Statue of Coatlicue displayed in National Museum of Anthropology and History in Mexico City

The following is an excerpt from a sort of “point of entry text” (Kincheloe and Berry, 2004) for some research/writing I am working on. Thoughts and comments that will help me improve, clarify, expand it are requested and welcomed, especially in relation to the Freire site being nepantla space, as defined and expanded upon by McLaren and Jaramillo (2008). What do you think about the concept? What might make the Freire site more effective as nepantla? This all relates to my research surrounding online education – and as Joe says, The Conclusion Is Just the Beginning! (Kincheloe, 2008b). It is very exciting research! 

Encountering nepantla

We need to rethink the meaning of politics, take risks, and exercise the courage necessary to reclaim the pedagogical conditions, visions, and economic projects that make the promise of a democracy and a different future worth fighting for.  – Henry A. Giroux, 2008.

Finally, my education is “over,” or at least almost, so “they” say, just because I nearly have my doctorate, although, there is still an ongoing debate with the university over how I am to complete my dissertation (they want me to rush; I want to learn and produce something worthwhile). As my education neared the end, I suddenly realized that it was not the end of my education at all, because there had been no real beginning. I was cheated once again, and this time even feeling baron-robbed along the way. While the capitalists would say my education should be “continuing” the truth is, had I continued trekking down their dark hallway, I would still be going nowhere. As Kincheloe (2007) has advised, we need to “resist the ways dominant corporate power operates to standardize the curriculum in a way that rolls students off the assembly line so they can become replaceable, low-paid employees in the free market-driven workplace of the globalized economy” (p. 6). The only advantage I have from this online form of commoditized education was the fact that I must have learned something about (as opposed to from) my previous education, and so I always far exceeded the capitalist-determined minimum requirements. I was never satisfied doing the minimum required to achieve an “A” grade; it was clear the system was set up for that, and A’s would not guarantee passing the comprehensive exams.

How degrading to fall from a 4.0 average to have to face the reality that you “don’t have what it takes.” Effective. And it’s not the fault of the person, it’s precisely the way the system is designed. Somehow, I must have seen this, because for every single assignment in every single course, I did much, much more than what “they” called for to reach “A” quality work – about five times more, usually (e.g. if the assignment asked for two research articles, I found 10, literally). Had I restricted my learning to the minimum requirements of the online learning environment I participated in, influenced as it was by the military-industrial-academic complex (Giroux, 2007), I don’t think I would be where I am today nearing the end of my program and feeling like I can really do this (if I don’t get thrown out for political reasons). Had I not taken this route, I probably would have ended up leaving the program – following the plan for the greatest percentage of the students passing through a capitalist-driven online doctoral education system, which is primarily made up of “nontraditional students” (translated: the poor, minorities, women and differently abled). For some reason, it is only desirable to have about 1% of the adult population with a doctorate, but completely acceptable to maximize profits by having as many participate in such an education for as long as possible, especially in a commoditized and increasingly militarized online program. The corporate sector and military are right there and ready to grab people up for cheap labor.

In spite of the extra work I did, I know my education is only beginning and it would never have begun at all had I not “stumbled” across critical pedagogy. Often when people are finally introduced to critical pedagogy, they are dismayed that their previous education never mentioned it. As I and others on the Paulo and Nita International Project for Critical Pedagogy Web site (Freire Project) have pointed out, we have come across it almost by accident (Epstein, 2008; maria, 2008; Paradis, 2008a). It has been a well-hidden pedagogy all through my six years of studies in education -- until I was able to remove the bondage of the capitalists who dictated knowledge. As I reached the research phase, I was suddenly free from expectations and requirements that bound up my time, efforts, and energy, free to gain knowledge, and my choice was critical pedagogy.

