A few days ago, we published the incisive interview we did with Antonio Collados about his experience in Aulabierta as a preview of the fanzine we are preparing about projecte3*. Today we offer you another preview with this text by Javier Rodrigo on the political implications of collaborative pedagogical practices, as is the case with projecte3* (we have everything very well tied down…).
It is worth mentioning that some people think that our ‘classes’ are too ‘ideological’. The fact is that we have always started from the fundamental basis that no educational system or pedagogical practice is neutral; in fact, educational practices that declare themselves ‘neutral’ exert an extremely political action: that of establishing what is the yardstick that allows us to differentiate and separate those values that are considered ‘neutral’ or ‘normal’ from those that are not. Moreover, we understand that education is a profoundly political process in a way that brings to the surface the incorrect, if not malicious, use of the adjective ‘ideological’… but let’s not get bogged down.
Javier Rodrigo points out in his text that political work in general and in pedagogy in particular has to do with the way in which we articulate structures and discourses within each institution, each identity and each space and how a critical pedagogy would come to transgress or subvert the ‘ways of doing’ normalized for each of them. In this sense we can understand that collaborative work is strongly impregnated with politics insofar as it implies crossing the borders between different identities, institutions, uses of language, cultural practices, etc. That is to say, it implies, to some extent, a transgression of the values held as ‘neutral’ or ‘normal’ by each of the agents involved.
One of the most interesting points of Javier’s text, and with which we fully agree, is the one in which he argues how critical pedagogy, understood as political work under these coordinates, is transformed into a continuous process of negotiation in which the objective is no longer to “give voice” or “empower” certain individuals or groups, but to provide mechanisms and tools through which each one can design and distribute their autonomy and with it negotiate and discuss what idea of autonomy, democracy, power or capacity for change (agency), we each have in our realities. This approach seems very close to that of Iris Marion Young when she defines social justice not as an equitable distribution of the goods that one ‘has’ (whether material, social or of any kind) but as a more egalitarian distribution of the possibilities of ‘doing’, including the possibility of modifying the institutions and discourses that we embody, that we go through and by which we are traversed.
But it will be better if everyone makes their own reading of the text that you will find after the link.
Javier Rodrigo is an art educator and researcher, a freelancer at Observatori dels Públics, and a member of the Artibarri and Bordergames networks.
The work of politics and pedagogies: articulating collaborative practices
“One does not return to a theory, one makes others, there are others to be made. It is curious that it is an author who passes for a pure intellectual, Proust who has said it so clearly: treat my book as a pair of lenses directed towards the outside, and well, if they do not serve you take others, find yourselves your apparatus that is necessarily an apparatus of combat. Theory is not totalized, it is multiplied and multiplies” (G. Delueze)
Critical Pedagogy…. (Working politically).
Let’s be direct: The work of pedagogy is framed as a political practice, which includes a whole set of rules, discourses, political structures, and agendas where education is situated within the global macro of democracy. Critical pedagogy does not reduce education as a field restricted to communication and work facing a group, be they students or as they are often called the famous “children”. Education as a political practice ceases to focus only on the mere transmission of content, the follow-up of a curriculum given in advance and the completion/achievement of a certain agenda by the students and teachers and formalization in a certain material. Agenda and formats normally imposed that (de)mark how the identities of each agent of the school community should behave, act, think and regulate. It is not what the teacher says or what the student learns that is important, but what kind of citizens we are forming and, therefore, what possibilities of collective political action (agency, as it is sometimes said) we are creating in schools. And that is a matter of participatory democracy
What we can learn from critical pedagogy is that the field of work of education is not only the work of the educator facing the student or facing some materials, that is to say what people do between them and a series of elements that work. Also the educational work is political in this dimension, since it works facing the imaginaries and discourses of the students, the type of elements that intervene in the educational field, and how we treat and work with the others. This fact is fundamental. The political work therefore is not constituted when working some themes, contents or materials as “potential” politicians (be these multiculturalism, or citizenship issues, the so-called visual culture, or recording videos in the street with young people, etc.). Rather, I consider that political work is a question of how we articulate within each institution the structures and discourses that are established, and how we aim to subvert them. Political work, and more in pedagogy, is a management of the method, of how we work the relations of power, and how we try to subvert them within each identity, of each institution, and of each space, all at the same time, in a relational way.
A work that is articulated politically is one that works a triple interrelated dimension -and that often even blurs these same dimensions-. These dimensions would be, first, the personal and interpersonal, that is to say the work with the people with their identities and their processes of construction of subjectivity; second, the discursive and the positional, let’s say where the people are situated and from where they speak and third, the most complicated step in my opinion, the articulating dimension or of autonomy.
The political question with this third point is no longer only to follow “the method”, but to build our own toolbox, our own methods and theories, contextual, but open to their appropriation. Let’s give a toolbox, and let each one build his method or his theory, his way of intervening, on the contrary, let’s give a recipe, and let’s hope that the others always depend on us. This is what I learned from Deleuze and Guattari, through the methods of others, by the way. This point can be key in the political-pedagogical work.
