"Gotta Break Free": Teaching Toward Victory Conditions

• In Event: Keys to the City: Nipsey Hussle, Marathon Education, and the Celebration of South Central

Abstract

The title of this paper is inspired by three sources: Breaking Free: The Transformative Power of Critical Pedagogy, a 1996 anthology of essays originally published in the Harvard Educational Review; the Let’s Get Free album by the rap duo Dead Prez (2000);, and the student quote from a year-end interview: saying, “I realized that I was a slave, you know what I’m saying, but I broke those shackles though. I started to look at life critically.... Like, “damn, this [is] crazy. My mind is trapped.... I’m incarcerated mentally...I’ve gotta break free.” Breaking Free lays out key fundamental theories of critical pedagogy, presented analysis on the broader social context within which educational policies and practices exist, and examined the political role of teachers and students in the process of learning and teaching. Let’s Get Free expressed a more militant, grounded awareness of deeper issues affecting the Black community, illuminating the oppressive nature of miseducation and state-sanctioned psychic control, the police state prison, freedom of speech, empowering gendered relationships, and mobilizing a mass movement in the context of colonialism and modern day slavery. The above-cited student quote speaks to the importance of channeling the reactionary behavior and self-defeating resistance (Solorzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001) of young people in over-exploited, marginalized, disinvested and dispossessed communities against the very social system that has historically undermined their humanity - advocating for the type of learning that utilizes the assets and community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) youth bring into classrooms.

Taken together, “Gotta Break Free” honors these texts and contexts by constructing grounded theory of pedagogy that aims to advance how teachers understand the larger historical context of collective oppression and provide a basis for understanding the dehumanization that educators actually have to respond to. Through this paper, the author seeks to solidify and introduce an interdisciplinary frame that will serve as the analytical lens for a corpus of qualitative data collected as part of a four-year qualitative dataset collected from a teacher action research project at Slauson High School in the Marathon District of South Los Angeles. Theoretical codes from the above mentioned, interdisciplinary lens whereas used to examine the accumulation of field notes, student work and other artifacts, classroom video, and interviews to generate grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) and tell a coherent, analytic story in line with the emerging framework for victory conditions. According to Nipsey Hussle, a victory is “a testament to the independent grind” and “to make it out mentally stable and not in prison and not on drugs, that's a win. That's a victory in itself… in the most humble way.” Towards that end, this paper attempts to frame victory from social struggle in urban communities and schools in a way that everyday people can understand, while also capturing its complexity. It also aims towards victory learning conditions that are rupturing – almost a violent kind of learning (see Leonardo & Porter, 2010), a re-direction – and does so differently than the very abstract language that social justice education has been using around issues of educational injustice.

Author

• Patrick Camangian, University of San Francisco