doing this, my intentions are of

SCHOOLING, MILIEU, RACISM: JUST ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL

recognition that schooling is continuing to act and influence the racialization of our youth despite the plethora of work to disrupt it. A movement towards schooling as an agential being puts responsibility and accountability on schooling, shifting away from students and teachers. In current form schooling responds with intentions ‘to kill the imagination of both teachers and students’ (Giroux, 2015: 3), numbing both into a slumber of standardization. Policies and practices put into place to assist schooling with reproducing the idealized dominant identity not only reaffirm who deserves an education, such as clergy and elitist White males from the past, but force others into conforming or leaving. Drop-out rates are soaring, suicide rates for youth are staggering, male students are being ex-communicated from school while females are fed conflicting values of appearance, and those in the middle cannot use the washroom. These policies and procedures, and the explicit curriculum in schools, have been shaping the ways in which pre-service teachers enter into this space. Schooling has taught us from its historicity that being human in these spaces requires students to adopt a narrative bestowed on them by another (Mishra Tarc, 2015). If the story does not fit, then something is wrong with that student, while for many others who identify with the ideal notion of identity, schooling supports their progression through it. What those learn then in this space is that one identity is valued over others, that rewards for aggression in athletics are a banner or a trophy and absenteeism from school. What those learn is that learning cannot be disrupted by clothing worn by female students but clothing that reveals an athletic body is permitted. Females and males learn that the teaching profession is synonymous with motherhood, therefore not commensurable with other professional salaries in areas such as medicine or justice. What is also learnt is that schooling does not have a role in this process of reproduction. That schooling has been

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left to a clandestine but purposeful practice of using tools of domination to racialize young people and teachers and promote a learning environment that values and rewards what it wants to produce. It is time to focus on what this practice does, not the outcomes (Ahmed, 2012), and this also must include schooling as one that we learn from, as ‘we do not obtain knowledge by standing outside of the world; we know because “we” are of the world’ (Barad, 2003: 829, emphasis original). What schooling does, as an agential being, is continue to reshape and reappear throughout history to disguise the outcomes of institutional racism. Each time racism reappears, it may result in a differing form, but the outcome remains the same in that racism has become so ‘routine or ordinary’ (Ahmed, 2012: 21) that it goes unnoticed. Symbolic schooling has used the tools of domination to continue to grow institutionalized racism as an expected outcome. First schooling privileges specific members of society overtly, then covertly navigates its way through socially accepted practices such as ability grouping, streaming, and ideas of inclusion by enacting on and reproducing a dominant identity. Not only have corporations capitalized on systems that align with creating dead zones and students that are regarded merely as filing cabinets in schools through standardization of curriculum and assessment measures, but they also are generating profit aimed at sustaining educational gaps that pit privilege against marginalized. What are we learning of in schools? What type of human is of worth? One that profits off racializing others? If the ‘future is radically open at every turn’ (Barad, 2003: 826) then it is time to reorient the conversation by including the agential enactments of schooling and disrupt racism from within, not from those profiting off movements to fix schooling. Engaging in critical pedagogic actions with pre-service teachers in their teacher education programmes perhaps will be the reorientation needed.

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Pre-service teachers that experience critical pedagogy modelled in their classes and engage in self-reflexive thinking on the role schooling has played in their secondary education offer a means for a disruption of racism in schooling. Schooling will find ways to allow its habitual practice to reappear; it may manifest by other means, perhaps through an evolving banned books list, or lack of funding for experiential learning, but maybe we will be ready to recognize the different tools of domination schooling will pick up.

REFERENCES Adichie, C.N. (2009, July). The danger of a single story [video file]. Retrieved on Jan 1, 2020 from https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_­ ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs 28(3), 801–831. Block, A. A. (1997). I’m ‘only’ bleeding: Education as the practice of violence against children. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language & symbolic power (Raymond, G. & Adamson, M. Trans). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. de Certeau, M, (1988). The practice of everyday life (S. F. Rendall, trans). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Dewey, J. (2008). The child and the curriculum: Including, The school and society. New York, NY: Cosimo Classics. Eisner, E. W. (1967). Curriculum theory and the concept of the educational milieu. The High School Journal, 51(3), 132–146. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/40365913 Foucault, M. (1997). Ethics: Subjectivity and truth, Volume one. London, UK: Penguin Press. Freire, P. (2013). Education for critical consciousness (M. Bergman Ramos, Trans). New York, NY: Bloomsbury.

Freire, P. (2014). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. Bergman Ramos, Trans). New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Giroux, H. A. (2010). Rethinking education as the practice of freedom: Paulo Freire and the promise of critical pedagogy. Policy Futures in Education, 8(6), 715–721. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2010.8.6.715 Giroux, H. A. (2015). Education and the crisis of public values: Challenging the assault on teachers, students, and public education, 2nd ed. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Højgaard, L. & Søndergaard, D. M. (2011). Theorizing the complexities of discursive and material subjectivity: Agential realism and poststructural analyses. Theory & Psychology, 21(3), 1–17. doi: 10.1177/0959354309359965 hooks, b. (2003). Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope. New York, NY: Routledge. Kincheloe, J. L. (2016). The curriculum and the classroom. In, Paraskeva, J. M. & Steinberg, S. R. (Eds.) Curriculum: Decanonizing the field (pp. 611–632). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Kumashiro, K. K. (2015). Against common sense: Teaching and learning toward social justice, 3rd ed. New York, NY: Routledge. Mishra Tarc, A. (2015). Literacy of the other: Renarrating humanity. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Myrick, L. (2015). Doing woman’s work: The gendered science of teacher pay. In, Lutz Fernandez, A. & Lutz, C. (Eds) Schooled: Ordinary, extraordinary teaching in an age of change (pp. 33–43). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Sensoy, O. & DiAngelo, R. (2012). Is everyone really equal? An introduction to key concepts in social justice education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Shilling, C. (1992). Reconceptualising structure and agency in the sociology of education: Structuration theory and schooling. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 13(1), 69–87. doi:10.1080/0142569920130105 Sontag, S. (1977). On photography. New York, NY: Picador Press. Statistics Canada (2012). Suicide rates by age and gender. Retrieved on October 25, 2019 from https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/82624-x/2012001/article/11696-eng.htm

67 An Existentialist Pedagogy of Humanization: Countering Existential Oppression of Teachers and Students in Neoliberal Educational Spaces Sheryl J. Lieb INTRODUCTION In this chapter, I position existentialism as a humanizing force of resistance to the dehumanizing ideology of standardization and measurement that underpins 21st-century neoliberal educational policies and practices; that is, to situate existential philosophy as a model of both pedagogical theory and practice through which reflective, critical, dialogical, and relational approaches to teaching and learning are emphasized over instrumental teaching practices based in rigid technique and concrete measures of prescripted information. Fundamentally, I position existential pedagogy as the ground upon which to establish and affirm teachers and students as equal and relational subjects, the touchstone of a humanizing pedagogy. Therefore, in the classroom setting, affirming students as individuals can serve as the starting point for dismantling the neoliberal model that objectifies and dehumanizes

them by standardizing their abilities, their interests, and their learning experiences. In the realm of education, the term ‘neoliberal’ is used ubiquitously to denote the culture of relentless assessment, testing, and accountability measures that have been in place for decades. At the same time, it is important to examine the historical contexts from which neoliberalism emerged in the education sector. In the United States, the advent of neoliberal education can be traced back to the 1980s. On this theme, Ellison (2012) correlated the neoliberal infiltration of American schooling to the era of President Ronald Reagan’s administration and, even more specifically, to the commission of a national report on the state of education titled A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (1983). The rise to prominence of the concept of globalization in the discourse of education reform can be traced to the rightward shift in American politics over the past thirty years and the publication

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of A Nation at Risk in 1983 (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983). Framing education policy within the context of crisis and global economic competition, Risk set the stage for policy debates over the past 25 + years and introduced the concept of globalization into the lexicon of education discourse, and it did so by constructing an image of public schooling as a failing institution. (Ellison, 2012: 119–20)

The overall implication of the report was that American education was failing to produce competent students, prepared to compete and achieve success as members of the future workforce in an increasingly connected global marketplace. While, historically, education and economics have always been linked in terms of job training and professional career opportunities for future employment, the trajectory of neoliberalizing globalization since the latter part of the 20th century has extended well beyond learning as preparation for the responsibilities of adulthood. Instead, the neoliberal turn in education has made learning a business project, and only those learners capable of ‘passing the test’ will be recognized as capable achievers (i.e., future profit makers) whose success, as contributors to the wealth of the nation, will ultimately be defined by neoliberal standards of performance and production. Prior to its eventual demise in 2015, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 positioned the American government as overseer of mandated assessment, testing, and teacher accountability programs administered by the states; in turn, linking the provision of federal funding for schools to statewide compliance (Ellison, 2012; Hursh, 2007; Wong, 2015). On this theme, Hursh (2007: 494) wrote, ‘NCLB, like other recent education policies promoting standardized testing, accountability, competition, school choice, and privatization, reflects the rise and dominance of neoliberal and neoconservative policy discourses over social democratic policy discourses’. Over time, and due to increasing controversy surrounding the contested effectiveness of NCLB, the Every Student

Succeeds Act (ESSA) replaced NCLB as of December 2015. Essentially, the ESSA narrowed the federal government’s role by placing more direct control of curriculum standards, accountability procedures, etc. with individual states (Wong, 2015). Regardless of where authority and implementation has shifted since the institution of ESSA, the neoliberal model continues as the ongoing driver of public education policies and practices in the United States. As a former K-12 public school educator laboring under the neoliberal umbrella, I participated in that economized educational culture, where administrators and their followers extolled the virtue and practical sense of preparing future workers for the 21st-century global workforce. However, based on my own experiences in the system and the stories gleaned from many other current and former educators, neoliberalism has diminished the creative work of teaching by fostering an educational culture of oppression in which both teachers and students are routinely dehumanized, manipulated, and controlled by an institutionalized worldview grounded in production and consumption. Similarly, neoliberal teaching practices evoke comparisons with a pedagogical problem to which Brazilian educator and political activist Paulo Freire spoke long ago and to which other critical pedagogues have spoken since; that is, the ‘banking concept of education’ (Freire, 2000: 72), a process of instruction that situates the teacher as the depositor of information into the empty minds of students. Whether we use Freire’s language or some other descriptive phrasing to denote the objectified status of contemporary teachers and students, systemic practices of dehumanization – resulting in what I term existential oppression – prevail in the educational realm today, most especially in public education. In this environment, personhood, signifying the individual as an independent thinker capable of choosing, acting, and exercising personal agency, is negated or marginalized. The teacher must teach according to ‘educational

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industry’ standards and styles, and the student must acquire and demonstrate achievement of the information deemed necessary by the system – all intended to show compliance with the neoliberal mission. For the teacher, there is no sanctioned situation of freedom in which to critically and creatively facilitate human learning, especially noticeable with the relegation of the arts and humanities to the curricular fringes. Once perceived as a work of passion and creativity, teaching has become the work of expedience and compliance within the neoliberal design. For the student, objectification has resulted in silencing students’ voices whether to question the status quo, consider alternative topics and points of view, or to exercise choices with regard to assignments and learning activities. Education has been devalued in terms of the student’s intellectual and social development. As a result of K-12 neoliberal education, students come to the university indoctrinated with an instrumental mindset that values ‘getting the right answer’ rather than valuing the more substantive questions that serve to underscore human development in its myriad complexities. The following sections proceed from this introduction: (a) Defining the Problem of Existential Oppression, drawing primarily from the theories of 20th-century existential philosophers Martin Heidegger (as presented by Dybicz, 2010) and Jean-Paul Sartre; (b) An Existentialist Conception of Personhood, mainly based on Sartrean theory; and (c) Existential Tenets and Vignettes: Teaching For and Against Resistance, excerpts from teaching field notes relative to a 2013 self-study and related discussions. As organized, each section builds upon the one preceding it. In other words, the theoretical discussion of the ‘problem’ of human objectification and dehumanization (existential oppression) sets the stage for a philosophical analysis of personhood from the humanizing perspective of existentialism. In turn, these sections lead to a presentation of classroom vignettes/brief narratives framed around key

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existential tenets associated with Sartre: individual freedom, subjectivity, choice, action, and responsibility. Specifically, I address each of the five tenets within the context of personally documented excerpts of ‘realworld’ pedagogical scenarios (vignettes) that occurred in an undergraduate classroom (the setting for the self-study). Illuminated by the interplay between instructor (myself) and students collectively, these vignettes thus serve as narrative illustrations of both the selected existential concepts and the dynamics at hand during the study.

DEFINING THE PROBLEM OF EXISTENTIAL OPPRESSION I am concerned with existential oppression as it impacts both the educator (particularly the K-12 teacher) and students who are being schooled within the neoliberal educational construct. I define educator existential oppression as the negation of the educator’s personhood, meaning the denial or negation of their subjective stance as an independently thinking individual and, with that, their freedom to choose how and what they will teach. On this view, educators’ freedom to pursue their projects – personally and professionally – is compromised, if not outrightly denied. For many educators, the sense of dehumanization and objectification is palpable when they find themselves operating like mindless automatons on an assembly line of standardization, uniformity, conformity, and acquiescence to an external network of power and authority. For other educators, the situation may not feel so dire, possibly because they have been schooled this way themselves and do not presume to critically question the status quo. There yet could be others who support the neoliberal agenda because they actually believe in its policies and practices. Having personally experienced existential oppression as an educator, I am committed to the cause of educator liberation as an inward

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act of self-reclamation and as an expression of resistance to an untenable educational culture. Yet how are we to understand this claim of existential oppression in a modern, democratic society such as ours, a society in which individuals have the option/right to choose their careers, their life projects? They are not forced to do this work, and they are not overtly oppressed in terms of physical and material freedom. On all these points, I submit that it is necessary to consider existential oppression as a phenomenon that is quite particular to the individual, corresponding to one’s present reality in relation to his or her perception of self as a value-creating and meaning-making subject in the world. Even while acknowledging the limitations and constraints on one’s freedom, teachers may yet go along with the situation at hand. In this instance, they know inwardly that they are at odds with the ideological/pedagogical stance of the neoliberal regime, but they typically persevere with the work at hand, ultimately ending up at odds with themselves as well. This is how existential oppression begins to take over the soul and psyche of the teacher who knows who he or she should be (according to personal instincts and values) as an educator, but who has become fragmented and torn between such philosophical and pedagogical values and the demands of the neoliberal workplace. The denial of freedom from which educator existential oppression emerges is not an overtly visible or physical manifestation of power exerted by one party over another, such that it would be evidenced by physical constraints on one’s freedom or denial of shelter and necessary sustenance. Rather, I suggest that existential oppression is a condition experienced within the self, and it is the self that must consciously and actively choose freedom if it is to be released from this kind of bondage. Dybicz (2010) specifically addressed existential oppression in the field of social work, reinforcing my rationale that work-based existential oppression is a particularly individual, internalized experience

of existence. Grounding his argument in existential philosopher Martin Heidegger’s (1927) theory of Da-sein in Being and Time, Dybicz (2010) wrote: Da-sein refers to one’s uniqueness as an individual – one’s identity within the context of one’s constructed world. So oppression occurs when discursive elements of the dominant discourse – narratives, or master narratives as labeled by some (Brubaker and Wright, 2006; Sands and KrumerNevo, 2006) – begin to restrict the possibilities of Da-sein. In plainer language, master narratives begin to define the individual in such a way that one’s essence, or worth, is lessened. (2010: 37)

In other words, Heidegger’s Da-sein can be understood as individual being (my italics) embracing the freedom that makes personal identity-creation possible in a socially constructed world. On this account, oppression looms as a threat when the ‘master narratives’ (Dybicz, 2010: 37) of an authoritative social order limit or take away an individual’s freedom. In the case of the educator, the standardizing discourse and authority of the neoliberal narrative limits and, in many cases, disempowers the educator’s access to both academic and personal freedom in the workplace, effectively suffocating any claim to freedom. With the progression of personal and professional growth stunted, the educator begins to live the experience of existential oppression, alienated from the system and progressively disconnected from the expression of her ‘true’ self and her intrinsic values in the work environment. Sartre’s (1984: 117) concept of ‘being-foritself’, as theorized in his famous work Being and Nothingness, evokes similarities with Heidegger’s Da-sein as both emphasize individual subjectivity. They each underscored the concept as the counterpart of existential freedom and its inevitable connection to personal responsibility. In turn, the individual’s particularity as a uniquely free and responsible subject renders existential oppression as a uniquely lived, personal experience in terms of affect because it is not based on a socially constructed category or on a disposition that

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encompasses all individuals in exactly the same way. This does not mean that others are not living through similar experiences of oppression, but the subjectively embodied individual can only be conscious to her own particular circumstances in terms of how she will choose to respond to them. Both Heidegger and Sartre pointed to the possibilities inherent to one’s consciousness of existential freedom. A caveat, though, is that these possibilities must be chosen by the individual, within one’s particular situation of oppression in order to counteract it or move beyond it. Thus, in terms of Dybicz’s rendering of an oppressive master narrative in the world of social work, the possibility of freedom as Da-sein cannot be realized under ‘the current horizon of understanding’ (Dybicz, 2010: 37). However, within the context of Heidegger’s Da-sein or Sartre’s being-foritself, the individual can access her freedom ‘in terms of one’s free will, [accessing] the ability to construct counter-narratives to the oppressive master narratives, and thus move Da-sein beyond one’s current horizon of understanding by constructing a new social reality or world’ (Dybicz, 2010: 37). Speaking to the realm of education, the counter-narrative would more likely constitute a limited change in social reality or environment as opposed to constituting a systemic impact on the oppressive neoliberal social order. Nonetheless, the individual’s personally crafted counter-narrative to objectification would represent choices and actions, regardless of how small or limited, geared toward resisting an unacceptable status quo. Sartre (1984) expressed the same concept, asserting that the individual who finally decides that her situation is intolerable will then choose to take action to resist or change it. Essentially, along with the empowerment of self-awareness, existential ideals of possibility and personal transcendence can fuel the individual educator’s journey toward a more humanizing pedagogical praxis. In other words, one can create a new existential reality by choosing one’s freedom

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as a personal counter-narrative of liberation and by constructing a new social reality within the present classroom or in an alternative educational setting. Not easy tasks, but necessary steps toward freeing oneself from the debilitating state of educator existential oppression.

AN EXISTENTIALIST CONCEPTION OF PERSONHOOD As a philosophical school of thought, existentialism is concerned with personhood as constituted by the lived world of human experiences through which the individual makes personal meaning. Sartre’s (2007: 20) famous maxim, ‘existence precedes essence’, asserts that the individual first exists and then creates itself as a particular person, continually informed and impacted by the experiences and relationships that emerge during the course of its life – ­physically embodied, subjectively separate from the other things and subjects of the world. In Sartrean (1984: 147) terms, the existent is a being ‘for-itself and projected toward its own possibles’ amidst the reality of earthly existence. Moreover, the subjective nature of human consciousness renders personhood as uniquely individual and distinctly singular from other life forms in that human consciousness can reflect upon its own thinking. Thus, the individual can consider the self, in situation, as an embodied self-consciousness; that is, as a being who can choose to be self-aware, reflective, selfactivating, and responsible. Following Sartre’s premise that human existence is the precursor to any notion of selfhood (essence), we might say that during the earliest years of existence, the individual first becomes aware of others and the surrounding physical environment; to eventually embark on the task of self-creation as one develops increasing consciousness of self as a being capable of choosing and acting relative

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to lived experiences and relationships with others. In claiming that ‘subjectivity must be our point of departure’ (Sartre, 2007: 20), Sartre emphasized the significance of the individual’s ‘project’ (2007: 23) of personhood; in effect, a project of living based on the authenticity of one’s choices and actions and the acceptance of responsibility for resulting outcomes. On this view, identity is continually shaped through the individual’s capacity to exercise personal agency and construct meaning of one’s project. To illustrate this point, Sartre (2007: 23) explained: ‘Man [Woman] is indeed a project that has a subjective existence, rather unlike that of a patch of moss, a spreading fungus, or a cauliflower’. Echoing Sartre, the late existential scholar/ educator Robert C. Solomon (2005) defined personhood as an attitude that engages the world by virtue of the individual’s subjective manifestation of her project. Positioning selfcreation as an outgrowth of consciousness in action, Solomon (2005: xvii) stated: ‘The self is an ideal, a chosen course of action and values, something one creates in the world.’ What about the existence of other subjects, individuals, in the world with whom we necessarily interact and form relationships? Sartre (1984) maintained that, upon encountering the ‘look’ (1984: 352) of the other, the individual becomes a kind of object for the other’s attention, just as she – the individual subject in question – encounters or engages other subjects as objects of her attention. Still, this subject–other dynamic emerges as an offshoot of the individual freedom and subjectivity that form the bedrock of an existentialist conception of personhood. In particular, existential freedom points to the integrity of personhood in contrast to the condition of victimhood associated with objectification and dehumanization. Freedom is further understood as the property of individual existence that nourishes and affirms humanity in its fullest possible expression; thus, countering denial of the self and unjust practices that dehumanize and diminish the human condition. While history reminds

us of the existential truth that human freedom has been and likely will continue to be threatened by those seeking power over others, the existential need to live in freedom will continue to motivate and function as the rational individual’s impetus for choosing self-consciousness and personhood over self-negation and victimhood, thereby also valuing human cooperation as opposed to human conflict. As a final note on the subject–other dynamic, existentialism’s primacy of individual subjectivity holds that the individual’s will to choose and act for freedom is not unilaterally self-serving. In choosing freedom for oneself, the individual is responsible for the consequences of choosing as it affects their own life and, potentially, the lives of others with whom they interact. Simultaneously, others hold the same responsibility for their choices and actions. As such, there is an implicit, existential reciprocity at work for those individuals who esteem freedom as a moral value and as the fundamental condition for living in a shared world. Presuming a rational state of mind as the default condition of the ‘individual’, Sartre (2007) reinforced this point while also deflecting stereotypical accusations of existential solipsism, the idea that the individual can only be certain of the existence of one’s own mind and no other. Thus, he asserted, ‘choosing to be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for any of us unless it is good for all’ (Sartre, 2007: 24). Having established a theoretical premise for the reality of existential oppression in the realm of 21st-century neoliberal education, followed by a discussion of an existentialist conception of personhood, the next section brings into focus each of five fundamental tenets of Sartrean existential theory. To reiterate, these tenets are: individual freedom, subjectivity, choice, action, and responsibility. The following vignettes, purposed to ‘illustrate’ the tenets, are actual excerpts from research

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field notes associated with a pedagogical self-study that I conducted at my university during the spring of 2013. Aimed at examining my existentialist approach to teaching and learning in an undergraduate classroom, I recorded my observations and perceptions of self and students immediately after each class session throughout the semester. These post-teaching field notes consist of general observations, direct teacher–student interactions, and reflections on numerous existential and pedagogical issues, to eventually become a focal component of a fuller philosophical/ narrative analysis. For this chapter, the aim is to demonstrate a progression from theory to practice; that is, from this chapter’s beginning focus on philosophical analysis of existential theory specific to issues of oppression and personhood in education to culminating glimpses into a humanistic narrative of practice in a real-world university setting.

EXISTENTIAL TENETS AND VIGNETTES: TEACHING FOR AND AGAINST RESISTANCE During the spring semester of the 2012–2013 academic year, I taught a foundations of education course predicated on social justice issues as they impact teaching and learning. Within this framework, students – primarily teacher education majors – examined the intersections between public education in the United States and the social, cultural, political, and economic structures that have framed (and continue to frame) this society. Set up as a seminar-style class, the course involved assigned readings, follow-up seminar discussions, reflective writing activities, and students’ choices of mid-semester and end-of-semester creative projects. Embracing the relative freedom of this undergraduate classroom and extolling teachers’ work as a passion and calling, I continued to position myself as a resistor to the prevailing neoliberal model of standardization and

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objectification by exposing my students to critical and philosophical forms of pedagogy that could be adapted to their own evolving teaching philosophies. Interestingly, a paradox emerged with regard to the contrast between my existential view of education and the neoliberal view with which these students, as a whole, had been educated or trained. From my interactions and discussions with many of them, I learned that exposure to a space of freedom in the undergraduate environment can be a disconcerting and anxiety-producing experience for the unsuspecting student who has been conditioned to the standardizing climate of K-12 education. Many of them revealed that they were more at home with the educational ‘norms’ associated with assessments, tests, rubrics, and standardized grading systems. Ironically, the situation in which I found myself as university instructor was this: I was relatively free to pursue my personally conceived pedagogy of humanization in the higher education setting. Yet a new tension set in as I then experienced my own freedom being resisted by my students, positioning me in confrontation with existential oppression as embodied in many of them. Quick to criticize their prior K-12 schooling experiences, they yet acknowledged that they had become accustomed to neoliberal schooling practices. Despite acknowledging their experiences of objectification, many yet demonstrated a resistance to a more liberating classroom environment in which their willingness to engage, confront, and share would be necessary to the teaching/ learning process. In other words, the abstract nature of freedom loomed as a kind of uncertain, sometimes frightening, specter in their externally manipulated frames of reference. By the end of the semester, a number of students had demonstrated their willingness to embrace the opportunities of intellectual and existential freedom provided to them, while many others did not. The following sections represent those fundamental Sartrean tenets or principles of existential theory previously noted, illustrated

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by excerpts from extensive post-class field notes documenting my spring 2013 selfstudy research project. Section discussions correlate the meaning of each tenet to the selected excerpts. The idea is for the reader to see more deeply into the thoughts and concerns of one educator’s attempt to pursue a humanizing pedagogy of personhood while resisting neoliberal educational ideology.

Individual Freedom According to Sartre (2007: 48), because the aim of human freedom is freedom itself, it stands as the ‘foundation of all values’. Therefore, individual freedom is the moral ground upon which the individual must affirm (through choices and actions) her existential project or purpose for living, learning, and working over a lifetime. On this view, human existence can be understood as an inherent will to freedom that manifests in the subjective space of self-awareness through which the individual initiates and takes responsibility for creating her life; moreover, doing so in response to, and potentially in defiance of, an uncertain and contingent world. The following scenarios illustrate both personal musings and actual issues attached to the concept of individual freedom in specifically pedagogical contexts. Excerpt from class field notes – class 3, January 23, 2013, on experiencing my own freedom. Now, no longer submerged, I discover how much I like teaching. I like students responding to me, as well as seeking me out. I feel like a real individual who matters for something in this world. Yes, it’s human connection, but it is also reconnection with the me that I consider authentic – that girl who shone in school just by being there, the girl who made the classroom her psychic home, the girl and woman who feels the greatest excitement walking around college campuses, absorbing the feeling of humming minds within glorious buildings that hold stores of life stories and human information.

I like ideas. I like to discover ideas and explore them with others who come alive with ideas. So, how do I make my students come alive with ideas? I am trying to build a community so that they will open up and talk. I cajole and I perform. I put my gregarious side forward, tell them personal anecdotes, and try to bring warmth to the setting. I forget that I am actually being me, and not performing falsely. Perhaps this is the underlying message of today: I am not performing – I am being me. I am a born student/educator – I love this kind of human interaction. I feel a sense of excitement swell my insides when I make a connection with the students; when they respond as if I have something valuable to share with them. I trust that we will build this community, and that they will open up. … I want them to emerge … find that part of them that says, ‘I can resist, I can speak up, and I can be an individual in the classroom, in society, in the world’. Excerpt from class 5 field notes – Wednesday, January 30, 2013, on the tension between individual freedom and students as objects of neoliberal indoctrination. I purposefully invite my students to engage in meaningful classroom dialogue, to share opinions, and to be open to diverse points of view. I think to myself that an education course such as this – predicated on critical pedagogy, contemporary social justice issues, and philosophy of education – should naturally provoke passionate ideas and engaged discourse. With a touch of desperation and a large dose of humor, I announce to the group, ‘Liberate yourselves!’ In other words, embrace your freedom to be who you are, who you are striving to become. They smile, laugh, and reinforce my hope of inspiring deeper efforts at personal reflection, open communication, and a realized sense of inner freedom, as well as connection to this educational community. Still, I ask myself if this is too much, too controversial a practice of socio-cultural critique and self-­examination? Might I crush the teaching aspirations of these future educators? I openly voice this

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fear to my class, further explaining that while we intend to critique many aspects of the institution of education, hopes and possibilities for change are available. Sartre’s (2007) conception of individual freedom speaks to an absolute kind of freedom that, on the one hand, looms as frighteningly overwhelming; or, on the other hand, looms as the open possibility of freedom with which the subjectively self-conscious individual can choose to create oneself and her life path. Thus ‘condemned to be free’ (Sartre, 1984: 567) – without a predetermined plan of how to create an authentic and meaningful life in this space of freedom – the individual has the awe-inspiring and sometimes daunting responsibility of crafting their existence in the face of worldly uncertainty and contingency. In existentialist terms, this means that the individual cannot escape the ‘facticity’ (Sartre, 1984: 127) of existence; that is, the ‘givens’ of mortal existence in an uncontrollable universe. Therefore, it is essential to emphasize an understanding of facticity as an unavoidable feature of human existence with which individual freedom is constantly entangled. In the following passage, Sartre famously expounded on what is involved in coming to terms with oneself as a freedom. We mean that man first exists: he materializes in the world, encounters himself, and only afterward defines himself. If man as existentialists conceive of him cannot be defined, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself.… Man is not only that which he conceives himself to be, but that which he wills himself to be, and since he conceives of himself only after he exists, just as he wills himself to be after being thrown into existence, man is nothing other than what he makes of himself. This is the first principle of existentialism. (Sartre, 2007: 22)

The neoliberal institution of education represents the facticity against which the freedom of the individual educator is pitted. Theoretically speaking, and according to Sartre, educators must choose how they will

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confront the facticity of their situations in order to avoid the self-deception and rationalization of ‘bad faith’ (Sartre, 2007: 25); that is, the submergence of their will to freedom through compliance and conformism in the face of a dehumanizing educational model. In other words, by choosing and acting in ways inconsistent with their more humanistic personal and professional ethics, the oppressed educator exists in bad faith. On the other hand, the educator who consciously and intentionally chooses and acts in accordance with values and principles grounded in humanization and freedom avoids the trap of bad faith, thus countering the dehumanizing effects of existential oppression. By consciously choosing their liberation (if only inwardly at first), the concept of freedom itself moves from an abstract ideal to a potential reality. ‘The technical and philosophical concept of freedom … means only the autonomy of choice … choice, being identical with acting, supposes a commencement of realization in order that the choice may be distinguished from the dream and the wish’ (Sartre, 1984: 622). What about the students in this classroom, most of whom were preparing to become teachers in K-12 public education? Did they have any sense of a Sartrean conception of individual freedom? First, I suggest that it would be the exceptionally self-aware individual – student or teacher – who could emerge from the contemporary K-12 culture of schooling unscathed by its system of dehumanization. As products of neoliberal schooling themselves, and as students preparing to work in that same arena as future teachers, an ironic dynamic emerged in which individual freedom expressed by the educator (me) was frequently met with the facticity of students’ resistance to the pedagogical experience of freedom. In effect, evidenced by their ways of engaging (or not), expressing themselves (or not), completing their work (or not), and taking advantage of the freedom afforded in this classroom (or not), a significant number of these students demonstrated

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the internalization of their prior neoliberal training and the habits of conformity they acquired in response to the neoliberal agenda.

Subjectivity As an inherent feature of human existence, subjectivity is predicated on consciousness of self as unique in terms of personhood and the subjective meaning-making processes that occur in one’s inner world. Therefore, subjectivity rests on the human capacity to think about and reflect upon one’s own thinking in order to create meaning, aligned with intentions and purpose, for creating and pursuing one’s life projects. In the following vignette, I link the ironic absence of student subjectivity in relation to the relative freedom provided in the seminar classroom (as opposed to the anonymity that punctuates the large lecture hall). If students fear or disdain a space of freedom in which they are encouraged to raise their voices and interact, what does this attitude say about their state of selfconsciousness? How can they come to know themselves as freely thinking subjects? How can they come to know others? How can they make meaning of their educational journeys beyond job preparation? Excerpt from class 2 field notes – January 16, 2013, on teacher subjectivity reaching out to students’ subjectivities. I then show a clip from the animated movie Waking Life [dir: Richard Linklater, 2001], the clip in which Dr Robert Solomon talks about the actual exuberance fostered by existentialism to a young college student. I want this clip to somehow better define the key existential concepts to my students than just giving them rote definitions. I ask for feedback on the clip, and it is still silent. No one wants to speak up. So, of course, I fill in the space with my own chatter, trying to prompt responses from the students. This is a challenging job for the teacher – to get people to invest themselves and speak up for who they are, what they view, what they perceive, and how they feel about it.

I sense my own prejudice, my personal belief that kids today don’t embrace the intellect; that they are so trained to get a job, any job, and in this case, to be teachers. What does that actually mean to them? … One student, a male, said he liked the sense of freedom to be who you are from the Waking Life clip, but no one really picked up on that, at least not verbally to extend the conversation. Blank faces, scared faces, unaware/unconscious underneath these blank stares; challenged faces who are not used to being provided a place of freedom to reveal themselves to me – to each other – to themselves. How does the student’s lack of consciousness of her own freedom implicate a state of existential oppression that precludes possibilities for individual engagement and community-building in the existential classroom? Can an existential pedagogy of personhood, as enacted and encouraged by the individual teacher, break through the silences of existential oppression in a classroom full of students? What is my task as existential educator in this regard? I suggest that I must help students realize themselves, consciously and subjectively, so that they might have their ‘selves’ to contribute to the pedagogical experience. To implement the task at hand, I must continue to respond to each student as a particular person – through our classroom dialogues, through the personalized commentary I provide in response to assignments, and during one-to-one conferences. Ultimately, the aim is to affirm the student as a subject so that they will recognize their own stances as individuals and as co-participants in the world of the classroom community. ‘Without the world there is no selfness, no person; without selfness, without the person, there is no world’ (Sartre, 1984: 157).

Choice and Action Throughout his writings, Sartre ‘explores the phenomenon of choice as the central feature of existential freedom’ (Cox, 2008: 40).

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The capacity to choose involves a level of self-consciousness that speaks to the individual’s propensity to think about options from a variety of perspectives (e.g., intellectual, rational, emotional) as opposed to the singularly instinctual or reflexive ‘choices’ exercised by non-human creatures. In turn, existential choice typically manifests as intentional action, particularly as choice can be understood as a decision made in the face of multiple options for possible action. Nonetheless, the individual’s inclination to choose from the well of a critical self-consciousness often depends on her societal conditioning. Specific to neoliberal schooling, conditioning links to schooling practices that tend to breed a ‘follower’ or conformist mentality in contrast to that of an independent thinker. The following excerpt is intended to illustrate the dilemma of independent thinking and choosing for students who have been conditioned as ‘followers’ based on a telling comment made in a seminar moment: ‘They [students, young people] need someone to tell them what to think’. In turn, and specific to the second excerpt in this section, I address the ongoing challenge of engaging students in the ‘complicated conversation’ (Pinar, 2012: 183) or dialogical interactions that symbolize forms of action within an existential pedagogical dynamic. Excerpt from class 15 field notes – March 6, 2013, on developing as a consciously independent thinker and chooser. What actually stands out to me is a comment made by a student last week when we were discussing issues of race and social class. … how human beings are the most profoundly intellectually capable of all living creatures, but on the other hand, the most helpless of living creatures when first born. So, we talked about how babies and young children learn about their very being in the world through relationships with others; how, even the activity of nursing cannot be understood by the infant as involving another person; the infant only can understand – through sensation – that something physically and emotionally nurturing is

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happening to her or his body/being. Then, of course, kids learn through contact with others as separate selves and through actual lived experiences. Then we talked about kids learning from the cultural standards of family, school, etc. … a particular student made the point that young people don’t know what to think on their own: ‘They need someone to tell them what to think’ (as in family, schooling, and culture). This one simple comment speaks volumes about the way students are programmed in their thinking; how they bring this programmed mode of thinking to the university. Then we have to work to undo this mindset in order to wake up their minds so that they might develop the habit of thinking and choosing for themselves. Excerpt from class 21 field notes – April 3, 2013, on the challenges of making connections and fostering dialogical interactions as intellectual forms of action in the existential classroom. I used my prepared prompts to solicit discussion about the chapter. I consistently had to regroup my thoughts, my prompts … I ended the class by trying to bring the final part of the discussion back to today’s assigned reading about validating and teaching immigrant students through art. I pointed out that these students had to be actively engaged in some way that would be meaningful to them, that would validate them as individuals, that would recognize their unique cultures and backgrounds, and that would reinforce their learning processes as intentionally lived experiences. I compared my attempts to engage them [my students] through a discussion of their personal interests in the arts, sports, or both … So, this issue of active engagement in the classroom conversation is real, an ongoing challenge for me. … With a few exceptions, it seems to me that they are not really interested in resistance; rather, they have internalized their own existential oppression to lesser or greater degrees. They say they hate testing. They claim that they have not truly learned anything of great consequence through the methods

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used in neoliberal schooling, but they are not inspired to change. If they won’t engage while they have the freedom to be students in a class that invites intellectual curiosity and energetic dialogues encompassing alternative perspectives to the status quo, how are they going to engage, critically and creatively, their future students in a system that provides their paychecks, their retirement, and their summer vacations? I am very conscious of myself as a person who chooses to educate, as Sartre’s (1984: 117) ‘being for itself’; that is, as a self-aware individual intent on pursuing her life/work project in a space of freedom. My students are the primary others in my pedagogical world, and because of them, I become a ‘being-for-others’ (Sartre, 1984: 299). As such, my choices and actions are extended toward my students, these other subjects, whose lives intersect with mine in the pedagogical space of the classroom. On this view, the teacher’s self-consciousness is necessary to establishing consciousness of others (i.e., students) and, with that, taking the necessary actions to foster a positive and productive teaching/learning environment. Therefore, the situation of the existentially oppressed educator begs the question, ‘How can the educator be a consciousness for her students if she cannot exist as an empowered consciousness for herself?’ As one of the few recognized women philosophers among the existentialists of the 20th century, Simone de Beauvoir (1976) held that the individual who does not resist oppression cannot be conscious to self as an agentic subject because, in not choosing freedom, she remains in denial of her own humanity. On this point, the contemporary educator must want her freedom, as her moral grounding and conscious choice, more than external approval and the security of a job at any personal cost. De Beauvoir (1976) wrote: Now, I can evade this choice. We have said that it would be contradictory deliberately to will oneself not free. But one can choose not to will himself free. In laziness, heedlessness, capriciousness,

cowardice, impatience, one contests the meaning of the project at the very moment that one defines it. The spontaneity of the subject is then merely a vain living palpitation, its movement toward the object is a flight, and itself is an absence. To convert the absence into presence, to convert my flight into will, I must assume my project positively. (1976: 25–6)

Educators who choose to act toward the goal of pedagogical freedom, within or beyond the confines of the neoliberal classroom, may be still materially oppressed but are no longer existentially oppressed once having chosen to reclaim personhood and their projects of freedom. As long as they are pursuing a pedagogy of personhood, despite the obstacles, they are not complicit with neoliberal ideology. Rather, they are embodying their projects through their actions.

Responsibility The existential tenet of responsibility emerges from the premise that the individual, as an inherently free and subjective being, chooses and acts with consciousness of self, others, and the purpose at hand. Consciousness of self as a chooser and actor confers upon the individual the responsibility for the outcomes or consequences of such choices and actions. Even more fundamentally, and hearkening to his maxim that ‘existence precedes essence’ (2007: 23), Sartre asserted: ‘Thus, the first effect of existentialism is to make every man conscious of what he is, and to make him solely responsible for his own existence’ (2007: 23). I suggest that for today’s undergraduate student, the sense of responsibility attendant to valuing one’s own existence as a self-initiating, committed learner is highly compromised by 21st-century educational technologies that promote habits of expediency over habits of independent thinking and doing. The following excerpt reflects my concerns about technology and its influence on students in terms of taking responsibility for their learning as

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an existential project grounded in personal and intellectual freedom. Excerpt from class 23 field notes – April 10, 2013, on being responsible for one’s own thinking and doing. Typically, I like talking about technology as a seminar topic because I tend to assume that undergrads will have something to say about such an integral part of their lives, especially when that part of their lives comes under criticism, sometimes under real attack. What has become most apparent to me is how much technology is woven into the minute fractions of their time each day. Even the more assertive, dialogically active students reveal the taken for granted nature of having grown up with technology and technology access. One student mentioned that a friend told her about some guy who created an app that can provide a summary of any kind of literary or other academic work, providing quicker and easier access than traditional short-cuts such as Cliff notes. What this means is that the individual learner will be even less responsible for her own thinking – reminds me of another student’s statement some time ago this semester: ‘Well, somebody has to tell us what to think!’ … if ours is a culture of technology, then education becomes a culture of technology, as well, aligning its standards, methods, and policies with the power interests entrenched in commercialization, globalization, and the economization of society. Therefore, the institution of education must follow suit in order to mold the right kinds of workers for the neoliberal marketplace. Sartre’s conception of responsibility can be understood as the partner, often the burden, of existential freedom. ‘We are left alone and without excuse. This is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free: condemned, because he did not create himself, yet nonetheless free, because once cast into the world, he is responsible for everything he does’ (Sartre, 2007: 29). In turn, responsibility assumes a kind of

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ethical value in that consequences, sometime positive and other times negative, always emerge from the individual’s exercise of her freedom to choose and act. The ethical dimension lies in the individual’s consciousness of self as a freedom and the acceptance of responsibility for how one uses that freedom. While Sartre emphasized the notion of individual responsibility as it relates to consequences applied to oneself, he also acknowledged the idea of responsibility as it extends toward the situations of others in the world. Responsibility, therefore, often leads to a sense of ‘anguish’ (Sartre, 2007: 25) because of the many ways in which acting in freedom and being responsible for one’s actions affect not only one’s own life, but the lives of others. Clearly, the self-conscious educator accepts the dual responsibility of engaging her pedagogical praxis purposefully and authentically while also fostering students’ internalization of their responsibilities as equal subjects and learners.

FINAL REFLECTION A brief compilation of field notes: final thoughts (spring semester, 2013). When I am teaching, I am being myself, but I am also performing. I am in the free action of my doing. I am dancing my dance of freedom, not tied to the puppeteer’s strings within the dysfunction of a neoliberal, bureaucratic school system that would make me one of its herd followers. For some, the conception of being a follower is more nicely nuanced as being a team player, making the ‘following’ sound desirable and politically correct, but I know better. Once the dance of freedom is experienced, no other music, no other dance steps will do. It’s my music and my dance. I can perform as I feel it permeate my body, and as my psyche wishes to reveal itself to those with whom I am dancing. In the classroom,

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I dance with my students. More often than not, I lead. But I still try to offer them the lead, and sometimes someone will take it. I am right there though, ready to glide into the next step; ready to assume the lead if needed, and yet ready to hand it back. It’s a flow of back and forth, trusting and hoping, leading and following, but always wanting them, the students, to experience the freedom of leading for themselves. Ultimately, in positioning the situation of 21st-century education as a conflict of existential freedom (educating for humanization) versus existential oppression (educating for dehumanization), I have proposed that an existentially oriented pedagogy has the potential to resist the neoliberal model. To this end, I have signaled the individual educator as a primary agent for change in the school setting because we can neither expect nor wait for top-down, systemic modifications in policy to trickle down to the classroom. Instead, 21st-century educators who believe in social justice, critical consciousness, and the affirmation of individual personhood must assume the role of scholar-activists committed to purposefully re-visioning and implementing humanistic pedagogical practices. On this view, teachers must consciously decide how they will teach, potentially discovering or recovering their ‘existential attitude’ (Solomon, 2005: xi) of self-empowerment and integrity through resistance to their own objectification. By opening to the possibilities of fulfilling their fundamental projects as educators in freedom, teachers can extend that freedom to their students and potentially ignite an intrinsic curiosity and desire for learning that moves beyond expedience and toward enlightenment.

REFERENCES Beauvoir, S. de (trans. Frechtman, B.) (1976). The ethics of ambiguity. New York, NY: Citadel Press. Cox, G. (2008). The Sartre dictionary. London: Continuum. Dybicz, P. (2010). Confronting oppression not enhancing functioning: The role of social workers within postmodern practice. Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, 37(1), 23–47. Ellison, S. (2012). From within the belly of the beast: Rethinking the concept of the ‘educational marketplace’ in the popular discourse of education reform. Educational Studies, 48(2), 119–136. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed.). New York, NY: Continuum. Hursh, D. (2007). Assessing No Child Left Behind and The Rise of Neoliberal Education Policies. American Educational Research Journal, 44(3), 493–518. Pinar, W. (2012). What is curriculum theory? (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Sartre, J.-P. (trans. Barnes, H. E.) (1984). Being and nothingness: A phenomenological essay on ontology. New York, NY: Washington Square Press. Sartre, J.-P. (trans. Macomber, C.; ed. Kulka, J.) (2007). Existentialism is a humanism = (L’Existentialisme est un humanisme); including, a commentary on The stranger (Explication de L’Étranger). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Solomon, R. (2005). Existentialism (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Wong, A. (2015, December 9). The bloated rhetoric of No Child Left Behind’s demise: What replacing the despised law actually means for America’s schools. The Atlantic. Retrieved November 25, 2017, from https:// www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/ 2015/12/the-bloated-rhetoric-of-no-child-leftbehinds-demise/419688/

68 Vocational Education and Training in Schools and ‘Really Useful Knowledge’ Barry Down

INTRODUCTION In chronicling the origins of radical education in the United Kingdom between 1790 and 1848, Richard Johnson (1979) invoked the idea of ‘really useful knowledge’ as a way of distancing educative or transformative ideologies from the processes of capitalist schooling and related forms of ‘subjection’, ‘servility’, ‘slavery’ and ‘surveillance’ (or ‘useless knowledge’) (1979: 78). He identified four key aspects of radical education that are pertinent to this chapter. First, it involved a critique of all forms of ‘provided’ education including both state and religious. In other words, radical education was strongly oppositional and revolved around ‘a contestation of orthodoxies’ both in theory and practice. Second, it sought to develop alternative educational goals in which ‘educational utopias’ could be achieved. Here, the focus was on developing alternative pedagogies and curricula or ‘really useful knowledge’ about everyday life and politics. Third,

it attempted to advance education as a political strategy or as a means of changing the world. In short, education was viewed as a key site of counter-hegemonic activity. Finally, radical education developed ‘a vigorous and varied educational practice’ which emphasised ‘mature understandings’ amongst citizens in order to build ‘a more just social order’ (1979: 76–7). Johnson argued that when radicals spoke of ‘really useful knowledge’ they usually embraced either a theory of economic exploitation, a theory of the class character of the state and/or a theory of social and cultural domination (1979: 88). The dilemma facing radical education, he argued, centred on the question: ‘So how was really useful knowledge to be got?’ (1979: 79). Herein lies the starting point for this chapter. In this chapter I address the points raised by Johnson in two interrelated ways by, first, undertaking a critique of ‘provided’ forms of vocational education and training in Australian schools and the instrumental

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competency-based training approaches on which it is built; and, second, envisioning alternative possibilities or ‘educational utopias’ in which critical pedagogies and curriculum can flourish based on the needs, desires, dreams and aspirations of young people themselves. Putting it another way, I endeavour to engage in a spirit of both critique and possibility as it relates to what’s happening to schools and the people who inhabit them under the auspice of neoliberalism (Giroux, 2011). At the heart of this work is a desire to end the bifurcation between academic and vocational knowledge and the boundaries of the class system on which it is created. This means confronting the ways in which school knowledge is currently constructed and organised to perpetuate social hierarchies and inequalities by socialising, screening and segmenting different classes of students into different forms of school knowledge based on one’s class, race and gender. In short, the intention is to engage in some disruptive thinking about the ways in which the social institution of schooling has been hijacked by powerful economic, political and institutional interests to produce compliant worker/citizens to fit the needs of global capital and the consequences which flow. Against this backdrop, I identify a set of values and signposts for a socially just alternative as part of ‘the practice of freedom’ (as opposed to ‘the practice of domination’) (Freire, 2000/1970: 80). As Richard Shaull says in his foreword to Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed: There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or, it becomes ‘the practice of freedom,’ the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. (Freire, 2000/1970: 34, original emphasis)

Freire’s (2004) intervention, like Johnson, provides a rallying point to not only denounce

the ways in which neoliberal corporate needs have colonised schooling, but also announce a better world (2004: 105). This involves a twofold move by, first, resisting those narrowly conceived technical training versions of education based on the values of human capital formation and, second, reimagining a more humanising education founded on the principles of social and economic justice in a democratic society. Whilst vocational and work-oriented programmes have been a key component of secondary education over the past century, recent decades have witnessed a radical shift to the right in response to high rates of youth unemployment and the need for a globally competitive work force. In the Australian context, for example, there has been ‘a policy convergence’ around two key elements of vocationalism in schools (especially public high schools in poorer neighbourhoods); first, VET in Schools programmes, which refer to any vocational course/subject/module or competency provided through schools that comply with the National Training Framework; and, second, school-based new apprenticeships requiring a contract of training with an employer and attendance at school on either part-time or full-time basis (Malley and Keating, 2000: 643). Critics like Kliebard (1999) argue that vocationalism is now the central purpose of schooling as the whole curriculum is orientated toward vocational purposes (1999: xiv). For Bauman (2005), the exhortation to ‘get work’ and ‘get people to work’ is an attempt to ‘put paid simultaneously to personal troubles and shared social [public] ills’ whilst maintaining ‘individual life, social order and the survival capacity (“systemic reproduction”) of society as a whole’ (2005: 16–17). As a result, young people are told to be flexible, not too choosy and willing to take whatever jobs come along without too many questions (Bauman, 2004: 10). In short, young people are taught to adapt to the vagaries of the free market and growing precarity (Standing, 2011).

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In the context of these introductory remarks, I organise the rest of this chapter around two key questions as a way of generating really useful knowledge as it relates to the field of vocational education and training in schools: • What has to be resisted? • What kinds of pedagogical conditions need to be brought into existence?

In addressing these questions, I draw on insights gleaned from over a decade of ethnographic research into the lives of young people in Australian high schools located in ‘disadvantaged’ suburban communities characterised by low levels of weekly earnings, high levels of welfare dependency, high rates of youth unemployment, low levels of parental education and poor educational participation and retention rates (Down et al., 2018; Smyth et al., 2010).

WHAT HAS TO BE RESISTED? Put simply, neoliberalism and the damaging consequences which flow for education and young lives, especially those living ‘on the threatening boundary of the classroom and disparagingly labelled as “marginal”, “slow learners” or “remedial” and eventually “vocational’’’ (Rose, 1989: 8). In this section, I pursue this argument by alluding to the problematic nature of neoliberalism especially as it relates to the field of vocational education and training in schools and the implications for the kind of education young people receive, or not. Lipman (2011) provides a helpful way into this when she defines neoliberalism as ‘an ensemble of economic and social policies, forms of governance, and discourses and ideologies that promote individual self-interests, unrestricted flows of capital, deep reductions in the cost of labor, and sharp retrenchment of the public sphere’ (2011: 6). The goal of neoliberalism is to weaken the welfare state, destroy public institutions, cut taxes, deregulate services, reduce labour costs and attack workers’

rights and conditions (Harvey, 2007: 3). Such draconian measures only become possible because neoliberalism has taken on an ‘aura of inevitability’ (Saul, 2005: 30) whereby all aspects of society are absorbed into a particular economic logic or ‘homo economicus’ in which ‘all conduct is economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics’ (Brown, 2015: 10). Accordingly, the only questions left, in the words of Saltman (2008), are ‘how to best enforce knowledge and curriculum conducive to individual upward mobility within the economy and national economic interest … as perceived from the perspective of business’ (2008: 209). In the context of this neoliberalising project, education has been radically redefined by a virulent form of what Sahlberg (2011) describes as GERM (Global Educational Reform Movement), an apt acronym to explain a set of narrowly conceived accountability practices based on the technical delivery of officially mandated content as measured by standardised test scores. As a consequence, neoliberalism not only creates ‘a new social imaginary’ or ‘common sense about how we think about society and our place in it’ (Lipman, 2011: 6) but also distorts the kind of education young people receive based on ‘the god of economic utility’ (Grubb and Lazerson, 2004; Postman, 1996: 30). Little wonder then, that McLaren and Farahmandpur (2005: 16) describe neoliberalism as ‘one of the most dangerous politics that we face today’. In the remainder of this section, therefore, I seek to interrupt two key logics underpinning the current obsession with vocational education and training in schools and why they should be resisted.

Human Capital Formation and Competency-Based Training The rhetoric of building a skilled workforce to meet the needs of a modernising economy

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in a globally competitive market came to prominence following the 1970s recession and again during the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. Schools were targeted for their failure to produce workers with the necessary skills to compete globally. This translated most effectively around the crisis of literacy and numeracy as measured on standardised test scores and rankings. This led to the introduction of a range of backlash pedagogies, corporate modes of management and disciplinary techniques in order to realign schools more closely with the interests of global capitalism. In effect, schools were required to produce workers with a set of ‘new mentalities’ (Davies and Bansel, 2007: 248) or the knowledge, skills, dispositions and identities that fit into a deeply stratified and predatory labour market. Carlson (2008) adopts the imagery of the ‘curriculum machine’ to describe how the school curriculum is translated into a sequential series of behavioural skills to be ‘mastered’ and related discursively to the functional entry-level needs of the workforce. He argues that this ‘basic skills machine’ is ‘designed to work and rework the “raw material” of labor power (students) in order to bring out and develop its economic potential, in this case a potential linked to a low-wage, service industry job market for high school graduates’ (2008: 84). As a result, we have witnessed a renewed emphasis on vocational education, careers counselling, work experience programmes, links to industry, competency-based training, curriculum differentiation and back-to-basics teaching. The logic is that schools must work harder, both literally and rhetorically, to teach students how to labour (Willis, 1977). The problem with this kind of reductionist logic is that it leads to an emaciated view of education limited to ‘technological practice’ or ‘training’ (Freire, 2007: 4) in which students are taught to ‘adapt … to what is inevitable, to what cannot be changed [in order to] survive’ (Freire, 1998: 27). Such fatalism, in the words of Freire (1998), creates a ‘heavy

dark cloud’ leading to a ‘despotic approach to education’ by reducing it ‘to mere training in the employment of dexterity or scientific knowing’ (1998: 102). As a result, education is designed to ‘train’ workers in ways that deny their humanity and ‘presence in the world’ (Freire, 1998: 74). In a similar way, Dewey (1944/1916: 316) warned about the danger of vocational education being interpreted as direct ‘trade education’, and, therefore, limited to achieving ‘technical efficiency in specialized future pursuits’. His central argument was that ‘to predetermine some future occupation for which education is to be a strict preparation is to injure the possibilities of present development and thereby to reduce the adequacy of preparation for a future right employment’ (1944/1916: 310). Like Freire, Dewey was concerned that education would become an instrument for perpetuating the existing industrial order of society, rather than a means of social transformation (1944/1916: 316). Moreover, vocationalism serves to hide what Sassen (2014: 1) describes as ‘the new logics of expulsion’ whereby ‘people, enterprises and places are expelled from the core social and economic orders of our time’. According to Sassen (2014: 5), these ‘deeper systemic dynamics’ are part of a newer ‘predatory formation’ which is responsible for ‘dismember[ing] the social through extreme concentrations of wealth, the destruction of much of the middle class and the expulsion of the poor from land, jobs and homes’. In other words, the promise of the knowledge economy to produce more high-skilled, high-tech jobs is nothing more than a ‘big lie’ (Macedo, 1993) for growing numbers of young people whose only hope is to find employment in part-time, casualised, repetitive and poorly paid jobs in the retail, trade and service sectors (Anyon, 2005). To put it bluntly, young people are being put to the sword by an increasingly callous market fundamentalism that objectifies young people,

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who are treated as disposable commodities, which in turn leads to their exploitation as a reserve army of labour (Freire and de Oliveira, 2014: 74). Nonetheless, right-wing think tanks, industrialists, politicians and educationalists continue to blame students as well as their families and teachers for the crisis in the economy. In an effort to ‘defuse the situation’, Sarup (1982) believes education systems typically respond in one of two ways: first, introducing a ‘hard approach’ which asserts that young people must simply learn to live in the real world (e.g., get up on time, be punctual, develop good habits, learn to accept discipline, gain work experience) (1982: 32) and, second, the ‘soft’ approach which ‘defines the problem in psychological terms; the focus being on the personal troubles of the individual rather than wider structural and institutional arrangements’ (1982: 32). In response, successive Australian governments have incorporated CompetencyBased Training (CBT) and employability skills into the school curriculum as one way of dealing with these kinds of problems (Down, 2009). The intention is to instil students with the principles and rules of the world of work (e.g., Bowles and Gintis, 1976). Critics like Wheelahan (2007) believe that CBT in schools serves no useful purpose and should be discarded because it leads to ‘a very fragmented, atomistic and instrumental view of knowledge’ (or useless knowledge) (2007: 647). The problem, she argues, is that CBT limits working-class students ‘to specific content, and not the systems of meaning in disciplinary knowledge’ (2007: 648). As a consequence, ‘the meaning of that content is exhausted by the context’, thus making it impossible for students to access knowledge capable of helping them to ‘transcend the present to imagine the future’ (2007: 648). In short, working-class students are being prepared for very lowlevel, poorly paid, casualised work.

Academic and Vocational Streaming The practice of dividing students into academic and vocational streams has been a part of the ‘grammar of schooling’ (Tyack and Cuban, 1995) for well over a century, thus making it very difficult to dislodge or imagine otherwise. This deep-rooted tradition is based on the belief that some students are smarter and more deserving than others, and these students will be destined for university and eventually high-paying and rewarding careers. The others, because of their wellknown intellectual inferiority, will be consigned to the bottom end of the labour market to ‘work with their hands not their minds’ (Kincheloe, 1999: 139). Kincheloe (1999: 11) contends that such views are deeply demeaning because they not only fail to value the knowledge of manual workers but also see vocational students as failures. By contrast, success in the academic curriculum ‘has become a symbol not only of prestigious work but of virtue itself’ (1999: 11). This leads to the flawed assumption that ‘being academically schooled’ is somehow the same thing as being ‘well-educated’ (1999: 11). Such views have profoundly damaging consequences for individual students. Rose describes how this kind of deficit thinking plays out in classroom life: If you’re a working-class kid in the vocational track, … you’ll … be constrained in certain ways: You’re defined by your school as ‘slow’; you’re placed in a curriculum that isn’t designed to liberate you but to occupy you, or if you’re lucky, train you, though the training is for work the society does not esteem; other students are picking up the cues from your school and your curriculum and interacting with you in particular ways. If you’re a kid like Ted Richards, you turn your back on all this and let your mind roam where it may. But youngsters like Ted are rare. What Ken and so many others do is to protect themselves from such suffocating madness by taking on with a vengeance the identity implied in the vocational track. Reject the confusion and frustration by openly defining yourself as the Common Joe. Champion the average. Rely on your own

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good sense. Fuck this bullshit. Bullshit, of course, is everything you – and the others – fear is beyond you: books, essays, tests, academic scrambling, complexity, scientistic reasoning, philosophical inquiry. (Rose, 1989: 29)

In this extract, Rose vividly explains how the cultural processes of advantaging and disadvantaging operate on different classes of students in schools. If you happen to be poor or from a minority background, then it is more likely that you will end up in the vocational track because you have limited potential and therefore are suited for manual or unskilled work. Historically, vocational education has been a form of class-based segregation or stigmatisation designed to restrict the numbers of students climbing the educational ladder reserved for the middle and upper classes, on the grounds that it would ‘lower standards’, ‘threaten excellence’ or interfere with the progress of the ‘academic elite’ (Bessant, 1989: 70). The upshot is that vocational education functions to reproduce a social hierarchy based on deep forms of classism, racism and sexism whilst making this state of affairs appear to be normal and universally accepted, and therefore unquestionable. The assumption is that some students are judged to be less capable or intelligent than others, and as a consequence, not suited to abstract forms of thinking and more valued futures (Oakes, 1995). As Teese (2000: 3) argues: ‘It is through the curriculum that the financial and cultural reserves of educated families are converted into scholastic power – the ability to differentiate one group of children from others on a socially legitimate and authoritative scale of general worth’. This kind of power becomes even more critical as individuals are made increasingly accountable for their own ‘labour market fates’ (Furlong and Cartmel, 1997: 28). The question becomes then, how is this deception maintained? Put simply, it can only happen because power is made invisible and those everyday practices which sustain

it take on the appearance of being natural or common sense (Kumashiro, 2004). In other words, these processes operate behind our backs and in ways that are not always of our own choosing or best interests. Delving into the history of education, we can see the legacy of the early eugenics movement which set out to improve the genetic potentialities of the population by encouraging the practice of selective breeding. Pivotal to this wider social experiment was the use of intelligence testing to detect mental deficiency or the abnormal in the student population. According to the science of mental testing, students who were deemed to be less intelligent (‘idiots’, ‘feeble-minded’, ‘morons’ and ‘imbeciles’) should be streamed into special classes that better reflected their innate abilities (Down, 2010). Such practices were justified in the context of the ‘psychological capture’ of education whereby individual merit and intelligence became the key to individual success (McCallum, 1990: 74). The modern science of psychology effectively promoted the benefits of intelligence testing to solve all manner of educational problems including grouping, selection, guidance, teaching methods and remediation of backward children. These psychometric practices penetrated all levels of the education system by linking notions of child development, academic excellence, scientific progress, social efficiency, meritocracy and the fulfilment of individual potential based on needs, abilities and interests. In reality, the pseudo-scientific practice of intelligence testing was deeply mired in the reproduction of social and educational inequalities (Kincheloe et  al., 1996). Whilst some of the language of the early eugenicists may have been tempered over the decades, ‘there can be little doubt that these developments continue to have tangible residual effects today in the way vocational education is still thought about as the destination track for working-class children’ (Down et al., 2018: 71).

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WHAT KINDS OF PEDAGOGICAL CONDITIONS NEED TO BE BROUGHT INTO EXISTENCE? In this section, the focus shifts to the task of reclaiming vocational education and training from the destructive effects of neoliberal ideologies and reimagining a socially just alternative based on the values of democracy, critical inquiry, justice, respect and civic activism. In Johnson’s (1979) terms, the intention is to pursue ‘really useful knowledge’ as a means of reframing some different kinds of conversations amongst policy makers, practitioners and community activists.

Rethinking Class and Deficit Thinking Foremost, there has to be a willingness to confront the historical class-based nature of vocational education and training and the deficit thinking on which it is based. It involves looking afresh at the ways in which different classes of students and their families are treated and with what effects. This entails asking more probing types of questions like ‘why things are the way they are, how they got that way, and what set of conditions are supporting the processes that maintain them’ (Simon, 1984: 380). In addressing these kinds of questions, Kincheloe and McLaren’s (2005) notion of an ‘evolving criticality’ is especially helpful because it enables us ‘to get behind the curtain, to move beyond assimilated experience, to expose the way ideology constrains the desire for selfdirection, and to confront the way power reproduces itself’ (2005: 324). At the heart of this criticality is an understanding of the ways in which social class operates on the lives of young people. In the words of Smyth and Wrigley (2013: 196), class is ‘grounded in relationships of power linked to the ownership and control of the economy – a system whereby a tiny minority own the means of production (factories,

land, technology, and so on) and determine the employment of most of the world’s population’. In terms of the argument being mounted in this chapter, class and poverty have ‘wide-ranging cultural and psychological effects’ which translate most acutely in the emotions and experiences of ‘shame and futility’ (2013: 196). As Rose (1989) so ably described earlier in the chapter, workingclass students deemed ‘unfit’ to study the ‘academics’, will ‘be constrained in certain ways’ through the disciplinary processes and relations of schooling (1989: 29). For example, labelling students as ‘slow’, ‘remedial’, ‘at risk’, ‘troublesome’ or ‘vocational’ is perhaps one of the most insidious and harmful practices in schools. Maxine Greene (2001: xvi) argues that labels ‘carry the messages of power: they demean, they exclude; they create stereotypes’. The problem is that they ‘become a part of our lived experience; they can become a part of one’s life, one’s identity and hence, difficult to replace’ (Hudak, 2001: 9). Moreover, labels blame the victim and their supposed defects – lazy, lack of aspirations, poor behaviour, low levels of literacy, dysfunctional families – rather than the systemic structural forces shaping the formal school system. As a consequence, the real causes of injustice (e.g., poverty, unemployment, health and housing) are hidden by a ‘public sphere… dominated by individualising, victim-blaming discourses [in which] structural perspectives are absent or marginalised’ (Fraser, 2012: 45; Valencia, 2010).

Integrating Vocational and Academic Learning The practice of dividing students between academic and vocational in high school is based on a myth about the inferiority of the intellect of manual workers. In reality, the socially constructed division between academic and practical knowledge serves no useful purpose other than to maintain a

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distorted social hierarchy that limits the imagined futures of marginalised students. Therefore, an important first step in the process of a democratising vocational education is to contest the distinction between ‘hand work’ and ‘brain work’ and the normative assumptions underpinning it (Apple, 1998). According to Rose (2008: 23), this involves rethinking the notion of intelligence beyond traditional standard measures of IQ and rediscovering the human dimensions of work. Only then, he argues, will it become possible to accommodate differences in student aptitude and interests beyond existing ‘limited categories and simplistic ways of organising courses, ranking, ordering and placement’, especially the artificial divide between ‘low and high level knowledge’ (2008: 31). Kincheloe (1995) argues that integration of vocational and academic knowledge provides a way forward because it allows students to use material and conceptual tools in authentic contexts. As a consequence, they come to ‘appreciate academic skill in real life context; at the same time, they understand the vocational activity at a level that demands their creativity’ (1995: 254). Kincheloe (1995) goes on to argue that vocational education approached in this manner is not only more respectful of the intellectual and creative potential of all learners but recognises that crafts and trades involve higher orders of intellect. Thus integration, in the words of Kincheloe (1995: 270), refuses ‘to validate the common assumption within the culture of formal education that the theoretical ways of knowing of the academic disciplines are innately superior to the practical ways of knowing of the vocations’. As well, integration is more likely to address some of the traditional criticisms of academic education such as irrelevance, boredom, teacher dominance and student passivity. This opens up the possibility of learning in a context that really matters to students based on their interests and using more participatory and cooperative forms of learning

involving conceptual understandings, problem-solving, application and skills development (Kincheloe, 1995: 254–62). Likewise, Dewey (1944/1916: 38) railed against what he called a ‘bookish’ and ‘pseudo-intellectual spirit’ in education rather than the development of ‘a social spirit’. Dewey wanted schools to focus on ‘the kind of intelligence which directs ability to useful ends’ (1944/1916: 39) by giving students ‘a social sense of their own powers and of the materials and appliances used’ (1944/1916: 40).

Developing Critical Awareness and Civic Activism I now turn to the contradiction of helping students to gain the knowledge and skills needed to participate in the social relations of the economy (the way it is) and, at the same time, developing forms of critical citizenship (how it might be) (Simon et  al., 1991: 6). Again, Freire (2004: 19) provides some helpful guidance when he asserts that a radical pedagogy must never make concessions ‘to the trickeries of neoliberal “pragmatism” [by reducing] educational practice to the technical-scientific training of learners, training rather than educating’ (original emphasis). In other words, if we want to overcome the crises facing young people today – precarity, consumerism, individualism, endless uncertainty and disposability (Giroux, 2015) and the ‘collateral damage’ and ‘wastage’ that flows (Bauman, 2011) – then we are beholden to not only speak out against the fatalistic ideology contained in neoliberal discourses but to ‘make the concretization of that tomorrow viable’ (Freire, 2007: 26). As Freire (2000: 100) declares: ‘Our historical inclination is not fate, but rather possibility.’ What Freire is alluding to here is the need for a new social imaginary, one founded on a commitment to the values of humanisation and solidarity on the one hand and community living on the other (Freire and de Oliveira, 2014: 79). In short, vocational

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education needs to shift the focus from training students to ‘developing their capacities for political agency, engaged citizenship, and critical intervention in the conditions in which they and others live’ (Goodman and Saltman, 2002: 154). Of course, this kind of criticality unsettles the dominant narrative of neoliberalism and human capital formation described earlier. Therefore, a critical pedagogy of vocational education will inevitably irritate dominant economic, political and institutional interests. This kind of criticality requires a new generation of what Kincheloe (2009: 388) describes as ‘warrior intellectuals’ who can ‘transcend the trap of traditional gender, racial, sexual, and class-based stereotypes and the harm they can cause in their individual lives and in the larger society’. In the process, they develop an understanding of critical consciousness and social action (praxis) as they formulate ‘concrete strategies to improve their own life chances’ (Ginwright and Cammarota, 2007: 707). This involves helping students to ask more penetrating questions about workplace issues in light of broader structural conditions, for example, personal experiences of work, the changing nature of work, structural unemployment, trade unions, power relations, health and safety, child labour, industrial legislation and wages and conditions (Simon et al., 1991).

Understanding the Nature of Good and Bad Work In the context of the globalisation of capital and profound technological transformations there has been an unprecedented disruption to the modes of production in which more and more commodities are now produced with less labour. The tendency of global capital to destroy jobs faster than they can be created has resulted in an increasingly competitive and exploitative labour market (Aronowitz and DiFazio, 2010). Young

people are now immersed in what Best and Kellner (2003: 75) describe as ‘a rapidly mutating and crisis-ridden world’ in which ‘flexibility’ and ‘insecurity’ are the new norm (Standing, 2011: 24). Giroux (2013: 136) puts it more bluntly when he describes ‘a culture of cruelty’ in which ‘debt, joblessness, insecurity, and hopelessness are the defining features of a generation that has been abandoned by its marketobsessed, turn-a-quick profit elders’. Given these perilous economic conditions, the cultivation of ‘really useful knowledge’ seeks to help young people interrogate the difference between ‘good’ work and ‘bad’ work. Kincheloe (1999: 64) believes that there is a sharp distinction between ‘work’ which ‘involves a sense of completion and fulfilment and a ‘job’ which ‘is simply a way of making a living’. But, as Kincheloe (1999: 65) argues, work also brings with it some important ethical and moral questions about the nature of ‘good’ work in a democratic society. At the heart of Kincheloe’s (1999) argument is the view that ‘good’ work involves the struggle for ‘worker dignity’ (1999: 65) based on a set of key principles; by way of summary: the notion of ‘self-direction’; the workplace as a ‘place of learning’; ‘work variety’; ‘workmate cooperation’; ‘a contribution to social welfare’; ‘an expression of the self’; ‘democratic expression’; ‘workers as participants’; ‘play is a virtue’; and ‘better pay between managers and workers’ (1999: 65–8). In this context, ‘really useful knowledge’ would be attentive to the kinds of political strategies required to safeguard more secure, well-paid and meaningful work. The emphasis would be on helping young people to build a ‘life project’ involving ‘selfesteem’, ‘self-definition’ and ‘long-term security’ (Bauman, 2004: 151). One such approach advocated by Sen (1992) involves the development of ‘capabilities’ which is about assisting young people to: (i) identify the kind of lives they want to lead; (ii) providing them with the skills and knowledge to

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achieve these goals; and (iii) helping them to understand and confront the political, social and economic conditions that enable or impede them (Smyth et  al., 2010: 74; Walker, 2006). The goal is to give all young people access to the kind of knowledge that they will require for survival as ‘human beings and to their claims as citizens’ (Appadurai, 2006: 168). This means providing adequate opportunities for ‘creative and dignifying work’ supported by a commitment to ‘occupational citizenship’ based on an ethic of ‘civic friendship and social solidarity’ (Standing, 2009: 10). If these goals are to be realised then it will require the creation of hospitable learning environments in which all young people are treated with dignity, trust, care and respect as the cornerstones of the socially just school (Smyth et al., 2014).

Reimaging Teachers’ Work In pursuing this agenda, ‘really useful knowledge’ would need to address the deep pessimism and fatalism that clouds the teaching profession today. Within the dominant GERM there has been a proliferation of anti-democratic and anti-educative policies (e.g., privatisation, school choice, corporate managerialism, commodification, competition and high-stakes testing) that have not only eroded the idea of ‘schools as democratic public spaces’ (Giroux, 1997: 218) but reinforced the conception of the teacher as technician (Ball, 1993: 107). The starting point for the kind of reclamation being advocated in this chapter has to begin, therefore, by reimaging teachers’ work in more socially critical ways. This means moving beyond a passive and compliant ‘banking’ approach to teaching and learning (Freire, 2000/1970) and, instead, rediscovering the critical democratic potential of ‘teachers as intellectuals’ (Giroux, 1988; Giroux and McLaren, 1986). As Giroux explains:

[T]eachers as intellectuals will need to reconsider and, possibly, transform the fundamental nature of the conditions under which they work. That is, teachers must be able to shape the ways in which time, space, activity, and knowledge organize ­everyday life in schools. More specifically, in order to function as intellectuals, teachers must create the ideology and structural conditions necessary for them to write, research, and work with each other in producing curricula and sharing power. … As intellectuals, they will combine reflection and action in the interest of empowering students with the skills and knowledge needed to address injustices and to be critical actors committed to developing a world free of oppression and exploitation. (Giroux, 1988: xxxiv)

Central to Giroux’s (1988) conception of teachers as intellectuals is a willingness to challenge some deep-rooted assumptions and beliefs that underpin conventional curriculum. These teacher scholars develop a more sophisticated awareness of the ways in which school knowledge is organised, produced and disseminated to benefit different classes of students in different ways. Giroux (1988) believes teachers begin to illuminate the relationship between power, knowledge and ideology in the context of wider economic, political, and social interests that different forms of knowledge reflect (1988: 18). In pursuing this kind of critical intellectual work, Giroux suggests that teachers interrogate questions, such as: • What counts as knowledge? • How is this knowledge produced? • How is such knowledge transmitted in the classroom? • What kinds of classroom social relationships serve to parallel and reproduce the values and norms embodied in the accepted social relations of other dominant sites? • Who has access to legitimate forms of knowledge? • Whose interests does this knowledge serve? • How are social and political contradictions and tensions mediated through acceptable forms of classroom knowledge and social relationships? • How do prevailing methods of evaluation serve to legitimize existing forms of knowledge? (1988: 17–18)

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In addressing these kinds of questions teachers become political actors as they begin to make everyday assumptions, beliefs and practices problematic. In short, teachers are knowledge workers capable of producing ‘really useful knowledge’ for the benefit of the ‘least advantaged’ (Connell, 1993).

CONCLUSION In this chapter I have argued that young people today face an increasingly hostile and precarious labour market characterised by growing levels of casual, menial and poorly paid service sector jobs. Under the influence of neoliberal ideologies, schools have not only been blamed for the crisis in the economy but, ironically, identified as part of the solution. This has led to a dominant view of education in which human capital formation has become normalised as the primary purpose of education. The consequence of this has been an increasing emphasis on vocational education and training in schools, particularly in poorer neighbourhoods. The official rhetoric suggests that schools need to be more closely aligned to the imperatives of a globally competitive market in order to produce ‘job-ready’ workers with the skills, knowledge and dispositions to fit into a hierarchical social order. As a consequence, vocational education and training in schools has been utilised to justify the segregation of students from poor and minority backgrounds into less socially valued forms of school knowledge and imagined futures. I have argued that this artificial division between vocational and academic serves no useful purpose other than perpetuating myths about the notion of intelligence and merit based on deficit views of marginalised young people around the intersecting axes of class, race and gender. The discourses surrounding these practices can be traced back to the early eugenics movement which still lingers under various guises as students are selected, sifted

and sorted into different forms of school knowledge. Despite the strengths of many vocational programmes to offer an alternative for disengaged and working-class students who typically drop out of school, these programmes have typically been a ‘dumping’ ground for the least advantaged. Furthermore, they fail to disrupt the strong correlation between social advantage and traditional understandings of academic success. Finally, this chapter draws on Johnson’s notion of ‘really useful knowledge’ as a means of not only critiquing existing assumptions, beliefs and practices underpinning the field of vocational education and training in schools, but advancing a set of alternative principles and values to guide practice. These include rethinking class and deficit thinking, integrating vocational and academic learning, developing critical awareness and civic activism, understanding the nature of good and bad work and reimagining teachers’ work. I have argued that this constellation of ideas offers a starting point with which to engage teachers in some more complex and difficult conversations for the purpose of interrupting taken-for-granted views of socio-political reality with which most individuals have become comfortable. At the heart of ‘really useful knowledge’ is a fundamental belief in the ‘educability’ of all students, grounded in the principles and values of respect, dignity, curiosity, rigour, hope, joy, autonomy and freedom (Freire, 1998: 100).

REFERENCES Anyon, J. (2005) Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education, and a New Social Movement. New York: Routledge. Appadurai, A. (2006) ‘The right to research’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 4(2): 167–177. Apple, M. (1998) ‘Work, power, and curriculum reform: A response to Theodore Lewis’s “Vocational Education as General Education”’, Curriculum Inquiry, 28(3): 339–360.

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Aronowitz, S. and DiFazio, W. (2010) The Jobless Future, 2nd edition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ball, S. (1993) ‘Education policy, power relations and teachers’ work’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 41(2): 106–121. Bauman, Z. (2004) Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (2005) Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, 2nd edition. New York: Open University Press. Bauman, Z. (2011) Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Bessant, J. (1989) ‘An historical perspective on the standards debate of the 1970s and 1908s’, Melbourne Studies in Education, 31(1): 63–70. Best, S. and Kellner, D. (2003) ‘Contemporary youth and the postmodern adventure’, The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 25(2): 75–93. Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. (1976) Schooling in Capitalist America. New York: Basic Books. Brown, W. (2015) Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books. Carlson, D. (2008) ‘Neoliberalism and urban school reform’, in B. Porfilio and C. Malott (eds), The Destructive Path of Neoliberalism: An International Examination of Urban Education. Rotterdam: Sense. pp. 81–101. Connell, R. (1993) Schools and Social Justice. Toronto: Our Schools/Our Selves Education Foundation. Davies, B. and Bansel, P. (2007) ‘Neoliberalism and education’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 20(3): 247–259. Dewey, J. (1944/1916) Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: Macmillan. Down, B. (2009) ‘Schooling, productivity and the enterprising self: Beyond market values’, Critical Studies in Education, 50(1): 51–64. Down, B. (2010) ‘Educational science, mental testing, and the ideology of intelligence’, Melbourne Studies in Education, 47(1–2): 333–357. Down, B., Smyth, J. and Robinson, J. (2018) Rethinking School-To-Work Transitions in Australia: Young People Have Something to Say. Dordrecht: Springer.

Fraser, N. (2012) ‘On justice: Lessons from Plato, Rawls and Ishiguro’, New Left Review, 74(March/April): 41–51. Freire, A. and de Oliveira, W. (2014) Pedagogy of Solidarity. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Freire, P. (2000/1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (1998) Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Freire, P. (2000) Pedagogy of the Heart. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (2004) Pedagogy of Indignation. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Freire, P. (2007) Daring to Dream: Toward a Pedagogy of the Unfinished. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Furlong, A. and Cartmel, F. (1997) Young People and Social Change: Individualization and Risk in Late Modernity. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Ginwright, S. and Cammarota, J. (2007) ‘Youth activism in the urban community: Learning critical civic praxis within community organisations’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 20(6): 693–710. Giroux, H. (1988) Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning. Granby, MA: Bergin & Garvey. Giroux, H. (1997) Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope: Theory, Culture and Schooling. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Giroux, H. (2011) On Critical Pedagogy. New York: Continuum. Giroux, H. (2013) Youth in Revolt: Reclaiming a Democratic Future. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Giroux, H. (2015) Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism. New York: Paradigm Publishers. Giroux, H. and McLaren, P. (1986) ‘Teacher education and the politics of engagement. The case for democratic schooling’, Harvard Education Review, 56(3): 213–238. Goodman, R. and Saltman, K, (2002) Strange Love: Or How We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Market. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Greene, M. (2001) ‘Foreword’, in G. Hudak and P. Kihn (eds), Labeling: Pedagogy and Politics. London: RoutledgeFalmer. pp. xvi–xvii.

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Grubb, W. N. and Lazerson, M. (2004) The Education Gospel: The Economic Power of Schooling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvey, D. (2007) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Hudak, G. (2001) ‘On what is labeled “playing”: Locating the “true” in education’, in G. Hudak and P. Kihn (eds), Labeling: Pedagogy and Politics. London: RoutledgeFalmer. pp. 9–26. Johnson, R. (1979) ‘“Really useful knowledge”: Radical education and working-class culture, 1790–1848’, in J. Clarke, C. Critcher and R. Johnson (eds), Working Class Culture. London: Hutchinson & Co. pp. 75–102. Kincheloe, J. (1995) Toil and Trouble: Good Work, Smart Workers, and the Integration of Academic and Vocational Education. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Kincheloe, J. (1999) How Do We Tell the Workers?: The Socioeconomic Foundations of Work and Vocational Education. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Kincheloe, J. (2009) ‘No short cuts in urban education: Metropedagogy and diversity’, in S. Steinberg (ed.), Diversity and Multiculturalism: A Reader. New York: Peter Lang. pp. 379–409. Kincheloe, J. and McLaren, P. (2005) ‘Rethinking critical theory and qualitative research’, in N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (eds), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3rd edition. London: Sage. pp. 303–342. Kincheloe, J., Steinberg, S. and Gresson, A. (1996) Measured Lies: The Bell Curve Examined. New York: St Martin’s Press. Kliebard, H. (1999) Schooled to Work: Vocationalism and the American Curriculum 1876–1946. New York: Teachers College Press. Kumashiro, K. (2004) Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning Toward Social Justice. New York and London: RoutledgeFalmer. Lipman, P. (2011) The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City. New York: Routledge. Macedo, D. (1993) ‘Literacy for stupidification: The pedagogy of big lies’, Harvard Educational Review, 63(2): 183–206. Malley, J. and Keating, J. (2000) ‘Policy influences on the implementation of vocational

education and training in Australian secondary schools’, Journal of Vocational Education and Training, 52(4): 627–652. McCallum, D. (1990) The Social Production of Merit: Education, Psychology and Politics in Australia 1900–1950. London: Falmer Press. McLaren, P. and Farahmandpur, R. (2005) Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Oakes, J. (1995) Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Postman, N. (1996) The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. New York: Vintage Books. Rose, M. (1989) Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educationally Underprepared. New York: Penguin Books. Rose, M. (2008) ‘Blending “hand work” and “brain work”: Can multiple pathways deepen learning?’, in J. Oakes and M. Saunders (eds), Beyond Tracking: Multiple Pathways to College, Career and Civic Participation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 21–35. Sahlberg, P. (2011) Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn From Educational Change in Finland? New York: Teachers College Press. Saltman, K. (2008) ‘Schooling in disaster capitalism: How the political right is using disaster to privatize public schooling’, in D. Boyles (ed.), The Corporate Assault on Youth: Commercialism, Exploitation, and the End of Innocence. New York: Peter Lang. pp. 187–218. Sarup, M. (1982) Education, State and Crisis: A Marxist Perspective. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Sassen, S. (2014) Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Saul, J. (2005) The Collapse of Globalism and Reinvention of the World. London: Penguin. Sen, A. (1992) Inequality Re-examined. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Simon, R. (1984) ‘Signposts for a critical pedagogy: A review of Henry Giroux’s Theory and Resistance in Education’, Educational Theory, 34(4): 379–388.

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Simon, R., Dippo, D. and Schenke, A. (1991) Learning Work: A Critical Pedagogy of Work Education. New York: Bergin & Garvey. Smyth, J., Down, B. and McInerney, P. (2010) ‘Hanging in with Kids’ in Tough Times: Engagement in Contexts of Educational Disadvantage in the Relational School. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Smyth, J., Down, B. and McInerney, P. (2014) The Socially Just School: Making Space for Youth to Speak Back. Dordrecht: Springer. Smyth, J. and Wrigley, T. (2013) Living on the Edge: Rethinking Poverty, Class and Schooling. New York: Peter Lang. Standing, G. (2009) Work after Globalization: Building Occupational Citizenship. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. Standing, G. (2011) The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury. Teese, R. (2000) Academic Success and Social Power: Examinations and Inequality.

Carlton, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Tyack, D. and Cuban, L. (1995) Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Valencia, R. (2010) Dismantling Contemporary Deficit Thinking: Educational Thought and Practice. New York: Routledge. Walker, M. (2006) ‘Towards a capability-based theory of social justice for education policymaking’, Journal of Education Policy, 21(2): 163–185. Wheelahan, L. (2007) ‘How competency-based training locks the working class out of powerful knowledge: A modified Bernsteinian analysis’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 28(5): 637–651. Willis, P. (1977) Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Westmead, UK: Gower.

SECTION VII

Teaching and Learning Barry Down

What kind of teaching and learning is desirable in the 21st century? How is teaching and learning currently being de/re/formed? In whose interests? What impact are these reforms having on teachers and students? What kinds of teaching and learning are valued/devalued? What knowledge is encouraged/discouraged? By whom? Who benefits? How can teaching and learning better connect to students’ lives? What might a democratic alternative look like? What resources are required to do this work? Of course, questions of this kind are not readily welcomed or even tolerated in increasingly corporatized and bureaucratized education systems including K-12 schools, colleges, vocational education and training or universities. Pasi Sahlberg (2011) sheds some light on the broader context in which education is now deeply mired. He coins the acronym GERM (Global Educational Reform Movement), an apt term to describe a set of global educational policies and practices based on a particular set

of assumptions about how to improve education systems (2011: 99). He argues a new educational orthodoxy has been promoted which imitates management and administration models based on the operational logic of private corporations (2011: 103). There are two underlying assumptions driving these GERM reforms: firstly, ‘external performance standards, describing what teachers should teach and students should do and learn, lead to better learning for all’; and secondly, ‘competition between school, teachers, and students is the most productive way to raise the quality of education’ (2011: 104–5). Lynch et al. (2015: 4) contend that this new managerial and neoliberalizing logic creates ‘market-led models of control and regulation as the new prototype for work organisations’. In the process, it has effectively ‘redefined what counts as knowledge, who are the bearers of such knowledge and who is empowered to act – all within a legitimate framework of public choice and market accountability’ ­

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(2015: 4). As a consequence, teaching and learning is radically reconstructed through a range of what Giroux (1988: 124) describes as ‘management pedagogies’, whereby knowledge is ‘broken down into discrete parts, standardized for easier management and delivery and measured through predefined forms of assessment’. In this context, teaching and learning is emaciated around a set of narrow neoconservative and neoliberal prescriptions, among them: back-to-basics instruction, rote learning, high-stakes testing, standardization, scripted lessons, privatization, commercialization, performativity, accountability, deskilling and de-professionalization (Gleeson and Husbands, 2001; Smyth, 2001; Saltman, 2007; Gewirtz et al., 2009). In countering these increasingly anti-­ educative and anti-democratic reforms, Freire (1998) offers an alternative democratic vision and practice. In his words: [T]o know how to teach is to create possibilities for the construction and production of knowledge rather than to be engaged simply in a game of transferring knowledge. When I enter a classroom I should be someone who is open to new ideas, open to questions, and open to the curiosities of the student as well as their inhibitions. In other words, I ought to be aware of being a critical and inquiring subject in regard to the task entrusted to me, the task of teaching and not that of transferring knowledge. (1998: 49)

Framed in this way, critical democratic teachers understand the complexity of teaching and learning in terms of the relational and contextual dynamics at play. As Connell (1993: 63) reminds us, ‘Being a teacher is not just a matter of having a body of knowledge and a capacity to control a classroom. …. Learning is a full-blooded, human social process, and so is teaching. Teaching involves emotions as much as it involves pure reasoning.’ Significantly, Connell (1997) believes that the focus on building the relational dimensions of teaching and learning provides opportunities to create ‘new practices’ which attend to different ‘types of social action: productive capacities used in economic

life; symbolic capacities, used in making culture; capacities for collective decisionmaking, used in politics; and capacities for emotional response, used in personal life’ (Connell, 1997: 4; Sen, 1992). In this democratic approach to teaching and learning, teachers and students become ‘knowledge workers’ who ‘research, interpret, expose embedded values and political interest, and produce their own knowledge’ (Kincheloe, 2001a: 241). These teacher scholars, according to Kincheloe (2001b): • take into account the democratic, moral, ethical and cognitive context; • push students to understand where content came from, the means by which it was produced, and how it was validated as knowledge worthy of inclusion in the curriculum; • induce students to use these contextual understandings to reflect, research, and evaluate information presented to them; • cultivate skills that can be used after the confrontation with content to enable them to learn new content in novel situations; and • prepare students to produce new content in relation to the context in which they are operating. (2001b: 22)

Pushing this democratic vision a little further, Thomas and Schubert (2001) argue that the kind of teacher identity required in the 21st century needs to be far more expansive than is currently prescribed in existing teaching standards in at least three key ways: firstly, teachers should be ‘engaged in philosophic inquiry’, that is, ‘investigating the value assumptions of their students, their colleagues, and their own metaphysical, epistemological, and axiological convictions’ (Thomas and Schubert, 2001: 234); secondly, teachers need to develop as ‘democratic connoisseur[s]’ or ‘critical interpreters of existent curriculums and creators of new curriculums, novel forms of instruction, and appropriate methods of assessment’ (2001: 235); and finally, teachers should see themselves as ‘progressive activist[s]’ committed to ‘democratic practice understood

TEACHING AND LEARNING

as … public advocacy for social policies that attempt to redress injustice and public criticisms of state actions that oppress or institutionalize inequality’ (2001: 235; see Down and Sullivan, 2019). In addressing these attributes the contributing authors in this section seek to not only challenge the damaging and demeaning impact of neoliberal reforms but generate a more participatory, engaging, activist and democratic classroom culture (e.g., Duncan-Andrade and Morrell, 2008; Abdi and Carr, 2013; Riddle and Apple, 2019). In these classrooms, we begin to see that ‘another kind of school is possible’ based on an understanding of ­problem-posing education, learning communities, social justice, anti-racism, diversity and inclusivity (Wrigley, 2006).

