This article critically explores the realities of our own border classroom resistance—the “story-circle” dialogue protocol—as a liminal, local practice of resistance to discursive practices of education and broader politics which seek to surveil students and teachers and commodify their achievement. More broadly, we suggest here critical pedagogy serves as a vital locale to address and resist dehumanizing historical, structural and ideological conditions as well as the discourses of standardization and commodification to which these conditions are reciprocally related.
New semester. New students. New story circle. It’s never an easy start. Strategic achievers praised often for their acquiescence to decontextualized, white-stream assessments of their decontextualized performance are sometimes slow to warm up to the idea that their questions will structure our learning. Although the step-by-step, detailed protocol is broadcasted on the big screen, I am bombarded with technical questions about rules and grading. After calmly answering a full round of this predictable resistance, I launch, without warning, into a sliver of my dissertation exploring neoliberalism’s influence on education—on my education. They seem to simmer down. I continue to perform my sometimes breathless story about how I managed to rhizome and bloom because of, not despite, my growing awareness of the “grim realities of educational and broader social policies” that can constrain the formal academic trajectories of women with “Yanez” or “Medrano” for a last name (Fassett & Warren, 2007, p. 83). Students clap, which paradoxically makes me feel small and awkward. I break them into small groups to craft the first story circle question. The first group, Sonja, Arely, Kayla, and Madeline step up to the board with such seeming confidence. Arely writes “The Loss of Innocence” in big, curly cursive. This is followed by their story circle question printed in neat block letters, “Is giving up some of our childhood and innocence to get ahead in life worth it?” There is no clapping, rather the clarifying hush of a question that has hit home with these early Latinx college high schoolers. Today this circle of high achievers, recruited
to this school for their ambition and outcomes, are now questioning how it is that their academic excellence in resistance against the deficit driven discourse of the achievement gap functions institutionally as a feather in some technocrat’s hat. Can this be answered? Should we even be asking this?
As the above story circle moment demonstrates, critical pedagogy can generate provocative spaces. Critical questions grounded in existential realities and honed through thoughtful dialogue whet appetites and awaken desire, and as Freire (2018b) suggests, spark liberations. In this article, we explore story circle pedagogy as a local practice of critical pedagogy enacted in classrooms at the second largest Hispanic serving institution in the United States, a companion community college and an early college high school. Each institution is just a stone’s throw from the perpetually contested and contemporarily, seemingly detested U.S./Mexican border in deep South Texas. These institutions are also situated in relation to what Giroux (2014b) terms a “war on democracy” in which blind fidelity to consumerism and “capitalistic forms of knowledge production and dispersion” dominate educational discourse (p. 3). For us, as teachers/professors operating from critical perspectives, and for our mostly “first generation” Mexican American and Mexican students, the story circle represents a risky liminal locale that is embodied, discursive and epistemological. It is a path between hope and fear. It is one that Holloway (1998) describes as a “preguntando caminamos”: a path made by asking (Fujino, Gomez, Lerza, Lipsitz, Mitchell & Fonseca, 2018).
In a time and country in which critical thought has become “both a liability and a threat,” in which “the notion that education is central to producing a critically literate citizenry ... is viewed ... as dangerous, if not treasonous,” and in which neoliberal tyranny aggressively separates “authority, power, and command ... from ethics, social responsibility, critical analysis, and social costs” (Giroux, 2014a, Ch. 1), resisting the objectification and commodification concomitant to the separation Giroux (2014a) describes requires a pedagogy that not only interrogates educational structures but simultaneously rejects conformity of ideas and experiences about/in higher education and provides opportunities for us to rehumanize ourselves and each other. As the antithesis to neoliberalism’s commands of silence, standardization and control, critical pedagogy asks us to “appraise education for pain, for inequity, and seek to act accordingly, which is to say with each other, not on, for, or to each other” (Fasset & Warren, 2007, pp. 26–27). Giroux (2014a) calls higher education out specifically to take “responsibility for creating a formative culture capable of producing democratically engaged and socially responsible citizens” and to create a language and space that offer “both critique and possibility” (ch. 1). In this article we provide narrative moments that suggest that story circles can serve as the kind of locale Giroux (2014a) is calling for. Similarly, Darder Baltodano, and Torres (2003) further articulate that dialogue is at the center of an “emancipatory educational process ... committed to the empowerment of students through challenging the dominant education discourse and illuminating the right and freedom of students to become subjects of their world” (p. 15). In this article we use narrative vignettes to illustrate the possibilities of the sort of dialogue Darder et al. (2003) describe. We also use these vignettes as narrative locales in which we use strategic details from highly localized spaces of particular story circles to demonstrate the ways local struggles of learning/teaching on the border are embedded within larger educational discourse which seeks to objectify, confine, and commodify learners.