The more I have learned about critical pedagogy, the more I realize there is more to know about life, change, relationships, process. I now owe a huge thank you to so many wonderful people from all over the world I have come in contact with -- educators, researchers, critical pedagogues, authors, theorists who have spent precious time instructing me and guiding me toward knowledge sources. I finally feel that I have turned the corner in that dark hallway toward achieving my education. Not only have I turned the corner and have seen the beautiful light at the end – which is just the beginning, I have also stepped out of the compressive, repressive, constraining condition that smothered me in the corridor. Escaping from the narrow darkness that blinded me from hope and possibilities, I suddenly see an expansive new world around me, bathed in beautiful golden sunlight, a world of peace, freedom, equality, and eco-social justice. It’s a whole new and beautiful direction, just as I described to Peter McLaren when I thanked him for his kindness (Paradis, 2008c). Everything I happen to pass by, I now stop and take the time to explore and learn from – a beautiful flower, a bumblebee, the giraffes on Tricia Kress’s facebook Web page, the tag David created, the books people have written, dialogue taking place. Everything and everyone around me is something and someone to learn so much more about…to love and enjoy, to live with in harmony, to accept differing viewpoints, to negate the negation, to conceptualize dialectically (Marx, cited in Allman, 2007), and to, most of all, forever discover, create, and share that special nepantla space (Anzaldúa, cited in McLaren and Jaramillo, 2008).

What is Nepantla?...it’s hope, it’s promise and it’s engagement in that perpetual revolution (Kincheloe, 2008c; McLaren & Jaramillo, 2008). It is a space one joyfully experiences when engaging in the “struggle and change of consciousness” (McLaren and Jaramillo, 2008), p. 207). It’s escaping the ugly, darkness, constraint, and violence of capitalist accumulation for a beautiful, peaceful, loving, free, democratic, productive existence. Curry Malott has named one way to engage in this process as FUN STYLE (Malott, 2008a,b,c) and he describes it:

FUN STYLE can best be understood as driven by critical pedagogy and informed by sentiments such as, "if i can't dance, i don't want to be in your revolution" by Anarchist Emaa Goldman. "Progress" here, can, in part, be "measured" by distance from external control and all coercive authority. Hakim Bay's Temporary AUtonomous Zones (TAZ) comes to mind. That is, FUN STYLE as a strategy for increasing the possibility for widespread democratic responsibility by constructing temporary spaces within society where freedom can be experienced physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually thereby strengthening the desire for permanent freedom.

This vision is based on the anarchist principle that the end should be represented in the means immediately. A permanent FUN STYLE would therefore look very much like a temporary one. from a TAZ to a PAZ (Permanent AUtonomous Zone). (Malott, 2008c).

Joe Kincheloe also has written about the sensuous, playful aspects of critical pedagogy, not to imply that the critical work is not to be taken highly seriously, but rather it is because the work is so serious and at times depressing that the playful element is necessary, along with the fact that creative engagement is consciousness raising. He refers to students engaged in the difficult work of transformation as “warrior intellectuals” (Kincheloe, 2007). As he states, “Such scholars, warrior intellectuals, fuse their critical insights and transformative activities with a sense of play. Here they expand, elaborate, develop, and refine what they are doing intellectually in an aesthetic manner that creates desire and affective engagement,"(p. 25). Kincheloe goes on to explain how this transpires with these scholars expressing their learning creatively, critically, analytically, aesthetically, imaginatively, as they reconceptualize their roles in society and cultivate humility that “allows them to be good leaders and good members of diverse learning communities [and] devote themselves to never-ending, life-long growth as citizens, parents, workers, teachers, scholars, researchers, and lovers” (pp. 25- 26).

