Pedagogical Imaginaries for Critical Pedagogies

• In Event: 46.065 - Critical Examining and Reinvigorating Critical Pedagogy Through a Self-Reflexive Symposium of Leading Critical Pedagogues

Abstract

What steps must critical scholars take to ensure critical pedagogy does not become a mere blip inside and outside the academy for understanding and ameliorating suffering and oppression?

Pedagogical Imaginaries for Critical Pedagogies
Because they are rigid, coercive, and hierarchical institutions in service of neoliberal capitalism, schools (and schools of education) are not environments in which pedagogical imaginations are fostered or encouraged, although many creative teachers overcome the circumstances of their work. However, I have been pedagogically inspired by a wide range of theoretical and social practices outside the realm of education per se that can serve as pedagogical imaginaries for critical pedagogies.
There are myriad other examples of post-left/insurrectionary anarchism that reflect the tenets of critical pedagogy. For example, there are a number of politically inspired performance artists who are exemplary role models of critical pedagogy and have much to offer educators interested in creating pedagogies of resistance including:
• Artists producing work that encourages individual mobility and freedom (Ruben Ortiz-Torres);
• Artists who produce actions that occur within the public sphere (Surveillance Camera Players);
• Artists who deploy aesthetic strategies in other discourses including anthropology and urban geography (e.g. simulating “dirty bombs”, recreating germ warfare tests) (subRosa; Critical Art Ensemble); and
• Artists who produce tools and clothing to augment the wearers’ sense of personal autonomy (The Yes Men, Center for Tactical Magic).

Social movements to preserve the commons such as Occupy and Standing Man (Taksim Square in Istanbul) are rich models for thinking about how to appropriate public education spaces for common rather than capitalist interests.
The above examples, as well as de Certeau’s understanding of la perruque and the Situationist International’s techniques of dérive and détournement, are some of the many sources that can serve as inspiration for the creation of pedagogies consistent with the historical tenets of critical pedagogy, but provoke new and creative pedagogical practices (and theorizing). Identifying, exploring and appropriating these sources of inspiration, imaginaries, that might be used to create insurgent pedagogies—pedagogies that attempt to maximize the possibilities education can fulfill the fundamental human needs for creative work, creative inquiry, and for free creation without the limiting effects of coercive institutions—is a key strategy for ensuring the relevance of critical pedagogy.

Author

• E. Wayne Ross, The University of British Columbia