On Critical Consciousness and Reclaiming Our Stories and Traditions: Making Manifest Nontraditional Ways of Knowing Within Traditional Learning Spaces

• In Event: Exploring the Tension Between Higher Education and Native Ways of Knowing: Challenges and Possibilities for Creative Spaces

Abstract

This study will reestablish a root system to ways of knowing that give power to ancestors, voice, stories, place, traditions, and people. The author canvasses the traditional learning institutions and systems that damaged this root system, anesthetizing the strengths for sense-making and negotiating within/across diverse contexts. The study is grounded in the author’s ontology learned and lived as a child and adolescent within micro contexts of home and school, and the development of the critical consciousness that these experiences ignited. The author seeks to unearth the possibilities of accessing new perspectives to make sense of our place in the world and illuminate the potential of acknowledging our agency to act within the world. Through story and theory, the author sketches a landscape of the development of critical consciousness and a process for reclaiming identities (Freire, 2000; Villenas, 2001; Villenas & Moreno, 2001).
The study reexamines idioms, stories, and traditions that framed the experiences of the home ontology after immigration to the United States and reconceptualizes the engagement within various contexts of a new environment, and how the suffering and chronic stress experienced, blinded the author to the subtle but revolutionary nature of mis papás' actions. These actions spoke to an awareness that the systems and structures that constituted school, work, and church communities would not willingly make room for different ways of knowing, and modeled resistance and agency (Stanton-Salazar, 2001; Trueba, 1999; Valenzuela, 1999). The study employs personal narrative and oral history as impetus for a deliberate look into the landscape of critical consciousness and its importance in imagining and creating equitable systems of teaching and learning.
The conceptual framework includes a discussion on critical consciousness and its role in understanding the ecological factors inherent in educational institutions, from self to community and society, so as to act upon those factors in order to change unjust systems and structures (Macedo, 2006; Freire, 2000; Giroux, 1997). The constructs of learning, teaching, and leading are embedded in relation to educational institutions and begin to frame the pedagogical strategies that individuals and communities employ within spaces for institutional and societal change. These pedagogical spaces and conditions highlight and provide insight into “the unfinishedness of our human condition” (Freire, 1998, p. 66). How do we blur the barriers we have constructed that impede the disruption of our set(s) of knowledge and carve out spaces where change, ambiguity, mindfulness, consciousness, and unfinishedness influence and inform the settings of progressive, creative, and responsible service toward one another?
Findings highlight a paralysis stemming from the anesthetizing of nontraditional ways of knowing that speaks to a distorted image of self as incapable of imagining creative possibilities and changing lived realities. The study provides insight into the indispensable nature of understanding the self, the extent to which various contexts and factors have contributed to its development or its distortion, and challenge what we think to be true about what we know regarding ourselves and our human potential and agency (Ornstein, 1993; Maturana & Varela, 1992).

Author

• Monica Valadez, Texas State University