Toward these ends, this article begins by briefly introducing a flexible framework from Probyn (1990), in which she draws fluid distinctions between local, locale and locatedness in order to situate story circles as a locale that resists the dehumanization of students and teachers. We then use this framework to locate ourselves as teacher/professors and researchers and to locate the roots and routes of the story circle. First, we situate it as a local form of critical pedagogical practice rooted in the work of Paulo Freire, indigenous and Black activists, and Anglo allies (Curthoys, Cuthbertson, & Clark, 2012; Fujino et al., 2018; Lau & Seedat, 2015; Peltier, 2016; Rodriguez, 2015; Villenas, 2019), and then go on to locate these notions of dialogue in relation to the story circle’s routes or resistance within our local classrooms.
Next, the path of this article introduces autoethnographic composites composed from findings from our joint autoethnographic case study to explore the story circle as a potentially generative liminal locale expressed discursively as simultaneously “safe” and “dangerous”; a powerful epistemological threshold between fear and hope “where many social meanings congregate” (Holman & Harmon, 2012, p. 266)—and where such meanings might be meaningfully marshaled into pedagogical action that refuses reform.
Local, Locale, and Location
According to Lipsitz (2016), “subordinated people need to create insubordinate spaces” (p. 272). In this article, we locate the story circle, and more broadly, critical dialogue, as a potentially insubordinate space that students and teachers can mobilize to resist, interrogate and ultimately cross (and double-cross) institutionalized borders that reduce human horizons to narrow educational outcomes patrolled by metrics of the moribund. As we hope to illustrate through the narrative vignettes we present here, the process of crossing borders through dialogue can be seen as anchored in sociopolitical realities and pedagogical practices as they are lived in the literal place and time of our story circles, nested within the material realities of HSIs and their place on the margins of the landscape of higher education. In this way, our narratives reveal sociopolitical patterns of the asymmetry of power experienced by students and teachers of color, and localized patterns of marginalization that are daily life for Latinx, Mexican American, and Mexican students in our border region. But through these vignettes, we also hope to illustrate the ways in which story circles function as discursive and epistemological spaces in which the startling particularities of border lives are voiced and rub up against localized ways of knowing to construct new spaces of pedagogical possibility that resist commodification. We draw from Probyn (1990) in order to help us make sense of our own spatial metaphors in relation to the embodied, discursive and epistemological spaces of local practice that story circles embody. Probyn (1990) begins by describing the local as “that directly issuing from or relating to a particular time” and/or place (p. 179). She locates the local as “practices which are directly stitched into the place and time which give rise to them” (p. 178).
In contrast to the local, Probyn (1990) understands the concept of locale as a space and a time. She understands locale to be both “a discursive and nondiscursive arrangement” (p. 178). According to Probyn (1990), “the concept of ‘locale’ then serves to emphasize the lived contradictions of place and event” (p. 182). Her notion of locale links place and event in order to explore embodied and discursive practices, highlighting contradictions among discursive practices aimed at emancipation and the complex ways these are lived in local practice. This distinction between local and locale helps us locate story circles as spaces of localized pedagogical practice in tandem with the discursive practices through which local spaces are constructed and transformed. This helps us look at the ways story-circle dialogue expresses and challenges the sociopolitical realities of the U.S.-Mexico border, but also the ways in which the discursive practices of story circle sometimes function to reinscribe asymmetries of power and privilege associated with these literal borders as well as epistemological despite our efforts to work against them. Likewise, in order to critically examine the ways our own pedagogical and research practices are located in similarly liminal thresholds between safety and danger, we use critical autoethnography as a method of moving between “the persistent dichotomies of insider versus outsider, distance versus familiarity, objective observer versus participant, and individual versus culture” (Reed-Danahay, 2017, p. 145).
Toward these ends, we draw from our larger, multisited, critical ethnography/ autoethnography exploring local practices of critical pedagogy at three higher education institutions (one a community college, one early college high school and a doctoral granting institution) located in the southern tip of Texas in a transnational community that Paredes (1958) described as “half in Mexico and half in the United States” (p. 1). This critical exploration of story-circle spaces (themselves representing intersections of cultural critique with personal experience) falls in line with a critical autoethnographic tradition that seeks to bridge the personal and the political (Alexander, 2016; Denzin, 2014; Holman Jones, 2016; Jones, 2018; Reed-Danahay, 2017; Spry, 2016; Zilonka, Cai, Medina, & Chung, 2019).
As a process and product of joint autoethnography, our narrative vignettes also mobilize the perspective of more than one first person. Rather, our vignettes represent recombinations of story-circle moments emblematic of the dialogic tension among borders of self/ other, researcher/researched, teacher/student, personal/political, hope/fear, and pedagogical safety/danger, experienced in distinct and overlapping ways by two individual voices distilled into narrative composites utilizing the convention of a singular “I.” Author 1 identifies as a third-generation, white, middle class, tenured professor in a doctoral program in a large HSI. Author 2 identifies as a Latinx, dual-enrollment instructor who teaches undergraduate communication courses to mostly high school sophomores and juniors at a community college near her hometown. For us, critical autoethnography is not only a mode for exploring and representing the asymmetries of power and the safety and dangers at work in critical pedagogy as it unfolds in our classrooms. Our joint critical autoethnography also serves as a liminal locale embordered by asymmetries of power, and saturated with the safety and danger of dialogue and our attempts to generate multiple meanings that resist the confines of conformity that contour contemporary educational research.
Story Circle as Rooted-In and Routed-By Critical Pedagogy as Local Practice
The story circle as we discuss it here is a classroom protocol rooted in Freirian traditions of liberatory pedagogy, indigenous traditions (Peltier, 2016), and the public pedagogy of activists in the Black belt of the southern U.S. Author 1 learned this protocol from her elderly neighbor Mary Wisham, a civil rights activist who participated in story circles as part of the work of the Free Southern Theater. According to Lipsitz (2016), the Free Southern Theater developed the story circle as a “mechanism for promoting creative and reflective thought” (p. 273). But the way Miss Mary balled her wrinkled fist as she recalled those circles indicated to me that there was more to the story. According to Lipsitz (2016), Free Southern Theater story circles followed the physical contours of that staple of Black sacred and secular culture: the ring shout. Participants would sit in a circle and create a collective story as each person spoke in turn in a way that was grounded in personal experience. When not speaking, it was necessary to listen and not interrupt the story. This serves as an important distinction between story circles and other forms of group discussions as this rule affords each student the opportunity to find their voice, be heard and listen to others. The story-circle protocol is special in its aim to connect, not to persuade or argue for the sake of arguing. Each successive participant adds something to the collective narrative, amplifying or elaborating on the words of the previous speaker. Once the circle had been completed, participants are encouraged to keep the conversation going without the mediation of the protocol.
The story circles of our research proceeded and still proceed similarly. If you walked into one of them you would find us seated in a circle (or in an online Zoom room) engaged in an “ongoing creation of the community’s consciousness of itself for all who are present” (O’Neal, O’Neal, Hofmann, & Rao, 2006, p. 3). The circle takes on a different feel depending on the multiplicities of identity, culture and curriculum. The pedagogical aims of story circles are as manifold as the contexts within which they are nested. In her study of the use of the story circle as a decolonizing, indigenous pedagogy, Peltier (2016) recognized that every story-circle participant comes to the circle to connect and understand (Peltier, 2016). Likewise, Randels (2005) sees sharing stories as an improvisational practice of locating common ground as a central pedagogical goal. Stories, as a basis of democratic dialogue, tend to unify a group of people and help them focus on their commonalities and mutual understanding (Randels, 2005). Additionally, Randels (2005) writes that story circles are about the stories being shared and created in that moment, rather than persuasion or debate. The immediate aim of story-circle protocol is to forge bonds through commonalities in their experiences as well as share the powerful moments of “love, injustice, hope” (O’Neal et al., 2006, p. 4).
Story circles are also routed by connections to what Derrick Bell and Alan Freeman referred to as “legal storytelling,” and what Delgado and Stefancic (2001) describe as a movement during the onset of critical legal studies, in which “Black and Brown writers [were urged] to recount their experiences with racism and the legal system and to apply their own unique perspectives to assess law’s master narratives” (p. 9). We see story circles as located on a dialogic threshold that documents experiences, details injustice and constitutes the possibilities of embodied criticalities. O’Neal et al. (2006) also see story circles as a critical pedagogy and methodology that can be used by participants to engage in dialogue about struggles navigating borders.
When we, as critical teachers/professors, implement such pedagogy, we are not on the outside of this circle. Story circles also help us engage with our own critical mis/understandings about knowledge and power in ways that sometimes, particularly in the contemporary academic climate, feel less than safe. hooks (1994) addresses the critical possibilities of such spaces as contingent upon mutual risk necessary for emancipatory dialogue as a “holistic model of learning ... where teachers grow and are empowered by the process. That empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks (hooks, 1994, p. 21). Freire (2018b) asserts that “education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students” (p. 72). More locally, our story circles also serve as liminal spaces for Freirian dialogue embodied by students and teachers in mutually, but not always equally, vulnerable ways that counter the omnipresent dehumanization at the center of current discussions of the U.S.-Mexico border and the people who attempt to cross it—both literally and figuratively. Fear is antidialogic, according to Freire (2018b), but the liminal space that story circles generate do not obey the borders of such binaries as dialogic and antidialogic. As the following vignette illustrates inviting all story-circle participants to fearlessly dive into dialogue that resists commodification and “constantly immerses itself in temporality without fear of the risks involved” is no small request (Freire, 2018b, p. 92).
One afternoon after teaching, as I was gathering my things, I noticed Ana and Gabby lingering behind. They both look a little nervous, like something is up or like something has been left unsaid. We have just emerged from an intense story circle initiated by a dual-enrollment student’s question regarding academic achievement, dualenrollment programs and their experience coming of age in an education environment devoted to helping them bust the achievement gap by fast-tracking them to college. In today’s circle, this group of students, half of which were dreamers or technically Mexican nationals, had expressed great faith in narratives of meritocracy as manifested in academic achievement. After all, this opportunity to jump-start their dreams (and/ or their family’s dreams) of a college degree through early college high school was contingent on this faith. But at the same time, the circle could not contain our simultaneous cynicism of an American dream that seems to grow more remote for us by the day, and which seemed to suck more and more of our heart and soul and to rob them of, as one student describes, “time just to be a teenager.” My own, sometimes rocky, experience as a Latinx student and then as a teacher and an adjunct pulls me in multiple directions. Did I say too much? Did I say enough? Sensing we all had more to say, I pull up a chair in front of Ana and Gabby, who are still at their desks. They hesitate with nervous but cheerful trepidation. I wait. Gabby nudges Ana as if to say, “Go on. Ask her.” Ana leans in slightly