Constitutions as Public Pedagogy: (Re)Making and (Re)Framing Established Ideologies

• In Event: The Constitution as Curriculum and Public Pedagogy

Abstract

Typically, education approaches the study of constitutions in terms of social studies and civics where focus is placed on the historical narratives surrounding them along with the rights and responsibilities these founding documents determine. We start from the assumption that constitutions function as public pedagogy (Sandlin et al., 2009) that teach us about the socio-economic and political forces that allow a particular constitutional text to exist. In this paper, we address the often unanalyzed, unspoken pedagogies of constitutions to examine their making and reframing (Goulding, 2017; Williams, 2015?) in Chile and the US. Our theoretical framework is informed by Pinar´s (2012) curricular questions around whose knowledge counts, what counts as knowledge, how knowledge is produced, reproduced, circulated and/or marginalized. We couple this with theories of settler colonialism (Wolfe, 2006; Tuck & Yang, 2014) to analyze two key speeches in Chile and the US that function as curricula of state ideologies in their discourse. Of these moments we ask: Who is constituted as “citizen” in these discourses and how are non-citizens/Otherness constituted? What national narratives are normalized or interrupted? What lessons about the more-than-human do these constitutional moments impart?
Utilizing postructurally informed discourse analysis (Maclure, 1994) we investigate two speeches across two national contexts: Chile and the US. In the case of Chile, we look at the inaugural speech given by Elisa Loncon, elected as the president of the constitutional assembly charged with writing the new constitution. We examine the speech as an interruption of the everyday political work in Chile–specifically, the interruption of settler colonialism and the processes of epistemicide embedded in normative politics and the constitution. In the case of the US, we examine a speech given by President Donald Trump at the National Archives on Constitution Day 2020 where he declared the creation of the 1776 Commission that would focus on promoting a “patriotic education that celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history” (C-Span, 2020) and framed this “pro-American curriculum” as a specific counter to the central tenet of the 1619 project and the field of Critical Race Theory. We analyze this text as a public curriculum of settlerness, where the common narratives around the founding ideals in the US are once again deployed for white supremacist and settler ends.
While in the US we continue to experience a radical shift toward far right politics–seen most recently in terms of limiting reproductive freedom and trans rights–in the global south, we currently bear witness to a constitutional movement centering human rights and marginalized voices. Our paper highlights the importance of investigating constitutions as public curricula which we hope will constitute an entryway for more conversations engaging state-making documents and what we make of/with them.

Authors

• Andrea Lira, Teachers College, Columbia University
  Presenting Author

• Dinorah Sanchez Loza, The Ohio State University
  Presenting Author