On Education

Preparing a class: Decolonial Research, Scholarship, and my son’s conversation with his mother       Each teacher has unique ways of preparing classes. A lot of concentration is required and pushing and pulling of resources, methods and facts. Close reading of texts for me are fundamental. For this week we are reading Decolonizing Methodologies. Research and Indigenous People by Linda Tuhiwai Smith and I get all worked up. It is hard to keep seated and not move and jump and have my body go into convulsions. I listen to music, I go get coffee and I finally had to…

  As we go back to the classroom (and shake off the dust of summer), we all have mixed feelings and expectations. While some of us will just go back to the normal, others will be anxious and perhaps fearful about a new semester. The beginning of a semester can carry a feeling of being displaced, a sense that we don’t know what is coming our way and what is next. In one word: the lack of control. That is why we occupied so much of our syllabi in order to gain immediate control of that space we actually cannot control, and…

Last time we talked about the body in the classroom. Our body, my body, the bodies of my students, are all shaped by institutional bodies that carry values, marks, love, deceptions, commitments and history. Just as our bodies carry constructions of race, gender, sexuality and so on, so too do our institutional bodies carry these same constructions. And in addition, through their organizational structures and curriculum, our institutional bodies support specific discourses of identity, race and class as well. In the classroom we are always constructing or breaking these discourses, consciously or unconsciously framing forms of life, framing racial and class…

  In memory of William Klug and Ioan Petru Culianu Pedagogies are concerned with the study and practice of teaching and learning. Pedagogies are ways of organizing society as it has to do with ways of thinking and valuing life, shaping emotions, defining sense, choosing abilities, establishing relations and so on. We all know that pedagogies do not belong to classrooms only, and it is not only used or studied by teachers. Pedagogies are about life! Paulo Freire’s has taught us about “critical pedagogy” which carries an expansive sense of pedagogy that has to do with the power of knowledge and…

      We who believe in freedom cannot rest We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes. (1) We have had a month of intense events in the US. The killings of Black precious people, this time, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, came to the news again, as if these killings don’t happen daily, and put the country, again, into a time of shock, a surprise to some, a confirmation to others. Also, the Republican Convention last week showed the terrifying promises of a worldview that can be very dangerous not only to the US but to the world…