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Gewirtz, S., Mahony, P., Hextall, I., and Cribb, A. (2009) Changing Teacher Professionalism: International Trends, Challenges and Ways Forward. London: Routledge. Giroux, H. (1988) Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning. New York: Bergin & Garvey. Gleeson, D. and Husbands, C. (2001) The Performing School: Managing, Teaching, and Learning in a Performance Culture. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Kincheloe, J. (2001a) Getting beyond the Facts: Teaching Social Studies/Social Sciences in the Twenty-first Century (2nd ed.). New York: Peter Lang. Kincheloe, J. (2001b) Hope in the shadows: Reconstructing the debate over educational standards, in J. Kincheloe and D. Weil (eds.), Standards and Schooling in the United States, Vol. 1. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. pp. 1–103. Lynch, K., Grummell, B., and Devine, D. (2015) New Managerialism in Education: CommerREFERENCES cialization, Carelessness and Gender. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Riddle, S. and Apple, M. (eds.) (2019) ReAbdi, A. and Carr, P. (eds.) (2013) Educating for Democratic Consciousness: Counter-­ Imagining Education for Democracy. London and New York: Routledge. Hegemonic Possibilities. New York: Peter Lang. Sahlberg, P. (2011) Finnish Lessons: What Can Connell, R. (1993) Schools and Social Justice. the World Learn From Educational Change Toronto: Our Schools/Our Selves Education in Finland? New York: Teachers College Foundation. Press. Connell, R. (1997) Schools, Markets, Justice: Saltman, K. (2007) Capitalizing on Disaster: Education in a Fractured World. Forum of Taking and Breaking Public Schools. Boulder, Education, 52(1): 1–13. CO: Paradigm Publishers. Down, B. and Sullivan, A. (2019) ‘Classroom Sen, A. (1992) Inequality Re-examined. Camready teachers’: Gaps, silences and contrabridge, MA: Harvard University Press. dictions in the Australian report into teacher Smyth, J. (2001) Critical Politics of Teachers’ education, in A. Sullivan, B. Johnson and Work: An Australian Perspective. New York: M. Simons (eds.), Attracting and Keeping the Peter Lang. Best Teachers: Issues and Opportunities. Thomas, T. P. and Schubert, H. (2001) ReinterDordrecht: Springer. pp. 39–61. preting teacher certification standards: LocatDuncan-Andrade, J. and Morrell, E. (2008) The ing limitations and possibilities, in J. Kincheloe Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities for and D. Weil (eds.), Standards and Schooling Moving from Theory to Practice in Urban in the United States, Vol. 1. Santa Barbara, Schools. New York: Peter Lang. CA: ABC-CLIO. pp. 229–243. Freire, P. (1998) Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Wrigley, T. (2006) Another School is Possible. Democracy, and Civic Courage. New York: Stoke-on-Trent, UK: Trentham Books. Rowman & Littlefield.

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69 Critical Pedagogy, Social Justice and Contesting Definitions of Engagement in the Classroom David Zyngier

Engagement is difficult to define operationally, but we know it when we see it, and we know it when it is missing. (Newmann, 1986: 242)

The centrality of teaching, the explication of what good teaching involves and the valuing of teachers’ knowledges are recurrent themes at teacher education conferences. Gore et  al. (2001) argue that preparing teachers who can produce high-quality outcomes for all of their students requires teacher educators to give greater importance to what they do and say about good classroom practices; that is, pedagogies that are characterized by intellectual quality, relevance, supportive classroom environments and recognition of difference. In short, what teachers do, matters. Such emphases are a welcome relief from narrow market-liberal and laissez-faire approaches to teaching promoted in some quarters that reposition teaching as learning management and teachers as learning managers. The work of teachers in schools and at other sites is now recognized as a valid

site for research. However, contemporary ‘education systems are not well equipped to support teachers as they research’ (Gale, 2000). We need to do more to create spaces that transcend traditional boundaries. Australian teacher educators and teachers are become increasingly familiar with the notion of ‘Productive Pedagogies’, itself the product of longitudinal research on school reform recently undertaken in Queensland, Australia (Lingard et  al., 2001a, 2001b). More generally, government departments of education have begun to acknowledge the importance of good pedagogy for successful teaching, if not its centrality in connecting relevant curriculum with authentic assessment. To date, one of Productive Pedagogies’ strengths has been its efficacy for teachers to use as a language to talk about their pedagogical work and, hence, a way of reclaiming some of the ground on what constitutes good teaching. In part, this can be attributed to the numerous observations of teachers’

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classroom practice that informed the construction of Productive Pedagogies. That is, many teachers understand its dimensions and elements as naming what ‘good’ teachers have always done.

PRODUCTIVE PEDAGOGIES No arbitrary obstacles should prevent people from achieving those positions for which their talents fit them and which their values lead them to seek. Not birth, nationality, color, religion, sex, nor any other irrelevant characteristic should determine the opportunities that are open to a person – only his [or her] abilities. (Friedman and Friedman, 1980: 163)

There is a view among some teacher educators and many in-service teachers that the basic skills form the foundation of all subsequent learning; that the way to introduce beginning teachers to the practice of teaching is to introduce the basic practical skills first and then perhaps introduce more theoretical concepts at a later point (Cambourne and Kiggins, 2004). The implication here is that one cannot learn other kinds of knowledges about teaching prior to the acquisition of the basics. This is not the view that we took. We in fact started with the theoretical engagement of the pre-service teachers – at the level of belief rather than the level of action in relation to pedagogy. Productive Pedagogies is derived from the Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study (QSRLS) (Lingard et  al., 2001a, 2001b), a three-year intensive observation of 24 representative state primary and secondary schools undertaken by some of Australia’s pre-eminent educational thinkers. It represents the largest and most detailed school reform study in Australia, containing almost 500 pages of perhaps the most exhaustive and important education research undertaken. The study was concerned with how student learning, both academic and social, could be enhanced. The base assumption of the research was that this enhancement required quality classroom teaching and

assessment practices. It rejects the emphasis on a credentialed society which defines quality student outcomes in terms of results from limited, standardized testing of basic skills. The QSRLS instead defines quality student outcomes in terms of a sustained and disciplined inquiry focused on powerful, important ideas and concepts which are connected to students’ experiences and the world in which they live. The study’s original contribution to the school reform debate was to specify which aspects of teaching require schools’ urgent attention. The key finding of the QSRLS should be no surprise to experienced educators (Lingard et  al., 2001a: x–xv); the higher the level of intellectual demand expected of students by teachers, the greater the improved productive performance and, hence, improved student outcomes. Quality learning experience is acknowledged as what our best teachers have always provided for their students – intellectually challenging material that is relevant and connected to the children’s lives, recognizing that children learn in different ways and have different needs within a supportive learning environment. What the QSRLS report has termed productive pedagogies is then crucial to improved student outcomes for all students, but in particular those ‘at-risk’ (Lingard et al., 2001b: 103–5). The QSRLS research found that students most at risk of failure, those from socially, culturally and economically disadvantaged conditions, were the least likely to be exposed to the intellectually challenging and relevant material. The Australian Council of Deans of Education (ACDE) foreshadowed the need for a new language for pre-service teachers, highlighting the work of the Faculty of Education at Woollongong University which in 1997 supported a proposal to design a research project which would ‘investigate, as a pilot, an alternative approach to initial teacher education’ (Australian Council of Deans of Education, 2002: 15, italics in original).

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, SOCIAL JUSTICE AND CONTESTING DEFINITIONS OF ENGAGEMENT

Their proposal for a ‘Knowledge Building Community’ is ‘a teaching model specifically designed to deal with the issue of contextualizing the delivery of instruction’ (Australian Council of Deans of Education, 2002: 15). The ACDE states that such a community is founded on the ‘creation of learning environments that support the continuous social construction of knowledge through the constant construction, de-construction, and reconstruction and sharing of meanings, so that the community’s knowledge needs are advanced and maintained’ (Australian Council of Deans of Education, 2002: 15, emphasis original). Ailwood and Follers suggest that developing teacher learning communities is founded on (among other issues) the requirement that ‘teachers talk to each other in a sustained way about the work of teaching and learning’ (2002: 6). Luke describes Productive Pedagogies as: An approach to creating a place, space and vocabulary for us to get talking about classroom instruction again. It isn’t a magic formula (e.g., just teach this way and it will solve all the kids’ problems), but rather it’s a framework and vocabulary for staffroom, inservice, pre-service training, for us to describe the various things we can do in classrooms – the various options in our teaching ‘repertoires’ that we have – and how we can adjust these, play with these (more narrative, less exposition; more dialogue, less lecture; more explicit statements of expectations) to get different outcomes. This isn’t a ‘one approach fits all model of pedagogy’. It has the possibility of providing a common grounds and dialogue between teachers, school administrators, teacher educators, student-teachers and others about these ‘repertoires’ and about which aspects of our teaching repertoires work best for improved intellectual and social outcomes for distinctive groups of kids. (Luke, 2002: 4, emphasis added)

Sorin and Klein (2002) suggest that an emphasis on the construction of robust intellectual knowledges and inquiring habits of mind in schools necessitates the implementation of innovative, inquiry-based teaching/learning relationships that have not been experienced by many pre-service teachers nor teacher educators. This, they conclude, is achieved through an inquiry-based culture in a teacher

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education programme. The author developed a framework for their pre-service course based on students experiencing new models of interaction in teacher education, where ideas and experiences were shared and problems solved cooperatively. By ‘modelling pedagogy’ we hoped to induct pre-service teachers into ‘new ways of being a teacher and a lifelong learner, as they build their own ways of learning and reflecting’ (Sorin and Klein, 2002). Productive Pedagogies has gained recognition nationally in Australia (and internationally) as a framework for teacher professional development which focuses on classroom practices while foregrounding persistent equity concerns in education. Since the publication of the QSRLS in 2001 there have been limited but significant contributions to this discussion focusing on Productive Pedagogies in the education and training of pre-service teachers (Gore et al., 2001; Sorin and Klein, 2002). Most notably Lingard et al.’s (2001b) research results from a pilot study involving final-year teacher education students attempting to apply the principles of Productive Pedagogies during their internship. The authors conclude that: Productive Pedagogy needs to come early in the teacher education program in order to be more fully integrated into students’ knowledge base for teaching. If it is just another framework, just another theory, just another list, then students are likely to draw on it as they might any other approach. Instead, if students are to treat Productive Pedagogies as foundational to all of their efforts in teaching, it needs to be: (1) clearly positioned in that way from the beginning of the teacher education program; (2) used as a device to guide all aspects of the teacher education curriculum; and (3) modelled in the pedagogy of teacher educators. (Lingard et  al., 2001b: 8, emphasis added)

Researchers acknowledge that definitions of engagement encompass a wide variety of constructs that ‘can help explain how children behave, feel and think in school’ (Fredricks et al., 2003). This section seeks to expose the various epistemological views underpinning these constructs.

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What is clear from their research is that students from home backgrounds more closely resembling the dominant school culture are most likely to develop the engaging positive school relationships noted by Finn (1989) and Fullarton (2002). What is contested in this chapter is that if engagement is to be socially just then all students should not only have equality and equity of access to activities, learning at similar levels, but also have similar opportunities beyond school related to these activities. The phrases ‘engagement in school’ or ‘student engagement’ are often cited (BangertDrowns and Pyke, 2001, 2002; Davies, 2002; Dodd, 1995; Finn, 1989; Shernoff et  al., 2003) as an essential component of programmatic interventions for students ‘at risk’. However, there have been very few attempts to define engagement other than behaviourally or to study it as part of the learning process (Murray et  al., 2004; Smith et al., 2001). These psychological definitions are commonly a mix of (i) behavioural aspects of the student as doing the work, following the rules, persisting and participating, while (ii) emotional aspects centre interest, value and feelings (negative and positive) towards school, the class and teacher and (iii) cognitive engagement (psychological investment) includes motivation, effort and strategy use by students. These views see student engagement as something students do and that teachers can organize for them (Luse, 2002 my emphasis). For example, Guthrie’s significant contribution on engagement, motivation and reading concludes in a ‘chicken and egg’ imbroglio suggesting that while ‘engagement … increases the occurrence of … [positive] outcomes … I also expect that positive outcomes increase engagement’ (Guthrie, 2001). Too often these definitions morph from student interest to student engagement, treating one the same as the other (Renninger and Wade, 2001). These three distinctions are critically reviewed in the next section of the chapter. Finn (1989) presented a model of student engagement with two central components, participation and identification, which has

subsequently dominated the research agenda. Participation, the behavioural component, includes basic behaviours such as the student’s acquiescence to school and class rules, arriving at school and class on time, attending to the teacher and responding to teacher-­ initiated directions and questions. Non-compliant behaviour, for example, disruption, inattentiveness, or refusing to complete assigned work, represents a student’s failure to meet these basic requisites. Other levels of participation include initiative-­ taking on the part of the student (initiating questions or dialogue with the teacher, engaging in help-seeking behaviour) and participation in the social, extracurricular, athletic and governance aspects of school life. Identification, the affective component, refers to the student’s feelings of belonging in the school setting and valuing the outcomes that school will provide, for example, access to post-school opportunities. Finn’s (1989) participation/identification model – like Guthrie’s framework – is a behaviouralist-based example of attempts to combine behavioural, emotional and cognitive research. Finn’s work has been readily adopted here in Australia (see for example Fullarton, 2002) and is characterized by associating lack of engagement with poor academic performance. This has led to an essentializing of engagement, portraying engagement and its concurrent academic success as a function of the individual, ignoring the contribution of gender, socio-cultural, ethnic and economic status (class) factors. This typology does not account for the distinctions in engagement made by Schlechty (2002); that students may be no more than passively compliant or even ritualistically engaged – that is, they are playing the rules of the game as described by Haberman (1991). Marks (2000), after Finn (1989), states that ‘[engagement is central] to achievement and to optimal human development’ and that its lack of presence ‘initiates a downward spiral that may lead to dysfunctional school behavior’ (Marks, 2000: 155).

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According to these views, as schools become more effective, students are more engaged and academic performance is hence improved. Greater student engagement is a sign therefore of effective schooling or school improvement. Such studies seek to demonstrate a strong relationship between engagement and performance, such that student participation leads to academic success ‘across diverse populations’ and that engagement has a ‘consistent, strong correlation with academic performance’ and also race/ ethnicity and socio-economic status (Finn, 1989: 118; Finn et al., 2003: 323–4). Marks concludes that socio-economic status consistently predicts engagement for middle-school students, reinforcing the conclusion of the QSRLS (Lingard et al., 2001a) and Schlechty (2002) that, while middle-class students and middle-class schools have a higher overall engagement and academic success, it seems also that the longer a student stays at school the lower is their engagement. This view that there is equivalence and correlation between student engagement and academic success is now addressed.

ENGAGEMENT IS NOT A PREDICTOR OF ACADEMIC SUCCESS – ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT DOES NOT NECESSARILY EQUAL ENGAGEMENT Contrary to the view of many researchers into student engagement, that it is ‘strongly related to … achievement’ (Guthrie, 2001) and that ‘there is considerable evidence in the research literature of the association between engagement and positive academic outcomes’ (Fredricks et  al., 2003), engagement is not a predictor of academic success (Willms, 2003) and, while the prevalence of disengaged students varies between countries and among schools within countries, this is not attributable solely to family background, or to academic achievement. On the contrary, the OECD research by Willms concludes that

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‘there is a significant number of students with a strong [academic] performance who are nevertheless disaffected from school’ (Willms, 2003: 3), and, while previous literature suggests that ‘risk factors’ for disengagement and low achievement come to school with the student, this report does not infer that low student engagement is the consequence of family-related risk factors like poverty, low parental education or even low cognitive ability (Willms, 2003). Willms found that while the ‘contextual affects’ of school are important, a high percentage of minority or low socio-economic status students in a school led to higher dropout, but not necessarily disengagement (Willms, 2003: 11). The report revealed that in Australia more than 20% of middle years’ students have a low sense of belonging to school, while almost 20% also have low student participation in school activities. Yet these students still achieve significant academic results. Contradicting Finn and others, Willms concludes that student sense of belonging to a school is a weak measure of academic performance and is not strongly related to either participation or ability. Students with a low sense of belonging fit into a wide range of socio-economic status groups. It seems from this that students therefore who reject (for any reason) the school’s values are labelled alienated or disengaged. Schlechty (2002) however recognizes that even such students who withdraw or retreat from school learning and activities (according to Schlechty) are making conscious decisions (therefore are perhaps counter-engaged) about their schooling. Like Schlechty, Bangert-Drowns and Pyke (2001, 2002), in attempting a taxonomy of engagement, view student engagement as a multifaceted and complex concept, acknowledging that engagement can also be problematic, unsystematic or even frustrated as well as structured, self-regulated, literate and finally critical. The research of Willms, Schlechty and Bangert-Drowns and Pyke rejects the notion

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that engagement is an unalterable characteristic, either inherited or experienced from home, but ‘entails attitudes and behaviors that can be affected by teachers and parents and shaped by school policy and practice’ (Willms, 2003: 9). Even though students have the necessary academic abilities and skills they still may become disaffected from school. The On Track data from Victorian schools (Department of Education and Training, 2004) demonstrates that educators cannot presume that students with a satisfactory or high level of academic achievement are also engaged – many indeed withdraw from school, or do not continue with further studies after completing their requisite 12 years (Shor, 1980: 195). Newmann (1981, 1992, 1996) developed increasingly complex understanding of engagement. His 1992 study identifies the factors that affect engagement in academic work as (i) school membership (clarity of purpose, fairness, personal support, success and caring) and (ii) authentic work (extrinsic rewards, intrinsic interests, sense of ownership, connection to real world and fun) (Newmann, 1992: 18). More recent research suggests that addressing this problem requires a whole system restructure that emphasizes challenging academic work in a mainstream (non-tracked) environment that includes greater real parental involvement where students are empowered to control their own learning through an authentic (Schlechty, 2002), productive (Lingard et  al., 2001a) or generative pedagogy (Zyngier, 2003). Therefore, where engagement is defined (narrowly) as willingness to become involved in teacher-initiated tasks and at the same time is separated from the students’ socio-political and cultural contexts, we find that if a student is engaged then the teacher is responsible, but if the student is disengaged then the problem is with the student. This correlation between participation and achievement is interpreted as causality (Fullarton, 2002). The reification of student engagement sanctions the identification and measurement of those conditions that seem to encourage or impede engagement. Engagement is more

than doing well on academic exercises or participation in sport and other extracurricular activities. I now proceed to argue that it forms the basis for social, cultural, political and intellectual participation in life within and beyond school.

PERSPECTIVES OF SOCIAL JUSTICE AND ENGAGEMENT – THREE CONTESTING PERSPECTIVES … Reflecting on engagement, Newmann (1996) includes three necessary components: (i) the construction of knowledge, (ii) disciplined inquiry and (iii) production of discourse, products or performances that have value beyond school success. As early as 1981 Newmann warned against programmes designed to make students just feel good. Eliminating alienation is not the same as eliminating stress or effort. On the contrary it is ‘arranging conditions so that [students] expend energy’ (Newmann, 1981: 548). Even with exciting material, students may remain apathetic (Haberman, 1991). Schoolwork that is incongruent with a student’s cultural commitments can ‘assault self esteem’ (Newmann, 1986: 555). Dodd (1995) suggests that what is needed to engage students is not necessarily learning that is fun, but learning over which they have ownership; that empowers them to make a difference to their lives. Newmann identified three dominant perspectives to account for engagement. He referred to these as the (i) conventional or professional technological, (ii) the developmental and (iii) the cultural emancipatory perspective (Newmann, 1986: 559–60). All may appear in some form in various schools, in various classes at different times (and even perhaps within individual teachers’ pedagogies). Each school has however a dominant culture and perspective, which based on Newmann’s original typology and informed by Vibert and Shields (2003), I now describe

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as (i) instrumentalist or rational technical, (ii) social constructivist or individualist and (iii) critical transformative engagement.

Instrumentalist or Rational Technical Fullarton’s review of the studies examining the relationship of participation in extracurricular activities with academic achievement in school concluded that participation is correlated with a number of desirable outcomes, including higher levels of self-esteem and feelings of control over one’s life, higher educational aspirations and higher grades, especially among males, in school (Fullarton, 2002: 2). Grounded in an objectivist understanding this involved counting the numbers of students on task or completing assigned work, involved in particular activities and other extracurricular activities. This view is manifested through surveys, observations and test data analysis. There appears little or no attempt to ‘go beneath the surface’ to understand the meaning that students make of the activity or their motivation to participate. Built on teacher initiation (Guthrie, 2001) or ‘doing for, rather than doing with’, teachers prepare activities [that] are common to most schools and are illustrative of teachers trying, in various ways to develop both pedagogical and social activities in which students may be both involved and interested. (Vibert and Shields, 2003: 227)

These teachers are well intentioned, exhibiting initiative and effort to involve students in numerous activities. Often reflected in this deficit view is the attitude that students and parents were neither competent nor capable of taking on responsibilities and planning because of their ‘background’ (Zyngier, 2007). Engagement becomes equated with compliance with adult-determined rules and participation in adult-determined and led activities. Where the (attributed) deficit is located in the background of the student, then

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parents too are reduced to being recipients of school-based programmes rather than being empowered to be active partners in their children’s educational development (Smith et al., 2001). Fullarton (2002) finds however that it does matter which school a student attends; socio-economic status is a persistent influence on participation, both at the individual level and at the school level. She concludes that students with parents who have the financial resources to allow a wide participation in extracurricular activities obtain a benefit from schooling that those students with less access to financial resources do not.

Social Constructivist or Individualist Engagement Student-centred pedagogy envisages engagement as implicit in active learning where self-motivation, reflective shared goal setting and student choice are located in the lived experiences of the students. This certainly produces more dignified and interesting classrooms, but does it necessarily raise substantive (and critical) student inquiry that questions the acceptance of official knowledge (Apple, 1996) for all students, not just the middle class? Thus the schools making the strongest claims for engagement (Fullarton, 2002) are the middle-class professional schools (Willms, 2003) where students learn the efficacy of their own values and manners in a system that neatly matches their own cultural background, thereby reinforcing the cultural capital of the dominant hegemonic group. If the student is left alone to choose, can they alone interrupt officially sanctioned discourses ‘where the “right choices” are powerfully inculcated in institutional habits, routines … [and] what in this context might student choice mean’ (Vibert and Shields, 2003: 233), in a system of schooling where domination is perpetuated? (Sefa Dei, 2003). Shared decision making is an illusion for students if they are not able to question and interrupt their own

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marginalization. A student-centred or social constructivist engagement defaults to a conservative position and ‘may become simply a more friendly method of encouraging “ontask [passive-compliant] behavior”’ (Vibert and Shields, 2003: 233). Too often studentcentred teaching makes connections between classroom learning and the world outside the school that remains uncritical and in the realm of make believe where teachers design activities that ‘simulate real-world environments … so that students can carry out authentic tasks as real workers would’ (Day, 2002: 23). Sing and Luke (1996) caution that pedagogy based on ‘unproblematic notions of individualism and liberalism which attempt to recognize and celebrate difference per se’ (in Bernstein, 1996: xiii) can actually conceal the pedagogical practices that are the cause of inequality of opportunity and outcomes for the disadvantaged in schools. Just saying that teachers need to be sensitive to student culture, background and experience (Lingard et al., 2001a) does not necessarily mean that the curriculum and pedagogy is inclusive and culturally sensitive (McFadden and Munns, 2002). The ‘romp, stomp and chomp’ or ‘festivals, folklore and food’ supplemental celebrations of difference still serve to subsume the other in the dominant culture (McMahon, 2003). Through this miscommunication and tension (grounded in different and differing competing ideological and theoretical assumptions), some attempt to claim an epistemological neutrality about engagement. This claim for neutrality is itself a politically conservative and technorational position on engagement and education (Walkerdine, 1983). Locating engagement in the individual student leads to an essentialization and reification of engagement; students (teachers and the community) are therefore engaged when the school is an engaging place. Engagement must not be disconnected from time, place and space and it is not about finding the reproducible programme (Zyngier and Gale, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c, 2003d) regardless of social contexts and ideologies.

Critical Transformative Engagement While a student-centred pedagogy sees engagement through the student’s exploration and discovery of individual interests and experiences, a critically transformative or generative pedagogy (Zyngier, 2003) perceives student engagement as rethinking these experiences and interests increasingly in communal and social terms for the creation of a more just and democratic community and not just the advancement of the individual. All students should be able to see themselves as represented in a curriculum that challenges hierarchical and oppressive relations that exist between different social groups. Newmann concludes that all schools can change their pedagogical practices so that they ‘deliver [such an] authentic pedagogy equally to students regardless of gender, socio-economic status, race or ethnicity’ (Newmann, 1996). Canadian research (Vibert and Shields, 2003) found that the schools where student engagement was conceived critically were more likely to be located in low socio-economic status communities, because these schools had acknowledged traditional responses as notable failures (for an Australian perspective see Zyngier and Gale, 2003a) and hence different approaches were required. This perspective acknowledges that the lives and work of teachers and students (and their families) are inherently political; the lives of children and their communities are a curriculum of life (Smith et al., 2001) not just connected to student experience, but also actively and consciously critiquing that experience. Not only is their world valued, but students are given the opportunity to voice and discover their own authentic and authoritative life in order to retrieve the learning agenda (Giddens, 1994). Gale and Densmore explain that this is not achieved through ‘pedagogic trickery’ (Gale and Densmore, 2000) or through simply ‘bolting on’ some aspects of so-called real-life

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education experiences into the curriculum. They explain that what is required in the classroom is pedagogy where the very nature of what is learnt is mediated by the group; the content becomes entwined in who these students are as people. Moreover, it reworks the test of isolation that students face in the classroom that are organized to (re)produce their disconnectedness. (Gale and Densmore, 2000: 149)

CONCLUSION Important work is currently being undertaken in Australia (and elsewhere) on the kinds of pedagogies that improve outcomes for all students (Lingard et  al., 2001a, 2001b) but in particular those variously labelled as ‘at risk’ of early school leaving, disadvantaged or from low socio-economic backgrounds. While many students do not believe their school experience has much bearing on their future and don’t feel that they are accepted by their classmates and teachers (Zyngier, 2007), they gradually feel disaffected and withdraw from school life. Some become disruptive and exert a negative influence on other students (Willms, 2003). As a former student noted, ‘When you are standing outside the classroom all day, it is very difficult to learn’ (Brown et al., 2001: 105). What is therefore needed for an engaging curriculum is CORE Pedagogy that ensures that teachers and students are: Connecting – to and engaging with the students’ cultural knowledge Owning – all students should be able to see themselves as represented in the work Responding – to students’ lived experiences and actively and consciously critiquing that experience Empowering – students with a belief that what they do will make a difference to their lives and the opportunity to voice and discover their own authentic and authoritative life. (Zyngier, 2007)

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Underpinning this are four main educational objectives: • To engage young people in issues of social justice; • To engage young people with a high level of authenticity; • To promote student-led classrooms, thereby challenging teacher practice; and • To create real community change. (Westheimer and Kahne, 2004)

The concept of engaged and facilitated learning is presented through Roger Hart’s Ladder of Youth Participation1 as a fluid continuum as it provides students and teachers with the following: • Opportunities for real community engagement (both within and beyond school grounds); • Opportunities for engagement with real issues; • Opportunities for transformative citizenship going beyond responsible citizenship or thin democracy to participation in thick democracy (Carr, 2008; Gandin and Apple, 2002); • Opportunities for effecting and sustaining change (so that the change perpetuates); and • Opportunities for independent learning.

Rather than cynically theorize over what is wrong in teacher education today, or in urban schools, or in public schools in general, or present another case study relating more of the same, this chapter suggests a realistic alternative to disengagement and alienation and school failure for many children, particularly those on the margins, through the creation of a generative pedagogy based on and in radical recognitive social justice (Gale and Densmore, 2000). For young people ‘at risk’, there is already too often an assumption that they are at best poor learners. Through their own fault, or their parents’, or decisions made by the school, or blind fate, it is assumed that these young people are able to exercise only limited control over their destinies. Many young people do not (wish to) see it that way (Zyngier, 2004). The lives of these young people who have been termed ‘at risk’ are

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buffeted, constrained, blocked and diverted by social, human, economic, political and geographical factors. In an uncertain future, these factors may seem to remove any element of choice. Yet these same young people still assert strongly that they are in control: ‘no-one makes decisions for me’; ‘we don’t know where we are going, but we’ll get there’ (Brown et  al., 2001: 118–19). In the end it is about what the students themselves say and think: It is the students themselves who will be able to tell us that they are engaged and who will say whether their education is working for them in a culturally sensitive and relevant way. It is the students who will be able to tell us whether the offers that education purports to provide are real or illusionary. It is at the messy point of teachers and students responding to each other in relation to classroom discourse and assessment practices where we are truly going to see whether or not students feel that school is for them. It is within this space that education can provide a chance that is not illusionary, and that it can indeed be engaging and lead to purposeful, relevant and productive educational outcomes. (McFadden and Munns, 2002: 364)

It has been too simplistic to define engagement in terms of deficiencies arising in the students. Historically the disengaged were those whose appearance, language, culture, values, communities and family structures were in contradiction to the dominant (White, middle class) culture that schools were designed to serve and support (Alexander, 2000; Hickson and Tinzman, 1990). The struggle over the definition of the term engagement is significant in itself, for it reveals the on-going ideological and epistemological divisions among educators and policy makers, and the general public. Research on student disengagement has shown that an exploration of the questions of class, gender, race/ethnicity, power, history and particularly students’ lived experiences and social reality reveals a complexity of factors that led marginalized youth to leave school prematurely. It is therefore crucial that questions of power, equity, engagement with

difference, that is, recognitive social justice (Gale and Densmore, 2000), be addressed if we are to improve (learning) outcomes, not just for the most marginalized youth, but for all. The research suggests that the complexity of issues relating to youth engagement (and early school leaving) cannot be fitted neatly into decontextualized accounts of youth experience, school interaction and socioenvironmental factors that create in the first instance student disempowerment and disengagement with school (Sefa Dei, 2003: 249). In order to create a more inclusive and empowering education system, one that engages with and responds to marginalized youth, we need to ensure that all students, not just the mainstream majority, feel that they belong and identify. In order to do this schools need to tap into the cultural knowledge of parents, guardians and community workers – this means that we value the different perspectives and knowledges that all people from all places have and can bring into the school system. (Sefa Dei, 2003: 250–1)

Critically, if students are to successfully engage in school and their knowledge systems, then these systems must connect to and engage with the students’ cultural knowledge while also affirming the different strengths that knowledge forms bring to classroom pedagogy (Sefa Dei, 2003). This pedagogical reciprocity is critical if those most at risk are to find themselves in schools, so that their knowledges, histories and experiences are validated and accounted for. Such student engagement is an empowering one, developing a sense of entitlement, belonging and identification. Otherwise students are ‘doing time, not doing education’ (Sefa Dei, 2003). For many marginalized students, schools are seen as the sites not of engagement, but of disenfranchisement and alienation. This means that our public education system is failing these students; failing to provide them with the necessary equitable environment required for the delivery of social justice

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(Sefa Dei, 2003: 270). If teachers have low expectations for groups of students it is easy to assign responsibility for the lack of achievement to the home or to the student rather than to what the teacher and the school does (Smith et  al., 2001). When the system does not work, there is always plenty of blame to go around. Schools are told that the problem lies with disaffected youth, negligent parents, the (overworked, underpaid) teacher(s), the school environment, et cetera. They could equally look for cause(s) in the many systemic barriers to the educational and employment achievements of marginalized young people. Dodd (1995) suggests that the best advice is to be found in Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince: ‘What is essential is invisible to the eye’. Instead of adding to this cycle of blame which inevitably can lead only to more failure, schools should be looking to make the education of youth, all youth, but in particular those from the margins, more critically connected to the social and cultural backgrounds from which they come, making it a less alienating and marginalizing experience. There is no guaranteed panacea. But social justice demands a rethink of what teachers do in the classroom, whether it is about schooling – a process where they socialize children to conform to the dominant cultural paradigm or about education – the empowerment of individuals and groups to critically reflect on and remake their society (Sefa Dei, 2000: 271).

Note  1  The Ladder of Youth Participation is a conceptual model created and developed by UNICEF sociologist Roger Hart. Based on a study of a youth involvement in 100 international environmental organizations, the Ladder first featured in Hart’s Children’s Participation: from Tokenism to Citizenship (1992). It comprises eight ‘rungs’ or ways in which organizations involve young people, from ‘Manipulation’, ‘Decoration’ or ‘Tokenism’ through ‘Assigned but Informed’, ‘Consulted and Informed’, ‘Adult-Initiated, shared decisions with young people’ to ‘Young people-initiated and directed’ and ‘Young people-initiated, shared decisions with adults’. See Holdsworth et al. (2007).

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art_index.asp?HREF=/articles/handbook/ guthrie/index.html Haberman, M. (1991). The pedagogy of poverty versus good teaching. Phi Delta Kappan, 73(4), 290–294. Hart, R. A. (1992). Children’s Participation: From Tokenism To Citizenship. Innocenti Essay no 4, UNICEF International Child Development Centre, Florence. Hickson, J., & Tinzman, M. B. (1990). Who are the ‘at-risk’ students of the 1990s? Retrieved 30 January, 2004, from http://ncrel.org/sdrs/ areas/rpl_esys/equity.htm Holdsworth, R., Stokes, H., Blanchard, M. & Mohamed, N. (2007). Civic Engagement and Young People: A report commissioned by the City of Melbourne. Melbourne; Youth Research Centre: Research Report 28 Lingard, B., Ladwig, J., Mills, M., Bahr, M., Chant, D., Warry, M., … Luke, A. (2001a). Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study: Final Report (Vol. 1). Brisbane: Report prepared for Education Queensland by the School of Education, The University of Queensland. Lingard, B., Ladwig, J., Mills, M., Bahr, M., Chant, D., Warry, M., … Luke, A. (2001b). Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study: Supplementary Materials (Vol. 2). Brisbane: Report prepared for Education Queensland by the School of Education, The University of Queensland. Luke, A. (2002). Education 2010 and new times: Why equity and social justice still matter, but differently. Retrieved 12 July, 2003, from http://vision.cangoul.catholic. edu.au/teaching/tf/readings/ed2010.pdf Luse, P. L. (2002). Speedwriting: A teaching strategy for active student engagement. The Reading Teacher, 56(1), 20–1. Marks, H. M. (2000). Student engagement in instructional activity: Patterns in the elementary, middle and high school years. American Educational Research Journal, 37(1), 153–184. McFadden, M., & Munns, G. (2002). Student engagement and the social relations of pedagogy. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 23(3), 357–366. McMahon, B. J. (2003). Putting the elephant into the refrigerator: Student engagement, critical pedagogy and antiracist education. McGill Journal of Education, 38(2), 257–73.

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Murray, S., Mitchell, J., Gale, T., Edwards, J., & Zyngier, D. (2004). Student Disengagement from Primary Schooling: A Review of Research and Practice (p. 60). Centre for Childhood Studies Faculty of Education Monash University: CASS Foundation. Newmann, F. M. (1981). Reducing student alienation in high schools: Implications of theory. Harvard Educational Review, 51(4), 546–564. Newmann, F. M. (1986). Priorities for the future: Toward a common agenda. Social Education, 50(4), 240–250. Newmann, F. M. (Ed.) (1992). Student engagement and achievement in American secondary schools. New York: Teachers College Press. Newmann, F. M. & associates (1996). Authentic achievement: Restructuring schools for intellectual quality (1st ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Renninger, K. A., & Wade, S. E. (2001). Engaging students in reading: Implications for research and practice. Educational Psychology Review, 13(3), 187–190. Schlechty, P. C. (2002). Working on the work: An action plan for teachers, principals, and superintendents. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Sefa Dei, G. J. (2003). Schooling and the dilemma of youth disengagement. McGill Journal of Education, 38(2), 241–256. Shernoff, D. J., Csikszentmihalyi, M., Schneider, B., & Shernoff, E. S. (2003). Student engagement in high school classrooms from the perspective of flow theory. School Psychology Quarterly, 18(2), 158–176. Shor, I. (1980). Critical teaching and everyday life (1st ed.). Boston: South End Press. Sing, M., & Luke, A. (1996). Introduction. In B. Bernstein (Ed.), Pedagogy, symbolic control, and identity theory, research, critique, (pp. 1–14). London; Washington, DC: Taylor & Francis. Smith, W., Butler-Kisber, L., LaRoque, L., Portelli, J., Shields, C., Sparkes, C., & Vibert, A. (2001). Student Engagement in Learning and School Life: National Project Report. Montreal: Faculty of Education, McGill University, Montreal. Sorin, R., & Klein, M. (2002). Walking the Walk and Talking the Talk: Adequate Teacher Preparation in These Uncertain Times? Paper presented at the AARE, Brisbane, Australia.

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Vibert A. B., & Shields, C. (2003). Approaches to student engagement: Does ideology matter? McGill Journal of Education, 38(2), 221–240. Walkerdine, V. (1983). It’s only natural: Rethinking child centred pedagogy. In A. Wolpe & J. Donald (Eds.), Is there anyone here from education? (pp. 79–87). London: Pluto Press. Westheimer, J., & Kahne, J. (2004). What kind of citizen? The politics of educating for democracy. American Educational Research Journal, 41(2), 237–269. Willms, J. D. (2003). Student Engagement at School. A Sense of Belonging and Participation: PISA 2000. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Zyngier, D. (2003). Connectedness – isn’t it time that education came out from behind the classroom door and rediscovered social justice. Social Alternatives, 22(3), 41–49. Zyngier, D. (2004). What school kids want: A film by young people about how young people really feel about school, in Putting young people at the centre: A Review. The Primary and Middle Years Educator, June. Zyngier, D. (2007). Listening to teachers – listening to students: Substantive conversations about resistance, empowerment and engagement. Teachers and Teaching, 13(4), 327–347. Zyngier, D., & Gale, T. (2003a, 29 November – 3 December). Engaging Programs: How Are Australian Schools Responding to Low Student Retention? Paper presented at the AARE Annual Conference: Education Risks, Research & Dilemmas, Auckland, New Zealand. Zyngier, D., & Gale, T. (2003b). Non-Systemic and Non-Traditional Educational Programs in FMP Secondary Schools: Final Report (p. 50). Frankston: Frankston Mornington Peninsula Local Learning Employment Network. Zyngier, D., & Gale, T. (2003c). Non-Systemic and Non-Traditional Educational Programs in FMP Secondary Schools: Interim Report (p. 35). Frankston: Frankston Mornington Peninsula Local Learning Employment Network. Zyngier, D., & Gale, T. (2003d, 20–25 July). Productive Pedagogies: Is it an Intelligible Language for Preservice Teachers? Paper presented at the Teachers as Leaders – Teacher Education for a Global Profession – ICET/ATEA, Melbourne, Australia.

70 Critical Pedagogy and Anti-Muslim Racism Education: Insights from the UK Khadija Mohammed, Lisa McAuliffe and Nighet Riaz

INTRODUCTION Basit came home from school and asked his mum ‘Am I a bad person?’ He appeared to be disturbed and confused and cried out ‘the boys and girls in the playground shouted “all Muslims are bad people!”’. His mother was deeply concerned and phoned the school to try and speak to Basit’s teacher. The teacher flippantly remarked: ‘It’s really nothing to worry about, they’re just kids repeating what they are hearing about Islamist terrorists and I’m sure it will all just blow over in a day or so.’ This incident took place a few days after the terrorist event in Nice, France and Basit found himself being questioned and held to account for the attack: ‘What do you think about the terror attack in France?’. This was clearly not a question but rather an attempt to vilify and demonise this young person for being a Muslim. Basit’s mother knew she had to address this issue. At a meeting with the head teacher, she explained that the teacher’s approach did not address Basit’s concerns and her sheer dismissal had a direct impact on her son.

Basit’s story is one of many such examples from the school setting where anti-Muslim

racism manifests. Essentially, this highlights the need for teachers to adopt a pedagogy that is critical and aims to promote equality and social justice (Giroux, 2015). Critical pedagogy consists of approaches that draw attention to privilege, marginalisation and oppression, and encourage self-reflection and appropriate action. Central amongst these approaches is Freire’s (1970) problemposing model which advocates dialogical exploration of issues and co-production of knowledge between students and teachers. The problem highlighted in Basit’s story is a problem that many experience today. It is a problem that persists and presents in many forms, ranging from acts of violence against Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people, to overt or covert discrimination, to microaggressions and colourblindness (Brinson and Smith, 2014). Being a microcosm of society, schools are affected by racism in its various forms (Leonardo and Grubb, 2019). For many years, multicultural education has tried to address racism and

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promote inclusion for all (Banks and McGee Banks, 2010). However, multicultural education has not been very effective in disrupting the dominant discourses that privilege certain groups of people and marginalise others based on the colour of their skin (Jay, 2003; Koh, 2015). Anti-racism education, a more critical approach with roots in critical pedagogy and Critical Race Theory (CRT), offers more promise (Dei, 1996, 2014). This chapter considers the need for antiracism education with specific focus on racism against Muslims. The chapter starts with a brief overview of CRT tenets that are of particular relevance to the topic, before it considers racism in the UK, where the authors live and work. The chapter then zooms in on anti-Muslim racism in the context of counterterrorist British policies aiming to prevent the radicalisation of young people. Given that some of these policies are positioned within schools’ duty to safeguard their students, the chapter then shifts the focus on the experiences of teachers who come from a similar background to that of youth who are considered to be at risk of radicalisation. By way of answering this question, the chapter shares insights from Muslim teachers and considers the role of initial teacher education in supporting Muslim and non-Muslim teachers to become self-reflective and confident in their ability to address anti-Muslim racism and to support students and colleagues affected by it. Drawing on the principles of critical pedagogy, the chapter ends with some suggestions that can be used to deliver anti-Muslim racism education. A note on terminology: writing from a British perspective, the authors use the term Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) rather than the term ‘people of colour’ which is currently preferred in the United States. The authors are aware of debates around the term BAME (e.g. Sandhu, 2018) and acknowledge its limitations; however, given that, at present, it is widely used in the UK, it seemed an appropriate term to use in this chapter.

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CRITICAL RACE THEORY (CRT) AS A FRAMEWORK TO EXPLORE ANTI-MUSLIM RACISM Critical race theorists use the term ‘racism’ to refer to both the obvious acts of race hatred and the more subtle ways that power disadvantages minority ethnic groups. In other words, it is not only acts of violence against minority ethnic individuals that constitute race hatred, but also subtle, covert acts of discrimination (Bell, 1980; Crenshaw et al., 1995; Delgado, 1995; Leonardo, 2002). Critical race theorists argue that society views racism as an ordinary fact of daily life and that the assumptions of White superiority are so ingrained in political, legal and educational structures that they fail to recognise the inequalities (Delgado, 1995). In other words, racism is entrenched in the fabric of society and is a structural issue rather than the result of ignorance and prejudice by individuals. Several scholars have used CRT as a framework to examine racial inequality in educational settings. Kholi (2014), who used a CRT framework to explore and analyse the experiences of Black, Latina and Asian American women enrolled on a teacher education programme in the United States, has pointed out that CRT scholars of education have developed the following five tenets to guide research: (a) centrality of race and racism; (b) challenge to the dominant perspective; (c) commitment to social justice; ­ (d) value of experiential knowledge; (e) interdisciplinary (Solórzano and Bernal 2001). Collectively, these tenets offer scholars the historical, legal and social analytical evidence to foreground race and racism within educational inequality. (Kholi, 2014: 4)

By placing the experiences of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) individuals and groups at the forefront, CRT offers a lens with which to examine the complexities of their lives. Whilst CRT intersects with other aspects such as gender, disability or sexuality, it places the racialised experiences of

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BAME people at the very core of the discussions (Yosso, 2005). In what follows, CRT is used as a framework to explain how the political, social and cultural structures in the UK have enabled the development and promotion of anti-Muslim racism. Gillborn (2006: 14) warns of the dangers that arise from ‘the absence of a clear conceptual map of anti-racism’ and states that a more systematic approach to anti-racism is required. He further argues that work carried out in the name of anti-racism is often lip-service, ‘a meaningless slogan that is evacuated from all critical content’ (Gillborn, 2006: 14). Hence, there is a need for critical scholarship that will address racialised inequalities in practice, and it is within this context that CRT may help to lead the way ahead.

Racism in the UK As noted, CRT provides a helpful framework that can be used to examine and expose how racism operates in society and the role institutions play in its reproduction and persistence. As this chapter is being written, the British establishment has made the UK a hostile environment for refugees, BAME people, Muslims, Jews and members of European nations (Booth, 2019). These individuals and groups have been made to feel unwelcome in the UK, resulting in some cases in differential treatment by institutions in comparison to native residents, where citizenship is revoked and individuals and families are removed from the UK and returned to their heritage country. For example, Commonwealth migrants of the Windrush generation have been deported due to not having documentation to prove their right to stay in the UK despite having arrived before 1971, when such documentation was not necessary, and having settled in the UK since their arrival (BBC, 2018). The policies and practices that lead to such events are in many cases underpinned by what is known as ‘anti-Muslim racism’. This term refers to prejudice and discrimination

against people who identify as Muslims (Bakali, 2016). It is closely related to the term ‘Islamophobia’, which dates back to the 1910s and 1920s but reached wider audiences in the UK with the 1997 Runnymede Trust report Islamophobia: A Challenge to Us All (Runnymede Trust, 1997). The report defined Islamophobia as ‘unfounded hostility towards Islam [and] unfair discrimination against Muslims individually or as part of a group’. The report contrasted closed views of Islam which see it as monolithic, static, barbaric, irrational, primitive and sexist with open views of Islam which see it as diverse, progressive, interdependent with other faiths and cultures, and equally worthy of respect. The report pointed out that a culture of mistrust and contempt for Islam was developing during the 1980s and 1990s which resulted in discrimination against Muslims in various social spheres. In 2017, 20 years after the 1997 report, the Runnymede Trust published another report looking at the evolution and current manifestations of Islamophobia. The 2017 report refers to Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism and defines it as any distinction, exclusion, or restriction towards, or preference against, Muslims (or those perceived to be Muslims) that has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life. (Runnymede Trust, 2017)

The 2017 report points out that it is everybody’s responsibility to challenge ­ Islamophobia and to promote community harmony and cohesion. Building further on the Runnymede Trust report, and in response to growing concerns about anti-Muslim racism in the UK, the AllParty Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims was launched in 2017 to highlight the aspirations of British Muslims and the challenges they encounter, to celebrate the contributions of Muslim communities to

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Britain, and to investigate prejudice, discrimination and hatred against Muslims in the UK. In its 2018 report, the APPG proposed the following definition of Islamophobia: Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.

The definition was supported by a range of guidelines and examples rather than a list of essential features, which the APPG perceived as confining a prescriptiveness to its understanding to the detriment of contextual and fluid factors that continue to inform and shape manifestations of Islamophobia. Through the use of critical pedagogy, with its emphasis on raising awareness, addressing controversial issues and developing critical consciousness (Kincheloe, 2004), teachers and schools can be instrumental in combatting anti-Muslim racism. However, before we consider how this can be done, through the CRT lens we will look at how policies and strategies can be used to normalise and promote anti-Muslim racism at institutional level, making it an inherent feature of social spaces, including schools.

COUNTER-TERRORISM POLICIES AND ANTI-MUSLIM RACISM Acts of terrorism such as the 11 September 2001 attack in New York, the 7 July 2005 attack in London, the 13 November 2015 attack in Paris or the 22 May 2017 attack in Manchester have fuelled further an antiMuslim sentiment and led to increased intolerance and hatred against Muslims (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2018). This rise of terrorist atrocities on a global, national and local level has resulted in a rise of counter-terrorism policies including CONTEST, the British Government’s counter-terror strategy whose aim is ‘to reduce the risk to the UK and its interests overseas from terrorism’ (HM Government,

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2011: 40). To facilitate implementation, CONTEST sets out a series of procedures and tactics organised into four strands: ‘Pursue’, ‘Prevent’, ‘Protect’ and ‘Prepare’. ‘Prevent’ is of particular relevance here as it places direct legal responsibility on ‘specified authorities’, including schools and colleges, to have ‘due regard’ in order to prevent individuals from being drawn into extremism (Heath-Kelly, 2012; Busher et al., 2017). Within the context of ‘Prevent’ is ‘Channel’, a programme aiming to identify individuals deemed to be susceptible to recruitment by extremist groups (HM Government, 2012). Channel is a multi-agency programme that relies upon the vigilance and cooperation of social workers, youth workers, health workers and teachers in assisting the local police to identify those ‘at risk of extremism’. The Prevent strategy argues that ‘ideology is a central factor in the radicalisation process’ (HM Government, 2011: 40). One of the key objectives of the Prevent strategy is to ‘respond to the ideological challenge of terrorism’ by undertaking ‘counter-ideological work’ designed to ensure that there should be ‘no ungoverned spaces in which extremism is allowed to flourish’ (HM Government, 2011: 9). The British Government has added the Prevent strategy onto institutional safeguarding systems which are already in place. Specifically, from July 2015, as part of their safeguarding practices, all schools have responsibility to ensure that their students do not become radicalised (HM Government, 2015). Arguably, the purpose of situating Prevent as ‘safeguarding’ is to dispel practitioners’ apprehensions about the duty and reassure them that this is a continuation of their existing professional responsibility to protect children from harm (Busher et al., 2017). The purpose of safeguarding policy and practice is to keep children within the parameters of what Coppock and McGovern (2014: 253) refer to as ‘imagined “normal” childhood’. According to Coppock and McGovern (2014), where children and young people do not align with the values and norms assigned to this

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essentialised childhood that denies diversity for the sake of uniformity and universality, they are positioned as ‘outside of childhood’ and deemed to be at risk or a risk. Such structures have led to extensive monitoring of Muslim students in an attempt to allay national and local anxieties provoked by the Muslim subject who has come to embody a ‘threat’ (Sian, 2015). Sian (2015) draws attention to Learning Together to Be Safe, subtitled A Toolkit to Help Schools Contribute to the Prevention of Violent Extremism (Department for Children, Schools and Families [DCSF], 2008). This is a handbook for teachers and staff with responsibility to prevent extremism through their safeguarding framework. The handbook offers guidance on how to identify students who are ‘vulnerable’ to extremism, how to monitor and report risks, and how to manage and contain extremist events if they occur (Mirza, 2010). The handbook very quickly introduces and then retains a focus on ‘al-Qaida’ as the main perpetrator of extremism, side-lining extremist right-wing groups such as the English Defence League (Coppock and McGovern, 2014; Sian, 2015), and giving speculative reasons as to why Muslims may become involved in ‘extremist’ activity (Sian, 2015). The suggested reasons range from a search for identity and belonging, to excitement and adventure, a grievance triggered by experiences of racism and discrimination, an effort to develop selfesteem and ‘street cred’, and identification with a charismatic individual (DCSF, 2008). Practitioners are advised to use their ‘professional judgement’ to decide what behaviours or actions give cause for concern. However, as Sian et al. (2013: 63) has pointed out ‘[t]he ability to make these judgements seems open to interpretation, speculation and bias and also appears to take the form of a witch-hunt’ and to have ‘a voyeuristic element in the digging deeper, to try and find evidence of “extremism”’. Such speculations are essentialist and reductive, effectively stereotyping Muslim students and their communities through a pathologising discourse (Alexander, 2000; Brah, 2006).

Sian et  al. (2012) argue that, despite the handbook’s claims to a ‘universal’ approach to tackling ‘extremism’, the text clearly has ‘a blatant and specific focus on governing and regulating almost exclusively Muslim children and their behaviour and practices’ (Sian et  al., 2012 cited in Coppock and McGovern, 2014: 243) and, as such, reinforces the anti-Muslim racism discourse and the construct of the ‘Muslim terrorist’ utilising a deficit perspective rather than an intersectional approach to identify the social and structural issues present in society which lead young people to feel isolated and question their sense of belonging and identity. What is even more concerning is the silencing of the critique of structural inequalities embedded throughout the schooling system and what Law and Swann (2011) see as racialised, segregationist and exclusionary practices. Thomas (2016) highlights the failure to invest in and trust processes of political and citizenship education for young people that directly address the challenge of extremist ideologies, and re-enforce processes, standards and embodied values of equal, democratic citizenship. He draws upon Davies’ (2008) argument that the absence of such processes leaves the Prevent strategy unbalanced and tilting heavily towards a securitised engagement with and surveillance of Muslim youth that is now being deepened. Thomas (2016) argues that the Prevent strategy misappropriates child protection concepts and exploits moral panics about supposed Muslim ‘extremist’ influence on British state schools to increase surveillance of Muslim students.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE PROFESSIONAL IDENTITIES OF TEACHERS Professionals can find it difficult to challenge discourses that pathologise and demonise Muslim communities because they are

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pervasive and persistent (Gilligan 2009 cited in Coppock and McGovern, 2014). Through policy such as Prevent, these discourses become legitimised and normalised (Coppock and McGovern, 2014). The Muslim children and young people are thus perceived as belonging to a ‘suspect’ community, and are positioned as simultaneously being ‘at risk’ of radicalisation and ‘being a risk’. But what about the professionals who come from the same ‘suspect’ community as the students who are being surveyed? CRT highlights the value of experiential knowledge in challenging dominant perspectives (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Delgado, 1995), so Muslim teachers are best placed to answer the question posed above. Unsurprisingly, given the current climate of anti-Muslim racism which is fuelled by policy such as Prevent, Muslim teachers’ experiential knowledge indicates that they are also likely to be perceived as a threat and to be subjected to hostility, prejudice and discrimination (Mohammed, 2018). In March 2018, the largest teaching union in Scotland, the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) highlighted some of the ways in which Muslim staff and learners in educational spaces experience anti-Muslim prejudice:

• Being overlooked – curriculum content does not include references to all faiths; policies do not reflect cultural/religious rulings; there is a lack of prayer facilities; professional learning opportunities are limited. (EIS, 2018)

• Verbal abuse and name calling: ‘terrorist’, ‘Paki Muslim’, ‘bomber’. Racist comments presented as ‘jokes’; derogatory comments and loaded questions, e.g. ‘so, what did you think of the Brussels event?’. Physical abuse, e.g. young Muslim girls have their hijabs pulled off. • Misrecognition – it is common for Sikhs, Hindus and other South Asian young people to be mistaken as a Muslim because of their skin colour, hair and features etc. (also noted in Hopkins et al., 2017). • Assumptions leading to isolation – if you are a Muslim, people make assumptions about your social life and skill set. This is illustrated in the following statement from a Muslim teacher quoted in Mohammed (2018): ‘A young learner shouted at me “You are not a proper, real teacher!”’. • Victimisation – when staff and young people raise any concerns about the prejudice they experience, they tend to be unfairly treated.

What about the [Muslim] children? If that is how the educated professionals are treated then what kind of treatment do the [Muslim] children receive […]? I think they will be having a terrible time. (Kashif in Mohammed, 2018)

These instances of anti-Muslim racism are in line with the findings of a recent study into the experiences of Scottish Muslim teachers (Mohammed, 2018). A case in point is the following quote from Shaista, a principal teacher for pastoral care, who spoke about her experience after she decided to wear the hijab: I walked in and the place fell silent. I had a big gulp in my throat …I just sat down and the staff were shocked and I was asked ‘what’s all this about?’ pointing to my hijab….I could feel the vibes, small things like when colleagues walked past in the corridor, before they would stop and say hello and now, just walked right by me… they look hesitant to approach me…it’s funny how they see you differently. (Shaista in Mohammed, 2018)

Such attitudes reflect the dangers of ‘othering’ and excluding members of staff because they are Muslim. Kashif, a maths teacher who participated in the same study, expressed concern:

Some answers to this question are provided by a recent study of the experiences of Muslim students in Glasgow schools (Riaz, 2018). The participants said that they perceived themselves to be treated differently and unfairly from other students in school by being overlooked, ignored, discriminated against and offered limited support with studies and transition out of compulsory education. The participating students spoke of instances of racial and religious discrimination, and of lack of mutual respect and appreciation of differences. These findings are in

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line with a growing body of research which shows that such experiences are frequent and can make Muslim students feel marginalised and alienated from the school culture (Ali, 2008; Kidd and Jamieson, 2011; Stevenson et al., 2017). Taken together, the findings outlined above highlight the need to raise awareness about anti-Muslim racism and its impact on students and staff who identify as Muslim. Given the opportunity, Muslim teachers can play an important role in supporting the active and meaningful participation of students from minority ethnic backgrounds, including but not limited to those of Muslim faith, and in promoting anti-racist education (LadsonBillings, 1995, 2005; Shain, 2003; Kholi, 2014). The value and success of practices which acknowledge and utilise the cultural, religious and linguistic funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) that diverse learners bring to school have led to an emerging consensus that we need ‘diverse teachers for diverse learners’ (Conteh et al., 2007; Santoro, 2013; Egalite and Kisida, 2018). This does not suggest that only Muslim teachers can teach successfully Muslim children, but that they can draw on their cultural and linguistic skills to benefit the education of all children. The mere fact that they are visible in school settings and leading learning could perhaps challenge the stereotypical representations that are held by members of the school community (staff, children and families – see Ladson-Billings, 1995; Cummins, 2000; Santoro and Reid, 2006; Cummins and Early, 2011). Schools are important sites for young people to encounter social justice. They are also sites for teachers to encounter social justice. Yet, whilst some Muslim teachers feel confident in utilising their cultural and linguistic skills, others choose to assimilate to the dominant ‘White’ culture in order to ‘fit in’ (Kholi, 2014), and, in the context of Prevent, so as to avoid suspicion that they may be a threat to ‘Britishness’. This potentially oppresses Muslim teachers’ identity and that of the young Muslim people they teach.

The presence of Muslim teachers who are confident in their Muslimness can play a key part in supporting young people to develop the critical literacy skills required to challenge any form of discrimination that is conveyed through the media and in social spaces including schools. Two further quotes from the study of Scottish Muslim teachers mentioned above (Mohammed, 2018) help to illustrate how these teachers’ cultural, religious and linguistic skills can be of benefit to all the children they teach (Mohammed, 2018). Safia, a Muslim teacher, speaks of the importance of not only being visible within a classroom but also of promoting a positive representation of her faith through her mere presence. She cites the importance of building relationships by forming strong bonds with the young people: I am the only Muslim teacher in my school and I spend a lot of my time breaking down the barriers… I do think that one of the most important things is to build relationships with the young people…you get through to them and there is a connection and for me I had it with an all-white [sic] class and also with a mixed class – it’s important in both cases. (Safia, in Mohammed, 2018)

Kashif, the Muslim maths teacher mentioned earlier, talks about how he uses critical pedagogy tools to stimulate thinking: I was talking to my Maths class who had just come from Religious and Moral Education and I asked them ‘when you think of peace which country do you think of?’…it was not a trick question and the class was mainly white [sic] kids. I threw it out there and they said Buddhist. I said ‘that’s interesting but do you know what is happening in Burma at the moment?’ I have a close Burmese friend and I gave them an example and they said ‘why isn’t that in the news?’ and I said ‘well you think about that…’ If I get the opportunity, I always throw things in. (Kashif, in Mohammed, 2018)

These quotes showcase some of the benefits of having diverse teaching staff who can encourage young people to think and challenge the dominant perspective. ­ Unfortunately, the percentage of BAME teachers in schools, especially in promoted

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posts, is very small so the benefits that come with their skills and experiences are not widely available. For many decades, Scotland has seen an underrepresentation of BAME teachers in schools. Systematic racism has been identified as a key factor in this, particularly in relation to the lack of recruitment, retention and promotion of BAME teachers into leadership roles (Arshad and Mitchell, 2007; CRER, 2018). The lack of diversity within the Scottish teaching workforce was highlighted in the Scottish government commissioned report Addressing Race Inequality in Scotland: The Way Forward launched in December 2017 (Lyle, 2017). The number of teachers from BAME backgrounds across the whole profession has declined from 1.9% of the total workforce in 2011 to 1.3% in 2016. Given the benefits associated with a diverse teaching force, as illustrated above, it is important to work towards identifying and removing the barriers that stop BAME people, including those who identify as Muslim, from becoming teachers and then progressing to promoted posts. Initial Teacher Education can play an important role in this.

THE ROLE OF INITIAL TEACHER EDUCATION Scotland takes great pride in its education system and within the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence (Scottish Government, 2004), opportunities to discuss Islam and Muslims should form part of inter-disciplinary learning, where discussions take place across the curriculum and not just during religious education. Indeed, it then becomes necessary to consider how initial teacher education institutions prepare student teachers to consider their evolving professional identities and their responsibility to promote social justice through their practice. Lander (2011) researched White student teachers who were preparing to teach in a

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secondary school in a diverse community. Drawing on CRT, the research provides an analysis of how the students’ ethnicity influenced their perceptions of issues related to race. The main findings were that White student teachers do not see themselves as racialised and are unaware of the privilege they hold because of their ethnicity. These findings reinforce the importance of addressing the question posed by Arshad and Mitchell (2007): with a homogenous teaching workforce, are we able to provide appropriate educational experiences for young people from diverse cultural backgrounds? Lander (2011: 362) asserts that ‘it is not until we question the neutral white position promoted by ITE [initial teacher education] policy and practice that we will begin to make a real difference to how student teachers perceive themselves in relation to their BAME pupils and their positions as educators in a multiracial society’. It is important that teacher educators consider how they position themselves and their student teachers in terms of ethnicity, culture and religion. This point is further reinforced by Bartolo and Smyth (2009), who present two ‘diversity challenges’ for teacher educators. Firstly, they encourage teacher educators to acknowledge the cultural, linguistic and religious skills all student teachers bring with them and, secondly, they ask teacher educators to help their student teachers examine their own attitudes and reflect on their cultural experiences. Pearce (2014) undertook research focusing on early career teachers’ preparedness to deal with racist incidents. The findings showed that although the beginning teachers lacked the ability to conceptualise and articulate examples of race discrimination, they did raise questions about the school processes, which often adopt a colour-blind approach and fail to deal appropriately with racist incidents. The findings highlight how important it is that teacher educators take up the diversity challenges outlined by Bartolo and Smyth (2009). By acknowledging the cultural, linguistic and religious skills all

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student teachers bring with them and by encouraging them to engage in self-reflection and examination of their own attitude and cultural experiences, teacher educators can help their student teachers become more confident in identifying and dealing with racist incidents. Pearce’s (2014) findings also highlight the inadequacy of school processes that take a colour-blind approach and do not deal with racist incidents effectively. This is illustrated by the incident reported in the Sunday Herald article that opens the next section.

ADDRESSING ANTI-MUSLIM RACISM THROUGH CRITICAL PEDAGOGY The following incident, which is outlined in a Sunday Herald article entitled ‘Probe after pupils shout “Allahu Akbar…Boom” in classroom days after Manchester Arena bombing’, took place in a secondary school in Glasgow, Scotland. According to the report, ‘teacher and pupils imitated a suicide bomber in a classroom, as Muslim pupils looked on horrified’. A parent of a Muslim female student contacted the school to share her disquiet at what had occurred in the classroom, which she perceived as an Islamophobic incident. The response from the school management and local government officials was that ‘while what happened was not appropriate, there was no evidence of any Islamophobic behaviour, language or intent’ (Swindon, 2017). As with the incident involving Basit, which was outlined in the introduction, the response to this incident indicates that there is an urgent need to develop a more effective approach to address anti-Muslim racism in schools. Critical pedagogy can aid by providing a framework that can be used to raise awareness in staff and students. Critical pedagogy emphasises the centrality of the social and cultural contexts in teaching and learning, and aims to empower students

and staff to take social action, thus creating a bridge between the school and the world (Kincheloe, 2004). The problem-posing approach that is favoured by critical pedagogues (Freire, 1970) can be a powerful tool in addressing anti-Muslim racism. Incidents such as the one involving Basit and the imitation of a suicide bomber can serve as stimulus for professional dialogue amongst staff and for continuing professional development (CPD). Staff can work in groups to analyse the incidents and consider the assumptions on which they are based, the perceptions of the different actors, and alternative endings. AntiMuslim racist incidents can also be used to stimulate discussion and problem solving with students. Creative approaches can offer a range of response options for these discussions (Bell and Roberts, 2010). For example, students can be encouraged to respond through artwork such as drawings, posters, or graphic strips that retell the incident in visual form and provide a different, more appropriate ending to what happened. Forum theatre (Boal, 2008) offers many possibilities for critical drama-based work. For example, students can develop scripts based on their individual or shared experiences. The scripts can then be acted out and the spectators can intervene to develop angles and suggest resolutions. Watching the enactment of anti-Muslim racist incidents arising from students’ own experiences can be very powerful for the spectators and can help them consider how to intervene. Critical literacy is another useful approach in anti-Muslim racist education. Being exposed to the racialised experiences of characters in story books and novels can help students understand the roots and impact of racism and consider their stance. From young adult novels such as The Hate U Give by Thomas (2017) to picture books such as All Are Welcome by Penfold (2018), race is covered in a range of books for children and young adults. Ensuring that such books are available in the school library for self-study

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but also that they are included as resources for lessons across subject areas can provide teachers with many opportunities to explore race and racism, including anti-Muslim racism. Whilst there are many approaches and resources teachers can use to address antiMuslim racism, some may not feel confident in facilitating discussions on this topic due to lack of opportunities to develop their own understanding and stance. This is why it is important that anti-racist education, including specific reference to anti-Muslim racism, is part of initial teacher education and CPD for practising teachers. It is in this context that practitioners can explore the issues and build the confidence required to address them effectively with their students. Finally, anti-Muslim racism education should be a whole school approach. Staff should work to develop a shared understanding of the issues and appropriate responses to them so that they can feel prepared to intervene, proactively and responsibly, as needed. A whole school approach should include: • Discussions of complex and sensitive issues around social justice and equality; some of these can be initiated in assembly and followed up in class. • Encouraging and dealing with questions from young people following any prejudiced media reporting; these can be addressed as they arise but followed up in a more systematic manner. • Curriculum content, resources texts and other materials that have positive references to Islam and Muslim achievement or influence. • Exploring the role of the media in documenting reports on Islam. Students should be given the opportunity to consider the different forms of discrimination that are evident in newspaper articles which demonise Muslims and can help young people to understand anti-Muslim prejudice. • Working closely with parents and the wider community. • Collaborations with relevant external agencies such as the local mosque and key speakers. • Supporting Muslim staff during Ramadhan and religious festivals and being aware that Muslim children may need to leave school to attend Jummah prayers.

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CONCLUSION As indicated in this chapter, anti-Muslim racism is a real problem in the UK. Education can play a very important role in raising awareness, encouraging self-reflection and developing knowledge and skills that can be used to disrupt anti-Muslim racism and to support those affected by it. Critical pedagogy and Critical Race Theory offer a useful analytical framework and robust tools that can help schools to deliver effective anti-­ Muslim racism education.

REFERENCES Alexander, C. E. (2000) The Asian Gang: Ethnicity, Identity and Masculinity. Oxford: Berg. Ali, S. (2008) Second and Third Generation Muslims in Britain: A Socially Excluded Group? Identities, Integration and Community Cohesion. Oxford: Nuffield College & University of Oxford. All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims (2018) Report on the inquiry into a working definition of Islamophobia / antiMuslim hatred. Online. Available: https:// static1.squarespace.com/static/599c3d2 febbd1a90cffdd8a9/t/5bfd1ea3352f531 a6170ceee/1543315109493/Islamophobia+ Defined.pdf Accessed: 18 October 2019. Arshad, R., and Mitchell, L. (2007) ‘Inclusion: Is it the new threat to the equity and anti­ discrimination agenda in Scottish schools?’ Paper presented at the Association of Teacher Educators in Europe (ATEE), Wolverhampton. Bakali, N. (2016) Islamophobia: Understanding Anti-Muslim Racism through the Lived Experiences of Muslim Youth. Netherlands: Springer. Banks, J. A., and McGee Banks, C. A. (eds) (2010) Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives (7th ed). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Bartolo, P. A., and Smyth, G. (2009) Teacher education for diversity. In: Swennen, A. and van der Klink, M (eds) Becoming a Teacher Educator. Netherlands: Springer, pp. 117–132.

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BBC (18 April 2018) Windrush generation: Who are they and why are they facing problems? Online. Available: https://www.bbc. co.uk/news/uk-43782241 Accessed 18 October 2019. Bell, D. A. (1980) Brown v. Board of Education and the interest convergence dilemma. Harvard Law Review, 93(3), pp. 518–533. Bell, L. A., and Roberts, R. A. (2010) The storytelling project model: a theoretical framework for critical examination of racism through the arts. Teachers College Record, 112(9), pp. 2295–2319. Boal, A. (2008) Theatre of the Oppressed. London: Pluto Press. Booth, R. (20 May 2019) Racism rising since Brexit vote, nationwide study reveals. Online. Available: https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2019/may/20/racism-on-the-risesince-brexit-vote-nationwide-study-reveals Accessed: 18 October 2019. Brah, A. (2006) The ‘Asian’ in Britain. In: Ali, N., Kalra, V. S. and Sayyid, S. (eds) A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain. London: Hurst and Company, pp. 35–61. Brinson, J. A., and Smith, S. D. (2014) Racialized Schools: Understanding and Addressing Racism in Schools. New York, NY: Routledge. Busher, J., Choudhury, T., Thomas, P., and Harris, G. (2017) What the Prevent duty means for schools and colleges in England: An analysis of educationalists’ experiences. Online. Available: http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/ eprint/32349/ Accessed: 18 October 2019. Conteh, J., Martin, P., and Robertson, L. (2007) Multilingual Learning: Stories from Schools and Communities in Britain. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. Coppock, V., and McGovern, M. (2014) Dangerous minds? De-constructing counterterrorism discourse, radicalisation and the ‘psychological vulnerability’ of Muslim children and young people in Britain. Children and Society, 28(3), pp. 242–256. Crenshaw, K. W., Gotanda, N., Peller, G., and Thomas, K. (1995) Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. New York, NY: The New Press. CRER (Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights) (2018) BME Teachers in Scotland: An overview of the Representation of BME Teachers in

Scotland’s Local Authorities. Online. Available: https://864a82af-f028-4baf-a09446facc 9205ca.filesusr.com/ugd/7ec2e5_cb7aff9 ac0254e61aa16c1c578e91f45.pdf Accessed: 18 October 2019. Cummins, J. (2000) Language, Power and Pedagogy: Bilingual Children in the Crossfire. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Cummins, J., and Early, M. (2011) Identity Texts: The Collaborative Creation of Power in Multilingual Schools. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. Davies, L. (2008) Educating Against Extremism. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. Dei, G. J. S. (1996) Anti-Racism Education: Theory and Practice. Halifax, NS: Fernwood Publishing. Dei, G. J. S. (2014) Personal reflections on antiracism education for a global context. Encounters/Encuentros/Rencontres on Education, 15, pp. 239–249. Delgado, R. (1995) Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Department for Children, Schools and Families (2008) Learning Together to Be Safe: A Toolkit to Help Schools Contribute to the Prevention of Violent Extremism. London: HMSO. Egalite, A., and Kisida, B. (2018) The effects of teacher match on academic perceptions and attitudes. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 40(1), pp. 59–81. EIS (2018) Challenging Anti-Muslim Prejudice. Online. Available: https://www.eis.org.uk/AntiRacism/ChallengingAntiMuslim­P rejudice Accessed: 18 October 2019. European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (2018) Fundamental Rights Report 2018. Online. Available: https://fra.europa. eu/en/publication/2018/fundamental-rightsreport-2018 Accessed: 18 October 2019. Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin. Gillborn, D. (2006) Critical Race Theory and education: racism and anti-racism in educational theory and praxis. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 27(1), pp. 11–32. Giroux, H. A. (2015) Education and the Crisis of Public Values: Challenging the Assault on Teachers, Students, and Public Education. (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Peter Lang.

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Heath-Kelly, C. (2012) Reinventing prevention or exposing the gap? False positives in UK terrorism governance and the quest for preemption. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 5(1), pp. 69–87. HM Government (2011) CONTEST: The United Kingdom’s Strategy for Countering Terrorism. London: HM Government. HM Government (2012) Channel: Protecting Vulnerable People from Being Drawn into Terrorism. London: HM Government. HM Government (2015) The Prevent Duty. Departmental Advice for Schools and Childcare Providers. London: HM Government. Hopkins, P., Botterill, K., Sanghera, G., and Arshad, R. (2017) Encountering misrecognition: Being mistaken for being Muslim. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 107(4), pp. 934–948. Jay, M. (2003) Critical race theory, multicultural education, and the hidden curriculum of hegemony. Multicultural Perspectives, 5(4), pp. 3–10. Kholi, R. (2014) Unpacking internalized racism: teachers of color striving for racially just classrooms. Race Ethnicity and Education, 17(3), pp. 367–387. Kidd, S., and Jamieson, L. (2011) Experiences of Muslims Living in Scotland. Scottish Government Social Research. Online. ­ ­Available: http://www.gov.scot/resource/doc/ 344206/0114485.pdf Accessed: 18 October 2019. Kincheloe, J. L. (2004). Critical Pedagogy Primer. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Koh, A. (2015) Deparochialising education and the Asian priority: a curriculum (re)imagination. In: Halse, C. (ed.) Asia Literate Schooling in the Asian Century. Oxon: Routledge. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995) But that’s just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy. Theory into Practice, 34(3), pp. 159–165. Ladson-Billings, G. J. (2005) Is the team all right? Diversity and teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 56(3), pp. 229–234. Lander, V. (2011) Race culture and all that: an exploration of the perspectives of White education secondary student teachers about race equality issues in their initial teacher education. Race Ethnicity and Education, 14(3), pp. 351–364.

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Law, I., and Swann, S. (2011) Ethnicity and Education in England and Europe, Gangstas, Geeks and Gorjas. Farnham: Ashgate. Leonardo, Z. (2002) The souls of white folk: critical pedagogy, whiteness studies, and globalisation discourse. Race Ethnicity and Education, 5(1), pp. 29–50. Leonardo, Z., and Grubb, W. N. (2019) Education and Racism: A Primer on Issues and Dilemmas (2nd ed.). Oxon: Routledge. Lyle, K. (2017) Addressing Race Inequality in Scotland: The Way Forward. Online. ­Available: https://www.gov.scot/­publications/ addressing-race-inequality-scotland-way-­ forward/ Accessed: 18 October 2019. Mirza, H. S. (2010) Multicultural Education in England. London: Institute of Education, University of London. Mohammed, K. (2018) Celebrating Professional Identities: A Case Study of Black and Minority Ethnic Teachers in Scotland. (Unpublished Thesis) University of the West of Scotland. Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., and Gonzalez, N. (1992) Funds of knowledge for teaching: using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory into Practice, 31(2), pp. 132–141. Pearce, S. (2014) Dealing with racist incidents: what do beginning teachers learn from schools? Race Ethnicity and Education, 17(3), pp. 388–406. Penfold, A. and Kaufman, S. (2018) All Are Welcome. London: Bloomsbury Children’s Books. Riaz, N. (2018) Transitions: exploring aspirations of BME Muslim youth exiting compulsory education. Journal of Research in PostCompulsory Education, 23(3), pp. 368–390. Runnymede Trust (1997) Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All. Runnymede Trust: Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia. Runnymede Trust (2017) Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us All. 20th Anniversary Report. Runnymede Trust: Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia. Sandhu, R. (17 May 2018) Should BAME be ditched as a term for black, Asian and minority ethnic people? Online. Available: https:// www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-43831279 Accessed: 18 October 2019.

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Santoro, N., and Reid, J. (2006) ‘All things to all people’: Indigenous teachers in the Australian profession. European Journal of Teacher Education, 29(3), pp. 287–303. Santoro, N. (2013) The drive to diversify the teaching profession: narrow assumptions, hidden complexities. Race Ethnicity and Education, 18(6), pp. 858–876. Scottish Government (2004) A Curriculum for Excellence. Online. Available: http://www. scotland.gov.uk/­P ublications/2004/11/ 20178/45862 Accessed: 18 October 2019. Shain, F. (2003) The Schooling and Identity of Asian Girls. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. Sian, K. P. (2015) Spies, surveillance and stakeouts: monitoring Muslim moves in British state schools. Race Ethnicity and Education, 18(2), pp. 183–201. Sian K., Law, I., and Sayyid, S. (2012) Debates on Difference and Integration in Education: Muslims in the UK. Working paper produced within the TOLERACE project. University of Leeds: Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies. Sian, K., Law, I., Sayyid, S. (2013) Racism, Governance, and Public Policy: Beyond Human Rights. London: Routledge.

Stevenson, J., Demack, S., Stiell, B., Abdi, M., Clarkson, C., Ghaffar, F., and Hassan, S. (2017) The Social Mobility Challenges Faced by Young Muslims. Social Mobility Commission. Online. Available: https://dera. ioe.ac.uk//29940/ Accessed: 18 October 2019. Swindon, P. (25 June 2017) Probe after pupils shout ‘Allahu Akbar…Boom’ in classroom days after Manchester Arena bombing. Online. Available: https://www.heraldscotland.com/ news/15369472.probe-after-pupils-shoutallahu-akbarboom-in-classroom-days-aftermanchester-arena-bombing/ Accessed: 18 October 2019. Thomas, P. (2016) Youth, terrorism and education: Britain’s Prevent programme. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 35(2), pp. 171–187. Thomas, A. (2017) The Hate U Give. New York: Balzer + Bray. Yosso, T. J. (2005) Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of cultural community wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), pp. 66–91.

71 Pedagogy of Connectedness: Cultivating a Community of Caring, Compassionate Social Justice Warriors in the Classroom Revital Zilonka

INTRODUCTION1 To be loved and taken care of are two of our deepest, most basic needs as human beings. However, for many of us, living in this world means living with many contradictions. We live within the pressures of care and neglect, hope and despair, connectedness and disconnectedness. Our human hunger for meaning, our desire for wholeness, and our wish for well-being are often clouded by negative feelings and emotions we have toward ourselves and others, traumatic experiences both past and present, and the social norms/values that construct our belief systems. When we do not feel loved and taken care of, we oftentimes experience disconnectedness, which may lead to undesired feelings and emotions that can further deepen our sense of disconnectedness. Brown (2010a: 23) argues that disconnection is rooted in the absence of love and a sense of belonging, which are ‘essential to the human experience’. She writes that ‘when those needs are not met,

we do not function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We  hurt others. We get sick.’ (2010a: 26). The absence of love and a sense of belonging, she asserts, ‘will always lead to suffering’ (2010:  26). Brown argues that the ramifications of disconnection within US American society are disastrous and evident. She states that ‘we are the most in debt, obese, addicted, and medicated adult cohort in U.S. history’ (Brown, 2010b, 15:32). Brown adds that we use these behaviors to numb bad feelings such as grief, shame, fear, and disappointment. By numbing these feelings, we also numb joy, gratitude, and happiness, thus making us feel miserable (Brown, 2010b). Brown’s (2010a, 2010b) scholarly work helped me to understand what I witnessed and experienced during my first year as an international graduate student in the United States while adjusting to a new culture and new social norms. I started to pay attention to the ramifications of disconnectedness within US American society. Learning about

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students’ accounts of anxiety and depression was heartbreaking, particularly while I witnessed the increasing number of people who experience homelessness, addiction, and mental illnesses. As an international student I explored the meaning of those phenomena and I began to look at all of them through a prism of dis/connectedness in order to see the connections between social disconnectedness, violence, dehumanization, exploitation, and how they are influenced by US American norms and values. It occurred to me that analyzing and understanding social dis/connectedness might be the missing link to explaining injustices and inequities in the United States (as well as around the globe). For four years I ‘experimented’ with my pedagogy and curriculum as a Cultural Foundations in Education course instructor. I utilized a social dis/connectedness praxis as an anchor for understanding injustices and inequities. In this chapter, I explore what it means to experiment with pedagogy and curricula that are concerned with social dis/ connectedness and how both supported my students and myself in restoring connectedness in the classroom.

THE WORLD AND THE WORD The world tends to be a place where we drift between despair and hope, experiencing social isolation and alienation while yearning for human connection (Palmer, 2004) and a sense of belonging. We live in a world in which many parts are ruled by cruel, greedy, and corrupt government officials and corporations that advance neoliberal ideology and practices which leave millions of people defenseless. Many people’s sense of powerlessness can be attributed to different causes (e.g., oppressive practices such as discrimination and legislation that limits people’s freedom) and manifests itself in diverse ways (e.g., loneliness, depression, and anxiety). All these causes and manifestations can lead

people to experience disconnectedness, which consequently deepens their sense of powerlessness. Shor (1987) writes about the powerlessness and confusion that people experience and argues that these experiences can only be understood through critical thinking. He admits that ‘most people are alienated from their own conceptual habits of mind’ (1987: 47), wonders why there are no masses of people ‘engaged in social reflection’, and asks ‘what prevents popular awareness of how the whole system operates and which alternatives would best serve human needs’ (1987: 47). For that, we need to engage in developing a new toolkit that includes radical language, thought, and praxis in order to challenge the dominant and hegemonic paradigms within society. Giroux (2011) writes that educators and other cultural workers need a new political and pedagogical language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which capital draws upon an unprecedented convergence of resource – financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technology – to exercise powerful and diverse forms of hegemony. (Giroux, 2011: 69)

Critical pedagogy is comprised of the radical language, thought, and praxis that is needed to challenge the chaotic reality we live in and to empower the powerless. Its philosophy and methods can assist us in reconsidering our role in the world – as teachers and students – to instill hope that this reality is not permanent and can be changed. The struggle for humanizing personal and professional space becomes the struggle for ‘the emancipation of labor, for the overcoming of alienation […] for the affirmation of men and women as persons’ (Freire, 2010: 44). Huerta-Charles (2007) reminds us that ‘within the critical pedagogy perspective there is a hope that teachers will become agents of social change’ (2007: 250), employing critical pedagogy in our classrooms which can advance a sense of agency. In a critical classroom, not only can we feel less

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powerless, but we have the opportunity to reclaim our power. Thus, education becomes a liberatory, radical act that humanizes people who find their voice. Critical pedagogy is hopeful and sees education ‘as the practice of freedom – as opposed to education as the practice of domination’ (Freire, 2010: 81). It is an ‘educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action’ (Giroux, 2010: 15). To become a liberatory critical pedagogue, one must recognize that education is rooted in loving relationships we cultivate with others and with the world. Freire (1971) writes, To be a good liberating educator, you need above all to have faith in human beings. You need to love. You must be convinced that the fundamental effort of education is to help with the liberation of people, never their domestication. You must be convinced that when people reflect on their domination they begin a first step in changing their relationship to the world. (Freire, 1971: 62, as quoted in Shor, 1993: 25)

Rendón (2009: 142) adds that ‘faculty can assist students to raise their self-awareness, find purpose, voice, and self-worth, as well as develop tolerance and learn to recognize social inequities and take action against them’ – much needed traits from which we can all benefit. There are four guiding principles of critical pedagogy: (1) uncovering, analyzing, and understanding power structures; (2) a commitment to empowerment that contributes to developing a sense of agency; (3) sustaining dialogue that enhances connectedness and a sense of belonging; and (4) critiquing the reality and generating – individually and collectively – new knowledge(s). These can be deployed as a means to counteract what Giroux (2011: 8) describes as ‘a real educational crisis in North America’ due to the neoliberal attacks it has been subjected to in

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the past decades in order to ‘defend public and higher education as a resource vital to the democratic and civic life of the nation’ (Giroux, 2011: 77). While I agree with Giroux, I am also intrigued by Weiner’s (2007: 65) query. ‘[W]hat if critical pedagogy’s project was neither the end of capitalism nor the radicalization of democracy…but rather the end of the world as we have learned to know it?’ To his question, I add the following two questions: 1 What if the critical pedagogy project is about connectedness? 2 What will it mean to reinvent critical pedagogy through a dis/connectedness prism?

As educators, we cannot ignore the harsh reality that many people, including our students, cope with daily. Students come from all walks of life and carry past or current experiences of hurt, disappointment, heartbreak, loss, anxiety, and pain. Those experiences are part of who they are and many of those experiences are attributed to socioeconomic structures that advance a select few while subjecting others to a life of hardship. In other words, social phenomena such as homelessness, untreated and undertreated mental illnesses, drug addiction, and alcohol abuse do not happen in a vacuum, and neither does discrimination against people of color or people with disabilities. When our students come to our classrooms to learn about justice issues and how those issues relate to schooling and education, they do not come as empty vessels. They all bring firsthand knowledge and experiences of social disconnectedness and therefore social reflection must begin with those personal experiences. Applying critical pedagogy principles in the classroom in order to challenge dominance and hegemonic paradigms within society is important. However, what I suggest is to hold off on discussions of hegemony and dominance and begin by focusing on the students and their stories of connectedness and disconnectedness.

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CONNECTEDNESS, COMMUNITIES, AND THE CLASSROOM Recognizing that ‘the search for meaning and connection arises from a basic human need to belong’ (Noddings, 2017: 1), critical pedagogues oftentimes strive to create classrooms that foster a sense of community. Working together, learning from each other, considering multiple perspectives, and participating in a collective act of imagining better possibilities can result in meaningful learning experiences. Two possible outcomes might be that students will realize the importance and benefits of investing in I/Thou relationships (Buber and Smith, 1937) and abundant communities (Block, 2008). By their very nature, communities nurture a sense of belonging (Block, 2008) and affirm practices of love (hooks, 2001) and care (Held, 2006), as well as enhancing notions of hope (Miller et al., 2011). Critical classrooms that engage in collective efforts to build communities also function as a form of resistance to neoliberal ideology and individualism in a market-driven capitalist society. Attick (2017) reminds us that, [i]n a neoliberal model, where students’ economic productivity and market value become the purpose of schooling, teaching becomes less an act of developing well-rounded, civic-minded, engaged human beings, and more focused on developing the specific skills that students will need to participate as both producers and consumers in the market. (Attick, 2017: 41)

Thus, shifting the focus from market-driven education to a liberatory education that ‘might help students to get meaning from their academics’ (Noddings, 2017: 4) becomes an imperative task for critical pedagogues who want ‘to prepare students for effective citizenship in a participatory democracy’ (Gutmann, 1987, as cited in Noddings, 2017: 5). Consequently, cultivating communities can reduce the culture of consumerism, loneliness, powerlessness, and anxiety that are associated with disconnectedness.

