Decolonizing the Flesh: The Body, Pedagogy, and Inequality

DC Geduld
“The world is not something that is, but that is becoming”
Learning and Teaching Space

Teacher

Contextual

Learner Content
I know with my entire body, with feelings, with
passion and also with reason. It is my entire
body that socially knows. I cannot, in the name
of exactness and rigor, negate my body, my
emotions and my feelings. - Freire, 1995
The learner as a body
• It is the body that provides the medium for
our existence as subjects of history and
empowered agents of change
• Children are moulded and shaped by the
structures, policies, and practices of
domination and exclusion that violently insert
their bodies
Paulo Freire (1998) refers to human responses
when he considers the process of studying:
"Studying is a demanding occupation, in the
process of which we will encounter pain,
pleasure, victory, defeat, doubt and happiness"
(p. 78), all physical sensations of the body
Learners as Integral Human Beings
• The notion of learners as embodied and integral
human beings has received limited attention in
discussions of classroom praxis
• Teachers assume that teaching and learning are
solely cognitive acts.
• Teachers do not concern themselves with the
physical nature of their learners,
• administrators or psychologists are summoned to
evaluate and hopefully "fix the problem."
Freire urges teachers to grapple with the fact
that students construct knowledge through the
multitude of collective interactions of the body
with the world
Amanda Sinclair (1999)
reminds us that:
the immediate impact of a person's body on another is
profound. A great deal happens before a person opens
their mouth. Emotions are aroused, judgments are
made. Comfort or discomfort levels are established well
in advance of verbal communication. We unconsciously
or consciously register and make judgments about
stature and voice. Bodies elicit feelings of excitement
and admiration, at traction and desire, envy and
distaste, (p. 3)
If "bodies are maps of power and identity"
(Haraway, 1990, p. 2), then teachers must work
to engage learners* physical realities more
substantively, in an effort to forge an
emancipatory practice of education. It is not
enough to rely on abstract learning processes,
where only the analysis of words and texts are
privileged in the construction of knowledge
• Thus, teachers and students must labour in
the flesh
• teaching and learning must be anchored in a
material understanding of our human
existence, as a starting place for classroom
praxis and our struggle to reinvent the world
 Freire (1993) posits this as vital to
critical pedagogy
We learn things about the world by acting and
changing the world around us. It is [in] this
process of change, of transforming the world
from which we emerged, [where] creation of the
cultural and historical world takes place. This
transformation of the world [is] done by us
while it makes and remakes us. (p. 108
In Teaching to Transgress ,bell hall
I have always been acutely aware of the presence of
my body in those settings that, in fact, it invite us to
invest so deeply in a mind/body split so that, in a sense,
you're almost always at odds with the existing
structure, whether you are a black woman student or
professor.
But if you want to remain, you’ve got, in a sense, to
remember yourself- because to remember yourself is to
see yourself always as a body in a system that has not
become accustomed to your presence or to your
Critical Principles for a Pedagogy of
the Body
• Learners need to be acknowledged,
respected, and treated as entering the
classroom as whole persons
• teachers ought to be fully present, to
negotiate the process of learning with their
learners, and to establish meaningful
interactions in the classroom community
Do Not
• reproduce pedagogical brutality in your
mentees
• Do not defend dehumanizing pedagogical
relations of power as you become the new
gatekeepers of the teaching and learning
discipline
Ira Shor and Paulo Freire (1986)
insist:
What we teach in the classroom should not be
an isolated moment separated from the "real
world.
to be cognizant of the larger social, political,
and economic conditions that shape the lives of
your learners.
engage the emotional and physical responses
and experiences of learners
Epistemological curiosity
• Children are naturally curious;
• They are born learners;
• Start their lives as motivated learners (not passive
recepticles);
• Learn by interacting, experimenting, playing in order
to internalize meaning of experience and words;
• Language intrigues them;
• The have unsatisfied needs; and
• Constantly question (why?)
Liberation vs Domestication
• Education can either stifle or develop the inclination to learn
(as why);
• Curricula must encourage questioning and action (praxis);
• Curricula and teaching should show that the world is
becoming (it is not fixed);
• Curricula, learning and teaching must encourage learners to
change the world;
• Education cannot be neutral – it is always political (it either
enables or inhibits – it liberates or domesticates – it is either
for critical enquiry or dependence; autonomous habits of the
mind or passive habits)
Banking classroom
The typical classroom is framed by competition, marked
by struggle between students and riddled by indicators
of comparative achievement and worth.
Star charts on the wall announce who has been
successful at learning multiplication tables, only
children with “neat” handwriting have their papers
posted for display …
Competition encourages people to survey other
people’s differences for potential weak spots …
THANK YOU!