Emancipatory Education for Liberation

UNIVERSITY SIN FRONTERAS

LIBERATION SUMMER SEMESTER

2012 ATLANTA Project South

Class #6 (final): Jenice View

8.15.2012

Emancipatory Education for Liberation

Jenice View at Liberation Summer Semester

How can we teach what we’ve been learning?

We are going to teach each other about core liberation struggles, thinking about the theory and practice of what we’ve been doing”...

The Ideas offered by class members about the best context for learning experiences: non-school settings, especially in existing communities; discussions and conversations with others, especially those that build stronger connections; struggles; hands-on activities; activities that enhance our ability to learn from our bodies, including our muscles and our hair; a diverse group; access the ability to cry as a way to break through to new awareness; challenges, including incarceration.

Some common elements shared by these different contexts: expressions of varied emotions; connections with others; empowering/confronting power; action involving and acceptance of our bodies; growth of various kinds.

SUMMARY BY STEPHANIE GUILLOUD AND RUBEN SOLIS

• This class will help us think about how people learn.
• Working for liberation is a continual process. We take actions that break down colonial systems everyday but still need to renew regularly our commitment to the struggle.
• Where are we in the long battle against colonialism?
• How can we talk and work together most effectively to understand colonialism and dismantle racism, while also imagining and creating a better society?

...AND HERE IS JENICE VIEW from Washington DC who is going to share the knowledge on teaching ...How can emancipatory education help bring about liberation?

Janice View started the last class of the LIBERATION SUMMER SEMESTER 2012, by introducing herself as a Board member of the University Sin Fronteras, as a professor at George Mason University, and an educator with teaching for Change, and now as an adjunct faculty for this last class of six of the course on COLONIALISN & LIBERATION.

After everyone in the Liberation class had introduced themselves, Jenice asked the class to divide into four (4) groups as she had prepared four lesson material packets, one for each group, to assist them in performing the task of coming up with a LESSON PLAN for each of the four areas. Each area and materials' packet dealt with a period, event or personality of a liberation struggle. THE FOUR were

1. The Democratic Republic of Congo
2. Liberation Theology in Latin America
3. Caribbean Pan-African Movement and
4. Southern Civil Rights (Freedom)Movements

Small group work on developing LESSON PLAN

SMALL GROUP REPORTS ON FOUR LIBERATION STRUGGLES

1. The Democratic Republic of Congo :

presentation of a chart showing the elements of the struggle which led to colonization, those which opposed it, and the material conditions which affected these developments

1. 1884-1960: Colonization, imposed by King Leopold II until 1908 and then by Belgium until 1960, a time period when industrializing nations and corporations were seeking access to new raw materials, workers, and consumers.

1960: After the successful struggle for independence, Patrice Lumumba became Prime Minister, reflecting a growing worldwide rejection of colonial values and the rise of Pan-Africanism.

1961: Lumumba was assassinated and replaced by U.S./CIA-backed Joseph Mobutu until 1997 as a counter-response to grassroots liberation movements. Globalizing economic institutions, particularly the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, imposed debt responsibilities on the neo-colonized nations.

2. Liberation Theology in Latin America :

presentation of a skit, complete with liberation theology posters, which portrayed how believers in liberation theology might have persuaded a Columbian peasant to stop believing in the established military and accept the leadership of a militant Jesus and Camilo Torres, a Catholic priest who was killed in 1966 in his first battle as a guerilla. Liberation theologists encouraged supporters of justice to use their faith to fight power, which they identified as a fight against institutional sin.

3. Caribbean Pan-African Movement :

presentation of a skit involving the reactions of two women to a television program which presented contradictory versions of the life of Amy Garvey, the wife of Marcus Garvey. One reporter portrayed her as an admirable Pan-Africanist leader and the other made her seem somewhat crazy and a hindrance to the movement. The women watching the program were shocked both at what they had not already known and at the ability of the media to harm the reputation of a famous person.

Note from Cita:

I’ve discovered some information relevant to research on Amy Garvey that some of you might already know. There were two Amy Garveys. Both were wives of Marcus Garvey and life-long Pan-Africanist activists.

The first, Amy Ashwood Garvey, lived with her husband for only a couple of months. She then criticized him in various ways as she became an international leader of a version of Pan-Africanism that emphasized the importance of women.

Amy Jacques Garvey was married to Marcus Garvey from 1922 to his death in 1940. She supported Garveyism until her death in 1973, calling for a more traditional but still activist role for women in the movement. I assume that the documents that inspired the skit were about Amy Ashwood Garvey.]

