De Levantarse y Seguir Cayendo: Taking a Critical Stance in Troubling Times

• In Event: Roundtable Session 32
  In Roundtable Session: Darder’s Culture and Power in the Classroom: Forging a Critical Bicultural Praxis—Stories From the Field

Abstract

De levantarse y seguir cayendo (To rise up and keep falling) is a reflective piece describing how critical pedagogy help a Chicana faculty member in an urban university negotiates the academic and political world. Few would argue that the present target of anti-public school rhetoric is focused on teachers and teachers unions. An article in rethinking schools (summer 2010) declared that the intent of the current round of “teacher bashing” is to “destroy the power of the teachers’ unions, and turn the public school system from a public trust into a new market for corporate development.” This is the political contexts in which this essay is situated. The essay written by a professor actively working with teachers and in teachers’ unions.

The essay is grounded in the work of Paulo Freire, Antonia Darder and critical pedagogy. The essay describes the educational journey of this bicultural activist. As one of many pieces, the work describes how critical biculturalism described by Darder (1991) as a process of cultural identity development that takes place for students who grow-up in two different sociocultural environments. Darder articulates the many ways in which we (bicultural people) and students respond to daily cultural conflicts and how we incorporate our responses into our cultural realities. But most importantly, Darder’s work pushes educators to contend with the fact that biculturalism is not only a process of cultural identity development; it is a political process that “moves us beyond the simple notions of individual psychological theories of identity, liberal paradigms of pluralism, and unproblematic notions of two distinct worlds interacting (Darder, 1995, p. 266).” Darder’s critical theory of biculturalism asks us to contend with our histories, our economic circumstances, and the assymetrical power relations that impact how working class bicultural populations are positioned within the context of US society. As bicultural people, we come to learn to negotiate the complexity of our conflicting worlds as we affirm and enact a new unique, hybrid, and oppositional culture.

The scholary contribution of this collective work will assist teachers, teacher educators and others in their work to provide educational opportunities for students who while seeking educational opportunities work to negotiate the multiplicities and complexities of their bicultural positionality. Moreover, the work will shed light on how bicultural people negotiate the troubling times of corporatization of schools by those whose primary interests are profit over people. As critical educators seek educational justice for students and communities entering into dialogue with others who share similar experiences provides us an opportunity to share the power of our collective voice, sustain our efforts to speak the truth and continue our quest for social justice. The coming together of like minded people can be the what fuels our daily commitment y nos ayude a lavantarnos (helps us rise again).

Author

• Theresa Montano, California State University - Northridge