Collaborative practices in their articulation… (Educating politically).
As collaborative practices we could define all those cultural practices where in the same field artists, diverse collectives, students, educators, cultural workers or artists come to work together (many times these labels are blurred). As in each context and case, the multitude of agendas and discourses are densified in a certain place and time, with very different and even contrary objectives, which provokes uncontrolled situations, collateral effects, and political dimensions that open in many scenarios. In order to be able to construct a political work in these collaborative practices I think that it is necessary to be able to situate them with respect to the articulation of the projects: that is to say in how to be able to affect multiple dimensions of work in the long term, to different agents, and how to transform-us within these practices with new coalitions. And this occurs in the situations in which these toolboxes are created. …
At this point it is necessary to point out what is the multiple objective of this toolbox that collaborative work implies: to transgress and modify the own identities, discourses and the policies implicit to our work through the cultural practices. It is not to have a single objective, but multiple ones, to be a war machine, that opens fronts of action, this is the starting point in a cultural pedagogy. We must remember that collaborating is negotiating, which implies positioning oneself and accepting change. Therefore, collaborative practices always entail a cross-border pedagogy, one that implies working from and with the various borders and cultures (symbolic, physical, professional, of discourse, identity, gender, etc.) and, above all, with the culture of collaboration that we bring with us. The political work of collaboration then lies in how we articulate and change our positionings, how we can finally question ourselves, and let others question us, how to change agendas and in this way, promote other agencies. The political-pedagogical work is not only about the type of citizen and democracy we want, but about the multiple negotiations of what types of political-pedagogical mechanisms can carry this out.
Here therefore the work of pedagogy as a political tool can be identified with the constant negotiation of the three dimensions mentioned above, and above all in how we can build spaces of contagious or relational autonomy: to educate is not only to give autonomy, but to provide collective spaces of autonomy, so that each person can create in the future this autonomy with others. To educate is not to “give voice” or “empower”, but to provide mechanisms where each one designs and distributes his autonomy, and with it to negotiate and discuss what idea of autonomy, of democracy, of power, or of capacity of change (agency), we each have in our realities (educators, students, families, and of course, the same researchers/pedagogues).
This perspective implies rethinking the last of the possible transgressions: to make this negotiation be dispersed, to be disseminated an infinite number of times, that can be parasitized, related, reappropriated… that is multiplied, let’s go. Therefore, the application of critical pedagogy in a collaborative practice focuses on producing the mechanisms to transgress and distribute culture with the aim that these mechanisms let other cultures circulate, and with it other ways of living, imagining, thinking, and -why not- changing or transgressing our society. The school is an alternative public school, a mechanism for direct and participatory democracy, with its regulations and its forms of resistance, and it is in its very borders where this articulating work begins, not outside of them, but within, from its very relations of power.
In the case of this text, the transgression does not exist because of its political will, its contents written here by me as “a great critical educator”, nor because of my personal and political connection with the field and the work of the people who coordinate these lines, but above all because of how it is distributed, rearticulated and reappropriated by other people.
It is in its use, in its translation to the practical level and what it serves to each one where its true political functionality would be- therefore this text should be accompanied by discussions, more workshops, or feedback- (here the limitation and the possibility of the text as a collaborative practice in its circulation as a fanzine and text of free access).
In the case of collaborative projects in schools, the dimensions of collaboration and the capacity for work entail a multiple dimension that accompanies the day to day of the schoolchildren, the educators, the families, the school staff and the political structures of the educational center, and the group of architects, artists or cultural workers with whom they have worked. The risk and the consequences are directly proportional, because the political work focuses on investigating and transgressing the borders of the discursive spaces within the school system (that is to say the laws, imaginaries and norms that conform said institution). What is interesting for me is if this work has been able to articulate through the people, their positions, and, above all, how finally the same conception of the same educational center is questioned, as all work of critical pedagogy. This is how it works articulating within a system with the concepts of collaboration and culture that were worked in the day to day of any classroom. Here the articulation would be put in motion, consciously or unconsciously, and the fact of being able to re-articulate entails its multiplication.
This collective pedagogy supposes a new concept of political action, since it opens multiple fronts of action in the same collaboration. This is the risk of the articulation in collaborative practices: collaborating supposes working with the differences, working from small interstices where this resistance emerges as an intervention within each system. It is then when the collaboration emerges as a space of transgression, as a mechanism of critical interventions, more than as a mere celebratory mirror of the institution. This is the challenge of an articulation, to provide new ways of re-thinking and re-acting within the systems, and to use the cultural intervention (be it representative, or physical, symbolic or material), as this engine of change to continue transgressing or retaking the introduction of this text, to multiply-itself.
Javier Rodrigo
This work is under a
Creative Commons license.