Shapiro (2006) argues that nurturing a sense of belonging to a community should be ‘our vision for education [that] speaks strongly to the need for meaning and purpose in our lives’ (2006: 75). He writes that community ‘provides the means through which we may receive the recognition of our presence, and affirmation of our value’, and that ‘we are “made” for relationship’ (2006: 76) – two assertions that resonate with the claims that as human beings we are ‘wired’ to connect (Brown, 2010a) and to live in communities (Hrdy, 2009). Block (2008) argues that community is the optimal space to restore the sense of belonging we have lost, and that community is where we can act on and value ‘our interdependence and sense of belonging’ (2008: 3). He explains that when we feel we belong to a community, we ‘act as an investor, owner, and creator of this place. To be welcome, even if we are strangers, as if we came to the right place and are affirmed for that choice’ (2008: 3). He urges us to foster communities where everyone has ‘the experience of being connected to those around them and knows that their safety and success are dependent on the success of all others’ (2008: 3). Community teaches us to take care of one another, understanding that our well-being is a reflection of the well-being of others (Block, 2008). hooks (2001) believes that community is also essential to learning the art of loving, and argues that the absence of a sense of community leads to a scarcity of opportunities to practice love (2001: 129). She writes that love lays the foundation for the constructive building of community with strangers. The love we make in community stays with us wherever we go. With this knowledge as our guide, we make any place we go a place where we return to love. (hooks, 2001: 144)

Consciously adding the community element to critical classrooms fosters the conditions in which students might experience closeness and intimacy with classmates they learn to

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care about and trust. Shapiro (2006) believes that the classroom can become ‘a space where all children are fully recognized and their unique presence unconditionally valued’, and that it can ‘provide care and support for everyone’ (2006: 77). He writes, [C]ommunity is both a place that asserts the fundamentally equal value of all lives, and, at the same time, a place that compassionately addresses us as being with differences that must not be treated as sources of humiliation or unfair disadvantages. (Shapiro, 2006: 77)

Building communities – within the school system or elsewhere – necessitates collective efforts. It necessitates going against the grain of how we were socialized to live, learn, and love. What is possible is oftentimes hidden from us or, at the very least, under-discussed in the education system. Education can bring people together while opening up spaces for students and educators to experience what hooks (2003: xv) defines as a ‘practice of freedom [that can] enable us to confront feelings of loss and restore our sense of connection’. Both hooks (2003) and Shapiro (2006) wish to witness efforts of generating meaningful connections in our education system. hooks suggests that we should confront what stands in the way of connectedness (2008: xv), while Shapiro reminds us that ‘when we say that something is meaningful we are making a statement about connections. Something becomes meaningful to us because it seems to connect things together in our minds’ (2006: 78). He adds that ‘it seems that we are… compelled to take the separate and nominally unrelated fragments we encounter in our world, and find ways to connect them together so that they can be understood as whole and related phenomena’ (2006: 78). It is hard to deny that many of these fragments, which ‘leave us disturbed and troubled’ (Shapiro, 2006: 78), are there by accident. In other words, governments, corporations, and religious institutions put many obstacles in our way that impede our ability to connect, care for, and wholeheartedly love

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one another. Moreover, values such as individualism and meritocracy, driven and deepened by neoliberal forces (which are very much reflected in legislation, regulations, and policies), lessen the role of communities in our lives. Shapiro reminds us that ‘the more we live, think, and act in individualistic ways, the more we live in ways that separate us from others, the more shrunken is our sense of meaning’ (2006: 79). Ideally, communities make sure that we are not alone. Shapiro writes that meaningful community ‘cannot be separated from social justice’ (2006: 77). Thus, in order to counteract social alienation, fragmentation, and loss of meaning, we ought to recognize what we have lost, and calculate the immense costs of these losses. In order to accomplish this, we need to imagine new possibilities for ourselves and others, as well as to fight against cultures that are ‘pushing human beings toward lives of spiritual emptiness and despair’ (Shapiro, 2006: 79). Thus, the classroom can become a space for students to generate meaning and new possibilities, to combat despair and cultivate hope through community building, and to practice love ethic (hooks, 2001) and wrestle with concepts that are concerned with dis/connectedness. Students who have taken a course with me said that sitting in a classroom that combined discussions about dis/connectedness with efforts to form a sense of community created meaningful opportunities for lifelong learning. The pedagogical strategies that I chose to facilitate in the course were standard for many critical pedagogues (e.g., sitting in circles, emphasis on working in groups, writing short reflections in notebooks and sharing in couples, groups, or with the entire class if they feel comfortable sharing). I also used games, art activities, taking turns to read aloud children’s books, a five-minute check in at the beginning of each class, and making sure that we all knew each other’s names by the end of the second week. All of those inclassroom practices were modeled, explained, discussed, and analyzed throughout each

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semester. Commitment to empowerment and sustaining a dialogue were two of the most important pedagogical models I insisted on in every interaction with the students. Most of the students responded well to the pedagogy. Working in groups, sitting in circles, expressing emotions, and sharing personal stories made us evolve from strangers into caring, compassionate people who got to know each other and develop close relationships. I am not suggesting that each semester we co-created a community. However, I conducted interviews with a dozen students and based on what they reported in their papers, there was definitely a sense of community. Belonging to a group of people who care about social justice issues and are passionate about social change and building communities – while realizing their own ­ social responsibility, both personally and professionally – showed them the building blocks of how they could construct similar spaces in their own future classrooms. Lisa, a student in her mid 20s, felt included from the very beginning of the semester. Arranging the desks and chairs into a circle every class allowed her to make eye contact with the other students, which she found helpful to not be distracted by cell phone or laptop usage. She mentioned that our circle offered more of a community-feel because students were much more inclined to pay attention to whomever was speaking, and in return, better able to give responses and feedback – no one could simply dismiss or tune-out to what the other was saying – unlike in more typical classrooms where students all face the front of the room, in which students are mostly responding and reacting to the teacher.

The efforts we put in co-creating a sense of community in the classroom helped us to discuss controversial and uncomfortable topics, such as racism. Laying the foundations of love ethic from the very beginning of the semester helped us to have respectful conversations about race and racism later in the semester. Daria, an Asian student in her early 20s, said that the efforts of forming a

sense of community contributed to experiencing the class as a safe space to speak one’s mind (a reoccurring theme with all the students in my study). She explained, [What I loved in the class was] how we were all able to be so open…and speak our minds and not be afraid of what we had to say. I just loved how open you let us be…versus other classes where there are some things we are not allowed to talk about and are forbidden. This was a class where we just come and express ourselves and say anything.

The ability to express one’s emotions and opinions in a safe environment from the beginning of the semester helped the ­students  – especially those who came from marginalized communities – to be able to discuss race and racism. Specifically, Daria felt respected in the class, which directly influenced her willingness to participate in those discussions. She said that when we were all just sitting there respecting each other…listening to what others had to say…I remember feeling like ‘oh, wow’, you know, we can all sit down like adults and have meaningful conversations and not want to judge anyone. I felt like as if we started to get more closer…the more touchy the topic was, when we were able to talk about it, the more I felt okay, we are a community…we were so open with talking to each other about our personal stories.

The students’ accounts about how the pedagogy of the course helped them to feel included, respected, and safe resonate with Brown’s (2010a) definition of connection. She writes that people feel connected ‘when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship’ (Brown, 2010a: 19). Being able to engage in dialogue is essential to restoring a sense of belonging and cultivating connectedness in the classroom. When students are engaged in Freirean dialogue, ‘the uniqueness of each voice is heard’ (hooks, 2010: 57) and they do not feel afraid that they will be shamed by classmates

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and/or teachers (hooks, 2010). Dialogue opens up spaces where students feel safe to share, to make mistakes, and to reclaim their voice without fear of being judged or mocked. When we cultivate practices of Freirean dialogue, when students experience connectedness with their teachers, classmates, and with the curriculum, students can then progress to analyzing social justice issues and critiquing the harshness of reality.

CONNECTEDNESS AND SOCIAL JUSTICE EDUCATION In this section I situate dis/connectedness within Social Justice Education (SJE) scholarship. I assert that (1) teaching SJE through a dis/connectedness prism can strengthen students’ understanding of current injustices and inequities, and (2) incorporating dis/­ connectedness discourses into SJE courses opens up critical spaces to develop new perspectives on individualism, meritocracy, and neoliberalism. Interjecting dis/connectedness into SJE may pave new ways to continue the important work of theorizing, praxis, and broadening SJE scholarship, as well as making it more inclusive, accessible, relevant, and engaging for students. SJE draws from multiple perspectives and simultaneously relies on the guiding principles of critical pedagogy in order to create the necessary conditions within the classroom for transformation to occur. SJE examines forms of oppression and provides tools to understand social phenomena, such as xenophobia, homelessness, and rape culture, that are politically, economically, socially, and historically contextualized (and can also be analyzed and understood through the dis/connectedness prism). It also examines how privilege and power structures shape social inequities and impact access to public spaces and services. Like critical pedagogy, SJE involves critiquing and asking epistemological questions, such as who creates bodies of knowledge,

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who gets to decide what the truth is, and whose knowledge is counted as important. It also asks questions regarding policies and curriculum decision making, such as whose knowledge is excluded from the curriculum, whose history we keep outside of the textbooks, and whose voices are silenced while others are granted freedom to exercise and to maintain their privilege. All of these practices shape and influence the way we, as individuals and communities, treat each other. SJE offers new ways to look at the world around us and to advance social change. In Hytten’s (2006) words, a disposition to ask why we believe what we believe, and how we have become socialized to accept certain realities, can help us to ask better questions about our social condition, challenge givens and open up alternatives and possibilities. (2006: 443)

To better tie education to social justice, I go to Bell’s (1997) work, whose conceptualization of social justice as both a process and a goal resonates with my work, as it is grounded in understanding how individualism, meritocracy, and neoliberalism inform and impact manifestations and practices of disconnectedness in the United States. According to Bell (1997: 3), the goal of social justice is ‘full and equal participation of all groups in a society that is mutually shaped to meet their needs’. The wish for equality and equity is linked to fairness within a society, where ‘individuals are both self-determining … and interdependent’ (1997: 3), so individuals can gain both a sense of agency and social responsibility. Bell (1997: 4) describes social justice as ‘democratic and participatory, inclusive and affirming of human agency and human capacities for working collaboratively to create change’. She writes that social change cannot eradicate domination ‘through coercive tactics’ (1997: 4) in order to achieve the goal of social justice, that any discussion about social justice requires an analysis and understanding of oppression and how it

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operates on the individual, cultural, and institutional levels. Murrell (2006: 81) writes that social justice involves ‘a disposition toward recognizing and eradicating all forms of oppression and differential treatment extant in the practices and policies of institutions, as well as a fealty to participatory democracy as the means of this action’. Both Bell’s (1997) and Murrell’s (2006) definitions of social justice speak to dis/connectedness in profound ways. As an ideal, it recognizes institutionalized unfairness and speaks to the despair, loss of agency, and hope that many experience due to indoctrination of individualism and the manner in which neoliberalism functions in public spheres. Analysis of power, privilege, and oppression requires that we understand what it means to live within a society saturated with injustices and inequities, where participatory democracy is in decline. Recognizing the ‘devastating human and environmental costs’ (Hytten, 2006: 441) that neoliberalism, globalization, and capitalism have caused over the years, Hytten connects SJE to democratic education and argues for teaching ‘the habits, dispositions, attitudes, and behaviors necessary for democratic citizenship’ (2006: 441). She explains that teaching for social justice means ‘to engage the very real struggles that exist in the world around us in classrooms and in the broader life of schools’ (2006: 441), which requires us to think critically about what is in front of us, envisioning and ‘imagining alternative possibilities’ (2006: 442) for the future. Thus, critical thinking and reflection become necessary components of SJE that seek not only to raise awareness about what is wrong in our society, but also to equip people with radical tools so they can right the many wrongs. Sensoy and DiAngelo (2010) write that ‘a great deal of scholarship in social justice studies is focused on the gap between the ideals of social justice and the practice of social justice’ (2010: xviii, emphasis in original). They prefer to use the term critical social justice in order to distinguish their ‘standpoint on social justice from mainstream

standpoints’ (2010: xviii). Those mainstream standpoints relate to the common understanding of social justice ‘as the principles of “fairness” and “equality” for all people and respect for their basic human rights’ (Sensoy and DiAngelo, 2010: xvii). Sensoy and DiAngelo argue that this common understanding is insufficient because it does not engage us in critically thinking of what fairness, equality, or human rights mean. They suggest adopting a critical approach for SJE, one that ‘recognizes inequality as deeply embedded in the fabric of society (i.e., as structural), and actively seeks to change it’ (2010: xviii). Their critical SJE principles acknowledge the individuality of people while understanding that people are also members of unequally valued social groups, which determine their access to resources in society. The critical component in Sensoy and DiAngelo’s stance on SJE is also related to one’s willingness to self-reflect. Those who participate in social justice work ‘must be engaged in self-reflection about their own socialization into [certain social] groups (their “positionality”) and must strategically act from that awareness in ways that challenge social injustice’ (2010: xviii). In other words, when it comes to the critical SJE classroom, as educators we must be committed to continuously sharpening our work by updating, reinventing, and questioning our methods and our stances. Going back to the radical toolkit I mentioned earlier in the chapter, which includes language, thought, and praxis (Shor, 1987), Hytten (2006) reminds social justice educators that [a]s part of the journey toward justice, we need to use the best tools that we have available to us now, including the tools of critical thinking that philosophers so value and the models we have developed of what a just society looks like, while also troubling those tools and remaining reflexive about the ways in which our social positionalities (and the blindnesses2 that are necessarily part of those positionalities) limit the potential effectiveness of these tools. (Hytten, 2006: 445)

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Critical SJE means that the scholarship does not stagnate or remain theoretical. Social and political consciousness must be translated into action. Critical SJE means that, alongside learning social theories and understanding that inequalities and inequities exist in our society, we make sure that we also engage in praxis.

The Critical Social Justice Classroom Social Justice Education (SJE) is hopeful. Even in dark times rife with institutionalized injustice, dehumanization, hyper-capitalism, overvaluing individualism, and other harmful practices (not only to people, but also to animals in the food industry and to ecosystems), we can witness a growing number of educators who advocate for SJE and implement its discourses and scholarship in all content areas. Like critical pedagogy, SJE calls for a nontraditional classroom setting where a student can be ‘an active participant, not a passive consumer’ (hooks, 1994: 14), and where pedagogy and education open up spaces for students to defeat notions of individualism by collaborating, investing in relationships, and restoring a sense of belonging and connectedness. A classroom setting that incorporates critical pedagogy and SJE is a classroom that values students’ well-being (hooks, 1994: 15) and expressions (hooks, 1994: 20), where social justice consciousness can flourish. Nontraditional classroom settings acknowledge the significance of community building, relationships, and the importance of genuine and inclusive dialogue. hooks (1993: 122) reminds us that ‘[d]ialogue is a powerful gesture of love. Caring talk is a sweet communion that deepens our bonds’. Thus, investing in relationships and communities becomes central to the work of SJE. Bettez (2011) explains, Critical communities thus might be defined as interconnected, porously bordered, shifting webs of people who through dialogue, active listening, and

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critical question posing, assist each other in critically thinking through issues of power, oppression, and privilege… Such critical communities…are essential to sustaining social justice efforts. (2011: 10)

Achieving a sense of connectedness within critical classrooms is possible. Educators can strive to create a space where students can learn about education-related social justice issues within the context of a broader investigation of social justice and realize their personal and professional responsibility to be part of desired social change. Giroux (2011) reminds us that it seems imperative that educators revitalize the struggle to create conditions in which learning would be linked to social change in a wide variety of social sites, and pedagogy would take on the task of regenerating both a renewed sense of social and political agency and a critical subversion of dominant power itself. (2011: 71)

When it comes to classrooms, Hackman (2005: 103) writes that ‘social justice education encourages students to take an active role in their own education and supports teachers in creating empowering, democratic, and critical educational environments’. The active role that students take happens only in critical classrooms where the educator recognizes their own role as a part of a transformative education. Hackman (2005) characterizes five essential components that social justice educators need to have: content mastery (factual information, historical contextualization, and a macro-to-micro content analysis); tools for critical analysis (e.g., debating and critiquing contents, praxis in order to provide students pathways for action instead of overwhelming them with only knowledge and information); tools for social change (to help move students from cynicism and despair to hope and possibility); tools for personal reflection (self-reflection is critical, specifically an analysis of power and privilege); and an awareness of multicultural group dynamics (critiquing the makeup of the class, including racial relations, diversity of the students, and social justice issues that are

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concerned with immigration, language, etc.) (Hackman, 2005: 104–8). These components can be recognized in the writing of many SJE scholars (e.g., Darder, 2002; hooks, 1994, 2010; Renner, 2009; Vacarr, 2001) who have shared their teaching as well as the experiences they have had with students in their own classrooms. In their writing, a common theme arises repeatedly: a sense of hope and possibility embedded in both critical pedagogy and SJE, as well as other virtues as enumerated by Freire (1998). It is fundamental for us to know that without certain qualities or virtues, such as a generous loving heart, respect for others, tolerance, humility, a joyful disposition, love of life, openness to what is new, a disposition to welcome change, perseverance in the struggle, a refusal of determinism, a spirit of hope, and an openness to justice, progressive pedagogical practice is not possible. (Freire, 1998: 108)

Both critical pedagogy and SJE hold the hopeful belief that our future is not yet determined. Critical pedagogy and SJE provide us with opportunities to rethink our stances on individualism, meritocracy, and neoliberalism. They open up spaces to deeply understand the immense costs of disconnectedness and to begin the important work of restoring connectedness. Making the world a better place for everybody is a lifelong journey that requires commitment and collective effort from all involved in this important work: teachers, students, school administrators, policy makers, and so on. The possibilities are only limited by our inability to imagine. Reinventing pedagogical tools and strategies while equipping educators and students with radical language, thought, and praxis can revolutionize not only the school system, but society at large.

interdisciplinary scholarship that is concerned with interpersonal relationships, community building, love ethic, and care. Pedagogy of Connectedness encourages students to first take a look at their own lives and to examine their stance on dis/connectedness, their relationships with themselves, their family, their friends, the communities they belong to, and the world. This becomes their entry point into a discussion about different social justice issues, because everybody experiences pain, loss, heartbreak, or disappointment at some point in their lives. For example, a student who was raised by a single mother and did not have a good relationship with their father can feel more empathy toward a teenage immigrant whose undocumented father was deported. Another student coping with a learning disability can relate to linguistic oppression which immigrants oftentimes are subjected to, and the feeling of powerlessness when dealing with filling out official forms for accommodations. Pedagogy of Connectedness speaks to both minds and hearts. The connections students make with social justice issues are not merely intellectual, but also emotional. Pedagogy of Connectedness asserts that dis/connectedness is something we can all relate to because of our lived experiences. Thus, examining these experiences at the beginning of the semester allows us to relate to others in profound ways, especially when it comes to our work as educators who serve diverse individuals and groups in the school system. Only after establishing some understanding of dis/connectedness and the role of community in one’s life can the collective investigation of social justice issues begin. In other words, concepts of dis/connectedness and community have become our frameworks that we keep returning and referring to time and again.

PEDAGOGY OF CONNECTEDNESS The pedagogy I have developed over the past four years, which I coin Pedagogy of Connectedness, is grounded in critical-feminist pedagogy and praxis, while drawing on

CURRICULUM OF CONNECTEDNESS A pedagogy that is concerned with social disconnectedness while enhancing a sense of

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connectedness, belonging, and hope – three pillars of the course that assisted students in learning about social justice issues – must be supported by a rich, diverse curriculum. In the Cultural Foundations in Education course I taught, the curriculum was as important as the pedagogy – one complemented the other. While I was experimenting with pedagogical strategies, I also experimented with the ­ curriculum. The curriculum includes the readings, movies, and classroom activities that foster not only philosophical discussions about dis/ connectedness, community, and social justice issues, but also create opportunities for students to invest in relationships with each other and to co-create a sense of community in the classroom. As we began each semester as a group of strangers, the curriculum helped us to gradually establish meaningful relationships rooted in love, compassion, and care, while unpacking social justice concepts such as power structures, oppression, and possibilities for liberation. The modules of the Cultural Foundations in Education course were designed in such a way that, over the semester, students were introduced to multiple voices from around the world, representing various social justice issues (e.g., social class differences, racial biases, and language barriers among immigrant students and people of color). The written curriculum components – the syllabus, the lesson plans, and the occasional h­ andouts – included poems, music video clips, short stories, documentary movies, books, and scholarly articles that demonstrate the richness of our humanity and its struggles. The curriculum exposed students to local and global perspectives of the ways in which we are disconnected and the human yearning to restore a sense of connectedness, belonging, and hope. The unwritten curriculum is represented in the ways we are all living curricula for each other (Schubert, 1986). The ‘living’ curriculum, carried by the course’s p­ articipants  – the students, the instructor, and the guest ­speakers – was rich and diverse as it brought

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lived experiences that resonated with the written curriculum. Schubert (1986: 423) writes that ‘teachers and students who learn from each other take with them an attitude that all life’s encounters have a pedagogic or curricular quality, [which is] the drive to encounter increased meaning and growth’. Schubert believes that everyone we meet ‘is a curriculum for us…each of us embodies a complex set of knowledges that interacts in ever unexpected ways when we encounter other people who also embody unique knowledges of their own’ (Harper, 2014: 67).

RESTORING CONNECTEDNESS IN THE CLASSROOM The curriculum and pedagogy encompassed in the sections of the course I taught for seven semesters provided weekly opportunities to rethink and reconsider ideas, ideals, and practices that are embedded in US American culture, its norms, and its values. We explored social justice issues alongside understanding how individualism and meritocracy function in a divided, polarized society. Analyzing our reality and critiquing it in meaningful ways requires a rich, diverse curriculum that validates and empowers students from all walks of life while challenging their beliefs and assumptions. Providing multiple voices and perspectives exposed students to different ways of being, thinking, and living. This was fundamental for the process of consciousness growth and imagining a better future for themselves and for the communities to which they belong. The curriculum did not provide ‘absolute answers’ (Schubert, 2016), but rather opened up spaces for students to ask more questions about the society and culture they participate in. The Curriculum of Connectedness provided what Walker (1980: 81) calls ‘rich confusion’. The Curriculum of Connectedness’ spirit is critical, feminist, and inclusive, and it is first and foremost about people’s lived

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experiences. Both the pedagogy and the curriculum bring to life the silenced voices and forgotten histories and herstories (Carroll, 1976) of those who unnecessarily suffer. Situating people’s lived experiences in the center of the course, while focusing on social justice issues and providing opportunities for transformation, is what I believe to be a very valuable way to reinterpret and reinvent Paulo Freire’s teaching for a 21st-century context.

Notes  1  Parts of this manuscript can be found in the author’s dissertation, ‘Connectedness in Education as a Social Critique of Individualism: Analysis of a Cultural Foundations Course’ (Zilonka, 2018). The author would like to thank Casey Casas and Carmit Erez for providing valuable feedback on both content and academic writing.  2  It is worth noting that ableist language like the use of blindness in critical pedagogy and SJE research is still pervasive. The use of this type of language creates disconnection for many scholars and educators with disabilities. One of the modules of the Cultural Foundations in Education course focuses on Ableism and ableist language. Students are challenged to rethink ableist metaphors and learn about how ableist language – as a sub-category of ableist practices – contributes to social disconnection.

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Brown, C. B. (2010a). The gifts of imperfection: Let go of who you think you’re supposed to be and embrace who you are. Center City, MN: Hazelden. Brown, C. B. (June, 2010b). The power of vulnerability. Retrieved October 15, 2019, from http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_ on_vulnerability. Buber, M., & Smith, R. G. (1937). I and thou. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. Carroll, B. A. (Ed.) (1976). Liberating women’s history: Theoretical and critical essays. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Darder, A. (2002). Reinventing Paulo Freire: A pedagogy of love. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Freire, P. (2010). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum. Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Freire, P. (1971) To the Coordinator of a ‘Culture Circle’. Convergence, 4(1), 61–62. Giroux, H. A. (2011). On critical pedagogy. New York, NY: Continuum. Giroux, H. A. (2010). Lessons from Paulo Freire. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 57(9). Hackman, H. W. (2005). Five essential components for social justice education. Equity and Excellence in Education, 38(2), 103–109. Harper, R. L. S. (2014). Untitled (Love Songs, for Professor Ward Weldon). Visual Arts Research, 40(1), 66–67. Held, V. (2006). The ethics of care: Personal, political, and global. Oxford University Press on Demand. hooks, b. (2010). Teaching critical thinking: Practical wisdom. New York, NY: Routledge. hooks, b. (2003). Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope. New York, NY: Routledge. hooks, b. (2001). All about love: New visions. New York, NY: Perennial. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York, NY: Routledge. hooks, b. (1993). Sisters of the yam: Black women and self-recovery. Boston, MA: South End Press. Huerta-Charles, L. (2007). Pedagogy of testimony. In P. McLaren & J. L. Kincheloe (Eds.), Critical pedagogy – where are we now? (pp. 249–261). New York, NY: Peter Lang.

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Hrdy, S. B. (2009). Mothers and others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Hytten, K. (2006). Philosophy and the art of teaching for social justice. Philosophy of Education (pp. 441–449). Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, University of Illinois. Miller, P. M., Brown, T., & Hopson, R. (2011). Centering love, hope, and trust in the community: Transformative urban leadership informed by Paulo Freire. Urban Education, 46(5), 1078–1099. Murrell, P. C. Jr. (2006). Toward social justice in urban education: A model of collaborative cultural inquiry in urban schools. Equity & Excellence in Education, 39(1), 81–90. Noddings, N. (2017). The search for meaning and connection. Educational Studies, 53(1), 1–12. Palmer, P. J. (2004). A hidden wholeness: The journey toward an undivided life: Welcoming the soul and weaving community in a wounded world. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Rendón, L. I. (2009). Sentipensante (sensing/ thinking) pedagogy: Educating for wholeness, social justice, and liberation. Sterling, VA: Stylus. Renner, A. (2009). Teaching community, praxis, and courage: A foundations pedagogy of hope and humanization. Educational Studies, 45(1), 59–79. Schubert, W. H. (2016). Closing a Chapter: C urriculum Windows to Tomorrow ­ ~1950s–2000s, Symposium at the 37th annual Bergamo Conference on Curriculum

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Theory and Classroom Practice, Dayton, Ohio, October 14, 2016. Schubert, W. H. (1986). Curriculum: Perspective, paradigm, and possibility. New York, NY: Macmillan. Sensoy, Ö., & DiAngelo, R. J. (2010). Is everyone really equal?: An introduction to key concepts in social justice education. New York: Teachers College Press. Shapiro, H. S. (2006). Losing heart: The moral and spiritual miseducation of America’s children. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. Shor, I. (1993). Education is politics. In P. McLaren, & P. Leonard (Eds.), Paulo Freire: A critical encounter (pp. 25–35). London: Routledge. Shor, I. (1987). Critical teaching and everyday life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Vacarr, B. (2001). Moving beyond polite correctness: Practicing mindfulness in the diverse classroom. Harvard Educational Review, 71(2), 285–295. Walker, D. (1980). A barnstorming tour of writing on curriculum. In ASCD 1980 Yearbook Committee & A. W. Foshay (Eds.), ASCD 1980 Yearbook – Considered Action for Curriculum Improvement. (pp. 71–81). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Weiner, E. J. (2007). Critical pedagogy and the crisis of imagination. In P. McLaren, & J. L. Kincheloe (Eds.), Critical pedagogy – where are we now? (pp. 57–77). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Zilonka, R. (2018). Connectedness in education as a social critique of individualism: Analysis of a cultural foundations course (Doctoral dissertation).

72 Counternarratives: Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Critical Caring in One Urban School Gang Zhu and Zhengmei Peng

INTRODUCTION Since 2000, the world has witnessed intensified educational inequality around the globe, accompanied by reproductive schooling, social stratification, and the resurgence of neo-liberalism ideology (Howard, 2015; Ravitch, 2016; Schmidt et  al., 2015). In Australia, there has been deep and longlasting inequality of academic achievement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students in the states and territories based on the most recent version of Australian national testing (National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy) in years 3, 5, and 9 since 2008 (Ford, 2013). In China, the educational disparity between the coastal and inland provinces – rural and urban regions – continues to loom large according to the Gini education coefficients analysis (Qian and Smyth, 2008). In the United States, educators have witnessed inequality in schools for decades, especially the alarming achievement gap arising from the socio-economic disparity

(Kozol, 1991; Ladson-Billings, 2006). Buchmann and Hannum (2001) systematically examined research on educational inequality in developing regions including Africa, Asia, and Latin America. They focused on empirical studies in four broad areas: macro-structural forces shaping education and stratification; the relationship between family background and educational outcomes; school effects; and education’s impact on economic and social mobility. Buchmann and Hannum’s seminal review has provided a powerful analytical framework for interrogating international educational inequality. This chapter endeavors to assist an international audience to gain a nuanced understanding about the educational inequality in one typical urban school in the United States. Specifically, we focus on how minority teachers redress this deep-rooted conundrum – achievement gap between White students and students of color – through multiple ways of knowing, doing, and being within the multicultural educational landscape. Specifically,

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this chapter provides a series of narrative accounts about one African-American social studies teacher’s culturally relevant pedagogy and critical caring. Subsequently, we draw some implications for international readers in broader educational contexts. Throughout the United States, the social injustice and educational inequality injustice situations are more serious in urban schools than in their suburban counterparts. Although urban schools have undergone numerous urban school reforms, the students in these schools continue to receive a substandard education (Ukpokodu, 2016). Researchers such as Oakes and Lipton (2007) have revealed that urban students experience a lack of rigor in their academic development and the failure of their schools to challenge them beyond low-level knowledge mastery. Other scholars have described a widespread pedagogy of poverty (Haberman, 2010), drill and kill (Shor, 1992), coloring curriculum (Schmoker, 2001), and the worksheet curriculum (Ukpokodu, 2016), symptoms that plague a multitude of urban schools. All these phenomena have contributed to the severity of the academic achievement gap within urban school settings, especially the widening disparity between White students and students of color. Taking ‘pedagogy of poverty’ as an example, Haberman referred to this as a practice that is characterized by low expectations, watered-down curricula, and low-level teaching engagement involving ‘giving information, asking lowlevel questions, giving directions, making arrangements, and giving tests’ (Haberman, 2010: 10). This type of impoverished pedagogy has undoubtedly exacerbated the current achievement gap. Another justification for this research comes from the neutrality, color-blindness, and meritocracy in teacher education (Sleeter, 2012). In recent decades, an increasing number of teacher education programs have officially announced their social-justice and culturally responsive orientations. However, the majority of the teacher workforce, roughly

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80% White cohorts of teachers (US Department of Education, 2016), are still White, middleclass, and heterosexual. This racial and cultural discrepancy is widespread in numerous American public schools, especially in innercity settings. In this majoritarian storytelling scenario, which is characterized by neutrality, objectivity, color-blindness, meritocracy, and ahistoricism (Dixson and Rousseau, 2005), the voices from teachers of color (e.g., African-American teachers and Hispanic/ Latino teachers) are usually silenced (Zhu et al., 2019). The second strand of negative forces comes from the neo-liberal educational reform typified by standardized tests, topdown accountability, and school choice, which contributes to the marginalization of culturally responsive pedagogy (Sleeter, 2012). Sleeter has delineated the status of the marginalization in three aspects: (a) a persistence of faulty and simplistic conceptions of what culturally responsive pedagogy is, (b) too little research connecting its use with student achievement, and (c) elite and White fear of losing national and global hegemony (Sleeter, 2012). From Sleeter’s perspective, culturally responsive pedagogy has been marginalized due to the oppressive external contexts. In this case, it is necessary to examine how teachers of color perceive, enact, and reflect on culturally responsive pedagogy while improving students’ academic achievement in challenging urban school settings. In light of the current deficient discourses around the achievement gap, culturally responsive pedagogy, and urban school teachers, this narrative research highlights the counternarratives (Milner and Howard, 2013; Yosso, 2006) of one African-American teacher’s culturally responsive teaching and caring relationship with her students, as opposed to the majority, which tend toward traditional majoritarian stories in the underserved urban school settings. Situated at the intersections of race, culture, ethics, and students’ achievement, this chapter probes

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Community cultural wealth Conceptual backdrop Funds of knowledge

Figure 72.1  The conceptual backdrop

into one minority teacher’s (i.e., one AfricanAmerican female teacher in this study) endeavors and struggles as manifested in this research project. Furthermore, this chapter illuminates the cultivation of critically conscious, community-anchored, and authentically engaging teachers (Valenzuela, 2016). By contextualizing the participant’s nuanced experiences of culturally responsive pedagogy and the authentic caring relationship with the students in this study, this chapter calls for heightened attention to minority teachers’ culturally responsive and ethnically based teaching stories within urban educational settings.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND This chapter synthesizes two interrelated strands of two theoretical frameworks: community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005; Yosso and García, 2007) and funds of knowledge (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2006; Rodriguez, 2013). The rationale for drawing upon these two theoretical constructs is twofold. First, community cultural wealth and funds of knowledge have organic associations both interrogating the mainstream scholarship characterized by the deficit view on the community culture and lived experiences that students of color bring to schools. Second, these two concepts are consistent with the fundamental tenets of the methodology in this chapter – the sociopolitical epistemological stance on teachers’ roles, caring, and

pedagogical practice. Accordingly, these two constructs collectively function as the conceptual backdrop of this chapter, as illustrated in Figure 72.1.

Community Cultural Wealth Acknowledging the limitations of Bourdieu’s conception of cultural capital (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990), Yosso (2005) posited that six types of cultural wealth draw upon the knowledge and dispositions that students of color already possess and bring with them to schools from their homes and communities. According to Yosso (2005), aspirational capital references the ability to maintain hopes and dreams for the future, even in the face of real or perceived barriers. This resilience is evidenced in those who allow themselves and their children to dream of possibilities beyond their present circumstances, often without the objective means to attain those goals. (Yosso, 2005: 78)

Linguistic capital references the ‘intellectual and social skills attained through communication experiences in more than one language and/or style…and reflects the idea that Students of Color arrive at school with multiple language and communication skills’ (Yosso, 2005: 78). Social capital reflects ‘networks of people and community resources. These peer and other social contacts can provide both instrumental and emotional support to navigate through society’s institutions’ (2005: 79). Navigational capital ‘refers to skills of maneuvering through

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social institutions. Historically this infers the ability to maneuver through institutions not created with Communities of Color in mind’ (2005: 80). Resistant capital ‘refers those knowledges and skills through oppositional behavior that challenges inequality’ (2005: 80). Lastly, the most salient component of the conceptual framework utilized in this chapter is familial capital. Familial capital reflects a concern for ‘cultural knowledges nurtured among familia (kin) that carry a sense of community history, memory, and cultural intuition’ (2005: 79).

Funds of Knowledge Drawing on Vygotskian and neo-sociocultural perspective in teaching (Moll, 2013), Moll et  al. (2006) defined funds of knowledge as the ‘historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well-being’ (2006: 72). Against the backdrop of the traditional European-centric dominant curriculum, ‘funds of knowledge’ as posited by Moll et  al. (2006) supplants the long-seated dichotomy between schools and families/ communities, especially in classroom teaching. The construct of funds of knowledge is conceptually rooted in a simple premise: people are competent and have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge. Simultaneously, the funds of knowledge approach facilitates a systematic and powerful way to represent communities regarding the resources they possess and how to utilize them in teaching. The construct of funds of knowledge also challenges the widely pervasive deficit perspectives about families of color whose children fail to find school success because ‘(a) students enter school without the normative cultural knowledge and skills; and (b) parents neither value nor support their child’s education’ (Yosso, 2005: 75). However, a funds of knowledge perspective, which informs the

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work advanced in this chapter, gives a critique to the assumptions that students of color possess deficient knowledge from home as they study in public schools.

LITERATURE REVIEW1 Culturally Responsive Pedagogy To better harness the potential of culture in education, researchers theoretically or empirically have conceptualized a series of culturally oriented pedagogies in education such as culturally appropriate, culturally congruent, culturally responsive, and culturally compatible (Aronson and Laughter, 2016). Amid the current discourses, culturally responsive pedagogy and culturally relevant pedagogy are sometimes used interchangeably. The pioneer in culturally responsive pedagogy, Gay (2010), defined it as teaching ‘to and through [students’] personal and cultural strengths, their intellectual capabilities, and their prior accomplishments’ (2010: 26); culturally responsive pedagogy is premised on ‘close interactions among ethnic identity, cultural background, and student achievement’ (2010: 27). Gay further noted, ‘Students of color come to school having already mastered many cultural skills and ways of knowing. To the extent that teaching builds on these capabilities, academic success will result’ (2010: 213). Ladson-Billings (1994), who was among the first scholars to define the concept, defined culturally relevant pedagogy as ‘a pedagogy that empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes’ (1994: 382). Ladson-Billings (1995) further contends that there are three criteria for culturally relevant pedagogy: (a) students must experience academic success; (b) students must develop and/or maintain cultural competence; and (c) students must develop a critical consciousness through which they

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challenge the status quo of the current social order (1995: 160). These three criteria constitute the pillars of culturally relevant pedagogy. Since its initial conception, culturally responsive pedagogy has been widely acknowledged in academia. As noted in the research, scholars have utilized culturally relevant pedagogy as a theoretical framework to analyze the opportunities, tensions, and challenges inherent in the culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms (e.g., Castagno and Brayboy, 2008; Milner, 2011; Nieto, 2010). Meanwhile, some researchers have advocated integrating culturally relevant pedagogy into teacher education programs (e.g., Cochran-Smith, 2004; Irvine, 2003; Villegas and Lucas, 2002a, 2002b). More recently, to promote critical engagement and rigor among diverse learners, scholars have linked culturally responsive pedagogy to brain research (Hammond, 2015; Maniates, 2016). Additionally, some academicians (Borrero and Sanchez, 2017) utilized asset mapping, a pedagogical tool for students to represent their cultural assets visually, in enacting culturally relevant pedagogy.

Ethics of Caring in Education Arguably, teaching is a multifaceted activity that can be termed a moral and intellectual practice with a rich tradition (Hansen, 2001). However, compared with the scientific analytic approach to teaching, research on the moral and ethical dimensions of teaching has received scant attention and is still in a nascent stage. Early research pioneers (e.g., Fenstermacher and Soltis, 1986; Goodlad et al., 1990; Jackson et al., 1993; Strike and Soltis, 1985) conducted ground-breaking work on the moral and ethical aspects of teaching and teacher ethics. However, research on teacher ethics has not garnered proper attention until now. Just as Sabbagh (2009) evaluated, current research on teacher ethics in education (e.g., deontological,

consequentialist, and virtuist) only provides over-simplistic frameworks for analyzing teachers’ ethical judgments and decision making. Noddings’s ground-breaking scholarship (1984, 1988, 1992, 2002) paved the way for the ethics of caring in education. From Noddings’s vantage point (1988), good teaching is constructed on caring relationships and trust. Noddings stipulated that intersubjectivity is a prerequisite to achieve the ethic of care  – the dyad of ‘one-caring’ and the ‘cared-for’; care is impossible without adequate recognition from the latter of the care given. Noddings (1984) further proposed two practices to achieve care. The first is ‘engrossment’, referring to paying full attention to another person to understand him/her fully. The second is ‘motivational displacement’, where the behavior of the one-caring is kept away from self-interest and moves toward the needs of the cared-for (te Riele et  al., 2017). Despite its usefulness in framing the student–teacher relationship in the ethical lens, Noddings failed to take the sociocultural context and the embedded racial dynamic into account (Rolón-Dow, 2005). Moreover, Noddings did not persuasively explain a multitude of context-dependent factors that contribute to the diverse understanding and acts of care (Barnes, 2018), which renders the instructional arrangements to promote caring she proposes insensitive to the inevitable influence of the sociocultural milieus. Based on her ethnographic study of Latina/o youth, Valenzuela (1999) distinguished two forms of caring: aesthetic and authentic. Aesthetic caring solely focuses on the instructional relationship between the teacher and students. Valenzuela concluded, ‘Teachers are committed to an institutional “fetish” that views academics as the exclusive domain of the school’ (1999: 73). On the contrary, authentic caring fosters reciprocal relationships among teacher and students. The domain of this caring goes beyond the formal role of education but includes an acceptance of the students’ cultural backgrounds

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and values encompassed in the relationship. Valenzuela (1999) further posited that this form of caring promotes and validates students’ cultural values and beliefs. In the context of the multicultural classroom, caring constitutes culturally responsive pedagogy and is an ethical act that ‘binds individuals to their society, to their communities, and to each other’ (Gay, 2010: 45).

METHODOLOGY Critical race counter-storytelling is a method of recounting the experiences and perspectives of racially and socially marginalized people (Solórzano and Yosso, 2002). Counter-stories reflect on the lived experiences of people of color to raise critical consciousness about social and racial injustice (Yosso, 2006). Validating the multiple sources of stories and voices as valuable data, counter-storytellers challenge the majoritarian stories that either omit or distort the histories and realities of the traditionally oppressed communities and racially stereotypical portrayals revealed in majoritarian stories (Yosso, 2006). Framed by the principles of critical race theory in education, counter-stories can serve the following functions in the endeavors for educational equality: (a) counter-stories can build community among those at the margins of society; (b) counter-stories can challenge the perceived wisdom of those at society’s center; (c) counter-stories can nurture community cultural wealth, memory, and resistance; and (d) counter-stories can facilitate transformation in education (Yosso, 2006). In other words, counter-stories can be adopted as a methodology that empowers people of color cognitively, emotionally, and politically, which is embodied by one African-American teacher in this chapter. According to Yosso (2006), there are at least three types of counter-stories: autobiographical, biographical, and composite. Composite counternarratives, which draw on

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multiple forms of data to recount the experiences of people of color[sic] (Yosso, 2006), contextualize this critical qualitative study. The researcher created the personal and professional counternarratives collaboratively with the subject of this present study. The first and most important justification comes from John Dewey’s classic definition about education: ‘[E]ducational process has two sides: one psychological and one sociological; [and neither] can be subordinated to the other or neglected without evil results ­following…’ (Dewey, 1897/1974: 427). Essentially, from Dewey’s perspective, education is organizing and re-organizing experiences. Following this, culturally responsive teaching experience is intimately connected with narrative inquiry since both of them emphasize the primacy of experience (Eisner, 1988). Moreover, human experiences are always subject to change; thus, the researcher takes the stance of the fluid inquiry advocated by Schwab (1960) to learn this ongoing experience better. Against the theoretical backdrop, the overarching research question guiding this chapter is: how does the urban school teacher (i.e., one African-American female teacher) maintain culturally responsive and caring teaching in the culturally and linguistically diverse classroom?

Participant and Context Jenny (pseudonym), a female AfricanAmerican social studies teacher in a southwestern US urban middle school, was the subject of this research. Jenny was born and spent the first half of her youth in Georgia. Jenny started her education in a private (Montessori) school for kindergarten and was educated in public schools from 2nd through 12th grade. All of Jenny’s public school education from the time she moved to Texas in 1994 was in urban areas. In this scenario, Jenny reflected that she was lucky to attend school in a district that was

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culturally diverse from 8th grade through 12th grade, thus providing the opportunity to experience getting to know people from all around the world. In college, Jenny initially was a vocal performance/music education major. Later, she pursued teaching as a profession because that was what her Mom had done. Jenny stated, ‘I had no desire to do anything else…or so I thought.’ When she finished her first year at a public university in Texas, Jenny realized that music was not for her. She also had friends who majored in music and who could not find jobs. Jenny said, ‘The only option I had in my head was to teach.’ Thus, Jenny spent the rest of her undergraduate education at another state public university, where she majored in an interdisciplinary studies program.

Data Collection and Analysis This chapter adopted a narrative approach to collecting the stories (Clandinin, Pushor and Orr, 2007) from three sources. The first source comprised multiple interviews (n=6) with Jenny via face-to-face telephone calls and email correspondences. During the interviews (each lasting about 30 minutes), Jenny storied her biographic experiences, years of teaching experiences in urban settings, and the factors facilitating or hindering her culturally relevant pedagogy. The second source of data comprised her reflective journals, teaching plans, professional development files, student assignments, and other related artifacts. These documents served as powerful tools in tracking, analyzing, and reflecting the trajectory of Jenny’s culturally relevant pedagogies and caring relationship throughout her career. Meanwhile, the aforementioned sources allowed triangulation of the interviews with Jenny. Furthermore, the classroom observation and the transcriptions from these interviews with Jenny ensured another layer of inquiry, and constituted the third research text for analysis. Typically, as a narrative case study, the researcher must be cautious about

the generalizability of the research findings; however, storying and re-storying (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000) Jenny’s culturally responsive and care-based teaching experiences can generate a three-dimensional narrative space of (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990) the dynamics between the educational context and her commitment to urban education. Jenny’s finegrained narrative, epitomized in this chapter, provides an avenue for audiences to access to big T truth – how one African-American teacher organically integrates culturally responsive teaching and the ethic of caring by drawing upon students’ funds of knowledge in daily teaching practice.

Ethics of the Study Before the formal inception of this project, I (the first author of this chapter) received the institutional review board approval from the university where I pursued my PhD degree. Simultaneously, I was permitted to observe the participant’s classroom instruction, which enabled me to learn the participant’s concerns, achievements, and challenges in urban educational settings. Additionally, the participant in this chapter signed the consent form, which guarantees the anonymity of the participant. As the principal investigator in this research, I must introduce myself to the reader when I undertook this study. I was an Asian international student focusing on curriculum and instruction in an American public, research-intensive university when I undertook this project. My personal and professional experience will undoubtedly affect the perspective that I adopted in this research and the accompanying interpretation of the data that I collected. To diminish the influence of prior personal perceptions, especially involving conscious and unconscious bias related to the research topic, I adopted a grounded theory approach in analyzing the collected data (Corbin and Strauss, 1990). In this way, I can generate the findings from the different sources of data that I collected.

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FINDINGS Through an iterative analysis of the multiple sources of data, I distilled three story fragments that succinctly capture Jenny’s culturally relevant pedagogy across her various teaching backgrounds. The following sections display the three major thematic distillations with corresponding evidences.

Vignette One: ‘I Told Them If I Could Do It, They Could Do It Too.’ At the beginning of this project, Jenny detailed an upbringing that was fraught with myriad challenges: I was born to a single parent mom in a small town in Georgia. There were many times growing up that we moved around repeatedly. It got to the point where I would just leave my boxes packed because I knew that there was a possibility that I would be moving. I never went hungry, but I do remember many times not having lights on when I got home from school. I would have to do my homework by sunlight, and once night came, by flashlight. There were a few times I remember coming home and being told I was moving and would stay up all night to get it finished. It was not because my mother was not a good mother. However, working in the field she was in [sic] did not always help pay the bills.

Despite the long-standing poverty that she was born into, Jenny did not feel stifled by the webs of her personal life struggles. On the contrary, Jenny always harbored optimism and used her experiences to inspire her students and the people around her. From Jenny’s firsthand experiences, I observed that Jenny did not succumb to the culture of poverty (Payne, 2005) or let lower socio-­ economic status influence her life trajectory. Jenny always spent her life in a positive way and showed this persistent trait to her students. Jenny told of a life-changing experience later in her life. She told the story that she was completely primed for an elementary school career up until she was a teacher’s assistant

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in an urban Texas high school. Many of the students in that school were drug dealers, teenage moms, caretakers for siblings and parents, and gang members. Consequently, the teachers in that school had to deal with a host of issues that plagued the school. However, when confronted with that tough situation, Jenny ‘was hooked immediately’ (personal narrative, 2016). In this scenario, Jenny reflected, Even though many of them were not that much younger than I was at the time, they just wanted an ear, someone who cared, someone who could help them see past their situation. When I graduated in 2008, I was able to go back and wear my cap and gown in front of the classes I interacted with and proudly tell them that I was officially the first person in my family to graduate from college. I was a lower income student, mom on welfare, single parent home, all the problems that people said would keep me out of college I didn’t allow. I told them if I could do it, they could do it too.

By disclosing her personal growing experience, Jenny showed her vulnerability to the students and struck a harmonious chord with the students in her classroom, most of whom also came from lower socio-economic families. Jenny was willing to share her individual experiences, which were remarkably similar to the stories of many students in her class. In this way, Jenny created emotional connections with her students.

Vignette Two: ‘My Biggest Mission Has Always Been Reaching the Unreachable.’ After working as an elementary teacher for four years, Jenny then transferred to an urban middle school where she teaches history today. Regarding the alarming achievement gap in American public schools, Jenny said that, in contrast to giving up on students like many urban school teachers do, she always encouraged her students and celebrated her students’ success at every step. Consequently, Jenny’s students finally became successful

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learners with gained confidence. For this story fragment, Jenny narrated, I taught 4th grade for years before I made the leap to middle school. My biggest mission has always been reaching the unreachable…. During my first year of teaching, I had one student called Anthony [pseudonym]. Anthony has never excelled in school and came in with a defeatist attitude. He knew one day that he wasn’t going to pass my class or pass the test. I just told Anthony to trust me, we would get him there. Anthony had bumps throughout the year, but I praised every success he had. If it was him jumping from 20 to 50, we celebrated it. If Anthony answers a question right in small group, we celebrated it. I shared his success with his Mom. When it came time to take the standardized test at the end of the year, Anthony passed the test and exceeded my expectation.

In this successful teaching story, Jenny vividly showed how she transformed a struggling student into a high-achieving one. The contributing factor underlying this story is the ‘I-Thou (you)’ relationship that Jenny constructed with Anthony. In the lens of Martin Buber’s ethical philosophy (1958), in the ‘I-it’ relationship, the individual treats the world and other persons functionally. Yet, in the ‘I-Thou (you)’ relationship, the individual deals with the work and the people around in an authentic and ethical manner. Buber saw education as being about a caring and ethical relationship. Relating to her teaching, Jenny did not consider Anthony as a stumbling block or ‘a number’. Rather, Jenny deeply cared about Anthony’s intellectual growth by celebrating his improvements at every step along the way.

Vignette Three: ‘You Matter as a Whole Person When You Enter into My Classroom.’ Instead of narrowly focusing on students’ academic achievements, Jenny embraced a more comprehensive and caring attitude toward her students. In her narratives, Jenny frequently mentioned that she always tried to relate the history subject matter, which she

taught, to her students’ divergent backgrounds. For instance, Jenny stated that even her Hispanic students talked about how the Chinese came to the United States and worked in railroad construction, which enabled her students to realize that diversity has always been embedded in America. Another story arose from the circumstances of the 2016 national election in the United States. One of Jenny’s students, from Honduras, begged her not to vote for Donald Trump because she was being forced to go back to her country [after the American presidential election]. Jenny’s student also told her about unsettling events that were transpiring in her home country. With these techniques that compelled interaction, Jenny established dedicated, affective connections with her students, which supported her students’ learning, emotionally and politically. Following Delpit’s construct (1997), Jenny did not treat the minority students as ‘other people’s children’ (2006: xiii). On the contrary, Jenny validated each student’s freedom to learn (Rogers and Freiberg, 1994). For this point, Jenny further shared, I have one student called Wen Fan [pseudonym] from China. Wen Fan knows American history well and came to ask me about the Monroe Doctrine, something we will cover but have not yet. She is knowledgeable and the way she tackled history is amazing. I always try to encourage her in front of the class so this is an equal field for every student. I just let them know that I care about them.

As can be seen from the conversation, in lieu of adopting a deficit view on minority students like Wen Fan, Jenny harnessed an asset-based view; that is, she validated the different cultural assets inherited by different ethnic groups in her class (Yosso, 2005). Jenny valued the multiple perspectives that the minority students brought to her classroom. Additionally, Jenny effectively tapped into her students’ potential in the study of history and constantly encouraged her students to bravely express their authentic voices. Intriguingly, this kind of caring

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relationship is not one-sided but mutual. Jenny admitted that such relationships energize her (‘Sometimes they teach me and keep me going’) and make her teaching more effective (‘My students perform pretty well. I do not have a lot of pressure’). Situated within the context of a complex web of standardized tests and testing, Jenny still endeavored to surpass the constraints of US federal and state accountability policies and standards. Jenny said that students should not be merely test takers but should be critical thinkers and ‘be the best person they can possibly be’ (interview, 2016). After realizing the faults in current social studies instructions, especially the rampant standardized tests throughout the state, Jenny said that she wants to be ‘a light in the dark for education’ (interview, 2016) and that she tries to revolutionize social studies in the multicultural learning communities (Nieto, 2010).

CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION As Sleeter (2012) argued, there is a clear need for evidence-based research that documents the connections between culturally responsive pedagogy and student outcomes and that documents outcomes not necessarily limited to academic achievement. Arising out of this consideration, this research has linked culturally responsive pedagogy to students’ academic learning experiences and caring relationships. From Jenny’s storying and restorying fragments, it can be inferred that, as an African-American history teacher in an urban middle school, Jenny integrated culturally responsive pedagogy into her daily teaching practice, as manifested in this chapter. More specifically, Jenny capitalized on the community cultural wealth and the funds of knowledge that her students brought to the classroom to transform successfully the struggling students that she teaches. Alongside her culturally responsive teaching practices, Jenny showed authentic caring

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(Valenzuela, 1999) to her students in the form of reciprocal supportive relationships between teacher and students. As reported in the present research, this type of caring rapport not only facilitates students’ academic development but also supports teachers’ career advancement. This research further shows that caring is an indispensable part of culturally responsive teaching and confirms Gay’s earlier research on culturally responsive teaching (2010). Last, this research shows that culturally responsive teaching is a pertinent and robust approach to addressing ethical and care issues in urban education (Shevalier and McKenzie, 2012). The use of counternarrative as a research methodology is particularly useful in highlighting the untapped voices of traditionally marginalized groups in urban educational settings. Herein, for example, the Black female teacher Jenny epitomizes the traditionally silenced voice in public education. Since the majority of the teacher workforce in the United States are White, female, and middle-class, Jenny’s teaching experiences challenge traditional racially stereotypical portrayals of Black minorities in US public schools and, thereby, foster a transformation of classrooms in urban education. However, this chapter did not intend to showcase a ‘perfect role model’ to a broad audience. As she shared in her daily teaching practice, Jenny also encountered a broad array of vexing challenges in which she was immersed and with which she had to deal – outdated learning contents, standardized testing, teacher accountability policy, and the school climate. All these factors collectively contribute to stress that, she felt, limited her effectiveness.

Implications While this research presents an American context, this research has theoretical, practical, and policy implications for urban education generally, especially for cultivating culturally responsive pedagogy and critical

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care within global urban educational settings In the United States today, the majority of K-12 public school teachers are White, female, middle class, and heterosexual. However, student enrollments in American public schools are becoming increasingly diverse, which causes increases in racial and cultural mismatches (McGrady and Reynolds, 2013) between White teachers and students of color. In reality, some urban school teachers are still color-blind (BonillaSilva, 2010) and do not recognize the problems of race and poverty associated with a racially based achievement gap (Milner, 2015). Confronting this dilemma, one must examine how teachers perceive and enact culturally responsive teaching in their own educational contexts. Meanwhile, as she is a representative teacher of color, Jenny and her stories will inspire teachers in urban public schools to reflect on their professional identities (Beijaard et  al., 2004) and their repertoires of instruction. For instance, in revealing how one African-American teacher draws upon her personal and professional experiences, especially her professional vulnerability (Lasky, 2005) in urban school teaching, this chapter underscores how the urban school teacher integrates the ethic of caring into social studies teaching in diverse classroom settings. In terms of its global implications for the development of critical pedagogy scholarship, this chapter contributes to the embodiment of the voice from traditionally marginalized and oppressed communities. Today, the world is going through the global educational reform movement (GERM; Sahlberg, 2011, 2016), which is characterized by standardized tests, accountability-based performativity, and value-added teacher evaluation (Hargreaves, 2003). All these collective forces, spurred mainly by the neo-liberal market ideology (Ravitch, 2013), disempower or demoralize teachers’ agency (Tsang, 2018) as imposed by top-down managerialist educational reforms and performativity (Ball, 2003). Within this niche, culturally relevant, responsive pedagogy

can be anchored as praxis in teacher education by allowing urban school teachers to shift their perspectives from deficit-based pedagogy to asset-based pedagogy (Jackson and Boutte, 2018). Teachers who hold the deficitbased pedagogy perspective consider minority students incompetent, unmotivated, and struggling in learning because of inadequate cultural capital for schooling. However, teachers who embrace asset-based pedagogy view minority students as opulent potential learners by virtue of their community cultural wealth and funds of knowledge. Furthermore, culturally responsive pedagogy might act as a powerful lens through which urban school teachers can examine the sociopolitical discourses contributing to the ‘achievement gap’ between White students and students of color (LadsonBillings, 2006). Following this line, teachers can interrogate their deep-rooted assumptions that underpin their abiding educational beliefs and daily practices. Also, teachers can question the long-term historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral contexts and balances that lead to the current achievement gap. Regarding its methodological implications, contrary to meta-narrative (or grandnarrative), the counternarrative adopted in this chapter contributes to truth-likeness (Bruner, 1986) associated with the dynamic intersection of race, culture, and pedagogy, unlike mega-narratives (or grand-narratives), which center around ‘a large and loose set of ideas about how society works, why it goes wrong and how it can be set right’ (Cohen and Garet, 1975: 21). Against the backdrop of the mega-narrative, the rhetoric of educational reform, which frequently permeates educational policies, such as urban school reform (Olson and Craig, 2009), distorts the multiple truths of narrative accounts. To dismantle the hegemony of the meta-narrative, this chapter characterizes counternarrative by questioning the majoritarian stories and validating ‘narrative resonances’ (Conle, 1996) between one participating minority teacher and the students. Overall, this chapter contributes to the burgeoning literature on culturally sustaining

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pedagogy as a way to push forward LadsonBillings’s (2014) original goals of engaging critically in the cultural landscapes of classrooms and teacher education programs.

Future Direction For the future research direction, it is necessary to explore minority teachers’ racial identity (Howard, 2016) and resilience (Gu and Day, 2007) in diverse classroom settings. Specifically, the future research will include Hispanic/Latino (e.g., US) and Aboriginal/ First Nation (e.g., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Alaska) teachers as research participants in the study to theorize their racial and cultural beliefs and discursive practices in daily teaching practices. Scholars can examine how these minority teachers enact their multiple ways of knowing, doing, and being in diverse classroom settings. Regarding the methodology, the researcher aims to adopt longitudinal research methods to analyze how teachers of color improve students’ academic achievement by utilizing students’ community cultural wealth and funds of knowledge. In this way, we can identity the interplay between evolving identity, multiple context, and teachers’ frames of reference. Another research direction is to examine the external influence of multiple educational contexts on teachers’ classroom practice through the lens of a knowledge community (Craig, 1995) and narrative knowing (Craig, 1998, 2004). More in depth, how urban school teachers construct and reconstruct their professional identities amid multiple urban educational contexts will be examined.

DECLARATION OF CONFLICTING INTERESTS The authors declare no conflict of interest in this study.

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Note  1  An article related to this research project is to be published in internationally reviewed journal Urban Education. The title of the paper is: ‘“You Have to Educate the Heart before You Educate the Mind”: The counternarratives of one AfricanAmerican female teacher’s asset-, equity- and justice- oriented pedagogy in one urban school’. The literature review section of this book chapter was first published in the Forum paper entitled ‘Extending critical race theory to Chinese education: Affordances and constraints’ in the journal Compare. In this paper, there is a section entitled ‘CRT as a heuristic for understanding educational inequality: How CRT is conceptualised in the United States’. The authors of this book chapter obtained the reproduction permission of the aforementioned section from the publisher Taylor  & Francis. The full article information is: Zhu, Z., Peng, Z., Hu, X., & Qiu, S. (2019). Extending critical race theory to Chinese education: Affordances and constraints. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education DOI: 10.1080/03057925.2019.1602966.

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Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1990). Reproduction in education, society and culture (2nd edition). London, UK: Sage. Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Buber, M. (1958). I and thou (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). New York, NY: Scribner. Buchmann, C., & Hannum, E. (2001). Education and stratification in developing countries: A review of theories and research. Annual Review of Sociology, 27(1), 77–102. Castagno, A. E., & Brayboy, B. M. J. (2008). Culturally responsive schooling for Indigenous youth: A review of the literature. Review of Educational Research, 78(4), 941–993. Clandinin, D. and Connelly, F. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Clandinin, D. J., Pushor, D., & Orr, A. M. (2007). Navigating sites for narrative inquiry. Journal of Teacher Education, 58(1), 21–35. Cochran-Smith, M. (2004). Walking the road: Race, diversity, and social justice in teacher education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Cohen, D., & Garet, M. (1975). Reforming educational policy with applied social research. Harvard Educational Review, 45(1), 17–43. Conle, C. (1996). Resonance in preservice teacher inquiry. American Educational Research Journal, 33(2), 297–325. Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1990). Stories of experience and narrative inquiry. Educational Researcher, 19(5), 2–14. Corbin, J. M., & Strauss, A. (1990). Grounded theory research: Procedures, canons, and evaluative criteria. Qualitative Sociology, 13(1), 3–21. Craig, C. J. (1995). Knowledge communities: A way of making sense of how beginning teachers come to know in their professional knowledge contexts. Curriculum Inquiry, 25(2), 151–175. Craig, C. J. (1998). The influence of context on one teacher’s interpretive knowledge of team teaching. Teaching and Teacher Education, 14(4), 371–383. Craig, C. J. (2004). The dragon in school backyards: The influence of mandated testing on school contexts and educators’ narrative knowing. Teachers College Record, 106(6), 1229–1257.

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73 ‘More than an Educator but a Political Figure’: Leveraging the Overlapping Intersections of Disability Studies and Critical Pedagogy in Teacher Education Phillip Boda What a request we make to teachers! To think and act critically, and to be metacognitive of that process based on the context in which they enact it. As I ponder this idea, and reflect on the past two years of educating new preservice teachers to embark on such a journey, I am left taken aback by some of the assumptions we have as teacher educators. For example, in teacher education there are two fundamental ‘camps’ that we might think about in terms of how to approach the process of educating teachers within their student teaching learning experiences, and beyond: one being ‘learning the practice’ first, the other being ‘learning the theory’ first – the theory or practice divide incarnate, as it were. Wherever you sit on this continuum, suffice it to say that this theory–practice debate has been long-winded and argued ad nauseum, to say the least. Rather than preoccupy the limited space I have in this chapter with ‘what-ifs’ and philosophical arguments of ‘idealized postwhatever’ to try and account for which

approach may be better suited to increase the efficacy-models of teacher education more broadly, I choose to instead address the realities that over 150 new teachers faced when trying to make sense of this thing called education from the 15-plus sections of courses I’ve taught over the past two years across disciplinary, state, and political foci. In doing so, I present to the reader a narrative, a story, about how my pre-service teachers learned to navigate teaching and learning critically, particularly as it relates to the intersection of Disability Studies and critical pedagogy. In this chapter I focus on the realities that my pre-service teachers have articulated when attempting to make sense of teaching and learning given the tools that they draw on from their personal experiences, as well as those resources I provided them as the teacher educator in their courses – their bricolage in-the-making developed as a function of the conscientization process (Freire, 1970), specifically aligned with the scaffolds

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I enacted (Sleeter et al., 2004). As I make this argument, I hope that readers come with me on this journey with open eyes and hearts, particularly because some of the things I may say they may not like, nor may they agree with at all. With that said, the realities that face teachers are just that, realities; therefore, in order for us as critical pedagogues, critical teacher educators, and critical researchers to engage with those realities we must first and foremost focus on how we have framed our visions of education, as well as how some narratives have been excluded within that process – toward an embrace of the unknown such that our desire to pursue a more equitable world is grounded in the realities of those who have been, or are currently being, excluded from educational experiences that imbue a critical eye toward the world. In my experience, these unquestioned assumptions can drive uncritical practices as teacher educators and lead to the inhibition of new teachers’ capabilities to develop a creative and critical bricolage if not taken seriously, as well as embody the banking system of learning in our classrooms if we are not careful of our own understandings of teacher education pedagogy. To this end, I weave a narrative about teacher education that has been minimal in teacher education praxis by critical teacher educators – more specifically, the overlapping intersections and engaging praxis of integrating Disability Studies and critical pedagogy in teacher education.

war – not a physical war, per se, but rather a political one similar to those articulated by critical scholars over the past decades (Boda, 2017a; Emdin, 2016; Giroux and McLaren, 1986; Peters and Chimedza, 2000). However, in this chapter I stake the claim that to encourage criticality in our new teachers without addressing both the arguments we construct and the actualized realities that will mediate their choices in K-12 classrooms in relation to (dis)ability is to fall short of any claim to criticality at all. To elaborate on a specific ideological commitment that embodies my point, disability as a socio-cultural construct of deficiency is focused on in this chapter as a complex intersectional concept that spans and interacts with ‘Othering’ markers of difference (i.e., race, class, gender, religion, sexuality, etc.). More emphatically, disability as one of many realities necessitates more nuanced articulations than have been used in the nature of critical pedagogy as both a philosophical and pragmatic goal. Through this intersecting narrative of disability studies and critical pedagogy, critical teacher education aligns itself once again to its promise to work toward a transdisciplinary equity for all that is emerging as a function of both applied theory and critical practice (Gutiérrez and Penuel, 2014; Kincheloe, 2001; Waitoller and King Thorius, 2016).

(Dis)ability, and the Marking of Difference SEPARATE BUT EQUAL PART TWO: DISABILITY AND DIFFERENCE The reality of teacher education is such that we must fight on all fronts to emphasize that the world exists in multiplicities that are of particular importance to teachers, as well as stakeholders fighting for social justice more broadly (Sandoval, 2000). In making a stand such as the one proposed in this chapter, this fight then becomes a metaphorical act of

The ideology of ability is embodied though normative expectations and assumptions that define who should be valued as citizens, and what constitutes personhood more broadly in relation to the construct of a nation-state citizen (Nielsen, 2012; Siebers, 2008). This set of beliefs about ability constructs ‘normal’ by validating any thought or action that frames a person, or set of persons, as capable of efficaciously interacting with the socio-political and economic environment – more specifically

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bodies and minds that reify a myopic view of identity and behavior (Siebers, 2008). This normalizing and assimilationist model of classifying citizenship is similar to how Whiteness operates as a socially normative construct in ways that engender White racial mores as capital (Harris, 1993). The normativity of ability, thus, ties directly into the social marker of difference embodied in disability, particularly in that they have been used in juxtaposition to emphasize the need for exclusion and inequity across multiple markers of difference such as race, class, and gender in historical and present day American society (Nielsen, 2012). Moreover, disability has also been shown to be interwoven with this idea of Whiteness as property vis-à-vis use of ‘smartness’ (Leonardo and Broderick, 2011), subsequently playing out in our school systems as young as elementary students (Hatt, 2012). In response, this chapter tells a story of how the inclusion of disability as a socio-cultural marker of difference can be used to mediate new teachers’ approach to, and understandings of, criticality in education – its beliefs and practices leading to an understanding of, and action taken toward, critical goals of equity in education. To organize this proverbial call to arms, three ideologies rampant in the American neo-colonial educational imaginary are analyzed (ignorance, paternalism, and selfishness), with three re-imagined ideologies being used to replace these justifications for exclusion and foster more equitable actions teachers can take (curiosity, inquiry, and care, respectively). Herein, this chapter challenges its readers, as well as critical theorists more broadly, to think and act in ways that (in my experience) challenge ableist systems of logic – i.e., the neocolonial ethics of power (Dussel, 2013) that, when not deconstructed, inherently produce anti-critical teachers under the guise of what I call ‘Separate but Equal Part Two’. But, for now, please let me elaborate on my comingof-age story that demanded a need to think about disability studies and critical pedagogy in teacher education in the pursuit of criticality.

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Narrative and Bricolage Throughout the past two years, I have worked as an adjunct across three different universities in two different states that span many different ideological commitments to over 150 teacherstudents. My primary goal for any course I teach, no matter if the course is disciplinaryspecific, philosophical, or general, is always to help teachers develop their own sense-making processes that relate to the nature of a bricoleur, of developing a sense of the world through the cognitive, socio-emotional, and epistemic tools at hand when making any decision (Steinberg and Kincheloe, 2010). By emphasizing the nature of embodying a bricoleur, I am bringing into pragmatic practice a methodological quality of analyzing social contexts with these ‘tools that you have at your disposal’. In essence, this is what we ask teachers to do every day, and which has been reported for decades as fundamentally what ‘teacher work’ looks like in practice (Freathy et  al., 2017; Parker and McDaniel, 1992; Scribner, 2005). Therefore, with teaching and learning fundamentally tied to the nature of what resources teachers draw on to make decisions, our work as critical pedagogues remains to become more familiar with the realities that our students may face in their classroom contexts in order to stay relevant to the nature of exclusion as an ever-evolving push toward homogeneity of personhood, as well as engage our students with those realities in relation to their own experiences. The esteemed Joe Kincheloe eloquently elaborated on this position: As bricoleurs recognize the limitations of a single method, the discursive strictures of one disciplinary approach, what is missed by traditional practices of validation, the historicity of certified modes of knowledge production, the inseparability of knower and known, and the complexity and heterogeneity of all human experience, they understand the necessity of new forms of rigor in the research process. To account for their cognizance of such complexity bricoleurs seek a rigor that alerts them to new ontological insights. In this ontological context, they can no longer accept the status of an object of inquiry as a thing-in-itself. (2001: 681–2)

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In this articulation of a bricoleur, and also the nature of bricolage (i.e., the product of the bricoleur’s work), I want to make evident that my courses required something more than critical pedagogy to ground my teacher-students’ pragmatic understandings of ‘the word and the world’ – they needed an ideological conduit, of sorts, to bridge these new and foreign critical concepts to their future practice. With my own personal experiences also connected to the nature of (dis)ability and exclusion in schools from an overlapping intersectional framework (Boda, 2017a, 2018), I view my own Self drawn toward how teacher-students could make sense of difference as an intersectional concept that includes rather than excludes, which required me to incorporate disability into the conversations about how difference plays out in classrooms. In these discursive and curricular moves to emphasize the importance of disability in order to more critically understand the way exclusion plays out in schools, I found myself brushing up against a large disciplinary focus – special education – that, at its base, derives from the premise that disability is inherently biological, and inevitably leads to a sociological deficiency to be meditated visà-vis something changing only in relation to the student and not the context of instruction (Reid and Knight, 2006). As I pushed further (just as I believe all critical pedagogues should do), what I found was a capitalist preoccupation with the production of a particular form of capital (Whiteness) and efficiency models of education grounded in high-stakes assessments – those same models that critical theorists and pedagogues have been pushing back against for over a hundred years. It is here where I found a place where my own bricolage was made, particularly one that emphasized the need to look more closely at the overlapping intersections of disability studies and critical pedagogy in teacher education to carve out a space where the logics of exclusion are interrogated for their influence on the rhetoric of anti-critical teaching and the pragmatic goals therein.

DISABILITY AND DIFFERENCE: A BACKGROUND ON EXCLUSION Disability, and difference more broadly, embolden the fundamental nature of diversity as juxtapositions to (more often than not) invisible norms; that is, Whiteness, ableism, masculinity, hetero-normativity, and Christi­ anity, to name a few. With my population of students – no matter the university context, mind you – coming from these predominantly invisible normative demographics (i.e., White, middle-class, hetero-sexual, able-bodied students), I was charged as a critical teacher educator to disrupt their normative Selfs, and help them unpack these assumptions and political alignments that they would then perform onto their students in their future classrooms. What I found, though, when I started my first course teaching this normative-reliant population, was that interrogations of race, class, and gender – as well as many other traditional ‘isms’ such as White supremacy and religiosity – were not enough when thinking about the nature of exclusion in the classrooms they would lead in the future. Much of the ways they had begun to try and deconstruct their ideological commitments to social constructs such as White supremacy lacked any interrogation of how disability as a social construct separate from impairment pervasively imbued a ‘catch-all’ for rationales of separating students from their general education counterparts, or how disability overlapped with other markers of difference that they may have explicitly addressed. Because of this reality, I aligned myself with the theoretics that when one helps teachers un-pack their experiences and deconstruct their biases, there needs to be an inquiry into the fragmented ideology-in-pieces (Philip, 2011) students bring to the table to help build new narratives that could be used later on by these teachers to challenge the deficit paradigms so actively used in schools against youth and their cultures. These narratives,

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mind you, more often than not mirror similar negative views of peoples in society more broadly that become distilled into the nature of schooling as a social institution. This is where disability became paramount to help students engage with the exclusion we cocreate (Boda, 2017b); this is where to be engaged with critical pedagogy it required understanding disability.

Disability and Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We? We often talk about exclusion and difference as if they were these predominant logics of critical pedagogy wherein all markers of difference are included. However, the reality that I found searching through the literature is that even when discussing disability in a critical way there is a loss of understanding for the pragmatic realities that formulate and foster exclusion – some of which I have written about extensively (Boda, 2018). Indeed, as many authors have noted (cf. Erevelles, 2000, 2011; Gabel, 2002; Goodley and RunswickCole, 2011), there have been lacking implementations of the broad theory of critical pedagogy in relation to more pragmatic realities for students labeled with disabilities, which then places a charge on critical researchers to go beyond the primarily philosophical arguments that have been emphasized in a critical pedagogy frame related to disability in terms of teacher education. The contribution of this chapter, thus, aligns well with the integration of a disability studies perspective within critical pedagogy that some researchers have shown to re-focus on the nature of disability exclusion as something that occurs by design rather than from emergent interaction (Smith and Routel, 2009; Ware, 2001; Watts and Erevelles, 2004), as well as engages critical pedagogy on how disability is inherently tied to race and class in systematic ways (Annamma et al., 2013; Gillborn, 2015). It was from this more pragmatic bricolage that I found myself constantly straying away

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from more abstracting notions of critical pedagogy to help teachers make sense of difference in ways that actively and pragmatically addressed the fundamental material realities of exclusion that, in my own personal experience, have been found to exist in surplus because of the lacking service paid to the influence of disability on labels of difference more broadly, by both teacher educators and their pre-service students. This exclusion, performed and fostered by analyses of difference sans disability, has been used to segregate students in self-contained classrooms away from the general education students and curriculum, and concurrently often created justifications for students of color by White teachers, even while these teachers touted ‘cultural relevance’ and ‘wanting to be responsive’ to these children’s needs in critical ways. This seemingly counter-­ intuitive and pervasive exception to the ‘culturally relevant/ responsive/sustained’ approach was, and continues to be, intimately tied to the nature of disability and the perceived objective lens used within the medicalized rhetoric of lack – the rhetoric of special education that manifests in exclusive material realities for students always seen as ‘in need’ of a savior. Luckily, these asset-based pedagogies are not only being used to construct more intersectional narratives of the need to understand disability exclusion (Waitoller and King Thorius, 2016), but their originating authors are also responding accordingly in light of such arguments for disability inclusion within these frames (Alim et  al., 2017), which provides a bridge to confront nuanced disability-based approaches to ­critical pedagogy.

Disability, Exclusion and Its Intersection with Race There has been ample reporting that students labeled with disabilities are disproportionately youth of color (Artiles et al., 2010; Reid and Knight, 2006; Patton, 1998). Moreover,

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even though there have been recent analyses that purport the opposite of such claims made about disproportionality over the past 30 years (Morgan et al., 2015, 2017), the nature of exclusion that is produced when students are labeled are such that this problem cannot be named and articulated by numbers alone (Collins et  al., 2016). Indeed, utilizing descriptive statistics (Shifrer et al., 2013) has provided exemplary analyses of bifurcation of opportunity related to disability labeling that void the prior claims of ‘underrepresentation’ in their reductionist attempt to identify an argument to place more students of color within special education – that very same neo-colonial logic and praxis I call ‘Separate but Equal Part Two’. Moreover, even before being labeled with a disability, students of color are disproportionately more likely to be placed in lower-tracks courses (Mickelson, 2015); then, after labeling, students of color are disproportionately placed into self-contained classrooms, denying them interaction with general education students and content-specialist teachers (Annamma et  al., 2014; Reid and Knight, 2006). Thus, there is a resounding need to engage with this overlapping and intersectional logic of oppression producing educational exclusion based on the rhetoric of special education ‘needs’ (i.e., lack) and the material realities manifesting from the labeling of students of color with dis­ abilities that align with misguided White savior complexes over-utilized in urban education (Emdin, 2016). To further engage with this rhetoric and reality, even when placing disproportionality aside, my own work showcases that the nature of exclusion based on disability and difference is not so cut and dry across the mere labeling of disability onto youth of color. In my own auto-ethnographic excavations (Boda, 2018), I illuminate that students of color where I taught in Brooklyn as a high-school science teacher were categorized as unable to learn, or teachers perceived them as being unable to be taught, based on these youths’ racialized culture – their perceived ‘streetness’, or to put

it more explicitly, their ‘Hip-Hop-ness’ – that overlaps and intersects with disability labels vis-à-vis teachers’ deficit perceptions of these students’ identities departing from the normative center of schools (Leonardo and Broderick, 2011). Indeed, this aversion to diverse and rhizomatic youth cultures has also been widely reported across multiple disciplines (cf. Emdin, 2016; Giroux, 2003; Ibrahim and Steinberg, 2014; Lesko and Talburt, 2012). Given this reality, disability, race, and class intersect in ways that exclude concertedly and align well with research goals within critical pedagogy to emphasize understanding the systematic nature of exclusion in order to seek a dismantling of such policies and practices through work on-theground right now (Kincheloe, 2008). Additionally, when these ideologies intersect (racialized youth culture, class-based constructs of youth, and disability), they compound onto one another and produce material conditions of exclusion that by design force students into subject positions that they then reify and own as their own Self, even as these students attempt to produce a counter-narrative that would label them as competent (Broderick and Ne’eman, 2008; Collins, 2013). In essence, what this short review provides for the reader is a criticalist’s material reality narrative of disability that is fundamentally, first and foremost, tied to notions of race, class, and neo-colonial logics we use to justify exclusion in schools. However, the question remains: why, as critical pedagogues, are we not focusing on these intersections when we educate our pre-service students, and in-service teachers, through purposeful curriculum and ­pedagogical choices? Moreover, if we are, why are we not publishing about such models of teacher education pedagogy to showcase the importance of such an approach for other teacher educators that may or may not be aware of such an equity-based model? This is where our story of redemption starts, and where we can make anew the nature of teacher education

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by including disability, and challenging the narratives of neo-coloniality that produce exclusion derived from the disability narratives that buttress justified segregation across multiple markers of difference. The next three sections focus on the ideologies of the neo-colonial educational imaginary previously posed (ignorance, paternalism, and selfishness), while integrating my personal experiences in helping teacher-students make sense of their learning to teach process through emphasizing the intersections between Disability Studies and critical pedagogy in teacher education – working toward curiosity, inquiry, and care.

IGNORANCE AND CURIOSITY When I started educating new teachers, I found myself always emphasizing the need to understand how to connect with them on a personal level – much like the way I used to connect to my students when I taught in K-12 contexts. However, what I found when I taught adults was that I needed to unpack my own bricolage – the tools I gained from my personal experiences – to truly focus on the needs of these new teacher-students. One narrative I found once I started to unpack my own biases was the notion of ignorance that was so prominent in my own learning experiences as a teacher-student. I found that my tenure as an undergraduate and graduate student had ill-prepared me to engage with narratives of disability, particularly how to teach and learn about them beyond a deficit lens. Thus this theme of ignorance emerged, in both my students and myself, which was at its base a description of how most teachers fail their students more broadly because of the fear that comes from ignorance about someone you’ve never interacted with on a personal basis. This meta-narrative of ‘not knowing the unknown’ – of ignorance – started my journey to envision teacher education at the intersection of disability and

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critical pedagogy, as well as embodied the initial steps my teacher-students took when trying to construct their own bricolage about teaching and learning from a critical pedagogy perspective. When I engaged with disability as a teacherstudent, the narratives were just as stark as they are in many courses I’ve seen nowadays, over a decade later. Specifically, those more critical notions of teaching and learning were reserved for the singular pluralistic/urban/cultural politics ‘diversity requirement’ course to suffice the teacher certification process. In doing so, disability was explicitly segregated into the other ‘special education’ course that was also used solely for certification. When I look back at my experiences and compare them to the present-day colleges in which I teach, I see a similar segregation of disability as separate, and defined as distinctly different, from the ideas that were being focused on in my ‘more critical’ courses. Why was this happening? Why was disability placed into a very real ‘separate-but-equal’ status of importance that, upon closer inspection, doesn’t emphasize the principles of critical pedagogy at all? Instead, these special education courses focused on medicalized rhetoric that disability is something that needs to be cured and eradicated by any means necessary similar to literature of disability more broadly (Goering, 2015; Shakespeare, 2013), or focused on the implicit, i.e., ‘softer,’ eugenic logics that the inherent deficit has always, and will always, exist within the student (Artiles et al., 2016; Brantlinger, 1997). Indeed, this was problematic. From this reflection of my personal experiences, I pushed forward to infuse counter-narratives of (dis)ability that brought to bear the nature of exclusion as it exists in the realities of students of color that are (mis)placed in special education because of the racialized culture they embodied on a daily basis. The response from my teacherstudents was resounding, and quite clear: ‘But disability is a medical problem…’ ‘you know, it’s diseases and genes’ so ‘special education

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has the answer for each of the problems on their individualized education plans (IEPs)’. From these responses, course after course, cohort after cohort, I began to see where this theme from my own experiences came from – it was ingrained in the neo-colonial imaginary that disability was deficit, just as race and cultures beyond Whiteness were ingrained on both colonizer and colonized to be inherently deficit and ‘in need’ of a ‘cure’ of their ‘uncivilized nature’ (Fanon, 1963; Oliver, 2004). These narratives of ignorance were so deeply present in every conversation I would have with my teacher-students that it became both a personal and professional commitment as a critical pedagogue to not only engage with them myself, but also to find ways to help my students engage with them in an attempt to eventually ameliorate these exclusionary ideologies they would use in the future to enforce ableist and racist logics of oppression. Here, I must say, there was an increasing need to identify ways to approach this master narrative of (dis)ability such that exclusion would be challenged beyond the traditional markers of difference that I had seen were siphoned and siloed into required courses – particularly those that failed to integrate (dis)ability in their discourse. What I adopted was a critical model of teacher education that focused on grounding the abstract notions of critical pedagogy into pragmatic moves that were made by teachers (and myself, admittedly) to produce exclusion for students labeled with disabilities. In this shift, I had to break away from any particular bricolage I had created before and re-think what a critical teacher educator’s pedagogy looks like and feels like when engaging with such ideologies in juxtaposition to one another and the master narratives of normality writ large. The model I ended up with was one of curiosity. Now many might read this now and say ‘Well, okay, but aren’t all teachers supposed to be curious?’ What I provide here is a simple refute to this superficial statement: if teachers are supposed to be curious about their students, truly curious

that is, would they not also think about their lived realities and the experiences these students face outside of school to help them make sense of their pedagogy? The answer is quite facetious but needed: they would, but they aren’t. Moreover, in the case of students with disabilities, if teachers perceive these students as being ‘handled’ by their special education counterparts, and therein outside of their purview of students that they are charged to ‘care for’, these teacher-students (in my experience) utilize this separate entity (the special education teacher and/or paraprofessional) as justification for not having to be curious about them – these students weren’t really theirs. What we find in this critical model toward disability in teacher education is the notion that teacher-students need both explicit and emergent experiences where they engage with (dis)ability on similar terms that they would race, class, gender, and all other markers of difference. In my own practice, this meant consistently and purposefully designing periods of discussion that focused on texts whose authors explored such overlapping and intersectional identities being negotiated and exploited, as well as rendering a new narrative about the purpose of schools and their role as educator – leveraging these intersections to cogenerate a bricolage that was not static or hierarchal, but fluid and differential. Therein, this new model was not just one of including (dis)ability into the curriculum of my courses, far from it. It was part of the bricoleur’s process by which I re-thought about my own practices in the undergraduate and graduate classrooms where students were asked to analyze these intersections with the explicit intent to have (dis)ability emerge as a point of discussion and contention – to design a teacher education pedagogy to counteract and combat ignorance in a way that helps students build their own bricolage. Albeit this was not so cut and dry in the moment; hindsight is always 20/20. Through these discourses that embodied inclusion by design (Dukes and Lamar-Dukes,

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2009; Jehlen, 2002), my teacher-students started to more thoughtfully engage with their own practices and experiences in classrooms where (dis)ability was very rarely discussed, let alone criticized for its exclusionary premises. The ending product that emerged was curiosity incarnate, a genuine stance of accepted ignorance that was grounded in the need to come from a place of wanting to assess for one’s self the validity used within the narratives imposed onto students before my teachers even saw them – to not assume an IEP, disability label, or special education placement constituted the extent of a student’s personhood or possibility. You know these narratives that exclude, we all do; the ‘teacher-talk’ when you receive your roster that jades you against students that, if you look hard enough, are often justified through the use of a disability label to explain students’ inability to learn rather than a teacher’s ignorance to the realities that student faces. Within this curiosity stance, (dis)ability became the pragmatic case of exclusion through which all other markers of difference were able to be deconstructed based on their juxtaposition to normative narratives, and then reconstructed through actions that were needed to fulfill this curious stance pragmatically. This is where the next theme emerged as a way to place credence to the philosophical and ideological commitments my teacher-students were wrestling with in my courses; this is where the need to move beyond curiosity into practice emerged.

PATERNALISM AND INQUIRY Teachers are one of, if not the, most important role models in many students’ lives when thinking about how much time students spend in schools and the relationships that can be built when teachers and students are authentic with one another in the process of building relational trust. Given this reality – which many normative-reliant teacher-students have

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experienced first-hand, albeit in contexts where they embodied the idea of ‘normal’ – new pre-service teachers often come into their tenure as a teacher with a savior complex couched in the preoccupation of Whiteness (Aronson, 2017; Emdin, 2016; LadsonBillings, 2009) and the neo-colonial logics demanded by First-world imposition of culture (Khoja-Moolji, 2017; Mignolo, 2012). This White, neo-colonial savior-ism translates into a very explicit set of beliefs and perceptions that these new teachers hold and utilize to justify exclusion, if not challenged. In my experience working with over 150 new teachers over the past two years, this manifests as a need to be seen as a parent – not in terms of ‘caring’ and ‘nurturing’ guide, but as paternalistic savior – which complicates the ways they then react to having a student labeled with a disability in class. Throughout my exposure to these new teachers’ savior complexes, I have consistently heard the same narrative that was exploited in the 1990s and millennial movies of teacher-saviors: ‘But their parents just don’t care’, ‘When are they going to learn about the proper ways to act’, and ‘When I was their age all I needed was a little discipline … they need to learn right from wrong earlier rather than later’. I want to say now that I am not devoid of having these exact thoughts justify particular actions myself, and if as the reader you’re saying that you have never thought these things, I would request you do some unpacking yourself – you drank too much of the neoliberal, neo-colonial Kool-aid: cut it out. We all think these things when first encountering populations different from us, and new teachers need a space to talk about them rather than being ridiculed. In my experiences, new preservice teachers need diverse ways to express these ideas wherein accountability for these justifications are not beholden to their own Self, and rather made into an accountability discussion for all stakeholders and parties as group thought. For example, my students started to create a more counter-narrative bricolage

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when I was able to express my own experiences of wrestling with these ideas alongside them. Given that the curriculum provided the background to these analyses, particularly in relation to disability and intersectional difference, the need to break down the ways shoring up personal pride and obsession with becoming the authoritarian figure – the embodiment of paternalism, in ‘knowing what’s right’ for someone – was required. Once my students recognized that they did have bias against people different from the White and able-bodied normative center of schooling (Leonardo and Broderick, 2011), there needed to be a space opened up about how to bear witness to a life and reality beyond their own subject position (Oliver, 2001). In these moments, disability was integrated as not only a concept to learn (i.e., moving beyond ignorance toward curiosity), but also a methodology from which new ways to view the purpose of education were seeded. In other words, the notion of the paternalistic White savior obsessed with ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways of knowing and being a subject – a student and citizen – was challenged by emphasizing the need to take action in light of the curiosity fostered by this newfound recognition of ignorance. It is here where the title of this chapter emerged. In my teaching during this point, I utilized a whiteboarding discussion activity where students represented their interpretations of a set of readings in relation to a video clip presented to them on large dry-erase boards in any way they desired: oftentimes in lists and concept maps, but sometimes in comic strips and drawn scenarios. During one session about a year ago, one student responded to another group’s explanation of their drawing by focusing on the nature of how disability made her think about the political nature of schooling being connected to societal expectations more broadly. She exposed herself to criticism by focusing on this abstract notion of being ‘more than an educator but a

political figure’, which, in my courses, must always be brought back down to a pragmatic level to justify claims. In doing so, she brought about a discussion on the material realities of disability, difference, and exclusion in relation to our obsession with ‘one way’ to ‘do education’ – i.e., ‘why do we say there is more than one way to learn but not offer this possibility in our class structures or pedagogies?’ This led to a consolidation of my students back into their groups to define actionable tasks that they could enact on the ground to inquire about lived realities beyond their own. In essence, while this is but one exemplar of this shift from paternalism to inquiry, after this session the emphasis to focusing on an action in relation to curious questions generated in class was the norm rather than exception. Here, there then began another layer of approaching their bricolage – their sense-making skills – due to the justifications used for actions to be taken by my students. It was at this point in my courses where critical pedagogy required a revisit to the why in how we approached education; it was at this point where my students often wrestled between selfishness and care.

SELFISHNESS AND CARE In the previous two sections, I presented the progression of pragmatic teacher pedagogy examples I used to address the overlapping and intersectional nature of disability studies and critical pedagogy in teacher education. In this third section, the pinnacle theme that emerged from my experiences, my students sought out and utilized the abstract notions of critical pedagogy to approach their curiosity and subsequent inquiries in ways that shifted from a position of selfishness to an ethics of care. This phenomenon has been reported as pertinent for understanding asset-based pedagogy (Hambacher and Bondy, 2016; Ladson-Billings, 1995), as well as for making

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sense of youth of color disproportionality placed in special education (Banks, 2017; Patton, 1998) and understanding material realities of disability in global contexts (Barile, 2003; Erevelles, 2011). It should not be surprising that this notion of care that emerged to help my students create a bricolage from which to critique their planned actions is couched within the fundamental tenets of critical pedagogy (Freire, 1998a), and thus was pertinent as an inclusion with many of my syllabi through Freire’s (1998b) Letters to Those Who Dare Teach. Here is the point in my courses where critical pedagogy as a methodology to make sense of ‘the world and the word’ became ingrained into the minds of my students, and provided a conceptual framework to engage with exclusion critically – beyond selfish tendencies. While the notion of care in education theory and practice is widely published, and thus does not need to be elaborated here, there were examples where my students purposefully took up the logic of care beyond one’s personal benefit to challenge other teacher-students that justified their actions in relation to selfish ends. The best exemplar comes from a discussion, of course, when students were asked to think about how they may act in ways that would benefit a child, given a particular scenario – a designed setup from the Paternalism and Inquiry theme presented above. This took many forms in different classes and included, but was not limited to, administering a youth study project, generating a solution from a collection of data within their own student population, and hypothesizing their reactions to problems they may encounter in relation to their practice. Given that my students had already engaged with the notion of being curious and then inquiring about the social realities of their students, the final task was to try to make sense of their inquiries in ways that would align with, or diverge from, the critical bricolage they were constructing. During these whiteboarding discussions, small-group work, and individual explorations of classrooms as social sites of

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resistance, what emerged was a need for me to think about what justifications my students were providing for the ways they were thinking. This extra step for me to inquire about the undergirding logic placed onto particular questions and actions brought my classes full circle to thinking about how the rhetoric of schooling that they developed from their personal experiences may translate into rationales that sought to exclude based on selfishness and lead to teaching practices that excluded even as their intention was to include. These conversations often relied on a questioning dialogic between my students and me, as well as between peers. More often than not, since this process would take place toward the end of the course, students would lead this questioning tactic. Questions such as ‘who benefits from your plan’, ‘why are you doing this’, and ‘in what ways is this focused on your [the teacher-student’s] needs rather than the student’s needs’ led to explanations related to personal preservation (e.g., ‘my evaluation requires me to show student growth’ and ‘edTPA has a place where we have to analyze videos of our teaching’), but those were few and far between. Most justifications, after a couple rounds of inquiry and dialogue, focused on utilizing ‘how students interacted outside of class’, fostering ‘more participation between students to improve learning and collegiality’, and came from ‘personal conversations with students’ about the teacher-student’s attempt to implement critical pedagogy in their service learning. Through these justifications, what I found was a genuine situated sense of care related to students as social beings and my teacherstudents focusing on how they could frame choices they make couched within that ethic of care. While brief, this example focusing on how to engage new teachers to think about their justifications to particular actions was an important step in my own evolution as a critical teacher educator. In particular, as my students started to inquire about their students labeled with disabilities, who were often

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also youth of color, they found that many of their students were ‘unique, rather than deficit’ and ‘required more attention’ that would inevitably ‘benefit both my own practice [the teacher] and the student’s experiences [in the classroom]’. This pinnacle analytic approach to the process that emphasized being a critical pedagogue on the ground aided in my teacherstudents being able to approach their praxis both by addressing their normative thoughts that seeded exclusionary rhetoric, as well as the practices that would produce exclusion if they implemented them in ways that only benefited the teacher and not the student. In this way, my approach to teacher education in relation to the overlapping intersections between disability studies and critical pedagogy modeled the process of learning to teach as a methodical inquiry, derived from a genuine sense of curiosity, and couched within an ethics of care. Through starting from a site of pragmatic material realities that produce exclusion, and then facilitation of a plan to negate such realities, my students emerged as critical pedagogues with a bricolage in-the-making – as in flux and always fluid – rather than fully formed and static. In essence, each step along this journey was not part of an either/or theory– practice divide; rather, it was a dialectic process that consistently and purposefully engaged my teacher-students with the notion of exclusion being both part of a larger rhetorical, and normative-reliant, narrative of exclusion, which included the subsequent material realities that end up producing exclusion for some and not others through this preoccupation with this normative center of schooling.

IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHER EDUCATION, TEACHER EDUCATORS, AND TEACHERS So, where do we find ourselves as critical pedagogues, critical researchers, and critical

theorists, now? In this chapter I presented a brief background of my own building of a bricolage as a critical teacher educator, explained how it became directly connected with intersectional notions of difference related to disability and ‘Othering’ markers of difference, elaborated on the literature that buttresses the nature of exclusion for Black and Brown youth, and then provided a sample of how my teacher-students built their own bricolage to counteract these exclusionary realities in relation to disability studies and critical pedagogy with aid from the pedagogical scaffolds I provided. It should be evident to the reader by now that my use of (dis)ability and its relationship with markers of difference such as race and class are crucial to understanding the nature of exclusion in American schools. Moreover, if we are to approach critical pedagogy in ways that embolden this fundamental reality within teacher education we must depart from both neo-colonial logics of oppression and the medicalized rhetoric that sustains the pervasively used justification for excluding poor Black and Brown youth from general education classrooms whether they are labeled with disabilities or not. This saviorism, this metaphor of students ‘in need’, maintains that students that embody positionalities away from a normative-reliant center – those students that live in the borderlands (Anzaldúa, 1987), in the margins (hooks, 2000) – will always require a ‘cure’ for what ails them, their deficit character incarnate in their Self. We must actively resist this logic, as well as make changes on the ground right now to support the students that live in these material realities on a daily basis. This chapter provides but one starting point from which I view approaching and leveraging the overlapping and intersectional nature of disability studies and critical pedagogy in teacher education. Its implications are widespread and not isolated to teacher education alone. However, if you are a teacher educator, teacher education researcher, or, hell, just a decent human being

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reading this chapter, you must recognize the need to respond to these realities in ways that bring about both systemic change in the long term and localized change right now. What this chapter illuminates is the nature of exclusion, not as a theory, per se; not in a philosophical argument of grandiose claims to an idealized post-whatever utopia; no, this chapter illuminates the rhetoric and realities that our K-12 students face right now, as well as a call to redemption for bringing back the criticality in our research and praxis within post-secondary contexts. Indeed, we must never forget that the nature of exclusion is a historical fact that derives its presence from the material realities faced by youth of color attempting to gain access to equitable education that upholds the rhetorical arguments and humanistic notion that all students are created equal and deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In ending on this note, I want to make clear that this rhetoric will never come to fruition if we continue to disregard the material realities that position students of color, specifically students of color labeled with disabilities, outside of the purview of this credo by virtue of them existing as their authentic Self. It is here where this chapter has the greatest implication: don’t let the notion of ‘Separate but Equal Part Two’ persist – the lives of our youth hang in the balance.

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74 Critical Pedagogy for Preservice Teacher Education in the US: An Agenda for a Plurilingual Reality of Superdiversity Guofang Li and Pramod K. Sah

INTRODUCTION The past few decades have witnessed enormous transnational movements of economic migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers that have deeply intensified the diversity of language, culture, and knowledge in many of the receiving countries such as the United States. In the United States, there are more than 43.7 million immigrants coming from countries where English is not the official language, accounting for 13.5% of the total US population (Zong et  al., 2018). Among the newcomers’ population, more than 200 languages are represented and among some ethnic groups, as high as 74% of them have limited English proficiency (Batalova and Zong, 2016). This ‘diversification of diversity’, or what Vertovec (2007) calls ‘superdiversity’, has surpassed traditional multiculturalism that aimed to address the marginalization of Indigenous and formerly enslaved minorities, signifying new complexities and hierarchical social positions

and structures, and therefore new patterns of social justice agenda (Cochran-Smith et  al., 2013). In the United States, this superdiverse population who ‘speak many languages, identify with many races and ethnicities, and have widely varied countries of origin, socioeconomic statuses, levels of education, and migration histories’ has also profoundly altered the school’s demographics with an exponential increase in the number of migrant-origin children are superdiverse in their ethnic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds (Park et  al., 2018: 5). Some urban schools sometimes have students from more than 100 language backgrounds. These children now constitute one-third of publicschool students in the United States and they often face multiple challenges of language acquisition, cultural adjustment, and content learning in the classroom that may not be experienced by their mainstream and locally born minority peers. To effectively educate these students requires a set of unique teaching skills and

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dispositions, not just good teaching for the general mainstream or locally born minority students (Li, 2018; Van Roekel, 2008). However, a body of studies (e.g., Coady et al., 2016; Gándara et al., 2005; Li, Hinojosa et al., 2017) on both preservice and in-service teachers for these diverse students has revealed that teachers lack ‘practical, research-based information, resources, and strategies needed to teach, evaluate, and nurture’ these superdiverse students (Van Roekel, 2008: 1). Further, while the student population is increasingly multilingual and multicultural, the majority of the teaching force are middle class, White, and monolingual; 87.5% of them have had little or no training in teaching linguistically diverse students; and less than 30% have had training in designing teaching for racially diverse groups (Li, Hinojosa et  al., 2017). Not surprisingly, there have been persistent achievement gaps between these English learners and their native-speaking peers, and between minority students and their mainstream counterparts in every single academic measure. These achievement gaps also have long-term impacts on the learners’ wellbeing, with lower high school graduation rates, higher dropout rates, lower higher education rate, and lower wage earnings, among other opportunity gaps. The need to prepare teachers for the superdiversity turn requires different kinds of teacher education curriculum. Since the achievement gaps ‘systemically’ impede these students from reaching their potential, the education of these students entails not just pedagogical knowledge, but also that of social justice, which requires teachers to be both professionals and advocates for these underachieving students. While teacher education programs in the United States have long been criticized for not producing critical teachers to successfully address the needs of racially, economically, and cognitively disadvantaged children (Castro, 2010; CochranSmith, 2003; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Lazar, 2016), the question arises whether the American teaching force is prepared to face

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the challenges posed by superdiversity in a post-multiculturalist world. Critical pedagogy, a form of teaching approach derived from Freire’s (2000) work to liberate Brazilian illiterate peasants, which helps learners develop critical consciousness to understand social structures and beliefs, learn to question and challenge posited oppression, and combat social injustice and inequity confronting students, especially marginalized students, has been considered essential for teacher education (LadsonBillings, 1995; Sleeter, 2008; Zeichner, 1983). However, despite much proliferation of research on critical approaches to education in general and the legitimacy of critical pedagogy in teacher education, recent progressive educational (i.e., language) policies in the United States have resulted in little transformative effects in practice, with the monolingual, English-only ideology remaining hegemonic in US schools (Wiley, 2014). In light of this observed contradiction between progress and limitation in critical work to date, Kubota and Miller (2017) challenge scholars and practitioners to reimagine praxis (theory-informed practice that leads to action) with a goal to effect change in the changing world. This chapter attempts to reimagine the critical work in preparing preservice teachers in order to address the growing linguistic superdiversity in the United States, using CochranSmith’s (2003) eight-question framework for multicultural teacher education, which includes questions related to diversity, ideology, knowledge, teacher learning, teacher practice, recruitment, outcome, and program coherence. This chapter first outlines the advantages and limitations of single-axis frameworks of diversity that teacher education programs have adopted in preparing teacher candidates to teach minoritized students in the past few decades. We argue that while significant advancement has been made to traditional categories of diversity in relation to locally born minority groups, less emphasis has been placed on linguistic

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diversity brought about through global migration. We propose an additive, intersectional lens of incorporating linguistic diversity with other traditional diversity categories and outline the key issues of ideology, knowledge, teacher learning and practice, recruitment and retention, outcome evaluation, and program coherence to consider when pursuing such an intersectional agenda.

THE EVOLUTION OF ‘DIVERSITY’ IN CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL TEACHER EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES The decade of the 1980s, in the wake of civil rights and feminist movements from the 1960s to 1970s, is traced as the beginning of advocating critical pedagogy in teacher education. In its early conceptualization, scholars tried to disrupt teacher education as normatively neutral and argued for placing a greater emphasis on developing morally deliberate and civic-minded teacher candidates, not merely technical and instrumental aspects of the teaching act. A plethora of proposals for critical teacher education, such as Zeichner and Teitelbaum’s (1982) inquirybased approach, Kirk’s (1986) radical tradition, and Giroux and McLaren’s (1986) transformative education to teacher education, aimed to help teacher candidates identify connections between the curriculum and the wider educational, social, economic, and political conditions that impinge upon classroom practice. While these proposals built up a foundation for the adaptation of critical pedagogy in teacher education programs, these early conceptualizations of diversity and criticality were focused mostly on ethnic (i.e., African American) and gender differences, which took the attention away from other social justice categories (Banks, 1993). These early conceptualizations also lacked a practical guide for curriculum change that teacher education programs could adopt.

As a result, critical pedagogy still held ‘a marginal status in teacher preparation programs’ (Zeichner, 1983), with little or no change in both school education and teacher education praxis (Gay and Howard, 2000; Graziano, 2008; May, 1999; Zygmunt and Clark, 2015), and in some cases resulting in ‘miseducation’ of teachers (King, 1991). In the 1990s, significant development in the conceptualization of diversity in critical pedagogy was made through multicultural education (Banks, 1993) and critical race pedagogy (King, 1991). Banks’ (1993) multicultural education, a movement beyond ‘ethnic-­ specific or gender-specific’ differences, brought ‘cultural pluralism’ to the concept of diversity. In his highly influential five-­dimensional model of multicultural education, Banks (1993) proposed an additive approach to celebrate cultural elements of different groups and add contents in relation to ethnic and gender perspectives to the curriculum, raise awareness of the process through which cultural assumptions, perspectives, and biases are constructed, reduce prejudice by developing positive attitudes toward the plurality of the society, and enhance minoritized students’ academic achievement. In line with Banks’ framework, Bennett, Niggle, and Stage (1990) proposed an agenda to incorporate multicultural education for future teachers that included developing (a) cultural consciousness, (b) intercultural competence, (c) eradication of racism, prejudice, and discrimination, and (d) skills to teach multicultural students. While multicultural education broadened the concept of diversity, the definition of ‘multiculturalism’ was considered too liberal or superficial, attributing inequalities in the schools and society to surface-level culture differences, neglecting the role of White privilege and institutional racism. Some scholars argued that such an essentialist view of diversity has perpetuated ‘dysconscious racism’ (uncritical habit of mind toward educational inequity and cultural diversity) that reinforces deficit theories that rendered

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students from non-dominant cultural groups as genetically and culturally inferior (King, 1991; Nieto, 2000). A review of multicultural teacher education programs in the United States revealed that few employed all five dimensions of Banks’ model; several did not even consider any dimension, and some considered integrating multicultural education as adding units on different cultures (LadsonBillings, 1995). To rectify ‘the limited and distorted understandings … about inequality and cultural diversity that accepts dominant White norms and privileges’, critical race theory was introduced from legal studies (King, 1991: 132). King (1991) suggested developing a kind of teacher education curriculum that challenges preservice teachers’ ‘internalized ideologies and subjective identities’ and requires them to self-examine their racialized ideologies and the construction of racial idealities and how they respond to racism against different groups in the society (1991: 134). While such an approach to developing critical consciousness and self-reflexive practices has provided necessary support to racial awareness in preservice teacher education programs (Gay and Kirkland, 2003), a large number of teacher education programs at colleges and universities across the United States have not been able to go beyond a mere engagement in perusing the meaning and significance of race and ethnicity related to Whiteness as teacher candidates often describe and analyze the issues of oppression and disparities between Blacks and Whites (Stachowiak and Dell, 2016). The explicit attention to race and Whiteness in diversity is inevitably significant but it also runs the risk of essentializing racism for other forms of inequalities (Castro, 2010). Research on preservice teachers has found that under such a single-axis framework, preservice teachers hold unsophisticated notions about diversity and democracy, almost exclusively in term of racism and ethnicity to the exclusion of class, gender, linguistics, sexual

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orientation, and disabilities (Scrimgeour and Ovsienko, 2015). Consequently, many teacher candidates still conduct a form of ‘guerrilla teaching’, in which they go ‘into unfamiliar schools, briefly depositing limited content to children whom they have never met’ (Zygmunt and Clark, 2015: 3). All in all, scholars increasingly recognize that a single-axis framework provides ‘an inadequate foundation for the deployment of critical pedagogies capable of confronting the reproduction of educational inequalities’ (Scrimgeour and Ovsienko, 2015: 35). There is a need for an intersectional approach to critical teacher education that allows possibilities to address different forms of oppression in the age of superdiversity.

From Diversity to Superdiversity: An Intersectional Lens for Critical Teacher Education in the United States As noted at the beginning of this chapter, superdiversity is characterized by ‘a tremendous increase in categories of immigrants, not only in terms of nationality, ethnicity, language, and religion, but also in terms of motives, patterns and itineraries of migration, processes of insertion into … the host societies’ (Blommaert and Rampton, 2011: 22). The changing nature of global migration has led to ‘new social formations spanning nation-states and the persistently poor socioeconomic standing of immigrant and ethnic minority groups are among the foremost developments that seem to render obsolete the older models of multiculturalism’ (Vertovec, 2010: 83). With such an influx of foreign-born populations in the United States, it is not enough to observe diversity only in terms of race, gender, and ethnicity, but it must also be considered in terms of other variables such as linguistic diversities, immigration statuses, and ‘their concomitant entitlements and restrictions of rights,

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divergent labor market experiences, discrete gender and age profiles, patterns of spatial distribution and mixed local area responses by service providers and residents’ (Vertovec, 2007: 1025). The complexities brought about by superdiversity, consequently, produce new forms of hierarchical social positions and stratifications, and hence new patterns of social justice issues that are not fixed but emergent in nature in different contexts (Vertovec, 2007). These new complexities and emergent patterns of social stratifications require preservice teacher education to move from a single-axis framework to ‘a multiplication of significant variables that affect where, how and with whom people live’ (Vertovec, 2007: 1025). As May (2015) argues, thinking from single-axis frameworks can only provide a fragmented view of inequalities as such thinking perpetuates systemic privilege, obscures the interplay of systems of inequality, masks within-group differences, and impedes cross-categorical coalitions for social change. In other words, teacher education curriculum needs to move toward intersectionality in critical teacher education that encompasses different forms of inequalities. Intersectionality supports the notion that minoritized students are subject to mutually reinforcing systems of oppression such as linguicism, racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, and others (Qin and Li, in press). An intersectional lens can motivate teacher candidates to ‘move beyond a peripheral understanding of difference toward the discovery of contextual cognizance, which has the potential to inform – and indeed transform – their teaching and student learning’ (Zygmunt and Clark, 2015: 5). Teacher candidates must be provided with opportunities to have direct contact with communities to learn about real-life experiences of their prospective students in order to be able to identify ‘intersectional harm’ or various mutually constitutive forms of injustices (Qin and Li, in press) resulting from a convergence

of factors such as traditional diversity classification in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender, but also new classifications under superdiversity such as linguistic diversity, religion, migration histories, and transnational experiences. As well, they must not just learn to recognize these social justice categories or simply develop knowledge about them through reading textbooks, discussing research articles, and writing essays – which is, in fact, practiced in many programs – rather, they should learn how to teach these superdiverse children in all stages of their teacher education programs. A starting point of an intersectional approach is to incorporate linguistic diversity within the paradigm of critical pedagogy. The US Census Bureau estimates that the number of linguistic minority students in K-12 schools is more than 14 million and nearly 5 million of these students are classified as English Language Learners (ELLs) – who came with diverse linguistic backgrounds but are struggling to use and understand English fully under the monolingual policy and practices in the mainstream schools (International Center for Leadership in Education, 2011). Many teachers of ELLs lack sociolinguistic awareness, and, therefore, are unable to deal with injustices and inequalities related to language due to a serious preparation gap in teacher education program curriculum on how to address the needs of students whose native language is not English (Coady et al., 2016; Li, Bian et al., 2018. Therefore, incorporating an intersectional lens of linguistic diversity with other forms of social justice issues is essential to help teacher candidates develop skills for content-specific and language-sensitive instruction and engage in critical discussions around discursive spaces of educational inequality and inequity because of language bias in the policy, curriculum, and practices (Cho et al., 2012). In the following section, we outline key questions to consider when implementing an intersectional perspective in critical teacher education for superdiversity.

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KEY QUESTIONS IN INCORPORATING LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY/ INTERSECTIONALITY IN CRITICAL TEACHER EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES In this section, we discuss key issues to consider when incorporating linguistic diversity and intersectionality in critical teacher education following Cochran-Smith (2003): the ideology question with a focus on stewarding policy making toward superdiversity, the knowledge question with attention to teachers’ knowledge base in and disposition toward superdiverse learners, the teacher learning and the practice questions that address teacher education curriculum, the recruitment/retention question that provides pathways to diversify the teaching force, the outcome question that discusses the assessment of such preparation, and finally the coherence question that addresses how these seven components are connected as a holistic system internally and externally from policy to practice for teacher preparation.

The Ideology Question In the United States, while Title VI of the US Civil Rights Act of 1964 led to an introduction of the Bilingual Education Act (1968) for socioeconomically disadvantaged minority children, the implementation of bilingual language policy has undergone several ups and downs due to national political (social and economic) agendas. Despite the increasing linguistic diversity and the mounting research evidence of the advantages of bilingualism, during the past 40 years, there has been a fierce debate on bilingual education for its potential impact on learners’ ability to assimilate and rapidly acquire English, the dominant language of the United States. The end result of the debate is that bilingual education was ‘left far behind, no longer part of the federal framework’ for educating English learners,

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with the passing of the No Child Left Behind Education Act in 2001 (Goldenberg and Wagner, 2015: 29). Hence, there has been a push for ‘English-only’ instruction and a sharp decrease in federal funding to help states and local school districts to provide bilingual support for diverse learners, presenting additional challenges for teachers to educate these students (Li, in press). This policy push for ‘English-only’ instruction strongly influences the way teacher education policies and practices are framed. The dominant monolingual educational practices have resulted in little attention to incorporating linguistic issues as a variable of critical pedagogy in teacher education programs (Li, 2018; Lucas and Villegas, 2013 Samson and Collins, 2012). Similarly, state as well as national requirements for teacher certification often focus more on ethnic diversity issues (though this varies by state) but not language requirements (Akiba et  al., 2010; Samson and Collins, 2012). Therefore, it is not surprising that most teachers believe that they were not sufficiently prepared to teach English-language learners because of their lack of opportunities to develop languagerelated knowledge through their program of study (Li, Hinojosa et al., 2017). As Samson and Collins (2012) argue, A multisubject elementary school teacher candidate, for example, may be required to take courses in child development, English language arts, math, science, social studies, art, behavior management, and assessment, but not in the pedagogy of teaching ELLs. Without specific required coursework relating to the unique learning needs of ELLs, teachers will not be able to teach these students adequately. (2012: 8)

Therefore, there is a need for policy change at the federal, state, and program level where issues related to linguistic diversity and other diversity categories must be made ‘central not peripheral to the rest of the curriculum, mandatory rather than optional for all prospective teachers, and infused throughout courses and fieldwork experiences rather

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than contained in a single course’ (CochranSmith, 2003: 15).

The Knowledge Question The knowledge question aims to address what knowledge, interpretive frameworks, beliefs, and attitudes are necessary to teach diverse populations effectively. Here, we highlight two areas of importance for teaching superdiversity: teachers’ knowledge base in second language learning and their dispositions toward superdiverse learners. Knowledge base in second language learning. Working with superdiverse learners require teachers to have a multicultural and multilingual repertoire in order to understand how language and culture shape school experiences and inform pedagogy for learners. Scholars argue that preservice teachers need ‘specific language-related preparation’ to teach a superdiverse student population effectively and teacher education programs need to ‘bring the notion of language from the periphery into the center of the discussion of teaching’ (Lucas and Villegas, 2013: 56). As such, teacher educational curriculum should help preservice teachers of ELLs develop a thorough understanding of ‘first and second language acquisition, strong content mastery, crosscultural understanding, acknowledgment of differences, and collaborative skills’ (Waxman et al., 2006: 192). In terms of linguistic knowledge in firstand second-language acquisition, Fillmore and Snow (2000) provide a list of language points that all teachers should know about educational linguistics, including components of oral language development (e.g., phonemes, morphemes, vocabulary, language ir/regularities, vernacular and dialects vs standard English vs academic English), written language such as spelling conventions, rhetorical structures, grammar, and text appropriateness (see their article for recommendations for course design for this

knowledge base). To ensure content mastery, in addition to disciplinary content knowledge, teachers also need to have disciplinary linguistic knowledge in how language works within a specific subject area of study such as science, social studies, and mathematics (e.g., Bunch, 2013; Schleppegrell, 2004; Turkan et al., 2014). Finally, to address cultural differences related to language, teachers must also gain understandings of students’ mother tongue, prior schooling, and home lives to identify funds of knowledge learners bring to the classroom and aid teachers to differentiate instruction according to their needs (Coady et al., 2016). Teacher beliefs and dispositions. Research has shown that a large number of teachers entering teacher education programs have a shallow knowledge base not only relative to their own cultural value system but also of other citizens in the society. Many White and middle-class preservice teachers of this generation are not aware of the structural and institutionalized inequalities of the school and society that are impacting on students’ access to education (Lazar, 2016) and often tend to resist or dismiss the principles of diversity that teacher education programs try to teach (Castro, 2010; Cockrell et  al., 1999; Hatch and Groenke, 2009). In Hatch and Groenke’s (2009) research, for example, most White teachers resisted the critical pedagogy approaches teacher educators strove to utilize and encourage their students to use, and lacked enough knowledge to scaffold critical understandings. Although some seemed to accept the notions of critical pedagogy, they often shied away from discussions on the issues of race, class, and power. Hatch and Groenke further found that (a) these students demonstrated ‘wilful ignorance’ about social inequalities and their place in perpetuating injustice; (b) students had difficulty acknowledging patterns of social injustice, even when confronted with clear evidence; and (c) they deny oppressions in the community, resist questioning current inequalities in education, and seem to operate

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on a series of stereotypical assumptions, like ‘critical pedagogy is anti-American’. The resistance suggests that without attending to preservice teachers’ previous knowledge, attitudes, and ideologies, it would be difficult to achieve success with critical teacher education (Graziano, 2008; Hatch and Groenke, 2009; Nieto, 2000). Building on Sleeter (2008), we delineate four fundamental issues to address White middle-class teachers’ beliefs and dispositions toward superdiversity: (a) supporting them to recognize the ubiquity of various forms of inequality with a particular attention to injustices related to language; (b) transforming their deficit views toward and lower expectations of students of diverse backgrounds, including those with diverse languages, immigration histories, countries of origin; (c) challenging their perspective of color- and language-blindness and denial of racial and linguistic disparities in practice; and (d) confronting their lack of sense of their own cultural beings and linguistic privilege. Li’s (2013, 2017) three-step intersectional approach to critical teacher education that moves from (1) examining the teacher’s own language and cultural identity and their beliefs about the role language, race, social class, culture, and other identities play in shaping children’s educational experiences, (2) contrasting these with their students’ language identities and sociocultural experiences, and (3) designing and taking actions to tackle systemic oppressions that may impact their students is an example of an inclusive framework to address different forms of cultural, racial, and linguistic inequalities in teacher education. Since prospective teachers often have limited exploration into critical pedagogy (therefore, resistance or misunderstanding of it), courses in teacher education curriculum must also seek to expand their learning experiences with actual classroom practices and model effective praxis that addresses linguistic and other forms of diversity in the classroom (Conklin, 2008; Graziano, 2008).

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The Teacher Learning/Practice Questions The teacher learning question and practice questions concerning individual courses as well as the program as a whole can be restructured to effectively prepare all teachers to work with superdiverse students. In line with our intersectional approach and the need to make superdiversity central to teacher preparation, it is critically important for teacher education to go beyond the ‘fragmented and superficial treatment of diversity’ (Villegas and Lucas, 2002: 20) to restructure its various components such as coursework and field experiences with conceptual coherence around superdiversity. Currently, while a whole program overhaul is rare, such program efforts have been devoted to modifying existing courses to add/infuse language-related content or creating a standalone course or program (e.g., TESOL endorsement or TESL certificate programs) (see Li, 2018 for a comprehensive review of these efforts). There are many innovative ways to revise existing courses, for example, by adding language- or culture-related content (AbbateVaughn, 2008), integrating service learning or community-based learning (Hutchinson, 2011; Tinkler and Tinkler, 2013), or intentionally place teachers in culturally and linguistically diverse schools, especially in urban contexts (Bleicher, 2011). All these revisions help ‘bring the notion of language from the periphery into the center of the discussion of teaching’ (Lucas and Villegas, 2011: 56). In addition to the infusion approach, adding a course in language or ELL teaching as a mandatory or elective course to the existing program is another useful practice. However, very few states and institutions have separate courses that are specifically devoted to these issues. While these efforts are improvements, it must be noted that if they are just sprinkling ‘disparate bits of information about diversity into the established curriculum’ (Villegas and

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Lucas, 2002: 21) without changing the status quo or holistic incorporation of the knowledge base in superdiversity, it is unlikely that there will be fundamental changes in producing truly highly qualified teachers.

The Recruitment/Retention Question The demographic disparity between increasingly homogeneous teachers and superdiverse students contributes to two significant problems noted above: (a) most prospective teachers’ fear of teaching diverse students, including the denial of various ethnic, cultural, and linguistic differences and injustices; and (b) teachers’ resistance to engaging in diversity issues in teacher preparation and classroom practices (Gay and Howard, 2000). Therefore, there is a need to diversify the teaching force. Since teacher educators play a central role in both selecting and teaching prospective teachers, recruitment and selection therefore should attend to prospective teachers and teacher educators. Recruitment and selection of teacher candidates. The enrolments of preservice teachers in the US teacher education programs are hugely White, middle class, and female dominant, leading to a demographic disparity in terms of teacher recruitment in the school (Nieto, 2000). Given this demographic situation, enrolment management in teacher education programs has become critical and requires close attention. Research has shown that minority teachers boost minority students’ academic achievements, improve graduation rates, and increase their aspirations for college (Gist, 2015). However, there has been a huge challenge for teacher education programs in recruiting a diverse preservice teacher body that can reflect and resemble the increasing diverse positions of students in American K-12 schools. For example, as the survey of American Association of State Colleges and Universities (National Center for Educational

Statistics, 2017) reveals, in 2012–13, 73% of teacher candidates were White, and only 11% were Hispanic or Latino and 10% Black or African American. The survey further depicts that some programs try to be strategic in situating themselves into more demographically heterogeneous communities; however, with very low success. These difficulties suggest that recruiting teachers from these communities requires systematic, intentional, and sustainable efforts to address issues related to admission practice, financial support, and employment opportunities, as well as induction strategies. Carver-Thomas (2018) outlines the following promising practices for teacher education programs for recruiting and retaining teachers from diverse backgrounds: creating alternative pathways to fund the cost of teacher preparation (e.g., service scholarship, loan forgiveness, joint funding from school districts, universities, and states), recruiting from non-traditional populations (e.g., high-school students, paraprofessionals, and after-school program staff), providing ongoing mentorship, tutoring, exam stipends, job placement services, and other supports to ensure teachers of diverse backgrounds successfully complete preparation programs, reforming state teacher licensure requirements to be aligned with their learning, and creating state data systems that monitor and reward the racial diversity of enrollees in teacher preparation programs, as well as those who complete the programs. Recruitment and professional development of teacher educators. Analogous to the lack of diversity in preservice teachers’ demographics, teacher education faculty members also lack diversity in demographics and tend to deny critical pedagogy approaches (Li, Bian et  al., 2018). As Hatch and Groenke (2009) revealed, most White middle-class teacher educators often feel threatened by anything that smacks of diversity and they are less likely, or unable, to invest their time and efforts needed to administer critical pedagogical approaches. Similarly, many believe

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that critical theoretical principles and critical pedagogical approaches are too complex for teacher preparation students to handle, and they believe their students expect to be trained to teach, not to learn to think critically. Ladson-Billings (1995) also points out that many teacher educators who are engaged in critical pedagogy have not studied the issues of cultural diversity and social and educational inequality and injustice. They have not even reflected upon their own dispositions, beliefs, and assumptions regarding children from poverty and underserved communities. This is evidenced in a recent study by Li, Bian et al. (2018) on teacher educators’ perspectives on preparing preservice teachers for cultural and linguistic diversity, where many of them reported little prior training in diversity and little time for on-the-job learning about diversity. As a result, many of them lacked both an awareness of the need, and the ability, to include such topics in their courses. Such ‘dysconscious’ practices reveal the fact that many teacher educators may lack the needed preparation to prepare preservice teachers to transform educational and societal discourses of injustice and inequity. These challenges are further compounded by a lack of clarity in the meaning of ‘criticality’ in current teacher education curriculum and policy. Therefore, there is a need for teacher education programs to diversify their teacher education faculty, identify gaps in faculty expertise, and provide continued professional development to support them to better engage preservice teachers in preparation for teaching for superdiversity.

The Outcome Question In the United States as well as many other countries, the fundamental objective of education is defined in terms of producing a workforce that has the skills and capabilities to enter the global economy. With this corporate model of education, teacher education in the United States ‘has made a major

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programmatic shift from inputs and processes to outcomes’ (Cochran-Smith et. al., 2013: 12) in producing highly qualified ‘teachers of record’ with a bachelor’s degree, state certification, and a pass score on the state licensing exam (Darling-Hammond, 2017). Consequently, there is increasing pressure from the federal government to ‘push teacher education towards a “back-tobasics” version of teacher training’ and prepare teachers to simply accept and implement the goals and agendas of neoliberal America (Down and Smyth, 2012: 3). In this system, teachers become robotic technicians with practical-vocational competencies to serve the interests of global capitalism. This shift to training technicians, as Leistyna et al. (2004) contend, ‘comes at the expense of transdisciplinary thinkers and producers of social knowledge about the world’ and, consequently, students in teacher education programs are diverted or lured away from critically reading historical and existing social formations, especially those that maintain abuses of power, [and] they so often become the newest wave of exploited labor power and reproducers, whether they are conscious of it or not, of oppressive social practices. (2004: 8)

Therefore, teacher preparation must assess not just their abilities in ‘just good teaching’ but also competencies in teaching for superdiversity. Li (2018) outlines four areas of competencies that are specific to teaching linguistic diverse learners but intersect with general teacher competencies: positive attitudes and dispositions toward linguistically diverse learners; a multicultural and multilingual repertoire; key instructional strategies specific to teaching diverse learners; knowledge of federal, state, and school policies, and contextual factors affecting diverse learners. However, as noted in the beginning section of this chapter, the majority of the preservice and in-service teachers reported that they were not prepared in these competencies. Similarly, in most state teacher

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licensing exams, these skills and strategies in teaching for diversity and social justice are not formally evaluated, for example, in state exams or Teacher Performance Assessments. These evaluation gaps in teacher preparation bring the last question, the coherence question.

The Coherence Question By coherence, we mean not just how superdiversity issues are covered coherently within teacher education programs at the various stages of teacher learning processes, including teacher preparation, certification, and evaluation, but also the alignment of federal, state, and local policies and practices in preparing teachers for superdiversity. At the institutional level, while some teacher education programs have oriented their curriculum toward a social justice agenda, it is often unclear among teacher educators and administrators what exactly ‘diversity’ means for them and what competencies they need to teach (Cochran-Smith, 2003). Similarly, despite the ‘will’ of many programs to address the issues of cultural and linguistic diversity alongside race issues, there is little consensus among key personnel on what these entail, which complicates the development of a solid curriculum for critical pedagogy (Lazar, 2016). This lack of coherence and consensus becomes problematic because these teacher education programs are producing ‘teachers with varied levels of exposure to sociopolitical issues related to poverty and racism and different conceptions of culturally sustaining pedagogic approaches’ (Lazar, 2016: 143). Further, many teacher education programs do not seem able to pull White students into critical debates on issues of diversity (Graziano, 2008: 154). On the other hand, preservice teachers from non-dominant groups ‘are not explicitly taught to access and utilize their own cultural and linguistic capital to support their students’ (Wyatt, 2017: 88). Rather, it

is assumed that because they are minorities they know how to do this. These inconsistencies suggest that without internal coherence on the concept of superdiversity and ways to support teacher learning, teacher education programs may fail to guarantee that the current teacher candidates will fulfil the objectives of critical pedagogy in real practices. In the United States, educational policies at the federal and state level often reinforce the single-axis frameworks toward diversity (i.e., through teacher certification exams) (Akiba et al., 2010). The two largest teacher education organizations in the United States, the Association of Teacher Educators and the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, have devoted ‘great attention to preparing teachers for culturally diverse students while paying little attention to teachers who will face language diversity’ (Téllez and Waxman, 2006: 9). Both state and federal governments are more eager to gauge quality based on performance outcomes, often masking other issues of race, culture, and language, which demotivates innovative practices in implementing critical pedagogy in teacher education programs. Analogously, despite an increase in multilingual citizens due to global migration, there is little progress in institutionalizing linguistic diversity as current language policies tend to favor a monolingual approach to teaching multilingual students (Li and Sah, 2019; Wiley, 2014).

CONCLUSION Over the last few decades, there has been clear achievement in the conceptualization of what is meant by critical teacher education, for example with the emergence of ‘radical teacher education’, ‘multicultural teacher education’, and ‘critical race pedagogy’, alongside a greater focus on preservice teachers’ ‘political and ideological clarity’ (Bartolomé, 2004) and ‘critical cultural/

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racial consciousness’ (Gay and Kirkland, 2003). In recent years, however, against the backdrop of superdiversity, there is an urgent need for teacher education to emphasize the role of critical reflection on sociolinguistic social justice for the changing demographics in school, alongside other forms of inequalities such as gender, race, culture, and ethnicity. Building on Cochran-Smith (2003), this chapter aims to provide an explicit framework for addressing intersectionality of the different forms of oppressions underpinning the education of future teachers for superdiversity. We argue that addressing each form of oppression in isolation will run the risk of compartmentalizing teacher candidates’ consciousness-raising experiences and essentializing differences. Envisioning a critical pedagogic model that addresses the intersectionality of the systemic oppressions that shape these disadvantages can help teachers to fully and sustainably transform the learning trajectories of minoritized students. In addition to helping teachers better support minoritized students as holistic beings, moving beyond a simplistic categorization of diverse students can even help teachers and researchers better understand factors that may affect the achievement gaps in standardized assessments (Van Roekel, 2008). While scholars are proposing diverse approaches to address intersectionality of inequalities in teacher education programs, as past developments have indicated, how to resolve the tension between the tendency to essentialize critical differences and directly target certain forms of oppression in the age of superdiversity, be it linguicism, racism, sexism, or classism, remains a central challenge to theorists, researchers, and teacher educators in the field. Existing research clearly shows that there are persistent barriers that prevent teacher education programs from successfully incorporating a critical pedagogic approach to the curriculum to prepare future teachers with the knowledge and skills required to transform

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the educational experience of minoritized students. Therefore, instilling critical pedagogy into teacher education is an unfinished project, which yet needs much exploration and development, especially within the new context of superdiversity.

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75 Teaching Social Justice Galia Zalmanson Levi

Good morning class. Today we will start changing the world and making our society more pleasant, egalitarian and just. The classroom, in the eyes of critical pedagogy, is an arena for social change, led by the teacher in cooperation with the students and the community as a whole. Education is a political act, an act that in its current form maintains the existing social structure (Freire, 1993). A structure compounded of a variety of economic classes, identities, nationalities and genders. Changing the existing social structure requires changing the power relations between those groups. For education to become a tool for social change, creating a more egalitarian society, it must address changing the power relations in society in general and in the classroom in particular. Substantial social change cannot rest on education alone, it should also be derived and driven by social and political activity in the different communities and society in general. Therefore, educators are also activists, intellectual transformers, who alongside their

educational work in the education system, act as activists in social change organizations (Giroux, 1988). Critical Pedagogy, as developed from the theory of Paulo Freire, strives to provide equal educational opportunities to all populations, especially for children in the marginalized strata. Such opportunities enable children from the margins of society to change their location in the social order and ensure equal opportunities for all boys and girls, regardless of their gender, nationality, origin, economic status and physical state (Gur Ziv, 2013). This chapter strives to examine what possibilities are given and which dilemmas are faced by a teacher when choosing to implement the critical pedagogy approach in her classroom in the public school system. After presenting the key elements of the teacher’s position, I will show how, by operating in three spheres: pedagogical, organizational and systematic, the teacher leads a significant change in the classroom, at school and in the community. In each sphere, the teacher

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identifies the mechanisms for social preservation and transforms them to mechanisms of social change.

TEACHING ACCORDING TO THE CRITICAL PEDAGOGY APPROACH: SEEING THE CLASSROOM AS A POLITICAL EDUCATIONAL ARENA The traditional classroom is inhabited by students of diverse identities involved in power relations: females and males, different races/skin colors, immigrants and nativeborn, wealthy and poor, etc. It is furnished with table and chairs, whose value and condition depends on the budgetary of the local authority, and is arranged to suit frontal lessons and enable the teacher’s mastery of discipline. The walls express educational, and sometimes national, values. In this political and educational space most curricula are determined by a central authority along with the measurement and testing methods used to evaluate the knowledge transferred from the teacher to the students. When facing relative measurement of their achievements in very specific domains that do not reflect their wide abilities and talents, many children find themselves developing low self-esteem (Lampert, 2013). The curricula contain overt and hidden messages that usually conform to the hegemony and serve its strengthening. The lack of representation of poets and authors from minority groups in the literature curricula in Israel, for example, mirrors the general power relations in society as they are reflected in economic and educational gaps (Svirsky et al., 2013). The classroom includes more than its inhabitants and its four walls. The communities the students come from and the extent of their inclusion in the curricula, ceremonies and events; the parents; the active organizations in the community; the overall educational policy – all take part in the political educational space in the classroom (Zalmanson Levi, 2011).

THE TEACHER AS AN INTELLECTUAL TRANSFORMER Leading social change must exceed the classroom walls. Each class is a partial mirror image of society with its myriad conflicts and inherent inequality and racism. Some students live in poverty and others grow unsighted to their economic advantage over their peers. Some come from families struggling for survival and some are used to getting everything they want. For some the school environment and curricula induces feelings of belonging and inclusion while others fail to find an expression of the lifestyle and culture of their homes and communities. To deal with this complex social reality, the teacher studies her students and their community’s culture and social structure. Her acquaintance and activity extend beyond the school to activism in social change organizations and initiating cooperation with them at the school. A teacher in an elementary school who encountered manifestations of racism against Eritrean refugees and was active in an organization that aids refugees initiated the visit of a refugee teenager who came to class and told the children about his journey and his life. The children showed interest and asked questions. It was evident in the conversation following the visit that the personal acquaintance with the teenager and his stories had shifted, even slightly, their prejudice attitudes towards the refugees. Another teacher used data on the economic gaps between men and women in society to solve math problems. As part of the mathematical activity, she taught her class to analyze data from governmental reports regarding social justice and equality issues. The teacher as an intellectual transformer is constantly aware of her surroundings and the opportunities she has to learn and change.

LEADING SOCIAL CHANGE Leading the social change can be carried out in three different spheres: the pedagogical

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sphere, addressing the relationship between the teacher and her students; the organizational sphere, addressing the organization of the classroom and the curriculum; and the systemic sphere, addressing the connection between the events in class, social structures and the different communities surrounding the class. Each sphere offers the teacher ways to identify the mechanisms that can lead to social change. Acting in all three can generate the movement towards change. The mechanisms presented here are a few examples of the numerous possibilities available to her as an intellectual transformer.

THE PEDAGOGICAL SPHERE The pedagogical sphere is where the relationships, both between teachers and students and between the students themselves, are maintained. This is an essential basic ground for the educational action to take place and the power relations it holds reflect the power relations in society as a whole. As any change in power relations in the classroom, the changeable mechanisms can be identified. Economic power relations can serve as an example. In a society where poverty and huge economic gaps exist, those will be present in the classroom and the difference between schools (Svirsky et al., 2013). These gaps can be manifested in the children’s clothing and equipment, in the amount and level of support they receive after school, such as private lessons and various enrichment and reinforcement activities, and in the level of availability for schoolwork while facing the difficulties of their everyday life. Children who have no private space at home, who have to look after younger siblings, who are reluctant to ask their parents for things they know are unaffordable, are children who can easily become part of the classroom disruptive culture (creating what is known as discipline problems) or take part in the quiet culture, meaning they become transparent for

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the teacher and school (Shor and Freire, 1990). The teacher does not hold the power to change these power relations in society, but she can acknowledge them, recognize them and create a situation in the classroom in which all children can meet the financial expense norms, form a support system for those who cannot afford it, and most importantly, reinforce those who need it to undermine the place of a child’s economic status in outlining his self-image and scholastic achievements (Zalmanson Levi, 2011). A key mechanism for changing power relations in the classroom is creating knowledge in the classroom. Knowledge is a central component in all levels of school education. Multiple assessment processes in the education system constantly examine whether the knowledge has been transferred from teachers to students. Facing this centralization arise questions such as: to whom does knowledge belong? Who decides what knowledge is to be taught? What knowledge is more important? How is knowledge formed? Schools apply a great deal of supervision on the students’ time, and a major part of the supervision is conducted through the curricula and learning processes. The intellectual transformer teacher’s role is creating a critical and reflective point of view on the hegemonic knowledge and incorporating it with additional knowledge of different kinds; knowledge stemming from the students themselves, their culture and history, their communities or other communities whose unique knowledge is unfamiliar to them. The process of transferring knowledge from the teacher to the students in traditional education was outlined by Freire as the banking model of education. The teacher deposits the knowledge with the students, and transfers it from one place to another. Testing is the procedure of validating the success of the deposit and the full transfer of the knowledge. In banking education the curriculum bypasses the teachers, as well as the children, the parents and the community, as they don’t take into account the teacher’s knowledge,

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the children’s unique knowledge and the accumulative knowledge assembled in the different communities (Freire, 1993). The process of creating knowledge in the classroom is the inverse of banking education. This process includes sharing personal narratives, analyzing their meanings and collaborative learning. Dialogue journals make creating knowledge in the classroom possible. These journals contain a written correspondence between the teacher and the student as part of the curriculum. The correspondent is free from obeying any writing rules and it enables a different interpersonal teacher–student relationship to be built. Corresponding is reciprocal and learning is carried out by expanding the writing and by repeating the teacher’s written corrections to the mistakes in the text. In correspondence notebooks, the teacher and the children share different aspects of daily life and the subjects for writing are decided by the children. This sets the ground for deep acquaintance and allows the children to introduce their world to the teacher–student dialogue (Freire and Macedo, 1987). Entering the writing process is not always easy, as Tigist, a young teacher in the 2nd grade, describes: The first thing we did in the classroom after a short introduction was starting the dialogue journals. The excitement was immediate and the children were excited to have their own personal notebook. At first, they found writing to us a bit weird and most only drew for us. We elicited writing by sharing stories from our lives, drawing animals and writing down their names and encouraging them to describe their drawings. In a few months, we began to see a change in the class; more and more students started writing in addition to drawing, the personal relationships grew stronger as well as the familiarity with a larger number of students. The activity with the dialogue journals became the anchor of our lessons and the students eagerly anticipated it every time we came. They seem to like writing.

In some cases, dialogue journals serve as a kind of a diary in which one can write down what cannot be said aloud. At a youth-at-risk

school, a teacher started using dialogue journals with a group of 14-year-old girls who had already dropped out of several schools and were poorly motivated to study. The girls struggled to write more than one paragraph in tests, but as soon as the second round of corresponding began, several girls wrote 3–4 pages, telling stories never heard by the homeroom teacher, stories about the happenings in their lives outside of school, including sexual harassment incidents and problematic family relationships. It seemed the girls were waiting for this opportunity. Following this process, the school staff embarked on a new process of empowering treatment and dialogue with the girls, carried out with their full consent and cooperation. It was the first time these girls wrote multiple pages of their own free will. The correspondence proceeded to additional writing processes relating to subjects learned in class and incorporating personal knowledge that was not necessarily problematic but rather empowering knowledge brought from their families or communities. A journal enables the acquisition of reading and writing processes, a significant improvement in writing, but it mainly fosters a process of creating knowledge and creating a meaningful dialogue between the teacher and her students. Cooperative learning in heterogeneous groups is a process based on the assumption that each and every student has something to contribute to their peers and that partnership on its own has a value in learning processes. Collaborative learning combines formal academic knowledge with the unique knowledge of the learners (Hertz Lazarowitz and Fux, 1987). Studies show that collaborative learning increases the level of achievement of all participants and contributes to strengthening tolerance, listening and cooperation (Maze and Ram, 2006; Sharan and Shai, 1990). Transitioning from personal learning, frontal lectures and even working in groups to collaborative learning in practice – learning in which students depend on each other and perform tasks together – is not simple

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at all (Hertz Lazarowitz and Fux, 1987). When the students join forces to study the materials, and progress at an uneven pace, the teacher waives her power position as the source of knowledge and the central authority in the class. Collaborative learning makes dealing with a variety of identities, abilities and difficulties possible as part of the learning process. On several occasions, I attended classrooms where the process of dividing the class into groups alone surfaced all the existing tensions in the classroom. Popular and unpopular, quick-learners and slower ones, those who have a lot of equipment compared with those who lack it, those who live nearby and those who commute, etc. The teacher can choose to ignore issues, or to see them as an opportunity to deal with the tensions. The mechanism created by collaborative work is very different from the competitive one often practiced in the classroom. Since the evaluation process is also shared, it involves mutual responsibility, a sense of partnership and coping with dilemmas that arise from the process, such as: if I learn quickly why do I have to wait for others? I need more time, why should I get stressed out by those who do everything fast? Are my knowledge and my story good or interesting enough? If we create a space to discuss those issues, the discourse expands, leading to questions of equality and inequality, allowing for unheard stories to be heard, and creating a model of social solidarity that can replace the competitive one. The creation of knowledge in the classroom can take place in the pedagogic sphere through personal writing in dialogue journals, through collaborative learning and many other pedagogical methods based on the principle that each and every individual has unique, appropriate and essential knowledge for the class. The pedagogic sphere can be utilized for implementing any of the central concepts of critical pedagogy, such as developing a critical perspective, empowerment, or encouraging dialogue, in order to create the mechanisms for social change.

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THE ORGANIZATIONAL SPHERE The organizational sphere includes the classroom in its physical, content-related and organizational aspects. Within this sphere, the pedagogical sphere is carried out. Many important educational decisions in classroom management are made even before the teacher enters the classroom and reflect on the institutional level. Every act of teaching and learning requires organization in some way: the number of lessons, their length, the distribution of content over time, etc. (Carmon, 2006). Organizational aspects have similar effects to those of the pedagogical approach itself, and are directly connected. Just by looking at the chair on which the students sit, one can learn about the overt and hidden messages of the system in which they are found. The teacher’s chair, for example, is different from the students’ chairs, thus symbolizing the institutional hierarchy and power relations. The way the chairs are arranged in the classroom enables the teacher to either maintain her authority in the classroom or create an atmosphere of sharing. The quality of the materials from which the chair is made indicates the financial condition of the institution. The chair has social and political implications (Shor, 1996). Schools can also be classified according to their structures and equipment, and of course according to their agenda, as they reveal who the students are, what their social status is, what their origin is, what their parents do for a living and what approach is taken by the teacher in regard to class management (Anyon, 1980). The curricula, presented to the class in the form of content, schedules, textbooks and exams, are also part of the organizational space. External tests that examine knowledge without implementation and deep understanding, papers on topics that have nothing to do with student life, and hierarchy created between the students based solely on the test scores create a competitive class in which some children are unseen and worthless even

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before the teacher begins to teach (Lampert, 2013). A study conducted on introducing a reform of multidisciplinary teaching found that all the reasons for its failure were organizational: an overly crowded schedule, inappropriate teaching and physical planning of a school that was not adapted to multidisciplinary learning (Wang et al., 2010). The organizational sphere is presented through the learning environment. When I enter a school for the first time with teacher education students, I ask them to wander around and observe the structure of the school – walls, corridors, the courtyard, the location of the officials’ offices and more – and see what they can learn about the school from this observation. In many ways, the educational environment reflects the educational approaches, priorities and social power relations in the school. One of the main components of the classroom environment is the walls, which raises the question: whose wall is it? In many classrooms, the walls belong mostly to teachers. The materials on them are materials prepared by the teacher and are intended to serve the learning objectives and values worthy of emphasis. Some of the contents are dictated by the school or the Ministry/State Offices of Education. Often, very few of the materials on the wall express the students’ part in the learning process. The message the walls send the children is that only important content decorates the wall and only the teacher’s words are important. The higher the grade level, the more desolate the learning environment becomes and the message is that everything that is important is said by the teacher or the textbooks. For the teacher who leads social change, a learning environment can be a source of empowerment, dialogue and change in power relations. Allocating a significant and visible place on the classroom walls to the learning and writing outcomes of students can convey the message that their knowledge is meaningful. Walls can promote multidisciplinary learning, for example, a dictionary of human rights

created in the classroom can also be used to teach linguistic structures, or as a component of history. The same basic dictionary can be used throughout the year on various subjects under the students’ responsibility. Walls that become significant can reduce class alienation, and taking part in their construction can help students build a sense of responsibility and belonging (Ronen, 2008). The furniture in the classroom and the manner in which it is arranged can also express an educational approach. Classes are organized in very varied ways. In some classes I visited, the whole class was organized in groups, and two individual tables stood close to the teacher’s table. I immediately recognized the children that the teacher sees as the most problematic in terms of discipline. There were times when I found a single table in the corner of the classroom, next to the rubbish, so I knew that for the teacher, this boy had no chance. Classroom arrangements have taught me about the teacher’s standings and strategies regarding children who find the system difficult. A variety of teaching methods is expressed in different settings of the classroom furniture: dialogue circles, group collaborative work, learning centered on various subjects and the integration of play and motion during the various classes. This variety can exist at the low grades, in high school, in teacher training and in academia. To allow variety, the classroom should be very dynamic in terms of furniture position, which can vary from lesson to lesson. Classes in which the furniture is fixed to one place, and every shift might take the class out of balance, tells, without words, what teaching methods are practiced in it (Christensen, 2010). The classroom is only part of the school learning environment. In recent years, many schools have built learning corners in the courtyard. These corners are usually very pleasant and offer a change in scenery and break in the routine. It is yet to be inquired whether this is a mere relocation

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or an opportunity to learn what is happening outside the classroom, and perhaps even outside the school. What learning opportunities are offered by the neighborhood and the community? Expanding learning environments opens up many more opportunities for transformative social learning. Social organizations in each community deal with the reality of inequality, utilization of rights and improving the life of the community. The organizations’ activities can be part of the classroom environment. One can be familiar with them, explore them, and act within them (Freire, 1993). The school yard is an active educational environment even if it is not defined as such. The yard is where the students spend their recesses, which often affect the students’ experience in school more than the lessons themselves. Surprisingly, during recess, when the environment allows for multi-game play, free play, social dynamics, creativity and game developing, the teachers are absent; their presence is representative and is related only to supervision (Avidan et  al., 2005). Recess is also an environment in which group and personal social problems arise, which may affect the learning situation more than the difficulty of the material taught in class. Considering the play yard during recess as part of the class’s learning spaces may be a fascinating social and learning opportunity. The learning environment, therefore, in its broad sense, exceeding the four walls of the classroom, should be a significant mechanism for social change in each of its components. The organizational sphere contains many other mechanisms, such as the curricula with their overt and hidden messages, the scheduling of the school day, the manner and level of maintenance and investment in the school structure and facilities. These mechanisms usually work to preserve social structures and power relations; it is up to the teacher and school staff to change them into ones that will promote social change.

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THE SYSTEMIC SPHERE The systemic sphere is where the overall educational policy is determined and contains the organizational sphere and the pedagogic sphere. The formal ways in which the school and the class are run include the external influences of the various communities surrounding it and social policy in general (Anyon, 2005). This sphere is usually not presented as part of classroom management because it occurs partly or mostly outside the classroom, and sometimes even outside the school. However, it has a direct impact on the organizational and pedagogical spheres that make up the daily life in the classroom. Testing policy, for example, which changes over the years as political education leaders change and according to the results of various international tests, affects the daily lives of teachers and students of all ages dramatically. The involvement of social change organizations in the process of dropping out from school and sorting out disciplinary and scholastic problems also has a significant impact. Leading social change in the systemic sphere is a complex challenge that requires commitment and willingness to enter occasional conflicts (Roan et al., 2009). A fundamental mechanism in this sphere is the relationship with parents. Observing the relationship between parents and schools around the concept of power and helplessness (lack of power) sheds light on what happens between parents and educators. Although both parties are motivated to serve the best interests of the child and agree on the common goal of supporting children’s education, there is a dichotomy in which parents are powerless while educators hold the power (Todd and Higgins, 1998). The broad presence of parents in their children’s lives extends to the lives of their teachers. The teacher–parent encounter usually takes place through one identity of each of them. The use of the word ‘parents’ often ignores their different identities, their social position

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and their symbolic and cultural capital. The teacher also possesses additional identities that may be relevant both to the human encounter and to the educational activity. This disregard occurs mainly in the relationships between teachers and parents from disadvantaged groups. Parents from strong groups do not allow teachers to ignore their privileged identities when they represent their children’s interests. Parents in disadvantaged groups (periphery, culturally excluded identity groups, poverty) are perceived by the education system as the source of the children’s problem. These parents often adopt passive behaviors because they are afraid to spoil and complicate the situation even more. They are not always familiar with the social codes and their language is labeled as inferior. The school interprets this as a lack of caring for the children. They do not believe in the system, accept exclusion and internalize oppression (Freire, 1981). Some schools and classes practice different models of relations with parents, in accordance with the educational outlook. In the ‘parents as viewers’ model, the teacher reports to the parents about the students’ achievements and they are called to school mainly in cases of disciplinary problems. Another model relates to parents as a resource of money, cakes and various donations. Parenting schools and various educational programs express a model that refers to parents as learners. The assumption is that the more they learn, the better parents they will be. The school and class parents’ committees express a formal attitude towards the parents that might lead to struggle in the case of problems. Different combinations of these models can be found in every school (Gur Ziv and Zalmanson Levi, 2005). All models show a prominent gender aspect. The term ‘parents’ usually does not account for the fact that mothers are usually those involved in children’s education and the communication with the school. The school’s attitude towards women sometimes reflects the society’s attitude towards women in general. They are

characterized as irrational, refusing to recognize reality as it is, emotional and more. The woman’s identity as a professional, social activist and strong woman is neutralized by the classification of a mother representing a narrow point of view on the picture the school sees (Gur Ziv and Zalmanson Levi, 2005). The situation is worse for women from disadvantaged populations, whose personal negative experience in the school system leads them to low involvement in school, and leads the school staff to relate to them as lacking relevant knowledge of the educational process (Reay, 2005). The communicative dialogical model is the one the critical pedagogical teacher will try to implement in her class. This model strives to create an equal balance and participation of parents in educational activity at school. The implementation of the model is done with recognition of social aspects of economic classes, cultural diversity, equality or inequality between the sexes. In this model, the teacher can maintain an ‘open door’ policy and an ongoing process of dialogue, clarification and joint thinking with the parents. Parents and teachers can work together for change by engaging in a discourse based on effective communication and problem solving (Gordon, 1995). The communicative dialogical model is based on the assumption that all parents strive for the best for their children even when the circumstances of their lives do not always allow them to do so fully. This model provides a real opportunity to change the power relations and meet many identities. Communication with parents is not limited to events involving the children. Parents can be partners in policymaking at both the classroom and school levels. They can help prepare materials, raise resources for class and strengthen the curriculum at home (Hornby, 2011). The professional knowledge and the accompanying jargon used by the teacher and the school may be an exclusion mechanism for those who do not obtain it. Refraining from using it, or explaining it, creates a sense of partnership. Recognizing that parents have

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unique and essential knowledge for the success of their children is a key point in their dialogue with the teacher. This knowledge is very relevant in creating cooperation for conflict resolution, creating social and emotional learning that leads to academic success. Such cooperation includes the teacher, parents and students. The teacher and the school can support the basic needs of the family through organizations in the community, meeting in the students’ homes and making decisions together with the parents (Mart et al., 2011). In this way, the parents are a source of activity and success in dealing with the children and not the source of and reason for the conflicts. The teacher recognizes that she and the school are responsible for educational situations in the school and does not transfer the responsibility to the parents. The model may lead to improvement in student achievements and to the creation of a community that is not alienated from school. Additional mechanisms that can be identified in the organizational space are related to policy towards authority and discipline, sorting and tracking policy within the school, ceremonies and school events, and more. Each of these mechanisms can become a mechanism for social change.

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In each sphere, the teacher identifies mechanisms she can use for creating change in favor of the students and social change. In this chapter, I have demonstrated possibilities for change in each sphere, but every teacher in each class can identify what is appropriate and possible in her class, in her school, in the community in which the school operates. Managing the class to lead social change may occasionally put the teacher in conflict with all the arenas in which she operates: the teaching staff in the school, the management, the parents, the supervision, the professional training bodies, and more. These conflicts are an unavoidable part of leading change, but they can be managed and thought through to reduce their impact on everyday life in the classroom. Finding partners for the vision within the school team may help. Constant rethinking and risk management with the prospect of changing or facing the needs of students can create priorities and make wise use of the forces and motivation to act. Finally, the personal connections between the teacher and the students, the parents, and other school and community activists are all a source of strength and encouragement for the teacher who leads social change in her class.

SUMMARY Managing a class, according to critical pedagogy, is leading social change. The teacher sees the class as a social and political space in which she knows every child in their various identities and their power relations. She fulfills her role as an intellectual transformer by implementing the constant learning of the class, society, and the connections between them. She creates partnerships in attempts to make a change and create a just and better society. Leading the change takes place in three spheres: pedagogic, organizational and systemic, though not all of them are found in her obvious role definition.

REFERENCES Anyon, J. (1980). Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work. Journal of Education, 162(1) 67–92. Anyon, J. (2005). What ‘Counts’ as Educational Policy? Notes toward a New Paradigm. Harvard Educational Review, 75(1), 65–88. Avidan G., Lampert H., & Amit G. (2005). The Silent Voice: A Different Perspective on Schoolchildren. Ra’anana: Hakibbutz Hameuchad. [In Hebrew] Carmon A. (2006). Organizing Institutional Knowledge: Perceiving Knowledge and Preservation Mechanisms. Tel Aviv: Mofet. pp. 10–38, 43. [In Hebrew]

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Christensen, L. (2010). Teaching for Joy and Justice. Re-imagining the Language Arts Classroom. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools. Freire, P. ([1970] 1981). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Jerusalem: Mifras. [In Hebrew] Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the City. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey. Giroux, H. (1988). Teachers as Intellectuals. New York: Bergin & Garvey. Gordon, T. ([1970] 1995). Parent Effectiveness Training. Tel Aviv: Yavne. [In Hebrew] Gur Ziv, H. (2013). Feminist Critical Pedagogy and Educating for Peace. Tel Aviv: Mofet. [In Hebrew] Gur Ziv, H. & Zalmanson Levi, G. (2005). A Critical View of Parents-School Relationships, in: Education and About, Tel Aviv-Yafo: Kibbutzim College. [In Hebrew] Hertz Lazarowitz, R. & Fux I. (1987). Cooperative Learning in the Classroom. Tel Aviv: Ach. [In Hebrew] Hornby G. (2011). Parental Involvement in Childhood Education: Building Effective SchoolFamily Partnership. New York: Springer. Lampert, H. (2013). Worthless Children: The Toll of Achievement Orientated Education. Tel Aviv: Mofet. [In Hebrew] Mart, A., Dusenbury, L., & Wessberg, R. (2011). Social, Emotional and Academic Learning: Complementary Goals for School-Family Partnerships, in: S. Redding, M. Murphy, & P. Sheley (Eds.), Handbook on Family and Community Engagement. Lincoln, IL: Academic Development Institute, pp. 37–44. Maze, S. & Ram, D. (2006). How Does Cooperative Learning Affect Scholastic Achievements? Masa – Teaching and Teacher Training Portal. http://portal.macam.ac.il/ ArticlePage.aspx?id=2578. Retrieved 29.10.2017. [In Hebrew] Reay, D. (2005). Mothers’ Involvement in Their Children’s Schooling: Social Reproduction in

Action?, in: Gill Grozier & Diane Reay (Eds.), Activating Participation: Parents and Teachers Working Towards Partnership, Stoke on trent, UK: Trentham Books, pp. 23–37. Roan, A., Loudoun, R., & Lafferty, G. (2009). Taking the Employee’s Perspective: Negotiating Critical Research in an Organization in Conflict, in: J. W. Cox, T. G. LeTrent-Jones, M. Voronov, & D. Weir (Eds.), Critical Management Studies at Work: Negotiating Tensions between Theory and Practice, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, pp. 17–28. Ronen, H. (2008). The Classroom as a Social and Educational System, in: S. Zidkiyahu, S. Fiserman, N. Eilam, & R. Havatselet (Eds.), Classroom Education. Tel Aviv: Mofet Institute, pp. 87–105. [In Hebrew] Sharan, S. & Shai, D. (1990). Cooperative Learning in Small Groups: Methodology Review, in: Y. Danilov (Ed.), Planning Educational Policy, Pedagogic Secretariat, Ministry of Education, pp. 169–214 [In Hebrew] Shor, I. (1996). When Students Have Power: Negotiating Authority in a Critical Pedagogy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Shor, I. & Freire, P. ([1987] 1990). A Pedagogy for Liberation. Tel Aviv: Mappa. [In Hebrew] Svirsky, S., Konor Atias, E., & Ophir, A. (2013). Israel: A Social Report. Tel Aviv: Adva Center. [In Hebrew] Todd E.S. & Higgins S. (1998). ‘Powerlessness in professional and parent partnerships’. British Journal of Sociology of Education,19(2), 227–236. Wang, J., Spalding, E., Odell, S. J., Klecka, C. L., and Lin, E. (2010). Bold Ideas for Improving Teacher Education and Teaching: What We See, Hear and Think. Journal of Teacher Education, 61(1–2), 3–15. Zalmanson Levi, G. (2011). Power Relations in the Pedagogic Training Class, in: E. Yogev (Ed.), Inquiring Look on Training, Ra’anana: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, pp. 192. [In Hebrew]

76 Creating Global Learning Communities Ramón Flecha and Silvia Molina

INTRODUCTION The first learning community in Barcelona was created in 1978 in an adult school located in La Verneda-Sant Martí, one of the poorest and most stigmatized areas in the city. After the end of Franco’s dictatorship in 1975, a movement in the La Verneda-Sant Martí neighborhood arose to claim improvements in the area, such as better public transportation and other public infrastructure and facilities, including a preschool and an adult school. The dream of a better life through education mobilized the neighbors to occupy one of the main buildings in the area, which had belonged to the Falangist political party during the dictatorship, and to claim its public use to develop educational and cultural activities for the people. The fight for their basic rights led them to start the classes in the street as part of the vindication, until the city council allowed them to use the building in response to the residents’ demands. Within this historical context of

community organizing, claiming their rights and strengthening democracy, La Verneda adult school became a space to learn and access culture based on democratic principles where everyone could participate, learn and contribute to the learning of others, inspired by Freire’s work on popular education (Aubert et al., 2016). Since its opening, this school has given people with low levels of education, many of whom were illiterate, the opportunity to learn, to make decisions regarding their education and to empower themselves to overcome personal challenges and engage in collective struggles for the benefit of the community. This revolutionary school set up the grounds of a global educational movement, schools as learning communities. Inspired by the democratic and dialogical principles of La Verneda, other schools across the educational system recreated its transformative approach to education and developed this communitybased school model. In the school year 1995–6 the first primary school transformed

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into a learning community. Since then, for the last 40 years, this movement has expanded worldwide throughout all levels of education to help prevent and overcome inequalities in the education of children, youth, families, neighborhoods and communities (Morlà, 2015). Today, there are more than 1,000 schools as learning communities throughout 13 countries. These schools include early childhood education, primary and secondary education and adult education, and all base their pedagogical practices on egalitarian dialogue, high expectations and educational actions that scientific research has demonstrated best contribute to enhancing learning for all and fostering social cohesion. Many of these schools attend to underserved students and oppressed communities that have found through education the means to improve not only their learning but also their opportunities in society. This chapter presents a review of the existing knowledge on schools as learning communities, an educational project that transforms schools and their surrounding communities by implementing Successful Educational Actions based on dialogic learning and community participation. We aim to contribute a comprehensive overview of the basis, development and achievements of this global network of schools that exists today, based on an extensive review of the scientific literature that, in the last few decades, has studied the contributions of this educational movement. This body of research reports the improvements brought by the learning communities drawing on both quantitative data (e.g., test scores) and qualitative data (observations and personal stories that collect the experiences of students, teachers, families and community members) that show that learning and solidary relationships can be fostered simultaneously with the commitment of the community in a common dream (Garcia Yeste et  al., 2018). We conduct this analysis by examining the contributions of critical pedagogy to the foundation of the schools as learning communities and, hence,

the achievements of the schools as learning communities. Ultimately, we aim to show that the global schools as learning communities project is an example of the transformative potential of this theoretical perspective. For these purposes, our review will cover the following topics: (a) the central role of dialogue for transformative learning and how it is used in some of the specific educational actions that are implemented in these schools; (b) the scientific basis upon which the learning communities approach was founded, making possible the combining of science and utopia to provide high-quality education; (c) how these schools contribute to educational justice and democratic education by enhancing quality and equity in student learning; (d) the transformative impact that these schools have in their surrounding communities; and (e) the global expansion to diverse contexts and countries. In this chapter we discuss how schools as learning communities have become a global educational response to address educational challenges shared by multiple communities worldwide. These learning communities are an educational movement based on critical pedagogy, bringing possibilities of radical transformation to more schools, communities and educational systems.

DIALOGIC LEARNING: THE TRANSFORMATIVE POTENTIAL OF LEARNING THROUGH DIALOGUE In schools as learning communities, learning occurs through dialogue among diverse agents, including children, youth and adult learners; teachers and other school staff; students’ families; and volunteers from the community. These participants engage in dialogues that are egalitarian and are based on the validity of the arguments, not on the position of power of the participants (Racionero and Valls, 2007). These two main features, i.e., the diversity of the participants

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in the dialogues and equality, characterize dialogic learning, the theoretical approach toward learning upon which the schools as learning communities are grounded (Flecha, 2000). Today, the main theoretical contributions that explain how learning occurs in the school context identify dialogue, culture and interaction as key factors. This has led to the conceptualization of a dialogic turn in the educational sciences (Racionero and Padrós, 2010) that takes into account contributions of authors such as Vygotsky, Mead and Bruner from psychology, Beck, Giddens and Habermas from sociology, and Freire from education, all of whom represent this shift in the understanding of learning. Freire’s work placed the role of dialogue for learning at the center of critical pedagogy. His theory of dialogic action (Freire, 1970) and his notion of dialogicity (Freire, 1970; Freire and Araújo Freire, 2000) not only understood dialogue as a fundamental part of the learning process but also understood it as inherent to human beings, to democracy and to transformation because, for him, the true word is, at the same time, praxis, and as such, it transforms the world. In addition, Freire perceives dialogue as essential for epistemological curiosity that leads to the act of knowing whenever it is based on humility and respect, because, in this way, it allows for the building of trust with others. Therefore, educational interventions that are based on respectful dialogue, according to Freire, develop learning, enhance personal fulfillment and promote social change. In schools as learning communities, learning is organized in a coherent way, departing from the notion that higher levels of learning and transformation, at both the personal and collective domains, occur when learners engage in learning interactions characterized by the seven principles of dialogic learning: egalitarian dialogue, cultural intelligence, transformation, an instrumental dimension, the creation of meaning, solidarity, and equality of differences (Flecha, 2000). These principles, which were first developed for

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adult education, foster learning in students of all ages across the educational spectrum (Racionero and Valls, 2007) and are aligned with the postulates of critical pedagogy and Freire’s work. Four specific educational actions that exemplify the use of dialogic learning and egalitarian dialogue in learning communities are interactive groups, dialogic literary gatherings, family and community education, and community participation in decision making. These educational actions indicate that the presence and use of dialogue in learning communities reflects Freire’s concept of the dialogic relationship as a practice inherent to both human nature and democracy and that such dialogue is an epistemological requirement (Freire and Araújo Freire, 2000; Mello, 2012). Interactive groups (Valls and Kyriakides, 2013) consist of organizing the classroom into small, diverse groups of four or five students each. Each group of students then works together with the aim to solve, through dialogue, various learning activities. Each student is responsible for ensuring that the other students in the group learn the content being studied and solve the activity. Accordingly, the group has to work in solidarity so that each individual member can benefit and maximize his/her learning, thus creating subcommunities of mutual learners (Elboj and Niemelä, 2010). The principle of solidarity extends beyond the group because, in each group, an adult volunteer from the community facilitates the dialogic learning-oriented interactions encouraging students to ask their peers when they need help, to check if they solved the activity well, and to help others who struggle with learning. Furthermore, the activities proposed are focused primarily on instrumental knowledge to help students achieve a high level of academic competency, helping prevent school failure and subsequent risk of social exclusion. A 10-year-old girl student of a learning community explained in 2011 at the European Parliament her experience participating in

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interactive groups and the opportunities and improvements it had brought to her and her classmates. One of the examples she shared was the story of a classmate who at age five left the town and the school to live with his family in Senegal. There, he did not attend school but, when he came back in fourth grade, he was included in the regular classroom with his same-age peers. Instead of lowering the curriculum for him, he participated in interactive groups and, progressively, was able to keep up with the pace of his peers, while they became friends (Flecha, 2015). As this example shows, interactive groups contribute to the development of learning communities as democratic schools, as defined by Apple and Beane (1995), because such groups not only contribute to creating more meaningful learning contexts for all but also help underprivileged students acquire the requisite knowledge and skills of the dominant curriculum, thus opening doors for socioeconomic improvement. Research on interactive groups has reported the ways in which this classroom organization grounded on solidarity-based interactions among students and with other significant adults contributes to both enhance learning and improve relationships within the school and within the community (Valls and Kyriakides, 2013). Family and community participation in classroom activities transforms interactions between children and adults in the schools and in the family sphere, when they, for instance, dialogue about the learning activities, a behavior that has a positive impact on the student’s selfesteem and motivation (Oliver et  al., 2011). Focusing on mathematics learning, for example, it was found that the dialogic talk that occurred in the interactive groups contributed to meaningful learning situations and positively impacted the children’s learning of mathematics (Díez-Palomar and Cabré, 2015). Research further indicates that incorporating interactive groups even in early childhood education can contribute to preventing school failure by providing children

with high-quality education that fosters both cognitive and social development in young children, thus making it possible for them to be reading at the age of five, whereas before, many in the same school could not read at the age of 10 (Aubert et  al., 2017). As an inclusive strategy, interactive groups also promote the learning and participation of students with disabilities (García-Carrión, Molina Roldán et  al., 2018). Importantly, in interactive groups, diversity is celebrated and understood as a source of learning that enriches interactions and dialogues. For this reason, because diversity, including cultural, linguistic, ability level, etc., is maximized within each group, all groups of students exhibit significant progress, while inequalities are reduced. In sum, by transforming the classroom according to profound human and egalitarian values, all children and their communities benefit from this democratic learning environment. Dialogic literary gatherings (De Botton et  al., 2014) consist of discussing the best pieces of universal literature that have previously been agreed upon and read by the participants. The participants of La Verneda adult school were the ones who first claimed to have access to those books that had been denied to them because, as they said, the people can understand everything, and if it is well written, they understand it better (Soler-Gallart, 2001). In the gatherings, the participants share their reflections, thoughts, feelings and questions as provoked by the text and discuss them with the group based on the rules of egalitarian dialogue. The context of dialogic learning that is created enables participants to create meaning about the text. Today, dialogic literary gatherings are being implemented in a variety of diverse contexts, such as early childhood schools, secondary education, adult education and prisons. By creating the space for the people to engage in transformative dialogues through classical literature, dialogic literary gatherings have contributed to breaking the stereotype that certain literary works belong to the

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cultural elite, thereby democratizing access to culture and knowledge (Ruiz, 2015). As such, the gatherings contribute to tear down elitist walls that have denied the possibility for the most underserved to access the greatest literary works. The positive impact reported on participants’ learning, including improvements in language skills, vocabulary, reading comprehension and reasoning has also improved the lives of the students with disabilities (Molina, 2015). Besides, this dialogic learning environment increases students’ prosocial behavior in terms of solidarity and friendship (Villardón-Gallego et  al., 2018). Accordingly, we argue that these improvements reflect Freire’s dialogicity in which participants learn by engaging in dialogue founded upon curiosity and mutual respect (Freire and Araújo Freire, 2000). In addition, the reading leads the participants to engage in discussions about topics that are universal and timeless, such as love, friendship, courage and injustice, and they bring to these debates their personal life experiences. In this way, participants enhance the meaning they give to reading, which, in the case of children, contributes to their enjoyment of the reading, and transforms personal relationships and expectations. This occurred, for instance, in the case of a 12-year-old Roma girl living in a disadvantaged context who had been bullied by her classmates. Their participation in dialogic literary gatherings, where they shared learning and thoughts, transformed both her classmates’ perceptions of her and her own perceptions of her abilities and future academic expectations (Aubert, 2015). In the case of adults in prison, their participation in the gatherings opens new possibilities for personal and social transformation, even in such a challenging and dehumanizing context (Álvarez et al., 2016). In other words, dialogic literary gatherings are a contribution to critical pedagogy insofar as they are a practice of critical literacy and are understood as the type of literacy that entails ‘words rethinking the worlds […], connect the political and the

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personal, the public and the private […] for rethinking our lives and for promoting justice in place of inequity’ (Shor, 2009: 282). In Freire’s words, this type of learning entails reading the texts critically, reading the world, and transforming it (Freire, 1994). By promoting connections between the learning contexts and their realities, these practices avoid the separation between text and context and between the object and its purpose, which Freire criticizes because it blocks the epistemological curiosity of the learner (Freire and Araújo Freire, 2000). By enhancing the learning of all students, these practices help to overcome the theories of social reproduction that critical pedagogy sees as insufficient (McLaren, 2009). Family and community education consists of promoting basic education as well as other educational and cultural activities, such as dialogic literary gatherings, among family members and other adults in the communities, by always drawing on their own demands and the needs participants identify (Flecha, 2012). When families and community members are involved in the school students’ motivation, the students’ self-esteem and engagement benefit from having learning interactions with their relatives at home, for instance being supported when doing homework. At the same time, families experience benefits in their own learning process, as they acquire knowledge and skills that facilitate their access to employment and improve their prospects for social inclusion (Flecha, 2015; Oliver et  al., 2011). The dialogic approach of family and community education in learning communities is deeply rooted in Freire’s contribution to adult education, which challenges the typical relations of traditional cultural and adult education practices (Allman, 2009). Freire perceives teaching and learning not as roles developed by different persons but as two internally related processes that are developed within each person. In other words, everyone can teach and learn, and everyone can think critically about the existing knowledge – both expert and non-expert

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knowledge – to gain a deeper understanding of reality, to question it and to problematize it, and ultimately to transform it. Through dialogic learning, adult education in learning communities embodies Freire’s approach, including his ideas of conscientization and emancipation through education, which made possible the reversing of the lack of academic education among adults in the neighborhood where the first learning community, developed in the 1970s, helped people become literate, obtain academic degrees, improve their labor opportunities and enter institutions of higher education (Aubert et  al., 2016). Subsequent learning communities working with children and youth have followed the path embarked upon by this pioneer school and have helped to transform and enrich the environment where children learn and grow. Hence, it is not necessary to wait until the younger generation grows to adulthood to improve the educational and cultural background of the community (Flecha, 2015). Community participation in decision making (Díez et  al., 2011), which includes students’ relatives and other people from the community, is another example of the presence of egalitarian dialogue in learning communities. Assemblies and mixed committees composed of teachers, students’ family members and other community members are organized to make decisions regarding key aspects of school operation. This entails considering the cultural intelligence of the diverse participants, which includes not only their academic knowledge but also their practical and communicative knowledge. This cultural intelligence, which everyone possesses, enables people to analyze and interpret their own reality and is regarded in the learning communities as a resource to analyze needs and identify ways in which to respond to those needs with greater opportunities to find better solutions for the community (Oliver et al., 2011; Ramis and Krastina, 2010). For instance, in one school placed in a very underprivileged neighborhood and attended mainly by Roma

students, early school leaving was a problem as, after finishing primary education in the school, the students had to move to a different neighborhood to continue secondary education. The community had identified the need to change school and neighborhood as a main barrier to their children completing their compulsory secondary education. For this reason, when their participation in decision making was enabled in the school, they proposed that compulsory secondary education was taught in the primary school and convinced the educational administration. This solution, which would not have been found without the participation of the community, considerably reduced the dropout rate of youth in the community (GarcíaCarrión, Molina-Luque et  al., 2018). The dialogic relationship that is built into these spaces of participation where anyone can contribute echoes Freire’s concept of unity in diversity and is an example of the democratic learning practices and contexts that can be created based on dialogicity (Freire and Araújo Freire, 2000).

SCIENTIFIC BASIS AND DREAMS FOR QUALITY EDUCATION AND EFFECTIVE TEACHER TRAINING According to Freire, ‘education requires technical, scientific, and professional development as much as it does dreams and utopia’ (Freire and Araújo Freire, 2000: 43). Dreams have been present since the beginning of the transformation process of schools as learning communities and since the first school as a learning community was created. One of the first steps is to dream the school everybody wants. Thus, teachers, students and relatives share their dreams and agree on those that will be prioritized. Periodically, the dreams are revisited and those that have been fulfilled are replaced by new dreams that then guide the school’s development through the next phase.

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Science, which is also present from the beginning, combined with egalitarian dialogue, is one of the primary tools necessary to achieve the community’s dreams. Indeed, guaranteeing the right to educational success in all dimensions of human development is at the heart of learning communities. To achieve this purpose, knowledge regarding those actions that have been demonstrated to improve people’s lives is included in the dialogue with the communities with which we conduct research. Between 2006 and 2011, the research project INCLUD-ED: Strategies for inclusion and social cohesion in Europe from education (European Commission, 6th Framework Programme) (Flecha, 2015) studied successful schools across Europe and identified educational actions grounded on dialogue and interaction in which community participation played an essential role. When studying the benefits and improvements reported across many diverse contexts and countries, these were shown to result in learning improvements and profound transformations when implemented elsewhere. As such, a series of Successful Educational Actions (SEAs) were identified and reported benefits to improve the learning and global development of culturally diverse students living under challenging circumstances. These SEAs shared certain features that were key to their success, and hence such evidence has become the scientific foundation of schools as learning communities. One of these features is to educate diverse students in a group while including all necessary supports for these heterogeneous groups and avoiding any separation according to their previous levels of attainment, as the ill effects of ability grouping have been well documented throughout the decades (Valls and Kyriakides, 2013). Another key feature is to maintain high academic standards for all students and to embrace learning through dialogue to foster everyone’s learning (Flecha, 2015). A third key feature is to make the most of community participation in all vital endeavors within the school (Gatt

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et al., 2011). As these features are key to the overall personal development and growth of children and youth, all learning communities base their actions and decisions on these key features. Teacher education in learning communities is also informed by research. Before the transformation of the schools as learning communities, the knowledge that has guaranteed the right to benefit from the best education is included in the dialogue with teachers and researchers, and teachers are engaged in joint reflection to achieve transformative action (García-Carrión et  al., 2017). This dialogue regarding scientific knowledge and knowledge of the community (Gómez et al., 2011) allows for the recreating of the available scientific evidence to respond to the specific situations the teachers and community face in each school. In addition, training is not exclusively for teachers, but rather is open to the community, thus maximizing the possibilities of transformative impact. This dialogic approach of evidence-based teacher education in learning communities entails, as Giroux (1988, 2009) proposed, going beyond technocratic and instrumental views of teachers that separate conceptualization, planning and design of curricula from its implementation to perceiving teachers as transformative intellectuals who are able to interpret the world by taking into account political, economic and social factors and to act accordingly for the benefit of their students, and especially for those who are the most disadvantaged and oppressed. It also entails avoiding the fetishization of method (Macedo, 2006) that reduces teacher training to learning tools and techniques while disregarding the development of critical consciousness. Further, the dialogic approach helps to overcome the traditional false dilemma between theory and practice that critical pedagogy addresses (Freire, 1970) and entails offering teachers a critical education that allows them to see beyond ideologies by learning to analyze the objective components that develop daily life in schools

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while providing them with the critical tools necessary to act accordingly throughout the transformation process (Kincheloe and McLaren, 2007; McLaren, 2003). Scientific and theoretical teacher training on the SEAs is also developed as a continuous professional development program. Roca et  al. (2015) explained that teacher participation in dialogic pedagogical gatherings involves periodic meetings where in-service teachers gather to discuss relevant educational theory and research. They further demonstrated how these gatherings contribute to the transformation of teachers both personally and professionally. For example, dialogues with colleagues on critical theory and scientific evidence enable teachers to envisage new dreams and utopias of social creation, commit to high-quality education for all children, engage in transformative educational movements and foster the creation of meaning in their profession. In these gatherings, teachers act as intellectuals, as Giroux (1988) proposed, as they interpret the world, attribute meaning to it and share with others their understanding of reality, while committing themselves to question their teaching efforts, i.e., what and how they teach, and the objectives they pursue. Furthermore, in these meetings, they clearly combine the language of critique with that of possibility as they introduce changes that create better conditions for their students by transforming their students’ realities and fulfilling the dreams of the students and their community.

CONTRIBUTIONS OF SCHOOLS AS LEARNING COMMUNITIES TO EDUCATIONAL JUSTICE AND DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION IN THE CONTEXT OF DIVERSITY One of the main features of critical pedagogy is that the social, cultural and political contexts in which education occurs are always considered in the analyses, and accordingly,

there is a permanent commitment to reduce the inequality and injustice that are produced in and explained by these contexts (see Darder et  al., 2009). Schools as learning communities share the same commitment. Any school can become a learning community and a broad spectrum of schools have already done so, including private and public, urban and rural, with much or little diversity. However, it is in those schools that begin from a highly complex situation characterized by school failure, high levels of diversity and cultural marginalization that learning communities have brought the greatest improvements. Research has shown the power of interactive groups to address educational inequalities and enhance the learning of all students, including those of minority cultural and ethnic backgrounds (Valls and Kyriakides, 2013). In this way, interactive groups reflect the principle of equality of differences. This was observed, for instance, in a school where the percentage of students who achieved basic competence in reading comprehension increased from 17% to 85% over a six-year period, while in the same period, the percentage of students of migrant origin in the school increased from 12% to 46% (Flecha, 2015). This is, while the number of migrant students increased by almost four times the original amount, the number of students who performed well in reading comprehension increased by five times. Similar improvements are found in contexts of cultural minority populations. In the case of a school located in a highly marginalized area that serves a predominant Roma population, SEAs achieved in a oneyear period an improvement in student learning as demonstrated by an increase in the scores on standardized tests of between one and two score points (out of five) for diverse skills, including language skills, math and English, among others. Student engagement with school also improved, with absenteeism declining from 30% to being occasional over a two-year period. During the same period, enrollment increased by 28% in the first year

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and an additional 10% in the second year (Flecha and Soler, 2013). Importantly, these results were achieved together with family and community participation in schools through the implementation of SEAs, which, in these cases, included family and community members who were migrants or who belonged to cultural minorities and exhibited low levels of education. The participation of family and community through interactive groups and in decision making and evaluation processes brings to the school the context and the culture that the students are living outside the school. When this occurs, at least three benefits are observed. First, diversity within the learning and decision spaces increases, which, in turn, increases the knowledge available to be learned and to be applied when making decisions. When the communities participate in schools, the curriculum, although socially constructed and representative of the hegemonic culture (McLaren, 2003), can be challenged, discussed and enriched for the benefit of the non-hegemonic cultures. Moreover, a culturally relevant pedagogy can be developed that fulfills three criteria, namely, contributes to student academic success, helps students develop their cultural competence (knowledge and value of their own culture), and helps students build a critical consciousness through which they can change the status quo of the current social order (Ladson-Billings, 1995). Second, misconceptions and justifications that explain school failure based on the school population or the school disaffection of particular cultural communities are dismantled, and it becomes clear that learning and engagement in school only depend on the educational actions that are implemented. Education then becomes an action associated with languages of critique and possibility (Giroux, 1988). Third, marginalized communities become actors in their own emancipation. Schools as learning communities, in the words of Freire (Freire and Araújo Freire 2000), make it possible to act against what the dominant

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forces argue as inevitable and detrimental to the most deprived. Instead, schools as learning communities entail optimism against the fatalism that perceives conditioning factors as determining factors against which nothing can be done, and they denounce the inequalities while announcing how the inequalities can be overcome (Freire, 2015).

