Pedagogical Prefiguration: Reflections on the Student Movement for Palestine

• In Event: Why Gaza Matters: Toward a Politics of Educational Repair

Abstract

This paper considers the pedagogical possibilities demonstrated by solidarity-driven encampments across universities in response to the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. This groundswell reflects expanding mobilizations on college campuses not seen for several decades, with a focus on ending universities’ complicity in the genocide via their investments in technologies of warmaking and transnational circuits of colonial knowledge production. Divestment would contribute figuratively and materially to educational repair in response to universities’ longstanding and ongoing participation in colonialism and militarism (Giroux, 2007).

Drawing on prefigurative politics as tied to space and place (Zavala, 2018; Maynard & Simpson, 2022), we examine how the movement for Palestine unfolded across campuses in ways that connected seemingly disparate geographic places linked through settler colonialisms and related forms of resistance. Prefigurative politics are the strategies through which people practice desired social futures in the here-and-now, engendering relational ways of being that sustain possibilities toward social transformation (Yates, 2015). This perspective illuminates how students’ everyday actions in the encampments, such as learning to live together outdoors in shared purpose, contributed to pedagogical hubs that model possible futures and complex forms of place-making (Bang, et. al., 2014).

Delgado (1989) offers counterstorytelling as a method for simultaneously amplifying subaltern narratives while contesting dominant narratives circulated to maintain hegemonic power. We engage counterstorytelling, first, to bear witness to the pedagogical and spatial innovations spurred by the encampments, and second, to refute claims by state and institutional officials disparaging student activism by drawing attention to the powerful forms of learning and change-making taking shape within this movement. We draw on our scholarly perspectives and experiences as educators, allies, and participants in the encampments at our respective campuses, each having garnered national attention for its distinct responses. We offer testimony highlighting on-the-ground experiences that provide greater empirical texture to this movement and its implications for liberatory education.

In their reclamation of university space, students devised pedagogical models responsive to the exigencies of the political moment at a time when most universities actively refused to engage critical pedagogies, let alone anticolonial praxis. This model was premised on relational ethics, radical care, and horizontal learning toward liberated futures, as demonstrated through their encampments’ articulations of community-centered agreements, curation of mutual aid networks, and abundance of teach-ins, reading groups, people’s libraries, and other forms of knowledge exchange. In their collective work to forge cross-racial, cross-ethnic, and cross-religious solidarities, students practiced and embodied ways of being that directly contrasted disparaging rhetoric from administrators and elected officials. They also wrestled with challenges of collective decision-making and place-making that reflect key layers of political and ethical learning.

Researchers and educators have much to learn from student movements at a time when truth-telling is under attack for threatening imperial power. Together, counterstorytelling and spatial views of prefiguration allow us to testify to the deep meanings and questions raised by the student movement for a liberated Palestine - one that will surely be historically consequential - so that we might learn what is needed to step into a world beyond colonial violence.

Authors

• Christopher Jadallah, University of California - Los Angeles

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University