Schooling Bodies: Critical Pedagogy and Urban Youth

(linked from eVALBEC April 2012)

 

By Professor Antonia Darder

The body is our medium for having a world. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)

[T]he body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. (Michel Foucault)

The human body constitutes primacy in all material relationships. Without the materiality of the body, all notions of teaching and learning are reduced to mere abstractions that attempt to situate the mind as an independent agent, absent of both individual and collective emotions, sensations, yearnings, fears and joys. It is the body that provides the medium for our existence as subjects of history and politically empowered agents of change; but, as Peter McLaren (1999) reminds us, ‘bodies are also the primary means by which capitalism does its job’. We are molded and shaped by the structures, policies and practices of domination and exclusion that violently insert our bodies into the alienating morass of an intensified global division of labor.

 

In Pedagogy and the Politics of the Body, Sherry Shapiro (1999) contends that, ‘any approach committed to human liberation must seriously address the body as a site for both oppression and liberation’. Yet, seldom is the significance and place of the body made central to discussions of emancipatory pedagogy. As a consequence, educational efforts to reinvent the social and material conditions within classrooms do not closely consider the significance of the flesh in the process of teaching and learning. That is, unless the discussion turns to “classroom management”—a convenient euphemism for both the covert and overt control of youth’s corporeality. Meanwhile, many classrooms and community settings exist as arenas where knowledge is objectified and abstracted from its concrete reality. Youth are then expected to acquiesce to an alienating function, which artificially severs their body from its role in the construction of knowledge. Hence, the production of knowledge is neither engaged nor presented as a historical and collective process, occurring within the flesh and all its sensual capacities for experiencing and responding to the world.

 

Urban youth as integral beings

The notion of engaging urban youth as embodied and integral human beings has received limited attention. Instead psychosocial discussions tend to over-emphasize the role of subjectivity or over-psychologized notions of the self, at the expense of critical development and collective consciousness. This inadvertently sidelines affective and relational needs of the body that must endure, resist, and struggle to become free from the ideological and corporal entanglements that domesticate youth. Yet, educators and cultural workers, we cannot deny that the body is enormously significant to the development of critical capacities in youth. Often missing in discussions of pedagogy is a more complex understanding of our humanity, in which the body is central to critical formation. Paulo Freire, particularly in his later works, attested firmly to this significance of the body in the act of knowing. ‘I know with my entire body, with feelings, with passion and also with reason’ (1995, 30). ‘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’ (1993, 105).

 

Unfortunately, however, the rubrics of traditional pedagogy assume that teaching and learning are solely cognitive acts. As such, educators and cultural workers need not concern themselves with the affective responses of youth, unless they are deemed as “inappropriate,” at which time the psychologist or social worker is summoned to evaluate the “problem” youth. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that learning, as well as teaching, can be very exciting, painful, frustrating, and joyful. Freire (1998) often referred to these very human responses when he considered the process of studying. ‘Studying is a demanding occupation, in the process of which we will encounter pain, pleasure, victory, defeat, doubt and happiness’—all, affective and physical responses of the body.

 

Thus, to become full subjects of history requires that educators grapple with the fact that intellect is but one aspect of our humanity, which evolves from the body’s collective interactions with the world. And as such, this requires our willingness to engage with youth bodies more substantively, in our efforts to forge a revolutionary practice of education. It is not enough then to teach and learn solely as an abstract cognitive process, where the analysis of words and texts are considered paramount to the construction of knowledge. Such an educational process of estrangement functions to alienate youth from ‘nature…the inorganic body of humanity’ (Marx, 1844). As such, they become alienated from their own bodies and that of others. Hence, educators must create the conditions for urban youth to labor in the flesh, investing themselves materially, in the construction of meaning and in the struggle to reinvent their world. This is vital to a critical pedagogy of the body, given that ‘we learn things about the world by acting and changing the world around us. It is [through] this process of change, of transforming the material 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’ (Freire 1993, 108).