TRANSFORMATION BEYOND THE SCHOOLS: WORKING WITH THE COMMUNITIES TO OVERCOME SOCIAL EXCLUSION Critical pedagogy places education in the center of the struggle of the power relations (Giroux, 1988) that preserve the inequalities not only within the schools and the educational systems but outside as well, in society as a whole. Schools as learning communities participate in this struggle by equipping students with the knowledge and skills necessary to improve their educational levels and break the cycle of inequalities that are often reproduced generation after generation (Girbés-Peco et  al., 2015). Furthermore, learning communities not only improve the education and the prospects of social inclusion of the youth so they can transform their lives in the future, they also transform the current realities of poverty and marginalization that surround the schools and the students. As Freire said, education cannot be neutral; it can either serve to transform the world to critically include people in it or allow the permanence of unjust structures and the adjustment of people to a reality considered untouchable (Freire, 2015). Schools as learning communities do not adapt to the failure of children or to the social exclusion of the communities. On the contrary, they work to change both. The study of schools as learning communities in highly marginalized contexts has resulted in the evidence of such transformations and has determined that community

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participation in decision-making processes is a primary factor that schools as learning communities offer as part of the community transformation. Decisive participation begins within the schools and is manifested in the improvement of the education offered to students. However, it can surpass the educational domain when the community becomes empowered to participate in the making of decisions that affect the community as a whole. Padrós et al. (2011) and García-Carrión (2016) report on the case of one highly marginalized school that, as a result of the huge improvements achieved in the learning community, wanted to continue the dialogic collaboration established with researchers to recreate the democratic model of decision making that they had developed in the learning community in other domains beyond education. In the school, children were not learning, and absenteeism and dropout rates were unacceptably high. Violence against teachers was reported in national media, and even the police did not dare go into the neighborhood. The profound change that the school needed was realized when the school was transformed into a learning community. The process entailed engaging and bringing together teachers, students’ families and researchers in egalitarian dialogues to make joint decisions regarding how the successful actions, as identified through research, were going to be implemented in the school to respond to the students’ needs and achieve the dream of a quality education, a goal that was agreed upon by the community. As a result, to implement the SEAs, the school opened its doors to the families and the community. It was not long before the children were learning more than they ever had before and high levels of conflict among students, teachers and families transformed into peaceful and fruitful coexisting relationships. Beyond the school, however, there were many challenges that this community faced, among the most important of which were poverty, unemployment, poor health and poor housing conditions. The experience

of this school demonstrated that even the most difficult situations can be transformed, thus exemplifying the Freirean premise of untested feasibility (1970), and that communities can be brought together to recreate the process throughout the entire neighborhood. Therefore, the community requested solutions to overcome the situation of oppression they suffered, and they asked for that evidence provided by research that had shown to improve other areas of society, so the community could decide how to reverse their situation of social exclusion (García-Carrión, 2016). The initiatives launched included establishing cooperatives as successful alternatives to capitalism and identifying the skills and activities already developed in the community that could promote new employment possibilities for the people in the neighborhood. This case is an example of how schools as learning communities reflect the Freirean ideas that education is a guide for change, that it serves to build a new society and that it regards all men and women as intellectuals, regardless of their economic or social role, because everyone acts as an intellectual when they interpret the world in which they live, give meaning to that world and share their understanding with others (Giroux, 1988). Community members act not only as intellectuals but also as agents of change. Apple (2012) confirms the importance of perceiving schools as places for action. Learning communities have demonstrated that when social policies are implemented following a bottom-up model and when they take the community agency into account, exclusionary realities that could not be overcome by top-down models begin to erode (Brown et  al., 2013). This is the difference that Freire (Freire and Araújo Freire, 2000) noted between an assistance-oriented policy and a policy that takes into account the importance of social, economic and political factors related to power relations. It is also an example of the power of education, as mentioned by Apple (2012), that can build

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coalitions with social effects based on care, love and solidarity and that can contribute to changing the society. According to Freire (2015), although change is difficult, it is possible. In learning communities, these transformations have been possible when the schools have opened to the community. Manuel, a family member of one of these schools, explained at the Final Conference of the INCLUD-ED project at the European Parliament, From here I want to say to all the parents and children of the world that if we had the misfortune of being poor and living in difficult areas, we can also change because we need it. Society can see how we can get out of poverty. (Flecha, 2015: 18)

LEARNING COMMUNITIES: CRITICAL PEDAGOGY EXPANDING ACROSS THE GLOBE Critical pedagogy has inspired a global network of schools that are making it possible to achieve educational success and improve social inclusion in communities where neither had been previously possible. These learning communities are an example of the transformative potential of this theoretical perspective. The first learning community, which was inspired by the work of Freire, was created in Spain in the 1970s (Sánchez, 1999). Today, there are more than 200 learning communities in Spain and more than 500 in Latin America, namely, in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Ecuador, and the numbers continue to increase. This growth reflects the validity of the Freirean theory and the practices inspired by his theory to respond to current educational challenges in diverse contexts. The growth of the improvements achieved by the schools as learning communities project, as a result of the SEAs they implement, has been the impetus for this expansion. Such evidence has allowed for the identification of

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the universal components of SEAs that make them successfully transferable to different contexts and that enable them to respond to the particularities of each context when they are recreated in each particular community. In this way, schools as learning communities overcome contextualist perspectives (Flecha, 2015) that place the causes of marginalization on the social, cultural and political characteristics of those particular contexts or populations and that understand that no effective solutions can be transferred, thus reflecting a form of charitable racism (Macedo, 2006) that perpetuates inequalities. Beyond the context, schools as learning communities represent a way to use science to fulfill the dreams of a quality education and the social inclusion of communities, and in this way, they are responding to the main aim of the critical pedagogy, i.e., to overcome obstacles to democratic education that hinder the student’s right to learn (Darder et al., 2009). They do it with the understanding that learning is a social process inseparable from social change, justice and equality (Freire and Macedo, 1987; Kincheloe, 2005). Furthermore, learning communities show that both learning and social change are collective endeavors that cannot be fully developed alone by teachers, by scholars, by students’ families, or by communities. Rather, it is when they all agree on a shared purpose and act collaboratively that the most exclusionary realities can be transformed and bring new opportunities for enhanced learning and a better life.

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Through the Dialogic Reading of Classic Universal Literature in Prison. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 62(4), 1043–1061. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1177/0306624X16672864 Apple, M. W. (2012). Can education change society? New York: Routledge. Apple, M. A., & Beane, J. A. (1995). Democratic schools. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Aubert, A. (2015). Amaya, Dialogic Literary Gatherings Evoking Passion for Learning and a Transformation of the Relationships of a Roma Girl with her Classmates. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(10), 858–864. http://dx.doi. org/10.1177/1077800415614034 Aubert, A., Molina, S., Shubert, T., & Vidu, A. (2017). Learning and Inclusivity via Interactive Groups in Early Childhood Education and Care in the Hope school, Spain. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 13, 90–103 Aubert, A., Villarejo, B., Cabré, J., & Santos, T. (2016). La Verneda Sant Martí Adult School: A Reference of Popular Education in the Neighborhoods. Teachers College Record, 118(4), 1–32. Brown, M., Gómez, M., & Munté, A. (2013). Procesos dialógicos de planificación de los servicios sociales: el proceso de cambio en los barrios de La Milagrosa y La Estrella (Albacete). Scripta Nova. Revista Electrónica de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales, 17(427). Darder, A., Baltonado, M., & Torres, R. (2009). ‘Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction’. In: Darder, A., Baltonado, M. & Torres, R. (Eds.). The Critical Pedagogy Reader (2nd edition). New York: Routledge. (1–20). De Botton, L., Girbés, S., Ruiz, L., & Tellado, I. (2014). Moroccan Mothers’ Involvement in Dialogic Literary Gatherings in a Catalan Urban Primary School: Increasing Educative Interactions and Improving Learning. Improving Schools, 17(3), 241–249. Díez, J., Gatt, S., & Racionero, S. (2011). Placing Immigrant and Minority Family and Community Members at the School’s Centre: The Role of Community Participation. European Journal of Education, 46(2), 184–196. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/j.1465-3435.2011.01474.x Díez-Palomar, J., & Cabré, J. (2015). Using Dialogic Talk to Teach Mathematics: The Case of

Interactive Groups. ZDM Mathematics Education, 47(7), 1299–1312. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1007/s11858-015-0728-x Elboj, C., & Niemelä, R. (2010). Sub-communities of Mutual Learners in the Classroom: The Case of Interactive groups. Revista de Psicodidáctica, 15(2), 177–189. http://dx.doi.org/10.1387/ RevPsicodidact.810 Flecha, A. (2012). Family Education Improves Student’s Academic Performance: Contributions from European Research. Multidisciplinary Journal of Educational Research, 2(3), 301–321. http://dx.doi.org/10.4471/remie.2012.16 Flecha, R. (2000). Sharing words: Theory and practice of dialogic learning. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Flecha, R. (2015). Successful educational actions for inclusion and social cohesion in Europe. Dordrecht: Springer Publishing Company. Flecha, R., & Soler, M. (2013). Turning Difficulties into Possibilities: Engaging Roma Families and Students in School through Dialogic Learning. Cambridge Journal of Education, 43(4), 451–465. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 0305764X.2013.819068 Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum Books. Freire, P. (1994). Cartas a quien pretende enseñar. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Freire, P. (2015). Pedagogy of indignation. New York: Routledge. Freire, P., & Araújo Freire, A. M. (2000). Pedagogy of the heart. New York: Continuum. Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word and reading the world. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey. García-Carrión, R. (2016). Schools as Learning Communities. International Review of Qualitative Research, 9(2), 152–164. Garcia-Carrión, R., Gomez, A., Molina, S., & Ionescu, V. (2017). Teacher Education in Schools as Learning Communities: Transforming High-Poverty Schools through Dialogic Learning. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 42(4), 44–56. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.14221/ajte.2017v42n4.4 García-Carrión, R., Molina-Luque, F., & Molina Roldán, S. (2018). How Do Vulnerable Youth Complete Secondary Education? The Key Role of Families and the Community. Journal of

CREATING GLOBAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES

Youth Studies, 27(14), 701–716. http://dx.doi. org/10.1080/13676261.2017.1406660 García-Carrión, R., Molina Roldán, S., & Roca Campos, E. (2018). Interactive Learning Environments for the Educational Improvement of Students with Disabilities in Special Schools. Frontiers in Psychology, 9(1744). http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01744 Garcia Yeste, C., Morlà, T., & Ionescu, V. (2018). Dreams of Higher Education in the Mediterrani School Through Family Education. Frontiers in Education, 3(79). http:// dx.doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2018.00079 Gatt, S., Ojala, M., & Soler, M. (2011). Promoting Social Inclusion Counting with Everyone: Learning Communities and INCLUD-ED. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 21(1), 37–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 09620214.2011.543851 Girbés-Peco, S., Macías, F., & Álvarez, P. (2015). De la Escuela Gueto a una Comunidad de Aprendizaje: Un Estudio de Caso sobre la Superación de la Pobreza a Través de una Educación de Éxito. International and Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Sciences, 4(1), 88–116. http://dx.doi.org/10.17583/rimcis.2015.04 Giroux, H. A. (1988). Teachers as intellectuals: Toward a critical pedagogy of learning. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. Giroux, H. A. (2009). ‘Teacher Education and Democratic Schooling’. In: Darder, A., Baltodano, M. & Torres, R. (Eds.). The Critical Pedagogy Reader (2nd edition). New York: Routledge. (438–459). Gómez, A., Puigvert, L., & Flecha, R. (2011). Critical Communicative Methodology: Informing Real Social Transformation Through Research. Qualitative Inquiry, 17(3), 235–245. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1177/1077800410397802 Kincheloe, J. L. (2005). Critical pedagogy primer. New York: Peter Lang. Kincheloe, J. L., & McLaren, P. (2007). Critical pedagogy: Where are we now? New York: Peter Lang. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). But That’s Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. Theory into Practice, 34(3), 159–165. Macedo, D. (2006). Literacies of power: What Americans are not allowed to know. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

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McLaren, P. (2003). Life in schools. An introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education (4th ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon. McLaren, P. (2009). ‘Critical Pedagogy: A Look at the Major Concepts’. In: Darder, A., Baltonado, M. & Torres, R. (Eds.). The Critical Pedagogy Reader (2nd edition). New York: Routledge. (61–83). Mello, R. R. de (2012). From Constructivism to Dialogism in the Classroom. Theory and Learning Environments. International Journal of Educational Psychology, 1(2), 127–152. http://dx.doi.org/10.4471/ijep.2012.08 Molina, S. (2015). Alba, a Girl Who Successfully Overcomes Barriers of Intellectual Disability Through Dialogic Literary Gatherings. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(10), 927–933. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1177/1077800415611690 Morlà, T. (2015). Comunidades de Aprendizaje, un Sueño que hace más de 35 años que Transforma Realidades. Social and Education History, 4(2), 137–162. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.17583/hse.2015.1459 Oliver, E., Soler, M., de Botton, L., & Merrill, B. (2011). Cultural Intelligence to Overcome Educational Exclusion. Qualitative Inquiry, 17(3), 267–276. http://dx.doi. org/10.1177/1077800410397805 Padrós, M., García, R., de Mello, R., & Molina, S. (2011). Contrasting Scientific Knowledge with Knowledge from the Lifeworld: The Dialogic Inclusion Contract. Qualitative Inquiry, 17(3), 304–312. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1177/1077800410397809 Racionero, S., & Padrós, M. (2010). The Dialogic Turn in Educational Psychology. Journal of Psychodidactics, 15(2), 143–162. Racionero, S., & Valls, R. (2007). ‘Dialogic Learning: A Communicative Approach to Teaching and Learning’. In: Kincheloe, J. & Horn, R. (Eds.). The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology. Vol. 3. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishers. (548–557). Ramis, M., & Krastina, L. (2010). Cultural Intelligence in the School. Revista De Psicodidáctica, 15(2), 239–252. http://dx.doi.org/10.1387/ RevPsicodidact.818 Roca, E., Gómez, A., & Burgués, A. (2015). Luisa, Transforming Personal Visions to Ensure Better Education for All Children. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(10), 843–850. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1177/1077800415614026

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Ruiz, L. (2015). Transforming the Vision of Classic Literature: A Personal Narrative of a Researcher. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(10), 899–905. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/ 1077800415614029 Sánchez, M. (1999). Voices Inside Schools – La Verneda-Sant Martí: A School where People Dare to Dream. Harvard Educational Review, 69(3), 320–336. Shor, I. (2009). ‘What is Critical Literacy?’. In: Darder, A., Baltonado, M. & Torres, R. (Eds.). The Critical Pedagogy Reader (2nd edition). New York: Routledge. (282–304). Soler-Gallart, M. (2001). Dialogic reading: A new understanding of the reading event.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Education. Valls, R., & Kyriakides, L. (2013). The Power of Interactive Groups: How Diversity of Adults Volunteering in Classroom Groups Can Promote Inclusion and Success for Children of Vulnerable Minority Ethnic Populations. Cambridge Journal of Education, 43(1), 17– 3 3 .  h t t p : / / d x . d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1 0 8 0 / 0 3 0 5 7 64X.2012.749213 Villardón-Gallego, L., García-Carrión, R., YáñezMarquina, L., & Estévez, A. (2018). Impact of the Interactive Learning Environments in Children’s Prosocial Behavior. Sustainability, 10(7), 2138. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/su10072138

SECTION VIII

Communities and Activism Michael B. MacDonald

Knowledge is both a public good and a location of power, and educators work at the nexus of these tensions. The birth of public education is entangled with the emergence of the nation state and its interest in creating an educated citizenry. The priorities of a nation could not be left in the hands of private education whether that was expensive secular academies, religious schooling, or family education. Free (or mostly free) education, a system of government tax funded schools, and teacher training was developed as a supportive framework for this system. The focus of the school system, as it was a product of the Enlightenment, was the development of the individual student released from, as Immanuel Kant put it, ‘his self-incurred tutelage’. Enlightenment as individual freedom developed as a kind of necessary subjectivity for the development of the triad of liberal democracy, capitalism, and public education. This triad is of course, modernity.

As Immanuel Wallerstein (1983) and many others (Harvey, 2005) have explained, modernity developed Atlantic trading routes, racist systems of exploitation and slavery – what Paul Gilroy called ‘The Black Atlantic’ (1993) – the colonization of Indigenous people of North and South America, and a global system of cultural and economic colonization still unfolding in the present (Berardi, 2009, 2011). Enlightenment, freedom, and wealth collection was reserved for European states and after the second world war was re-centered in America. In this unfolding system of modernity only these subjectivities mattered. The ‘barbarians’ outside of modernity had no subjectivity worth recognizing; only the control of their bodies fitted to capitalist exploitation mattered. Walter Mignolo (2000, 2011) has recognized that ‘the expansion of Western capitalism implied the expansion of Western epistemology in all its ramifications’ (2002: 59), no modernity without its darker side, coloniality.

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Mignolo argues that modernity/coloniality are the two pillars of Western Civilization and are supported by a matrix of knowledge that includes Christian theology as well as secular science, economics, and philosophy that produce knowledge self-justifying simultaneously of knowledge production: ‘colonial matrix of power’. The struggle against this system, what he calls ‘decoloniality’, means to delink (to detach) in order to engage in epistemic reconstitution. It is here that I understand Paulo Freire’s contribution (1970, 2001, 2010), the foundation for critical pedagogy, and the framework of critical community praxis. The founding situation Freire provides in Education for a Critical Consciousness (2010) is useful for thinking about critical pedagogy as a work of decoloniality, not postcolonialism or decolonization, for instance. Decoloniality works towards reconstitution/reemergence, resurgence of epistemological systems marked as ‘outside’ and therefore ‘less than’ EuroAmerican ways of doing/being. This inequality is the colonial difference. Freire was tasked with teaching non-­literate Brazilians to read and write Portuguese as part of a national program of modernization. He recognized that nonliteracy from the perspective of the state (illiteracy) would exclude nonliterate communities from the world economy, but he simultaneously recognized that the pedagogical practices of modernity/coloniality enacted epistemic violence that would do further social damage to the communities in which he taught. The solution he developed was to teach literacy as a technology, a particular sort of tool that can be used for particular ends and enacted within already existing community epistemic frameworks. The first goal was anthropological, to understand how a community learns and then work within this system to teach literacy. The political consequence, he theorized, was to activate what might be now called decoloniality. The context of colonization must be recognized by the teacher. The community does not have to be taught what this means, they have lived its horrors. What has to occur is the transformation of learning

into a system that empowers a resurgence in community-based ways of learning/being. Freire’s was an early attempt that did not have the benefit of the elaboration of modernity/coloniality or of decoloniality as it has been developed, and therefore is not a roadmap or a fixed method so much as it is a starting place. While Freire outlined a method in the particular and then later more general macro-sociological models of education, there is little in his work that theorizes the operations of epistemic violence, or the capture of subjectivity. It is necessary to look further for this in two directions, I think. The first is to look further into critical theory that had developed since the structuralist framework he utilized. There is much in Michel Foucault’s theories of power and his later aesthetics of the self that might provide a useful starting point for theorizing the practice of subjective capture within modernity/coloniality. And because modernity/coloniality is not a fixed historical period but an unfolding, the philosophical analysis that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari called Integrated World Capitalism can prove useful in understanding the operation of capitalism on the deterritorialization of subjectivities from what they call ‘the full body of the earth’. More recently Rosi Braidotti and Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi have, each in their own ways, undertaken a critical analysis of the humanist-capitalist project illustrating the ways human autonomy is becoming automated by technological processes of subjective enunciation. These processes are the automation of modernity/ coloniality that results in the speeding up of social life/subjective capture. The second area of development is to build the critical pedagogical project in partnership or allyship with projects of decoloniality. While there is much in Freire’s work that can be critiqued (see bell hooks, 1994, 2003, 2010), there is nonetheless a starting point for the restructuring of educational projects in line with the needs of communities. Critical community praxis contributes to this part of the project. While the critique of modernity/

COMMUNITIES AND ACTIVISM

coloniality is a necessary component for understanding the broader context, practices of decoloniality must happen at the local level, in and with communities. While modernity/ coloniality worked to reshape (destroy) the particularities of community so that they fall in line with the universals of humanism, decoloniality works towards epistemic reconstitution. These reconstitutive projects will take many forms, and will likely engage in many more forms of educational experiments. It would be naïve for us to imagine that decoloniality emerges simply from the observation of its practices; instead the real work, the praxis, is the emergence of alternative subjectivities; alternative, that is, from the subjectivities produced by modernity/coloniality. Writing from Canada during a period of Indigenous resurgence, I am witness to the projects undertaken by Indigenous activists and community leaders. The educational programs that are being developed in many parts of Canada are helping Indigenous youth find an Indigenous voice. But at the same time, I am witness to a Canadian federal government claiming to recognize historic treaty obligations while simultaneously supporting energy policies that will negatively impact the traditional homelands Indigenous leaders are working to develop for their communities. This is only one example of Indigenous resurgence happening around the world. The case studies found in this section explore the complex political contexts where educators dedicated to critical community praxis find themselves. Perhaps the most difficult part of decoloniality is the necessity for local development of methods. Sharing experiments so that others may be able to build upon parts that make sense is an aim of this section, but inspiration may also be the most important take away from these chapters. As we know, praxis is the application of theory to practice,

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and it is our hope that the reader will find clues in this section for how to undertake educational projects for the good of their home communities.

REFRENCES Berardi, F. ‘Bifo’. 2009. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e). Berardi, F. ‘Bifo’. 2011. After the Future. Edinburgh, Scotland: AK Press. Freire, P. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). New York: Continuum. Freire, P. 2001. Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Freire, P. 2010. Education for a Critical Consciousness. New York: Continuum. Gilroy, P. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvey, D. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. hooks, b. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. hooks, b. 2003. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Routledge. hooks, b. 2010. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. New York: Routledge. Mignolo, W. D. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mignolo, W. D. 2002. ‘The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference’. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101: 1, Winter: 57–96. Mignolo, W. D. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wallerstein, I. 1983/2011. Historical Capitalism. New York: Verso.

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77 Moving from Individual Consciousness Raising to Critical Community Building Praxis Silvia Cristina Bettez and Cristina Maria Dominguez

INTRODUCTION In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire (2000: 169) writes that no one can ‘unveil the world for another’. He asserts that while ‘one Subject may initiate the unveiling’, all involved ‘must also become Subjects of this act’ (Freire, 2000: 169). Critical pedagogy is understood then as ‘co-intentional education’, where teachers and learners are subjects ‘not only in the task of unveiling’ the social world and their place in it and ‘coming to know it critically’, but also ‘in the task of re-creating that knowledge’ (Freire, 2000: 69), in efforts towards liberation for all. At the heart of the struggle for liberation through education for critical consciousness then is this dynamic where people come and become together as ‘co-subjects’ (Freire, 2000: 169). But what does this ‘authentic praxis’ (Freire, 2000: 169) in which people are ‘co-subjects’ (2000: 169) in and through critical consciousness raising and engagement and, more generally, critical pedagogy, look, feel, and

move like? How do we create and sustain this with our students? While we agree that critical pedagogy is not about ‘an a priori method that simply can be applied regardless of context’ (Giroux, 2011: 4), we believe that the individually focused philosophical orientations and practical approaches present in the existing literature severely limit us in pursuing its aim. Believing that ‘the struggle for liberation is a common task’ (Freire, 2000: 176), we are called to, as hooks (2010: 43) says, ‘break with the notion that our experience of gaining knowledge is private, individualistic and competitive’ and thus offer critical community building as a praxis orientation for critical pedagogy. In the first half of the chapter we define critical pedagogy and critical consciousness. We then explore the exigent literature on critical pedagogy and the way in which the emphasis on students as individuals, and critical consciousness as an individual endeavor, unintentionally limits the efforts of critical educators to foster and sustain critically and

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collectively conscious liberatory educational spaces. We then briefly note the work of other scholars who have made similar critiques, adding to them our assertion that a critical community building praxis orientation to critical pedagogy is practicing a prefigurative politic1 as it not only provides the conditions for those involved to re-imagine and re-write the world but also, through the praxis orientation itself, allows those involved to begin to bring such a world to life. In the second half of the chapter we discuss what a critical community building praxis orientation can offer critical pedagogy. In this section we define and discuss critical community building praxis and share the work by which it is informed. We also offer four critical community building practices: (a) configuring the space for maximum interaction among community members, (b) engaging in intentional welcoming/connecting/being present with each other’s practices, (c) creating community commitments, and (d) promoting mind, body, spirit connection in relationships through collective arts-based activities and story sharing. Lastly, within the discussion of each practice, we share practical examples from our teaching experiences.

But, as Giroux explains, critical pedagogy ‘does more than emphasize the importance of critical analysis and moral judgements’ (Giroux, 2011: 3); it moves beyond critique of the ways in which socio-cultural, economic and political power is inequitably distributed via society’s social systems and structures, calling teachers and students to forge ‘strong connections between knowledge and the ability to take constructive action’ (2011: 165). Critical pedagogy involves exploring and implementing tools, strategies, and ways of being/moving in the world with others that ‘unsettle common sense assumptions, theorize matters of self and social agency’ (Giroux, 2011: 3) and ‘engage the world as an object of both critical analysis and hopeful transformation’ (Giroux, 2011: 14). According to Freire (2000), who most view as the father of critical pedagogy, it is this development of critical consciousness that creates the capacity for learners ‘to intervene, to recreate, to transform’ the world (2000: 66). Thus, the primary aim of critical pedagogy is to raise a critical consciousness, through liberatory praxis, to increase social justice for all.

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AIMS

CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Extending critical theory’s concern with ‘matters of distribution of power and principles of social control’ (Davis et  al., 2015: 146), critical pedagogy engages teachers and students in co-creating learning spaces ‘where the complexity of knowledge, culture, values and social issues can be explored in open and critical dialogue’ (Giroux, 2011: 14). In educational spaces where critical pedagogy is at work, teachers and students ‘uncover what is usually allowed to be tacit or implicit, such as forgotten histories, concealed power structures, unstated purposes, hidden ideological leanings, and no-longerdefensible beliefs’ (Davis et al., 2015: 163).

According to Freire, one of the gravest obstacles ‘to the achievement of liberation’ is the way in which ‘oppressive reality absorbs those within it’ and ‘thereby acts to submerge human beings’ consciousness’ (2001: 51). For Freire, raising critical consciousness enables people to ‘confront reality critically’, and is therefore a key component of the reflection portion of the ‘reflection and action’ liberatory praxis needed to transform the world (2000: 52, 51). Viewing reflection and action as interdependent processes tethered together as a praxis, Freire understood raising critical consciousness as an ongoing process of developing and

MOVING FROM INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING TO CRITICAL COMMUNITY BUILDING PRAXIS

sustaining the capacity ‘to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and take action against the oppressive elements of reality’ (2000: 35, n.1). Critical consciousness is therefore not merely an ‘intellectual’ practice, it necessarily involves ‘action’ (Freire, 2000: 65) that is interdependently related to theory and is therefore ‘not merely an occupation but also preoccupation’ (Freire, 2000: 53). Through raising and engaging critical consciousness, people come to unveil and confront oppressive reality critically, in order to simultaneously examine and act upon it (Freire, 2000: 52).

Challenging the Limiting Emphasis on Individual Critical Consciousness Raising Freire tells us that ‘political action on the side of the oppressed must be pedagogical action in the authentic sense of the word, and, therefore action with the oppressed’ (2000: 66, emphasis in original). He emphasizes that, ‘while no one liberates himself by his own efforts alone, neither is he liberated by others’ (2000: 66). Further, Freire (2000: 85) contends that the struggle for liberation, ‘the pursuit of full humanity… cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity’. According to Freire (2000: 85–6), if we attempt ‘to be more human, individualistically’ we are engaging ‘egotistically’ which is, in and of itself, ‘a form of dehumanization’. In these lines and in many others written by Freire (2000) and those who have continued and expanded his work, scholars acknowledge that engaging critical consciousness is a relational, even a collective, endeavor, one with solidarity and community at its core. However, in our view, what is limiting is that, despite this recognition, there continues to be an overwhelming emphasis present in the literature on critical pedagogical praxis on the individual and individual critical consciousness raising. For example, Aronowitz (2001),

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in his introduction to Freire’s Pedagogy of Freedom, states that the critical educational project that Freire has called us to points us towards ‘collective solutions’ and ‘individual responsibility for intervening’ (2001: 17). In the foreword to Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times, he writes that Freire’s critical literacy, ‘the ability to read and write, and to examine texts as well as the circumstances of one’s life’, is about preparing students ‘for a self-managed life’ (Aronowitz, 2009: ix). According to Aronowitz (2001), in critical literacy, students engage in ‘self-reflection’ and through this way of knowing thyself, he argues, they ‘become aware of the forces that have hitherto ruled their lives and especially shaped their consciousness’ (2009: ix). Even when he acknowledges that critical pedagogy involves ‘students in the process of learning’, his emphasis remains on students as individuals, describing the critical pedagogical classroom as a place of promise for ‘a process of self-emancipation’ (Aronowitz, 2009: x). We see a similar approach to the critical pedagogical project in Giroux’s (2011) work. While there is an acknowledgement of the ‘individual’ as ‘social’, critical pedagogy and critical pedagogical educational spaces, particularly those that take up ‘civic education’, are viewed primarily as public spaces that make it possible for ‘individuals to meet, address public interests, engage pressing social issues, and participate collectively in shaping public policy’ (2011: 143). Like Aronowitz (2009), Giroux (2011) views critical pedagogy as ‘a responsible and selfreflective practice’ (2011: 6). As such, educators of critical pedagogy are charged with the central task of providing a space where ‘conditions that expand the capacities of students to think critically’ are present so that they can learn to ‘take risks, act in socially responsible ways, and connect private issues with larger public considerations’ (Giroux, 2011: 6). In short, in Giroux’s (2011) perspective critical pedagogy involves foregrounding ‘a struggle over identities, modes of agency, and those maps of meaning’ in such a way that enables

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students to ‘define who they are and how they relate to others’ (2011: 6). Individual consciousness raising and engagement is therefore at the crux of the Girouxian critical pedagogical project. McLaren (2016), more than Giroux (2011), recognizes and emphasizes an understanding of people as beings who are always in social relations, beings always situated in relation to others and with others with/in structures. This is not only present in his understanding of power dynamics, societal structures and the workings of the social–cultural–political world, but also in his approach to and visions of critical pedagogical praxis. For example, he asserts that, as critical educators, we must see ourselves as having responsibility ‘not only for how we act individually in society but also for the system in which we participate and within which our subjectivities are fashioned in conditions not of our own making’ (McLaren, 2016: 127). He even challenges Aronowitz’s (1987) understanding of empowerment as ‘the process of appreciating and loving oneself’ (1987: 17–18, as cited in McLaren, 2016: 149), arguing that ‘empowerment means more than self-confirmation’ (McLaren, 2016: 149). However, in other moments in Life In Schools, McLaren (2016) stresses the individual, stating that the critical pedagogical project should be an educational project that helps ‘create the conditions for student self-determination in the larger society’ (2016: 147). Individual agency is emphasized. In short, while critical pedagogical scholars Aronowitz (2009), Giroux (2011) and McLaren (2016) acknowledge social responsibility, public considerations and the social and structural embeddedness of ‘individuals’, the understanding of critical pedagogical praxis put forth by them is one through which students come to think, act and connect as individuals, socially connected individuals but individuals nonetheless. Said another way, the aim of critical pedagogy, if we follow these scholars, is to raise and engage the consciousness of a collection of individual ‘critical agents’ (Giroux,

2011: 6), who, through conscientization, may come to be ‘responsive to moral and political problems of their time and recognize the importance of organized collective struggles’ (Giroux, 2011: 6). In reviewing this literature, we are called to question this emphasis on the individual. Are the capacities, responsibilities, determinations and reflexivities these scholars speak of truly individual and self-oriented? Should these aspects of being, living and moving in the world be conceived of and approached as individual in our pursuit of collective liberation? More specifically, in the work of critical pedagogy, should we be thinking of ourselves and experiencing ourselves and others as ‘individuals meeting’? Should we be viewing and taking up collective struggle as individual critical agents or critical community members? This might seem like semantics but as critical pedagogues we know that language is power (Macedo, 2006) and that there is a difference in these ways of thinking about and taking up the work of critical pedagogy. Many may be reading this thinking, ‘don’t we have individual responsibilities and take individual actions?’ We recognize that many of us, especially those of us living and working in the US and Western European context, and especially those of us more dominantly positioned2, may have come to see and even experience ourselves as individuals, and as a result may think of responsibilities and actions as taken up individually. But we wish to challenge this way of seeing, being and moving in the world, particularly as it relates to critical pedagogical praxis. We believe that we constrain ourselves and our students when we emphasize and privilege, or at the very least stress, the view of people as individual actors/agents/citizens in the work of critical pedagogy. When we view ourselves as separate beings who come into and out of social relations in this work, we limit connections with other human beings, particularly across lines of difference. And as such, the raising and engaging of critical consciousness, when

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taken up as an individual endeavor, while potentially increasing freedom and liberation for that individual, may (unintentionally) inhibit liberation for others. We can increase the breadth and depth of our work if we move towards seeing and treating ourselves and others as relational. We assert that a critical community building praxis orientation to critical pedagogical work may be more likely to increase transformation for social justice. Therefore, we argue that just as our work in critical pedagogy involves ‘people and not things’ (Freire, 2001: 128), our work in critical pedagogy ‘is with people’ (2001: 127) not persons; it is with relationships and communities, interdependent community members not independent individuals. Our work builds with that of other scholars (Ellsworth, 1989; Summers-Effler, 2002) who challenge the individualistic focus in critical pedagogy to raise critical consciousness. We believe that this individualistic focus on critical consciousness is misleading as ‘individual and organizational critical consciousness is not attainable through individual self-reflection; it requires sharing and exploring experiences with others, through conversations, and what Mercer (2000) calls ‘“interthinking” (thinking together)’ (Evans et al., 2014: 6). We agree with Carmen et al. (2015) who assert that much critical consciousness work ‘reproduces individualistic and cognitive approaches … focusing on the lone subject’s development as an individual, agential, civic actor’ (2015: 828). Such frameworks not only ‘ignore the historic and sustained colonial power dynamics and historicity that act in and through communities in collective, dialectical ways’ (Carmen et al., 2015: 828), but also stunt what is made possible through critical pedagogical work, particularly within and through relations that cross lines of power difference. Thus, rather than take up a view of participants in the critical pedagogical classroom as agents, a word and role that has solo connotations at best and rugged individualistic undertones at worst, we think it best to work with

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the people of the critical pedagogical classroom as critical community members. As critical community members, people engage consciousness together, seeing themselves as always in relation with others (both in and outside the classroom), and therefore collectively responsible for the moral and political problems ‘of their time’ (Giroux, 2011: 7). Understanding students and teachers alike in the critical pedagogical classroom as members of a critical community, raising and engaging collective critical consciousness in the pursuit of social justice increases possibilities for collective healing, a ‘tending to the wounds, injuries and traumas of historic and recent colonial projects’ and the co-creation and sustaining of a space where critical community members together ‘imagine how to rewrite and reconstitute those (racial, gender, sexuality, dis/ability) surrounding, asymmetric power dynamics’ (Carmen et  al., 2015: 841–2). What’s more, as we will explore in the sections below, critical community building practices embody a prefigurative politic in that critical community members, through their building and sustaining of community, not only imagine, rewrite and reconstitute power relations, but bring to life those relations through the process of critical community building, furthering a movement towards building and sustaining a beloved community and thus creating the world we want to live in.

EMPHASIZING COMMUNITY BUILDING IN CRITICAL PEDAGOGY As evidenced in the previous sections, we see that discussions of community are often absent in literature on critical pedagogy. When community is mentioned, it is often cursory, with little to no mention on how to engage in/ as community. Here are some patterns we noticed when community is invoked in the critical pedagogy literature. First, the focus is most often on the relationship, the sense of community, developed between the teacher

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and (one) student or between the teacher and the students, rather than between all in the classroom (Freire, 2000; Giroux, 2011; McLaren, 2016). Second, often an emphasis is put on the ‘dialogue’, (Freire, 2000; Giroux, 2011; McLaren, 2016) and although dialogue is extremely important for learning in a community, creating community (and understanding barriers to community) goes beyond dialogue to include non-verbal communication, the structure of a space, the emotions present and the emphasis (or lack thereof) on the well-being of the whole. Thus, in this chapter, we build upon the work of the few foundational scholars (Freire, 2011; Kincheloe, 2007) writing about community as it relates to critical pedagogy, incorporating and building upon the work of feminist and/or scholars of color (Anzaldúa, 2002, 2012; Boler, 1999, 2004; Brock, 2005; hooks, 1994, 2003, 2010; Rendón, 2009) and scholars writing about community (Block, 2008; Renner, 2009; Summers-Effler, 2002) to implore critical pedagogues to centralize critical community building in critical pedagogy praxis. For the remainder of this chapter we will (a) define critical community building and (b) articulate critical community building practices, based upon our work as reflexive educators and incorporating the work of queer, feminist and/or scholars of color that may not always be recognized as operating explicitly within the discipline of ‘critical pedagogy’.

Definition of Critical Community Building Critical community building developed out of my (Silvia’s) work in social justice pedagogy (Bettez, 2011a, 2011b; Bettez and Hytten, 2013). In that work I argue that critical community building is an essential component of social justice activist teaching. Due to the often emotionally taxing nature of engaging in education for social justice (Boler, 2004; hooks, 1994; Kumashiro,

2004), students and faculty need support networks to sustain them (Darder, 2002: 145) in their efforts to think and act upon the world for transformation (Freire, 2001). Furthermore, as mentioned previously, critical pedagogy work is with interdependent members of communities, not independent individuals. The concept of critical community building combines various scholars’ conceptions of community (Block, 2008; Fendler, 2006; Hall, 2007; Pharr, 2010) with critical theorists’ (Hinchey, 1998; Kincheloe, 2007) definitions of ‘critical’. Critical communities are ‘interconnected, porously bordered, shifting webs of people who through dialogue, active listening, and critical question posing, assist each other in critically thinking through issues of power, oppression, and privilege’ (Bettez, 2011b: 10).

What Critical Community Pedagogical Practices Can Offer We believe a critical community orientation to critical pedagogy work can enhance the possibilities of creating transformation for liberation of all people. Wallin-Ruschman (2018) in her work on the relational dimensions of critical consciousness (CC) development explains that feminists have critiqued the critical consciousness literature, which ‘has been shaped by a masculinist overemphasis on rationality and individuality’ (2018: 3). She states: One area of bias centers on the tendency to privilege cognitive over emotional processes and to position the two aspects of mental life in opposition to one another, with emotion framed as not only feminine but also problematic. The SPCHC [socio-political-cultural historical consciousness] model seeks to integrate emotions and relationality as both component parts of CC and as factors driving CC development. (2018: 3)

We agree with this critique. Our critical community building pedagogy orientation is in alignment with the SPCHC model as we seek

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to ‘integrate emotions and relationality as both component parts of CC and as factors driving CC development’ (Wallin-Ruschman, 2018: 3). Her work builds upon the work of Summers-Effler (2002), who argues that emotional energy and hope are needed to enact social change and that there is an intertwined interaction between the two that occurs within and supports community. She emphasizes the importance of working in solidarity, stating that in weighing opportunities for maximizing emotional energy against risks to emotional energy, the experience of group solidarity can create enough emotional energy to inspire people to willingly take risks for the purpose of creating change. Consciousness and the willingness to take risks for change happen in groups of two or more with access to enough emotional energy to create hope. (Summers-Effler, 2002: 55)

Summers-Effler notes here that group solidarity inspires hope, thereby increasing the possibilities for risk-taking in service of social justice. We appreciate and build upon the arguments of Wallin-Ruschman (2018) and Summers-Effler (2002) for communityand solidarity-oriented work explicating how community building practices can be implemented and experienced in critical pedagogy classrooms.

CRITICAL COMMUNITY BUILDING PRAXIS Although more recent literature on critical pedagogy, critical consciousness and sociopolitical-cultural historical consciousness (Carmen et al., 2015; Summers-Effler, 2002; Wallin-Ruschman, 2018) speaks to the importance of a community orientation, there is limited detail in that work about how to engage and create community. Thus, here we provide details about potential critical community building pedagogical practices that we believe could enhance the work of critical pedagogues. These practices come from

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(a) our lived experience (Collins, 1999; Delgado-Bernal, 2002) as educators and learners and (b) the work of scholars of color, mostly feminist, and White, feminist, queer scholars who are not necessarily situated in the field of critical pedagogy.

Positionality Influences We are both educators actively engaged in critically reflexive practice. As such, our positionalities – ‘the combination of social status groups to which one belongs (such as race, class, gender, and sexuality) and one’s personal experience (understanding that experience is always individually interpreted, and it is the interpretation that gives an experience meaning)’ (Bettez, 2015: 934) – matter. We provide brief overviews of the aspects of our positionalities that we feel most influence our pedagogical praxis. Author 1: I teach in a cultural foundations graduate program and previously taught undergraduate students. Before attending graduate school, I was trained as a community educator by mentors and learned through doing. My undergraduate degree is in sociology and women’s studies, contributing to a feminist, group-relations foundational perspective that carries into my pedagogical work. One of my primary graduate school instructors was a Black woman scholar/artist (Hanley, 2017) who advocated for teaching social justice through a critical multicultural, arts and aesthetic, women-of-color-focused perspective. As a queer, cisgender, light-skinned, mixed, bicultural, bilingual Latina who often did well in school, but also had significant academic struggles, learning (and teaching) has always been an embodied, visceral, not-just-cognitive experience. Central to all my work is a focus on increasing intercultural understanding and promoting social justice. Author 2: I teach Women’s Studies courses at a historically Black women’s college and previously taught Women’s Studies at state universities and community

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colleges. Beginning in my undergraduate years and continuing on in a master’s program in Women’s Studies, I was introduced to and subsequently shaped by the work of women of color, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, queer and trans*3 feminists committed to intersectional, interdisciplinary, transnational liberation work. As a White anti-racist, queer feminist scholar and educator, my work as a pedagogue is done to honor these ancestors and elders as well as those beside me, behind me and those yet to come. Answering the call of Chicana feminist Lara (2002) in her piece ‘Healing Sueños for Academia’, through my teaching I work to co-create and hold space for a collective healing of the fragmentalization of the mind, body and spirit and the individual from the community to make possible communal consciousness raising and engagement to further our collective learning, relating and living for social justice in the pursuit of collective liberation for all. Our social identities, embodied experiences as educators, lived knowledge and formal and informal educational training impact our critical community building orientation. Having both taught and been trained in women’s studies, we know that feminist, women-of-color scholars influence our values and philosophy of community building. It was not until attending graduate school, and sometimes only during practice of teaching itself, that connections to particular theoretical/pedagogical orientations from the literature became apparent to us, and sometimes those links – although literature/theoretical influences are present – are not clear. Our internalized lived experience meshes with the writings we love – Gloria Anzaldúa, Laura Rendón, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Chandra Mohanty, Adrienne Rich, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Mab Segrest – influencing how we make sense of the world and engage in our pedagogical praxis. Furthermore, as we work together to articulate our critical community building praxis, our ideas intertwine and grow through our collaborative writing

process. It is from this messy, iterative, fluid, multi-interpreted experience that we offer the following critical community building practices.

Critical Community Building Practices We offer details of four critical community building practices: (a) configuring the space for maximum interaction among community members, (b) engaging in intentional welcoming/connecting/being present practices, (c) creating community commitments, and (d) promoting mind, body, spirit connection in relationships through collective arts-based activities and story sharing. These practices decenter the traditional teacher as knowledge producer/student as learner hierarchy and instead value what each community member has to offer as educators and learners. The examples we give are situated within higher education; however, many of these can be and have been (by our colleagues and students) translated into K-12 and other nontraditional education spaces. Configuring the physical space. Although, as educators, we may not always have much control over the physical space in which we engage in critical pedagogy, the physical space impacts the potential for community building. Traditional classroom configurations with a teacher (desk) at the head of the classroom and student desks in rows facing the teacher inhibit community building. We have found that configuration of desks with chairs, and space between people, matters. If confined to a traditional classroom, at a minimum, we suggest putting desks and chairs in a circle with the teacher as a part of that circle. If access to technology is needed, a U-shape works well too. In situations where desks cannot be moved, students can be asked to stand up and create circles, or turn around in chairs; of course, attention to and accommodations for possible mobility issues must always be kept in mind.

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For highly charged issues, or interactions in which heightened active listening is helpful, we have found that removing desks (or any other objects between people) aids in increasing the intimacy between community members. We have moved desks to the periphery of the room and created circles of just chairs, with chairs practically touching (often this is all the actual space allows). If the energy in the room is heavy, creating two rows of chairs facing each other with a desk in between and having people switch dialogue partners every 2–4 minutes, with engaging question prompts, can decrease anxiety about sharing and raise the energy among the group. We have both, at times, taken our classes outside. Doing this automatically removes desks and encourages new seating configurations between community members. With adult students, smaller class sizes and enough advance notice, arrangements can be made to meet in new, distinct spaces, such as coffee shops, museum conference rooms, libraries, public parks, even a (i.e. the teacher’s) home. Intentional welcoming. To facilitate community building, educators need to be intentional in welcoming everyone. Gestures, rituals and activities can be put in place to set a tone of welcoming, not only by the educator to the students, but also between students. Creating a welcoming, open space can also be modeled by the educator through personalstory sharing. Here we include a few actions we take related to beginning of semester, and everyday, welcoming gestures. Critical pedagogy researchers often remark on the importance of building relationships and demonstrating care for students. On the first day of class, we share personal information about who we are and why we teach what we teach and invite students to share about themselves and why they choose to learn in our classes. We also have students write on index cards on the first day, ‘Anything that would be helpful for me to know in working with you’. We have received comments like, ‘i have 3 small children; i have a very sick

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mom; i commute 1.5 hours; it’s my first year of grad school; i have a disability; i’m often on call and may need to answer my phone; i’m very shy’. This mere act demonstrates a desire to know each community member and respond to their needs. Also, as they introduce themselves on the first day, students are invited to share anything they wish with the community as a whole that would be helpful in working with each other. Although these first-day practices are important, so is continuing the welcoming, working-together, intention-setting behavior. A few practices we have found useful include asking ‘how are you?’, sharing music, and meditation. At the beginning of class, students can be encouraged to turn to someone next to them and ask, ‘how are you?’ (Wah, 2014). After creating space for students to share one-on-one, we often ask, ‘is there anything anyone wants to share with the class that you would like us to know and/or would help us to best work with you today?’ Rarely do people share in large groups, but sometimes people share good news, creating a sense of celebration with community. Other times people will say things like, ‘I just want you to know, if I seem distant or uninterested, it’s because I’m having a really hard day (or, ‘I’m not feeling well’, or ‘I have a sick kid’, etc.), it’s not you’. This reminds us all that we bring our whole selves into the classroom; bodies and emotions matter. One practice that I (Silvia) have implemented in the past few years is to have students share music at the beginning of class. On the first day students are told about it, invited to sign up on a google document, and either I or one other person (I contacted in advance) share a song to model how it is done. Students can share any music that is meaningful to them for a maximum of four minutes and can share anything they want to about the song and why it matters to them for a maximum of four minutes. This takes only eight minutes of time; on evaluations students frequently comment about how much they like this sharing to build community. We both

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have also used meditation to begin classes. Silvia uses it at particularly hectic times in the semester or when she knows someone is struggling with personal issues, or she is herself and needs to center for class; Cristina has used it at the beginning of each class. These can be silent or guided (see, for example, Sharon Salzberg, breathing meditation). For students who have never meditated before, it is helpful to begin with guided meditation. This reminds us of the mind, body, spirit connection as it relates to the learning process. These are a few of our strategies for intentionally welcoming each other into the classroom learning space. The particular actions may not matter as much as the intentionality, effort and encouragement for everyone to welcome everyone, to demonstrate care and a desire to learn about, with and from each other in community. Creating community commitments. Often in classroom spaces no discussion is had about how people will work together. In K-12, typically teachers set ‘classroom rules’ that students are expected to follow. In higher education, most often assumptions are made about classroom norms, and passed along through the hidden curriculum (Anyon, 1980). Sometimes, collective ‘ground rules’ are created. In a classroom centered on critical community building, it is helpful to engage in creating collective community commitments. In my (Silvia’s) work as an educator, I have shifted from facilitating ground rules, to agreements, to community commitments. I (Cristina) have also made this shift, in part because of the experiences I had as a student community member in Silvia’s classes. With community commitments, rather than emphasizing what should or shouldn’t be done, community members instead consider simultaneously what is most helpful to them personally as learners and what is best for the well-being of the whole community of learners. As educators facilitating this, we first ask students to reflect and write about what they feel they need in order to have the best

experience in a learning environment. All comments are welcome and written for all to see, without censorship. We then invite people to dialogue about them, which suit them, which overlap, which would not be helpful. These are then discussed, added to, modified, and some removed until a full final list remains. As members of the community, we share our own thoughts as well. When complete, we ask everyone to raise their hands if they can agree to the list. If anyone does not raise their hand, discussion continues until all feel they can voluntarily commit. We find that co-creating community commitments sets the tone from day one of thinking of ourselves as existing in a community of learners who can strive to work together for the well-being of the whole. This approach shifts ‘the more individualistic nature of critical pedagogy’ and ‘urges collective action grounded in cultural understandings, experiences, and ways of knowing the world’ (Brock, 2005: 97, emphasis in original). Mind, body, spirit connections. As mentioned earlier, often critical pedagogues centralize critical consciousness development in ways that overemphasize the mind, rationality and individuality (Wallin-Ruschman, 2018). Shifting to a critical community building orientation in teaching and learning requires promoting mind, body, spirit connections. Although not predominant in much of the critical pedagogy literature, such orientations can be found in the writings of scholars grounded in combinations of feminist pedagogy (Boler, 1999; hooks, 1989, 1994, 2003, 2010), culturally responsive pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1992) and wholeness pedagogy (Brock, 2005, Rendón, 2009). We encourage critical pedagogues to consider how they/we might promote mind, body, spirit connections in teaching and learning practices. As educators, we have found two approaches particularly helpful: (a) collective arts-based activities, and (b) story sharing. In doing this work, we must recognize ‘emotions as central to the domains of cognition and morality [which] need not preclude

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intellectual rigor or critical inquiry’ (Boler, 1999: 110). Rather than dismiss, omit, or discourage emotions, we can view them as ‘a starting point for critical inquiry’ (Boler, 1999: 119). We simultaneously heed the warnings of Mohanty (1989, as cited in Boler, 1999: 129–30), to not allow invocations of emotions, particularly based on personal experience, to obscure historical and political contexts. Community members can be encouraged to share stories that require critical reflection and ‘historicized ethics’ (Boler, 1999: 183) while other community members engage in active witnessing; ‘as a witness we undertake our historical responsibilities and co-implication’ (Boler, 1999: 186). This process can enhance critical consciousness as community members are encouraged ‘to recognize what it is one doesn’t want to know, and how one has developed emotional investments to protect oneself from this knowing’ (Boler, 1999: 200). Collective arts-based activities can also encourage mind, body, spirit connections within and between community members. As learners we have found such activities to be especially impactful to our growth, and as educators we incorporate them often. We have used variations of Boal’s ‘theater of the oppressed’ techniques (Boal, 1985, 2002; Green, 2001), Rendón’s (2009) cajitas, and our own (and students’ own) individually designed creations that incorporate drawing, painting, multimedia, playwriting and performance (including reader’s theater, emceeing, role acting and dance). To give an example, I (Cristina) have usually paired music sharing (discussed above) with mindful coloring when local/global events are being felt intensely by the classroom community. When bringing this activity into the classroom, I often adopt a social justice organizing practice I have participated in in grass-roots community groups where people are invited by a facilitator to think of and/or, if they feel moved to, share out the name of those they are carrying with them in the face of what is happening who they wish

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to, in spirit, invite into the space with them. Through coloring and holding space for ourselves, each other and others while listening to music shared by each community member, we, as whole and complex beings in whole and complex relations, build community in nonverbal, holistic and artistic ways. We encourage critical pedagogues to consider and/or share how to promote mind, body, spirit connections in the classroom. Our students have commented that the modeling of this matters; we must be willing, as educators, to be vulnerable and make such connections ourselves. We can share stories about our challenges and engage in the artsbased activities with students. We acknowledge that writings about arts-based activities exist (Hanley et  al., 2013), and encourage critical pedagogues to incorporate them, considering intentionally how such practices might enhance community building. Overview. These critical community building strategies we include are by no means exhaustive. We offer here merely some possibilities in hopes that educators can see the benefits of a ‘community member’ centered, rather than ‘individual’ orientation to, critical pedagogy and will intentionally promote critical community building praxis in their teaching.

Limits We recognize that critical community building praxis has limits and comes with challenges. Educators promoting community must be willing to share power while still maintaining the role of facilitation; sometimes the lines get blurry and the work is messy. Similarly, all students (each community member) must be willing to engage with others in community, to be accountable to the group. In an increasingly neoliberal climate, not everyone is willing to think and operate as more than individuals. We have found that in classes where not all students have a commitment to social justice, promoting community building

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can be challenging. Most damaging, perhaps, are previous negative experiences between community members (such as feeling unfairly treated, not being listened to, being put down, being dismissed, etc.). We recognize and have experienced limits and challenges to critical community building praxis, yet we feel intentionally striving for critical community building is worth the work.

CONCLUSION In this chapter we assert that a critical community building praxis orientation can offer new possibilities for working towards the overall critical pedagogy aim of increased social justice. We suggest a shift in orientation from raising the critical consciousness of individuals to inspire action for social change to emphasizing how consciousness raising and social justice action happens with and through community. If we intentionally speak about our classrooms as communities, and students and teacher(s) within them as community members, then we are always foregrounding relationships and interdependence. If we believe Audre Lorde’s (2007: 132–3) adage ‘I am not free when any woman [or person] is unfree, even when her [their] shackles are very different from my own’, then we are called to consider how our lives are intertwined and to focus on being a member of a community rather than an independent individual. This kind of community-enmeshed and accountable reflection and action, we believe, could increase our chances of achieving justice for the larger human collective, rather than merely for some. Although this work should ideally occur in all aspects of our lives; it can begin, for educators and students, in our classrooms. In this chapter, we offer suggestions for critical community practices. We hope our work inspires dialogues about and actions related to critical community building within the field of critical pedagogy.

Notes  1  We understand practicing prefigurative politics as ‘removing the temporal distinction between the struggle in the present and a goal in the future; instead, the struggle and the goal, the real and the ideal, become one in the present’ (Maeckelbergh, 2011: 4).  2  As Wagner and Shahjahan (2015) assert in their article, many of us who are more dominantly positioned may find ourselves more comfortable in traditional classrooms where teachers engage learners as individuals and rely on mind-supremacist ways of teaching and learning, privileging ‘verbal interaction’, for instance, as ‘a useful means of processing information’ (2015: 249).  3  I use trans* to indicate that I am employing a expansive definition of transgender that encompasses trans identities in addition to transgender (Steinmetz, 2018), including but not limited to agender, bigender, gender nonbinary, genderfluid and gendernonconforming identities.

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Bettez, S. C. & Hytten, K. (2013). Community building in social justice work: A critical approach. Educational Studies, 49(1), 45–66. Bettez, S. C. (2015). Navigating the complexity of qualitative research in postmodern contexts: Assemblage, critical reflexivity, and communion as guides. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 28(8), 932–954. Block, P. (2008). Community: The structure of belonging. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Boal, A. (1985). Theatre of the oppressed. New York, NY: Theatre Communications Group. Boal, A. (2002). Games for actors and nonactors. London: Routledge. Boler, M. (1999). Feeling power: Emotions and education. New York, NY: Routledge. Boler, M. (2004). Teaching for hope: The ethics of shattering world views. In D. Liston & J. Garrison (Eds.), Teaching, Learning and Loving: Reclaiming Passion in Educational Practice (pp. 114–132). New York, NY: Routledge. Brock, R. (2005). Sista talk: The personal and the pedagogical. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Carmen, S. A. S., Domínguez, M., Greene, A. C., Mendoza, E., Fine, M., Neville, H. A., & Gutiérrez, K. D. (2015). Revisiting the collective in critical consciousness: Diverse sociopolitical wisdoms and ontological healing in sociopolitical development. Urban Review: Issues and Ideas in Public Education, 47(5), 824–846. Collins, P. H. (1999). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York, NY: Routledge. Darder, A. (2002). Reinventing Paulo Freire: A pedagogy of love. Boulder: CO: Westview Press. Davis, B., Sumara, D., & Luce-Kapler, R. (2015). Engaging minds: Changing teaching in complex times. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Delgado-Bernal, D. (2002). Critical race theory, Latino critical theory, and critical racedgendered epistemologies: Recognizing students of color as holders and creators of knowledge. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(1), 105–126. Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the

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repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, 59(3), 297–325. Evans, S. D., Kivell, N., Haarlammert, M., Maljhotra, K., & Rosen, A. (2014). Critical community practice: An introduction to the special section. Journal for Social Action in Counseling and Psychology, 6(1), 1–15. Fendler, L. (2006). Others and the problem of community. Curriculum Inquiry, 36(3), 303–326. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed.). New York, NY: Continuum. Freire, P. (2001). Pedagogy of freedom. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Giroux, H. A. (2011). On critical pedagogy. New York, NY: Continuum. Green, S. L. (2001). Boal and beyond: Strategies for creating community dialogue. Theater, 31(3), 47–61. Hall, D. E. (2007). The academic community: A manual for change. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Hanley, M. S. (2017). Road trip. Brownsville, TX: Anaphora Literary Press. Hanley, M. S., Noblit, G. W., Sheppard, G. L., Barone, T., & Bell, L. A. (2013). Culturally relevant arts education for social justice: A way out of no way. New York, NY: Routledge. Hinchey, P. (1998). Finding freedom in the classroom: A practical introduction to critical theory. New York, NY: Peter Lang. hooks, b. (1989). Talking back: Thinking feminist, thinking black. Boston, MA: South End Press. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York, NY: Routledge. hooks, b. (2003). Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope. New York, NY: Routledge. hooks, b. (2010). Teaching critical thinking: Practical wisdom. New York, NY: Routledge. Kincheloe, J. L. (2007). Critical Pedagogy in the Twenty-First Century: Evolution for Survival. In P. McLaren & J. L. Kincheloe (Eds.), Critical Pedagogy: Where are We Now? (pp. 9–42). Peter Lang Publishing Inc.: New York: NY. Kumashiro, K. (2004). Against common sense: Teaching and learning toward social justice. New York, NY: Routledge Falmer.

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Ladson-Billings, G. (1992). Liberatory consequences of literacy. A case for culturally relevant instruction for African American students. Journal of Negro Education, 61(3), 378–391. Lara, I. (2002). Healing sueños for academia. In G. E. Anzaldúa & A. Keating (Eds.), This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (pp. 433–438). New York, NY: Routledge. Lorde, A. (2007). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Berkley, CA: Crossing Press. Macedo, D. (2006). Literacies of power: What Americans are not allowed to know (Expanded ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Maeckelbergh, M. (2011). Doing is believing: Prefiguration as strategic practice in the alterglobalization movement. Social Movement Studies, 10(1), 1–20. Mercer, N. (2000). Words and minds: How we use language to think together. London: Routledge. McLaren, P. (2016). Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education (6th ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Pharr, S. (2010). Reflections on liberation. In M. Adams, W. J. Blumenfeld, C. R. Castañeda, H. W. Hackman, M. L. Peters, & X. Zúñiga (Eds.), Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (2nd ed.) (pp. 591–598). New York, NY: Routledge.

Rendón, L. I. (2009). Sentipensante (sensing/ thinking) pedagogy: Educating for wholeness, social justice, and liberation. Sterling, VA: Stylus. Renner, A. (2009). Teaching community, praxis, and courage: A foundations pedagogy of hope and humanization. Educational Studies, 45(1), 59–79. Steinmetz, K. (2018, April 3). The Oxford English Dictionary Added ‘Trans*.’ Here’s What the Label Means. Time. Retrieved from: https:// time.com/5211799/what-does-trans-asteriskstar-mean-dictionary/ Summers-Effler, E. (2002). The micro potential for social change: Emotion, consciousness, and social movement formation. Sociological Theory, 20(1), 41–60. Wagner, A. E., & Shahjahan, R. A. (2015). Centering embodied learning in anti-oppressive pedagogy. Teaching in Higher Education, 20(3), 244–254. Wah, L. M. (Producer). (2014). If these halls could talk [Video]. United States: StirFry Productions. Wallin-Ruschman, J. (2018). ‘I Thought It Was Just Knowledge but It’s Definitely a Lot of Guts’: Exploring Emotional and Relational Dimensions of Critical Consciousness Development. Urban Review: Issues and Ideas in Public Education, 50(1), 3–22.

78 Arab Spring as Critical Pedagogy: Activism in the Face of Death Awad Ibrahim

It’s the same kind of humiliation that takes place every day in many parts of the world – the relentless tyranny of governments that deny their citizens dignity. Only this time something different happened. After local officials refused to hear his complaints, this young man [Mohammed Bouazizzi], who had never been particularly active in politics, went to the headquarters of the provincial government, doused himself in fuel, and lit himself on fire. Barack Obama (as cited in Wright, 2015: n.p.) Freedom… begins with the recognition of a system of oppressive relations, and one’s own place in that system. The task of Critical Pedagogy is to bring members of an oppressed group to a critical consciousness of their situation as a beginning point of their liberatory praxis. Change in consciousness and concrete action are linked…; the greatest single barrier against the prospect of liberation is an ingrained, fatalistic belief in the inevitability and necessity of an unjust status quo. Burbules and Berk (1999: 47, original emphasis)

‘In order for music to free itself,’ writes Deleuze (1993: 104), ‘it will have to pass over to the other side.’ The other side ‘where territories tremble, where the structures collapse, where the ethoses get mixed up, where

a powerful song of the earth is unleashed, the great ritornelles that transmutes all the airs it carries away and makes return’. Nowhere are these boundaries collapsed, borders pushed to their limits, citizenship totally revamped and redefined, and the ‘powerful song of the earth unleashed’ than in the Global Hip-Hop Nation (GHHN) (Alim et al., 2009; Ibrahim, 2012, 2016). This is a semiotic, boundaryless and arts-based Nation that has its own ‘language’ and ways of speaking, including the spoken word, the body, the dance, the gesture, the music, graffiti and all forms of linguistic and extra-linguistic expressions. These complex semiological languages, as Roland Barthes (1983) would have called them, allow the French to speak to the Americans, the Venezuelans to the Finnish, and the Japanese to the Brazilians in ways that we are yet to fully understand; hence this chapter. Taking two examples from the Arab Spring – a rapper and a graffiti artist – I am calling for a way of conceiving Arab Spring as critical pedagogy, as a praxis of criticality

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where the language of critique goes hand in hand with the language of possibility, as activism even in the face of death.

THE HIP-HOP THAT IGNITED THE ARAB SPRING REVOLUTION As we are watching a revolution-in-themaking in Sudan (Beaumont and Salih, 2019) and witnessing the burning of Syria, one cannot help but think that the flames of protest that started on March 15, 20111 were sparked by three preceding events: first, Cairo’s Tahrir Square Revolution (started on January 25, 2011),2 second, the Tunisian Jasmine Revolution (as it was/is known in Tunisia and assumed to have started on December 17, 2010 with the act of selfimmolation of Mohammed Bouazizzi, the 26-year-old street vendor whose harassment and humiliation reached its peak when the police confiscated his only possession: his fruit and vegetable vending cart).3 However, the third event, for which I have attempted to create a genealogy elsewhere (see Ibrahim, 2016), is what concerns me in this chapter. It is a hip-hop song, and thanks to it, as we shall see, we can say: The Revolution Will Be Televised (contrary to Gil Scott-Heron’s prophetic song).4 Asen (2011) titled his hiphopdiplomacy article on the same topic: The Rap that Sparked a Revolution: El General (Tunisia). Asen uses ‘spark’ and I use ‘ignite’. For this chapter, I am using the two terms interchangeably and purposefully. Hip-hop, as we know, is not a political party, it is an artistic, cultural and musical expression and movement. Born to a large extent within the African American history and tradition, however, this artistic and musical expression and movement is deeply marinated in the political history of oppression, marginalization, and struggle (see especially Alim, 2011; Chang, 2005; Hudson et al., 2019; Perry, 2004; Rose, 1994, for the impact of the Latino and Caribbean

influence on hip-hop style and message). In this sense, hip-hop revolutionizes and makes people think and hence ‘ignite’ and ‘spark’ their desire for change. The hip-hopper in question, El Général, did exactly that. In early December 2010, just before Mohammed Bouazizzi’s self-immolation act, then a relatively unknown hip-hopper whose songs were strictly underground, quietly released a track, ‘Rais Lebled’ or ‘Mr. President’, along with a simple video on his Facebook site. No bling, no special production but a raw and angry track addressed directly to then President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Within days, it had gone viral and was on the lips of people as they defiantly went on the streets in the face of death (Asen, 2011). It was one man, one mic, and a revolutionary message: ‘Mr President … people have become like animals… We are living like dogs.’ A caveat and an explanation are in order here. As an event that is produced within a sociality, history, time and space, hip-hop does not just speak its name. Hip-hop is a testimony, an account and a witness to the historical moment in which it is born. As such, El Général’s ‘one mic’ does not just belong to him. That is to say, this couplet of one man/ one mic has to be read within a genealogy of sociality, history, time and space, where his voice and message belong as much to him as they do to other oppressed, marginalized and struggling communities (both in Tunisia and globally). ‘[T]oday,’ El Général raps, ‘I am speaking in the name of myself and all the people who are suffering in 2011.’ Clearly, El Général understood this ethics of witnessing, of speaking up and of telling, hence the song and the video, which were bold products that landed him in jail and detention for days. He was not released until he was forced to sign a statement to no longer make any political songs. As with all dictators, they bring it on themselves. Before his release, the video was picked up by a number of human rights organizations and the Global hip-hop community. It was then reposted all over the Internet.5 In imprisoning El Général, not only

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did he become well known to all in Tunisia and internationally, but ‘Rais Lebled’ became the anthem of the ‘Jasmine Revolution’, as it is/was known in Tunisia (Wright, 2011). El Général was only 21 years old. So, when Mohammed Bouazizzi set himself on fire on December 17, 2010, it was ‘Rais Lebled’ that was on people’s lips. Mr. President, today I am speaking in the name of myself and of all the people who are suffering in 2011, there are still people dying of hunger who want to work to survive, but their voice was not heard get off into the street and see, people have become like animals… You know these are words that make your eyes weep as a father does not want to hurt his children then this is a message from one of your children who is telling of his suffering we are living like dogs half of the people living in filth and drank from a cup of suffering6

The beauty is all over this text: first, in its locality (i.e. how it speaks to and in the process politicizes local social issues); second, in its deeply rooted hip-hop aesthetic, especially in being a voice for the voiceless; third, à la Public Enemy and in a typical hip-hop style, in speaking truth to power (especially in its appellation and interpellation to ‘Mr. President’); fourth and finally, in its collective voice, where one becomes a witness to the suffering of others and hence feeling the need to speak up even if it means being thrown in jail or sentenced to death (Ibrahim and Alfano, 2016). When Bouazizzi stood in front of the municipal building and set himself on fire,

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that act caught on, literally, and spread across the country and the region, into Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Syria and now Sudan. Interestingly, Asen (2011) explains, when Egypt’s revolution erupted in Tahrir Square a month after Tunisia on January 25, 2011, what was heard was not the usual Koran recitation, national anthem and ‘traditional’ poetry, but El Général’s ‘Rais Lebled’. It was now an infamous phrase: ‘People want the régime to fall’. It was the image of Bouazizzi’s selfimmolation that was burned in people’s imagination and it was El Général’s hip-hop song ‘Rais Lebled’ that was on people’s tongues first in Egypt, then Yemen, then Bahrain, then Libya, then Syria (Wright, 2015, 2011) and now Sudan (Beaumont and Salih, 2019). Around the same time, Ghosh (2011) of Time Magazine tells a very interesting story about how ‘Rais Lebled’ was taken up in Bahrain: At 6:30 p.m. on Feb. 15 [2011], as thousands of people gathered to protest against their ruler at a busy intersection in Manama, the capital of the small island nation of Bahrain, you could just about hear over the general hubbub the anthem of the young people who have shaken regimes from North Africa to the Arabian Gulf… A reedy female voice shouted out, several times, the first line of ‘Rais Lebled,’ a song written by the Tunisian rapper known as El Général. ‘Mr. President, your people are dying,’ the woman sang. Then others joined in. ‘Mr. President, your people are dying/ People are eating rubbish/ Look at what is happening/ Miseries everywhere, Mr. President/ I talk with no fear/ Although I know I will get only trouble/ I see injustice everywhere. (Ghosh, 2011: n.p.)

Interestingly, Ghosh explains, Bahrain, as it happens, doesn’t have a President; it’s ruled by a King, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa. No matter. The protesters in Bahrain knew that ‘Rais Lebled’ was the battle hymn of the Jasmine Revolution that brought down Tunisia’s dictator, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, and that it was then adopted by the demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square who toppled Hosni Mubarak. Now it had come to Bahrain, as rage against poverty and oppression swept the Arab world from west to east. It isn’t just songs that are being copied. (2011: n.p.)

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Ghosh explains further, in a nod to the Egyptians, organizers in several countries have dubbed their demonstrations Days of Rage, and the popular Tunisian chant, ‘The people want the regime to fall,’ has been taken up by protesters from Algeria to Yemen. (2011: n.p.)

A hip-hop song, it seems, can spark and ignite a revolution and El Général’s ‘Rais Lebled’ is a case in point. A hip-hop song, it is also worth noting, can be a perfect illustration of how the global is creolized, where the local and the global can and do co-exist. In doing so, it does away with boundaries; the question of the nation and its boundaries in a time of hyper-media and hyper-communication is no longer relevant. Boundaries are certainly relevant for politicians; one only needs to listen to US politicians talking about ‘the wall’ between the United States and Mexico. Yet not for hiphoppers, whose poetic intervention is making hip-hop belong as much to the Tunisian Jasmine Revolution, Cairo’s Tahrir Square and the current Syrian struggle for human dignity as it does to African Americans, Aboriginals, Latino/as and other marginalized communities in North America and across the globe (Hudson et al., 2019).

AN INTERMISSION: WHAT’S ALL THIS GOT TO DO WITH CRITICAL PEDAGOGY? If critical pedagogy is, in sum, the practice of freedom (Kincheloe, 2008), then El Général and the Arab Spring in general are examples and illustrations of critical pedagogy par excellence. Critical pedagogy requires ‘criticality’, where one is ‘moved to do something, whether that something be seeking reasons or seeking social justice’ (Burbules and Berk, 1999: 47). But to reason, interpret and reflect is not enough for critical pedagogy; one has to be willing to act as well. Indeed, the very idea of separating thinking and acting is a false and unnecessary dichotomy. Naming the world – especially naming

the world differently so that a better future can be brought into existence – is an intervention in the world. Thought and practice, for critical pedagogy, are two faces of the same coin. Paulo Freire (1970) refers to this radical space where an ‘authentic union’ between reflection and action, thought and practice happen as praxis (1970: 48). Clearly, the result of this authentic union is not always predictable and, as in the case of Mohammed Bouazizzi, the desire for praxis may even lead to death. Praxis leaves no rock unturned. It deals with changing the habits and thoughts of the individual as much as it does with institutions, histories and structures. To reach this level of radical praxis, one has to be extremely literate on the psychology of the individual and exceptionally informed on the nature of ideologies, structures and technologies that control the individual and how they think and act. We see this radical praxis in the next section with Nour Hatem Zahra: the 23-year-old Syrian graffiti artist who was well known as ‘the spray man’.7

GRAFFITI, ARAB SPRING AND THE SYRIAN TURN If El Général has the power of the word, the story of Zahra is about the power of graffiti – or arts overall, especially in a revolutionary context like Syria, a country that is struggling against tyranny and for human rights and human dignity. Zahra was a young man who understood that the alternative to not living authentically was death. So his short life was a test to what it means to put criticality and praxis into practice, how to think deeply and act passionately. Zahra started protesting in the spring of 2011 (which is no different than what we are seeing now in Sudan – see Beaumont and Salih, 2019). Back then, the opposition thought it would only take a few months to get rid of the president, as it had in Tunisia

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and Egypt. To the horror of everyone, then Syrian forces started killing protesters, detaining them, torturing them; and the people started fighting back. But in face of torture, not to say death, there was Zahra and his friends – organizing protests, hiding activists from the dreaded security forces, distributing medical supplies to those who were injured but terrified to go to a government hospital. Beside being an anti-government activist and community organizer, Zahra was also a graffiti artist. He and his friends spray-painted slogans against President Bashar Assad around the suburbs of Damascus. Then, around December 2011, Zahra got caught. Apparently one of his graffiti artist friends, who was under torture, had given up his name to his torturer. Zahra, we are told, later forgave the friend.8 Nonetheless, Zahra was jailed for 56 days. As soon as he got out of jail, he started spraypainting again. He and his friends went around spraying the suburbs of Damascus with slogans against the Syrian president. Slogans such as: ‘Down with the traitor.’ ‘To the trash heap of history.’ Pictures of the president with the word ‘pig’ scrawled underneath. Being tech-savvy, Zahra then spearheaded a Facebook initiative between April 14 and 21, 2012, which came to be known as ‘Freedom Graffiti Week’. Zahra and his friends declared this a week filled with arts performance, intellectual conversations and gatherings, civil disobedience and peaceful expression – thus putting the praxis of critical pedagogy into practice. A week later, on April 29, 2012, Zahra was at it again, jumping from one car to the next and going from one neighborhood to the next with his spray paint. His final act, according to National Public Radio (NPR), was that he sped through one of the checkpoints fearing for his life and avoiding secret security. As he did that, he was shot in the leg. Bleeding to death, Zahra’s body was stiff when it was found and his eyes were still open. According to the YouTube videos, the mourners came by the hundreds to the funeral. Most of them were young men who wore the

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latest fly gears, but primarily baseball hats and skinny jeans. Like groomsmen, they carried Zahra’s janazah (coffin) on palm fronds and danced around the ones who held his body aloft. Singing prayers for Zahra and his family, they clapped and chanted over and over again: Um elshaheed nihna eyalik [‘Mother of the martyr, we are your children’]. Then, like so many of the amateur videos coming out of Syria, YouTube footage of Zahra’s funeral just stops. The next day there is another one: another funeral, another boy covered in flowers, another video. All of these videos begin with a hand that is holding an 8½ in x 11 in (A4) paper that describes and documents the event, the date and the place. Then, they all just end. We are left to our own imagination of what’s next.

ARAB SPRING AND/AS CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: LESSONS LEARNED Combining the life story of Zahra and the story of El Général’s song ‘Rais Lebled’, there are four broad lessons learned from Arab Spring in general and these two stories in particular when read through the lens of critical pedagogy. The first major lesson is the practice of freedom. Here, it is never enough simply to focus on reforming people’s ideas and habits, however necessary, but more important to focus on challenging and transforming the institutions, histories, ideologies, structures and relations that engender distorted and oppressed situations and thinking in the first place (Giroux, 2011, 2016; McLaren and Kincheloe, 2007; Wink, 2011). Both Zahra and El Général spoke and correctly named the ills and habits of people that need to change, but they did not stop there. Most likely neither Zahra nor El Général (or Bouazizzi for that matter) ever heard about critical pedagogy. Nonetheless, they put it into practice because, as part of their practice of freedom, not only did they use their criticality to name what they saw as injustice but

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they actioned it, they did something about this injustice. They were able to see beyond and see otherwise. Second, which is a logical sequel from the first lesson, one cannot name injustice and do something about it unless one has reached a higher level of social, historical and political ‘literacy’, which Freire (1970) refers to as conscientização or consciousness. To be socially, historically and politically literate, for Freire, is to challenge the self-contempt and sense of powerlessness against injustice, poverty, oppression, and nihilism. As we saw with Zahra and El Général, both were effective in developing and practicing a sense of confidence and efficacy, a collective thought and action, and a desire to change, not only one’s self, but the oppressive circumstances of one’s social group. Here, the cultural action (rapping in the case of El Général and graffiti in the case of Zahra) is a perfect performative moment of what Freire (1970: 47) calls ‘cultural action for freedom’, which ‘is characterized by dialogue’, a dialogue whose ‘preeminent purpose is to conscientize the people’. Third, in this dialogic practice of critical pedagogy, the question of border crossing (Giroux, 2005, 2016) and working against a nationalist notion of border becomes a preeminent question, especially when it comes to global solidarity against poverty, oppression and the continuing colonization of Indigenous peoples and the so-called developing countries. The question of border is at the heart of the Global Hip-Hop Nation – this semiotic, arts-based and border-less Nation. Let me explain. The Arab Spring is phenomenologically a transnational movement, criss-crossing from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Gulf (Ibrahim, 2017). In this transnational movement (some may even say ‘revolution’ (Ben Jelloun, 2011)), two of hiphop’s elements emerge as cornerstones that help form and perform this movement. It was rapping in the case of El Général and graffiti in the case of Zahra. Both Zahra and El Général understood and learned, in turn, four lessons in relation to the dialogic practice

of border crossing: first, that ‘[i]f you wish peace [somewhere], [you have to] care for justice [everywhere]’ (Bauman, 2007: 5) and, second, one way to conscientize people to care for justice nationally and transnationally is to make them stare at and name injustice in a way that makes them see and imagine a just world. Third, in this process of conscientização, representations matter. The two artists in question were able to show people the national and transnational nature of injustice and called for global solidarity and human dignity. That is, for Zahra and El Général, ‘justice is… a planetary issue, measured and assessed by planetary comparisons’ (Bauman, 2007: 5). Injustice somewhere is injustice everywhere; and the oppression that is inflicted on people in Egypt and Tunisia is no different than the continuing marginalization of people in Bahrain. Here, fourth and finally, The human misery of distant places and remote ways of life, as well as the human profligacy of other distant places and remote ways of life, are displayed by electronic images and brought home as vividly and harrowingly, shamingly or humiliatingly, as is the distress or ostentatious prodigality of the human beings close to home during daily strolls through the town’s streets. (Bauman, 2007: 5)

Put otherwise, in a time of globalization, migration and constant movement, especially post-Internet, ‘[n]othing is truly, or can remain for long, indifferent to anything else… [n]o well-being of one place is innocent of the misery of another’ (Bauman, 2007: 6). The Iraq war was a spectacle we had watched on TV – ironically comfortably as we were dining or having a soft drink. We watched Syria burning, Afghanistan destroying, and Yemen starving. We feel helpless. There is a compression of time and space and what is happening elsewhere, in distant lands, is now sitting right in our living rooms thanks to globalized meaning-making machines (media, Internet, popular culture, TV, etc.). ‘There is nowhere one can escape to’ (2007: 6) and however indifferent one might be, the

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horrific nature of the images we watch can only give us nightmares. Be warned, this is a nightmare ready to happen. Critical pedagogy would ask: why do such situations happen in the first place and what can be done about them socially, politically, nationally and internationally? The fourth and final lesson is this: if death makes it stupid, the bigger ethical and critical pedagogy question is, how do we go on? How do we go on living after witnessing trauma? Is there a language that helps us understand what we have just witnessed? Better yet, what is language in the face of trauma if it is not another moment where language cheats us, another moment of stupification? Language, one may argue (see also Freire, 1970), cheats us, we are almost able to express what we want to say, but right at the moment, something is left over, something is there, something is purely emotional and it escapes language. This is the critical pedagogy of the leftover. For me, this is the only pedagogy that might help us at least start to conceptualize what is happening in Syria and what happened in Tunisia, a conceptualization which will become clear next. Generally speaking, the leftover is made absent. It takes a visionary to bring it to light, it takes strong poets to articulate it. For Richard Rorty (1989), strong poets do not simply write verses or simply teach. The ‘poet’ here is a broad, generic term used to refer to someone who not only has the language but also the vision to tell us something new, or invent the known in an unknown language. The strong poets, Rorty (1989) explains, are horrified at simply being ‘a copy or a replica’; s/he has the courage and audacity to engage, look for and think through the ‘blind impresses’, the gaps and the blind spots of thoughts, ideas and practices (1989: 43). The blind impresses are the difficult knowledges – problems, if you like – that society prefers not to face, be it racism, violence, oppression, sexism, xenophobia, ethno-supremacy or homophobia. In the face of formidable pressure, the strong poets will

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choose to walk through these ‘problems’, so to speak, and deal with them at the individual, national, and global level. Strong poets dare to speak and teach in the face of cynicism, budget cuts, and hopelessness. Clearly, both Zahra ‘the spray man’ and El Général ‘the rapper’ are strong poets. They had the vision, the language, and the audacity to walk through death. They are teaching us about the courage it takes to stand up for what we believe in. This courage, interestingly enough, is coming back to the metropolis of the West. The courage of Zahra and El Général is teaching us here in the West a different notion of citizenship. This is a radical notion of citizenship, a global one that is yet to be fully understood. In times like these, with vulgar and predatory capitalism and neoliberalism, on the one hand, and social media where all is available at a click of a mouse (of course, if you can afford a computer and Internet), on the other, one can only begin to question the three ‘kinds of citizens’ that Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne (2004) talked about: personally responsible, participatory, and social justice oriented. I think there is a different kind of citizenship that is developing by young, exceptionally tech-savvy, and politically committed citizens. And I do think we need to pay very close attention to these young people and pedagogically learn from how they do what they do, how they flip the script (as we say in hip-hop) and, in the process, unearth and envision a different and a better future (Ibrahim and Steinberg, 2014). For critical pedagogy, the example of the Arab Spring, particularly Zahra and El Général, is a testimony to William Pinar’s (2012) argument that the world has become a site of teaching; and I think it has always been. In most cases, McLaren and Kincheloe (2007) contend, radical pedagogy is expelled from schools. Seeing Arab Spring as a performative moment of this radical pedagogy, it is clear that critical pedagogy has gone public. For Pinar (2012), critical pedagogy has gone ‘into the streets, onto television, into the movies, on the Internet, through music,

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poetry and the visual arts, in museums, on bodies, and at the zoo’ (2012: xv). The new frontiers for critical pedagogy therefore, it seems to me, are to decipher these public spaces of the leftover and what they teach us. If studied carefully, they seem to be calling for a different type of curriculum, one where activism, thinking and acting are a necessary triangle for what it means to become fully human. However, what is being called for, the potential, as Giorgio Agamben (2000) put it, has the impotential embedded in it. That is to say, in conclusion, in times like these, where similacrum and visual representations reign strong, El Général and Zahra are challenging us to think about what might be called ‘Strong Poetry Curriculum’. This is a critical pedagogy of contingency, where the challenge is not to see revolution in its ultimate and final result, but to look at the cracks, the small mutations and the thousands of small acts that give it its final shape. Put otherwise, to conclude, it is the power of the strong poets that will carry us through pain; it is the word of the strong poet that will make us rewrite what we know differently. After all, novelty will almost strictly happen in and through contingency, in and through the cracks. After all, we are talking about Arab Spring as critical pedagogy thanks to El Général’s hip-hop song and to Zahra’s graffiti.

Notes  1  http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east26116868. A version of this section was published in Ibrahim, 2017. 2  http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/ 2011/01/201112515334871490.html.  3  Warning: this is a graphic video of the selfimmolation: https://www.youtube.com/watch? vDjHw_auqod6Y.  4  https://www.youtube.com/watch?vDqGao XAwl9kw.  5  See this as an example: https://www.youtube. com/watch?vDIeGlJ7OouR0.  6  This is a hybrid English lyric translation drawn from different sources including YouTube, Time Magazine, Newanthem blog (Jones, 2011), and

Kimball (2014) in Hiphopdiplomacy blog (see reference section; see also Ibrahim, 2016). These lyrics were cited in Ibrahim, 2017.  7  I consolidated my information on Zahra from many YouTube videos (see for example the many hundreds of mourners who came to his funeral: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzn_ bp4hoawandfeature=related) and from the Freedom Graffiti Week – Syria: https://www.facebook.com/MAD.GRAFFiTi.Week.SYRiaa/. Here is a taste of Zahra’s work: https://www.fatcap.com/ graffiti/175640-hatem-zahra-idlib.html.  8  https://www.npr.org/2012/05/02/151852095/ a-syrian-graffiti-artist-defiant-until-death

REFERENCES Agamben, G. (2000). Means without end: Notes on politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Alim, S. (2011). Global ill-literacies: Hip Hop cultures, youth identities, and the politics of literacy. Review of Research in Education 35(11), 120–146. Alim, S., Ibrahim, A., & Pennycook, A. (2009). Global linguistic flows: Hip-Hop cultures, youth identities, and the politics of language. London: Routledge. Asen, J. (2011). The rap that sparked a revolution: El General (Tunisia). Retrieved April 11, 2019 from: http://hiphopdiplomacy.org/2011/ 01/31/the-rap-that-sparked-a-revolution-elgeneral-tunisia/. Barthes, R. (1983). Elements of semiology. New York: Hill and Wang. Bauman, Z. (2007). Liquid times: Living in an age of uncertainty. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Beaumont, P. & Salih, Z. M. (2019). ‘Save the revolution’: Sudanese protesters head to Khartoum. Retrieved from: https://www. theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/26/ save-the-revolution-sudanese-protestershead-to-khartoum. Ben Jelloun, T. (2011). By fire: Writings on the Arab Spring. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Burbules, N. & Berk, R. (1999). Critical thinking and critical pedagogy: Relations, differences, and limits. In Popkewitz, T. & Fendler, L. (Eds.), Critical theories in education: Changing terrains of knowledge and politics (pp. 45–66). New York & London: Routledge.

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Chang, J. (2005). Can’t stop, won’t stop: A history of the hip-hop generation. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Deleuze, G. (1993). Essays critical and clinical. London: Verso. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Seabury Press. Ghosh, B. (2011). Rage, rap and revolution: Inside the Arab youth quake. Retrieved April 11, 2019 from: http://www.time.com/time/ magazine/article/0,9171,2050022,00. html#ixzz2ZuRiI599. Giroux, H. (2005). Border crossing: Cultural workers and the politics of education. New York: Routledge. Giroux, H. (2011). On critical pedagogy. New York: Continuum. Giroux, H. (2016). The Giroux reader. London & New York: Routledge. Hudson, A., Ibrahim, A., & Recollet, K. (Eds.). (2019). In this together: Blackness, Indigeneity, and Hip-Hop. New York: DIO Press. Ibrahim, A. (2012). Global Hip-Hop nation language: A (semiotic) review of Languages of Global Hip Hop. Journal of Sociolinguistics 16(4), 547–552. Ibrahim, A. (2016). Critical Hip-Hop ill-literacies: Re-mixing culture, language and the politics of boundaries in education. Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies 11(1), 1–11. Ibrahim, A. (2017). Arab Spring, favelas, borders, and the artistic transnational migration: Toward a curriculum for a Global Hip-Hop Nation. Curriculum Inquiry 47(1), 103–111. Ibrahim, A. & Alfano, A. (2016). Macklemore: Strong poetry, Hip-Hop courage and the ethics of the appointment. In Steinberg, S. & Ibrahim, A. (Eds.), Critically researching youth (pp. 102–115). New York: Peter Lang.

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Jones, A. (2011). Anthems for a new generation. Retrieved April 15, 2019 from http:// newanthems.blogspot.ca/2011/01/rayes-lebledhamada-ben-amor-el-general.html. Ibrahim, A. & Steinberg, S. (Eds.). (2014). Critical youth studies reader. New York: Peter Lang. Kimball, S. (2014). Rapping the Arab Spring. Retrieved from: http://hiphopdiplomacy. org/2014/01/14/rapping-the-arab-spring/. Kincheloe, J. (2008). Critical pedagogy primer (2nd edition). New York: Peter Lang McLaren, P. & Kincheloe, J. L. (Eds.). (2007). Critical pedagogy: Where are we now? New York: Peter Lang. Perry, I. (2004). Prophets of the hood: Politics and poetic of Hip Hop. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pinar, W. F. (2012). What is curriculum theory? (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rose, T. (1994). Black noise: Rap music and Black culture in contemporary America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Westheimer, J. & Kahne, J. (2004). What kind of citizen? The politics of educating for democracy. American Educational Research Journal 41(2), 237–269. Wink, J. (2011). Critical pedagogy: Notes from the real world (4th edition). Boston: Pearson. Wright, R. (2011). Rock the casbah: Rage and rebellion across the Islamic world. New York: Simon & Schuster. Wright, R. (2015, December 15). How the Arab Spring became the Arab cataclysm. The New Yorker. Retrieved May 3, 2019 from: https:// www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/ arab-spring-became-arab-cataclysm.

