An Experiment in ‘Radical’ Pedagogy and Study: On the Subtle Infiltrations of ‘Normal’ Education

Authors

  • Erin Dyke University of Minnesota
  • Eli Meyerhoff University of Minnesota

Abstract

Through a militant co-research project with a class in an anarchistic free school, we explore how dispositions from so-called ‘normal’ education infiltrate activities of aspirationally ‘radical’ pedagogy. Grappling with these tensions as a kind of ‘playful work,’ we focus on four themes: the geo- and body-political situatedness of knowledge, space-time, a/effective relationships, and pedagogy and study. Across these themes, we take up and trouble assumptions of modernity/coloniality, as sources of obstacles we experienced in our class and, more broadly, in projects of movement-embedded study. Subscribing to these assumptions both happens through and serves to legitimate the institutions of education, or the processes of making people ‘ready’ for adulthood, work, and governance. As a counter-force, we offer tactics for de-linking from these imaginal trajectories and composing pedagogies of decolonial, communal futures.

Author Biographies

Erin Dyke, University of Minnesota

Erin Dyke is a PhD student in the Culture and Teaching track within the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests intersect pedagogy, the relationship between education and social movements of resistance, and the role of modern schooling in neocolonial and capitalist social reproduction.

 

Eli Meyerhoff, University of Minnesota

Eli Meyerhoff received a PhD in Political Science from the University of Minnesota in Fall 2013, and now works as a contingent academic in Durham, NC. His dissertation is a critical intervention in the politics of study and higher education. His other articles include “Time and the University” and “Creating Commons.”

Downloads

Published

2013-12-06

Issue

Vol. 29 No. 2 (2013): Special Issue: Justice Work In and Outside of Schools

Section

Considerations

License

In every case, copyright of work appearing in JCT is retained by the author. In accordance with its mandate to promote discussion on matters of curriculum, the Foundation for Curriculum Theory permits limited reproduction of parts of JCT. Individual articles may be reprinted for educational purposes, provided that no fees (other than copying costs) are charged.

For information regarding more extensive copying or reproduction for other purposes, contact:

editors@jctonline.org