Searching for the "Clarity" in Political Clarity and the "Radical" in Radicalization

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: The Power and Possibilities of Art-Based Community Participatory Research and Pedagogy in Preparing Critical Educators

Abstract

In his Letter to North American Teachers, Paulo Freire (1987) argued that in addition to knowledge about content subjects, teachers also had to understand the political nature of education. That is, they needed “political clarity,” itself a task requiring serious intellectual discipline. Freire believed that teaching was an act of “reknowing already known objects” and that the development of political clarity was possible when teachers re-experienced their own capacities to re-know and re-learn these objects through shared explorations with their students. Yet how do teachers develop political clarity? How do they understand the term, particularly when contextualized within broader Freirean principles of critical consciousness and revolutionary praxis? Finally, if pedagogy of the oppressed is “a task for radicals” (Freire, 2000), is it possible for teachers to imagine themselves in this way? This presentation will explore these questions by deconstructing an interactive experience developed for teachers/students in a graduate seminar on critical pedagogy and the life and work of Paulo Freire. Throughout the semester, class members had struggled to understand these complex theories in somewhat decontextualized discussions, so the experience created a scenario for them apply the theories “on the ground.” The experience occurred after they had read several books and multiple articles by Freire and by his contemporaries Amilcar Cabral (1973) and Gustavo Gutíerrez (1996, 1997). Its organization was also inspired by August Boal’s (1995) Theater of the Oppressed, which encourages “spectactors” (spectator + actor) to use improvisation and role-playing as a tool to understand social, personal, and political problems and to search for solutions.
The activity imagined Southern Arizona as a post-apocalyptic territory recovering from several years of intense conflict, a circumstance instigated when the incumbent president rejected election results that favored his opponent. Post-election protests occurred across the nation and along the U.S.-Mexican border, eventually developing into the “War of the Deplorables.” The new territory of Baja Arizona emerged as a “liberated” zone led by various coalitions to tackle post-conflict issues. The education coalition’s charge was to apply Freirean principles of cultural action and revolutionary praxis to create a “pedagogy of the oppressed” (Freire, 2000). To accomplish this task, coalition members performed four general tasks: defining political clarity, deciding what it meant to expel “destructive cultural residues,” engaging their peers in an “Easter” -- or rebirth -- into critical consciousness, and articulating a “pedagogy of possibility” for schools and universities Freire (1972, 2000). While the experience helped most participants clarify and problematize theoretical ideas, it surfaced ideological tensions for others, including an inability to disrupt the teacher-learner binary and to imagine the activity as an intellectual space in which, as revolutionary leaders, they could take risks and practice “co-intentional” education Freire (2000). Additionally, these individuals resisted identifying themselves as members of an oppressed class, a critical stage in one’s [re]humanization and creative radicalization. This presentation will thus explore whether (and how) teachers can adopt a radical stance, particularly in educational settings that discourage radicalism

Authors

• Mary Carol Combs, The University of Arizona

• Awad Ramdan, University of Arizona