A Pedagogy of Beauty: The Power and Poetics of Embodied History

• In Event: Puerto Rican Women Teacher Educators Telling Their Stories, Sharing Their Lives

Abstract

The presentation will engage excerpts from a book in progress that speaks to my struggles as a colonized Puerto Rican subject and my efforts to move from the suffering caused by the impact of wretched impoverishment and childhood trauma toward a process of political radicalization, a pedagogy of love, and a social consciousness of liberation that create organically expressions of beauty (Anzaldúa, 1995).

Objectives:
• To explore how colonization and the politics of migration to the mainland during the 1950s, shaped my cultural life experiences, class sensibilities, pedagogical directions, political commitments, and scholarly production in my work within both universities and communities, over that last 35 years.
• To present how involvement in and poetic documentation of individual community efforts for education and other related issues can be instrumental in supporting our political formation
• To understand how teachers of color in the early grades and later at the university were significant to my persistence and achievement in the field.
• To highlight how the pedagogical and political are inextricably linked in both the formation of cultural identity, and the pedagogical struggles as a university educator
• To demonstrate the power and poetics of embodied history in the praxis of a pedagogy of beauty, based on the influences of Paulo Freire and other critical educators of our time.

Theoretical Framework
This critical interpretative study draws on autoethnography and the notion of artistic production as political imagination and aesthetic experience (Joy & Sherry, 2003), to trace the manner in which poverty, racism, and sexism intersect within the context of colonization and the tyrannies of banking education (Freire 1970) to produce an embodied history that “reveals a complex relationships between the body, personal identity, and the power of social elites” (Newman, 2013). Notions of embodied history (Newman, 2013), the authority of lived experience (Darder 2011; hooks, 1994), a pedagogy of love (Darder, 2002, 2015; Freire 1970), and the link of pedagogy to beauty (Hugo, 2007) are all central to the critical theoretical lens that informs this analysis of autoethnography and artistic works.

Modes of Inquiry and Data Sources
The presentation is based on a critical interpretive and decolonizing study that is anchored methodologically on a qualitative investigation that employs critical autoethnography and artistic production as historical artifacts to trace the process of decolonization and tell the story of a journey that moves from colonization and impoverishment to social consciousness, empowerment, and liberation, as both cultural citizen and radical educator/scholar.

Substantiated Conclusions
The interpretive analysis is in sync with many of the experiences of other Boricuas who have struggled to move from oppression to empowerment through a variety of avenues, including education (Morales, 2004; Nieto, forthcoming; Pantoja & Ramos 2002; Sotomayor, 2014).

Scholarly Significance
From the bicultural context of our Boricua identity formation and embodied histories, Puerto Rican scholars can provide important pedagogical entryways for bicultural students, through our capacity to bring our voices, social agency, and the authority of our lived experience to the dynamics of our classroom praxis. This is particular salient to our work with young women of color.

Author

• Antonia Darder, Loyola Marymount University