Conocimiento as Praxis: Revealing, Reinterpreting, Rewriting Pedagogy

• In Event: 41.029 - Teachers of Color as Wounded Healers: Disrupting Dehumanization in the Teaching Profession

Abstract

This paper returns to data collected in a Teacher Initiated Inquiry Project[2] (TIIP) where I examined my process for developing critical multi-literacies (Morrell, 2007) with ninth grade youth in South Los Angeles. While a Critical Literacy framework (Morrell, 2007) helped shed light on the kinds of cognitive and emotional work involved in developing transformative pedagogy, I was left lacking a language to place pain and healing at the center of my analysis, and to position my personal struggles alongside those of my students. By reanalyzing data from this project with a Chicana Feminist Epistemology framework (Calderón et.al., 2012), I hope to reveal a more comprehensive critique of dominant epistemologies I was seeking to subvert and honor the healing processes I engaged with students throughout a final curricular unit. I draw data from classroom observations, student work, feedback from community, and my own pedagogical and personal reflections, examining how I shifted interactions and pedagogical strategies to create spaces for individual and collective healing. As a “rich and holistic account of a phenomenon” (Merriam, 2009, p. 51), this case study provides a nuanced description of how students’ home and community life impacts their schooling experiences and can give insights into the kinds of curriculum these students need. By focusing on Anzaldúa’s (2002) concept of conocimiento, which theorizes the work of restoring self and community, I hope to show how healing can be a centerpiece for transformative pedagogy. Instead of portraying participants with deficit-based narratives, I draw upon Tuck & Yang’s (2014) framework of “desire narratives” to highlight pain as a powerful resource towards knowledge, where bodily sensations, emotions and thoughts can uncover needs beneath such pain.

I begin by sifting through my positionality as a non-Chicana scholar who employs Chicana Feminist theory in service to Black and Latina/o youth. I explain several CFE concepts that inform and weave my work together as a teacher and researcher. I then briefly describe the schooling and community context in which healing was necessary. Next, I use data from the curricular unit to examine my and my students’ path of conocimiento, which “enables you to link inner reflection and vision… with social, political action and lived experiences to generate subversive knowledges” (Anzaldua, 2002, p. 533). I use the paths of conocimiento to mark transitions in my grieving/healing process that coincided with shifts in relationships between students and me, as well as the critical literacy practices I engaged with youth. I conclude by discussing tensions that arise when teaching with a healing framework and advocate for critical reflexivity in both research and pedagogy. Conocimiento as praxis is a way for critical educators to utilize theories to reintegrate bodymindspirit (Lara, 2002) into their teaching practice and enhance their ability to genuinely connect with students’ lived realities. In doing so, we can legitimize alternative epistemologies that can motivate students to “articulate unnamed, unvoiced, and repressed experiences” (Anzaldúa, 2002, p. 538). This kind of praxis offers hope in the face of isolation, division and suffering.

Author

• Stephanie Cariaga, University of California, Los Angeles