Critical Community Pedagogy: Intentional Praxes of Decolonizing Teacher Development

• In Event: Grassroots Professional Development: Centering the Social Justice Needs of Teachers

Abstract

“It’s about intentionality.” --Manulani Aluli Meyer (2003)

Objectives
Central to grassroots social justice professional development (SJPD) is the building of a community of critical educators who collaborate and support each others practice. The concept of “critical community” was intentionally built from the ground up. Based on a twelve-year longitudinal study on Pin@y Educational Partnerships (PEP), a grassroots service and teaching pipeline that serves kindergartners to doctoral students through the teaching of ethnic studies, I will share examples of how the development of a critical community positively transformed the lives of marginalized youth and teachers. In this paper, I will build on what my colleagues, Jeff Duncan-Andrade (2010) describes as “critical hope” and Shawn Ginwright (2010) calls “radical healing” to explore how PEP educators put into action intentional praxes in their daily work.

Theoretical Framework
Pin@y Educational Partnerships (PEP), an educational pipeline focusing on the teaching of ethnic studies, has been able to create a spatial and curricular intervention that uses critical pedagogy as its theoretical framework. Critical pedagogy is a fundamental tool to understand the moral, historical, cultural, and political responsibility of education to create a just society. Thus, through this approach, teachers in PEP understand education as praxis for freedom and humanization (Freire, 2000). Drawing from the foundations of critical pedagogy, PEP has built, what we call "barangay pedagogy," our own grassroots social justice pedagogy with deliberate intention to create a critical community. PEP makes “barangay pedagogy”—the creation of barangays/communities amongst teacher apprentices, students, practicing educators, and community organizers—a central philosophy in the training and practice of transformative teachers, service providers, organizers, and leaders. Barangay pedagogy provides teachers with a sense of what Lawsin (1998) describes as 'bayanihan spirit,' a strong feeling of belonging to a community. Barangay pedagogy also puts forth to healing a process that is both individual and communal.

Methods and Data Sources
This twelve-year study draws from three sources of data: 1. Through autoethnographic methods focused on the grassroots SJPD in PEP, in this study emerged the grounded theory of “critical community” through “barangay pedagogy; 2. Then, student and teacher journals and final reflections, provided on the ground applications of this grounded theory; and finally 3. Through a post-survey of PEP teachers who have gone on to credential programs and/or in teaching positions throughout the nation, this study found that PEP has prepared them to be community engaged social justice educators.

Results and Significance
PEP provides a unique decolonized model for teacher training. PEP's barangay structure allows decolonization process is both individual and communal. (Strobel 2001) This critical community pedagogy/barangay pedagogy provides a means for decolonizing teacher education and training by: 1. providing a barangay structure that challenges individualistic models of teacher internships through the creation of teacher apprentice communities; and 2. showing how an extended barangay/network of effective educators, who participate in the training, support, and maintenance of teacher education can reproduce more effective social justice educators.

Authors

• Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, San Francisco State University

• Maharaj Desai, University of Hawaii - Manoa