Rhythms of Resistance: Narratives of Critical Hope and Transformational Consciousness

• In Event: Feelin' Myself: Possibilities of a Pedagogy of Listening

Abstract

Objectives
This scholarship investigated counter-narratives within a Youth Development critical media program for high school students who employed modes of Hip Hop to resist destructive sociocultural forces “by any medium necessary” (Assante, 2008). This research examined the transformative nature of text as cultural products, as lived culture, and as a reflection one’s “Critical Sense Making” (CSM) process from adolescence to adulthood. CSM was a concept that emerged from this work to understand how participants grappled with and navigated identity forming experiences and decisions in their lives during the program as well as into their adulthood years later.

Theoretical Framework
This scholarship draws upon praxis (Freire, 1970) to build a language and process of hope, critique, struggle, and possibility and the methodology of the oppressed (Sandoval, 2000) to highlight discrete technologies utilized. Praxis identifies critical knowledge, dialog, reflection, and experience/action as operations to move along the CSM process. Through the methodology of the oppressed, five interrelated technologies act as tools: semiotics, deconstruction, meta-ideologizing, democratics, and differential movement. Applying these skills reveal the structures, practices, behaviors, and utterances where ideologies and languages of domination are rationalized, normalized, naturalized, and applied everyday. Through praxis and the methodology of oppressed, structures of supremacy can be ruptured and transformational consciousness attained.

Methods
These questions guided this study: What is the transformative nature of text as cultural products and as lived culture that youth co-create within this critical media program? How did the participants’ experiences during the program years influence key moments of contention and clarity into and through their adulthood? During the 2008-2010 school years, data included student products (i.e. poems, songs, music videos, documentary videos), individual/focus group interviews, filmed program sessions, field notes, and program documentation. In 2017, additional data included surveys, individual interviews, and reflective field notes. Critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1993, 2010) and critical race methodology (Solorzano & Yosso, 2002) were utilized to analyze data.

Findings
Departing from “critical thinking,” this paper advances what the author calls Critical Sense Making (CSM). Critical thinking tends to be reduced to a set of individual “intellectual” skills (Paul & Elder, 2008) that do not necessitate an analysis of oppression. CSM, however, situates an analysis of the socio-historic conditions that have influenced one’s multiple positionalities with one’s navigation of situations, decisions, and evolving clarity of purpose in the everyday political sphere of culture. It problematizes and challenges ideas, situations, and texts, while helping to understand individual/collective identity formation and multiple positionalities dynamically possessed within different contexts entered across time. The findings indicate that this is not a simple nor linear journey. Although each of the participants interviewed as adults currently work in education or community organizing, their counterstories revealed complex tensions of identity, pathways, and purpose.

Scholarly Significance
This research extends the scholarship on the long term complex effects of a social justice, problem posing education amidst robust structures that organize and sustain supremacy and the implications of sustained mentoring and relationship building over time.

Author

• G. T. Reyes, California State University - East Bay