4. Southern Civil Rights Movement :

presentation of a group reading of a call to southerners to join the Civil Rights Movement in order to build a stronger community; to gain equality and equal representation; to create radical ideas, beliefs, governance, education, and demonstrations; and to build this movement through non-violent direct action. They aimed, as well, to sustain a youth movement, to expand the Civil Rights Movement, to develop models reflecting their values for organizing and for social interactions, and to build their own history. They were guided by the models of a number of Civil Rights leaders, particularly Ella Baker.

DISCUSSION OF THE COMMONALITIES BETWEEN THE MOVEMENTS

• Pattern of movements rising and falling and rising again
• All involving experiences of oppression and resistance to it
• Character assassination and other distortions of the facts of history by their enemies
• Revealing the violence of colonialism, through both mass killings and assassinations of leaders (Lumumba, Camilo Torres, Walter Rodney, Archbishop Romero, Malcolm X, and many others)
• Public violence being used against movements as a form of terrorism
• Owning their own history by presenting the truth
• Much movement activism from the 1950s through the 1970s, but with roots going much earlier
• Expanding their impact by reaching out to other groups
• Gaining strength from faith
• Reliance on technology of different kinds to spread their messages

DEBRIEFING AND FEEDBACK FROM JENICE

See the handout with information and space for comments about the different methods of emancipatory pedagogy.

Focusing on primary (first-hand/original) sources allows us to develop more of a sense of how people in the past experienced and thought about their lives, but secondary (not first-hand) materials can help give those documents a fuller context, synthesize the information found only by reading many, many primary documents, and include possible explanations for the events and developments being studied. Consider the possible differences between Wikipedia and other encyclopedic summations of history and those by historical scholars. In starting a lesson, however, something as basic as a picture book can be an effective jumping-off point.

Limited time in a learning session (or limited space for written materials) makes it necessary to edit thoughtfully. Notice the decisions about information and documents that are made in textbooks and other common methods of relating history. In choosing documents for a discussion, vary the nature of the documents according to length, target audiences, writing style (wordy and not so wordy), use of images; remember that some in the group may be reluctant readers who can learn most from a short quote.

Movements, by definition, have countless activities going on at the same time. Think about ways for quiet, shy people to participate in the learning process and in a movement. “Constructivist” pedagogy emphasizes the benefits of recognizing that everyone has some knowledge to share and that we can learn more if we combine all of that knowledge. “Popcorn” pedagogy allows anyone to pop into the discussion whenever they have something to say, allowing free-wheeling brainstorming but giving more power to quicker (not necessarily deeper) thinkers with loud voices and self-confidence.

The handout of the two Learning Pyramids (without research records to support the numbers given) reminds us of the important to include different kinds of activities in any learning situation.

Individuals vary in the ways in which they learn best. Pay attention to your own learning style, as well as that of others, and to the varying desires of a particular audience.

Research does support the effectiveness of using the arts as part of learning (performance, visuals, music, etc.).

The strategy of focusing on the personal stories of individuals, whether in the past or today, is not a trivial approach since it reveals the extent of personal conflicts and failings in the lives of people too often portrayed as perfect heroes. We need to see ourselves in the lives of the people we study. Including biographical information about more than one leader for each movement can help demystify activism and leadership by showing that a movement’s success relies not on the existence of a solitary, heroic leader who seems capable of more than any of us could do but on the determination, contributions, and cooperation of many ordinary human beings.

A social justice orientation to learning often reveals more complexities to the history than are usually recognized, particularly how many people were involved in specific developments. A group process can be difficult, requiring a clear purpose and sensitive facilitators. We have a number of methods to counter our lack of knowledge about the past–including oral history (only for the recent past), family stories, field studies, analysis of documents–but we have to accept the reality that we cannot know everything. It is important to think about the most useful questions, even if we cannot find documented answers for them.

Always leave open the possibility of unknown elements in a historical narrative. We know, for example, that Bartolome de las Casas opposed the oppression of indigenous Americans by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, but the fact that we do not know about any other priests who also did so does not necessarily mean that he was the only one.

STEPHS’S CONCLUDING THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS CLASS

• We are claiming this moment as the inauguration of the Universidad Sin Fronteras, with the presentation of the first certificates to all who participated in the process.

• This class did not accept the boundaries usually imposed on learning and teaching. We covered history from the time when Europeans declared their “right of discovery” to recent years when we have been reclaiming our bodies.

• We want to keep working together and to spread the methods and meaning of the class for many years to come, whether that be twenty or two-hundred.

DECOLONIZE NOW!

“...Emancipate yourself from mental slavery...NONE But ourselves can free our minds...”

-EMERY

“We believe in and will continue to work for collective development”

-STEPH

Ours is not to interpret or just know the world...BUT Transform it

-RUBEN