Social Movements as Decolonial Educational, Curricular, and Pedagogical Spaces

• In Event: The Constitution as Curriculum and Public Pedagogy

Abstract

This conceptual paper addresses the decolonial educational spaces collectively created by the political cultures that emerge within the historical process of struggles seeking to form a Constituent Assembly. Cabildos abiertos, public assemblies, or town halls organized by distinct communities are learning processes in which dialogue, ecology of knowledges, and intercultural translation are needed for them to avoid silencing other perspectives, histories, and experiences.

Although this study is not situated within the Chilean context, I make salient connections between the political cultures that emerge within particular geopolitical conjunctures. It is the sociopolitical context that creates the conditions of possibility to radically democratize political-economic and socio cultural institutions. In particular, the radical democratization within educational institutions entails shifting governance and curriculum structures undergirded by Eurocentrism and the logics of coloniality. I argue that it is not enough to “decolonize” the syllabus by including readings from the Global South and historically silenced intellectuals. Instead, it is necessary to unsettle the decision-making power of knowledge producing institutions in order for the Eurocentric foundations of knowledge to be fractured to a point of the return.

Since constituent assemblies require the creation of public assemblies in which various issues, including education, are debated openly, they make it possible to radically democratize decision-making power in all spheres of social existence which then may be included in the constitution after subsequent debates.

Based on an ethnographic study on the Honduran student movement, I demonstrate how collective subjectivities are created and how they radically democratized governance and curriculum. Public assemblies are not only spaces in which certain topics are discussed or debated but rather are places in which knowledge and experiences born in struggle are shared. They become alternative educational spaces where knowledge becomes a collective process rather than a meritocratic competition fostering possessive individualism and indifference. Collective knowledge production becomes political and shapes the political culture of social movements. Knowledge takes on an organizational, pedagogical, and praxis-oriented dimension where the radical transformation of institutions and constitutions is made possible through collective decision-making or countervailing power geared toward advancing a political project.

Public assemblies are therefore micropolitical yet are able to transcend to the mesopolitical (institution) and macropolitical (constitution) when the aforementioned conjunctures allow for the articulation of distinct sites of resistance. The massive demonstration throughout Chile, for instance, created the conditions of possibility to radically transform the country away from neocolonial and neoliberal designs, as well as the dictatorial legacies, that have acutely affected the nation since Salvador Allende was overthrown in 1973 by a US-back coup resulting in the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Like the Chilean context, student movements in Honduras articulated their political-pedagogical project within a post-coup and dictatorial regime that is no longer in power due to the mobilization of broad-based social movements. In the full paper, I detail how social movements’ pedagogical gestures enunciate other possible worlds through the creation of alternative educational spaces (e.g., public assemblies, workshops, wordpress journals, social media, popular education, alternative radios, etc).

Author

• Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores, Texas Tech University
  Presenting Author