Hey Everyone,
Here is a space that we can share our critical reading assignments. For our first week we got to read the introductions of; “Reclaiming Indigenous Voices and Vision” (Battiste 2000), “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (Freire 2000), “Popular Education and Social Change in Latin America” (Kane 2001), “Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination” (Robin 2002), and “Colonialism/Postcolonialism” (Loomba 2005). Please post your thoughts as comments below!
Thanks,
Lisa
Friday, October 19, 2007
"Don't Just Do Something, Stand There"
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2 comments:
For this critical reading assignment we start out our class with the introductions of; “Reclaiming Indigenous Voices and Vision” (Battiste 2000), “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (Freire 2000), “Popular Education and Social Change in Latin America” (Kane 2001), “Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination” (Robin 2002), and “Colonialism/Postcolonialism” (Loomba 2005). I have never read Marie Battiste's work before, but I have heard her quoted often. Battiste elegantly reflects on the effects of Colonialism on First Nations peoples in Canada. Western epistemology have maintained hegemony over Indigenous thought paradigms, discrediting Indigenous ways of knowing. The scholars in this collection challenge the settler knowledge paradigm by opening the four directions, gathering knowledge from all sides of the box to reconstruct the colonial landscape.
Paulo Freire joins the paradigm through the “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” a text which deconstructs the politics of pedagogy by positing that all education is inherently political. Taking on the Banking Model of education, Freire argues for a grassroots, decentralized approach. Freire states that the freedom of oppressed lies in their hand, with real solutions flowing from the bottom up. His popular education model makes every student a teacher, and every teacher simultaneously a student. Yet the claims of widespread universal applicability, and excessive rhetoric and black and white analysis create questions for the average reader: With many different relationships between the oppressed, and the oppressor that cross through us all can we really fit into these dichotomies? Don't we all have a bit of both these dualities which exist within us all? Not to say that there are not solid lines which oppression flows, but to state that we all consist of multiple identities, and that this us v.s. them approach has its limits.
Which brings us into the post-structuralist world of Loomba's “Colonialism/Postcolonialism," where we wade through some new and old concepts around our colonial world. Is colonialism over? Can we say things like neocolonialism, or postcolonialism? What do they really mean? Loomba dives us in head first into the nitty gritty of Postcolonial Studies. Postcolonialism for me is not the end of colonialism per say, but an after map of its "river of blood" around the globe. Increase of digital communications has helped seal the effects of colonial thought and control, and while empire may be over in the traditional sense of Queens, Kings, and crusades, it lives on in more modern forms; free-trade agreements, oil wars, sweatshops and corporate takeovers. I feel that this book is going to help me gain an understanding of how colonial discourse filters into media institutions.
“Freedom Dreams” follows up Loomba, as Robin pushes to free the Black Radical Imagination through creative expression. Robin encourages us to acknowledge the inherent subversive qualities of poetic knowledge, as to dream across boarders is a form of subversion in itself. In order to create a better world, we must first imagine what it looks like. Utopia is only possible if you believe that it can be achieved. Much like how in countries that have dictators democracy means chaos, the word utopia in a North American context means an unattainable dream. Trace that word south of the boarder, and it starts to mutate taking on new meanings. As the United States (and Canada) become infused with Latino immigrant culture could the genealogy of this word shift and in turn transform the potential social change? The surrealist attitude that Robin asks us to embrace has long been a part of Latin American culture, through the writings of Isabelle Allende and other Latin American surrealist writers.
Which brings us to our final read, "Popular Education and Social Change in Latin America." I think that this book clear up a lot of the questions that people have in class, mainly: "What is Popular Education anyways?" I feel that while we have been covering many of the broader concepts that are embedded in Popular Education practice, and even though we've been using it throughout the class, we rarely get to discuss just what this educational philosophy encompasses specifically, and how/where is it practiced. This book I think will clear out a lot of the confusion once we get to reading it, smoothing and concretizing the concepts that we've been learning across the course.
Good Summary!
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