and looks around as if she is secreting her words from potential eavesdroppers: “Miss, if you had a chance, like, if you were our age, would you have come to early college high school like us?” she almost whispered with a sinister smile on her face. I did not expect this question. I hesitate and stumble to negotiate how to be honest without compromising my obligation to an institution I,in some ways, resist and which often seems to resist my pedagogical aims. This time, Gabby nudges me: “Like, do you think we should be here at this school?” I felt incredibly vulnerable. Though I never spoke the exact words out loud for fear of losing my job, I was always hopeful enough in the experiences my students and I shared together that, at some point every semester, I end up fessing up, however opaquely, to my discontent with the lived realities of our dual-enrollment programs and their neoliberal deficit-oriented doublespeak. I am scared of saying the wrong thing. I know Ana’s mom well. But, here in this moment shared with these young women and our emerging consciousness, this question seems like a test of who I am and who I want to be as a critical pedagogue. Ana rephrases her questions, “Miss, it’s okay. I guess what I mean is, do you wish you had started college in high school, like maybe you would be further along in your career. I thought of my goal to purchase a home and how far away it was given my current earnings as a nomadic adjunct instructor. I recount my lack of job security. I picture some of my college colleagues and their more socially successful-looking lives as they started families. I picture some of the fellow students in my doctoral courses, some superintendents and principals, all secure in their leadership and their 401k plans. I recall how I had recently been without a job for four months. For a long time, I just stare at Ana. I think I know what my truth is. But how do I offer it up? Can I? Should I?
Locale Between Safety and Danger
As the above narrative reveals, story circles can serve as both risky spaces of critical dialogue and as pedagogical “safe spaces” for students and teachers to name and reframe their hopes and fears against neoliberal discourse that works to commodify these in narrow terms of academic achievement in ways that put the hopes and dreams of Latinx students in particular peril. The notion of educational safe spaces was developed by feminist and LGBT movements of the 1970s in order to claim, “exclusive physical and discursive spaces for sexual minorities or women to come together to talk and support each other” (Macdonald, 2014, p. 63). In education, the discourse of safe spaces is linked to notions of critical and feminist praxis aimed at naming exclusion and engaging in the difficult labor of resisting and reframing through dialogue and action, while tending to and honoring the lived experiences of the marginalized people and their stories (Macdonald, 2014). However, as Macdonald (2014) notes, the meaning of the term “safe space” has experienced discursive drift and morphed into a more general notion of a “desired classroom atmosphere within education” designed to deal with complex issues and intersections of race (p. 63). In fact, Donadey (2002) asserts that it is the responsibility of critical pedagogues to transform their classrooms into safe spaces that empower the voices of marginalized students through dialogue aimed at exploring lived experience. However, as Flensner and Von der Lippe (2019) point out, the term safe space has often been used uncritically as a conceptual metaphor and as a nebulous, blanket term covering all dialogic spaces designed to allow the otherwise silenced to speak. According to Flensner and Von der Lippe (2019), only in the past two decades have researchers begun to critically examine the ways that the discourse of safe space can also pose danger (Arao & Clemens, 2013; Barrett, 2010; Boostrom, 1998; Leonardo & Porter, 2010). Specifically, Leonardo and Porter (2010) suggest that the race and power dynamics circulated through “regular” pedagogy are also at work in the critical pedagogies aimed at empowerment, and that this can make the work of safe spaces risky. Freire (2018a) discusses this power dynamic in his caution that efforts to liberate students can also reveal the colonizers’ desire to integrate, domesticate and objectify, instead of opening a space in which students experience their own conscientizacao in radical solidarity. Operating from these concerns, the story circle becomes less about discursively ensconcing dialogue in a protocol whose rules ameliorate asymmetries of power and patrol language. Instead, these liminal locales engage with the pedagogical risk of discursively transforming the neoliberal certainties of curricular control into critical instability, indeterminacy and the vicissitudes of praxis in disobedient moments of becoming (Stengel & Weems, 2010). The narratives below illustrate such moments of uncertainty against a control imposed by systems of power and privilege and internalized by students and their teacher in ways that intermingle the personal and political and in doing so defy easy conformity.
