Advocacy as Pedagogy: What Happens When We Lie?

• In Event: 43.060 - Will the Truth Set Us Free? Queer, Trans, and Youth of Color Challenging Essentialism

Abstract

When Barack Obama delivered the 2018 Nelson Mandela Lecture, he highlighted compromise as an essential practice in the development and maintenance of inclusive democracy. Obama said, “And I should add for this to work, we have to actually believe in an objective reality...You have to believe in facts. Without facts, there is no basis for cooperation” (Obama, 2018). Obama succinctly captures one mainstream liberal reaction to the Trump regime and their embrace of lying: if we simply clear up the misinformation and re-assert our shared values we can quickly get back on track toward progress. However, as a teacher of recently arrived immigrant youth learning English, I see how “the facts” can marginalize just as effectively as lies. Increasingly, educators are called to be advocates for our students as they navigate flawed systems. As educators, we must consider our advocacy as pedagogy. What is the role of lying in liberatory pedagogy?

Critical race theory offers theoretical grounding for methods of resistance through interest convergence (Bell, 1995) and counter-storytelling (Delgado & Stefanic, 2001), which complicate the idea of truth as a means to liberation. Liberatory pedagogy, from the traditions of Paulo Freire (2000), bell hooks (1994), and Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995), indicates that primacy of allowing students to discover, define and live their true selves. However, many of our true selves, especially when we are queer and undocumented, are routinely (and legally) denied educational resources. As school funding is slashed and economic inequality looms outside our classrooms, we must take up the question of how we teach our students to be boldly themselves and outwit the gatekeepers who too often stand in their way. There is no simple recipe for when to be boldy oneself and when to conceal strategically. All teachers, but particularly queer and trans educators, have the challenge and the opportunity to use this tension in our pedagogy to explore pluralism, integrity and citizenship with our students (Cazden et al, 1996; Keenan, 2017).

To interrogate the role of dishonesty in liberatory pedagogy, I present a conceptual paper describing critical incidents from the community college retention program for immigrant youth learning English that I developed and coordinated in San Francisco (Halle-Erby, 2018). Drawing from the tradition of autoethnography, I analyze these incidents through the tensions raised in conversation between theories of liberatory pedagogy and critical race theory. The structure of community college occasionally encourages students to lie to access resources. Questions on residency, immigration status and household income are frequently gatekeepers for reduced tuition, meal vouchers and transportation stipends. Just as often, the answers are less than straightforward: “Do I include money my family earns under the table in my total household income?”, “Do I use my aunt’s address in San Francisco or my dad’s address in Richmond?” I highlight incidents where, in order provide my students access to resources, I encouraged dishonesty. I explore how those teaching acts developed a pedagogy of co-conspiracy that enhanced, rather than compromised, trust and collaboration among our learning community.

Author

• Kyle M. Halle-Erby