Building the Educator as Communal Intellectual

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: Developing Our Humanity in Community

Abstract

In these dangerous times of corporate-led globalization (Robinson 2016, 2017), and a white nationalist politics that may lead us toward apocalyptic doom (McLaren, 2018), it becomes our responsibility as educators and community activists to pose urgent questions to our constituencies that are often considered too discomfiting or too threatening for inclusion in public forums and that must be seasoned with conventional applications of political domestication in order to be considered for inclusion in contemporary debates (McLaren, 2018).
Society is in desperate need of a new paradigm of teacher that refuses to accept the limit situations imposed by the transnational capitalist state, a paradigm designed to encourage the intellectual to break free from the multiperspectival approaches to theory most often associated with postmodern free-market intellectuals, approaches that continue to deflect attention away from the pervasive contradictions immanent in capitalist social relations and from the totalizing effects of alienation and immiseration that globalized capitalism has wreaked upon every aspect of contemporary existence in capitalist societies (McLaren, 2016).
This paper will present the theoretical foundations for the communal intellectual (Darder, 2011). The communal intellectual in the post-digital age needs to serve more than a balm for bondage but as a light pointing past the limit situation of capitalism, towards the future as an untested feasibility (to coin Freire), where socialism is allowed to materialize in the hearts and minds of the people (and not simply remain looped into their computer hard drives) so that it can become coterminous with the revolutionary dialectics of economic transformation and collective governance (Thomas, 2011).
The intellectual I am describing is willing to engage in the development of a collective social imaginary grounded in an alternative to capitalist relations of exploitation and alienation (McLaren, 2015). The paper will seek to illuminate some important nuances and articulations surrounding the challenges that face us as dissident educators at this particular historical conjuncture and to explore ways in which the communal intellectual can be reconceptualized and revitalized in revolutionary terms. This paper intends to serve as a countervailing riposte to the role of the teacher as free-market intellectual and to insist on a materialist and indigenist recentering of the role of the intellectual in today’s social order (Darder, 2011).

Author

• Peter L. McLaren, Chapman University