Madeline nervously picks up her oversized “geek” glasses with her right pointer finger, with a mocking sophistication she performs during difficult moments of dialogue. Madeline speaks today’s truth: “My pastor told this story this past Sunday about his 30-something son who has rebelled against the church. My pastor said that when his boy was really little, he used to make him come to church every Sunday and Wednesday and make him pray every night. He would watch him pray to make sure he did it. He made him do all these things because he wanted him to be a good boy.” I think I saw a connection to the question about innocence and coerced becoming, but it was nascent. She shifted in her chair and held the gaze of the story circle. “But now that he’s grown up, the son doesn’t go to church and he doesn’t even pray. So, the pastor went up to him and said, ‘Why don’t you go to church and pray?’ and the son told him, ‘You forced me to do all this stuff when I was younger, and now I’m here and I don’t even know what I believe in or what it really means to me.” Her voice trailed off and I squirmed. Madeline looked around, holding the gaze of the circle, and continued, “I already feel like I’m starting to be confused about why I have to learn and what it really all means, because right now it doesn’t feel like my choice.” I looked around and saw a circle full of students connecting deeply to this moment of profound parallel. “Why don’t they let me choose school on my own?” she said.
On one hand, Madeline’s parable about the peril of heavy-handed authority reveals the stereotypical, existential angst often associated with adolescence. But on the other hand, in the larger context of the story circle’s educational critique, she makes an astute connection between what she experiences as ideological tactics of the church and those of the neoliberal state. What we now deceptively call the “common core,” a name that implies standardization across all borders and simultaneously mocks the intention of benefiting all, was referred to as the “core curriculum” in the 1950s and 1960s, and focused heavily on “experiential pedagogy, flexibility of content, student direct-edness, [and] democratic process” (Nunez, 2017, p. 218). Our present curricular core focuses first and foremost on ensuring students are prepared for entry-level careers, postsecondary courses and specialized workforce-training programs (www.corestandards.org). As a dual-enrollment teacher and student, teaching and learning within the confines of an institution so proud of its mission to graduate every high school senior with an associate degree, we have to proceed carefully. In our classroom, we cautiously navigate the liminal space of a dialogue that allows us to critique the system but is also itself nested firmly within systems of power and privilege that seek to displace Madeline’s desire to own her knowledge and which might seek to replace us if our teaching refuses complacent displacement of localized knowledges that we generate together through dialogue.
Crossings
Complete consensus. The statistics suck. Over the course of the semester, we have been exploring a cascade of numbers quantifying the “the achievement gap.” Latinx students appear dead last on multiple predictable measures including college graduation and doctoral degrees. In this university in which 92% of students identify as Hispanic, and in this particular classroom in which 100% of students identify as Latinx or Mexican American or Mexican, these numbers were not a surprise, but still shocking. It seems like the question has been the same for the past 3 weeks. Today’s incarnation of deficit-driven inquiry: “What factors really contribute to academic failure and what can we do?” I am talking fast trying to use Ladson-Billing’s (2013) ideas of educational debt and opportunity gap to turn the question around. Then heavy set and worn down, seemingly indifferent Edoardo, as if driven by sudden epiphany, blurts: “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Just stepping on campus, being around “normal” people, staying organized, and dealing with my wife and trying to help my kids study. Everybody says they want to talk about PTSD. But there’s a line.” Fellow veterans, Mari, Luis and Josue are rapt as the conversation deepens and embraces this particular struggle. I think about the line Edoardo describes and my own pedagogical line and the way the story circle often brings us to those lines. Sometimes, we cross.
