(De)Constructions of Self: Subjugated and Silenced Cosmologies in Education for Justice and Liberation

• In Event: 45.087 - Liberating Oppressed Ontologies and Cosmologies as Transformative Educational Praxis

Abstract

Conceptions of Self explored in poststructural and psychoanalytic spaces have informed new possibilities for justice and liberation (Kumashiro, 2000). Despite these efforts, there is much work to be done especially in the context of education for justice and liberation. Subjugated and silenced epistemologies that construct Self in quantitatively and qualitatively different ways have much to offer these epistemologies that are often dominated by Western understandings of the Self (Kumashiro, 2000) that are hyper-focused on notions of rationality, individuality, and autonomy (Shahjahan 2010; Wagner & Shahjahan, 2015). This paper explores the relationship between practicing educators’ engagement with education for justice and liberation and their understandings and experiences of the Self and Other, drawing on understandings from Buddhist, Afrocentric and Indigenous ways of knowing.

This study draws on two main bodies of literature: post-structural (Foucault, 1979; Kumashiro, 2000) and anti-colonial education (Dei and Kempf, 2006); and, spirituality in education (hooks, 1994; Krishnamurti, 1953; Miller, 1999; Palmer, 1993; Wayne, Manyimo & Ritskes, 2011). Both bodies of work explore understandings of Self. The former situates this knowledge in relationship to the Other within the context of identity, power, domination and oppression, to mobilize towards greater social justice and socio-political, cultural and economic liberation. The latter deconstructs the Self/Other binary as the site of ultimate liberation, freedom and integration. This study builds on both bodies of scholarship by identifying constructions of Self from silenced epistemologies to inform the pursuit of education for justice and liberation, and provide opportunities for uncharted movements in pre-service and K-12 schooling contexts.

This qualitative study employed a spiritual dialogic research approach (Edwards, 2016) that views a spiritual community as a method of inquiry. This approach focuses on attention to spiritual matters that arise in group settings and has the intention to genuinely understand the process of spiritual development. This study included 10 participants that are part of an established group of educators (i.e., teachers, administrators and educators seconded to a university), who: are committed to education for/as justice and liberation; have a deep personal connection to spiritual worldviews/practices; and, are experimenting with spirituality in their educational contexts. Participants were invited to meet three times to reflect on and explore how their spiritual worldviews, experiences and connections inform their understanding of, and engagement with education for justice and liberation. Participants were also invited to participate in individual interviews where they explored their understandings of Self, Other, Self-Other relationships, and the connections to educations to education for justice and liberation.

Findings are expressed as three interconnected, yet distinct paradoxes: (De)centered, interdependent and non-existent constructions of “I”; subjectivity and objectivity in the search for ‘truth’; and, spiritual vs. political agency in educational activism and self-care. In exploring and (re)claiming conceptions of Self through explorations of paradox from Indigenous, Africentric and Buddhist worldviews, this study explores possibilities of education for justice and liberation that may lay dormant within these paradoxes in pre-service and K-12 schooling contexts.

Author

• Vidya Shah, York University