79 Schools as Learning Communities Maria Padrós and Sandra Girbés-Peco

This chapter is devoted to the educational approach that more than 3,300 schools are currently developing worldwide, which is Schools as Learning Communities. The Learning Communities project consists of a whole-school intervention to improve both children learning and social cohesion, through the dialogic participation of all the community and the implementation of successful educational actions (Gatt et al., 2011). Schools as Learning Communities have empowered traditionally excluded communities as in the case of immigrant, native Roma and Indigenous communities, not only enabling students to meet the official standards and widening their opportunities, but also empowering them to lead radical changes in their schools, communities and lives. We will show how Learning Communities connect with the thinking and acting of critical pedagogy (Kincheloe and Steinberg, 1997; McLaren and Kincheloe, 2007). The authors of the chapter are members of the Community of Research on Excellence

for All (CREA), which is an international, interdisciplinary, diverse network formed by more than 80 researchers from various universities. Within this community, both authors have been committed to the development of schools as Learning Communities for 20 and 10 years respectively. We have participated in the process of many schools rethinking themselves and changing their organization to work not for the families but with the families; we have collaborated as volunteers in some of them; and we have witnessed how relationships between teachers and parents in those schools have evolved from conflict or mutual distance to real trust, and many times friendship. We have also participated in international and national research on the implementation, challenges and outcomes of the project in very diverse contexts. This research has always used a communicative methodology approach that questions the traditional hierarchies between researchers and the researched and focuses on the transformative dimensions to generate

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real improvements in people’s lives (Gómez et al., 2011; Soler-Gallart, 2017). The chapter is grounded in our knowledge acquired by this direct engagement and research with the Learning Communities; a knowledge that is filled with admiration for the daily work of teachers, families and students that against many odds create spaces of resistance and hope. As Apple (2013) suggests, we are acting as critical ‘secretaries’ to those who are challenging persistent educational inequalities, not as neutral outsiders but as researchers committed to the scientific rigor and the ethical purpose of putting science at the service of the public good (Burawoy, 2005; Soler-Gallart, 2017). The chapter is organized into three sections. The first section introduces the Learning Communities project and its historical development since the first experience in the 1970s. In the second section, we discuss the theoretical framework of dialogic learning in which daily practices of these schools are grounded. With the case of Dialogic Literary Gatherings, we exemplify how this perspective recreates a model of liberating education (Freire, 1970), promoting excellent and critical education for all children. In the third section, we explain the ways of promoting democratic participation in schools as Learning Communities, which challenge the traditional power relationships within schools and generate radical solidarity. Our final remarks are devoted to the challenges and the possibilities for continuing the project.

TRANSFORMING DIFFICULTIES INTO POSSIBILITIES: SCHOOLS AS LEARNING COMMUNITIES The first Learning Community was founded in Spain by Ramon Flecha, who had already been involved in clandestine adult education and social movements during Franco’s dictatorship, together with neighbors and other

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educators. As a grassroots movement in La Verneda neighborhood (Barcelona), they occupied a building formerly used for the Francoist ‘female section of the National Movement’ and there created a cultural center with an adult school (Tellado et  al., 2013) as a space for responding to the high rates of illiteracy and lack of services in that working-class area. La Verneda-Sant Martí School was from the very beginning an assembly-based organization, in which learners were considered participants, and the main decisions were taken by those with no academic degree (Sánchez, 1999). Therefore, starting from literacy and basic education, the school gave voice to hundreds of people and became a driver of mobilization, in line with other well-known transformative initiatives in the field of popular adult education (Horton and Freire, 1990). During the first years of the Spanish democracy, many education initiatives that started as popular and critical projects rapidly adapted themselves to bureaucratic mainstream schooling. La Verneda-Sant Martí School stood out from others by maintaining its core features such as gratuity for all its activities, or participants’ right to decide. Nowadays, La Verneda-Sant Martí is still a unique center that opens seven days per week from 9am to 9pm offering a vast range of free activities, including Spanish for migrants, driving lessons, financial literacy, robotics and university entrance preparation. It has over 2,000 participants and, along with educators, there are more than 100 volunteers – ranging from housewives and migrants to university professors, and many of them also learners at the school (Aubert et  al., 2016). As Tellado (2017) shows, besides providing learning opportunities the school bridges individuals to communities and enhances community activism for the common good through social engagement – for instance, it has been very active in solidarity towards migrants and refugees, strongly positioned against gender violence, and it had a key role in the protests

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to demand the metro and other services in the neighborhood. In the 1990s, some primary schools decided to recreate the dialogic approach of La Verneda-Sant Martí in the formal education system as a means to reverse the persistence of segregation, educational failure, early school leaving and conflicts in marginalized areas. CREA, founded in 1991, played the role of bringing theoretical and scientific evidence to be discussed with teachers and communities in the interested schools, as a basis for the development of the project. Those schools were pioneers in inviting family members with little formal education to volunteer regularly in classrooms, acknowledging their experience as valuable resources rather than deficits (García-Carrión, 2012). They had the courage of starting a project when in Spain the hegemonic discourse was focused on the adaptation to differences and rejection of the struggle for equality. The schools and researchers involved in those first Learning Communities faced, on the one hand, a deficit thinking model associated with conservative discourses and explicit racism; and on the other, they dealt with some of the most important obstacles such as the structuralist and postmodern approaches from which any transformative project was considered naïve, since schools were understood as mere reproducers of the structural conditions of oppression (Flecha et al., 2003; Aubert et  al., 2004). Teachers involved in those first schools as Learning Communities demonstrated courage in resisting the postmodern wave that would lead to immobilism, and they kept being critically hopeful (Freire, 1994a), thus making possible real improvements in the lives of children and their families, and inspiring other schools to follow their steps. CREA and Learning Communities were also fundamental for shifting the public discourse and promoting critical perspectives, for instance with the Conference on Critical Education for the New Information Age (Giroux et  al., 1999) and other conferences called ‘Educational Change’, in which

Joe Kincheloe and Shirley Steinberg also participated (Flecha and Gómez, 2016). More than 10 years later, CREA coordinated the research project INCLUD-ED, funded by the European Commission’s Framework Programme for Research. As the result of an extensive study of successful schools around Europe, INCLUD-ED provided a list of successful educational actions that have been shown to promote excellent results – in terms of improving educational achievement, coexistence and social cohesion – regardless of students’ characteristics or the contextual features of the school (Flecha, 2014). At the same time, INCLUD-ED also provided evidence on the educational improvements generated by Learning Communities in very diverse settings. These results contributed to a dramatic increase in schools starting their own transformation in Learning Communities, not only in Europe but also in Latin America, including schools in remote areas like the Rural Centers for Alternate Education (CRFA) in Peru (Racionero-Plaza and Puig, 2017). In 2019 there are more than 3,300 schools as Learning Communities distributed throughout several European countries (Spain, UK, Portugal, Cyprus, Italy, Malta, Czech Republic) and in Latin America (Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador). Besides, the results of INCLUD-ED also influenced educational policies to scale up the implementation of successful educational actions worldwide (García-Carrión et al., 2017). In this context of growth of the project, more critical educators have the possibility to reinforce and improve the work done over the last decades. However, clashing interests may also arise, such as the willingness of individual prominence – or even funding – of some researchers who present themselves as ‘experts’ in Learning Communities, or the fears of other researchers and educators who may feel threatened by this success. Thus, a new challenge is to ensure that the project remains at the service of the right to education for all, maintaining the key features that

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define the Learning Communities as a real utopia (Wright, 2010: 91–2). Two of these features are dialogic learning and democratic organization. We describe them in the following sections.

THE LIBERATING CONCEPTION OF DIALOGIC LEARNING As in the Freirean conception of liberating education (Freire, 1970, 1998), dialogue is at the heart of the Learning Communities and it is probably what best defines the essence of the project. Dialogue is the most important tool for bridging individuals and communities and creating new realities. It is what enables the different participants in the project – teachers, families, students and volunteers – to learn together, work together, transform together. The relevance of dialogue for teaching and learning processes that was so profoundly understood in Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory (1978) has been increasingly recognized, and current theories see intersubjectivity and culture as key factors in learning processes (Cole, 1996; Gutiérrez and Rogoff, 2003; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wells, 1999) to the extent of implying a ‘dialogic turn’ in the learning sciences (Racionero and Padrós, 2010). Flecha (2000) developed the conceptualization of dialogic learning, taking into account contributions from psychology (Vygotsky, 1978), Freire’s dialogic action (Ramis, 2018), the theory of communicative action (Habermas, 1984) and symbolic interactionism from sociology (Mead, 1934), among others. Grounded in this interdisciplinary theoretical base, dialogic learning is defined (Flecha, 2000) through seven principles: (1) egalitarian dialogue as based on the validity of the arguments rather than on the power positions of those involved, (2) cultural intelligence, which means that knowledge and abilities of the participants are valued, (3) transformation instead of

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adaptation to the environment or traditional expectations, (4) an instrumental dimension so that dialogue is used to increase learning, (5) solidarity as both the base and effect of the dialogue, (6) creation of meaning for the individuals and the group through dialogue, and (7) equality of differences as the equal opportunity for all students to participate and succeed in learning, regardless of their cultural background and other personal features. Starting from these principles, schools as Learning Communities make all necessary efforts to ensure that their students get instruction of the highest quality. The emphasis on the change of the learning environment, rather than adapting students’ learning to it, is especially important in regard to populations that have been systematically underserved (Flecha and Soler, 2013). Against the assumption that they do not ‘need’, are not interested in, or will not use a high-level learning program, the Learning Communities aim to ensure that these students get instruction at the highest level. They do not limit the difficulties nor make a ‘functional’ curriculum. On the contrary, they strengthen the STEM and academic language proficiency (Cummins, 2000), and guarantee students’ access to the best cultural goods through, for instance, Dialogic Literary Gatherings (DLGs). Indeed, DLGs (De Botton et  al., 2014; López de Aguileta, 2019) are one of the successful educational actions based in dialogic learning that are implemented in Schools as Learning Communities. In essence, they consist of a dialogic space for the exchange of interpretations of the books of classical literature. Among many other books (usually adapted for their age) that students read and discuss are Don Quixote, Romeo and Juliet, One Thousand and One Nights, Around the World in 80 Days, Frankenstein, The Mahabharata, Oliver Twist, Crime and Punishment… In this way these schools do not deny the right of all children to enjoy classic literature,

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and do not reduce school culture to products subject to the laws of the market (Eco, 2000). Instead, they familiarize children with the best works and are confident of their capacity for appreciating them. As Umberto Eco (2000) argues, those who question the interest or pleasure of certain social groups in this kind of literature reflect, in the end, a disdain for ‘the mass’ and nostalgia of times past, in which cultural goods were a class privilege. In addition, DLGs do not rely solely on reading classic literature but also facilitate the exchange of interpretations between participants through an egalitarian dialogue, breaking with the banking conceptions of education (Freire, 1970), and promoting dialogic inquiry (Wells, 1999). In DLGs, children read at home the part of the book that they have decided (for instance, two chapters) and select excerpts that they want to share with their mates. At class, they sit in a circle and discuss one by one all the selected excerpts, so that for every excerpt there is an extended utterance, deepening the meaning, diverse interpretations and relationships with other ideas. As some of the studies about DLGs have shown (Hargreaves and GarcíaCarrión, 2016), DLGs reverse the traditional teacher monopoly of talk in classrooms, meaning that over 75% of the learners join in the dialogue, contributing to over 80% of the talk. The case of Aisha1, a 10-year-old Moroccan immigrant girl, shows how DLGs provide a space for learners to recreate the dynamic and mutual movement from word to world in the act of reading (Freire and Macedo, 2005). Aisha is a student in one of the Learning Communities that we have researched, located in a deprived area in northeast Spain where nearly half of the inhabitants are non-European immigrants, most of whom come from Morocco. Two years prior to our observation, Aisha moved to the neighborhood with her mother and three sisters, while her father had immigrated alone four years earlier to work as a bricklayer in Spain. She participates in the weekly

DLGs in her school. In one of our observations, Aisha was most of the time listening carefully to her classmates. At one point in the DLG, Aisha asked for the floor to read the excerpt she had chosen: Ulysses is alone and with the boat destroyed. He gets to Ogigia Island where the nymph Calypso lives, who retains him with her for seven years. But Ulysses never forgets his home. Nevertheless, he always misses his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus. Then, she explained to her classmates that the long return to Ulysses’ home reminded her of the trip her father made when he immigrated alone to Spain and of the trip she made years later to meet him. And she added: ‘These days I’ve seen on TV that many people from Syria had to leave their country, because of the war. It’s winter and they’re cold, and nobody wants to give them a house. Like Ulysses, they face a lot of problems on their way. I think all children must have a house. When we came, there were people who helped us, and others didn’t. I think that now we all should help them.’ Aisha’s intervention enabled her classmates, most of whom had undergone migration processes, to share their experiences and their thoughts about the humanitarian refugee crisis in Europe, intensified since 2016. They reflected on the difficulties their parents had faced for giving them a better future, and the worse situation of those escaping from Syria. These kinds of vivid conversations connect the topics in the book with the issues that concern them and have a strong relationship to their coexistence, such as friendship and family, in a way that prevents learners from experiencing disaffection towards the school institution (Willis, 1977). At the same time, learners engage themselves in profound reflections on diasporas as historical and political phenomena, cultural relationships, social injustices and human rights. They integrate others’ words in their own words, in Bakthinian terms (Bakthin, 1982), and therefore these dialogues will be part of their voices when entering new dialogues in other spaces.

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DEMOCRATIZING PARTICIPATION IN LEARNING COMMUNITIES The Learning Communities project assumes a democratic school organization by involving traditionally excluded community members in central areas of school life to ensure the right to quality education for all students. To this end, Learning Communities are opened to the neighborhood and school staff actively work to reduce those structural, organizational and cultural barriers that, in many cases, impede community participation in schools (Carreón et  al., 2005). Thus, the project promotes forms of participation that have been identified as leading to the development of the potential of the community – regardless of the background or the socio-educational level of the participants. Among the different typologies of participation promoted, educative participation and decisive participation stand out (Díez, Gatt and Rancionero, 2011). Educative participation means the involvement of both family and community members in educative programs and in different learning contexts in the school. It implies family and community inclusion in curricular activities performed in the students’ classrooms and in after-school programs aimed at providing more learning time and contexts to students who need it. Interactive groups (IGs) are an example of this kind of educative participation (Aubert et  al., 2017; Valls and Kyriakides, 2013). IG is an inclusive form of classroom organization aimed at students learning through multiplied interactions. Students are organized into small heterogeneous groups (mixing gender, cultural background, educational achievement, etc.) and each group has an adult volunteer who does not need to have any specialized knowledge; indeed, many of the adults are family or community members volunteering with no previous experience in teaching and, many times in deprived areas, with low academic degree or literacy skills. Each group of students

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engages in a different activity and after a given time (usually around 20 minutes) they change the activity and the volunteer, intensifying interactions that they engage in during the lesson. Importantly, volunteers do not substitute the teacher but rather ensure that students interact with each other and contribute to creating an atmosphere that enhances instrumental learning (Díez-Palomar and Cabré, 2015; Valls and Kyriakides, 2013). The lack of academic degrees or specific training of the volunteers, far from being a problem, becomes an advantage for being an actual facilitator, as they may not know how to solve the tasks. Moreover, they bring a diversification of cultural role models in schools with racially diverse students but racially homogeneous teachers (Van den Bergh et al., 2010). One of the case studies within the aforementioned INCLUD-ED project is a school located in one of the poorest districts of Spain, a neighborhood with a high concentration of Roma people that has been badly hit by unemployment (the neighborhood’s unemployment rate is four times higher than the town average), illiteracy (77.4% of people have not completed basic education), drug trafficking and crime (García-Carrión, Molina-Luque and Molina, 2017). When that school decided to become a Learning Community to overcome educational failure, absenteeism and constant confrontations between teachers and families, the teaching staff proposed José to participate as a volunteer at school. José was born in the neighborhood, had a difficult childhood, leaving school at the age of nine, and had just been given a conditional release after serving a prison sentence. While in most schools a parent like José could only be seen as a hardship, the unusual invitation to be part of the transformation of the school was based on the recognition of cultural intelligence that all parents have. José returned to his neighborhood and started participating in the school of his two children as a volunteer in IGs. It was not an easy step to do, but he

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quickly got on very well with the children, the teachers and other volunteers, so that he could get over his initial discomfort. José’s participation was very important for his little son, and enhanced the sense of solidarity into real practices and not only as part of a discourse but a real action. Educative participation also means the extension of the educational opportunities to the whole community. In that sense, many Learning Communities offer educational activities – e.g., literacy, languages, job skills or ICT – that share the common feature of responding to the requests of relatives and other community members (De Botton et al., 2014). Some months into his volunteering, José decided to enroll in literacy courses developed at the school to be able to provide more support to his children and to other school students. The self-esteem and self-concept of José and other parents involved in the school improved definitively when they began to perceive the effects that their participation in the school was generating: one year after the transformation into a Learning Community, the school increased the scores of nine-yearold students in all subjects in standardized tests. Furthermore, the school absenteeism rate was reduced from 30% to 10% and then to only occasionally (Girbés et  al., 2015). In this way, the strong tendency of student loss that had been experienced in the school in previous years was reversed. Besides educative participation, Learning Communities enhance the decisive participation of community and family members through their involvement in decision-making spaces. In addition to maintaining traditional school decision-making bodies – e.g., families’ associations or school councils – these centers are organized in a way that families are not mere beneficiaries of the decisions of staff, but they share a dialogic leadership (Padrós and Flecha, 2014). One of the specific measures for doing this horizontal work are the mixed committees – formed by students, family and community members, teachers

and volunteers – which have the aim of moving towards collective priorities that have emerged from extended debates. Instead of telling parents to ‘hold on’ when they have a demand, mixed committees provide a flexible, bottom-up structure that breaks with bureaucratization and technocratic approaches that often paralyze processes of change in schools (Illich, 1973). They are alive and flexible structures that change at the pace of changes of school life and act as democratizing structures (Freire, 1994b). Encouraged by the positive experience in IGs and educative programs, José joined other Roma residents and extended his participation to the school decision-making structures, through assemblies and one specific mixed committee dealing with the request for secondary education in the school. This demand was based on the harsh reality that most of their children abandoned education at the age of 12 when they finished elementary school and were supposed to leave the neighborhood to attend high school. Without a dialogue, this school drop-out would usually be blamed on lack of interest, or insufficient efforts, of the families. In an egalitarian dialogue, following Habermas’ (1984) conception, the arguments provided by its participants are not considered according to the speakers’ status, expertise or power (claims of power), but rather based on the validity of their arguments (claims of validity) regardless of their culture, gender, language, origin, socio-educational level or professional position. Parents and school staff worked together until the educational administration acceded to their requests, and the center started to offer secondary education at the same building. From no former student having achieved completion of compulsory secondary education, it grew into dozens of students obtaining the degree in the following years (GarcíaCarrión, Molina-Luque and Molina, 2017). And this was just one among many other improvements resulting from the transformation of the school, not only impacting the students and their families but becoming a

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springboard for the transformation of the neighborhood.

FINAL REMARKS, CRITICAL CHALLENGES AND CRITICAL POSSIBILITIES In this chapter, we have tried to convey a real project that embodies the essential elements of critical pedagogy. One is the trust in dialogue, in its fullest sense, that impregnates every facet of school daily life. Another is the transformative purpose and transformative nature of the project, as it starts with transforming conditions in the community and ends by transforming the expectations, the outcomes and the traditional power relationships. Yes, it is a real project: Aisha and José are only two of thousands of students and parents who are part of this transformation in very diverse settings. They do not only learn from teachers, they learn together with teachers as transformative intellectuals (Giroux, 1988) to challenge the daily situations of oppression with both hope and rigor. We are asked many times about the odds, the difficulties, the problems. Of course they exist, despite us focusing on the victories. One of the main handicaps are the attacks that we – researchers, teachers, even family members participating in the project – receive. As we have pointed out above, many of these attacks come from people who should be pleased with the existence of the Learning Communities, as they speak about how to improve education. Thus, they do not base their words on any school transformation, nor on the dialogues with the disadvantaged, they react against a project that goes beyond an ‘expert discourse’, trying to discredit the project or the results. This is not new – jealousy is an old passion. In addition, as critical researchers committed to the struggle against gender violence, we have experienced those attacks in specific personal, cruel

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ways (Flecha, 2008), as second-order harassment (Vidu et  al., 2017). Another challenge that we point out, especially when Learning Communities may be quite tantalizing, is to protect the unique aim of the Learning Communities, which is improving the education and the lives of all children, from other interests. And in the same vein, those involved in the Learning Communities have preserved an admirable struggle for maintaining the plurality of the project, preventing political parties or specific groups taking ownership of the project. We focus on celebrating the victories because of the need of all communities to know that it is possible to work with those parents who have been traditionally blamed for the failure of their children in school, to accomplish their dreams. Despite the difficulties, challenging pessimism, overcoming deficit thinking, avoiding market logics in education, more than 3,300 schools are doing it in many corners of the world.

Note  1  The names used in this chapter are fictitious.

REFERENCES Apple, M. W. (2013). Can education change society? London: Routledge. Aubert, A., Duque, E., Fisas, M., & Valls, R. (2004). Dialogar y transformar. Pedagogía crítica del siglo XXI. Barcelona: Graó. Aubert, A., Molina, S., Shubert, T., & Vidu, A. (2017). Learning and inclusivity via Interactive Groups in early childhood education and care in the Hope school, Spain. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 13, 90–103. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2017.03.002 Aubert, A., Villarejo, B., Cabré, J., & Santos, T. (2016). La Verneda-Sant Martí adult school: A reference for neighborhood popular education. Teachers College Record, 118(4), 1–32.

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Bakthin, M. M. (1982). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Burawoy, M. (2005). For public sociology. ­British Journal of Sociology, 56(2), 259–294. Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Carreón, G., Drake, C., & Barton, A. (2005). The importance of presence: Immigrant parents’ school engagement experiences. American Educational Research Journal, 42(3), 465–498. Cummins, J. (2000). Language, power, and pedagogy: Bilingual children in the crossfire. Toronto: Multilingual Matters. De Botton, L., Girbés, S., Ruiz, L., & Tellado, I. (2014). Moroccan mothers’ involvement in dialogic literary gatherings in a Catalan urban primary school: Increasing educative interactions and improving learning. Improving Schools, 17(3), 241–249. Doi: 10.1177/ 1365480214556420 Díez, J., Gatt, S., & Racionero, S. (2011). Placing immigrant and minority family and community members at the school’s centre: The role of community participation. European Journal of Education, 46(2), 184–196. Doi: 10.1111/ j.1465-3435.2011.01474.x Díez-Palomar, J., & Cabré, J. (2015). Using dialogic talk to teach mathematics: The case of interactive groups. ZDM, 47(7), 1299–1312. Doi: 10.1007/s11858-015-0728-x Eco, U. (2000). Apocalypse postponed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Flecha, R. (2000). Sharing words: Theory and practice of dialogic learning. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Flecha, R. (2008). Heartless institutions: Critical educators and university feudalism. The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 1(1), 1–6. Flecha, R. (2014). Successful educational actions for inclusion and social cohesion in Europe. London: Springer. Flecha, R., & Gómez, A. (2016). Joe L. Kincheloe: How Love Could Change the World. In Agnello, M. F & Reynolds, W. M. (Eds.), Practicing Critical Pedagogy (pp. 51–60). Cham: Springer.

Flecha, R., Gómez, J., & Puigvert, L. (2003). Contemporary sociological theory. New York: Peter Lang. Flecha, R., & Soler, M. (2013). Turning difficulties into possibilities: Engaging Roma families and students in school through dialogic learning. Cambridge Journal of Education, 43(4), 451–465. Doi: 10.1080/0305764X. 2013.819068 Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (1994a). Pedagogy of hope: Reliving pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (1994b). Education and Community Involvement. In Giroux, H. A., Flecha, R., Freire, P., Macedo, D., & Castells, M. (Eds.) (1999). Critical education in the new information age (pp. 79–88). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (2005). Literacy: Reading the word and the world. London: Routledge. García-Carrión, R. (2012). Achieving Social Cohesion in Europe through Education: A Success Story. In Shuayb, M. (Ed.), Rethinking education for social cohesion: International case studies. Cambridge: Palgrave Macmillan. Garcia-Carrión, R., Gomez, A., Molina, S., & Ionescu, V. (2017). Teacher education in schools as learning communities: Transforming high-poverty schools through dialogic learning. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 42(4), 42–56. http://dx.doi.org/10. 14221/ajte.2017v42n4.4 García-Carrión, R., Molina-Luque, F., & Molina, S. (2017). How do vulnerable youth complete secondary education? The key role of families and the community. Journal of Youth Studies, 1–16 (21). Doi: https:// doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2017.1406660 Gatt, S., Ojala, M., & Soler, M. (2011). Promoting social inclusion counting with everyone: Learning communities and INCLUD-ED. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 21(1), 33–47. Doi: 10.1080/09620214. 2011.543851

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Girbés, S., Macías, F., & Álvarez, P. (2015). From a ghetto school to a learning community: A case study on the overcoming of poverty through a successful education. International and Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Sciences, 4(1), 88–116. Doi: 10.17583/rimcis. 2015.04 Giroux, H. A. (1988). Teachers as intellectuals: Toward a critical pedagogy of learning. London: Greenwood Publishing Group. Giroux, H. A., Flecha, R., Freire, P., Macedo, D., & Castells, M. (1999). Critical education in the new information age. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Gómez, A., Puigvert, L., & Flecha, R. (2011). Critical communicative methodology: Informing real social transformation through research. Qualitative Inquiry, 17(3), 235–245. Gutiérrez, K. D., & Rogoff, B. (2003). Cultural ways of learning: Individual traits or repertoires of practice. Educational Researcher, 32(5), 19–25. Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action, Vol. I. Boston: Beacon Press. Hargreaves, L., & García-Carrión, R. (2016). Toppling teacher domination of primary classroom talk through dialogic literary gatherings in England. FORUM: for promoting 3–19 comprehensive education, 58(1), 15–25. Horton, M., & Freire, P. (1990). We make the road by walking. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Illich, I. (1973). Deschooling society. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Kincheloe, J. L., & Steinberg, S. R. (1997). Changing multiculturalism. Open University. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lopez de Aguileta, G. (2019). Developing school-relevant language and literacy skills through dialogic literary gatherings. International Journal of Educational Psychology, 8(1), 51–71. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.17583/ ijep.2019.4028 McLaren, P., & Kincheloe, J. L., Eds. (2007). Critical pedagogy: Where are we now? New York: Peter Lang. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Padrós, M., & Flecha, R. (2014). Towards a conceptualization of dialogic leadership. International Journal of Educational Leadership and Management, 2(2), 207–226. Doi: 10.4471/ijelm.2014.17 Racionero, S., & Padrós, M. (2010). The dialogic turn in educational psychology. Revista de Psicodidáctica/Journal of Psychodidactics, 15(2). Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1387/RevPsi codidact.810 Racionero-Plaza, S., & Puig, P. (2017). La Confluencia entre Comunidades de Aprendizaje y otros Proyectos: El Caso de los CRFA en Perú y Guatemala. Multidisciplinary Journal of Educational Research, 7(3), 339–358. Doi: 10.17583/remie.2017.3023 Ramis, M. (2018). Contributions of Freire’s theory to dialogic education. Social and Education History, 7(3), 277–299. Doi: http:// dx.doi.org/10.17583/hse.2018.3749 Sánchez, M. (1999). Voices inside schools – La Verneda-Sant Martí: A school where people dare to dream. Harvard Educational Review, 69(3), 320–336. Soler-Gallart, M. (2017). Achieving social impact: Sociology in the public sphere. London: Springer. Tellado, I. (2017). Bridges between individuals and communities: Dialogic participation fueling meaningful social engagement. Research on Ageing and Social Policy, 5(1), 8–31. Doi: 10.4471/rasp.2017.2389 Tellado, I., Serrano, M. A., & Portell, D. (2013). The achieved dreams of a neighborhood. International Review of Qualitative Research, 6(2), 289–306. Doi: 10.1525/irqr.2013. 6.2.289 Valls, R., & Kyriakides, L. (2013). The power of interactive groups: How diversity of adults volunteering in classroom groups can promote inclusion and success for children of vulnerable minority ethnic populations. Cambridge Journal of Education, 43(1), 17–33. Van den Bergh, L., Denessen, E., Hornstra, L., Voeten, M., & Hollan, R. (2010). The implicit prejudiced attitudes of teachers: Relations to teacher expectations and the ethnic achievement gap. American Educational Research Journal, 47(2): 497–527. Doi: https://doi.org/ 10.3102/0002831209353594

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80 Love Unconditionally: Educating People in the Midst of a Social Crisis Elbert J. Hawkins III

INTRODUCTION As I sit here, I am lost in a daydream – a daydream that features a place where people are safe, acknowledged, accepted, honored, valued, and loved. Like many dreams, daydreams enable us to escape our current state of existence, retreat into our thoughts, and live temporarily unbothered. In addition, daydreaming is a performance that occurs with attentiveness and opened eyes. However, this performance gives off a false sense of consciousness and, like many dreams, daydreams require us to awaken and work towards making a whimsical fantasy a reality. Living in a world where people are loved unconditionally is a reoccurring daydream of mine. As I work to make this a reality, I am challenged by the reoccurrence of violent behaviors, hate, prejudice, and inequitable practices in 21st-century schools. As a professional school counselor, I am charged with the task of subverting the status quo and transforming our schools into educational

spaces that not only implement traditional counseling practices but implement practices that work to preserve my students’ family and community in which they live. In addition, I am charged with disaggregating data that brings attention to marginalized student populations, educating teachers on the importance of holistic education, and leading professional development seminars and workshops that promote equitable school practices. Bridgeland and Bruce (2011), in the National Survey of School Counselors: Counseling at a crossroads, report that more than half of the nation’s counselors believe that the US educational system needs a significant transformation and overhaul, especially in urban public schools identified as minority schools with high socioeconomic disparities (2011: 18). Therefore, as a professional school counselor, I address and work towards transforming school issues such as student growth and achievement, disparity gaps, graduation and school dropout rates,

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defunct tracking systems, inequitable classroom practices, and the social and emotional needs of my students. Presumably, these social crises warrant immediate attention if educators hope to transform schools into culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining spaces that honor and value all students. To combat many of these crises, I argue that love is needed within our spaces of learning. We need the kind of love that is unconditional; however, I question: is this the kind of love educators are willing to give? Recently, I observed a social studies teacher at Excellence High School engage her students in culturally relevant ways. I will call this teacher EH. Her class makeup was 18 African American young men, 15–18 years of age, who were a part of the Successful Team Aimed at Reaching Student Success Honors Academy (STARSS Honors Academy). The design of the honors academy empowered these young men – giving them a sense of self-worth, honor, and value. The setting in the classroom was warm and inviting and the culture EH and the young men created was filled with a sense of camaraderie and solidarity. During the informal observation, EH implemented a lesson that allowed them to engage in critical conversation that focused on social issues such as race, class, police brutality, inequitable school practices, and their concern with African American young men implicitly labeled as ‘America’s problem’. While engaged in the lesson, they discussed the impact of power, privilege, and difference and how it related to their lives, their community, and their social well-being at Excellence High School. EH and her students created a space where their conversation was honest, critical, and reflective of a world that is constantly evolving. On a separate occasion, I informally observed EH’s class again while a guest lecturer was present. While I was there, one of her students asked the question, ‘Can people of color be racist, specifically Black people?’ The lecturer that day addressed the young man’s question, first, by explaining race as

a social construct created to support a social order that reinforced superior and inferior ideologies based on a person’s physical traits, genetic makeup, ancestry, etc. Second, he addressed individual biases that are not necessarily associated with one specific group but are shared by all, and, third, he addressed the possession of power and dominance, which is race and gender specific, traditionally favoring Whiteness and White masculinity, reinforcing a system of racism and racist behavior. However, he failed to mention and explain the ideological power and belief behind the concept of race that keeps people divided in spaces of learning, like our schools and classrooms. Again, EH was strategic in her use of critical pedagogy and engaging her students in conscious discourse that enabled them to experience a sense of liberation in the classroom. In addition to EH, I informally observed a 10th-grade English teacher who was teaching a lesson on social justice. I will call this teacher AM. Her English class was a standard college prep course (meaning there is no honors weight assigned to the course), multicultural, and coed. As a part of the lesson, AM required her students to research topics that stretched their thinking about the world in which they live. From child-soldiering, to addressing the achievement gap, to food deserts, to human trafficking, AM’s students chose topics that taught them a valuable lesson about privilege, collectivism, and the social, economic, and political disparities that people face in their community and other parts of the world. AM also taught a lesson that introduced the idea of civil disobedience to her students. However, instead of having them research specific topics, she had them analyze the work of prominent figures throughout US history. AM’s students analyzed speeches and the life stories of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. To assist with this lesson, I observed and helped to facilitate group discussions on violent acts, nonviolent protests, and the idea of peace, forgiveness, and reconciliation. The assignment enabled her students to

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give reverence to the past, which also enabled them to compare present-day struggles with struggles of the past. Using culturally relevant materials to engage her students, she taught them a valuable lesson on social justice, affirmation of self, and civil disobedience through the lenses of three prominent figures who were reflections of their culture. Observing these two teachers heightened my curiosity about the idea of love being positioned in our schools and in classroom spaces. I questioned its existence, its relevance to school and classroom culture, and wondered during the observations – is EH and AM’s style of pedagogy a performance of love? In this chapter, I discuss the idea of loving unconditionally in the midst of a social crisis. Using our schools as a frame of reference, I hypothesize that, when educators infuse love into spaces of learning (i.e. schools and classroom spaces), they will subvert the status quo and empower students to accept who they are, and educators will righteously advocate for marginalized and dehumanized students, giving them space to develop a sense of agency. In addition, I discuss the problem in theory and its significance to education, the theoretical perspective, and the way it transforms school and classroom spaces. In the literature review, I discuss the following themes that emerged from the informal classroom observations: a culture of love, radical love in theory and in practice, and, lastly, disrupting a culture of hate. In this chapter, I add to the conversation of radical love and encourage educators to infuse the idea of radical love into their schools and classroom spaces unconditionally with hopes to transform the heart and soul of people in a world that constantly evolves (Douglas & Nganga, 2013).

THE PROBLEM IN THEORY With a pervasive influence from popular culture, television, news sources, and social

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media, many people have become desensitized to our basic needs. Resulting in an educational system that keeps us divided based on our differences and a lack of understanding for the other, which I find problematic. Xiangjun and Xin (2007: 489) define difference as a relationship among beings – a central belief in Confucianism. Meaning, human differences are embedded in people to bring us closer together as a collective and not to separate us from the collective. However, the idea of difference, well at least for me, remains complex for several reasons. First, it disrupts our belief and value system, meaning it challenges people to be open and accepting to human characteristics such as language, religious affiliation, and cultural practices that are different from our own. Second, the idea of difference typically leaves us, specifically educators and students, with more questions than answers of one another, and, third, the idea of difference challenges educators to accept their students holistically rather than to simply tolerate them in the classroom. Johnson (2006: 13) suggests, ‘The real illusion connected to difference is the popular assumption that people are naturally afraid of what they don’t know or understand’. He states that this assumption is far from the truth and a cultural myth – people are not afraid of what they do not know, but are afraid of what they do know (2006: 13). In other words, many people are conscious of each other’s human existence and they realize that as humans we all bleed the same. However, society’s creation of social constructs such as race, class, and gender enables certain groups to perpetuate divisive systems that divide us, manipulating us into thinking that we should be afraid of one another on the basis that we do not look, act, and situate ourselves as being the same. Many people are afraid of what they do know as it relates to race, class, and gender, which is realizing these are divisive constructs that carry little to no meaning. However, people who remain oblivious to this reality deny equal and

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equitable access to people who wish to live in a democratic society. I am reminded of James Baldwin, an African American novelist and activist who questions the existence of race, which is used to marginalize and dehumanize people in the United States. Baldwin (as cited in Essence, 1984: 2) stated, ‘America became white – the people who, as they claimed “settled” the country became white – because of the necessity to denying the Black presence and justifying the Black subjugation’. Baldwin goes on to say that this approach is cowardly and, By deciding that they were white [sic]. By opting for safety instead of life. By persuading themselves that a Black child’s life meant nothing compared with a white child’s life. By abandoning their children to the things white men could buy. By informing their children that Black women, Black men, and Black children had no human integrity that those who call themselves white were bound to respect. And in this debasement and definition of Black people, they debased and defined themselves. (Baldwin, 1984: 3)

In other words, race categorized as a ‘difference’ is not an important value in the scheme of human development until we begin to recognize and elevate its meaning to either include or exclude people from social categories based on the hue of their skin. Ironically, race in the United States is one of the most valued characteristics that is used to privilege or oppress other people. Another factor that makes the current educational system problematic is how we have attempted to define effective classroom spaces. The ideas of effective classrooms were in response to school improvement plans, which primarily focused on measuring classroom practices that would improve academic achievement. Effective classrooms are instructional environments that are managed well, relevant to student goals, and cater to marketplace values such as competition and individualism (Cheng and Mok, 2008: 371). From the practice of knowledge delivery, which emerged in the 1980s, where teachers deposited knowledge into the minds of their

students, to using education and learning as a provisional service to please stakeholders in the 1990s, to using education for the sole purpose of strengthening our global markets at the turn of the 21st century, educational practices such as these have taken precedence over culturally relevant and responsive education and attempts to educate and understand the whole child. Effective classroom practices also align with Effectiveness Theory and how classroom effectiveness is measured. Creemers and Reezigt (1999: 33) explain that Effectiveness Theory is measured when, ‘The quality of instruction at the classroom level is determined by three components: the curriculum, the grouping procedures which are applied, and the behavior of the teacher’. Garrison and Liston (2004) define classroom effectiveness in terms of instructional qualities, time, and opportunities for learning (2004: 380). Other practices that define effective classrooms consist of high expectations, open communication, a balanced curriculum, well-prepared teachers, detailed and positive feedback, etc. However, educators fail to define effective classrooms in terms of love, which is also a vital aspect to student success in the classroom. Yet the goal of many schools is to create an environment that is equitable, conducive to student learning, and accepts students’ differences. Therefore, our current system of education needs our immediate attention if we are to transform and develop healthy relationships with educators and their students.

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE It is my experience that to incorporate or to mention love as a viable educational practice in schools and classroom spaces is taboo. I speculate this is due to the popular use and practice of love or Eros in its most celebrated state, meaning people typically embody love through performances of desire, passion, and romanticism. Often, people fail to recognize

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and understand other forms of love that shape and center us as humans, such as agape love, the love that centers and sustains us spiritually, and philia love, the love that enables us to love our sisters and brothers unapologetically. These three forms of love embedded in our psyche help to define our sense of humanness and, in many ways, affect the way we choose to live. The performance of love is complex, which often leaves us confused and emotionally distraught in many public spaces, including our schools and classroom spaces. Therefore, I question, if love is a practice and a human need, a performance that ends wars, calms and retrains our enemies, and sustains us like a bridge over troubled water – then why do people regulate this performance to just their churches, temples, synagogues, homes, and relationships? Why are people fearful of sharing, experiencing, or practicing love outside of the realm of desire, passion, romanticism, and religion? As a professional school counselor, I argue the practice of love in our schools and classroom spaces is an effective and viable practice. However, this practice will be contingent on the way in which educators choose to position and incorporate love into the classroom. To fill this void, I purpose the use of radical love. Kennedy and Grinter (2015: 44) define radical love ‘as the empathetic, active, and passionate impulse to transform social relationships in ways that seek justice and freedom’. In addition, the idea of equality verses equity is an important concept to critically think through as they position and incorporate radical love into our spaces of learning (Colonna and Nix-Stevenson, 2015: 10). Teachers who practice radical love recognize and understand the importance of holistic learning and purposefully work to incorporate culturally relevant material into the classroom that acknowledges, accepts, and sustains a sense of wholeness for their students. The use of radical love in the classroom compels educators to think critically and justly as they prepare lessons that engage their students holistically.

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After observing EH and AM, I argue the attention they give to their students and their need and desire to sustain a learning environment that honors, values, and accepts their students was a radical performance of love. Like Paulo Freire, EH and AM disrupt an educational system that traditionally embraces a banking system of learning and classroom practices that marginalizes many students. EH and AM’s use of culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy enabled them to insert their students’ family, community, language, and positionality into a style of discourse that disrupted the status quo and transformed the dominant narrative. To understand the concept of radical love in 21st-century schools, I use the literature to explore and affirm my curiosities as they pertain to a culture of love, radical love in theory and in practice, and the act of disrupting a culture of hate; and, lastly, I reflect on my positionality.

LITERATURE REVIEW A Culture of Love To understand the concept of radical love, I give my attention to one of the three tenets of love, which is agape love. Like radical love, agape love is a practice that requires action, commitment, shared knowledge, and a desire for self-transformation. The practice of agape love is unconditional, revolutionary, and gives people a sense of renewal as they work to honor, value, and accept other people for who they truly are. Used primarily as a Christian principle, agape love is revolutionary, an unconditional and a supernatural kind of love, and the highest guiding principle that connects people to a holistic experience with God. Gregory Marshall (2002: 16) states, ‘Agape is the New Testament, a Greek word for the steadfast love God has for human beings, as well as for the neighborly-love humans are to have for one another’. In addition, he characterizes agape as being an unconditional

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commitment to the good of others, having equal regard for the well-being of others, and a passionate service open to self-sacrifice for the sake of others (2002: 16). This kind of love goes beyond the notion of loving people in the natural, which often enables us to place parameters around the people we choose to love. Sean Chabot (2008: 816) defines agape as revolutionary: ‘It encourages us to confront oppressive circumstances and painful experiences directly, as long as we translate potentially destructive emotions into constructive dispositions and behavior’. In other words, the practice of agape love helps to free us from oppressive and destructive situations – giving us a sense of peace. I am reminded of the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., a civil rights activist, spiritual leader, and novelist, who turns to the premise of agape love to resist his oppressors and to transform the external (physical) and the internal (spirit) effects of violence. Martin Luther King, Jr. explains, Agape means understanding, redeeming good will for all men. It is an overflowing love which is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless, and creative. It is not set in motion by quality or function of its object…Agape is disinterested love. It is a love in which the individual seeks not to his own good, but the good of his neighbor. Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people, or any qualities people possess. It begins by loving others for their sakes. (as cited in Popova, 2015)

Contrary to the other tenets of love, Eros and philia, the ego is absent from agape love. Meaning, agape love is not self-gratifying, idolized, or confined to a specific social group. Based on my experience with and understanding of agape love, it is bigger than I or me. It is rational, balanced, and goes beyond religious thoughts and practices that separate us from the collective and the communion of others. Nygren (1953: 77) mentions, ‘It is only when all thought of the worthiness of the object is abandoned that we can understand what Agape is’. In other words, when people eliminate the act of

idolizing and placing people in superficial positions based on cultural and social supremacy, only then will they begin to understand agape love. Like Eros and philia, agape is a love of choice, a principle that cannot be forced upon or demanded. Therefore, when people choose to practice this principle, it requires commitment, a sense of responsibility, and solidarity for other people. Juxtaposed to Eros and philia, agape love does not fade, it is consistent, and it is not embedded in reciprocity or reciprocal performances as a way for people to coexist peacefully in an evolving world. Garrison and Liston (2004: 22) assert, ‘Reciprocity and equality do not characterize the love that seeks the welfare of young children’. Meaning, people who practice agape love understand its concept and they do not expect anything in return for their unconditional love for others. However, being a person who understands spirituality and embraces the daily communion with God, I question the feasibility of living this practice daily and incorporating this practice into social spaces such as our schools and classroom spaces. The practice of agape love is supernatural – then how do we, as humans, position ourselves to love without conditions placed on other people? Therefore, as people who honor and value humanness, do we abandon the practice of agape love for practices grounded in spirituality? Not to confuse spirituality with religion, which is a practice of traditional norms that typically keeps people bound to social and cultural biases. Bruce and Novinson (1999) define spirituality as, a ‘search for meaning and values, which includes some sense of the transcendent.’ That is, some force or life energy beyond ourselves that is often identified with religions, but which may be simply a sense of interconnectedness with others and a desire to make meaning and live out one’s own values about good and wrong. (1999: 163)

It is my experience that people who are spiritual see themselves and understand themselves to be tenets of love. However, people

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who are spiritual place conditions around their love and, depending on their position, they look forward to some form of reciprocity. As a professional school counselor, I look forward to shared experiences and the act of producing knowledge and creating new meaning with students I encounter. Bruce and Novinson (1999: 164) assert, ‘Spiritual persons recognize that “facts” are tempered by perceptions, biases, and world views. Spiritual persons have the courage to speak from their own deeply held values and to listen to and respect the values of others, even when they are in conflict’. In other words, spirituality centers us and enables us to escape from the traditional strongholds of religion and biased doctrine. Lastly, people who are spiritual offer a sense of hope to situations that appear to be hopeless. The ideas of agape love and spirituality are complex in theory and in practice; however, if educators are to honor, value, and accept our students amidst social crisis – embodying some of the characteristics of agape love and spirituality is perhaps necessary to produce knowledge, to create new meaning, and to transform our spaces and the mindset of people. However, to ensure this kind of transformation through these tenets, educators will need to be well versed in the idea of Knowing Thyself and will need to divest from dogmatic and positivistic doctrine that idolizes systems of oppression.

Radical Love in Theory and in Practice Currently, in many schools marginalized students are more likely to lose interest in school, which often results in a loss of interest in healthy relationships with family and a loss of interest in their community. Thus far, in this chapter, I argue for educators to incorporate love into their schools and classroom spaces to combat educational practices that leave certain students feeling disconnected from the collective. Given the choice, I would choose radical love to combat negative educational

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practices that leave many students in a state of hopelessness. In theory and in practice, radical love honors, values, respects, and compels students to think consciously and critically about the world in which they live. The practice of radical love helps to create discourse among educators and students – enabling them to dissect political, social, and economic myths that separate and secure their biases in the collective. Nussbaum (2013: 379) states, ‘We can hardly solve social problems without understanding both the resources on which we may draw and the problems that lie in our way’. Meaning, to resolve educational practices deemed problematic we need to understand the cause if we are to give our undivided attention to the effects. Previously, I mentioned the work of EH and AM with the STARSS Honors Academy and their efforts to subvert the status quo and dismantle negative school and classroom practices at Excellence High School. From course content to classroom instruction, EH and AM’s educational approach with each student was intentional, which gave them the attention and the respect they needed and deserved. Nussbaum (2013: 381) states, ‘First, our hunch was confirmed that good proposals for the cultivation of public emotion must be attentive to their place, their time, and the specific cultures of the variety of citizens who are their intended audience’. Meaning, radical love in theory and in practice requires educators to meet students where they are and to engage them in school and classroom practices that cultivate the whole child. The literature does not explicitly place culture or culturally relevant pedagogy into the same paradigm as radical love. However, by design, by definition, and in practice, I argue culturally relevant pedagogy is a radical approach. In its practice, culturally relevant pedagogy enables teachers to affirm their students’ cultural identity, while encouraging them to question the political, social, and economic inequities and disparities in their institutions (Ladson-Billings, 1995: 469).

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As a professional school counselor, I promote culturally relevant material and programs that embrace my students holistically. This performance of love affirms my students’ positionality and gives them an opportunity to claim a sense of agency in classroom spaces traditionally constructed on standards of Whiteness. Nussbaum (2013: 382) states: ‘The loves that prompt good behaviors are likely to have some common features: a concern for the beloved as an end rather than a mere instrument; respect for the human dignity of the beloved; a willingness to limit one’s own greedy desires in favor of the beloved’. In practice, radical love incorporates these features, which gives educators and students an opportunity to develop a relationship that culturally sustains their learning experiences. Like EH and AM, Christopher Emdin, an associate professor in mathematics, science, and technology at Teacher’s College, Columbia University, uses culturally relevant pedagogy and culturally responsive pedagogy to deliver course content in his classroom. With an eagerness to transform the status quo in his classroom, Emdin delivers course content and assigns work that does not commodify or isolate his students but gives them an opportunity to bridge the gap between education and the world in which they live. Once, he structured an assignment like a cypher, a lyrical rap battle commonly used among Hip-Hop artists to enlighten, to explore the complexities of various spaces, and to create safe zones for a coterie. The assignment had a slight competitive edge to it that connected his students to one another and the assignment – enabling them to explore, research, and critically think through concepts that challenged their traditional ways of learning information. Emdin states (2016: chapter 8, para. 6), ‘Bringing the battle into the classroom helps neoIndigenous youth heal from traditional teaching and concurrently helps teachers to approach competition in the classroom differently’. Emdin embraces his students’ culture and sense of style to enhance

their worldviews, which gave them an opportunity to take part in a style of discourse that bridged their home, community, and school norms together to produce knowledge and to create new meaning. Educators like EH, AM, and Emdin work tirelessly to engage and connect marginalized, dehumanized, and disconnected students to education and to learning. Their efforts to love and advocate for students is admirable and warrants the collective’s attention if we hope to transform the state of education in the United States. Currently, in many schools, radical love in theory and in practice gives educators and students an opportunity to think consciously and critically as it pertains to topical issues and our place in the world. In theory and in practice, radical love enables teachers to meet students where they are, and it gives students a sense of purpose and a sense of belonging as they learn from educators who honor and value their presence.

Disrupting a Culture of Hate Good and evil, yin and yang, light and darkness, love and hate – the dichotomy in these terms suggests that we cannot live in this world without having one or the other. As I recall, the most recent mass shooting took place in Sutherland Springs, Texas, where a lone gunman murdered 26 people and wounded 20 people aged 1–77, as his victims attended a church service. I am convinced people cannot live without experiencing positive and negative energy in the world. In many ways, positive and negative energy sustain each other, which keeps order and maintains a sense of balance in the world. However, the premise of death that spawns from hate due to a person’s race, ethnicity, religion, or gender, convinces me in a way that often leaves me angry, afraid, and motionless. Like love, hate is a choice and is persistent, but where love sustains us holistically, hate diminishes

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the spirit and kills the soul. Through social justice education and learning, and the idea of activism, I examine ways educators and students can preserve our sense of humaneness, our freedoms, and our ability to stand in and with the collective to disrupt the idea of hate and to stand in love. I begin with James Baldwin, an activist, novelist, and humanist who confronts a nation that fails to acknowledge its bigotry, violent behavior, and hate towards a group of people who are the epitome of resilience, strength, and love. I Am Not Your Negro, a documentary that is narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, tells the story of Baldwin’s activism and his commitment to humanity and love through the assassinations of three prominent civil rights leaders, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. As he reflects on their deaths, Baldwin reflects on a nation that prides itself on being a home of the free and the brave. However, Baldwin questions the ‘stars and stripes’ that symbolize freedom and bravery – he argues the fight and the struggle people endured for the United States was unmistaken, but questions the freedom and liberation of its people, particularly African Americans. Baldwin states, ‘In America I was free only in battle never free to rest. He who finds nowhere to rest cannot survive the battle’ (I Am Not Your Negro, Peck, 2017). I read into this quote figuratively as Baldwin explicitly refers to the plight of African Americans during an era where being ‘woke’ or conscious was more than just a catchphrase, but a means for survival. Presently, the social injustices and inequitable practices continue to haunt the psyche of many African Americans, leaving them to question almost every aspect of their human existence. Living through the deaths of his spiritual brothers, Baldwin embraced the pen to ‘write and to get it out!’. Meaning, he no longer slumbered, and his tongue was no longer bridled – he returned from his excursions overseas, and lived his life through the words and through the work of Evers, King, and Malcolm. Living

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in the words of King (1981), Baldwin knew the eye-for-an-eye philosophy would leave people blind and he did not subscribe to the concept of fighting evil with evil – Baldwin responded with aggressive love (1981: 42); the kind of love that cures the blind, transforms the language of the oppressor, and reconciles its differences through knowledge production and the creation of new meaning. Throughout the documentary, Baldwin affirms his position and claims a sense of agency in a way that preserves the heart and spirit of the collective. Baldwin asserts, ‘I cannot be a pessimist because I am alive’ (as cited in I Am Not Your Negro, Peck, 2017). In other words, people cannot succumb to the negative pitfalls the world offers. He reminds us that our past is not our history, but our present is, as we wear and carry our history daily not to relive it shamefully or angrily, but to live it as a symbol of resilience and as a shared history. Baldwin also reminds us that Black history and blackness is American history. Lastly, Baldwin brings his spiritual brothers’ death full circle, and he questions, ‘Why is it necessary to have a nigger in the first place…I am not your nigger…I am Man’ (as cited in I Am Not Your Negro, Peck, 2017). Another activist who is transforming a culture of hate is Warsan Shire, a 21st-century writer, poet, and humanist. Born to Somali parents in Kenya, Shire is transforming the world through her poetry and raising our level of consciousness for refugees and people exiled from their country due to war, political unrest, or religious persecution. One of my students at Excellence High School introduced me to Shire’s work by way of her senior project. The teacher, one of my colleagues, designed the senior project to spark her students’ interest in the works of traditional and contemporary poets and poetry. The student’s presentation of her senior project heightened my curiosity and ignited my fascination with Shire’s work as the words in her poetry brought me into her world. The amount of love and attention given to her people speaks volumes to Warsan’s sense of criticalness, her

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love for family, community, and humanity. To conclude this section, I focus on the content in two of Shire’s poems, ‘Home’ and ‘What We Have’. I attempt to articulate a message of love by honoring and finding a sense of solidarity in her work. Like Baldwin, she captures the attention of many as she brings attention to marginalized, dehumanized, and desensitized people finding love and a sense of peace through heartache and struggle. ‘Home’ no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well your neighbors running faster than you breath bloody in their throats the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body you only leave home when home won’t let you stay. no one leaves home unless home chases you fire under feet hot blood in your belly it’s not something you ever thought of doing

made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back. you have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land no one burns their palms under trains beneath carriages no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled means something more than journey. no one crawls under fences no one wants to be beaten pitied no one chooses refugee camps or strip searches where your body is left aching or prison, because prison is safer than a city of fire and one prison guard in the night is better than a truckload of men who look like your father

until the blade burnt threats into no one could take it your neck no one could stomach it and even then you carried the anthem under no one skin would be tough enough your breath

the

only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets

go home blacks

sobbing as each mouthful of paper

refugees

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dirty immigrants

leave your clothes behind

asylum seekers

crawl through the desert

sucking our country dry

wade through the oceans

niggers with their hands out

drown

they smell strange

save

savage

be hunger

messed up their country and now they want

beg

to mess ours up

forget pride

how do the words

your survival is more important

the dirty looks

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear

roll off your backs maybe because the blow is softer than a limb torn off or the words are more tender than fourteen men between your legs

saying – leave, run away from me now i dont know what i’ve become but i know that anywhere

or the insults are easier

is safer than here (as cited in http://headspacepress.com/home-by-warsan-shire/)

to swallow

‘What We Have’

than rubble

Our men do not belong to us. Even my own father, left one afternoon, is not mine. My brother is in prison, is not mine. My uncles, they go back home and they are shot in the head, are not mine. My cousins, stabbed in the street for being too – or not – enough, are not mine.

than bone than your child body in pieces. i want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark home is the barrel of the gun and no one would leave home unless home chased you to the shore unless home told you to quicken your legs

Then the men we try to love, say we carry too much loss, wear too much black, are too heavy to be around, much too sad to love. Then they leave and we mourn them too. Is that what we’re here for? To sit at kitchen tables, counting on our fingers the ones who died, those who left and the others who were taken by the police, or by drugs, or by illness or by other women. It makes no sense. Look at your skin, her mouth, these lips, those eyes, my God, listen to that laugh. The only darkness we should allow into our lives is the night, and even then, we have the moon. (as cited in http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/22838/auto/0/0/ Warsan-Shire/WHAT-WE-HAVE)

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Shire’s work is captivating and in both poems her acknowledgement and attention to the human condition reflects the human condition Baldwin speaks of a century ago. While Shire does not explicitly say she cannot be a pessimist like Baldwin, she positions herself in the seams of hope. Both poems give hope to a collective voice and to her attempts to reconcile with the banality of evil while finding strength in the power of love.

Positionality As a professional school counselor, my interest and curiosity in the concept of radical love became apparent after paying attention to the human condition. From marginalized students experiencing childhood trauma, bigotry, violence, and hate, to students with an I/me complex, I choose to give and receive love in my educational space. Being in education, I understand the importance of creating an educational ethos that includes the practice of radical love. In practice and in theory, radical love sustains me, and with radical love I am charged with the responsibility to educate and to sustain other people, especially my students. As an African American man, I am also responsible for teaching other people, specifically students of color, to radically stand in their truth and embrace greatness despite opposition from the dominant culture. In addition, as an educator, I invest in the system of education for the sole purpose of transforming not only the spaces in which we learn, but also our family, community, and the world in which we live. Therefore, to sustain our system of education, it is critical for me to accept, value, honor, and love people for who they are as we evolve and claim a sense of agency in our world.

CONCLUSION I daydream to find inner peace and to temporarily escape the harshness of the world.

Juxtaposed to this temporary act, I am ‘woke’ and to be woke is to live in a world where you acknowledge people for who they are, accept and not tolerate, include and not isolate, and love unconditionally and not hate. Incorporating the concept of love in theory and in practice into our schools is possible – if educators take the transformation of our schools and classroom spaces and themselves seriously. Realizing that many of our schools and classroom spaces are microcosms of the world in which we live, educators will need to take the lead in constructing an educational system that cultivates a system of critical, conscious, and righteous learning. Love as a viable educational practice can subvert the status quo and enable educators to acknowledge and accept the human condition and educate our students holistically. Educating from a position of love is educating from a position of wholeness, which enables educators to break from biased social and cultural norms that keep us divided within the collective. The practice of love is complex and conditioning people to accept love in the form of acceptance, social justice learning and education, equitable school practices, and critical thought will be challenging. However, when used as a radical practice, to love in practice enables us to create meaningful and critical discourse, which gives us an opportunity to question the political, social, and economic structures that dilute many public and private institutions. In this chapter, I argue for educators to create space for love as a viable educational practice. Focusing on radical love, I argue radical love will give educators an opportunity to break through social barriers that marginalize, dehumanize, and desensitize many of our students within our spaces of learning. Using our schools and classrooms spaces as a catalyst for love, I argue educators will subvert the status quo that traditionally leaves our students socially and culturally unconscious. With love as a classroom practice, educators not only acknowledge and accept the social and emotional aspect of our students, but

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they acknowledge, accept, and understand the importance of their family and community. Incorporating these tenets into course content and classroom instruction, students can become engaged and make critical connections to education and the world in which they live. The use of love as an educational practice values and honors people who are in sync with and a part of the collective.

REFERENCES Baldwin, J. (1984). On Being ‘White’ … and Other Lies. Essence Magazine. Bridgeland, J. and Bruce, M. (2011). 2011 National Survey of School Counselors:Counseling at a crossroads. Washington, DC: Hart Research Associates. Bruce, W. and Novinson, J. (1999). Spirituality in Public Service: A dialogue. Public ­Administration Review, v59(2), pp. 163–169. Chabot, S. (2008). Love and Revolution. Critical Sociology, v34(6), pp. 803–828. Cheng, Y. and Mok, M. (2008). What Effective Classroom?: Towards a paradigm shift. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, v19(4), pp. 365–385. Colonna, S. and Nix-Stevenson, D. (2015). Radical Love: Love all, serve all. The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, v6(1), pp. 5–23. Creemers, B. P. and Reezigt, G. J. (1999). The Concept of Vision in Educational Effectiveness Theory and Research. Learning Environments Research, v2(2), pp. 107–135. Douglas, T. and Nganga, C. (2013). What’s Radical Love Got to Do with It: Navigating identity, pedagogy, and positionality in preservice education. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, v5(1), pp. 59–82. Emdin, C. (2016). For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education. Boston:

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Beacon Press. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Retrieval 22/10/2016. Garrison, J. and Liston, D. (Eds). (2004). Teaching, Learning, and Loving: Reclaiming passion in educational practice. New York, NY: Routledge Falmer. Johnson, A. G. (2006). Privilege, Power, and Difference (2nd edition). Boston: McGrawHill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages. Kennedy, J. and Grinter, T. (2015). A Pedagogy of Radical Love: Biblical, theological, and philosophical foundations. The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, v6 (1), pp. 42–57. King, M. L. Jr. (1981). Strength to Love. Philadelphia: First Fortress Press. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, v32(3), pp. 465–491. Marshall, G. (2002). Pedagogy and the Christian Law of Love. Journal of Education and Christian Belief, v6(1), pp. 9–17. Nussbaum, M. C. (2013). Political Emotions: Why love matters for justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nygren, A. (1953). Agape and Eros. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press. Peck, R. Director (2017). I Am Not Your Negro. Documentary Film. CA: Velvet Film. Popova, M. (2015). ‘An Experiment in Love: Martin Luther King, Jr. on the Six Pillars of Nonviolent Resistance and the Ancient Greek Notion of “Agape”’. https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/01/martin-luther-king-jran-experiment-in-love/ Retrieval 22/11/2019. Shire, W. Home. http://headspacepress.com/ home-by-warsan-shire/ Retrieval 12/1/2017. Shire, W. What We Have. http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/ item/22838/auto/0/0/Warsan-Shire/WHATWE-HAVE Retrieval 12/1/2017. Xiangjun, L.I. and Xin, Y. (2007). An Explanation of the Confucian Idea of Difference. Frontiers of Philosophy China, v2(4), pp. 488–502.

81 ‘We Do It All the Time’: Afrocentric Pedagogies for Raising Consciousness and Collective Responsibility S h u n t a y Z . Ta r v e r a n d M e l a n i e M . A c o s t a

Afrocentric pedagogies are not new to educational discourse. Asante (1991) asserts that early conceptualization of Afrocentricity within education dates back to Carter G. Woodson’s (1933) seminal text Mis-education of the Negro. At its core, Afrocentric pedagogy is characterized as ‘an alternative, nonexclusionary, and nonhegemonic system of knowledge informed by African peoples’ histories and experiences’ (Sefa Dei, 1994). This chapter presents the embodiment of two Afrocentric Pedagogies, Village Pedagogy and Critical Studyin’, within the field of education and human services. Each of these pedagogies are effective for raising the critical consciousness and collective responsibility of emerging professionals entering Eurocentric social systems to serve youth and families of color. We assert that centering the cultural aspect of pedagogical strategies is critical for deconstructing how all students have been institutionally socialized to dehumanize students of color. Consequently, Afrocentric approaches, such as Village Pedagogy and

Critical Studyin’, are critical tools for accelerating the educational success of students of color. Critical Studyin’ offers a morally engaged pedagogy hinged on a cultural critique of the ideological foundations of knowledge that guide societal maneuverings (King, 2008). Such an approach has potential to move students from passive onlookers to active change agents committed to justice. Similarly, Village Pedagogy empowers activists to challenge inequalities by raising their social consciousness regarding systemic policies and practices that perpetuate inequality (McCoy and Packer, 2017). This approach fosters a sense of collective responsibility in recognizing and dismantling systemic marginalization. Collectively we use these Afrocentric pedagogies to recover and recenter the historical connections of social systems and how they have and continue to marginalize people of color. In addition, we illustrate how these approaches offer unique insight for resisting systemic marginalization. Through professional examples of these

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pedagogies, we unveil how African American scholars reconceptualize marginalization and embody resilience through pedagogical strategies, thus empowering the next generation of educators and practitioners to create institutional change.

RECOVERING AND RE-CENTERING AFROCENTRIC PEDAGOGIES In the 21st century we have found that what educators think, believe, and do (or don’t do) in the classroom has an invaluable influence on the quality of life and educational outcomes for people of color. While education in the United States continues to be crucial to community and societal health and well-being, particularly for African American and Latina/o populations, orchestrating schooling environments that train emerging professionals to become culturally competent and culturally relevant has grown more complex. The majority of these complexities converge around issues of justice and providing equitable education and human services to all children, and these issues are connected to particular racial, economic, gender, cultural, and ability ideologies that intersect in multiple ways. To advance this notion, this chapter explores the role of educators who train professionals within the field of human services and teacher education. This novel approach underscores the importance of educators from two distinct fields to embody pedagogical practices that intentionally raise the critical consciousness of future professionals in ways that will translate to better educational and quality of life outcomes for African Americans. It is critically important for human services educators and teacher educators to intentionally engage in Afrocentric pedagogies. Such engagement is vital to improving the quality of life and educational outcomes of all students, specifically African American students. Human services practitioners serve the most marginalized populations of our society

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within various contexts such as probation and parole, educational systems, and family systems (Neukrug, 2017). Given the social constructions of race, and how it is associated with disproportionate outcomes across various contexts, human services professionals often find themselves serving a large number of African American clients when addressing issues of homelessness, domestic violence, and grief intervention. As a result, unexamined biases may inadvertently impede on practitioners’ ability to create equitable access to resources such as education, employment, and housing. Consequently, educators training human services professionals have an increased responsibility to train practitioners to engage clients in culturally relevant ways (National Organization for Human Services, 2015; Tarver and Herring, 2019). Similarly, it is critically important that teacher educators recognize their responsibility to engage in culturally relevant pedagogy when preparing teachers. For example, some teachers carry negative perceptions of African American students as intellectually inferior and behaviorally challenging, and these perceptions manifest in low academic and behavior expectations, which translate into few opportunities for students to engage in academically rigorous learning experiences and increased use of excessive discipline tactics. Consequently, both human services educators and teacher educators must be intentional about their pedagogical approaches, and ensure that such approaches are effective for raising the critical consciousness of professionals in ways that will positively impact the lives of people of color. Such consciousness is critical to practitioners’ ability to intentionally evaluate how their own beliefs, values, and personal biases may impact the lives of African American clients (Ricks, 2014). Such pedagogy also requires educators to challenge students to go beyond relying simply on good intentions and politically correct conversations, by creating a context where students are encouraged and challenged to analyze how their practice influences professional

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interactions (Neukrug, 2017). As a result, we posit that utilizing Afrocentric approaches for training human services practitioners such as probation and parole officers, social services case managers, community educators, and teacher educators is critical. Thus, Village Pedagogy and Critical Studyin’ are essential pedagogies for preparing professionals to work with marginalized populations.

THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF VILLAGE PEDAGOGY AND CRITICAL STUDYIN’ Village Pedagogy as Tool for Training Practitioners to be Critically Conscious Village Pedagogy is a dynamic Afrocentric approach to teaching and learning that is often utilized by faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU; Harris, 2012). However, despite the frequency with which it is utilized at HBCUs, McCoy and Packer (2017: 246) assert that it ‘may be employed by any educators with a passion and commitment to actively counteracting the marginalization and systemic oppression of African Americans, while simultaneously empowering students to do the same’. Thus, Village Pedagogy may even be embodied by educators within majority institutions. One essential aspect of Village Pedagogy is that it creates an atmosphere where ‘African Americans are able to advance through education and not have to acquiesce to alienation, instructional subordination, and systemic marginalization’ (Harris, 2012: 336). Village Pedagogy emerges from both Afrocentric pedagogy and critical race theory. Whereas Afrocentric pedagogy focuses on the teaching and learning practices that need to be revised in order to achieve educational equity for African American people, critical race theory deconstructs systemic barriers to equity that are perpetuated from the origins

of systemic establishment within the United States. Collectively, Village Pedagogy merges these two perspectives to embody the instructional practices of teaching and learning that move practitioners to activism in ways that will enhance the quality of life for all people of color. The foundational propositions of Village Pedagogy are (1) deconstructing systemically racist policies and practices; (2) fostering critical consciousness; and (3) developing a collective responsibility. The following section outlines the emergence and expansion of Village Pedagogy within the context of Afrocentric pedagogy and critical race theory. Within Afrocentric pedagogy, two theoretical propositions articulated by Asante (1991) are also foundational to Village Pedagogy: 1 Education is fundamentally a social phenomenon whose ultimate purpose is to socialize the learner; to send a child to school is to prepare that child to become part of a social group. 2 Schools are reflective of the societies that develop them (i.e., a White supremacist-dominated society will develop a White supremacist educational system). (1991: 170)

From this framework Village Pedagogy posits that, despite the fact that institutional socialization has been touted as education, authentic education is a powerful tool for raising critical consciousness. As a result, a foundational principle of Village Pedagogy asserts that critical consciousness regarding how individuals and institutions inadvertently engage in the creation and perpetuation of disproportionately adverse outcomes for marginalized populations is essential for working to enhancing the quality of life for people of color. Village Pedagogy espouses a critical race theory framework to address the Afrocentric notion that schools perpetuate White supremacist ideology, by critiquing the larger societal tendency to maintain such inequalities across social systems. According to critical race theory, racism is endemic to all social institutions within the United States (Bell, 1992; Crenshaw et  al., 1996). Thus, the notion of White supremacy can be evident

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beyond systems of education; including law enforcement, health care systems, and social service systems. Village Pedagogy utilizes critical race theory to emphasize that within an inherently racist society all social systems have been established to perpetuate racist policies and practices that are institutionally perpetuated and are thus creating and maintaining the disproportionate outcomes they were designed to perpetuate. Consequently, Village Pedagogy is essential for training emerging human services practitioners to develop critical consciousness that challenges and resists racist policies and practices embedded within various social systems. Critical race theory also mandates that educators and practitioners engage in social justice activities (Dixson and Rousseau, 2006). Such action must resist ‘solely relying on traditional methods of transformation such as the incremental process of disseminating empirical scholarship; [but] rather [incorporate] methods that result in more immediate change such as engaging in Village Pedagogy’ (DeCuir and Dixson, 2004; McCoy and Packer, 2017). Consequently, Village Pedagogy works to foster collective responsibility that mandates active advocacy for systemic change through individual action that results in institutional changes toward equity. It works to dismantle biased practices and policies that exist as a result of power dynamics within existing client–­practitioner interactions. Through Village Pedagogy, practitioners are able to engage in critical self-reflection to unveil how well-intentioned practices can mask institutional inequities. Village Pedagogy challenges emerging practitioners to re-examine when institutional ‘best practices’ contradict culturally competent strategies.

Critical Studyin’ as the Praxis of the Black Studies Intellectual Tradition In the field of education, Afrocentric pedagogies in the college classroom are essential

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to helping prospective educators and administrators develop an informed cultural standpoint from which to translate powerful classroom teaching practices. This is so because these pedagogical approaches have the potential to disrupt not only racially unjust practices, but more importantly, the logic that creates and holds these practices as universal truths in our system of public schooling. Moreover, Afrocentric pedagogies offer humanizing, liberatory alternatives in terms of teaching, learning, and achievement that maintain cultural and community well-being. Critical Studyin’ achieves this goal through an interdisciplinary, multimodal critical approach to studying the complexities involved in schooling and education as well as approaches to cultivating educational excellence. Critical Studyin’ represents a morally engaged pedagogical approach with roots in antiracist teaching (King, 2008). Critical Studyin’ is an approach inspired by the Black Studies intellectual tradition. Black Studies as an intellectual tradition targets the belief structure of racism in ideologically biased knowledge. Black Studies intellectual theorizing draws together contemporary works in anthropology, sociology, and education, as well as historical works in psychology and history. Theoretically, Black Studies theorizing is situated from an ideological purview of democracy as juxtaposed to the ideological position of racism that often guides thinking and movement in teaching and teacher education. It focuses on the belief structure of race in ideologically based knowledge used in public schools and academia and on knowledge systems and traditions of Indigenous cultural groups. Examples of Black Studies theorizing are located in Clyde Woods’ analysis of the makings of the Mississippi Delta (Woods, 1998), Katherine McKittrick’s extrapolation of Black women geographies (McKittrick, 2006) and Joyce King’s examination of critical, qualitative

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research in teacher education (King, 2008). Evidenced in the tradition of Black Studies Intellectualism is a commitment to racial social justice as a democratic outcome of human freedom. There is also a commitment to centering the lives, experiences, and wisdoms of Indigenous peoples and using this lived, experiential knowledge as the basis for theories of change, justice, and education. The Black Studies intellectual tradition of Critical Studyin’ is not predicated on the study of the symptoms or outcomes of a racist educational system – but is the intentional probing of the illness or deficiencies within our existing system of logic or reasoning that create such inhumanities. It seeks to repair the severed historical knowledge that prevents teachers from being able to consider current and existing problems of racial injustice including poverty, school performance, and police brutality. It awakens teachers to the systemic and continued patterns of racial social injustice – it moves them away from considerations of racism as a historical occurrence and always linked to enslavement. In other words, Critical Studyin’ does not get us sidetracked and bogged down in race – but maintains a concerted attention on the ideology of racism which is at the heart of racial inequity. King (2008) conceptualizes Critical Studyin’ as a productive way to engage educators in ­studying racism and culture and the practical implications for teaching and learning. She writes, ‘By deciphering the implications of ideological conceptions of “Blackness” (and socially constructed “Whiteness”), Critical Studyin’ offers a pedagogical alternative to alienating knowledge that rationalizes injustice, corrupts scientific reasoning, and obstructs critical moral agency’ (King, 2008: 338). Collectively, both Village Pedagogy and Critical Studyin’ are constructive, seeking both to dismantle the knowledge system and social structure of race and to develop new interpretive frameworks, theories, and methodologies.

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS OF AFROCENTRIC PEDAGOGIES IN TEACHER EDUCATION AND HUMAN SERVICES Critical Studyin’ as Pedagogy in Teacher Education There are three conceptual tools that characterize Critical Studyin’ and offer a method of teaching through culture that cultivates critical consciousness of individuals with full regard for race and culture. The first is Diaspora Literacy and refers to the ability to understand reality and literature from an informed, Indigenous perspective. As King (2008) summarizes, it means naming and categorizing concrete situations of injustice and alienation in the everyday lives of Black people. It also means noticing and naming perspectives and practices that increase positive outcomes for individuals and communities from an emic perspective. In other words, it includes engaging in study and discourse around African American excellence in teaching and learning from an African American perspective. Cultivating Diaspora Literacy supports the development of Heritage Knowledge, the second tool the author reveals. Heritage Knowledge liberates individuals from the ties of bondage levied by racist, hegemonic belief systems and permits them to develop an awareness and pride in themselves. Heritage Knowledge represents a group’s memory of their collective history which facilities the cultivation of positive relationships with others. Third, African American pedagogical excellence refers to engagement in teaching with full regard for the social, cultural, and historical implications of teaching and learning from an African American perspective. It draws on the cultural and racialized epistemologies of people of African descent and links this knowledge with teaching practices that promote academic excellence, cultural competence, and sociopolitical consciousness for children. Using these three concepts,

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Critical Studyin’ engages individuals in practiceto-theory theorizing. Briefly, practice-to-theory involves recovery and (re)remembering historical events, personal and group experiences, consciousness, identity, and culture related to African descent people. Teachers examine the lived reality and experiences of African Americans as a heuristic to consider the racial reasoning, theories, and codifications that shape such experiences.

Pedagogical Embodiment of Village Pedagogy There are several ways that educators embody Village Pedagogy. Among these strategies are personal connections through instructional practices, systemic navigation, and experiential learning. Each of these tools are embodied within the classroom in ways that will train human services practitioners to be culturally competent in relation to all marginalized clients. This is particularly important given the current ideology of America as ‘post-racial’, which underscores the need for human services educators to engage in pedagogy that develops a critical consciousness within emerging practitioners (Ricks, 2014). Thus, the pedagogical embodiment of Village Pedagogy offers tools that create a learning environment that deconstructs systemically racist policies and practices; fosters students’ critical consciousness; and develops collective responsibility for enhancing the quality of life for African Americans. Personal connection. One aspect of Village Pedagogy is personal connection through instructional practices. This connection is inclusive of both the connection between the instructor and the students, as well as between the students in the classroom. Personal connection problematizes an understanding of diversity from the perspective of gazing at others who are different, to encourage culturally competent strategies such as respect, responsiveness, and reciprocity (Barrera and Corso, 2002). It is essential

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that instructors learn and understand the perspectives of the students within the classroom. This will allow instructors to identify the various identities represented within the learning environment. For example, getting to know students will reveal to the instructor which students have experienced economic privilege or racial oppression in their lived experiences. This knowledge is essential for fostering a critical understanding of perspectives that challenges emerging practitioners beyond their personal experiences. In addition, the connection between students is also critical for humanizing personal experiences that are distinct from one’s lived experiences. Thus, creating a learning environment that amplifies the voices of divergent perspectives fosters personal connection crossculturally among students. Then, students are trained to assess the ways they can utilize privileged spaces to advocate for their clients as opposed to assuming advocacy needs based on personal biases. This also enhances the collective responsibility of students to work beyond their own lived experiences to enhance the quality of life for oppressed populations. As aforementioned, ‘Village Pedagogy is the art of instructing in, from, and through a communal environment. [It] occurs in teaching and learning in community that enhances campus living and classroom learning’ (Harris, 2012). Collectively, this communal environment creates personal connections where educators get to know their students including their positionality, biases, privilege, and oppressions. This type of knowledge requires the educator to teach from where students are. Thus, privilege is no longer an abstract term, but rather something that the educator makes visible to the students regarding various ways it may operate within their personal lives, and ways in which they can utilize their privilege to alleviate the oppression of others. Systemic navigation. Village Pedagogy serves as a tool for educating students and future practitioners about the existing barriers. Because of systemically racist policies

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and practices that exist, there are innumerable barriers for African Americans when navigating those systems. Consequently, Village Pedagogy fosters a critical consciousness for how to navigate, advocate, and resist existing barriers. For example, Harris (2012: 334) recalled that within the context of his HBCU, he ‘sensed cultural and pedagogical connections at the HBCU that helped prepare [him] to better adjust to other cultural settings, such as predominantly White corporate settings and predominately White graduate schools’. Thus, it should be noted that systemic navigation is not institutional socialization that favors cultural assimilation; rather it is education that is culturally centered from the perspective of African Americans, that unveils and deconstructs the cultural nuances and practices of mainstream settings in a way that allows one to effectively navigate majority systems without sacrificing themselves. This includes a culturally competent systemic understanding of issues of power, privilege, and oppression (Tarver and Herring, 2019). Thus, to successfully navigate mainstream systems does not require one to embody and embrace mainstream values and believes; but rather Village Pedagogy provides an understanding of systemic navigation of power, privilege, and oppression in ways that honor, respect, and value cultural variations. It also teaches those positioned with more societal power and privilege how to challenge, resist, and alleviate systemic barriers. Experiential learning. Village Pedagogy requires curriculum and instructional practices that connect to the lived experiences of African Americans. ‘Village Pedagogy requires social justice action that transforms classrooms into villages by collectively resisting systemic marginalization and oppression’ (McCoy and Packer, 2017). Within the classroom this transformation takes place by centering African American experiences within the curriculum and instructional techniques. Harris (2012: 334) articulated that this includes ‘the mutual sharing of language, music, styles of dress, stories, and other ways

of being’. Thus, Village Pedagogy reflects culturally centered curriculums that incorporate various genres of text, multimedia content delivery, and various cultural milieus beyond Eurocentric expressions that connect to the lived experiences of African Americans and other people of color.

AFROCENTRIC PEDAGOGIES IN PRACTICE IN TEACHER EDUCATION AND HUMAN SERVICES Village Pedagogy and Critical Studyin’ both offer important strategies that can be utilized within courses designed to train emerging human services practitioners and teacher educators. The following sections provide an illustration of both pedagogies. We offer both specific classroom strategies and subsequent student feedback on the effectiveness of these approaches from a personal and empirical perspective. These illustrations offer tools for educators who seek to engage in practices that will improve the quality of life and educational outcomes for African Americans in culturally competent and culturally responsive ways.

Village Pedagogy within a Diversity of Human Services Course As an assistant professor within a researchintensive university in a southeastern US state, I, the first author of this chapter, embody Village Pedagogy in all of my courses. The following is one illustration of how I did so within a Diversity of Human Services course. Offered as one of the core courses within the undergraduate curriculum of a human services bachelor program, the course had an enrolment capacity of 25 students. This included both traditional students as well as non-traditional and

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military-affiliated students. The course is an upper-level course, designed for students to 1 Have greater self-awareness about one’s personal cultural identity, values, beliefs, and customs, and how these factors may impact the helping relationship; 2 Have increased awareness about racism, prejudice, oppression, and privilege, and the effects of these factors on themselves and their clients; 3 Have increased knowledge about the eight major social identities which every person possesses (race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, physical abilities, age, and religion/spirituality) and the impact of these identities on the helping process and relationship; and 4 Have learned skills and techniques for ethically and effectively meeting the needs of diverse clients.

In order to translate these goals into course strategies within Village Pedagogy, the following assignments and curricular activities were utilized throughout the course: • Critical Dialogue and Case Studies. Critical dialogue and culturally centered case studies are utilized throughout the course to foster personal connection of students with the instructor and between students. The critical dialogue ensues as a result of activities that make students’ respective positionalities, such as race, gender, socioeconomic status, age, etc., salient. Specifically, all students participated in an exercise called dimensions of difference where they stratified according to gender, race, geographic identity, and socioeconomic status growing up. They then discussed how their experiences privileged and or marginalized them during their upbringing. Next, students were led to discuss how this was similar or dissimilar to their peers and the implications their experiences may have on interactions with individuals and groups who are different from themselves. Another critical dialogue occurred after participating in multiple class activities such as the Privilege Walk and playing Monopoly with modified rules that highlight economic privilege. Through such activities, students begin to develop a consciousness regarding how privilege for some equates to oppression for others. The peer interaction humanizes experiences that are divergent from their lived experiences, and creates empathy

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and compassion for marginalized populations. The student–teacher connection is utilized to assist students with translating their knowledge of their privileged spaces into areas for collective responsibility for advocacy. The cultural case studies were then introduced and students were challenged by their instructor to interpret various scenarios from multiple cultural perspectives. This allowed students to develop a strengths-based understanding instead of a pathological deficit lens for understanding experiences different from their own. • Integrative Writing Assignment. Collins’ (2014) theoretical assumption that social locations such as race, gender, socioeconomic status, ability status, and other diversity factors simultaneously privilege and marginalize individuals within society was the basis of the Integrated Writing Assignment. It was designed to theoretically advance the process of cultural competence by allowing students to examine how they were socialized regarding various aspects of identity such as race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. The Integrated Writing Assignment required students to implement Collins’ (2014) theory by critically self-reflecting, in written and oral formats, on the areas where they are simultaneously marginalized and privileged. The written format provided students a professional scenario as an emerging human services professional seeking a new certification criterion. In this role, students were required to write a four-page written assessment to the Council for Standards in Human Services that discussed three salient aspects of their identity; their socialization around each of their salient identities; and a plan for enhancing their culturally competent practice within their professional career. The oral part of the assignment required students to present a creative five-minute autobiographical demonstration of their self-reflection during class. Students were instructed that successful presentations should engage their respective diversity, thus be culturally centered based on how they identified. They were permitted to include, but were not limited to, poems, spoken word/rap, artwork, multimedia, songs, video, crafts, food, etc. As a result, the culture of each student was valued and brought into the course curriculum. • Cultural Immersion Assignment. The Cultural Immersion Assignment was a four-part assignment where students were required to choose a

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population they did NOT identify with; engage in an immersion activity that was culturally centered on that population; conduct an interview with someone who identified with their chosen population; and write a four-page paper that described their experience. Each student was instructed to choose a non-dominant cultural group they did not belong to. This assignment embodied Village Pedagogy through experiential learning and system navigation. • Diversity Workshop Assignment. For the Diversity Workshop Assignment, students were assigned to small diverse groups, and charged to select a cultural/ethnic group of which they were not a part. As a group, students were assigned the task of conducting a one-hour workshop about their approved group to the rest of the class. Each student group had to research and study the chosen cultural group and present: (1) variations in the group’s cultural characteristics, (2) critical historical or current experiences that contributed to the group’s identity/experience in society, (3) existing issues that the group may perceive as relevant, and (4) culturally centered strategies for working with members of the cultural/ethnic group. Half of the workshop had to include a diverse panel of individuals who identified within the cultural group being investigated.

Thus, students were required to conduct research and to collaborate with community members to compose their respective panels. This assignment embodied Village Pedagogy through experiential learning and systemic navigation.

Figure 81.1 captures how each of the course activities and assignments aligned with the pedagogical embodiment of Village Pedagogy. A qualitative pilot study examining students’ perceptions of the process of becoming culturally competent human services practitioners was conducted to examine the most impactful aspects of the course (Tarver and Herring, 2019). Below, I discuss the experiences of three students to highlight the influence of the course assignments as they relate to the Village Pedagogy strategies of personal connection, systemic navigation, and experiential learning. Personal connection. Sarah1 reflected on her classroom experiences by stating, ‘It was truly amazing to sit in class and to listen to other individuals’ experiences that I could either relate to or just empathize for what

Figure 81.1  Course activities within a Diversity of Human Services course that illustrates Village Pedagogy

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they did go through that I couldn’t relate to. It created a level of respect for my classmates’ (Tarver and Herring, 2019). Such respect is the foundation for humanizing experiences in ways that offer a critical consciousness for diverse perspectives. Sarah’s example suggests the personal connections with peers were key to her development of critical consciousness. Such enhanced empathy is also critical for building a foundation of collective responsibility that pushes human services professionals to be more justice-minded in ways that will enhance their ability to engage in advocacy in culturally relevant ways. Systemic navigation. When reflecting on the Cultural Immersion Assignment, Alex stated, ‘I have never really thought about my diversity and everything that plays into diversity, marginalization, and privilege, until this assignment’ (Tarver and Herring, 2019). His experience offered him the opportunity to get to grips with his personal privilege as well as how it may interact with the oppression of others. The experiential aspect of the Cultural Immersion Assignment proved to be impactful for Alex’s ability to understand how systemic interactions need to be considered and addressed within professional–client relationships. In his experience, Village Pedagogy offered insight into the nuanced cultural factors that influence system navigation. Experiential learning. Experiential learning encourages students to reflect on their own biases. For example, Sable described, ‘I formed opinions about certain others and categorized them as arrogant. But after the project I understood that they have experienced marginalization before and it made me connect to them more’ (Tarver and Herring, 2019). This is a critical realization for human services practitioners, given the roles that they play when working with marginalized populations. Being able to deconstruct and address personal biases is an essential aspect of improving the quality of life of marginalized populations (Tarver and Herring, 2019). Such understanding yields a more authentic

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understanding of populations that human services practitioners will go on to serve. Collectively, these findings reveal that human services educators who espouse a personal commitment to the collective uplift and improvement of the quality of life for all African Americans are well positioned to engage in Village Pedagogy (McCoy and Packer, 2017). In this manner Village Pedagogy ‘translates into a pedagogy that supersedes traditional implementation of teaching strategies that focus primarily on covering predetermined course curriculum solely for degree matriculation’ (McCoy and Packer, 2017: 242). Rather, it fosters collective responsibility to enhance the quality of life for marginalized populations. For human services educators, this begins with engaging in pedagogy that equips students with a critical consciousness ‘to analyze and critique institutional practices that contribute to the institutional marginalization of African Americans, and empowering [students] to become social justice advocates’ (McCoy and Packer, 2017: 248). This approach is both timely and essential for addressing existing systemic inequalities.

Critical Studyin’ in a Literacy Methods Course for Preservice Teachers The description and data samples presented below are drawn from a larger research project studying the influence of Black Studies on the professional perspectives and enactments of preservice reading teachers. This project is connected to my work, the second author, as a teacher educator at a large research-intensive public university in the US South. In this example I present Critical Studyin’ in an undergraduate literacy methods course, the second in a series of four literacy methods courses preservice teachers take to meet state licensure and graduation requirements. This course focuses on literacy instruction for children in grades 2nd through 6th. The group met for 16 three-hour sessions.

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The conceptual focus of the course is multifocused to 1 Stimulate an ideological disruptive learning environment through which preservice teachers begin to engage in identity work, notice and name socially toxic and socially just phenomena, and forge professional identities aligned with justice; 2 Encourage preservice teachers to consider their roles and responsibilities in increasing the positive literacy outcomes for culturally diverse students through engagement, achievement motivation, and community building in the classroom; and 3 Invite preservice teachers to begin to construct a vision and practice of effective elementary literacy teaching with full regard for the cultural lives and experiences of students and communities.