As the above narrative attempts to illustrate, transformative moments require complex and sometimes risky commitments. As Fujino et al. (2018) argue, speaking from the “armor of vulnerability” can be a powerfully rehumanizing act that builds community (p. 71). This can be emancipatory. Such vulnerability can also be dislodging, particularly in spaces of higher education, where epistemological boundaries demarcating whose knowledge counts are often rigidly patrolled through neoliberal discourses that demand obedience to dehumanizing standards that emborder teaching and learning (Giroux, 2014b). As Gressgard (2012) asserts that “Liminality tends to refer to a position ‘outside’ of the community, and yet it is located in the midst of it. In that sense, the liminal space is not marginal but central” (p. 24). It is a collective threshold that demands crossing—a constant negotiation of borders. As Anzaldúa (1987) notes:
Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional of an unnatural boundary. It is a constant state of transition. (p. 3)
As Anzaldúa (1987) notes borders can be dangerous places, and these are dangerous times for students in our circles—some of whom cross the border each day to come to school. Under threat from a dangerously dehumanizing discourse that constructs Latinx populations as criminal, some students are cautious in their critique. Freire (2018b) asks “how can I dialogue if I am afraid of being displaced, the mere possibility causing me torment and weakness?” (p. 90). In this liminal space between hope and fear, it is clear that the privileges and responsibilities of openness are discursively linked to larger neoliberal discourses that often function to displace democratic ideals in order to commodify the labor of students and teachers, especially students and teachers of color, and that these are connected to larger and contemporarily amplified antiimmigration and racist discourse that openly and aggressively seeks to marginalize and literally displace Latinx people, particularly those from Mexico living in the United States. Even though story circles often seem to open up these spaces through multiple voices, as critical questions and open critique circulate the circle, you sense that many students look uncomfortable and some even fearful. Stories generated in our circles often betray the impact of compensatory attempts to surveil, patrol and control the flow of people del otro lado to este lado—the side of the bridge where our institutions are located. These stories also reveal sometimes aggressive attempts to control the surplus of local and global knowledges and its production as they cross borders inhabited and reinhabited by people marginalized through discursive practices and epistemological traditions hostile to such crossings (Zilonka et al., 2019).
Paths of Critical Pedagogy
I am proud to work here. Even in these uneasy times, our university claims its bicultural, bilingual and biliterate identity—markets it even. This is no superficial resistance within the current sociopolitical context of Texas and beyond. One that Limón (1998) terms “quasi-colonialism” and that “includes land usurpation and physical violence but also, and more significantly, the daily extraction of labor power and racial-cultural gratification and status within a code of racial segregation often enforced through the power of the state” (pp. 110–111). In tonight’s story circle with doctoral students we are talking about decolonizing curriculum, when immaculately groomed Rey comes in late. I think about the multiple times Dr. Chessmore’s chalk grazed my head when I loped in late to his class years ago. I opt for a softer yet acerbic, “Glad you could make it, Rey.” He apologizes profusely. Next, Monica rushes in. I then receive a text from Joe. He won’t be coming. It must be open house night at school, I think. We begin our circle. Just as Carmen begins to ask a profound question about decolonizing the self, she is interrupted by a text. Victor can’t make it either. I uncharacteristically stop the circle. I remind students about the expectations on the syllabus regarding engagement and attendance and balancing work and making their education a priority. “It’s about respect for our work and each other,” I chide. Melissa nods her head in tacit agreement. The rest of the class, however rallies around the latecomers in a solidarity that needs no words. Bodies bow-up, and faces turn away from me dismissively in abject rejection of my cheap, misplaced guilt-trip. It is just Melissa and I outside of this parallel circle whose stories of long lines at the Anzaldúa bridge and border patrol hassles and detainment first surface as tense indignation exchanged through silent and knowing glances that communicate worlds to those who listen. As John O’Neal, reminds regarding story circles, “Hearing is a creative act ... the listening is what gives definition to the story.” (Lipsitz, 2016, p. 274)
