Post-Imperial Hope and Healing: Pedagogies of Possibility Among Filipino American Teachers

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 19
  In Roundtable Session: Radical Dreams: Using the Anti-War Lessons of Martin Luther King Jr. in the Fight for Students of Color

Abstract

For Filipinas/os, war is both constitutive of and instructive for what Philippine historian Renato Constantino refers to as a “mis-education” initiated through imperialism. The central purpose of this paper is to make explicit the relevance of historical and contemporary contexts to better understand how they shape education. In particular, we focus on ways Filipina/o American critical educators enact, engage, and mobilize resistance in schools. This study addresses the following questions:

1) How might the intersections of education and war inform nuanced understandings of the pervasive “soul wound” (Duran et al., 1998) of colonialism and imperialism?

2) Despite the larger maintenance function, how has schooling provided opportunities for innovative and responsive forms of teaching and learning?

3) Acknowledging the concerted efforts and collectivized resistance, to what extent might Pedagogies of Rebellion be instructive for challenging and dismantling U.S. imperialism within and across the diaspora?

This paper draws from anti-imperialist critiques, critical race theory, and ethnic studies to situate Filipina/o Americans and education alongside historical examples of racialization (Rodriguez, 2010; San Juan, 1998). Lisa Lowe (1996) reminds us that the question of empire involves analyzing “the material legacy of the repressed history of U.S. imperialism in Asia” (p. 60). Similarly, critical race theory allows us to challenge ahistoricism that occludes how power and privilege affects communities of color in general and Filipina/o Americans in particular (Buenavista, 2010; Solórzano, 1997). Therefore, engaging analyses with empire and race as analytics centers the unique and troubling history between the U.S. and the Philippines, most salient within education.

Our project is a four-year case study of Pin@y Educational Partnerships (PEP) an innovative ethnic studies educational “counter pipeline,” that has nearly 60 critical educators and serves over 300 students in San Francisco public schools (K-college) a year. We ground our data through interviews, auto-ethnography, and participant observation of PEP teachers’ classrooms, trainings, and work with PEP students. PEP is a grassroots ethnic studies pipeline that aims to provide ways for students and teachers to transform the classroom into a community, in which teachers and students serve each other and work together to respond to larger community issues and systemic problems.

Building on this applied work on decolonization and centering the resistance to the expansion of empire, we name the following deimperializing pillars as Pedagogies of Rebellion: 1) A critique of empire and it’s relationship to white supremacy, racism, and colonial mentality; 2) Challenging imperialist practices on the institutional, interpersonal, and internalized levels; 3) Centering and placing high value on indigenous and historically marginalized knowledge; 4) Connecting ourselves to historical and contemporary resistance movements that struggle for social justice on the global and local levels; and 5) Imagining new possibilities for post-imperial life that promote radical healing and hope. We found that these Pedagogies of Rebellion and the concept of deimperialization can be applied to multiple schooling contexts and move us toward a more just and post-imperial world.

Authors

• Edward Ryan Curammeng, California State University - Dominguez Hills

• Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, San Francisco State University