A Place Where Our Knowledge Is Shared: A Zapatista Approach to Community and Pedagogy

• In Event: Cultural Intuition as Our Guide: Co-Constructing Knowledge in the K–12 Classroom

Abstract

Objectives
The goal of this paper is to explore how four non-Indigenous critical educators, who collectively developed their critical consciousness through Indigenous epistemologies and politics, particularly those belonging to the Zapatistas, were led by their cultural intuition (Delgado Bernal, 1998), to develop community centered pedagogical values and practices. While some might describe their approach to teaching as one informed by critical pedagogy, it is worth examining how Indigenous epistemologies and politics can shape teachers' cultural intuition and consequently guide the development of their pedagogy and practices. While critical pedagogies push us toward liberation (Giroux, 2001), Indigenous epistemologies and pedagogies complicate and expand critical pedagogies urging them to become less Western, individualistic, and anthropocentric (Grande, 2004; Cajete, 2015) and instead push us towards pedagogies that are more responsive to growing social and ecological crisis.
Theoretical Framework & Methods
To best understand how Zapatismo has shaped the cultural intuition of educators, I draw from Sandy Grande’s Red Pedagogy (2004) and Gregory Cajete’s work on Native Science (2015). Together Grande and Cajete help us think through how we might disrupt ideologies that have shaped the institutions that shape our lives and perceptions of the world. Together they ask us to pull from Indigenous traditions, cosmologies, and epistemologies to imagine new ways of conceptualizing and relating to each other and the natural world. Ways that are not rooted in coloniality but instead are concerned with place, our relationship to land, our relationships to each other, our histories, our present and our futures. To document how teachers’ cultural intuition and subsequently their pedagogical values and practices have been informed by Zapatismo, I engaged in observations, document analysis and conducted four pláticas and four follow-up pláticas. I drew on Pláticas as both a method and methodology since the interactions lent themselves to collaboration and were open to the multiple, “…ways of knowing and learning in our communities” (Fierros & Delgado-Bernal, 2016). Pláticas are more than a method of data collection but instead are spaces in which the data can be theorized, and knowledge can be constructed. This felt fitting since it reflected the kind of beliefs held by my participants and the communal and intellectual practices that they engage in regularly.
Findings & Scholarly Significance
Through this study, these four critical educators gave us some insight into how Zapatismo shaped their cultural and pedagogical practices. While critical pedagogies have allowed us to think through and work towards human liberation and agency, they have not yet provided us all the tools necessary to disrupt colonialism and its logics (Grande, 2004). I argue that we must begin to examine how non-Indigenous educators can take up Indigenous epistemologies and politics, to have it form part of their cultural intuition, not with the aim to better critical pedagogy, but to push us to take responsibility for our own complicity in settler colonialism and to instead look to find ways to transform own practices and pedagogies so that we may form responsible and accountable relationships across communities, with Indigenous peoples, and with lands and waters.

Author

• Sara Jasmin Diaz-Montejano, University of California - Los Angeles