As the above narratives illustrates, the path of a “betweener” who embodies and enstories “life in and between two cultures” can be treacherous (Diversi & Moreira, 2010, p. 19). Similarly, the path of praxis can be a pedagogically tricky one for the teacher/professor. Borrowing words from Anzaldúa and Keating (2012) the paths of critical pedagogy are liminal locales that invite “uneasy passages, conduits, and connectors that connote transitioning, crossing borders, and changing perspectives” (p. 1). Such is the work of story circles, as localized practice and more broadly critical traditions of dialogue which serve as locales of uneasy passage, conduit and transformation. As Giroux (2014a) argues, the success of neoliberalism’s war on critical thought and emancipation requires a climate of domination, one in which the communidads such as those in our classrooms, “are torn apart and deterred, furthering a retreat into orbits of the private and undermining those spaces that nurture noncommodified knowledge, public values, critical exchange, and civic literacy” (Giroux, 2014a, ch. 1). Giroux (2014a) reveals the clearest path to resisting commodification is to uncorporatize the higher education classroom and reinstate the critical aims of curriculum and pedagogy. Specifically, we need spaces of critical dialogue in which students and teachers function as the subjects (as opposed to objects) of their own education meaning-making and their own liberation. The way that story circle protocol is used in this study, as a form of critical dialogue, localizes Giroux’s (2014a) call for civic responsibility to critical experiences of producing fluid forms of resistance through shared conversations and understanding. Story circles allow students to attempt to complicate and uncomplicate their very complicated realities as they struggle to embrace “civic courage and the common good” together (ch. 1). Our vignettes show that teachers aren’t invulnerable to this transformation either and that rehumanizing the lived-curriculum of our classrooms interrogating and acting on our own conformity.
In the vignette in which Ana and Gabby sought out an opinion of dual-enrollment programs, we put our inner conflict with neoliberal doublespeak on full display acknowledging that, though safe at times, story circle experiences remain dangerous as we walk the line between our commitment to critical pedagogy and our “professional” obligations. The vignette in which Madeline vulnerably admitted her confusion and resentment regarding the purpose of superimposing college credentials onto her high school experience early college high school and the comparison she struck between her experience to that of her pastor’s son who was forced into unchosen expressions of faith simultaneously revealed Madeline’s crisis of educational faith and also revealed Madeline’s emerging critical understanding of a complex system in place seeking to push her down an assembly line of academic achievement in which her minoritized achievement becomes the coveted product of neoliberal ameliorations of an achievement gap forged from the same commodifying force that gave rise to it.
The path of this research winds among liminal spaces between the measured hope we find in story circles as local projects of dialogic freedom, and thorny thickets of resistance against a neoliberal discourse through which Latinx, Mexican American, and Mexican students are constructed, with radical conformity, as culturally, linguistically, discursively, and epistemologically “at risk,” and simultaneously “dangerous.” This path also represents an epistemological departure from neoliberal aims of reducing complex local knowledges to individual variables that can oversimplified, quantified, and manipulated (Wiebe, 2018). Located in the intellectually fertile intersections among indigenous, Black activist, and Freirian dialogic traditions, local practices of critical dialogue embodied in our study of story circles run counter to what Block (2009) terms the neoliberal, “road to inhumanity” (p.
3). Such work not only challenges us as teachers/professors to delve critically into ourselves and our experiences in the classroom and the world it is connected to (Darder, 2017). It also creates a path where students walk beside, rather than behind, us. As Giroux (2014a) writes, “Teachers, young people, artists, and other cultural workers must come together to develop an educative and emancipatory politics in which people can address the historical, structural, and ideological conditions at the core of the violence being waged by the corporate and repressive state as well as begin to imagine a different collective future” (ch. 1). In this article we critically explore the story circle as a localized practice of just this sort of educative politics within the specific context of the of the embordered spaces in which we teach, learn and live. More broadly, we suggest here critical dialogue serves as a vital locale to address and resist dehumanizing historical, structural and ideological conditions as well as the discourses of standardization and commodification to which these conditions are reciprocally related. We hope the critical dialogical moments presented here also evoke story circles as generatively liminal locales of critical pedagogy that allow us to traverse, alongside students, difficult paths of resistance with hope and fear, courage and reservation, assertiveness and tenderness to imagine a different future. (McLaren, 2003; McLaren & Kincheloe, 2007).