We need spaces to practice these transformative tasks that critical pedagogy has us doing, and there are not many safe places. Giroux (2008) advises us to consider the ravages of neoliberalism in this new era, in which we are under rule of “an emerging U.S. authoritarianism,” he has named “proto-fascism” (p. 19). He points out that resistance is taking on a broader perspective. “Central to these new movements is the notion that neoliberalism has to be understood within a larger crisis of vision, meaning, education, and political agency” (p. 3) and he contends that it is necessary to create spaces that allow resistance to include “discourses of political agency, civic education, and cultural politics as part of a broader struggle over the relationship between democratization (the ongoing struggle for a substantive and incusive domcracy) and the global public sphere” (p. 3). As Giroux has pointed out, the “places” or public spaces where these activities can occur are shrinking, even in the university, which has traditionally remained a safe haven. Corporatization and militarization is taking a huge toll on public spheres as places of civic engagement and globally they have reduced politics to war and violence. Giroux expresses his hope “that of all groups, educators, especially, would be mindful of the potential for a better future and would vocally and tirelessly challenge these nihilistic views by making it clear that critical education is a precondition for global justice and is at the very heart of expanding the public good and promoting democratic social change” (Giroux, 2008, p. 110). We must create and utilize spaces within the university since the “public and higher education may be among the few spheres left in which the promise of youth can be linked to the promise of democracy” (Giroux, 2008, p. 110).

How can this space in which this fun style type of learning, warrior intellectualism, political agency, and perpetual revolutionary action can occur be defined? What are its features? Peter McLaren and Nathalia Jaramillo (2008) suggest we view these spaces in terms of Nepantla, a Nahuatl (Aztec language) word that refers to in between  or middle spaces. It is space in which one can practice “the process of developing political, cultural or psychological consciousness as a means of survival” as originally conceptualized by Anzaldúa (Chicanoart.org).

Peter McLaren and Nathalia Jaramillo (2008) take the concept nepantla space further:

We have expanded on the concept of nepantla as a space where students and teachers can engage in a dialectics of negation, as nepantla opens up possibilities for potentially new and transformative social practices to emerge. Through an individual and collective refusal of dominative social and cultural practices, a politics of material-spiritual-psychic conditions for direct participation in a social world of their own making (Anzaldua, cited in McLaren and Jaramillo, 2008, p. 198).

What is nepantla? It is also a space where teachers and students can “mediate the schism between theory and practice as they move into less secure pedagogical processes” (McLaren and Jaramillo, 2008, p. 198). While nepantla can and should be created in classrooms, an online learning courseroom can also be an empowering nepantla due to several inherent features these educational environments offer if combined with a teacher who creates a safe atmosphere. As an example, The Paulo and Nita International Project for Critical Pedaogy Web site, with Joe Kincheloe’s great interaction that makes it feel like such a safe place to share in is a powerful embodiment of nepantla. It provides an opportunity to engage in dialogue, and a place where learning, teaching, and researching have merged as is desirable and expected for an online community of practice if it is to optimize the online environment for knowledge sharing and production. The Freire Project definitely has all of the ingredients, including space in which a normally shy, quiet, sit-in-the-back-of-the-class-never-speak-out-person (for reasons that can be explored in nepantla space) and silenced voices, can speak out this time, for “in nepantla, the silent among the voiceless can be heard, as no fragmented marker of identity goes unnoticed” (McLaren and Jaramillo, 2008, p. 198). And so, with the Friere Project site there is the experiencing of “nepantlismo,” the finding of “new collective and systematic ways of re-creating the state from the bottom up, building capacities that will help us administer everyday life in ways hitherto uncharted, such that these efforts can match – and eventually overwhelm – the forbidding scale of danger that we face in today’s specter of neoliberalism and its accompanying coloniality of power” (McLaren and Jaramillo, 2008, p. 209). Nepantla is space where we are free to collectively hope, dream, change, create, and struggle for a much better future. Nepantla is space where the “aura of ‘critical immanence’ (Kincheloe, 2008a, p. 53) and the sense that the world truly is on the verge of something spectacular” can be experienced (Paradis, V. 2008b). Nepantla is space where we can live and share Fun Style (Malott, 2008a,b,c) kinds of experiences, where we can “develop better theoretical frameworks for understanding how power, politics, and pedagogy as a political and moral practice work in the service of neoliberalism to secure consent, to normalize authoritarian policies and practices, and to erase a history of struggle and injustice” (Giroux, 2008, p. 180) and snuff out the capitalist-driven indoctrination, and where we can learn, relate, share, amd produce knowledge – nepantla is where true education begins, and it is revolutionary.