In order to engage in the practice-to-theory analysis indicative of Critical Studyin’ and as a way to model the practice of developing instruction from an asset-based perspective, preservice teacher participants were engaged in the following activities: • Book club discussions. Discussions were scaffolded around student participation in a book club using the novel The Jacket (a children’s novel based on the experiences of one European American boy’s struggle to confront and understand his own privilege and prejudice after an incident with a young African American boy). • Ethnographic research (portfolio project). Preservice teachers used ethnographic methods (observations, interviews, open-ended surveys, etc.) to collect data related to schools, classrooms, and communities. Students were given approximately three weeks to collect data in the field, after which students and professor engaged in a collective analysis of their data in ways that encouraged students to wrestle with racial, geographic, and socioeconomic differences in the kinds of literacy instruction children receive. Students also wrote reflective responses in which they posed lingering questions about the data and our analysis that they wanted to explore further. • Community-based teaching experience in which they worked in grade-level teams (2nd–5th grade) to prepare and implement a modified Readers’ Workshop model driven by culturally relevant principles and practices at a local elementary school serving African American and Latino children. After

one week of observation (preservice teachers watched the professor model a lesson with 3rd graders), preservice teachers worked in six-person teams to provide whole-group instruction with an emphasis on building and maintaining community through morning meeting, reading fluency, and phonics for 30 minutes. They then worked in partner within their same grade level to provide reading comprehension and vocabulary instruction to five elementary students for 30 minutes. Preservice teachers engaged in this communitybased experience one day per week for nine weeks out of the semester. • Community literacy carnival. In partnership with a local community-based organization and an elementary school, preservice teachers and I designed and carried out a Literacy Carnival for children and families in the school community. Preservice teachers developed literacy-based carnival-type games and set up booths around the campus. Preservice teachers engaged with children and families as they facilitated the games. Students were responsible for preparation, setup, and clean up of games. After the carnival, we debriefed and reflected on the activity.

Figure 81.2 captures how each major activity is aligned with the pedagogical tools of Critical Studyin’. In the section below, I present data from three preservice teachers’ end of course analysis and reflections on their experiences and learning to highlight the potential of Critical Studyin’ in preparing conscious and competent classroom teachers. Lauren, White, female in her early twenties. Lauren was sincere in her in class participation and often shared her ideas in class. In her in-class interactions with classmates, she served as the facilitator and momentumkeeper as she kept everyone on task and motivated to address each task presented to them. I feel I have changed not only as a teacher but as a person through this experience. When our semester began Dr Acosta challenged us to draw what we think a ‘good reader’ is. I didn’t consider the race or gender I used, the setting, any of it. Most of us drew White, females, reading alone or with one other person, this may have been how most of us grew up, but the children at Carver2 don’t look how we depicted good readers, they are

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Figure 81.2  Preservice teacher learning activities from a literacy methods course framed around the Black Studies Critical Studyin’ pedagogical framework almost the opposite. This activity showed me that we have to be careful of how we perceive a ‘good’ student or reader alike, because at Carver I saw a completely different picture of what great readers looked like, and it was nothing as I had first depicted… My assumptions about Carver’s after school program was that it was only students who were either struggling greatly or unable to read at all were a part of it, little did I know that over the course of this class my assumption would be greatly altered after seeing such potential in my second grade students. At this point I realized how wrong my original preconceived thoughts were. My assumptions that I had made turned out to be false. The students proved me wrong time after time and were flying through the lessons. My feelings at this point grew to be more personal as I was able to put names with faces and interact with the students.

Fatima, African American female in her early twenties. Fatima was very thoughtful in her responses and in class interactions and expressed an interest in teaching in predominantly African American, low-income school settings upon graduation. These weeks of teaching really helped me to let go of some biases that Latino students were slow with reading. One student shocked me and made me elevate my expectations because she was a great reader. This is why getting to know your students is a major key of teaching. Compared to my concerns

at the beginning about not being accepted by the students, or not being able to enact change, by the end I had a different concern. My final concern was after all of these weeks planning, and coming every Wednesday, who would work within the students’ after school program now, would they really be receiving valid help? Would they enjoy their time? I was concerned for them as learners, because I had seen so much growth in such a short time already. However, I do believe we made a positive impact on the students because during morning meeting, one student in particular said that he first felt shy to read and voice his opinions because he was scared of what other people would think but towards the end he did not feel shy anymore and he was comfortable with opening up about anything with us. I personally think this was a better response than a student saying that they now enjoyed reading. This also resonated with me because over the past years a lot of times I have been silent in certain situations whether they have been uncomfortable or if I was just to voice my opinion. I was scared of what others might say, but now I know it is very important to express yourself. Confidence and selfesteem are a major component that a lot of students lack in school and being able to gain confidence and feel comfortable talking to us as student teachers really meant a lot to me.

Allison, White, female in her early twenties. Allison was always eager to participate in class discussions and ask critical questions, whether she was well-informed on the subject

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or not. Allison often engaged me in extended conversations before and after class. My feelings changed and I learned that while this was an opportunity for me to practice my teaching style this was more about those who were learning – the students. I realized that this was not just a fun activity that was to be done weekly. During the middle of this journey it fully clicked within me; this is not for me specifically, moreover it is about them. On October 19th I saw my teaching and planning advance and become more developed. On this day we learned about the creation of the airplane, the myths, and made paper airplanes. On this day I saw myself have more fun with what I was teaching and have more confidence and control over the area that I was monitoring. From the morning meeting and the introduction of concrete poems to the paper airplane race I not only saw the kids having fun but I also saw them engaged and learning without the dreaded commands, ‘pay attention’ and ‘be quiet’. By the end of the semester, I was deeply immersed and invested in the students. I felt like they were mine.

The power and potential of the tools and learning activities encapsulated within Critical Studyin’ is nested around three important aspects that align with research on educator preparation for diversity, including: critical inquiry as stance (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 1999), normalization of disruptive learning spaces (Chapman, 2011; Ladson-Billings, 2000), and school-based teacher learning (Darling-Hammond, 2016). Taken together, Critical Studyin’ offers prospective educators with opportunities to learn how to read the word and the world in ways that offer possibilities for the development of dispositions and practices necessary for effective teaching such as sociopolitical clarity, cultural competence, responsibility, and agency.

DISCUSSION OF LESSONS LEARNED AND IMPLICATIONS FOR HUMAN SERVICES AND TEACHER EDUCATORS Although Afrocentric pedagogies may be perceived as controversial, particularly among those who do not understand or value

culturally centered approaches, the utilization of such pedagogies is timely and critical to improving the conditions of African Americans (Acosta, 2017, 2018). The limited effectiveness of Eurocentric approaches within human services and teacher education further underscores the need for the culturally centered approaches of Village Pedagogy and Critical Studyin’ for preparing practitioners and teacher educators to work with people of color. Each of these approaches are designed to enhance the quality of life and educational access specifically for African Americans. However, Asante (1991: 173) further describes that, ‘Afrocentric education is…against the marginalization of African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, Native American, and other nonWhite children’. As a result, any educator seeking to educate and improve the quality of life of marginalized populations should consider engaging in these pedagogical approaches when training emerging teachers and practitioners. The embodiment of the Afrocentric pedagogies of Village Pedagogy and Critical Studyin’ have yielded valuable lessons that have implications for educators who are interested in engaging in culture-centered approaches. One important lesson learned from engaging in Village Pedagogy is that human services educators must be intentional about engaging in Afrocentric pedagogies, such as Village Pedagogy, to prepare future human services professionals to enhance the quality of life of African American clients. The limited focus on the systemic influences that create barriers for African Americans has perpetuated disproportionate outcomes for African Americans across various systems, such as health care, probation and parole, and education. Failure to train future professionals in culturally centered ways will inevitably contribute to existing inequalities (Tarver and Herring, 2019). Alternatively, Village Pedagogy offers an ideal approach that students perceive as very impactful for their professional development. Although additional research is

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needed to understand the impact of Village Pedagogy within the field of human services, the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings highlight the significant potential it has for improving the lives of marginalized populations. Thus, human services educators who are justice-oriented should utilize Village Pedagogy to intentionally develop culturally competent instructional practices that can help them translate their social justice objectives and ideas into practical application for students that will enhance future outcomes for African Americans. Three important lessons emerged from the utilization of Critical Studyin’. First is that enactment of Afrocentric pedagogies must begin inward and radiate outward. Thus, an authentic passion and commitment for improving the educational experiences of African American students is essential for engagement in Critical Studyin’. More importantly, teacher educators must engage in their own individual identity work and give serious attention to their perspectives, ideologies, and existing teaching practices, and this must be a continual practice. As Closson et al. (2014) posit, African American professors’ successful enactment of antiracist pedagogies such as Critical Studyin’ depends on their own negotiations of self and others. Second, praxis, or experimentation and inquiry, are important in ‘becoming’ an Afrocentric pedagogue. Therefore, teacher educators must situate their own enactments of Critical Studyin’ and Village Pedagogy as tools for self-reflection toward the development of a racial-social justice personal, pedagogical, and political stance. Finally, classroom context matters in terms of creating the conditions necessary to engage in Critical Studyin’ in ways that are healthy and productive. Teacher educators must be deliberate in creating spaces that foster risk, authentic engagement, and the normalization of cognitive violence, and they must be prepared to manage the interpersonal demands and dilemmas that will certainly arise under these conditions.

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Collectively, Village Pedagogy and Critical Studyin’ are exemplary approaches for embodying Afrocentric pedagogies. It is essential to understand that these and other Afrocentric pedagogies are not ‘anti-White; it is however, pro-human’ (Asante, 1991). While the empirical examples of pedagogical embodiment were provided in this chapter by two African American women, they may be utilized by any educator who has a passion and commitment to improving the quality of life and educational outcomes for African Americans.

Notes 1  Pseudonym used to protect participant confidentiality. 2  Pseudonym used to protect participant confidentiality.

REFERENCES Acosta, M. M. (2017). ‘EDG 6931 writes back!’. Black Studies as emancipatory resistance to neoliberal tyranny in teacher education. [Special Issue]. Critical Studies – Critical Methodologies, 17(3), 269–276. Acosta, M. M. (2018). ‘No time for messin’ around!’ Understanding Black educator urgency: Implications for the preparation of urban educators. Urban Education, 53(8), 1–32. Asante, M. K. (1991). The Afrocentric idea in education. The Journal of Negro Education, 60(2), 2, 170–180. Barrera, I. & Corso, R. M. (2002). Cultural competency as Skilled Dialogue. Topics in Early Childhood Special Education, 22(2), 103–113. Bell, D. A. (1992). Faces at the bottom of the well: The permanence of racism. New York, NY: Basic Books. Chapman, T. (2011). Critical race theory and teacher education [Special Issue], Myriad, 8–17. Closson, R. B., Bowman, L., & Merriweather, L. R., (2014). Toward a race pedagogy for Black faculty. Adult Learning, 25(3), 82–88. Cochran-Smith, M. & Lytle, S. L., (1999). Relationships of knowledge and practice:

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teacher learning in communities. Review of Research in Education, 24, 249–305. Collins, P. H. (2014). Toward a new vision: Race, class, and gender as categories of analysis and connection. In T. E. Ore (Ed.), Social construction of difference and inequality: Race, class, gender, and sexuality (6th ed.), pp. 711–725. New York: McGraw-Hill. Crenshaw, K., Gotanda, N., Peller, G., & Thomas, K. (Eds.). (1996). Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement. New York, NY: New Press. Darling-Hammond, L. (2016). Research on teaching and teacher education and its influences on policy and practice. Educational Researcher, 45(2), 83–91. DeCuir, J., & Dixson, A. (2004). ‘So when it comes out, they aren’t that surprised that it is there’: Using Critical Race Theory as a tool of analysis of race and racism in education. Educational Researcher, 33(5), 26–31. Dixson, A. D., & Rousseau, C. K. (2006). And we are still not saved: Critical Race Theory in education ten years later. In A. D. Dixson & C. K. Rousseau (Eds.), Critical Race Theory in education: All God’s children got a song (pp. 31–56). New York, NY: Routledge. Harris, O. D., III. (2012). From margin to center: Participating in village pedagogy at historically Black colleges and universities. Urban Review, 44(3), 332–357. King, J. E. (2008). ‘If justice is our imperative’: Diaspora literacy, heritage knowledge and the praxis of Critical Studyin’ for human freedom. In A. F. Ball (Ed.), With more deliberate speed: Achieving equity and excellence in education – realizing the full potential of Brown v. Board of Education (pp. 337–360). National Society for the Study of Education 105th Yearbook, Part 2. New York: Ballenger, 2006. Ladson-Billings, G. (2000). Fighting for our lives: Preparing teachers to teach African

American students. Journal of Teacher Education, 51(3), 206–214. McClam, T., Diambra, J. F., Burton, B., Fuss, A., & Fudge, D. L. (2007). Support: A key to successful service learning. Human Service Education, 27(1), 18–24. McCoy, S. Z., & Packer, T. G. B. (2017). Village Pedagogy: Empowering African American students to be activist. In R. Brock, D. NixStevenson, & P. C. Miller (Eds.), Critical Black studies reader (pp. 241–249). New York: Peter Lang. McKittrick, K., (2006). Demonic grounds: Black women and the cartographies of struggle. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN. National Organization for Human Services (NOHS) (2015). Ethical Standards for Human Services Professionals. Retrieved November 20, 2019 from https://www.nationalhumanservices.org/ ethical-standards. Neukrug, E. S. (2017). Theory, practice, and trends in human services: An introduction (6th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning. Ricks, S. A. (2014). Teaching and learning in ‘post-racial’ America: Implications for human services professionals. Journal of Human Services, 34(1), 163–168. Sefa Dei, G. J. (1994). Afrocentricity: A cornerstone of pedagogy. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 25(1), 3–28. Tarver, S. Z., & Herring, M. H. (2019). Training culturally competent practitioners: Student reflections on the process. Journal of Human Services, 39, 7–18. Wark, L. (2008). At-risk decisions in professionalclient relationships: A classroom exercise. Human Service Education, 28, 83–99. Woods, C. (1998). Regional blocs, regional planning, and the Blues epistemology in the Lower Mississippi Delta. In L. Sandercock (Ed.), Making the invisible visible: A multicultural planning history (pp. 78–99). Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA:University of California Press.

82 Critical Pedagogy, Democratic Praxis, and Adultism To b y R o l l o , J . C y n t h i a M c D e r m o t t , Richard Kahn and Fred Chapel

EDUCATION AND ADULTISM The task of critical pedagogy is to cultivate the skills and sensibilities required to challenge relations of domination. To that end, the role of the teacher is to foster a more equal and democratic society by promoting self-directed and collective learning opportunities. To trust children – that is, to treat them with equal respect and encourage their participation in decision-making – is to prefigure the agency they will exercise as active critical citizens who are empowered to transform society rather than simply reproduce its norms and institutions. From this perspective, educational practices that privilege the teacher’s interests and deny or subordinate the agency of children constitute a form of domination sometimes referred to as adultism (Flasher, 1978; Tate and Copas, 2003), childism (Pierce and Allen, 1975; Young-Bruehl, 2011), aetonormativity (Nikolajeva, 2010), or misopedy (Rollo, 2016b). Education is adultist when teachers alone determine subjects, curricula, and

assessment, thus encouraging obedience and passivity in students and, accordingly, propagating the anti-democratic pathologies of civic conformity and apathy. Adultist pedagogy tends to focus on conventional practices of ‘voting, volunteering, or joining a civic group’ (Broom, 2017: 3) which is an arbitrary restriction from the perspective of the child, falling short of empowerment and failing to demonstrate genuine trust or equal respect for children who are capable of creating their own democratic practices and institutions. The idea that democracy is the purview of adults with ‘mature capacities’ permeates the earliest defenses of democratic education. Adultist assumption and priorities are present from the opening of John Dewey’s classic Democracy and Education (1916), in which he asserts that children must be ‘initiated into the interests, purposes, information, skill, and practices of the mature members’ (Dewey, 1916: 3). George Counts’ Dare the School Build a New Social Order? (1932) is even more intentional with respect to socializing

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children into existing democratic institutions than Dewey, though both Counts and Dewey heavily influenced the work of Myles Horton, who would discard many of the adultist precepts. Standard curricula in civics classes tend to limit the child’s participation to those democratic ideals and institutions prioritized by adults, and in this respect they constitute a kind of adultist ‘hidden curriculum’ (Giroux and Penna, 1979). For theorists of education and democracy, this hidden curriculum was celebrated as a source of democratic socialization, but questions remained as to the democratic legitimacy of an educational framework that is largely predetermined. A more critical assessment of child learning and habituation emerged during the latter half of the 20th century, where the catastrophic collapse of European democratic politics into fascism prompted interest in the education and socialization of children. The United Nations formulated a new Declaration on the Rights of the Child (UN General Assembly, 1959), which was modeled on the 1924 Geneva Declaration that child-advocate Janusz Korczak had prophetically criticized as an inert and merely aspirational document. From this point onward, democratic pedagogy would be informed by both an emerging global cognizance of children’s unique vulnerabilities and rights as well as a deep critique of power and ideology that cast its light beyond formal political institutions to the psychology of citizens and mass society. New fusions of Marxist critique and psychoanalysis found expression in the democratic and free school movements, epitomized in the formation of A. S. Neill’s Summerhill School. Indeed, the foreword for Neill’s Summerhill (Neill, 1960) was penned by critical psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (Fromm, 1960). By the mid 20th century, educational theorists seemed to be converging on a single problem: if the established political ideals and institutions venerated by adults were so easily turned upside-down, perhaps something more robustly democratic could be established by and for children. Questions of this sort heavily informed some

classic works in critical pedagogy and child participation, such as Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and Illich’s Deschooling Society (1970), works that revealed how power structures in the classroom reproduce power structures in society generally. Yet, elements of adultism persisted in these new critical paradigms of education and socialization, for it was generally assumed that children could and should participate like adults. In the American context, a child liberationist movement developed to challenge inequality and the exclusion of children in everything from education to the workplace and electoral politics (Holt, 1974). But calls for greater inclusion of children always presupposed the child’s integration into existing adult economic and political institutions. Likewise, seeking to elaborate on the previous two declarations, the UN passed the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), which laid out children’s rights to participation insofar as they conformed to the agency of adults. Article 12 of the Convention reads: States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.

Contemporary educational reformists rely on these and other resources to promote citizen preparation and participation, yet, as we see in the idea of a ‘ladder participation’ (Arnstein, 1969; Hart, 1992), the particular modality and scope of engagement is often vague and seems inevitably to presuppose that children will emulate the adult prioritizing of voice, speech, or expression. There are problems with the focus on children’s voices, of course, centering mostly on the way educational contexts shape and constrain what a child can talk about and how the child’s speech gets interpreted by adults. Adults will often craft an interpretation of the child’s voice so as to make it more cognizable to an adult audience (Spyrou, 2011; I’Anson, 2013). Adults are also prone to interpreting

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what children say through a neoliberal individualist lens (Murris, 2016). Likewise, the focus on voice can romantically assume a standard of authenticity in the child’s speech that is not applied to adults, that there is something that can be appropriately labelled ‘the child’s view’. The prevailing ideal, however, is that educational systems can be increasingly democratized to allow for greater student control and this will serve as a corrective to the interventions of adults. The privileging of voice as the definitive form of political agency is apparent in the fact that the concepts of voice, power, and participation are interchangeable in most of the educational literature. It is suggested without hesitation that children’s views should be heard, yet it is rarely supposed that a child’s agency can be enacted without adult mediation. As a field, critical pedagogy has taken up the ideal of democratic engagement to address adultism in education along with the view that education exists to prepare children for pre-established roles and responsibilities (see Rehfeld, 2011). Critics are beginning to understand that children may demand a voice, and adults aspire to give them a voice, only because the hegemonic understanding of agency has restricted the field of choice to voice and voice alone. Theorists and practitioners are therefore seeking to revolutionize pedagogy in ways that move beyond voice, as reflected in the most recent UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (2009) interpretation of Article 12, which stipulates recognition of, and respect for, non-verbal forms of communication including play, body language, facial expressions, and drawing and painting, through which very young children demonstrate understanding, choices and preferences. (2009: 9)

It is increasingly acknowledged that the focus on voice in education can stifle participation and active citizen engagement. Citizens who find themselves unable or unwilling to articulate their interests or justify their beliefs in political for a are often incentivized to act in ways that are less public, leaving their

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potential contributions neglected (Rollo, 2016a). There is also a risk in privileging voice that those who do excel at public dialogue will find their energies diverted into talk at the expense of action. This relates to what is called the attitude–behavior or value– action gap, which refers to the ways that citizens’ expressed political views often do not correlate with their actions (Kollmuss and Agyeman, 2002). In these examples, among others, the privileging of voice seems to undermine democratic community and effective governance, leading to the more general problem of political disillusionment and apathy. There are additional dangers to the adultist privileging of voice in education aside from general issues of disillusionment and apathy. One such risk relates to the inherent developmentalism in the idea of voice-based agency and its role in exacerbating issues of ableism and colonialism. Building political systems around adult capacities tends to reify the developmentalism that subordinates not only children but also people with disabilities (Erevelles, 2000). Insofar as the privileging of voice assumes a natural human telos from the voiceless agency of childhood toward mature faculties of speech and reason, those who do not achieve adult capacities are considered incomplete or defective (Vorhaus, 2005). Adultism in education promotes the idea that, without intervention from fully developed adults, those with profound cognitive or communicative disabilities cannot fully contribute to the establishment, contestation, or modification of societal norms. Similarly, insofar as the veneration of speech and literacy tends to position non-literate people or cultures who privilege ceremony or action over public deliberation at a lesser stage of social evolution, the adultist reduction of agency to speech and reason has colonial implications (Nandy, 1984). These developmental forms of exclusion are resisted by critical pedagogy through its focus on the inclusion of practical, embodied, and other non-verbal forms of educational praxis.

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It is important to observe that problems of apathy and exclusion are not inherent in speech but, rather, inherent in the reductive and adultist association between speech and agency. Thus, the issue is not that children are always unable to speak for themselves but, rather, that adults posit speech as the practical and normative threshold of agency, inclusion, and equality. A genuinely democratic education would prepare children for the world of the adult while also permitting children the space to create the world anew. A fully child-centered pedagogy resists seeing the democracy that has been constructed by adults as the final stage of civilizational evolution into which children must be socialized or assimilated. To that end, the latest incarnations of critical pedagogy take up the insights of figures like Dewey without adopting their programmatic emulation of adult political institutions. They also seek to capture Freire’s revolutionary edge without falling into the idea that critical consciousness can only be cultivated through literacy and dialogue. The critical emancipatory promise of education is realized when children are permitted to choose which modality of agency they prefer in a given situation (e.g. voice, action, silence). To that end, critical pedagogy is gradually implementing a more robust attunement to embodied aspects of learning (McLaren, 1988), offering a corrective to the arbitrary restrictions of adultism. In turn, children continue to demonstrate to adults that there is perhaps nothing inherent to critical engagement with the world that requires speech or literacy. Norms are established, affirmed, contested, and modified in both the speech and deeds of citizens. We see early manifestations of such attunement in the work of Jane Addams (1902), who understood that democracy requires practices of embodied care. In contemporary democratic theory, we see it in the focus on empathy (Morrell, 2010). Full respect for the child as an agent is found in Indigenous land-based educational practices (Simpson, 2014), such

as the Dechinta Bush University (Ballantyne, 2014), which reject the developmentalist model as applied to either the individual or to social evolution. And we find a similar balance between voice and other forms of democratic agency in the Foxfire and Highlander programs and Youth Participatory Action Research.

FOXFIRE AND HIGHLANDER Choosing to abandon an adultist model of classroom processes can be achieved in collaboration with students, teachers, and administrators who recognize the failures of the existing system. Such choice often occurs in haphazard ways as participants grapple with shedding old models so thoroughly ingrained in the status quo. The oft-cited adage that teachers teach the way they were taught rather than the way they were taught to teach is only partially true. When do educators experience a non-adultist learning environment that can create alternative sets of practices and more importantly attitudes that lead to opportunities for youth to experience their rights on a daily basis? Where do educators learn about a process that respects children? As Warren (1972: 169) so aptly stated, ‘There are neither rights nor freedoms in any meaningful sense unless they can be enjoyed but all’. More than collaboration is necessary, however, to erase the colonialism of adultist practices. Even Hart’s (1992) Ladder of Participation model falls short of seeing children as rightful catalysts for their learning. Interactions with children must recognize that their ideas and concerns and questions must be center stage. The oppressive, but well-meaning, classroom that is characterized by teacher-determined practices simply reiterates the abuse that so many children experience. Although many children have no understanding of their rights or support from their communities to learn, it does appear that there are increasing examples

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across the world that demonstrate that children are increasingly being included and, in fact, are taking on significant responsibilities (Fletcher, 2013). Evidence of international civic action projects created and designed by youth are reported by the Inter-Agency Working Group on Children’s Participation (2008). This work is supported to increase children’s citizenship and civil rights. In the United States, educators can look to examples that are challenging the adultist mentality and are consistent with the point of view of embodied care.

Highlander The first example is the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee begun in 1932 by Myles Horton, Don West, and James Dombrowski as a place where collective action could occur. Horton, the key person in its development, understood at a deep personal level that if change was to occur in the community, it had to come from the local participants, utilizing their skills, ideas, and actions. His upbringing taught him about service to others and, as he finished his college education, his beliefs that people have the ability to pose and solve their own problems were affirmed (McDermott and HoffmanKipp, 2009). As he clearly stated, ‘you don’t have to know the answers. The answers come from the people and when they don’t have any answers then you have another role and you find resources’ (Horton et al., 1998: 23). At the Highlander Center in the rolling hills of Appalachia, Horton used dialogue as a means for a community of people to make decisions. Rocking chairs line the conference room, inviting participants to listen with their hearts and think critically about their ideas and those of others. The idea for this kind of dialogical process is to provide multiple ideas that can be tried even if they may fail. Within the community there are always options to make the road better if everyone participates. Although no process from Highlander has been named per se, this attempt to resolve

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local challenges is usually referred to as Popular Education. The extensive and historical results from this perspective created untold changes, contesting the oppression and inherited ideology that preyed on the members of the community. They saw themselves as voiceless and unable to enact their agency to create change. It certainly was not easy and took a powerful and robust commitment to undercut the years of chronic devaluing that described the dayto-day existence of the workers. For example, miners who had no rights and had lives full of occupational danger and poverty came to see themselves as able-bodied individuals working collectively to forge forward with union organizing and demands for decent lives. Horton, however, was not the organizer. He did not take the role of ‘teacher’ to lead the uneducated to the promised land. No, it was quite the opposite. He stated of his role that I don’t know what to do, and if I did know what to do I wouldn’t tell you, because if I had to tell you today then I’d have to tell you tomorrow, and when I’m gone you’d have to get somebody else to tell you. (Horton et al., 1998: 126)

Today the center continues these same processes, and their mission states: Highlander serves as a catalyst for grassroots organizing and movement building in Appalachia and the U.S. South. Through popular education, participatory research, and cultural work, we help to create spaces – at Highlander and in local communities – where people gain knowledge, hope and courage, expanding their ideas of what is possible. (Highlander Center, 2017: http://highlandercenter.org/about-us/)

In 1987, Paulo Freire and Horton met at Highlander to create the book We Make the Road by Walking (Horton et  al., 1990). Freire and Horton were practitioners who believed that people had the answers to the questions they posed. Horton (Horton et al., 1990) wrote that [t]he teacher is, of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves. (1990: 181)

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This faith and trust allows that taking risks in the company of others provides solutions to everyday challenges. They did not see themselves as the ‘experts’ but rather the catalysts that provided the environment that could create the changes necessary. Their work encourages creativity and critical analysis and is a liberatory approach essential in working out the day-to-day mistakes that often lead to disagreements and failure around practices of equity and diversity. Solutions to the most vexing problems reside within the community if only the time and process is allowed to hear the ‘other’ through democratic dialogue. Freire and Horton are not provocative in the sense that their ideas are political. What is perhaps provocative is their sense that people can be trusted. In defining the foundational concept of this trusting relationship, Horton stated that, ‘I think if I had to put a finger on what I consider a good education, a good radical education, it wouldn’t be anything about methods or techniques. It would be loving people first’ (Horton et al., 1990: 177). Both Horton and Freire believed that dialogue was a necessary practice that could create opportunities for problem solving even if the ideas ‘failed’ along the way. Paulo Freire coined the expression ‘Banking education’, which emphasizes that the teacher’s role as the active one in the teacher–learner relationship is an anti-dialogical approach. It serves the oppressor by denying the learner an active role in the learning. Dialogic action has two basic dimensions, reflection and action.

Foxfire A second model of an anti-adultism process was created with students in rural Georgia in 1966. Brooks Eliot Wigginton (Wig) was rather unsuccessfully teaching high-school English and began to ask the students what could be done to make it successful. Wig’s account of what began to happen is central to understanding the oppression and colonialism that occurs in schools. After he posed the

question as to what they could do together, he states, The class was silent. For long minutes we simply stared at each other. And then slowly, quietly, the talk came. Nothing of real consequence got resolved that day in terms of specific classroom activities that they might enjoy more than what I had imposed on them (I realized later how helpless many of them are to come up with brilliant suggestions when, because of the way they’ve been taught for so many years, they can’t even imagine what the options would be; and how wrong teachers are who say ‘Well, I asked them for their ideas and they couldn’t come up with any good ones so we just went on with the text’). But at least we began the dialogue and we began to look at each other in a different light. (Wigginton, 1985: 32)

More than 50 years later that dialogue supporting students to wrestle with who they are and what is important still continues. The Foxfire Approach is alive and well and still challenging the neoliberal approach of current classroom ‘reform’. Foxfire is an alternative to the traditional classroom, and as Wig and his students proceeded, they developed the series of Foxfire Magazines and established the beginning of cultural journalism, using the real world as the source of learning, consistent with the field of experiential learning (Knapp, 1993). This approach uses the students’ whole environment as a source of knowledge. The community, rather than the classroom, is the context for learning, where real experiences can occur. Experiential learning theory defines learning as the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience. Knowledge results from the combination of grasping and transforming experience (Kolb, 1984). In the Foxfire process, students are assisted in learning how to interview, to ask questions, and to create dialogue with their neighbors, relatives, and local ‘experts’. As the interviews took shape, students wrote their findings and published them in the Foxfire Magazine. An unlimited number of topics were, and still are, being investigated, ranging

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from quilting, to hog dressing, to ways to manufacture stills, and to serving as governor. What is significant about Foxfire is the transformation that it allows. Wig describes the pecking order that exists for many students in school. Wigginton (1998) stated that certain students get to do everything and other students get to do very little. And one of the magical aspects of this whole endeavor is that virtually anybody can play a part and make a contribution and it doesn’t have anything to do with strength or looks or popularity or money or whether or not you have a car or any of those other trappings of adolescent prestige. Those fall by the wayside in a situation like this. (Wigginton, 1998: 209)

As the process developed and more teachers came to understand the revolutionary aspect of it, the Core Practices (listed at the end of this chapter section) organically emerged as outcomes of those experiences. An everevolving living document, there have been many changes with input from students, teachers, and the community. Since Foxfire is considered an approach rather than a process or a standard curriculum, any community or content or age is relevant. As a completely student-centered process, the Core Practices reinforce the role of the teacher as helper and facilitator when needed. The work of the classroom belongs to the students and centers them as the problem posers and solvers. The act is political without being named as such. Turning the curriculum, or the projects, over to young people requires a sincere trust in them. What was it about folks like Horton and Wigginton that allowed them to give up control? Wig, for example, had no more trust in students than any other teacher initially. But as he watched their growth and responsibility and that they craved the trust, it provided the fuel to allow the work to continue (McDermott & Smith, 2016). As international educators confront the neoliberal standardization and privatization of education, it serves society well to deconstruct attitudes and behaviors toward children

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which prevent children from engaging in their rights. Partnering with young people has many advantages and can be a powerful political ally in the struggles for equity and democracy. But what stands in the way? A report from the Inter-Agency Working Group on Children’s Participation (2008) as well as the work of Lansdown (2003) provide a clear analysis of the factors and myths that prevent adults from trusting children and respecting their skills. Just as Wig’s students had no easy solutions, so too do educators follow their age-old model of top-down oppression believing these myths. Assumptions abound regarding the participation of children. Some assumptions include the misbelief that children lack the experience to participate, they do not accept responsibility so cannot be granted their rights until they do, participation is not part of the culture, giving children too much to do robs them of their childhood, participation will create a lack of respect for adults, those who participate are not representative of all the children, some become ‘professional activists’, and it is difficult to sustain their participation. These assumptions repeat the colonializing language of any oppressor, making excuses about behavior that is not based on dialogue or a desire to increase engagement in a democratic society. Lansdown’s (2003) work continues to argue that participation creates risks for children, including manipulation by adults and putting children at risk if they are too outspoken or visible. As essential as it is to protect children, without knowledge of their rights and demonstration of what they would look like, young people are denied the opportunity to fully function in a society that they will fully manage in their adulthood. Examining these myths with young people can move the dialogue of rights to center stage. When children encounter other perspectives – when they discuss, argue, and compare ideas – they are building understanding and making public that which has been private (Krechevsky et al., 2016).

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Foxfire Core Practices The Core Practices were tested and refined by hundreds of teachers working mostly in isolated and diverse classrooms around the country. When implemented, the Core Practices define an active, learner-centered, community-focused approach to teaching and learning. Regardless of a teacher’s experience, the school context, subject matter, or population served, the Approach can be adapted in meaningful and substantial ways, creating learning environments that are the same but different – environments that grow out of a clearly articulated set of beliefs and, at the same time, are designed to fit the contour of the landscape in which they are grown. Considered separately, the Core Practices include 11 tenets of effective teaching and learning. Verified as successful through years of independent study, teachers begin their work through any number of entry points or activities. The choices they make about where to begin and where to go next are influenced by individual school and community contexts, teachers’ interests and skills, and learners’ developmental levels. As teachers and learners become more skilled and confident, the Core Practices provide a decision-making framework which allows teachers to tightly weave fragmented pieces of classroom life into an integrated whole. When they are applied as a way of thinking rather than a way of doing, the complexities of teaching decisions become manageable, and one activity or new understanding leads naturally to many others. If teachers choose the Approach to guide their teaching decisions, it is not important where they start, only that they start. The adaptability and room for growth in skill and understanding make the Core Practices a highly effective, lifelong tool for self-reflection, assessment, and ongoing professional development. The Work Teachers and Learners Do Together Is Infused from the Beginning with Learner Choice, Design, and Revision

The central focus of the work grows out of learners’ interests and concerns. Most problems that arise during classroom activity are solved in collaboration with learners, and learners are supported in the development of their ability to solve problems and accept responsibility. The Academic Integrity of the Work Teachers and Learners Do Together Is Clear

Mandated skills and learning expectations are identified to the class. Through collaborative planning and implementation, students engage and accomplish the mandates. In addition, activities assist learners in discovering the value and potential of the curriculum and its connections to other disciplines. The Role of the Teacher Is That of Facilitator and Collaborator

Teachers are responsible for assessing and attending to learners’ developmental needs, providing guidance, identifying academic givens, monitoring each learner’s academic and social growth, and leading each into new areas of understanding and competence. The Work Is Characterized by Active Learning

Learners are thoughtfully engaged in the learning process, posing and solving problems, making meaning, producing products, and building understandings. Because learners engaged in these kinds of activities are risk takers operating on the edge of their competence, the classroom environment provides an atmosphere of trust where the consequence of a mistake is the opportunity for further learning. Peer Teaching, Small Group Work, and Teamwork Are All Consistent Features of Classroom Activities

Every learner is not only included, but needed, and, in the end, each can identify her or his specific stamp upon the effort. There Is an Audience beyond the Teacher for Learner Work

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It may be another individual, or a small group, or the community, but it is an audience the learners want to serve or engage. The audience, in turn, affirms the work is important, needed, and worth doing. New Activities Spiral Gracefully out of the Old, Incorpo­ rating Lessons Learned from Past Experiences, Building on Skills and Understandings That Can Now Be Amplified

Rather than completion of a study being regarded as the conclusion of a series of activities, it is regarded as the starting point for a new series. Reflection Is an Essential Activity That Takes Place at Key Points Throughout the Work

Teachers and learners engage in conscious and thoughtful consideration of the work and the process. It is this reflective activity that evokes insight and gives rise to revisions and refinements. Connections between the Classroom Work, the Surrounding Communities, and the World beyond the Community Are Clear

Course content is connected to the community in which the learners live. Learners’ work will ‘bring home’ larger issues by identifying attitudes about and illustrations and implications of those issues in their home communities. Imagination and Creativity Are Encouraged in the Completion of Learning Activities

It is the learner’s freedom to express and explore, to observe, investigate, and discover activities that are the basis for aesthetic experiences. These experiences provide a sense of enjoyment and satisfaction and lead to deeper understanding and an internal thirst for knowledge. The Work Teachers and Learners Do Together Includes Rigorous, Ongoing Assessment and Evaluation

Teachers and learners employ a variety of strategies to demonstrate their mastery of

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teaching and learning objectives (Smith, 2016: xv–xvii).

YOUTH PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH AS ANTI-ADULTIST EDUCATIONAL PRAXIS As expressed in the opening section of this chapter, for all the ways in which the critical pedagogical tradition – inclusive of Highlander and its Foxfire offshoot – provides a possible educational foundation for a transformative critique of adultist ideology and structure, as a counter-form enclosed within the adultist social order, critical pedagogy can still also reproduce the political problem of defining democratic agency primarily qua voice. However, it is important to recognize the dialectical and historical nature of critical pedagogy and so, even when forms of adultism may be implicated as a hidden curriculum within it, there is nothing essential to the theory or practices of critical pedagogy as such that demand it. The issue for this tradition remains, then, as to how non-adultist forms of education such as implied by theories of empathic care (for example) can be respected democratically as social partners by adultist civic institutions (such as the government, academia, and the education system generally). Critical pedagogy suggests that the very imaginary (Lewis and Kahn, 2010) of such respect is itself bounded by forces of oppression that lead us to characterize non-adultist education as dialogical or as speaking back to power (or for itself). The paradox of research for non-adultist critical pedagogical praxis, then, is that until the adultist social order has achieved radical reconstruction of education along very different political lines, critical practitioners are compelled to speak about non-adultist democratic educational practices in the hope of raising their profile (i.e. their voice) within the discourse of what constitutes legitimate social learning and communitybased knowledge or authority. As such, much

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of the description of these anti-adultist forms of will itself re-implicate and re-inscribe adultist ideology under present conditions. Yet, again, for critical pedagogy this reproduction of adultism is not necessary per se but rather a meaningful symbol/symptom of the hegemonic norms that subjugated and oppositional groups must navigate as agents who, by embodying social alternatives, then potentially produce new paradigmatic space for future social action along more liberatory lines. The tradition of critical pedagogy has thus long recognized that it is an ontologically complex research project that seeks to work alternatively from and for the grassroots-aspolitical subject(s) rather than from a class of privileged experts whose work often objectifies knowledge (and others) on behalf of universal standards of truth that disenfranchise/disempower many (Kincheloe et al., 2011). In this way, critical pedagogy is participatory action research (PAR) that attempts to create inclusive local communities of research in which knowledge and power are democratically obtained and distributed across community participants in order to serve the community’s own desires and demands as part of an active movement for greater communal self-determination and social empowerment (Hall, 1992; Park, 1992; Udas, 1998; Ozer et  al., 2010). Increasingly, over the last two decades, critical pedagogical researchers have overtly recognized the need to challenge adultist methods, ideas, values, and outcomes that can be involved in participatory action research (Mirra et al., 2016) and there has been a turn toward the research paradigm of youth participatory action research (YPAR) that ‘pushes PAR to include age as an identifier that should not serve to deny the legitimacy…for young people…to envision the world as they desire it, and then to take action to make these visions a reality’ (London, 2007: 407). As with community-based projects such as Foxfire, YPAR practitioners routinely find that youth can benefit through such research by gaining skills such as civic and institutional leadership, teamwork abilities, academic literacies, political advocacy, and

community resolution/transformative peacebuilding (Duncan-Andrade and Morrell, 2008; Cammarota and Fine, 2010). In turn, it has been found that these skills can help youth realize greater self-respect, efficacy and confidence, improved social networks, and intergenerational community, as well as a more thoroughgoing knowledge of structural inequalities and responsibility for a wide variety of social issues and the demand for their political action. Moreover, traditionally adultist organizations and communities have been shown to benefit from YPAR too, as it can lead to stronger internal and external relationships (i.e. outreach), forms of distributed leadership typical of learning communities, relevant curricula and types of organizational culture, improved data gathering and analysis on youth issues, and greater actionability on the findings of youth-oriented research (London et al., 2003). Indeed, for all these reasons, it can be declared that YPAR now constitutes a primary methodology for the uneducational project of teaching and learning for socio-ecological sustainability (Bellino, 2016; Strong et al., 2016; Bellino and Adams, 2017). Still, the anti-adultist implications of YPAR continue to pose significant challenges for its emancipatory realization within the prevailing adultist culture and as a relatively nascent educational paradigm YPAR maintains limitations and can often generate contradictions that remain the possible future foci of critical action, even as it contributes to self-­realization for young people. As an example of its limited nature, to our earlier point, YPAR theorists often continue to imagine that such practices justly raise the silenced ‘voices’ of youth as a community disenfranchised in/by adult institutions of civic power (Fox and Fine, 2013; Wernick et al., 2014) and it is not uncommon to read that YPAR generates ‘counter-­narratives’ or ‘counter-stories’ and testimonios by/of youth to oppose the hegemonic imaginary of them (especially those youth who may be further targeted for oppression based on identities related to, e.g. race, class, gender, sexual orientation or ability) as either ‘at-risk’ or as a form of ‘cultural deficit’ (Yang, 2009; Kirshner and

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Pozzoboni, 2011; Tuck, 2012). In this manner, even as it undeniably mobilizes youth to enact social change, accounts of YPAR may re-inscribe adultist conceptions of agency as speech-centric. Another issue YPAR faces is that because it is often conducted within the educational system, community-based civic organizations, and/or with academic partners, it is absolutely rare that it occurs without the centrally facilitative role of adult allies who can help young people gain access to network resources, advocate on their behalf to adultist institutions, and even help catalyze youth into organized research communities through ongoing roles as critical facilitators. While such allies certainly can empathically and carefully bridge to the embodied experiences and lives of non-adult research partners in methodological ways, the nuanced and complex pressures upon such allies (along with their central role) can easily lead to privileging adultist norms and aims in YPAR projects. In this vein, the literature on YPAR is replete with stories of the challenges of such work, by which it is generally meant that youth conducting it have been perceived as alternatively unmotivated, inconsistent, undisciplined, cavalierly playful, or some other negative characteristic suggesting that they blocked a more thorough and serious critical pedagogical study. Indeed, this deficit view of youth behavior and capabilities is one reason that the focus of such work is often on youth and not younger children still, who are more rarely considered to be meaningful participatory research partners (Langhout and Thomas, 2010). But we might ask: meaningful on whose terms? And the answer is almost always the adult ally’s own expectations and needs, or at least the organization(s) to which they are connected and to which they are subject. Therefore, since YPAR works for change within adultist spaces, it should be noted that this raises serious ethical issues for its practice – for while the engagement and self-­ determinative participation of youth is promoted as an empowerment in this way, it is also possible that such participation can greatly subject youth to surveillance, exploitation, further subordination, and other

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forms of increased vulnerability. Therefore, great care must be taken by those who would progressively seek to include children and youth as democratic equals for educational and civic change, for the very desire to include them may itself serve adultist means and ends and in fact further exclude the real lives and truths of non-adults from being understood respectively.

REFERENCES Addams, J. (1902). Democracy and social ethics. New York: Macmillan. Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the American Planning Association, 35(4), 216–224. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/01944366908977225 Ballantyne, E. F. (2014). Dechinta Bush University: Mobilizing a knowledge economy of reciprocity, resurgence and decolonization. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, 3(3), 67–85. Bellino, M. E. (2016). Critical youth participatory action research to reimagine environmental education with youth in urban environments (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). CUNY, New York. http://academicworks.cuny.edu/ gc_etds/1448 Bellino, M. E., & Adams, J. D. (2017). A critical urban environmental pedagogy: Relevant urban environmental education for and by youth. The Journal of Environmental Education, 48(4), 270–284. Broom, C. (2017). Youth civic engagement in a globalized world: Citizenship education in comparative perspective. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cammarota, J., & Fine, M. (Eds.). (2010). Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion. New York: Routledge. Counts, G. S. (1932). Dare the school build a new social order? New York: John Day. Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. New York: Macmillan. Duncan-Andrade, J., & Morrell, E. (2008). The art of critical pedagogy: Possibilities for moving from theory to practice in urban schools. New York: Peter Lang.

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Erevelles, N. (2000). Educating unruly bodies: Critical pedagogy, disability studies, and the politics of schooling. Educational Theory, 30(2), 25–48. Flasher, J. (1978). Adultism. Adolescence, 13(51), 517–523. Fletcher, A. (2013). A short introduction to youth engagement. Olympia, WA: The Freechild Project. Fox, M., & Fine, M. (2013). Accountable to whom? A critical science counter-story about a city that stopped caring for its young. Children & Society, 27(4), 321–335. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Fromm, E. (1960). Foreword. In A. S. Neill, Summerhill: A radical approach to child rearing (ix–xvi). New York: Hart Publishing. Giroux, H., & Penna, A. N. (1979). Social education in the classroom: The dynamics of the hidden curriculum. Theory and Research in Social Education, 7(1), 21–42. Hall, B. L. (1992). From margins to center? The development and purpose of participatory research. The American Sociologist, 23(4), 15–28. Hart, R. (1992). Children’s participation: From tokenism to citizenship. Florence: UNICEF International Child Development. Highlander Center. (2017, July 16). Highlander’s mission and work. Retrieved January 27, 2020 from http://highlandercenter.org/about-us/ Holt, J. (1974). Escape from childhood. Boston: E. P. Dutton. Horton, M., Bell, B., Gaventa, J., & Peters, J. M. (1990). We make the road by walking: Conversations on education and social change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Horton, M., Kohl, J., & Kohl, H. (1998). The long haul: An autobiography. New York: Teachers College Press. I’Anson, J. (2013). Beyond the child’s voice: Towards an ethics for children’s participation rights. Global Studies of Childhood, 3(2), 104–114. Illich, I. (1970). Deschooling society. New York: Harper and Collins. Inter-Agency Working Group on Children’s Participation. (2008). Children as active citizens: A policy and programme guide. Bangkok: Inter-Agency Working Group on Children’s Participation.

Kincheloe, J. L., McLaren, P., & Steinberg, S. R. (2011). Critical pedagogy and qualitative research: Moving to the bricolage. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (4th ed., 163–177). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kirshner, B., & Pozzoboni, K. (2011). Student interpretations of a school closure: Implications for student voice in equity-based school reform. Teachers College Record, 113(8), 1633–1667. Knapp, C. (1993, June). Reflecting on the Foxfire approach: An interview with Eliot Wigginton. Phi Delta Kappan, 74(10), 779–782. Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Kollmuss, A., & Agyeman, J. (2002). Mind the gap: Why do people act environmentally and what are the barriers to pro-environmental behavior? Environmental Education Research, 8(3), 239–260. Krechevsky, M., Mardell, B., Filippini, T., & Tedeschi, M. (2016). Children are citizens: The everyday and the razzle dazzle. Innovations in Early Education: The International Reggio Emilia Exchange, 23(4), 4–15. Langhout, R. D., & Thomas, E. (2010). Imagining participatory action research in collaboration with children: An introduction. American Journal of Community Psychology, 46(1–2), 60–66. Lansdown, G. (2003). International developments in children’s participation: Lessons and challenges. In E. K. M. Tisdall, J. M. Davis, M. Hill, & A. Proust (Eds.), Children, young people and social inclusion: Participation for what? (139–158). Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Lewis, T. E., & Kahn, R. (2010). Education out of bounds: Reimagining cultural studies for a posthuman age. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. London, J. K., Zimmerman, K., & Erbstein, N. (2003). Youth-led research and evaluation: Tools for youth, organizational, and community development. New Directions for Evaluation, 98(Summer 2003), 33–45. London, J. K. (2007). Power and pitfalls of youth participation in community-based action research. Children, Youth and Environments, 17(2), 406–432.

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McDermott, J. C., & Hoffman-Kipp, P. (2009). Horton, Highlander, and the habituation of democracy. In R. Linné, L. Benin, & A. Sosin (Eds.), Organizing the curriculum: Perspectives on teaching the US labor movement (205–220). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. McDermott, J. C., & Smith, H. (2016). No inert learning accepted at Foxfire! In: H. Smith, & J. C. McDermott (Eds.), The Foxfire Approach: Inspiration for classrooms and beyond (1–9). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. McLaren, P. (1988). Schooling the postmodern body: Critical pedagogy and the politics of enfleshment. The Journal of Education, 170(3), 53–83. Mirra, N., Garcia, A., & Morrell, E. (2016). Doing youth participatory action research: Transforming inquiry with researchers, educators, and students. New York: Routledge. Morrell, M. (2010). Empathy and democracy: Feeling, thinking and deliberation. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Murris, K. (2016). The posthuman child: Educational transformation through philosophy with picturebooks. New York: Routledge. Nandy, A. (1984–5). Restructuring childhood: A critique of the ideology of adulthood. Alternatives, 10(3), 359–375. Neill, A. S. (1960). Summerhill: A radical approach to child rearing. New York: Hart Publishing. Nikolajeva, M. (2010). Power, voice and subjectivity in literature for young readers. New York: Routledge. Ozer, E. J., Ritterman, M. L., & Wanis, M. G. (2010). Participatory action research (PAR) in middle school: Opportunities, constraints, and key processes. American Journal of Community Psychology, 46(1–2), 152–166. Park, P. (1992). The discovery of participatory research as a new scientific paradigm: Personal and intellectual accounts. The American Sociologist (Winter), 29–42. Pierce, C., & Allen, G. B. (1975). Childism. Psychiatric Annals, 5(7), 15–24. Rehfeld, A. (2011). The child as citizen. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 633(1), 167–179. Rollo, T. (2016a). Everyday deeds: Enactive protest, exit, and silence in deliberative systems. Political Theory. Online. DOI: 10.1177/009059 1716661222

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Rollo, T. (2016b). Feral children: Settler colonialism, progress, and the figure of the child. Settler Colonial Studies. Online. DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2016.1199826 Simpson, L. (2014). Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, 3(3), 1–25. Smith, H. (2016). The core practices. In H. Smith, & J. C. McDermott (Eds.), The Foxfire approach: Inspiration for classrooms and beyond (xv–xvii). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Spyrou, S. (2011). The limits of children’s voices: From authenticity to critical, reflexive representation. Childhood, 18(2), 151–165. Strong, L., Adams, J. D., Bellino, M. E., Pieroni, P., Stoops, J., & Das, A. (2016). Against neoliberal enclosure: Using a critical transdisciplinary approach in science teaching and learning. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 23(3), 225–236. Tate, T. F., & Copas, R. L. (2003). Insist or enlist? Adultism versus climates of excellence. Reclaiming Children and Youth, 12(1), 40–45. Tuck, E. (2012). Repatriating the GED: Urban youth and the alternative to a high school diploma. The High School Journal, 95(4), 4–18. Udas, K. (1998). Participatory action research as critical pedagogy. Systemic Practice and Action Research, 11(6), 599–628. UN. (1989). Convention on the rights of the child. Treaty Series, 1577, 3. UN General Assembly. (1959, 20 November). Declaration of the rights of the child. A/RES/ 1386(XIV), available at: http://www.refworld.org/ docid/3ae6b38e3.html [accessed 31 July 2017]. UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. (2009, 20 July). General comment No. 12 (2009): The right of the child to be heard, CRC/C/GC/12, available at: http://www. refworld.org/docid/4ae562c52.html [accessed 1 August 2017]. Vorhaus, J. (2005). Citizenship, competence, and profound disability. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 39(3), 461–475. Warren, E. (1972). A republic if you can keep it. New York: Quadrangle Publishing. Wernick, L. J., Woodford, M. R., & Kulick, A. (2014). LGBTQQ youth using participatory action research and theater to effect change: Moving adult decision-makers to create youth-centered change. Journal of Community Practice, 22(1–2), 47–66.

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Wigginton, E. (1985). Sometimes a shining moment: The Foxfire experience. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday. Wigginton, E. (1998). Reaching across the generations: The Foxfire experience. In R. Perks, & A. Thomson (Eds.), The oral history reader (206–213). New York: Routledge.

Yang, K. W. (2009). Focus on policy: Discipline or punish? Some suggestions for school policy and teacher practice. Language Arts, 87(1), 49–61. Young-Bruehl, E. (2011). Childism: Confronting prejudice against children. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

83 Presence and Resilience as Resistance Ta n y a B r o w n M e r r i m a n

Trying to change the world is dull, probably futile work. Still, it could be something in our human blueprint that drives us to do work that makes things better. I teach graduateschool preservice teachers: emergent educators, I call them. Every new term they appear, so sure and certain they can make things better. I have found it to be a source of optimism that I try not to take for it granted, but I forget not everyone has this to tap into, especially when things seem even more grim and upside down than ever before. Here is what I tell them: you are on the front lines, but better than that, because you are not a pawn. You are integral to the struggle for equity to reinvent itself; for the struggle of the moral universe to arch towards justice. You are the difference, in fact. And we need you to go on to have long, flourishing careers. Telling them this is meant to build them up to endure the countless, stupid frustrations of graduate school; and later to endure the inevitable heartbreak of teaching.

But, also, it’s true. The research bears it out. This brings us to critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy is an approach to practice that builds on a learner’s awareness of inequity and builds upon the individual and social accountability to fix it. Critical pedagogy connects classroom learning with context: with lived experiences, histories and capital that every student brings to the learning environment. Worthwhile learning is that which empowers students to transform their worlds. Social reconstruction pushes critical pedagogy further by locating the struggle for equity firmly in schools, with teachers and learners at the front lines. Critical pedagogy elevates the role of the teacher and pushes against formulaic, teacher-proofed, boxed curriculum. This presents two possibilities: either teachers rise to the challenge and create classrooms that empower students, their families and their communities; or they continue to uphold the hegemonic systems of belief and actions. And, either way, teachers

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are making a choice. There is no neutrality, or just teaching your subject. The way to be certain we are teaching for transformation is through a theoretically informed practice that builds on students’ assets and is continually renewed through critical reflection and reinvention. In a critical pedagogy, the role of the teacher is significantly different, because the typical school structure isn’t built for this and because a learning program based on questioning, thinking and challenging is not easy and it requires considerably more time, attention and thoughtfulness to implement and assess. Much of the work in critical pedagogy centers on African American children and the impact of systemic racism in schools. The work of universalizing this theoretical reserve is left to the recipients to figure out. This is problematic for a number of reasons; least of which is that presuming the experience of one group can be swapped or replaced by another is essentialist and, in its own way, discriminatory. There is no sense in doing the work of social justice education if we are going to stop short of details that really matter. In the book Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter, Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo warn against the ‘the problem of overgeneralizing oppression and liberation’ (Freire and Macedo, 1993: 170). Macedo invites Freire to explore this dilemma in his own work, positing that [t]he criticism leveled against your work, particularly your position considering gender in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, raises the issue that you universalize oppression without appreciating the multiplicity of oppressive experiences that characterize the live histories of individuals along race, gender, ethnic, and religious lines. For this reason a critical pedagogy must address the specificities of oppression so as to create the necessary structures for liberation. (1993: 170)

Instead, I want to push beyond my own personal context as an African American mother, teacher and woman, and position all of the language of critical pedagogy (Critical Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Culturally

Responsive Teaching, Social Reconstruction, Social Justice Teaching, Multiculturalism) under one umbrella of anti- oppression teaching. I am relying on a definition of oppression that focuses on resources, that constructs oppression as a situation in which one or more identifiable segments of the population in a social system systematically and successfully act over a prolonged period of time to prevent another identifiable segment, or segments, of the population from attaining access to the scarce and valued resources of that system. (Davis, 2002: 2)

This works because so much of the conversation about education is a conversation about resources, and because the focus is on the cause not the recipient, which ties in nicely with the other claims in this essay. In this model, Whiteness is general: a position of power formed and protected through colonialism, slavery, segregation and distribution of resources, violence against marginalized bodies, the criminal justice system and more; and it is particular: the actual individuals that are the public-school teachers in our country. In their discussion, Freire’s response to Macedo is layered. He says that yes, it’s difficult to avoid a particular focus, but at the same time ‘readers have some responsibility to place my work within its historical and cultural context’. He also goes on to say that the ‘specificities do not alter the analysis of oppression and its relations’ (Freire and Macedo, 1993: 170). We need only honor this responsibility and do the work of making the connections to apply the returns of one inquiry to inform our work on another.

THE WORK OF FIXING RACISM The work of fixing racism is not something we, as people of color, have to do. We aren’t the problem. We’re good. Roxane Gay, in MariNaomi, 2015, Speak Up!: A Graphic Account of Roxane Gay and Erica Jong’s Uncomfortable Conversation

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Black people can’t talk to white [sic] people about race anymore. There’s really nothing left to say. There are libraries full of books, interviews, essays, lectures, and symposia. If people want to learn about their own country and its history, it is not incumbent on black [sic] people to talk to them about it. It is not our responsibility to educate them about it. Plus whenever white people want to talk about race, they never want to talk about themselves. There needs to be discussion among people who think of themselves as white. They need to unpack that language, that history, that social position and see what it really offers them, and what it takes away from them. Steve Locke, 2011, ‘Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race’

That racism (or any -ism) is the domain of the dominant culture, so undoing racism (or the other -isms) is the work of the dominant culture – an idea that should be writ large across our history as a country. Yet, somehow, this is a strangely unpopular and unexpected opinion. So much so, that finding research and perspectives to support and expand upon this idea is difficult. Over the years I have found a number of strong voices but from miscellaneous places that don’t have much else to do with critical pedagogy, or even schools. People of color, of any marginalized group for that matter, sit at the table day after day, year after year, and strategize as to how we can fix racism in our world. At some point, it has to be the entire rest of the population that accepts the work as their own, otherwise, it will be just us at the table. At what point are the oppressed just sitting around the table trying to solve the same problems? In order for things to actually change it would be the dominant culture that has to change. People of the dominant culture must recognize the roles they play in this dynamic and seek to undo it. Not just as an ally, which still positions the struggle as ours, but as central to the problem. This means acceptance of the prison of hate they are locked in and a genuine investment in their own liberation from the role of the oppressor. When there is a benefit to the rest of the population, or what the Critical Race

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Theorists call a convergence of interests, then the rest of the population will do the work of learning, and changing their own personal perspectives as well as dismantling the systemic forces (which are ultimately populated by people) that create and recreate racism every day. Or, as Roxane Gay says, until then: we’re good. The first time I heard this stated in a definite and exact way was in the 1994 documentary, The Color of Fear. The Color of Fear is the document of eight men and the director, Lee Mun Wah, over the course of a weekend in Ukiah, California. These men, each representing four of the major ethnic and racial groups from the United States, tell their stories and explore their own worldview when it comes to racism, ethnicity, family history and prejudices. In a particularly uncomfortable, powerful point in the movie, one of the players, Victor, says: ‘The problem of racism is not POC’s problem; we are the recipient of the problem’ (Lee et al., 2000). And, that’s just it. As the recipient of the problem, there are hard limits to what we can do. Much of which, actually, we have already done. Robert Jensen (2005) suggests that we invert the race line equation of W. E. B. Du Bois by turning the question around. ‘That question should have been turned on to the white people of his world. He should have been asking them. White supremacy comes out of their community, out of their world. White people created a white supremacist society, therefore, by definition, white people are the root of the problem’. This isn’t theoretical, it’s mathematical. And yet I see little evidence that the national conversation around race is framed this way. At best, people from the dominant culture are situated as allies. In war, allies are friends. They stand alongside the enlisted. This is great, but doesn’t create actual transformation. White people should be the enlisted. One of the most matter-of-fact, yet unexpected explanations of this reality comes from a mom who is discussing integration

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in her community, Anytown America, in the 1950s in a documentary called Racism in America. When questioned about the Myers family integrating into their neighborhood, and the resulting resistance: ‘Do you think the Myers family will affect property values?’ asks the interviewer. ‘I don’t think the Myerses have anything to do with property values decreasing or increasing. I think this is purely a white [sic] problem, not a negro problem. It is the feelings of the majority group which will influence property values, not the minority group’. (History News Network, 1950)

A small example, no doubt, but it’s also a powerful bit of ethnography. From here we get to move from the ordinary to the really extraordinary: we can look at the antiracist work of Albert Einstein to categorically drive the point home. From a noted friendship with Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois, to speaking out against the conviction of the Scottsboro Boys (nine African American teenagers accused in Alabama of raping two White American women on a train in 1931) and becoming a member of the NAACP, Einstein’s advocacy is unapologetic and comprehensive. In a 1946 commencement speech at Lincoln University he issues accountability in no uncertain terms: There is separation of colored people from white [sic] people in the United States. That separation is not a disease of colored people. It is a disease of white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it. (Einstein cited in Kincheloe et al., 1999: 140)

TAKING THE CURE So, how do you get an entire nation who, as described by Einstein in the 1946 Statement on Racism and Civil Rights: ‘The Negro Question’, suffers from a ‘fatal misconception. [Whose] ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force; and in the …quest for wealth and an easy life have been

ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery’ (Einstein, 1946) to work towards dismantling a system on which their lives have been built? A system that forces them to collude and maintain a legacy established by generations before them? First, diversity benefits everyone, and in many respects, especially, the dominant culture. And this is especially true in schools. In recent research the federal government found something profound: ‘White student achievement in schools with the highest Black student density did not differ from White student achievement in schools with the lowest density’ (Kamenetz, 2015). Furthermore, ‘What the work tells us is that when you have people from the social majority in a diverse environment they work harder and focus on the task more’. It is explained that they think about problems more broadly’ (Kamenetz, 2015); they are more likely to back up their own opinions and consider alternative points of view, rather than assuming everyone thinks as they do. This is, coincidentally, the heart of common core. In fact it is aimed directly at the anchor standards. For example, the Comprehension and Collaboration Anchor Standard reads as follows: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.SL.1 Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively. (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2018)

The benefits aren’t exclusively qualitative. Buffalo, NY, after thoughtfully rebranding its entire district as a response to the mandatory busing regulations in the early 1980s, to include ‘schools reflecting virtually every philosophy in education, from the progressive to the traditional’ (Winerip, 1985: 1), saw a significant rise in test scores after the schools were integrated. ‘Test scores are up. While in 1976 the average Buffalo third grader scored at the 45th percentile in

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mathematics on the state pupil evaluation test, the average score five years later was at the 69th percentile’ (Winerip, 1985). Buffalo is one example of many districts that made these gains after deciding to see mandatory busing as an opportunity, and integration as an asset. Judge John T. Curtin of Federal District Court, who was instrumental in making some of these changes, said, ‘I’m distressed by people who make statements nationally that integration doesn’t work. It does work. It’s plain wrong to say it won’t. It’s worked in Buffalo’ (Winerip, 1985). The practical benefits are compelling, but there are reasons even more upright. The extension of the premise that the work of fixing racism falls to the dominant culture is that they are equally bound to the contract. Nelson Mandela argues this beautifully in The Long Walk to Freedom: The oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrowmindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity. (Mandela, 1995: 535)

Indeed. Taking into consideration the commonly asked question, ‘How can I be responsible for something that happened before I was born, or for something that has nothing to do with me?’, the answer can be that the peculiar institution and the resulting peculiar inequity that resulted are in many ways systems that no one asked to be a part of and that limit all of us. In 1959, journalist John Howard Griffin, ‘convinced that we were making little progress in resolving the terrible tragedy of racism in America – a tragedy for the white racist as well as for the Negro (and other) victim groups’ (Wallechinsky, 1995: 316), took on the perhaps extreme project of medically altering his skin tone to pass as Black and make his way through the segregated deep South. This bizarre act of surveillance

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resulted in his book Black Like Me (1996). He stresses the dehumanization of all participants: ‘We led strange, hidden lives. We were advocating only one thing: that this country rid itself of the racism that prevented some citizens from living as fully functioning men and as a result dehumanized all men’ (Griffin, 1996: 171). And, truly, I want to believe, and have abundant evidence to show, that many White people are also anxious to move on from Whiteness. Especially the artificial position that Whiteness has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with social position. It is nothing but a reflection of privilege, and exists for no reason other than to preserve it. If the motivation is the weariness of the warden, the hope for changing the world, or simply for the practical benefits, let’s get on with our work of teaching and even restoring humanity.

SCHOOLS AS THE LOCATION OF POSSIBILITY Amanda Lewis explains that [r]ace is at play all the time inside and outside of schools. It is part of what is happening in our many daily interpersonal interactions. It is one lens through which people read the world around them and make decisions on how to act, react and interact. The nature of the decisions made in schools heightens this dynamic. (2003: 300)

To the extent this is true for the other intersections of identity – gender, religion, socioeconomic status – will depend on the context that Paulo Frieire describe in his discussion with Donaldo Macedo. Lewis goes on to explain that ‘although clearly not the only social institution concerned, schools are involved in framing ideas about race and are at the center of many struggles around racial equity’ (2003: 284).

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Leila Villaverde (2004) draws possibilities for a Critical Pedagogy Practice in her chapter ‘Developing a Curriculum and Critical Pedagogy’, pointing out the power in ‘seeing learning everywhere’ (2004: 133). She adds that ‘questioning is the core of a critical pedagogy’ (2004: 133) and that ‘teachers should want students to be independent learners with the skills for inquiry and autonomy’ (2004: 132). In fact, a critical pedagogy is born of a critical pedagogy. The reflection and exploration required to reinvent dominant culture can only be fostered in a critical pedagogy that can ‘analyze and expose the dominant value systems that undergird the way knowledge is defined and curricula are constructed and tested’ (2004: 133). Establishing what she describes as ‘individuality in a collective space’ (2004:133) is the optimal, rightful progression of the same reflection and exploration. Teachers are in an ideal position to play this role, to attempt to get all the issues on the table in order to initiate true dialogue. Central to the definition of critical pedagogy is the tenet that there is no neutrality, or, as Ira Shor states, ‘Education can either develop or stifle their [students’] inclination to ask what and to learn. A curriculum that avoids questioning school and society is not, as is commonly supposed, politically neutral. It cuts off the students’ development as critical thinkers about their world’ (Shor, 1992: 12). Even math and science pedagogies, those that are thought to be linear and objective, are in fact context dependent and fraught. This idea may require a more complex and layered analysis, which is completely worthwhile, since all students can afford more nuanced support in these subjects, and these subjects need to reflect the different perspectives and impetuses that our students will bring to the disciplines. Angela Calabrese Barton (2003) explains that ‘science ought to be about the transformation of one’s world or circumstances’ (2003: 32). Science classes that begin and build on ways to use the science as a tool for exploring and solving problems, higher incidences

of particular health issues in certain communities, for example, are spot-on examples of critical pedagogy and transformative education. School is not just a place to observe and analyze these issues, but is, instead, at the center of any possibility for change. Joe Kincheloe and Peter McLaren (2000) tell us schools, as venues of hope, could become sites of resistance and democratic possibility through concerted efforts among teachers and students to work within a liberatory pedagogical framework. Giroux (1988), in particular, maintained that schools can become institutions where forms of knowledge, values, and social relations are taught for the purpose of educating young people for critical empowerment rather than subjugation. (2000: 281)

In Black Curriculum Orientation (1993), Bill Watkins explains a Social Reconstruction curriculum. Built around the missives of thinkers like George Counts, Manning Marable and W. E. B Du Bois and, later, tangential to critical pedagogy, Social Reconstruction views the curriculum as a ‘tool to challenge and eventually change unjust economic, political and social arrangements’ (Watkins, 1993: 332). The notion that schools are the front lines of change is not new, but it suggests a different context, a different urgency and a different set of possibilities for each generation of students and teachers.

TEACHERS All of this amounts to an urgent tension in schools. Simply, the racial disposition of the US teaching workforce in no way matches the students that are being taught. Upwards of 85% of the teachers in the United States are White, while the 50% of students identified as White in 2012 is forecast to be closer to 45% by the year 2024. What this means is that, contrary to Malcom X’s fear that ‘only a fool would let his enemy teach his children’ (O’Shea, 2012: 185), the education of

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children of color is primarily in the hands of White teachers. What is the likelihood that this existing teacher workforce can ensure what the Black Panther Program described as ‘an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of the self’ (Newton and Seale, 1997: 249)? True contention with the realities and challenges of implementing a critical pedagogy must be wrestled with: ‘If you do not have knowledge of yourself and your position in the society and in the world, then you will have little chance to know anything else’ (Newton and Seale, 1997: 249). And, once more, we should note the very important role of the teacher. Schools are the sites of resistance or subjugation, and teachers are smack in the middle of the action. Hiding behind the ignorance or apathy of just wanting to teach your subject is an act of subjugation, reinforcing, even bolstering the role of schools as the primary creator and maintainer of the belief systems, the prison, the disease. So, who are our teachers and what is important to them? Behind the numbers that would tell us that the average teacher is a politically conservative, middle-aged White woman, there will be stories and exceptions. I remain optimistic: for every student that I’ve had insist that race was something they never noticed or talked about, I have had several more students that have not only contributed to but seriously advanced and transformed our classes’ perspective on difference and activism, challenged the corridors of power, and courageously fought for equity for themselves and for others. I can remember each time a student cried in one of my classes, which hasn’t been that many times. Given the sometimes difficult and fraught nature of my subject, it could be much worse. My students are generally of a sturdy stock and one of the sturdiest, a young, matter-of-fact preservice teacher, one day had the realization that if she really wanted to change minds and hearts when it comes to race, maybe she should use her considerable skills as a teacher and leader to talk with her fellow White families and communities about

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not being racist. My response to her was, absolutely; her reach would extend much further if she worked in White schools and her ability to influence and change minds would be better optimized in a White school. My sturdier student understood my response, but another student, a young woman who had recently made a career change to enroll in graduate school and eventually teach, did not understand my response, and she cried. What were her goals? To save Black children? To dismantle oppressive systems? How much of her identity was caught up in this undecided outcome? When asked, the majority of teachers indicate that they believe much of what’s happening in schools to be ineffective, and also name having the opportunity to shape students’ academic and social lives and ‘working with students who face economic or social disadvantages’ as their primary reasons for going into and staying in the profession (TNTP, 2013). This suggests that, overall, the White women who make up the profession are not adverse to openly taking on this role, but the extent to which these goals are intersecting and this abstraction becomes a reality remains to be seen. I want to be clear: I’m not in any way suggesting that White women don’t belong in our classrooms. I am personally unsure of the usefulness or practicality of the idea that they don’t. Investing in the skills, space and time for these teachers to situate and analyze themselves as racial beings, confront their own biases, critically reflect upon and reinvent their practice is a more realistic and sustainable solution that doesn’t require marginalized families to opt out of the compulsory education they are entitled to. To be sure of due diligence, let’s review some of the ways in which schools function to maintain, uphold and replicate systems of oppression: • At the base of schooling was a set of concerns which embodied a conservative ideology: we must preserve our communities by teaching the immigrants our values and adjusting them to existing economic roles. In some historical

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instances, such as the Carlisle Indian School, whose informal motto was Kill the Indian: Save the Man, this ideology was taken to disturbing extremes. Native children were given new names, new language and were brutally punished should they demonstrate any of the traditional Indian ways. Children were taken to the boarding schools under duress and if they were to become sick and die from disease, which they frequently did, the parents were not notified (Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction, 1892). • Rituals like the Pledge of Allegiance encourage unquestioning nationalism: Bellamy’s pledge advanced the goal of assimilation – written to, in his words, ‘mobilize the masses to support primary American doctrines’ by warding off internal enemies hostile to ‘true Americanism’ (Petrella, 2017: 1). The creation and proliferation of the pledge, in part, served as a way to consolidate White Anglo-Saxon Protestant American values that the White mainstream perceived as under siege. And, even if we agree to have our students recite the pledge in our classrooms, what is not acceptable is punishing or ostracizing a student who chooses not to participate. • Children of color, especially Black children, are subject to higher suspension rates, police presence and zero-tolerance discipline policies (US Government Accountability Office, 2018). • A handful of publishers dominate the educational resource and assessment industry. Curricular programs furnished by the major publishing companies are written to satisfy the mandates of the religious right, particularly the Texan, conservative, religious right, which has heavy influence and tricky and dubious ways of exercising control over the nation’s curricular storyline. Certainly, this sounds conspiratorial, but it isn’t. The Texas textbook plot is well documented and every bit as disturbing. Furthermore, the same resource publishers are constantly being cited for issues from odd linguistic choices to blatant mistakes in their teaching and assessment materials that readily play a large part in sustaining discriminatory ideologies (Collins, 2012).

Generally, the question what can be done? is in proximity to the question: how am I responsible? I might find myself an outlier by consenting to do the work of trying to answer these questions, but I am a teacher after all.

Doing so will require connection: ’Learning surges from understanding the interrelated nature of what we are studying and experiencing what we know and what we don’t’ (Villaverde, 2004: 133). There is no instruction book, but, either way, the work of fixing racism moves between the personal and the systemic, starting with looking inward and facing our own bias and worldview. After this happens, much of the work will unfold on its own. Contending with ourselves first is not a guarantee that we can fight systemic inequity, but that fight can’t happen until we do our work first. This should be a foundation any teaching practice and always in good faith: ‘… the teacher has the option to put a distinct spin on content. The teacher’s passion, likes, dislikes knowledge and experience come through and the content is never neutral’ (Villaverde, 2004: 132). Resist simple approaches that focus on behaviors and seem to offer easy answers. Resist the shortcut of expecting people of color or other marginalized groups to help you construct an analysis. First of all, no one is born with a sophisticated study of these questions. We have to do just as much work as anyone. Beyond this, you have to hold faith that most of the work happens in process. This process is the basis of critical reflection. Critical reflection involves thinking and problem solving. It is a process in which capable individuals attempt to make sense of a challenging situation by identifying areas of potential growth. Next, goals for improvement and actions to accomplish them are identified, ideally in an exchange with the teaching community and with application of theory and existing research on similar situations. I had a chance to communicate with Victor from The Color of Fear, and he reiterated the importance of this process, adding that the questioning is what leads to the perspectives being made explicit: ‘What is the role of Black agency? What is liberation? What will it look like when achieved? What do we do with “the oppressor”? What is the role of

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“the oppressor” in liberation? What is the role of solidarity? What is the new story? When liberation is achieved, then what?’ Even the most abstract or superlative line of questions can help to sharpen our viewpoints and surface the biases we might not know we hold (Lee Lewis, 2017). We have to reject traditional ideas of meritocracy, deficit model approaches and a color-blind view of race. In fact, we have to reject approaches that erase or silence any individual’s or group’s identity. And, if we aren’t there yet, we have to build empathy and make the space to consider different perspectives as we build a reflective practice. And with no reflection comes no growth. Vital to this reflection being conducive to growth and transformed practice, we also need to be willing to get uncomfortable. Inevitably, in dialogue with students, a story of an attempted line of inquiry being interrupted and derailed by a personal rejection or hurt feelings will be shared with conviction as a reason for turning back or stopping altogether. Recently, a student of mine, a White man who was doing his student teaching in a high school with a large population of Black students, wrote that he, too, was the object of marginalization because a student who didn’t know him told him that he probably voted for the Republican candidate in the presidential race. He felt his frustration with this situation justified his negative perception of the students he was responsible for. In response to him I wrote that while he was right to name the feelings of being judged or even stereotyped, his feelings do not equal a history of state-sanctioned systemic powerlessness. In fact, were he able to distance himself from his feelings, he may have been able to see that this feeling of being judged based on race and outward appearance was likely mutual and could be used as a point of connection and empathy with his student. When I hear people describe how their hurt feelings about being silenced, questioned or scrutinized were a signpost for them to turn around and even legitimize their bias, I want

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to shout that, for one as a person of color, I can usually count on that being the default emotional atmosphere and yet, every day, I have to work through that and move forward. In fact, there wasn’t any competing option. Connecting again to the words of Victor Lee Lewis, reflection and transformation requires a kind of subjugation: ‘I’m not gonna trust you until you’re willing to be changed and affected and transformed by my experiences as I am by yours every day’ (Lee et al., 2000). Critical pedagogy requires authentic care. The concept of authentic care interrogates the idea of care in the classroom: who cares? What is the nature of this care? Angela Valenzuela (1999) defines authentic caring as a ‘reformulation’ in which ‘school functionaries are to embark on a search for connection where trusting relationships constitute the cornerstone for all learning’ (Valenzuela, 1999: 82). Aesthetic caring focuses on institutional priorities: rules, policies, procedures, and accountability and compliance. The concerns of aesthetic caring may be a reality; yet, when schools privilege aesthetic caring over authentic caring, subtractive schooling is the outcome (Valenzuela, 1999). When our schools are experienced as adversarial, or even abusive, by the students they are meant to serve, then the formalities of the daily operations cease to matter. Central to this exploration of care is the understanding that ‘what looks to teachers and administrators like opposition and lack of caring, feels to students like powerlessness and alienation’ (Valenzuela, 1999: 94). Not caring is a survival mechanism and ‘a form of resistance, not to education, but to the irrelevant, uncaring and controlling aspects of schooling (Valenzuela, 1999: 94). In fact, these students may come from families and communities that have been failed by schools for generations and, unlike the typical teacher, do not view school as a means to advancement or enjoyment, but instead a location of potential ‘cultural genocide’ in which success means ‘consenting to the school’s project of cultural disparagement and de-identification’ (Valenzuela, 1999: 94).

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It isn’t that these students and families don’t care, in fact, much the opposite. They don’t care about a system that defines them as the problem while consistently disparaging and disappointing them. Valenzuela found significant difference in how students and teachers perceived caring. Teachers expected students to care about school, including ideas and practices that lead to compliance, while students expected teachers to care about them. Having the space and freedom to build these relationships is another facet of a learning program that is built around inquiry, empowerment and transformation. While the cognitive demands of a practice that can’t be downloaded, photocopied or assessed through multiple choice are tremendous, the affective demands are probably even more so. Changing and evolving our perceptions, our values and responses entangles an entirely different part of our souls. This may be asking a lot, but it is integral to being an excellent teacher because all together ‘you have to like people of color – you have to authentically like dark colors, you have to love brown [people]’ (Bartolomé and Trueba, 2000). bell hooks pushes this further, arguing that ‘collectively, Black people and our allies in struggle are empowered when we practice self-love as a revolutionary intervention that undermines practices of domination’ (hooks, 1995: 111). And, truthfully, what most of us know is that, ultimately, some things can’t be taught. The most successful teacher training programs can expose preservice teachers to every theory, method and trick in the world of education, but they still can’t study for authenticity and love. Recognize and embrace that transformative teaching is about both content and approach. Leila Villaverde explains that ‘the teacher’s passion, likes, dislikes, knowledge and experience come through and content is never neutral. Understanding this reality is part of practicing a critical pedagogy’ (2004: 133). From the moment you turn on your classroom lights in the morning to the moment you drive away from your school at the end of the day

you are making the choice to interrupt or to maintain equity. We make the substantial effort to curate content that is reflective of our students or that can be filtered through their perspective and lived experience. So, if we are obligated to teach American History, for example, we teach it through the lens of their context and history. Intentionality is everything, and as much as possible, we teach for connection and synthesis, not coverage. This connectivity is crucial for tapping into student interest, and is, coincidentally, the foundation of scaffolding and cognitive development. We start with the skills and concepts that the students hold as a point of reference, of departure, and move from there. Transforming content is as much about what is included as what is left out. I recently shared a Juneteenth activity with a group of Social Studies preservice teachers. Not one student in the entire group even knew about Juneteenth and its historical significance. This group is brilliant, motivated and capable, and in every way, not to be faulted for what was completely excluded from their own educational narrative. If this is the case with a group of highly aware and capable emergent educators, then it is likely it is the same for everyone. In fact, assuming that there are significant holes in any written curriculum should be our default. I am always realizing and being made aware of new concepts, new information and new strategies and, as teachers, we should all be constantly reinventing and rebuilding our material. This is central to a reflective practice. It can be comforting to realize that this is a common and shared space [t]his self-examination is a lifelong process. We all have areas of limited vision, particularly where we are members of the dominant group. If we can model open-ness to ongoing learning, our students will benefit and we can be less judgmental and more self-accepting when we make mistakes or uncover new areas of ignorance or lack of awareness, and not retreat from this difficult but important work. (Bell et al., 1997: 302)

Critical pedagogy also requires that we prioritize the affective domain of learning as

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much as the cognitive domain. While there is considerable effort spent (even if superficially) to build cognitive thinking in a typical school academic program, the affective domain of learning is generally overlooked. Concerned with the awareness and growth in attitudes, emotion and values, the affective domain is often dismissed as the feeling domain. While this is partly true, I think it’s a mistake to neglect these skills. In fact, I would go farther to say that we should prioritize these skills for their intellectual impact on learning. When attitudes are not connected then very little beyond memorization will take place. Paulo Freire explained the banking concept of teaching as the ‘act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor’ (Freire, 2000: 72). At the same time, he described the problemposing method of education. The problemposing education rejects the ‘vertical patterns characteristic of banking education’ (2000: 80). Consciousness is spoken to directly in the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, and is, in fact, described as a ‘major variable’. The resource emphasizes the extent to which it shapes our learning: ‘There is a high level of consciousness in cognitive activity at all stages’ (Krathwohl et  al., 1956: 100). Ultimately, the end is internalization of the new perceptions. Freire, too, often speaks directly to consciousness: Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of women and men as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world. They must abandon the educational goal of deposit-making and replace it with the posing of the problems of human beings in their relations with the world. (Freire, 2000: 80)

Lastly, we have to contend with context, with the reality that the racial, gender, religious, ethnic and linguistic identities of the students will shape how we convey a transformative curriculum. This should go without saying, yet the belief that culturally responsive pedagogy is only relevant for schools that serve a predominantly minority population is so

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flawed and problematic, so oddly ingrained and yet so much a part of the larger problem, that it has to be spoken and, hopefully, demolished. In 1969, Nathan Hare, the Chair of San Francisco State’s pioneering Black Studies Department, imagined a Black Power Education Reform. This program, he explained, should be offered to all students: A racist society cannot be healed merely by solving the problems of its black [sic] victims alone. The black condition does not exist in a vacuum; we cannot solve the problems of the black race without solving the problems of the society which produced and sustained the predicament of blacks. At the same time we transform the black community…white [sic] students may operate to transform the white community and thus a racist American society. (Hare, 1997: 164)

He goes on to explain that White scholars would be needed to transform the White community because they ‘would be more attuned to the white community and better able to arrange the relevant field work experiences there for white students’ (Hare, 1997: 164). Lonnie Bunch is the founding director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC. When undertaking the monumental task of building this museum from the ground up, he wanted to bring many different points of view into contact and to tell the African American Story, not as adjacent to the American story, but instead as the American story, in all of its complexity and brilliance. In his words: The defining experience of African-American life has been the necessity of making a way out of no way, of mustering the nimbleness, ingenuity and perseverance to establish a place in this society. That effort, over the centuries, has shaped this nation’s history so profoundly that, in many ways, African-American history is the quintessential American history … If you’re interested in American notions of freedom, if you’re interested in the broadening of fairness, opportunity and citizenship, then regardless of who you are, this is your story, too. (Bunch, 2016: 1)

The African American experience, he says, ‘is the lens through which we understand what it is to be an American’ (Bunch, 2016:1).

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One of the most significant exhibits in the museum is the casket of Emmett Till, who, as a 14-year-old child, was brutally murdered by a gang of men in Mississippi, because the wife of one of the men untruthfully accused Till of whistling at her. Somehow, his mother, Mamie Till, was astonishingly strong, and in the midst of her greatest pain she had the foresight to think about bearing witness to the world. She said, leave the casket open; let the world see what they did to my baby. Every major publication in the country printed the picture of his tortured, broken body. This became a trigger for the Civil Rights movement and, in fact, when Rosa Parks was asked to relinquish her seat on a bus sometime later, she thought of Emmett and said no. God told me, ‘I have taken one from you, but I will give you thousands.’ This fight became her new child. Everyone’s child. (Mosni, 2011)

In an oral history, Simeon Wright, one of the cousins that Emmett was visiting that summer, had this to say: But it’s getting better. As each generation comes on the scene, they see the injustices that have taken place and they hear about Emmett, hopefully, because a lot of the states are trying to bury that. They don’t want that and the school system don’t want it known to their children. They’re trying to bury it. But, once they found out what happened to Emmett Till in 1955, they are horrified. And they promise and they make it their life legacy to bring about a change. (Mosni, 2011)

With each new generation, Emmett’s death takes on new meaning and calls us to new action. As an educator, as a mother, this story is so moving and important to me because it reminds me that every day we have to renew, bear witness and take action. Our children, each child, deserve to be more than metaphors and mechanisms of change, though. And, ultimately, our children need to leave school with the tools to empower and transform so that they can fix all of the many things that we have broken in this world.

REFERENCES Bartolomé, L., & Trueba, E. (2008). Beyond the politics of schools and the rhetoric of fashionable pedagogies: The significance of teacher ideology. In E. Trueba & L. Bartolomé (EdS.), Immigrant voices in search of educational equity (pp. 277–292). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Barton, A. C. (2003). Kobe’s story: Doing science as contested terrain. Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(4), 533–552. Bell, L. A., Love, B. J., Washington, S., & Weinstein, G. (1997). Knowing ourselves as social justice educators. In M. Adams, L. A. Bell, & P. Griffin (Eds.), Teaching for diversity and social justice (pp. 299–310). Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group. Bunch, L. (2016, September). The Definitive Story of How the National Museum of African American History and Culture Came to Be. Retrieved from https://www.smithsonianmag. com/smithsonian-institution/definitive-storynational-museum-african-american-historyculture-came-be-180960125/#4sspSZEmYloT Ylcs.99 Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction. 1892, “Kill the Indian, and Save the Man”: Capt. Richard H. Pratt on the Education of Native Americans, pp. 46–59. Retrieved from http:// historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4929 Collins, G. (2012, June 21). How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us. Retrieved from http:// www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/06/21/ how-texas-inflicts-bad-textbooks-on-us/ Common Core State Standards Initiative. (2018). Common Core State Standards for mathematics: Kindergarten introduction. Retrieved from http://www.corestandards. org/Math/Content/K/introduction Davis, K. E. (2002). Expanding the theoretical understanding of oppression. Alexandria, VA: Council on Social Work Education. Einstein, A. (1946). The Negro Question. Retrieved from https://www.globalresearch. ca/the-negro-question-albert-einsteins1946-statement-on-racism-and-civil-rights/ 5441436 Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum. Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1993). A dialogue with Paulo Freire. In P. McLaren & P. Leonard (Eds.), Paulo Freire: A critical encounter (pp. 167–174). London: Routledge.

