Whereof the Teacher-Student? An Antidiscriminatory Cultural Production Project

• In Event: "Mirror, Mirror on the Walls": Co-Interrogating Heteronormativity, Bodies, Masculinities, and Power in Multiple Educational Contexts

Abstract

Purpose
This presentation showcases an iterative performance staged by pre-service teachers of a foreign language teacher education program of a public university in Colombia. Specifically, it asks in ‘what ways can foreign languages teacher education programs, i.e., programs that educate professionals to teach colonial and imperial languages (e.g., English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese), contribute to eliminating all forms of epistemic, sex-gender, and cultural violence in the classroom?’ We specifically targeted femicides and violence against women in this project.

Argument
Drawing from a cultural production approach and the “orders of cultural production” (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2020), this proposal advances a twofold argument. On the one hand, enacting anti-discriminatory cultural production projects implies a pedagogical-ontological movement to overcome the teacher-student divide (Freire, 2000[1970]; Todd, 2001). On the other hand, anti-discriminatory practices involve a movement from a curricular (individual learning experiences) to a pedagogic stance (i.e., collective, mutually shaping experiences (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2012)) to overcome what’s known as the “economy of the gift” (de Certeau, 1984) and the “pedagogy of gifting” (Luke, 2008) whereby teachers seek to “politicize” students by engaging hot topics like gender violence, embodiment, or sexual identities (Probyn, 2004) in their courses yet without disclosing their own identifications.

Methodology
Applying some principles of Participatory Action Research (Fals Borda, 1993), though neither framing nor following the complete PAR inquiry cycle, we [students and teacher] agreed to:
● Organize horizontally, co-producing knowledge, and “flattening hierarchies” (Fals Borda, 1993) among us, meaning that I would cooperate and participate in the performance with the same cognitive and affective investment and intensity as the students.
● Acknowledge our public performance “as a mediating instance between theory and pedagogical-political practice ” (Fals Borda, 1985, p. 98), addressing social justice issues of interest/that affect our communities. For this particular project, it was the femicides in the province of Valle from 2017 to 2019.
● Make our class product (i.e., the performance) public not private, “problematizing hegemonic cultural production practices, such as essay writing as the only valid literacy practice in the University” (see Valencia 2022a), to circulate it in other circuits inviting a wider audience, overlapping/conflating the pedagogical, the personal, the collective, and the political.

Scholarly significance
Pre-service teachers learned that anti-discriminatory cultural production projects are approximations of social justice, equity, and the common good, that is, failed attempts for, “like Sisyphus’ punishment, [anti-discriminatory practices] entails a permanent and unfinished effort of understanding, revising, and overcoming an endless, difficult, and stumbling slope.” (Fals Borda, 1985, pp. 13-14).
In their reflections, pre-service teachers contended that, when anti-discriminatory practices hinge on the orders of cultural production, divides/contradictions such as teacher-student, men-women, or Indigenous-settler are addressed in more nuanced though complex ways, construing differences “beyond a monistic or dualistic model” (Grosz, 2005, p. 9). They realized that difference stops being the destination point to become the point of departure to explore the complicated, historized, localized ways human beings relate, act upon, and seek to transform each other.

Author

• Andrés Fernando Valencia, Universidad del Valle
  Presenting Author