Let the revolution continue – perpetually, in nepantla!

In solidarity,

Vanessa

References

Chicanoart.org (2008). Nepantla. Retrieved November 9, 2008, from http://www.chicanoart.org/nepantla.html.

Epstein, J. (2008). Teachers as intellectuals. Critical Pedagogy, Technology & Online Education: Injustice of Mountaintop Removal Mining Part 2. October 29, 2008. The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy.

 http://freire.mcgill.ca/blogs/critical-pedagogy-technology-online-education%3A-injustice-mountaintop-removal-appalachian-mount#comment-1552

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.

Kincheloe, J. L. (2007). Introduction: City kids – Not the kind of student you’d want to teach. In Joe L. Kincheloe and kecia hayes (2007) (Eds.). Teaching city kids: Understanding and appreciating them. New York: Peter Lang. Retrieved November 9, 2008, from the Critical Pedagogy Reading Room, The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy, http://freire.mcgill.ca/critical-pedagogy-and-teaching.

Kincheloe, J. L. (2008a). Critical Pedagogy Primer, (2007 edition). New York: Peter Lang.

Kincheloe, J. (2008b). Knowledge and critical pedagogy: An introduction. Amsterdam: Springer. 

Kincheloe, J. L. (2008c). The perpetual revolution. November 11, 2008. The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy. http://freire.mcgill.ca/blogs/obama-american#comment-1621.

Kincheloe, J. & Berry, K. (2004). Rigor and complexity in educational research: Conceptualizing the bricolage. London: Open University Press. 

Malott, C. (2008a). Vanessa: we teach cuz we’re teachers. October 4, 2008. The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy.

http://freire.mcgill.ca/content/it-curtain-call-captial#comment-1391.

Malott, C. (2008b). Vanessa. October 8, 2008. The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy. http://freire.mcgill.ca/content/it-curtain-call-captial#comment-1411.

Malott, C. (2008c). FUN STYLE. October 8, 2008. The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy.

http://freire.mcgill.ca/content/it-curtain-call-captial#comment-1418

Maria (2008). Why isn’t the critical pedagogy perspective being taught to undergrads in education? November 3, 2008. The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy.

http://freire.mcgill.ca/blogs/why-isnt-critical-pedagogy-perspective-being-taught-undergrads-education

McLaren, P. & Jaramillo, N. (2008). Rethinking critical pedagogy: Socialismo nepantla and the specter of Che. In Denzin, N. K., Lincoln, Y., & Smith, L. T. (eds.). (2008). Handbook of critical and Indigenous methodologies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Paradis, V. (2008a). Stumble is correct, the question is why. Critical Pedagogy, Technology & Online Education: Injustice of Mountaintop Removal Mining Part 2. October 29, 2008. The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy.

http://freire.mcgill.ca/blogs/critical-pedagogy-technology-online-education%3A-injustice-mountaintop-removal-appalachian-mount#comment-1555. 

Paradis, V (2008b). Paulo Freire’s birthday. Critical pedagogy, technology & online education. September 19, 2008. The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy.

http://freire.mcgill.ca/content/critical-pedagogy-technology-online-education%3A-paulo-freires-birthday.

Paradis, V. (2008c). You did it!!! Thank you, Peter McLaren!!! Critical Pedagogy, Technology & Online Education: Shirley Steinberg’s Pedagogy of Misbehavior, or being bad while being good. November 4, 2008. Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy.

http://freire.mcgill.ca/blogs/critical-pedagogy-technology-online-education%3A-shirley-steinbergs-pedagogy-misbehavior-or-bein#comment-1599.