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Griffin, J. H. (1996). Black like me. New York: Signet. Hare, N. (1997). Questions and answers about Black Studies (1969). In W. L. Van Deburg (Ed.), Modern black nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan (pp.160–172). New York, NY: New York University Press. History News Network. (1950). Racism in America: Small Town 1950s Case Study. Film. Retrieved from https://historynewsnetwork. org/article/158107 hooks, B. (1995). Killing rage: Ending racism. New York: H. Holt and Co. Jensen, R. (2005). The heart of whiteness: Confronting race, racism, and white privilege. San Francisco, CA: City Lights. Kamenetz, A. (2015, October 19). The Evidence That White Children Benefit From Integrated Schools. Retrieved from https://www.npr. org/sections/ed/2015/10/19/446085513/ the-evidence-that-white-children-benefitfrom-integrated-schools Kincheloe, J. L., & McLaren, P. (2000). Rethinking critical theory and qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 303–342). London: Sage. Kincheloe, J., Steinberg, S. R., & Tippins, D. J. (1999). The stigma of genius: Einstein, consciousness, and education. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Krathwohl, D., Bloom, B., & Masia, B. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives. Handbook II: Affective domain. New York, NY: David McKay. Lee, M. W., Hunter, M., Goss, R., Bock, R. C., Stir-Fry Productions., & Stir-Fry Seminars & Consulting. (2000). The color of fear: A film. Oakland, CA: Stir-Fry Seminars & Consulting. Lee Lewis, V. Personal Communication. November 29, 2017. Lewis, A. E. (2003). Everyday race-making: Navigating racial boundaries in schools. American Behavioral Scientist, 47(3), 283–305. Locke, S. (2011, January 8). Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race. Retrieved from https:// goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/whyi-dont-want-to-talk-about-race/ Mandela, N. (1995). Long walk to freedom: The autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Boston, MA: Back Bay Books. MariNaomi (2015, September 10). Speak Up: A Graphic Account of Roxane Gay and Erica Jong’s Uncomfortable Conversation. Retrieved from https://electricliterature.com/speak-upa-graphic-account-of-roxane-gay-and-erica-

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jongs-uncomfortable-conversation231596e44c0e Mosni, J. (2011, May 23). Simeon Wright oral history interview. [video] Retrieved from https://www.c-span.org/video/?317933-1/ simeon-wright-oral-history-interview Newton, Huey P., & Seale, Bobby (1997). What we want, what we believe: Black Panther Party Platform and Program (1966). In W. L. Van Deburg (Ed.), Modern black nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan (pp. 249–252). New York, NY: New York University Press. O’Shea, R. (2012). Blame Rane. North Hampton, NH: Goose Publishing. Petrella, C. (2017, Nov. 3). The Ugly History of the Pledge of Allegiance—and Why it Matters. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost. com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/11/03/ the-ugly-history-of-the-pledge-of-allegianceand-why-it-matters/ Shor, I. (1992). Empowering education: Critical teaching for social change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. TNTP. (2013, August 13). Perspectives of Irreplaceable Teachers. Retrieved from https:// tntp.org/publications/view/perspectivesof-irreplaceable-teachers-best-teachers-thinkabout-teaching US Government Accountability Office. (2018, March 22). K-12 Education: Discipline Disparities for Black Students, Boys, and Students with Disabilities. GAO-18-258. Retrieved from https://www.gao.gov/products/ GAO-18-258 Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling: U.S.-Mexican youth and the politics of caring. Albany: State University of New York Press. Villaverde, L. E. (2004). Developing a curriculum and critical pedagogy. In J. L. Kincheloe & D. Weil (Eds.), Critical thinking and learning: An encyclopedia for parents and teachers (pp. 131–134). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Wallechinsky, D. (1995) The people’s almanac presents the twentieth century: The definitive compendium of astonishing events, amazing people, and strange-but-true facts. New York, NY: Little Brown. Watkins, W. H. (1993). Black curriculum orientations: A preliminary inquiry. Harvard Educational Review, 63(3), 321–337. Winerip, M. (1985, May 13). School Integration in Buffalo Is Hailed as a Model for US. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/ 1985/05/13/nyregion/school-integration-inbuffalo-is-hailed-as-a-model-for-us.html

84 African American Mothers Theorizing Practice A p r i l Ya i s a R u f f i n - A d a m s

The impact of cultural domination and ideological management from the devastation of chattel slavery in the United States is still felt in the lives of African Americans in the 21st century. Schools remain polarizing and challenging places for Black and Brown students because of the destructive nature of mainstream education and the lasting effects of racism on racialized populations (Darder et al., 2017; Du Bois, 1903; Woodson, 1933). To combat the oppressive forces of education and the world in order to create lasting change and educational equity, African American mothers must propose alternate ways of seeing both education and the world in order to create lasting change and educational equity. Critical pedagogy recognizes that ‘love is the basis of an education that seeks justice, equality, and genius’ (Kincheloe, 2008: 3); thus, it is needed to visualize and actualize an educational system in the United States that seeks to recognizes the humanity of all students and understands ‘how power shapes and

misshapes the pedagogical acts’ (Kincheloe, 2008: 4). Indeed, critical pedagogy ‘aspires to link practices of schooling to democratic principles of society and transformative social action in the interest of oppressed communities’ (Darder et al., 2017: 2). African American mothers involved in their children’s education enter schools reflecting their space in society. African American women throughout societal discourse are seen as lazy, uneducated, hyper-sexed, illogical, loud, and chaotic. These negative images of African American women infiltrate schools, influencing relationships between minority mothers and educators. Educators often view Black mothers as unruly and disruptive and devalue their knowledge in favor of oppressive educational policies and a curriculum designed to ensure the marginal position of African Americans in this country. This chapter will highlight the ways African American mothers theorize their participation in their children’s education, drawing on the voices and experiences of

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African American mothers whose children receive special education services to understand how they struggle against oppression and challenge negative beliefs about African American families in schools. Drawing on a theoretical framework that strives to dismantle the power structures associated with schools in the United States, the chapter will disrupt notions of inhumanity that pervade the education system based on cultural domination and ideology to overcome the politics of containment.

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND AFRICAN AMERICAN MOTHERS Critical pedagogy is an emancipatory and radical way of examining education. Indeed, it encourages scholars to question how ‘historical power makes particular practices seem natural, as if they could be no other way’ (Kincheloe, 2008: 2). The questioning evoked by this type of reflection leads scholars and activists to analyze the merits of neutrality with suspicion. Therefore, critical pedagogy ‘offers people who experience subordination through an imposed assimilation policy, a path to understand cultural voice’ (Macedo in Freire, 2004: 12). Macedo (2004) further states critical pedagogy is rooted in lived experience, examines class to understand oppression, and moves beyond understanding race as monolithic. For students of United States history, critical pedagogy is a useful tool to complicate the country’s educational system. For instance, cultural domination was one of the central reasons for the creation of the United States’ public-school system in the 19th century (Spring, 2005). In fact, the curriculum was intended to exclude and destroy the cultures of Native American, immigrant, and African American people. Schools were used as sites of ideological management, which refers to ‘the effect of political and economic forces on the ideas disseminated

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to society’ (Spring, 2005: 4). The need for a curriculum that asserts cultural domination and ideological management exists because racism is a central issue in United States history. From a critical pedagogical perspective, the censorship that took place and still occurs in American schools is sophisticated in nature and happens by omission or the selective selection of acceptable bodies of knowledge (Spring, 2005). According to Kincheloe (2008), critical pedagogy suggests and demands the radical Anglo-Americans must be willing to learn from non-Anglo people. This radical phenomenon occurs by asking questions such as: ‘how does a world that is unjust, by design, shape the classroom and the relationship between the teacher and the student’? For African American women who are a historically marginalized and oppressed group, critical consciousness is gained by theorizing. By critiquing power relationships in schools, African American women begin to restore humanity to how the lives of Black families are viewed in academic literature. As an African American woman, mother, and scholar it is important for me to understand my role as an ‘agent of knowledge’ (Collins, 1990). I see it as my job to challenge deficitbased views of African American mothers and children through my work in order to ‘counter notions of normal spaces that serve to subjugate African American women and reinforce racism, classism, and sexism’ (Story, 2014). Thus, through my scholarship mothering becomes a political act focused on survival, power, and identity (Collins, 1990).

THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS Black Feminist Theory Black feminist theory is an epistemological framework that accepts that Black women’s distinct voice and viewpoint can be used to explain their lived experience. According to

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Brock (2017: 335), ‘Black feminist theory understands the nexus of race, class, and gender as controlling forces in Black women’s struggles’. By placing the self-defined viewpoint of African American women at the center of analysis, Black feminist scholars recognize the long-term and widely shared resistance among African American women can only have been sustained by an enduring and shared standpoint among black [sic] women about the meaning of oppression…like other subordinated groups, African American women not only have developed distinctive interpretations of black women’s oppression, but have done so by using alternative ways of producing and validating knowledge itself. (Collins, 1990: 183)

Therefore, Black feminist theory emerges as a catalyst for fundamental shifts in how we understand oppression and injustice in the United States (Villaverde, 2008). African American mothers’ theorizing practice relies on Black feminist theory to provide a language of critique and a space for voice with a self-defined Black women’s standpoint (Collins, 1990; Brock, 2017).

Critical Race Theory (CRT) in Education CRT in education expands on the established themes of CRT in the law by applying these themes to analysis of education. According to Lynn and Parker (2006): Unlike previous studies of race and education that were merely descriptive of racist acts, policies, curriculum or teachers and administrators, they (Ladson-Billings and Tate) helped to explain how a critical analysis of racism in education could lead to the development of new ways to think about the failure of schools to properly educate minority populations. (2006: 266–7)

Overall, CRT provides a needed perspective for understanding the socio-historical significance of race in the evaluation of educational practices. CRT in education has three central propositions: ‘(1) race is a significant factor of the inequity in the United States, (2) American

society is based on property rights rather than human rights, and (3) the intersection of race and property can be used as a tool to understand inequity’ (Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995: 48).

Power Foucault (1980) viewed power as one mechanism used to objectify human beings and bring order through their interactions with each other. He states: Power must be analyzed as something which circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localized here or there, never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power. In other words, individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application. (Foucault, 1980: 98)

Disciplinary power and surveillance in special education are the mechanisms of control used to perpetuate the politics of containment for African American women and their children and norms defined by White, middle-class, cultural standards. Thus, special education highlights the already entrenched notion of ‘otherness’ African American families feel when they encounter many educational leaders and teachers.

UNDERSTANDING THE POLITICS OF CONTAINMENT Building on Black feminist principles and theorizing, Patricia Hill Collins (1998) the new politics of containment theory describes the intersection of racism and sexism from a socio-historical perspective in the lives of African American women and their children. The politics of containment questions how the ‘changing patterns of the global economy, the

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wholesale denial of deeply entrenched racial practices in the United States, and the emergence of a rhetoric of color blindness arguing that institutionalized racism has disappeared’ undercuts claims from African American women that racial and sexual discrimination persist (Collins, 1998: 30–1). The emergence of the rhetoric of colorblindness obscures the workings of institutional power and challenges the notions of Black disadvantage due to racial barriers. The imperceptible nature of the new politics of containment makes its exclusionary practices more detrimental to African American mothers navigating the special education decision-making process. Strategies of containment are embedded in American life and therefore are often difficult to identify and analyze. Delineation of these strategies provides greater insight into the ways African American women, such as the African American mothers who strive to advocate for their children in special education, experience the complicated and imperceptible racism, marginalization, and disenfranchisement in the new colorblind society. There are two key strategies of control in the system of containment: racial segregation and surveillance (Collins, 1998). Racial segregation leads to ‘the division of racial groups into physical and symbolic spaces based on the belief that proximity to the group deemed inferior will harm the allegedly superior group’ (Collins, 1998: 280). According to Collins, although social arrangements are different, social indicators of African American women’s disadvantage remain remarkably unchanged in contemporary American society. In spite of the advancements of the women’s rights and civil rights movements, African American women have remained excluded from good jobs, schools, and neighborhoods. Indeed, the practice of de facto racial segregation is one strategy of control illustrating the politics of containment in contemporary society where laws abolish such tactics. For instance, formal desegregation in schools gave African American women access to educational

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attainment; however, possessing the right to be in a public space, such as schools, did not necessarily translate into the right of equal treatment in those public spaces (Collins, 1998). Further, special education and the subsequent isolation inherent in it becomes an issue of access, limited access to useful information, knowledge, and curriculum for both African American mothers and their children. The second strategy of control, borrowed from Foucault, refers to disciplinary power techniques used to monitor, classify, and control individuals to render them easily supervisable, efficient, and productive (Foucault, 1980; Jardine, 2010). In the new politics of containment, Collins (1998: 281) describes surveillance as the process ‘whereby people’s words and actions are constantly watched and recorded’. For example, low-income African American women often experience blatant forms of surveillance based on their involvement in social welfare agencies. According to Collins (1998), these agencies assume that African American women are unable to function as adults, and the agencies impose a form of social control to infantilize the participants. Involvement with social welfare agencies makes it difficult for many poor African American women to exercise substantive citizenship rights because the participants are already deeply involved in social institutions designed to monitor their behavior, critique their parenting, and further suppress their knowledge. In education, surveillance can be seen in the widespread use of standardized testing (monitoring through examination); in the use of grading to classify students and rank students; and in the ways learning is broken down into simple segments in order to control what is learned and when it is learned. Foucault (1980) described disciplinary power as performed through surveillance; here he explains: But in thinking of the mechanisms of power, I am thinking of its capillary form of existence, the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives. (1980: 38–9)

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Likewise, the special education decisionmaking process can be described as yet another form of disciplinary power used to exploit the lives of African American women and their children.

AFRICAN AMERICAN MOTHERS’ THEORIZING PRACTICE The complex issues confronting African American mothers’ special education decisionmaking process are a result of a history of dehumanization, marginalization, and isolation in the United States that extends beyond the educational system (Hilliard, 1992; Patton, 1998). Legally sanctioned social policies have justified the exclusion of African American people from educational access, and therefore substantive citizenship rights (Collins, 1998; Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995). Research on African American mothers should combine an awareness of institutionalized practices and personal experiences with racism that contribute to their low participation in the special education decision-making process. In addition, because of the dual minority status of African American women, it is necessary to combine theoretical frameworks to gain deeper insight into their involvement in the special education decision-making process. Taken together, the theories presented here merge to provide a comprehensive perspective of African American women in educational and community contexts. Further, the theories address how the politics of containment works to exclude the participants from the special education decision-making process. The conceptual framework of this research study draws on Foucault’s (1980) theory of power, critical race theory (Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, and Thomas, 1995; Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995), and Black feminist theories (Collins, 1990; hooks, 1984) to discuss how the politics of containment impacts African American mothers’ special education ­decision-making process. It is my assertion

that the merger of these theories sheds light on the historical and contemporary issues confronting African American mothers and their children, thus is an essential element in the historical, theoretical, and empirical goals of this dissertation. Educators can use this framework to improve school–family partnerships to provide more equitable and just educational opportunities for African American students. I have identified four theoretical links to the politics of containment and African American mothers’ special education decision-making process: voice and revisionist history, property and citizenship, the politics of desegregation, and surveillance and interest convergence. These themes are central to understanding how African American mothers theorize practice.

Voice and Revisionist History The use of voice, storytelling, and revisionist history to assist those with subjugated or suppressed knowledge in naming, describing, and defining their own reality is an important component of the theoretical framework. Voice takes on different functions in each theoretical perspective, yet the central purpose is to allow marginalized voices to address the oppression and to share insights about social inequalities (Collins, 1998; Dixson and Rousseau, 2005; Few, 2007; Foucault, 1980). Foucault believed that listening to the truths of people who are marginalized would help bring freedom to thoughts and actions. In his discussion of subjugated knowledge, he explains: They are a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to the task or insufficiently elaborated naïve languages, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity. I also believe that it is through the re-emergence of these low-ranking knowledges, of these local popular knowledges, these disqualified knowledges, that criticism performs its work. (Foucault, 1980: 82)

In order for criticism to do its work, it is the duty of researchers to demand specific descriptions of the actual, not the intended,

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effects of power from those who experience it. In order to get descriptions for his work Foucault interviewed prisoners (jails), the psychiatric patients (asylums), and delinquents (schools). CRT combines the use of voice with counterstory. Voice is used as evidential support of the impact of legally supported racism on the lives of people of color (DeCuir and Dixson, 2004). As Dixson and Rousseau (2005: 10) explain, voice is ‘the assertion and acknowledgement of the importance of the personal and community experiences of people of color as sources of knowledge’. The valuable knowledge gained from the experiences of people of color is used to create counterstories. Matsuda gives meaning to the need for counterstories in social science research, using Black poverty as an example. She states: The technique of imagining oneself black [sic] and poor in some hypothetical world is less effective than studying the actual experience of black poverty and listening to those who have done so. When notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, are examined not from an abstract position of groups who have suffered through history, moral relativism recedes and identifiable normative priorities emerge. (Matsuda et al., 1993: 63)

Thus, critical race theorists combine voice and counterstory to place marginalized people of color at the center of scholarship to shift commonly held and often incorrect assumptions maintained in dominant discourse (Dixson and Rousseau, 2018). Black feminist thought, from which the politics of containment derives, uses voice to describe the meaning of lives lived within a culture of domination and oppression. Collins (1990) writes: Placing U.S. Black women’s experiences in the center of analysis without privileging those experiences shows how intersectional paradigms can be especially important for rethinking the particular matrix of domination that characterizes U.S. society. Claims that systems of race, social class, gender, and sexuality form mutually constructing features of social organization foster a basic rethinking of U.S. social institutions. (1990: 228)

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The use of voice places the decision-making of African American mothers in context because it gives the mothers the opportunity to explain how their lives are impacted daily by an educational system that views them as undeserving and unworthy of participating in their children’s educational decisions and prefers they remain invisible in schools.

Power in Property and Citizenship Central to Collins’s new politics of containment and CRT are the concepts of property and citizenship. For African American women, there is an intricate and historical linkage between property rights and citizenship. Female slaves were idealized as property and producers of property (Collins, 1998), once-emancipated African American women became ‘property transformed to citizen’ (Ladson-Billings, 1999: 19). Unfortunately, emancipation did not translate into substantive (full) citizenship (Collins, 1998; Delgado and Stefancic, 2017; Lynn, 2006). Despite having been granted formal citizenship rights, African Americans were not able to receive the intangible benefits that Whiteness offers in American society. Harris’s (1993) description of ‘Whiteness a property’ exemplifies an essential function of Whiteness as the absolute right to exclude. Today through their involvement in special education, African American mothers and their children are excluded from the general education setting, which in effect often denies them many of the intrinsic privileges of citizenship in the United States. The relationship between property and school funding exacerbates African American mothers’ exclusion. Indeed, property ownership and school funding illustrates the intersection of CRT and the politics of containment. An example of this is how educational funding, which is based on property tax, is used to exclude and marginalize poor, African American mothers. Because poor, African American mothers often do not own property and therefore do not pay property

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taxes, policymakers justify dilapidated buildings and lack of educational resources available in schools for the participants and their children based on lack of funding, making inequities representative of class not race. Moreover, mothers involved in the special education seldom possess the benefits bestowed on property owners which provide them with an authoritative voice in their children’s educational decisions (Rao, 2000). The decisions African American mothers make on behalf of their children will influence their children’s ability to obtain substantive citizenship rights. Consequently, special education is viewed as a containment strategy that excludes African American women and children from gaining the knowledge and skills needed to participate in a capitalist society.

Politics of Desegregation Closely related to the property and citizenship constructs is the issue of desegregation. African American women and their children are relegated to the position of outsiders through sophisticated forms of racial segregation. Social advancements after the civil rights era produced a colorblind rhetoric and the denial of entrenched racial discriminatory practices. The overturning of de jure segregation, or legally mandated segregation, which granted African American women formal citizenship rights for the first time in the country’s history, created a new system of racial segregation that works within formal American citizenship laws and practices. Thus, current forms of institutionalized racism are demonstrated in the reality that many social institutions are still segregated; despite this contradiction many Whites believe racism and discrimination no longer exist (Collins, 1998). CRT critiques desegregation from the legal, political, and historical perspective with particular emphasis on the Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954 (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017; Dixson and Rousseau, 2018; Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995; Lynn and Parker, 2006). CRT in

education scholars often revisit the prominent case and examine the subsequent forms of de facto segregation, socially occurring segregation, that have become institutionalized in public schools through the existence of educational policy. Special education has been linked to these new sophisticated forms of segregation (Artiles, 1998; Blanchett, 2006; Harry and Klingner, 2006; Hilliard, 1992; Patton, 1998). Racially biased assessments, reliance on a medical model, and racially coded academic discourse are used to substantiate the placement of African American students, especially African American males, in special education (Collins, 1998; Harry and Klingner, 2006; Ladson-Billings, 1999). The failure of African American students to succeed in general education classes reflects a failure to learn within the identified racially neutral curriculum and instruction (Ladson-Billings, 1999). The commonly held belief that curriculum assessments are race neutral and objective, justifies the classification of students who perform poorly on tests. Therefore, performance on assessments becomes a tool to substantiate the segregation of African American students from general education settings because scores are seen as inevitable and scientifically based (Collins, 1998; Delgado and Stefancic, 2017).

Surveillance and Interest Convergence As lower-income African American mothers who are involved in the social welfare agencies also enroll their children in public schools they become ensconced in another institution where they will be subjected to surveillance. Black feminist notions of surveillance provide a context for the meaning of the special education decision-making process in the lives of African American families: special education places these families under scrutiny in schools. Special education becomes a means of monitoring and evaluating African American mothers’ parenting skills and becomes a method of perpetuating deficit-based myths of Black

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mothers in schools (Collins, 1998). Moreover, special education serves as a means to track African American children’s academic progress and illustrates the purpose of surveillance in Western society and its effect as a disciplinary act of power (Foucault, 1980). The purpose of special education is to improve the educational outcomes for students; however, this often is not the case for African American students in special education. These students are disproportionately represented in high-incidence categories of learning disabled, mildly mentally retarded, and emotionally and behaviorally disturbed. The achievement gaps between students in special education widen over time, making special education ineffective and detrimental to many African American students’ long-term educational outcomes (Hilliard, 1992; Losen and Orfield, 2002; Patton, 1998). Conversely, special education provides White students with access to opportunities and privileges not available in the general education classroom settings. Special education for these students provides advantages that support their ownership of intellectual property. According to Bell (2004), interest convergence covenants ‘are decisions in which black rights are recognized and protected when and only so long as policymakers perceive that such advances will further interests that are their [Whites’] primary concern’ (2004: 49). Interest convergence explains the historical role of special education legislation that maintains the advantage of White students while serving to further disadvantage African American students. In addition, by combining the constructs of interest convergence and surveillance, we see how special education suspends African American women and their children in a place of travelling while staying in place (Collins, 1998).

CONCLUSION When African American mothers who are struggling with their children’s educational

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choices recognize their knowledge, and the power in their knowledge to be transformative, they will tell their story. Indeed, it is imperative for educators to understand that African American women, and mothers in particular, have the power to ‘perceive critically the way they exist in the world in which they find themselves’ (Macedo, 2004). Hopefully, by sharing their story African American mothers can become the agents of change needed to disrupt the oppressive system of education that exists, and push education towards becoming a practice of freedom (Freire, 2004; hooks, 1994). However, this is not the end of the story, as Alice Walker proclaimed in her innovative work, ‘In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens’: But this is not the end of the story, for all the young women – our mothers and grandmothers, ourselves – have not perished in the wilderness. And if we ask ourselves why, and search for and find the answer, we will know beyond all efforts to erase our minds, just exactly who, and what, we Black American women are. (Walker, 1983: 403)

Though motherhood remains locked within a reductive and imaginary prism of White supremacy, hetero-normativity, and sexism (Story, 2014: 1), and images of Black women – mammy and matriarch – are pervasive in the media, by using a theoretical framework that provides a revisioning and re-centering perspective of African American women a new and brighter understanding of Black families will emerge.

REFERENCES Artiles, Alfredo J. “The Dilemma of Difference: Enriching the Disproportionality Discourse with Theory and Context.”Boulder, Journal of Special Education, vol. 32, no. 1, 1998, pp. 32–36. Bell, Derrick. “Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform.” New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Blanchett, Wanda J. “Disproportionate Representation of African American Students in Special Education: Acknowledging the Role of White Privilege and Racism.” Educational Researcher, vol. 35, no. 6, 2006, pp. 24–28.

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Brock, Rochelle, et al., editors. Critical Black Studies Reader. New York: Peter Lang, 2017. Crenshaw Kimberlé. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. Edited by Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller and Thomas. New York: The New Press, 1995. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment New York: Routledge, 1990. Collins, Patricia Hill. Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Collins, Patricia Hill, and Simmons College (Boston, Mass.). Another Kind of Public Education: Race, Schools, the Media, and Democratic Possibilities. Boston: Beacon Press, 2009. Darder, A., & Torres, R. D., Baltodano, M. The Critical Pedagogy Reader. 3rd ed., New York: Routledge, 2017. DeCuir, Jessica T., and Adrienne D. Dixson. “‘So When It Comes Out, They Aren’t That Surprised That It Is There’: Using Critical Race Theory As a Tool of Analysis of Race and Racism in Education.” Educational Researcher, vol. 33, no. 5, 2004, pp. 26–31. Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. 3rd ed., New York:, New York University Press, 2017. Dixson, Adrienne D., and Celia Rousseau Anderson. “And we are Still Not Saved: Critical Race Theory in Education 10 Years Later.” Race Ethnicity and Education, vol. 8, no. 1, 2005, pp. 7–27. Dixson, Adrienne D., and Celia Rousseau Anderson. “Where Are We? Critical Race Theory in Education 20 Years Later.” Peabody Journal of Education, vol. 93, no. 1, 2018, pp. 121–131. Du, Bois W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. [First published 1903. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co.] Few, April L. “Integrating Black Consciousness and Critical Race Feminism into Family Studies Research.” Journal of Family Issues, vol. 28, no. 4, 2007, pp. 452–473. Foucault, Michel, and Colin Gordon. Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. 1st American ed., New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th anniversary ed., New York: Continuum, 2004. Harris, Cheryl I. “Whiteness As Property.” Harvard Law Review, vol. 106, no. 8, 1993, pp. 1707–1791. Harry, Beth, and Janette K Klingner. Why Are so Many Minority Students in Special Education?: Understanding Race & Disability in Schools. New York: Teachers College Press, 2006.

Hilliard, Asa G. “The Pitfalls and Promises of Special Education Practice.” Exceptional Children, vol. 59, no. 2, 1992, pp. 168–172. hooks, bell. Feminist Theory from Margin to Center. 1st ed. New York: South End Press, 1984. hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education As the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994. Jardine, Gail McNicol. Foucault & education. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. Kincheloe, Joe L. Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction. Springer, 2008. Ladson-Billings, Gloria. “Chapter 7: Preparing Teachers for Diverse Student Populations: A Critical Race Theory Perspective.” Review of Research in Education, vol. 24, no. 1, 1999, pp. 211–247. Ladson-Billings, Gloria, and William F Tate. “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education.” Teachers College Record, vol. 97, no. 1, 1995, pp. 47–68. Losen, Daniel J. and Orfield, Gary. “Racial Inequity in Special Education.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2002. Lynn, Marvin. “Race, Culture, and the Education of African Americans.” Educational Theory, vol. 56, no. 1, 2006, pp. 107–119. Lynn, Marvin, and Laurence Parker. “Critical Race Studies in Education: Examining a Decade of Research on U.S. Schools.” The Urban Review, vol. 38, no. 4, 2006, pp. 257–290. Macedo, Donaldo. Introduction in Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th anniversary ed. New York: Continuum, 2004. Matsuda, Mari, Delgado, Richard, Lawrence, Charles and Crenshaw, Kimberlè Williams. “Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assault Speech, and the First Amendment.”Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993. Patton, James M. “The Disproportionate Representation of African Americans in Special Education.” Journal of Special Education, vol. 32, no. 1, 1998, pp. 25–31. Rao S. S. “Perspectives of an African American Mother on Parent-Professional Relationships in Special Education.” Mental Retardation, vol. 38, no. 6, 2000, pp. 475–88. Spring, Joel. The American School: 1642–2004, 6th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2005. Story, Kaila Adia, editor. Patricia Hill Collins: Reconceiving Motherhood. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2014. Villaverde, Leila E. Feminist Theories and Education: Primer. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. 1st ed., New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. Woodson, Carter G. The Mis-Education of the Negro. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998 [1933].

85 Deploying Critical Bricolage as Activism Sherilyn Lennon

As ‘the beyond of qualitative work’ (Lather, 2016: 129) folds into the present, alternative ways of understanding the relationships between power, discourse, context, identity, practice and performance emerge. Nascent forms of qualitative research push and prod at the boundaries of what counts as social science research and what does not. These emergent designs work to blur the delineations between ontology and epistemology by destabilizing traditional notions of the researcher as rational, reasonable, reliable and emotionally disconnected from the object of inquiry. Spawning a new breed of researcher, comfortable with being uncomfortable, this form of research is inextricably linked to the political forces, fluxes and flows shifting and shaping communities. Such dynamic and contingent understandings of what counts as research allow for a complexity of thinking that draws from feminist, critical and socio-cultural schools of thought as well as poststructural and postmodern ones – sometimes all at once. In this ‘plurality of fissions and margins’ (Lather, 2016: 129), speech acts, practices, micro-politics, gender performances,

identities, feelings, discourses, experiences and encounters all present as fair game for those intent on knowing differently who we are, what we do and who we are always becoming. In this chapter I add to the growing corpus of new empirical work by proposing a cycle of inquiry for those wanting to do activist research from inside their communities. Drawing from and extending Kincheloe and Berry’s (2004) notion of critical bricolage, this cycle works to conceptualize community activism as research and research as community activism. In the final section of the chapter I demonstrate how the cycle of inquiry might be used by applying it to my own experiences of conducting insider activist research around issues of gender in an isolated rural Australian community.

WHAT IS CRITICAL BRICOLAGE? The term critical bricolage describes an essentially qualitative research approach that strategically and creatively harnesses an

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array of methodological tools and theoretical lenses in order to deepen understandings of the world and promote the will to act (Kincheloe and Berry, 2004; Kincheloe et al., 2012). Kincheloe and McLaren (2005) hint at the unsettling potential of critical bricolage when they posit that [b]ricoleurs attempt to remove knowledge production and its benefits from the control of elite groups. Such control consistently operates to reinforce elite privilege while pushing marginalised groups farther away from the centre of dominant power. (2005: 318)

Grounded in social theory, critical theory and philosophy (Steinberg, 2012), critical bricolage supports highly political research by encouraging those who embrace it to do more than identify and pontificate over problems from the ivory tower of academia. Bricoleurs are prepared to get down and dirty in communities where they situate themselves as provocateurs with the intention of initiating responses from others in order to allow deeper and deeper cultural understandings to foment. This process has the capacity for deepening self knowledge while also working to challenge and disrupt practices and performances that have become naturalized and/or taken-for-granted. Kincheloe and McLaren (2005: 318) assert that a basic concept of bricolage is ‘confrontation with difference’. Lather and Smithies (1997) and Kincheloe (2002) have made potent use of this multi-paradigmatic and multi-methodological approach as evidenced in their highly acclaimed publications documenting the insidious ways that power works to include some while excluding others. Troubling the angels (Lather and Smithies, 1997) incorporates the moving stories of American women infected with HIV and dying of AIDS, while The Sign of the burger (Kincheloe, 2002) examines the impact on others of the global monopoly that is the McDonalds phenomenon. Bricoleurs begin by positioning themselves through the telling of their own story (Steinberg, 2012) before moving on to

trouble the status quo, seek out injustices and make them transparent. Joyce and Tutela (2006) espouse the benefits of bricolage for researchers wanting to delve deeply into ‘complex splintered pieces of information’ (2006: 79). Kincheloe and McLaren (2005: 318) call bricoleurs ‘detectives of subjugated insight’, while Kincheloe and Berry (2004) cite the advantages of bricolage as a framework for researchers who are looking for ‘a practical way to construct a critical science of complexity’ (2004: x). Critical bricolage is founded in the principles of ‘relationality, multiplicity, complexity and, most importantly, criticality for social action and justice’ (Berry, 2006: 113). This means that practicing bricoleurs need to demonstrate [m]ultiple ways to collect, describe, construct, analyse and interpret the object of the research study; and, finally, multiple ways to narrate (tell the story about) the relationships, struggles, conflicts, and complex world of the study that maintains the integrity and reality of the subjects. (Berry, 2006: 90)

While the eclecticism embraced by bricolage can falsely give the impression that the research – perhaps even the researcher – is superficial, ill disciplined and uninformed, this is not the case. The job of the critical bricoleur is to make sense of the complex ways that power operates in specific contexts to shape lives. The multiplicity of conceptual and methodological tools that bricolage makes available are purposefully and strategically selected so that they might be put to use excavating, making transparent, and irritating power asymmetries. The researcher’s actions are aimed at making visible and critiquing social inequities and the ideologies embedded in them, thus reducing their capacity to continue unchecked. Berry (2006) cites as many as five research models used by bricoleurs in attempting to do this – theoretical bricolage, methodological bricolage, interpretative bricolage, narrative bricolage and political bricolage – but warns against adopting hard and fast linear

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approaches to research, claiming that this can impede the interconnectivity and potential richness of the design. Instead, bricolage operates as a counter to positivist and rationalist approaches that attempt to explain social and cultural phenomena with objectivity and from a distance. Bricoleurs need to pick an eclectic but strategic path through a diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches, visiting and re-visiting them when necessary. In this way they are able to transcend reductionist research designs that can be blinded by monological lenses, pre-determined end points and the sterility that often accompanies more traditional research designs.

THE REFLEXIVE BRICOLEUR An important feature of critical bricolage is its use of researcher reflexivity. It is vital that researchers be continually ‘reflecting critically on the self as researcher, the human as instrument’ (Guba and Lincoln, 2005: 210) as a means of forever and always coming-toknow through the research process. This might mean constantly checking for personal biases: do I belong to a privileged or dominant group? Do I need to rethink, reconstruct, or re-negotiate my identity or interpretation of the known world? Have I excluded voices which need to be heard (Berry, 2006)? How is my research affecting my life or the lives of others (Lather, 1991; Lennon, 2016; 2017)? Researchers need to accept that they cannot know how or where their research will unfold, only that all those involved will be affected in ways that cannot be predicted. The role of the critical bricoleur is to identify, problematize and co-construct ‘perceptions of the world anew … in a manner that undermines what appears natural, that opens to question what appears obvious’ (Kincheloe and McLaren, 2005: 321). This constant questioning and unsettling creates research that is, by nature, never-ending. Each new find offers a fresh and varying interpretation

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of a particular lived experience which can be critiqued, re-thought and re-shaped. The evolving nature, constant digging, shifting evidence, re-questioning and re-positioning can make this research appear haphazard. Lather (1991) defends the inherent messiness of this type of research, claiming that, ‘while we need conceptual frames for purposes of understanding, classifying research and researchers into neatly segregated “paradigms” or “traditions” does not reflect the untidy realities of real scholars’ (1991: 11). Steinberg (2012) argues that if a researcher is looking for answers then bricolage is probably not a good choice. This is an intuitive method rather than a positivist one. The frustration of bricolage is that it often asks more questions than it answers and it is never truly finished. It has the capacity to illuminate, problematize and make transparent the cultural norms, ideologies, discourses and practices being produced and reproduced in communities, but it can leave the researcher with a sense of incompletion and a feeling that there is always more to do (Steinberg, 2006). Serious challenges faced by bricoleurs include how to avoid distorting or exploiting others’ lives through the re-telling of their stories or the questioning of their belief systems (Lather, 1988, 1991; Lennon, 2017); how to remain permanently flexible, elastic and open at all times to alternative viewpoints, re-presentations and datagathering opportunities (Kincheloe and Berry, 2004) – despite being openly biased and passionately connected to the research; and how to avoid replacing old inequities with new ones (Lather, 1988; Lennon, 2017). Steinberg (2006) captures the paradoxical nature of critical bricolage when she describes it as a ‘complex collage’ (2006: 120) ‘which transcends any one field’ (2006: 117). There is a certain irony to critical bricolage in that it embraces paradigmatic complexity as a means of understanding human complexity. Despite this, it provides a very useful frame for uncovering and transforming asymmetries of power that reside – often invisibly – within communities,

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their social structures and their institutions. However, Lather (1988) does issue a warning to researchers pursuing cultural transformations. She stresses the importance of not supplanting old and harmful ideologies with their own reifications. Instead she encourages researchers to consider that they too are ‘permanently partial’ (1988: 577) and that these biases must be acknowledged by the research. Like Freire (1971, 2000) and Giroux (2001, 2003), she encourages a form of researcher reflexivity that adopts a cycle of self-sustaining critical reflection and analysis when pursuing liberatory agendas.

EXTENDING KINCHELOE AND BERRY’S INQUIRY PROCESS TO EMBRACE COMMUNITY ACTIVISM The research practices of the bricoleur are deeply rooted in the tenets of poststructuralism, which argue that meaning – and all life performances – are never natural or static but continuously being inscribed and re-inscribed by the cultural contexts in which they are situated (Steinberg, 2006). While responsible for driving the research act, bricoleurs may, at times, need to distance themselves from it, rising above the action to ask: how am I influencing the lives of others? How is my life being influenced by this research? What am I learning about myself/the community/ the world? (Kincheloe and Berry, 2004). Bricoleurs seek to understand, critique and transform ‘the historical and social ways that power operates to shape meaning and its lived consequences’ (Kincheloe and Berry, 2004: 208). Researchers employing this approach must become agile and adept conceptual and methodological negotiators, creatively and reflexively engaged in seeking further clarification and new ways of knowing, critiquing and re-presenting their worlds (Kincheloe and Berry, 2004). The versions of reality that are collected (sometimes provoked), analyzed and

syncretized from the community under study build a text created by a passionate scholar who is capable of eliciting passionate responses from others: an individual who is emotionally connected to – and empathetic towards – the community s/he is seeking to know and understand more deeply and the cultural beliefs and practices s/he is committed to unsettling and transforming (Steinberg, 2006: 127; Lennon, 2015). When seeking to understand complex social issues and power structures, Kincheloe and McLaren (2008) suggest that researchers start by asking Who am I? before using this to inform the What is? which in turn can be used to inform the What should be? I would like to extend this cycle of inquiry to incorporate activist research by adding What can I do about it? and How do others see me as a result of what I’ve done? before returning again to the original question of Who am I (now)? The addition of these three further questions extends Kincheloe and McLaren’s original inquiry questions to create a feedback loop that is potentially never ending. The final three questions of the extended cycle (What can I do about it? How do others see me as a result of what I’ve done? and Who am I [now]?) promote researcher intervention and reflexivity while acknowledging the multiple and shifting positionalities of the researcher throughout the course of the research cycle. These extra questions encourage political and/or public acts of disruption and by doing so extend critical bricolage beyond phenomenological and hermeneutical understandings to garner emancipatory ones. Figure 85.1 captures this evolving cycle of ongoing questioning and its capacity for deepening understandings, interrupting the status quo, realigning power asymmetries and extending personal learnings. The six questions making up the extended feedback loop which create the cycle of inquiry show how a merger of four theoretical paradigms – incorporating poststructuralist, feminist, critical and socio-cultural understandings – can work to guide an

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Figure 85.1  The cycle of inquiry extending the bricolage to incorporate community activism

ongoing cycle of inquiry, intervention and self-­ discovery. Using this cycle to guide the research process acknowledges that the researcher is forever being inscribed and reinscribed through the research process and through others. The cycle of inquiry allows the researcher to conceptually blend and blur, focus and re-focus, question and re-question, discover and re-discover. The result is research that is self-generating, organic and never ending. It is living research, deeply rooted in, and influenced by, its shifting cultural context and the ongoing actions of those within it. It has the capacity to continue unfolding long after the research proper has ended.

APPLYING THE CYCLE OF INQUIRY TO CONTEXT: MY STORY OF COMMUNITY ACTIVISM In this section I demonstrate how the cycle of inquiry introduced in the previous section might be understood as a framework for community activism. In doing so I align it with my

own journey of insider activist research within an isolated rural community in Western Queensland (see Lennon, 2015).

Who Am I and What Is? The community in which I conducted my activist research was located 400 kilometres west of the State’s capital city. Here it was surrounded by some of the most fertile and sought-after agricultural land in Australia. It had been my first and only teaching position, the place where I had met and married my partner – a local farmer – raised my three children and worked as an English Head of Department at the local high school for over a quarter of a century. My extended period of time in this community had allowed me to develop many personal and professional relationships with others including other parents, work colleagues, farm workers and my husband’s extended family – many of whom had been living in the district for five generations. I had a deep knowledge of how things were and how things were meant to be. I understood my position as a

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White woman of relative privilege but a woman nonetheless. Normalized for me was the enactment of White male control of the public sphere, finances and property ownership. In contrast, I understood females as performing roles that incorporated domestic servitude, primary care giving and cultural gatekeeping. Over my many years of teaching at the local high school I had also come to understand that it was normal for boys to perform poorly at school and that their life successes would come later. Research that I conducted as part of my doctoral study flagged that a divergence in many boys’ and girls’ academic performances began at the age of eight and continued to widen throughout their schooling lives. While girls as a statistical cohort consistently performed better at school, this all changed once school finished. Upon graduating, many of the boys would obtain local apprenticeships with considerable future earning potential. Of the girls who remained in the community, most were relegated to lower-status – and less well-paid – traineeships. These findings unsettled me and led me to look beyond the school gates to investigate further. More troubling still was evidence that I started to collect from articles in the local newspaper, semi-structured interviews and incidental encounters with community members. These data sources began to illuminate the toxic ways in which hegemonic masculinity was manifesting in my community. I found evidence of practices steeped in misogyny and homophobia manifesting as physical violence, sexual assault, intimidation, harassment, financial and civic control, high risk behavior, exclusionary practices, packing, predation and a sense of White male entitlement (Lennon, 2015, 2017). In one memorable interview a woman told me of her experience of being sexually assaulted one night after two members of the local rugby club broke into her home. After the assault she felt that she was not in a position to press charges because her attacker was from ‘such a well-to-do family in town’. In another interview a young female teacher recounted

her story of the night a group of intoxicated Year 12 boys stood outside her teachers’ accommodation demanding that she come outside because ‘we want to fuck you’. In yet another interview a local health worker told me of a group of high-school boys who had filmed, and then circulated, footage of an explicit sexual encounter between themselves and a 16-year-old girl. In the aftermath of the incident, when parents and authorities had become involved, the parents allegedly excused their sons’ behaviour with the defence, ‘Well what do you expect? Boys will be boys … and she was a female from, well, not the most desirable social class … therefore it really didn’t matter’. One of the things that I found most troubling about stories such as these was how complicit many of us who lived in the community were in unwittingly sanctioning hierarchical gender regimes and practices that led to the subjugation of females – or the feminine – while endorsing a sense of White male entitlement. This complicity took many forms including excusing male harassment as harmless or a joke, normalizing the predation and/or objectifying of females and conflating biological sex with gender (‘Boys will be boys’). Cultural myopia had allowed hypermasculine beliefs and practices to seed and take root to such an extent that they were now largely invisible. The consequences of this invisibility were limiting for all of us who lived here. With this burgeoning knowledge came an unsettling feeling accompanied by a different way of being in and seeing my community. These increased understandings worked to reposition both my research and me. What began as an interpretivist study had gradually morphed into an activist one fueled by a researcher on an emancipatory quest.

What Could or Should Be and What Can I Do About It? The capacity to make visible what has been invisible for the purposes of transformative

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Figure 85.2  A particularly troubling and well-known local image

thinking, social action and self-transcendence is a central principle of critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy is most commonly associated with educational settings where it seeks to challenge the status quo by promoting educators as transformative, classrooms as political and students as agentic (see Freire, 2000; Giroux, 1983, 2007, 2015; Kincheloe, 2007). It advocates for classroom spaces that are democratic but uncomfortable, productive but unpredictable, and supportive but risky. In these spaces ‘pedagogy goes beyond providing the conditions for the simple acts of knowing and understanding and includes the cultivation of the very power of self-­ definition and critical agency’ (Giroux, 2007: 3). Giroux (2015) encourages educators using critical pedagogy approaches to heighten students’ engagement in their learning by connecting it to their lifeworlds: Any viable approach to critical pedagogy suggests taking seriously those maps of meaning, affective investments and sedimented desires that enable students to connect their own lives and everyday experiences to what they learn. (Giroux, 2015: 19)

I wanted to take these understandings and see if I could use them to ignite a shift in thinking and practices across an entire community. This desire led me to act in ways that were

deliberately disruptive of local gender beliefs and practices that I believed to be limiting community members’ lives – including my own. In my emancipatory quest for social justice, I turned to the platform provided by the local newspaper. Here I wrote and published a letter to the editor problematizing, what I considered to be, a particularly toxic gender message being broadcast to local youth in the form of a logo (as displayed in Figure 85.2) marketing an annual social event. My umbrage at the implicit gender messages in the logo suggesting how male and female roles and relationships were to be enacted on the night compelled me to act. In re-positioning myself as a community activist, my researcher identity and conceptual framing had significantly shifted.

How Do Others See Me as a Result of What I’ve Done? My public critique of the logo (Figure 85.3) generated many responses. These included – but were not limited to – my mailbox being defaced with stickers of the logo, messages of support and complaint being left on my answering machine, admonishing emails from community leaders, the creation of a public

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Figure 85.3  My public critique of the logo

blog devoted to the topic of the appropriateness or otherwise of the image, whispered conversations supporting my stance and complete silence on the matter from some. Over a six-month period, my propitious act resulted in me being publicly branded a ‘nihilist’, ‘alarmist’, ‘absurd’, ‘confronting’, ‘old fashioned’, ‘a bit slow in my uptake’, ‘politically correct’, ‘humourless’, ‘out of control’ and ‘ridiculous in the extreme’. In that same period of time I was also constructed as ‘brave’, ‘empathetic’, ‘respectful’, ‘responsible’, ‘so right’ and informed that ‘this district needs more women like you’. I received comments such as, ‘To be honest I’d never noticed it until Sherilyn pointed it out’ and ‘Your article was the first time I had been made to notice the logo’. These words and comments stuck to me and became embodied in my own and others’ feelings and actions. Ahmed (2004: 88) writes of words as objects that have a ‘stickiness’ about them. In this way they can stick to bodies where they work to re/preconfigure our actions, practices, feelings and futures. Over days, weeks and months more and more

words were produced and got stuck. They came in the form of multiple letters to the editor, full-page articles in two different newspapers, an editorial, a communal blog, a series of opinion pieces, vociferous debates and incidental discussions in bars and coffee shops and on street corners. Some words were used to condemn my stance; others to support it. I had set out to make an invisible artefact of power and culture visible (Kincheloe and Berry, 2004) and comments like these confirmed that I was indeed having an effect – not least of all upon myself. Despite the unsettling caused by my public critiquing of the logo, I found succour in the knowledge that there were many in the community who now saw the logo differently. Dialogic spaces questioning gender norms had opened up within and across the community. These took the form of public letters to the editor, newspaper articles devoted to the topic, community blogs, dinner party debates, whispered conversations and, occasionally, acts of emancipation. In one instance a public offer of $500 was made by a local farming family to anyone who would

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design a new logo. In another a sponsor informed me that she had withdrawn funding from a local organization because it was using sexist humour to promote its brand. She went on to explain that my actions had also given her the strength to act. This confirmed for me that the disruption process I had begun was indeed harnessing collective agency within and across the community. It is impossible to document or be certain of every instance of unsettling, rethinking, or transformative action that occurred – or will occur – as a consequence of my unsettling but, suffice to say, it has and will continue. While still in use at time of writing, the logo and its phallocentric message of White male entitlement no longer reposes innocently and invisibly within the cultural landscape. Tom, a local businessman whom I interviewed in the course of my research, articulates why it is vital for communities’ futures that they have people who are willing to challenge toxic constructs and their manifestations into practice: I think it’s great that we raise these issues in a community. A community needs to think about these sorts of issues and unless you’ve got people brave enough to raise them then it’s never part of the debate. I think sometimes we need to reflect on our values and the things that we do in a community and for that reason I think it’s important that these various issues are raised.

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would challenge the dominant social order from the inside. I have come to the crossroads. My study is all but over and it is time to start making life decisions. With what can I live and with what can I not live? If I were to leave, where would I go? If I stay, will I ever be able to truly reconnect with this community? In learning about myself I have learned that I don’t necessarily fit where – or how – I thought I did. I know that it is impossible to go back – to unlearn – and I know that I would not want to, but can I find – or make – a space in this community where I feel comfortable again? Where I do fit? Where I want to be? Or is it too late? Do I know too much?…. I find I am making more and more trips to the city: finding reasons to leave my community – my home – more and more often…. My husband tells me my study has changed me. He is right. I have grown. Become more politically literate, more intense, more attuned to seeing and exposing injustices, demanding change…. And I am not alone. Some of my female friends are also feeling it. Making comments. Have I infected them with my malcontent? Complicated their lives as well? Turned them into outsiders in their own community? I know I am responsible for starting a ripple of dissatisfaction; a desire for change. Have I betrayed my community, or enriched it? There is a bittersweet irony in knowing that I began my research journey because of my unwavering passion for, and commitment to, this community and its students, and here I am ending it by wondering whether I even belong here anymore. For the first time in my life I am considering alternatives; imagining different futures in other places…. I am a different person to that which I was at the beginning of this study.

Who Am I (Now)? About two years into my study I found myself so completely entangled in the human politics of the research site that it became an ethical dilemma for me to pretend that I was somehow always in control, always rational and disaffected from the feelings I was feeling or the encounters I was having. I turned to the keeping of a journal as a way of capturing and writing through my experiences. This became my way of documenting and critically reflecting on the shift in researcher positionality that was occurring as a consequence of my activism. The following entry gives a window into/ warning of the consequences for those who

THE RISKS AND REWARDS OF COMMUNITY ACTIVISM It is apparent from this entry that the doing of the research has resulted in a profound shift in my knowing and being in the world. This mind/body rupture can be witnessed in the continual questioning of who I am, what I have learned, where I now fit and how my research has impacted on others’ lives. The entry reveals the potential price to be paid for pursuing community activism; a price that includes both cultural exile and social displacement. Bettez (2015: 936) claims that emerging forms of

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qualitative research are capable of being ‘simultaneously chaotic, gut-wrenching, perplexing, revealing, and exhilarating’, while Ahmed wisely counsels that, ‘[I]n order to move away from attachments that are hurtful, we must first bring them into the realm of political action….the past lives in the very wounds that remain open in the present’ (2004: 33). While I cannot seal my wounds by undoing my actions or my words – nor would I want to – it is patently clear that insider activist work is not easy or risk free. Unlike the cold, neutral and rational research conducted by a dispassionate scholar, it is hotblooded research that has the potential to be socially transformative but also unsettling and uncomfortable for many – including the researcher. Community activism is informed by a fundamental belief that there are more risks involved in idly waiting for the shifting forces of culture, history and economy to more equitably re-align power asymmetries than there are in seeking intervention oneself. In setting out to excavate and unsettle social injustices and the power asymmetries inherent to them, it is inevitable that there will be prickly moments. Despite this, Kincheloe and McLaren (2008) encourage such approaches, claiming that it is necessary for the ‘revitalisation and revivification’ (2008: 417) of communities. While unpredictable and risky, making transparent and disrupting how power works within and across communities is important work that has the potential to enrich the lives of all it touches. By using a cycle of inquiry to extend Kincheloe and Berry’s concept of critical bricolage, this chapter has been able to reconceptualize community activism as research via research as community activism. The strength of the approach I suggest lies not in its ability to be replicated and re-administered to other communities. All contexts and communities are complex and idiosyncratic and standardizing research that seeks to perform social transformations is simply not possible. It is one of the reasons why

‘learning the bricolage is a lifelong process’ (Kincheloe and Berry, 2004: 31–2). Different researchers in different contexts will need to consider different theoretical compositions, different disruption processes, different tools of inquiry and/or different entry points than those outlined in this chapter. Instead, on offer here is a way of conceptualizing and thinking through a process for performing research with transformative intent. As with bricolage, the proposed process purposefully and strategically draws from an array of conceptual tools, tenets and techniques to support a never-ending cycle of inquiry for understanding and challenging lifelimiting beliefs and practices from inside communities. While community activism might be complex and fraught with risk, what journeys of (self)discovery are not.

REFERENCES Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. New York, NY: Routledge. Berry, K. (2006). Research as bricolage: Embracing relationality, multiplicity and complexity. In K. Tobin & J. Kincheloe (Eds.), Doing educational research: A handbook (pp. 87–115). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Bettez, S. C. (2015). Navigating the complexity of qualitative research in postmodern contexts: Assemblage, critical reflexivity, and communion as guides. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 28(8), 932–954. Freire, P. (1971). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). New York, NY: Herder & Herder. Freire, P. (2000). Learning to question: A pedagogy of liberation. In A. Freire & D. Macedo (Eds.), The Paulo Freire reader (pp. 186–230). New York, NY: Continuum International. Giroux, H. (1983). Theory and resistance in education: A pedagogy for the opposition. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey. Giroux, H. (2001). Theory and resistance in education: Towards a pedagogy for the opposition. London: Bergin & Garvey.

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Giroux, H. (2003). Critical theory and educational practice. In A. Darder, M. Baltodano & D. Torres (Eds.), The critical pedagogy reader (pp. 27–56). London: RoutledgeFalmer. Giroux, H. (2007). Introduction. In P. McLaren & J. Kincheloe (Eds.), Critical pedagogy: Where are we now? (pp. 1–5). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Giroux, H. (2015, October 13). The curse of totalitarianism and the challenge of critical pedagogy [blog]. Retrieved from https:// philosophersforchange.org/2015/10/13 Guba, E., & Lincoln, Y. (2005). Paradigmatic controversies, contradictions, and emerging confluences. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 191–216). London: Sage. Joyce, P., & Tutela, J. (2006). We make our road by talking: Preparing to do dissertation research. In K. Tobin & J. Kincheloe (Eds), Doing educational research: A handbook (pp. 59–83). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Kincheloe, J. (2002). The sign of the burger. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Kincheloe, J. (2007). Critical pedagogy in the twenty-first century: Evolution for survival. In P. McLaren & J. Kincheloe (Eds.), Critical pedagogy: Where are we now? (pp.9–42). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Kincheloe, J., & Berry, K. (2004). Rigour and complexity in educational research: Conceptualizing the bricolage. Berkshire, England: Open University Press. Kincheloe, J., & McLaren, P. (2005). Rethinking critical theory and qualitative research. In N. Denzin & S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 303–342). London: Sage. Kincheloe, J., & McLaren, P. (2008). Rethinking critical theory and qualitative research. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), The landscape of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 403–455). London: Sage.

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Kincheloe, J., McLaren, P., & Steinberg, S. (2012). Critical pedagogy and qualitative research: Moving to the bricolage. In S. Steinberg & G. Cannella (Eds.), Critical qualitative research reader (pp. 14–32). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Lather, P. (1988). Feminist perspectives on empowering research methodologies. Women’s Studies International Forum, 11(6), 569–581. Lather, P. (1991). Feminist research in education: Within/against. Geelong, Victoria: Deakin University. Lather, P. (2016). (Re)Thinking ontology in (post)qualitative research. Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 125–131. Lather, P., & Smithies, C. (1997). Troubling the angels: Women living with HIV. New York, NY: Westview Press. Lennon, S. (2015). Unsettling research: Using critical praxis and activism to create uncomfortable spaces. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Lennon, S. (2016). Re-turning feelings that matter using reflexivity and diffraction to think with and through a moment of rupture in activist work. International Journal of Qualitative Studeies, 30(6), (534–545). Doi: 10.1080/09518398.2016.1263885 Lennon, S. (2017). Using critical and postcritical pedagogies to pick at the seams of patriarchy from ‘the inside’. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (Special Edition: Rurality, 38(3), 377–388). doi: 10.1080/01596306.2017.1306983 Steinberg, S. (2006). Critical cultural studies research: Bricolage in action. In K. Tobin & J. Kincheloe (Eds.), Doing educational research: A handbook (pp. 117–137). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Steinberg, S. (2012). Critical pedagogy and qualitative research: Moving to the Bricolage. In S. Steinberg & G. Cannella (Eds.), Critical qualitative research reader (pp. 192–197). New York, NY: Peter Lang.

86 Critical Community Education: The Case of Love Stings Annette Cobur n and David Wallace

INTRODUCTION Community Education is a discrete professional discipline that reaches beyond traditional forms of schooling and college education in order to facilitate the generation of knowledge and action for change among communities that are impacted by inequality and injustice. The Scottish Standards Council for this professional practice, which is also known as Community Learning and Development, identifies our aim as being to ‘support social change and social justice [by] challenging discrimination and its consequences and working with individuals and communities to shape learning and development activities that enhance quality of life and sphere of influence’ (Community Learning and Development Standards Council, 2017). Critical community educators work with, not for, communities so that they can learn together in purposefully developing educational praxis that challenges, changes and eradicates barriers to a socially just and good

life for all (Wallace and Coburn, 2018). Our analysis of community education as critical is grounded in characteristics for pedagogy that engages learners as actors in their social or political contexts, where learning is collaborative, dialogical, informal and problemposing (Coburn and Gormally, 2017; Coburn and Wallace, 2011; Martin, 2008; Wallace and Coburn, 2018). Critical community education is aligned with Freirean pedagogy in its aspirations for practice that seeks to establish ‘a critical relationship between pedagogy and politics, highlighting the political aspects of the pedagogical and drawing attention to the implicit and explicit domain of the pedagogical inscribed in the political’ (McLaren, 2005: xxxvii). Organised through practice domains of adult education, community development and youth work, Community Education and its incarnation as Community Learning and Development is enacted in communities across Scotland, where ‘the focus of the work is always a value laden, social and moral activity’ (Coburn and

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Gormally, 2017: 15). Community Education across the world (Brennan and Curtis, 2015; Burke, 2004; Wischmann, 2015) is characterised by this social and democratic purpose (Wallace, 2017). Developing critical consciousness in the context of collaborative activity in communities helps to create new knowledge and understanding of the world, underpinning praxis and community development (Wallace, 2017). In this way, critical community education serves its purpose most effectively when challenging contemporary orthodoxies (cultural hegemony) that lead to alternative readings and understandings of how things are so that they might be changed (counter hegemony). It is these principles that underpin our analysis of a public health education project for young people called Love Stings (Coburn and Wallace, 2009). Drawing on empirical research, involving 66 young participants who were identified as ‘vulnerable to exclusion’, our evaluation of a community-based youth health initiative considered how youth work, practised as critical pedagogy, created possibilities for boundary crossing and interprofessional practices (Coburn and Wallace, 2011). This amplified claims in the National Youth Work Strategy, which suggested youth services ‘play a vital role in improving the life chances of young people…working collaboratively…[to]…ensure that Scotland continues to be at the forefront globally of innovative work with young people’ (Scottish Government, 2014: 18). This strategy emphasised that, working across professional disciplines, youth workers offer joined-up services that enable young people to make informed health choices and to enhance their capacity to flourish. Findings suggested that, where young people had experienced negative relationships in school, family and medical environments, youth work was effective in challenging problematic health behaviours and in contributing to the shifting from naive consciousness among participants and moving to more critical awareness and action (Freire, 1996).

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BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT The capability of young people to be free and to live a good life is impacted by dominant social and cultural discourses and political ideologies (Giroux, 2011). Young people, particularly in impoverished, Black and working-class communities, have been subjected to multiple discrimination and prejudice. A negative discourse reinforced by powerful media interests routinely constructs their behaviour as antisocial, contributing to a process of exclusion or marginalisation from mainstream society. Youth work practices seek to subvert these pathologies about young people in the interest of social justice since they impinge on the rights and limit the capabilities of young people to grow as active citizens in their own right. Freire (1996) suggests the concept of marginalisation as ‘paternalistic … apparatus … [where]…the oppressed are regarded as the pathology of the healthy society’ (1996: 55), noting that no one is marginal or outside of society and in need of integration into the healthy mainstream. People are always inside and part of society but have become ‘“beings for others”…[and so]…the solution is not to “integrate” them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure, so that they can become “beings for themselves”’ (Freire, 1996: 55). Over time, in response to successive moral panics, there have been a series of what could be regarded as experiments in social engineering (Popper, 1961) that seek to control and socialise young people into a neoliberal capitalist job market, proposed as the only way of structuring society and making a good life. The persistence of crises about young people suggests that such experiments in social control are not working! The chapter is developed in three sections. First, it outlines the research design and context in which Love Stings was developed. Next, it examines findings that, according to the young people, helped improve their physical and emotional position, in ways that were different to their earlier involvement in school or mainstream health interventions. Finally,

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we argue that an alternative discourse of critical community education, incorporating youth work, can contribute to improving young people’s sexual health and subjective well-being.

RESEARCH DESIGN This qualitative case study incorporated rapid response ethnography (Finlay et  al., 2013). Working with participants in six half-day sessions over a two-year period, data were generated through group discussion, decoding of collages and individual interview. Participants provided individual data but also contributed to collective discussion about the programme. The researchers were present during these discussions and made detailed field notes. Secondary-level data were gathered through content analysis of documentation provided by the project and a review of contemporary literature, strategic plans for sexual health improvement and policy contexts. Responses were analysed through simple inductive coding (Boyatzis, 1998), meaning that themes were generated from the data provided, rather than from existing theoretical ideas. As such, findings are descriptive of the young people’s experiences of practices in one case setting. Although not replicable to other projects, findings offer an indication of the extent to which learning and action in this setting may be adapted for use in similar contexts.

Collage and Interview Sessions The collection of visual data (Prosser, 1998) has been used in qualitative research investigations. Collage making is an extension of this method, utilised by researchers in situations where participant evaluation and reflection on experience are called for (Finlay et al, 2013; Gormally and Coburn, 2014). Collage provides an opportunity for participants to portray their own experiences and perceptions through metaphor. Using magazines, leaflets and other printed matter,

participants were invited to cut out images or text that represent ideas, emotions or reactions about their experience of Love Stings. The materials were assembled together into one collage as a visual artwork that helped participants to offer a story of Past, Present and Future experiences of the Love Stings programme (Figures 86.1 and 86.2). These images exemplify the kind of collage-art as data. Gauntlett (2007: 96) refers to activity where participants are given something to do and are observed in the process of doing it as ‘activity-based ethnography’ and ‘ethnographic action research’. Moss suggests this process as a means of making ‘implicit knowledge explicit’ (Moss, 1993: 179). Like Gauntlet (2007: 102), we made observation notes, recorded participants explaining their collages and obtained a digital photograph of each for further analysis. Recorded data were transcribed and used to develop a thematic analysis in which content was drawn together and categorised to identify recurring themes.

Collage Work as Focus Group The making of collages, although an individual activity, was undertaken in a group setting, as shown in Figures 86.3 and 86.4. Groups ranged from three to five young people, involving a total of 19, selected through convenience sampling, from an overall observed cohort of 66 participants. Sharing collage resources and drawing on collective reflections provided both a degree of dialogue and a collaborative element to the data-gathering process that is akin to a focus-group process (Forrest-Keenan and Van Teijlingen, 2004). Experiences were shared, recounted and compared in an iterative dialogical process of meaning making that was clarified and extended through participant use of visual and verbal prompts. Johnson (1996) argues that focus groups raise consciousness and help to empower participants in, for example, collective resistance to being led by the researcher.

CRITICAL COMMUNITY EDUCATION: THE CASE OF LOVE STINGS

Figure 86.1  Pat’s collage

Figure 86.2  Sam’s collage

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Figure 86.3  Creative conversations at the collage table

Figure 86.4  Collaborative dialogue at the collage table

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Individual Interviews Individual interviews involved participants offering an explanation of the story told through their collage, and comprised 15 of the original 19 participants. Interviews were recorded for transcription and thematic analysis, to explore the detail and identify emerging themes (Hart, 2007). The selection criteria involved individual participants, ‘whose main credential is…[was]…experiential relevance’ (Rudestam and Newton, 2001: 93), which meant they had direct experience of participating in the Love Stings programme. In this instance ‘experiential relevance’ also meant the sample was largely self-selecting and opportunistic in terms of who was available or inclined to take part.

Ethical Considerations We approached this research, adopting the notion of ethical symmetry (Christensen and Prout, 2002), from a position that views young people not as objects of research from a position that views young people not as objects of research but as co-participants in the research process, stressing their competency and agency (Sime, 2006). Ethical procedures were followed to ensure they did not come to harm as a consequence of engaging in the research process and all names were changed and details omitted during reporting, to protect anonymity. All participants gave informed consent and were advised on how to withdraw this consent at any stage. One participant declined to have their collage photographed. All remaining participants gave full consent for all data, including the collage-art recorded interviews, to be used to generate findings.

THE CONTEXT FOR LOVE STINGS The underpinning context for Love Stings recognises that structural inequality,

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discrimination and exclusion impacts on young people’s aspirations for social justice, active citizenship and well-being. Located in an established youth project, with a credible track record in working with young people experiencing poverty and exclusion in inner city areas, the Tackling Sexual Health Inequalities programme (named by participants as ‘Love Stings’) sought to mitigate the impacts of inequality and exclusion by improving young people’s health and wellbeing to • help young people become capable of taking responsibility for their sexual health and to be confident and interested in accessing mainstream health providers; • provide opportunities for young people to understand the issues (and make positive, informed choices) around contraception, relationships, pregnancy and parenthood; and • use informal education as means of engaging young people and offering intensive support to reduce their participation in risky sexual health behaviours.

Developed through outdoor and youth work education, the programme intended to build young people’s confidence as a pre-cursor to making a positive contribution to society. A programme of activities was designed in collaboration with young people to equip them with knowledge that informed behaviour choices and assisted in building confidence that helped them to articulate their reasons for making particular choices to a potential sex partner. Incorporating problem-posing education, groupwork and fun activities, Love Stings was participative, collaborative and experiential. It included a residential experience, facilitated by experienced youth workers and regular group sessions involving health professionals. Over a two-year period, 66 young people participated in Love Stings, with 57 of them successfully completing the whole programme. Of those who engaged in the programme, 38 remained involved in the wider youth work setting for at least a year after completion.

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The Challenge of Showing How Learning Is Developed: Youth Work as Critical Community Education Dewey (1859–1952) argued that learning must be active and suggested that education for young people went beyond schooling. Real, guided experiences fostered their capacity to contribute to society and to be active community members. However, for such a contribution to be meaningful, an approach to education that goes beyond an instrumental process of learning as training is required. Further, this approach is not bounded by the confines or power imbalances manifest in institutional learning (Wallace, 2017). Fostering participation and engagement as educative processes in this way represents aspirations for a particular type of society, one in which democratic and empowering education is nurtured and cultivated. Drawing on Dewey (1938), Apple and Beane (1995) and Giroux (2001), this process can be connected to empowering practices such as those observed in Love Stings. Further, in providing a catalyst for reflection and building on mutual experiences, the process of active learning at Love Stings aims to promote societal improvement in the interests of all (Rosales, 2012). The work at Love Stings appears therefore to be a corollary of such Deweyan sentiment for critically participative and experiential education: To say that the welfare of others, like our own, consists in a widening and deepening of the perceptions that give activity its meaning, in an educative growth, is to set forth a proposition of political import. Dewey (1922) as cited in Boydston (2008:202)

Ord (2009) has emphasised the importance of Dewey’s ideas in thinking about experiential learning in youth work. Dewey saw the construction of knowledge as a two-way transaction, involving the learner and the environment in which they are located, at a particular time and place. Activating participation,

learning is located with the lives and interests of young participants and is explicitly intended therefore to be responsive to their cultural milieu rather than a dominant and imposed narrative (Wallace and Coburn, 2018). It is this social and experiential engagement that is a cornerstone of critical youth work practice and it is this that appears to connect to what Dewey described as processes of trying and undergoing (Dewey, 1916). The core impulse in practice is one in which participation in activities explicitly builds from and extends experience. The legitimacy of such reflexive experience – the trying and undergoing – provides a means of developing really useful knowledge (Tett, 2010) articulating identity and agency as contestation of official and hegemonic constraints. Thus, by engaging in activity and interacting with the environment, education becomes an act of continuity, where experiential education locates lived social experience at the heart of the educational process and cannot be subsumed as an abstraction solely of the psychological or cognitive. For Dewey, experience involves a dual process of understanding and influencing the world around us as well as being influenced and changed ourselves by that experience. Wallace (2017: 41)

Thus, learning in youth work is suggested as part of a continuum. Drawing on experiences from wider contexts, learning about sexual health in youth work, as in schooling, involves young people in interaction with the environment in which learning happens. Learning is developed by decoding specific experiences and considering what these might mean in a wider context. Yet the extent to which learning may be claimed as a direct result of a particular set of experiences, in a specific setting, is difficult to evidence. This is because learning is a cumulative process that builds on learners’ existing knowledge and understanding of the world and is derived from a variety of sources, settings and experiences (Dewey, 1938; Illeris, 2007; Vygotsky, 1978).

CRITICAL COMMUNITY EDUCATION: THE CASE OF LOVE STINGS

The health education practices and principles underpinning Love Stings were notably consistent with the empowering philosophy of education set out by Dewey (1938). Taking a social and informal approach to ‘new learning’ (Barton and Hamilton, 1998; Freire, 1996; Sommerlad, 2003) contrasted starkly with participants’ views about their experiences of school learning (their main source of sexual health education prior to participation in Love Stings). Their reaction to more formal settings and instructional approaches was characterised by non-participation and non-learning: John: in school like teachers just telling you … don’t really want to listen to what teachers say …Love Stings workers give you choices, choice to be there, a choice to say what you want and how you feel, not like school, I always come here I never miss it. Claire: Love Stings treats you more like an adult. A lot better (than school) not like a daft wee wean (foolish small child)…not looking down on you…so I listen more and pick a lot up, whereas, at school I didn’t listen!

These extracts show that having choices and the freedom to act in a particular way was important and that not feeling patronised was central to their learning (listening more and picking up a lot). The young people suggested that the youth work environment facilitated learning in ways that were different to their experiences of schooling education. In this sense, youth work could be positioned as a boundary-crossing pedagogy. Working across formal and informal boundaries, with young people who were on the edges of formal health services and mainstream education (some were already excluded from school and were disengaged from health services). Utilising a critical pedagogy, youth workers engaged with young people in critical conversations about their lifestyles and life choices. This shifts practice from a formulaic response that offers instructional classes on safe sex, towards a more critical social praxis. According to Coburn and Wallace (2011: 13), functional youth work is defined

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by its ‘explicit socialising of young people to meet preconceived norms’, where young people are perceived as deficient and involved in ‘risky’ behaviours. Alternatively, a more critical pedagogy for youth work takes problem-posing as the starting point for learning where power shifts towards young people as capable social actors, as ‘young people are encouraged to learn by probing common-sense views of the world, to facilitate understanding of the justice and injustice, power and oppression, and…to promote social transformation’ (2011: 15). Love Stings exemplified this more critical praxis in its use of conversational and experiential methods to engage young people in learning about themselves and the steps they could take, to enhance their well-being.

Jane’s Story – a Typical Example of the Love Stings Process Collages provided data on the changing nature of participants’ lives. While there was diversity in specific experiences, the young people’s lives were typically impacted by multiple and complex issues and they were either sexually active or vulnerable to sexual exploitation. The typical nature of the young people’s lives is exemplified in Jane’s collage (Figure 86.5).

Past Jane used her collage to explain her perspectives on sex and sexual health. Images included a wine bottle that she selected to represent her consumption of alcohol, and an image of a pregnancy testing kit to signify tests she’d taken when she thought she was pregnant. These images characterised her life prior to participation in Love Stings: When I was younger, I didn’t really bother about sex when I was going out with people… it didn’t really bother them too much…now that I’m getting older and boys are wantin’ sex…it’s just a bit harder to deal with relationships…if you’re not havin’ sex with them…’cause it [the relationship] wouldn’t survive that long would it?

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Figure 86.5  Jane’s collage

In the past I thought I knew hunners [hundreds, meaning ‘a lot’] of stuff and before I came on the sexual health…I thought I knew everything… I was running about doin’ everything…doin’ it [‘it’, meaning ‘having intercourse’] without using protection…I didn’t know I could cause myself a lot of bother through it…I wasn’t very confident before I came on the course… but I was confident enough to run about thinking I knew everything… I’m confident around boys ‘cause I’ve got two wee brothers… I used to run about getting drunk and having unprotected sex which wisnae [was not] too bright, ‘cause it could’ve turned into a pregnancy, disease or anything.

health, following participation in Love Stings, where she was capable of informed reflection on past behaviours and her comments were consistent with evidence of changing health behaviours in terms of the age at which people engage in intercourse for the first time (Wellings et al., 2001).

In this final comment, Jane’s thinking was consistent with the health belief model (Janz and Becker, 1984), whereby people who believe there is a problem or risk to themselves (such as pregnancy or Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs), as distinct from more communal or societal concerns, are more likely to take preventative action. Jane’s comment is a reflection on her past, in light of what she now knows about sexual

I wisnae [was not] dead confident in front of people…like when I was out with people that I didn’t know…when I came to Love Stings I wisnae [was not] too confident around people…I was like, that shy one that sat back all the time and didn’t say anything. But then I…came on the sexual health course and started to learn about myself and I started to get confident and felt a bit good about myself. When I was doin’ sexual health in school…the teachers don’t approach it in a good way, because they just tell you that…they tell you all the wrong

Present Some images on Jane’s collage depicted her life now. She said that she put ‘me’ at the centre because of her increased confidence and self-respect:

CRITICAL COMMUNITY EDUCATION: THE CASE OF LOVE STINGS

things or the consequences but they also tell you that it’s wrong to do it at your age..[so] I didn’t want to talk about things like….em..with people lookin’ doon [down] on me like I’ve got no respect for myself and that I’m just a wee slut, that does anything wi’ anybody. Coming here [for Love Stings]..telling the truth about myself and speaking up about myself and not being ashamed of everything else ‘cause no one else was ashamed…so why should I be ashamed…That was the best part, ‘cause when everyone was speaking I was thinking…and we were all…telling everybody about ourselves and our lives…[I think]…that’s good, I could tell somebody about what I do, without them looking down on me, and me thinking that it’s not right for someone at my age. That’s the best bit about coming.

Jane’s lack of confidence was consistent with findings on the impact of national identity on sexual health statistics in New Zealand (Braun, 2008). Braun found a characteristic lack of capacity and inclination to communicate about difficult or sensitive issues, making it difficult to communicate about sex, particularly during complex communications with a sexual partner. Jane’s comments typified a view that informal conversational methods enabled participants to feel more confident about how they might discuss sex with a partner. Increasing confidence and self-efficacy were explicit programme aims and were consistent with policies for youth work and sexual health but, importantly, they also underpinned development of knowledge, skills and attributes that could enable the young people to flourish beyond the project.

Future Looking to the future, Jane chose images of vibrant people, looking fit and healthy, full of energy and fun: That’s me now…[woman in pink dress]…dead [very] confident and happier than everybody…and I know what I want in life…even if I’m still young, I have got plans of where I want to go soon… ’cause I’m goin’ to college soon to train to be a hairdresser…so I want to get far on in life.

Jane’s selection included the image of a woman in a traditional wedding dress, a

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young baby and an older couple. She suggested this as her future vision, beyond college, when she would like to meet a partner and have a family but not just now. This was interpreted as showing how participation in Love Stings assisted young people in renewing and reclaiming a coherent life-vision: I’ll look out for myself in future…and think about me…not everyone else. Obviously, I’ll think about people around me and have respect, but I’ll think about me and care for myself, have more respect for myself…Love Stings has…like when you imagine if I didn’t go on that course… I could’ve ended up with a wee baby that I didn’t know how to look after, that I didn’t want…it could’ve ruined my life…it could’ve stopped my life right there…cause that’s what happens when you don’t use a condom… you’ve got responsibilities….and you can get infections.

Like other participants, Jane connected her future aspirations to finding work in a chosen field and settling down with a family. Contrary to negative hegemonic pathologising of young people, Jane projected a happy family unit in which there was stability of income and employment, a productive and stable relationship and a sense of contentment and well-being. Jane connected the lessons she learned in Love Stings with working to achieve this vision.

FINDINGS ABOUT LEARNING, AGENCY AND FLOURISHING 1 Raising awareness and increasing knowledge and understanding

Research in public health policy and practice has persistently focussed on teenage pregnancy as a social problem associated with high levels of unwanted pregnancy, excessive alcohol consumption, poverty, social exclusion and poor physical health through Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) (Arai, 2009; Cense and Ganzevoort, 2019; Monasterio et al., 2007). It is further reported that experiences of sexual relations among

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young people are linked to alcohol consumption, which increases the likelihood of engaging in unsafe sex (Braun, 2008). Noting the dominance of a stigmatising discourse, Arai (2009) argues for an alternative policy direction to offer more supportive responses to young mothers, while Cense and Ganzevoort (2019) call for further research into the use and development of peer education methods for improving sexual health. Love Stings sought to offer a more positive than stigmatising response to participants and engaged young people in critical and reflective conversations with their peers. This included consideration of their experiences of a suggested link between sex and alcohol consumption, and the impact of alcohol on feelings of confidence or in the loss of inhibition as part of wider conversations about making a good life. Despite the sensitive nature of this topic, discussion was facilitated by using creative youth work methods such as ‘beer goggles’, whereby participants are asked to wear a set of spectacles that distort vision (as a simulation of drunkenness). Participants then accomplish tasks such as checking, opening and applying a condom to a banana. Young people specifically highlighted this exercise as having a ‘sobering effect’ on realising how little they could accomplish of the safe-sex tasks: And then what did you do? Why did you have them on (Booze Goggles)? They passed us a condom which was still in the paper, still in the wrapper, so we had to like check the wrapper to see if it was pierced or anything and then we had to check the date, which I never knew they had. So then I checked the date and the date was out [of date]. So then I said, I can’t use that one so they gave me another one, I had to check it and see if it had any holes or anything, it looked ok, but it wasn’t really…I opened it and then we had to fill it with water and my condom started leaking. Jack So how did the course help you to get to the stage where you could talk about it with confidence, because you obviously do?

It made us learn more about one subject, sexually transmitted diseases also known as STIs…erm… they went over things with every one of us and told us the symptoms, told us how you can get rid of them…it like raised me [my knowledge] up a bar so that I knew what I was talking about. Davy

In this way, Love Stings facilitated participant learning. The young people offered informed responses when asked about what they had learned, which included detailed knowledge about sexual health, sexually transmitted infections and the availability and increased use of wider support services for sexual health improvement. Participants routinely commented on increased confidence as beneficial in short-term practical outcomes but also in promoting deeper-level thinking that would inform future decisions: They taught you to get checked out…before you do anything or if you catch anything, even if you have a wee [small] cut…then an STI can be passed on to you and you can pass it to other people. Jim They showed us pictures so that if anything happens to any of us, we would know exactly what it looks like…so we can go and get it checked out…I found out that condoms have expiry dates…I never knew that! John It made me think about things…not just the sex stuff…it makes me think about things before I do them. It makes me think a lot more about doing stuff and just keeping me out of trouble. Eric

The above comments show that Love Stings worked on both a physical and emotional level in that young people’s learning about STIs and avoiding a specific physical health condition also led to them thinking about the feelings of others and to consider the consequences of their wider actions in terms of personal feelings, beyond ‘the sex stuff’ and staying ‘out of trouble’. In this sense, critical dialogue was aligned to the content of their learning but also offered a process for personal transformation, in beginning to think

CRITICAL COMMUNITY EDUCATION: THE CASE OF LOVE STINGS

about the person they were becoming, and the kind of life they wanted to live. In committing to working with young people and focussing on aspirations that challenged orthodoxies on their existing ways of being in the world, Love Stings presented a critical community education model for sexual health education that was in keeping with the kind of supportive response that was advocated by Arai (2009) and challenged dominant narratives around young people in some contemporary societies (Coburn and Gormally, 2017; Wallace and Coburn, 2018; Finlay et al., 2013; Giroux, 2011). Love Stings met outcomes related to aims, and called into question taken-for-granted perspectives on how to engage young people in making informed decisions now and in future. Participants believed that learning through critical conversation had a more lasting effect than their experiences of sex education in schools. Love Stings exemplified responsive practices in which positive working relationships and trust were central to success. As Milburn et al. (2003: 10) argue: Youth work is required to be responsive to those young people who are alienated, excluded and in some cases rejected by other adults and public services. It has to start ‘where they are’, not with unreasonable expectations of conformity to structures and unreal demands for results. The creation of varied youth work opportunities is an enormous challenge, made more demanding yet supremely unique by the fact that young people come forward voluntarily to participate. Youth work is not compulsory. (Milburn et al., 2003: 10)

This was consistent with the views of young people at Love Stings who routinely noted the relevance of the process, the willingness of staff to speak in their own terms and share their experiences. The young people highlighted another advantage in claiming that this programme was empowering in assisting their future decisions. 2 Self-efficacy – choosing to do the right thing

Love Stings participants engaged in various activities connected to aspects of sexual

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health. This enhanced their capacity to think critically about other aspects of their lives, beyond the immediate concerns for sexual health improvement. Young people reflected on learning discussions and activities within the group to inform future decisions beyond sexual health matters. (Love Stings) gives you the facts and how we could help ourselves. Advice that stays for life…it could change your whole life… Sharon When I’m older I’d like to settle down….meet a woman and have a family…get a job. John Love Stings is not just about sexually transmitted diseases, it’s about things we do that concern our health …[get into]…fighting and that…Love Stings made me think…get a clear vision…I don’t want to be doing these things when I’m older… Jack

Participants used the skills and knowledge learned to reflect on their lives and to take responsibility for decision making that was consistent with a theory of empowerment as ‘capacity to make effective choices…and then transform those choices into desired actions and outcomes’ (Alsop et al., 2006: 10). Alsop et al. (2006) suggest that the capacity for decision making and action relies on both agency and opportunity, where agency is linked to the ability to make choices, and opportunity is tied to the structural contexts in which the social actor, or social group, lives. This was consistent with core elements of practice at Love Stings, where young people were able to develop confidence and use their power to choose a course of action that would allow them to envision their futures as different to their current contexts. Engaging in dialogical processes helped facilitate learning, confidence building and self-efficacy in a personal capability (Bandura, 1997; Carr, 2011). In turn, this enabled them to commit to change, in order to make a better life for themselves and also for the wider group of young people involved in the project.

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These ideas on self-efficacy and agency resonate with a critical community education that does not ‘give answers or solutions’ to empower people, but rather uses problem-posing methods to raise questions and promote critical dialogue through which people recognise their power and use it to develop their knowledge and understanding of the world, and how it might be changed. Participants were able to take responsibility for their own affairs and this continued into their home and community lives. This suggested that young people involved in the Love Stings project took decisions about their health behaviours which facilitated their development of alternative life trajectories. 3 Building relationships and the importance of place and conversation

Location and context were identified as influential in determining learning and teaching conversations. In particular, the Love Stings residential was highlighted as a positive learning environment, where much of the learning was built around a day of physical outdoor activity whereby ‘the daily routine gives staff close proximity…[in]…presenting a rich array of openings for conversation and dialogue’ (Jeffs, 2017: 71). Conversations that began on a hill, or in preparing a meal, were returned to or extended in the evenings and according to participants this enhanced their relationships with youth workers: They were open about like their experiences as well, they didn’t just want us to talk about our experiences. They shared their experiences with us as well, if you know what I mean? Millie

As youth workers gave something of themselves and their own experiences, this contributed to the development of relationships that helped young people to understand things more than their in-school learning experiences: Was there a difference between coming here and a sexual health talk in school? Were they different or the same?

Aye. They [youth workers] helped you remember ‘cause if you didn’t understand they talked to you like individual. And then they helped you to understand…more than school would. Karen

In a study of how youth workers defined the work they do, participants were strongly supportive of process-based relationships, rather than product-orientated outcomes, where ‘the process of youth work was generally seen to be contingent on the quality of relationship between a young person and a youth worker’ (Harland and Morgan, 2006: 10). The importance of this relationship was also exemplified by participant comments that youth workers were open to talking on young people’s terms and ensuring that no one was singled out because of either limited knowledge or extensive experience. According to the young people in this study, the importance of place was another core aspect in their experiences. School was viewed as a place where sex education was explained in science terms and did not consider relationships or sexual good health: In school you didn’t get told a lot…I didn’t think science was a thing for sexual health…it was just about flowers and plants and then…it turns into a baby inside you… and you were like…aye right…I don’t even know what’s going on here…you didn’t get told about all the things that could happen, all the diseases you could get and the consequences that could come… Lynne

At Love Stings, they felt comfortable in asking or talking about anything. The conversational basis for this educational youth work signified the construction of relationships as a priority in working with young people which required a level of skill among youth workers, in order to maximise these learning opportunities (Batsleer, 2008). 4 Building positive relationships in critical community education

Our observations of youth workers interacting with young people during collage making and other routine activity at Love Stings

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confirmed the importance of positive relationships in creating an environment for critical community education. Young people were challenged to think about sexual health problems or respectful relationships and to discuss the consequences of their actions by workers who took time to explain the why and how of such problems, rather than simply issue statements of fact, instruction or judgement. Smith (1988, 2003) has identified characteristics for youth work that suggest a commitment to association and positive relationships with others, development of friendliness, taking an informal approach and a concern for well-being. Participants identified family members, teachers and friends, who had ‘been there’ during especially difficult times in their lives, as important associations. They also suggested that having fun, choosing to participate and learning something were positive features of their involvement. This is consistent with Smith’s additional characteristics of voluntary participation and educational progression. This use of humour helped maintain an ethos that encouraged the normalising of taboo conversation topics. The importance of informal and educational methods to overcoming barriers to participation suggested youth work as a potentially important and largely unexplored method of developing sexual health education. Love Stings was consistently inventive in the use of music, arts, technology and outdoor education. This facilitated engagement in critical and meaningful learning. Yet, while these activities are the means, they are not the ends of youth work. Arguably, the gains in confidence and knowledge evidenced in participants’ responses cannot be readily quantified or evaluated and in any case may not be systematically judged until some future point. However, a range of soft indicators suggest that the youth work paradigm provides an effective engagement strategy based on the overwhelmingly positive reaction of participants to the programme.

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In this sense the value of input costs (staff time, transport, funding) may be judged against the value of the outputs Love Stings delivered, to 66 young people who had been involved in, and rejected, ‘interventionist’ programmes despite being identified as having multiple and complex life circumstances. For example, the cohort included young people who were single parents living in hostel accommodation or involved with police and social work ‘interventions’ which isolated or excluded them from forming lasting positive relationships. Yet they reported a positive impact on knowledge and learning among peers at Love Stings.

CONCLUSION Building on our earlier assessment of youth work as critical pedagogy (Coburn and Wallace, 2011) which facilitates young people’s agency through creation of a positive and creative discourse, this chapter discusses research findings from an evaluation of ‘Love Stings’, a youth work programme that engaged young people in education and personal development related to their sexual health and well-being. Over 12 weeks, Love Stings offered a positive and proactive response to health inequalities, improving young people’s capacity to flourish and to take action towards developing a good life (Sen, 1999). The findings enhance understanding of youth work as critical community education that offers a counter hegemony to mechanisms of compliance and conformity. This alternative paradigm prioritises young people’s voices as equal to those of people who currently seek to direct their lives. In this case study, young people’s capacity to take control of their lives was extended by their engagement in critical dialogical processes that helped them to construct new knowledge and understanding about their lives. Rather than take a deficits view of young people, critical community educators see

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young people as assets in their communities. In seeking to develop and sustain a useful level of criticality, we assert that learning should be constructed through dialogical, rather than deficiency-driven, processes. Love Stings ticked boxes in terms of ‘fixing’ problematic sexual health behaviours. Yet, by taking a critical focus that utilised dialogue and problem-posing methodologies, outcomes could not simply be measured in terms of behaviour change. Instead the findings suggested that collaborative and purposeful conversations between youth workers, health workers and young people appeared to enhance learning for the longer term. However, findings also raised deeper questions aligned to a wider hegemonic and patriarchal discourse on sex education. For example, learning was aligned with ideas from gay awareness training (Kitzinger and Peel, 2005), whereby young people at Love Stings were challenged to consider definitions of coercion, control and homophobia. However, outside of the facilitated sessions, there was limited evidence that homophobic comments were challenged, nor were dominant heterosexual perspectives. This suggested room for deeper consideration and understanding of how sex education is developed in a patriarchal society rather than reducing it to hegemonic and formulaic learning (Beggan and Coburn, 2018). Further, while the need for safe sexual health practices for ALL young people was advocated across the programme, the needs of LGBTQI+ young people were underplayed, and all participants openly identified as heterosexual within what appeared as a heteronormative space. There was also no evidence of engagement with Black and Minority Ethnic young people (BME as routinely used to denote people of colour and range of minority ethnic people). Although there is a limited literature or data about sexual well-being of BME young people in Scotland (Simkhada et  al., 2006), the latest census figures (2011) show that 12% of the total population in the city that hosted Love

Stings identified as BME. Thus, it would also have been expected that the sexual health needs of BME young people would have been included via development of a more culturally sensitive programme. This again suggested heteronormative focus, and lack of recognition of specific LGBTQI+ and BME young people’s needs offers a challenge for anyone involved in developing such programmes to find ways of subverting contemporary orthodoxies in order to ensure that important conversations are not missed in terms of understanding the intersectional nature of sex education. Despite the above challenges, this study has shown that youth work does offer an alternative and challenging discourse through engaging young people in learning that enhances their capacity to make educated, informed choices, to act as agents for themselves or in collaboration with others to shape alternative futures. While more critical questioning of the patriarchal tensions inherent in development in sex education would assist in a deeper analysis of power, Love Stings did offer a critical community education that was discrete from mainstream schooling or formalised social work and police interventions. Youth work creates possibilities for transformational education. As part of a wider continuum of education, critical community education sees salutogenic potential (Beggan and Coburn, 2018; Coburn and Gormally, 2019) rather than pathological problems in meeting the aspirations of young people and communities for making a good life.

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