Why Does Our Collective Work Feel Empowering? Toward a Historicized In Situ Critical Curricular-Pedagogical Praxis in Aztlán, Gran México

• In Event: Inter-Epistemic Dialogues With Decolonial Studies From Latin America

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of our pedagogical essay is to outline US-based critical curriculum theory of the late 1970s through the mid-1980s and follow its shattering via feminist-poststructuralist critiques so as to articulate the exigencies of in situ critical curricular-pedagogical praxes in Aztlán, Gran México. Critical curricular-pedagogical praxes, by definition, refers to critical pedagogy specifically elaborated within bioregions and leveraged toward collective conscientization. Specifically, we seek to provide a credible in situ critical curricular-pedagogical praxes transferable to other bioregions.

Perspectives
Our essay works through transnational, Hispanophone, and translanguaging traditions of decolonial alternatives articulated by many but emblematized by Mignolo and Walsh (2018) writ large and Joao Paraskeva (2016, 2020) in curriculum studies. Following a transnational-local dialectic, we follow decolonial traditions into our bioregion via the decolonial work of Anzaldúa (1987, 2015), Hinojosa (1977), and Paredes (1976). Emblematic of Jaramillo’s (2012) curriculum studies, we articulate a transnational-local dialectic that seeks to articulate learning and teaching alternatives to the whiteness of coloniality.

Method
We deploy the method of the pedagogical essay. The pedagogical essay is deeply based in Hispanophone and translanguaging educational traditions (e.g., Gonzalez, 1969; Mariátegui, 1928; Vasconcelos, 1924/1997) but also present in US (Schubert, 1992) and transnational curriculum studies (Author 4; Paraskeva, 2016) as catalytic counter-narrative to positivist social science. The essay method enacts a sliding critical hermeneutic of reading-writing that moves back and forth between primary documents, secondary document support and critiques, and historical contextualization. Our method requires we both read primary documents within historical context and draw out relevant critiques to inform us via traditions of cultural and educational criticism. Like other essays, transferability and credibility follow from catalytic insights provided from prolonged engagement in both documents and processes.

Results/conclusion/significance
Emphatically NOT an “origins” story for our resistant, transnational, translanguaging, in situ critical curricular-pedagogical praxis, our essay works through resources of critical curriculum studies history (e.g. Apple, 1979/1990, 1982/1995; Giroux, 1981, 1983; McLaren, 1989) to trace its required shattering emblematized by Ellsworth’s (1989) poststructuralist-feminist critique. Via this shattering, our essay newly advances the notion of critical curricular-pedagogical by answering the question: Why does our collective work feel empowering? To answer this, we situate our collective transnational and translanguaging scholarship and related activisms within Aztlán, Gran México as but one instantiation of critical decolonial alternatives. Learning with Ellsworth and other feminist poststructuralists like Haraway, Lather, Miller, and Munro, we emphasize the situatedness of our feminist, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist critical curricular-pedagogical praxes. In emphasizing situatedness, we articulate our resistant, transnational, and translanguaring traditions of the Rio Grande Valley, Aztlán (Hinojosa, 1977; Paredes, 1976) for which Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987, 2015) work is emblematic. Authors 2 and 3’s emergent historically situated praxes provide specific instantiations of situated critical curricular-pedagogical praxes. In our conclusion, we make the case for de-centered, deterritorialized, and pluriversal notions of critical curricular-pedagogical praxes that emphasize the critical in historical US critical curriculum theory but instead historicize, theorize, and conjugate the transnational with the local.

Authors

• James C. Jupp, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

• Raul Garza, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

• Amy Montoya, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

• Pauli Badenhorst, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

• Laura M. Jewett, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley