A Praxis of Love: Learning With Students to Co-Create Liberatory Community Possibilities

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 9
  In Roundtable Session: Reclaiming Our Own Spaces: Youth and Educators Building Emancipatory Relationships, Identity Constructions, and Resistance

Abstract

Objective
Despite best intentions, without engaging in a vigilant process of praxis (Freire, 1970), educators seeking to cultivate educational opportunities for enacting democratic principles toward social justice action may inadvertently reproduce banking notions of education (Freire, 1970) when young people are positioned as passive objects who participate in experiences defined and shaped by educators. Teachers and students engaging together in meaningful learning experiences signal a need for engaging the dialectic between authority and freedom (Freire, 1998) in ways that counter adultism in youth organizing (Delgado & Staples, 2008) while also cultivating a new paradigm and pedagogical framework that heals, reinvents, and transforms relationships and systems to create the equitable and democratic society we seek (Ginwright, 2016).

Theoretical Framework
This autoethnography (Chang, 2016) explores how educators learning with youth can build a paradigm and practice for transformative youth organizing. I utilize critical pedagogy (McLaren, 2003) and decolonizing pedagogy (Tejada & Espinoza, 2003) frameworks to interpret various texts, events, narratives, and my personal experiences as a secondary social studies teacher in order to: 1) unveil how texts around community organizing in youth movements are historically and philosophically constructed and 2) contribute to systematic political efforts to cultivate counter-hegemonic intellectual spaces (Darder, 2015).

Methods
In an effort to create a new paradigm and practice for educators engaged in transformative organizing in classrooms and youth movements, this interpretive study deconstructs the ubiquity of epistemicides (Grosfoguel, 2013) as reflected in the colonial project of Eurocentric schooling (Grande, 2008; Woodson, 1933) and builds on transformative and healing frameworks tied to: educational settings (Ginwright, 2016), critical youth praxis and participatory action research (Delgado & Staples, 2008; Mirra, Garcia, & Morrell, 2016), and community organizing (Keating, 2008).

Findings
Through a critical analysis of autobiographical field texts, this autoethnography has found the following: 1) love for students is expressed through a sincere commitment to learning about their lived realities, fostering and honoring their holistic growth and potential, 2) love for students’ community is expressed through a commitment to creating culturally-relevant curricula and assessments that provide meaningful learning experiences that foster students’ sense of personal and community agency through authentic relationships with local community organizing around issues that resonate with students’ experiences in their communities, and 3) communion between adult educators and youth is cultivated by learning with students and sharing one’s authentic human self in ways that develop respectful collaborative relationships with students.

Scholarly Significance
While on a journey to become more human, a true communion between revolutionary leaders and the community is critical to achieving an education for liberation (Freire, 1970). This work reveals the critical importance of building relationships between adults and young people in ways that reclaim their collective humanity in order to engage in an authentic process of respecting the dignity of students’ struggles while critically examining and collectively healing from the oppressive root causes (i.e., racism, poverty, patriarchy, etc.) that impact their everyday lives towards new possibilities (Ginwright, 2016; Mirra, Garcia, & Morrell, 2016).

Author

• Emily Bautista, Independent Scholar