Chapter 6: Between Fate and Destination, Drifting and Traveling when Interrogating Globalization’s Fluidity: Critical Pedagogy in the Everyday

My dilemma, living in the everyday, is that I may take my everyday, or for that matter all my “everydays,” for granted. Kosík argues that for many of us, this is usually the case. Kosík (1976) speaks to this as a “nihilism of the soul” (p. 48). He warns the virtual “us” that “the everyday can be transformed into an instinctive, subconscious, unconscious and unreflective mechanism of acting and living” (p. 43). Early in the 20th century, John Dewey (1910/1997) spoke to this type of everyday experience as “dominated by the past, by custom and routine, [which] . . . is often opposed to the reasonable, the thoughtful.” Dewey hoped that everyday “experience” could include reflection “that sets us free from the limiting influence of sense, appetite, and tradition.” Hence, experience, Dewey envisioned, “may welcome and assimilate all that the most exact and penetrating thought discovers” (p. 156). Therefore, the interrogation of teaching and learning within a global context and the courage to understand our future within a global context as well as act on it will be only as great as our desire to understand our past in light of the present, a present that continues to unfold with or without our collective actions in the everyday. The everyday is especially compelling for us as critical teacher educators; so much of our cultural work is in the engagement of lived experience in the everyday of working with a plethora of learners.