#ImaginationWork: Banana Split > Cartesian Split

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This week, I've been thinking a lot about dichotomies. Specifically the western-rational discourses that authorize Cartesian binaries and create false dichotomies such as:

• head/heart
• mind/body
• individual/collective
• teach/learn
• subject/object
• agency/passivity
• spiritual/rational
• alive/dead
• healthy/ill
• female/male
• feminine/masculine 
• doing/being
• inner/outer
• IRL/URL

The list goes on and on. The problem with buying in to the Cartesian split is that slashes separating one from the other are constructed as impenetrable, acting as a wall, rather than a bridge. And, as Freire (1970) reminds us, it is the oppressors who benefit from division: "As the oppressor minority subordinates and dominates the majority, it must divide it and keep it divided in order to remain in power" (p. 141). However, even when we - as students, scholars, educators, and engaged citizens - begin to dismantle the slash and decolonize the constructed binaries, we find ourselves in a messy middle ground - in heterotopia.  
 

In this installation of #ImaginationWork, I want to consider the the potential of the Cartesian split to motivate unifying resistance, in and out of the classroom. 

Inhale/Exhale (Or, At Least We Have the Election Results)

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When I initially started this blog post last week, I wrote that I was most agitated by deeply feeling the tension of the in-between, an individual and collective heterotopia defined by:

• the mid-semester slump
• the slow anxiety of waiting for election results
• the week before quarantining to spend fall break with chosen family
• the intersection of forging meaningful connections in virtual spaces
• balancing health and well-being on a sliding scale of better-this-week-than-the-week-before and vice versa

As my #ImaginationWork blog posts have aimed to elucidate, this in-betweenness is both tricky and transformative. There are infinite opportunities for innovation and adaption existing simultaneously alongside valid feelings of grief and uncertainty. 

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And, today, I'm grateful to report that heterotopia is beaming a bit brighter with 2020 election results rolling in yesterday: the election of Biden and Harris to office is a decision symbolizing hope to so many, even as it illuminates the work still to be done. I've read countless (relatable) social media posts expressing that after having held their breath for four years under a racist, sexist, xenophobic, ableist, trans- and homophobic administration, people can breathe. 

In the words of Rachel Cargle:

Exhale. With him out of the office there is deep deep joy to be had. The critical knowledge, radical empathy and intentional action continues. Both can exist at the same time. So thrilled we can catch our breath for a moment, even if just for a (joyful) moment as we gear up to charge forward again as always toward justice. (italics added for emphasis) 

As I see it, this one more instance of evidencing that the binary political system is broken and - like the many other "slashes" between constructed opposites - in need of dismantling and decolonization through individual work and collective organizing. Surely here, too, #ImaginationWork, invested in Freire's (1970) "development of a consciousness of freedom and a willingness to transform the world through reflective action" (Dannels, 2017, p. 203)" is as critical outside of the classroom as it is inside. 

Personal/Political: The Paradox of Learning and the Undivided Self

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The classroom - where the personal and political powerfully collide - is an electric heterotopia. Classrooms, like "students" and "teachers," do not exist in vacuums but rather are situated with/in the socio-political/cultural context along the continuum of a shared spatiotemporal reality. However, as a designated space of teaching/learning - virtual or physical - the classroom holds the power to both oppress or to free. And it can feel like an endless struggle, at times, to attempt to bridge division, to ceaselessly aim for a practice of freedom - in and out of the academy. 

bell hooks' (1994) reminds us of the imperative to employ engaged pedagogy as a means to "actively fight to utilize the spaces that we are privileged to access to help empower students and ourselves to engage in liberatory practice." To this end, it is the liberatory teacher's imperative to commit to creating courageous spaces for students to be acknowledged and understood, welcomed and wanted, cared for and challenged while centering the classroom's subjects (students and teacher) as whole people.  

To actualize these courageous spaces in the academy, and cultivate critical thinking/learning that will effect change outside it's walls, demands teachers:

...break through collective academic denial and acknowledge that the education most of us had received and were giving was not and is never politically neutral. Though it was evident that change would not be immediate, there was tremendous hope that this process we had set in motion would lead to a fulfillment of the dream of education as the practice of freedom. (hooks, 1994, p. 30)

From the perspective of employing engaged pedagogy as liberatory practice, we witness the constructed division between political and personal, education as a tool of domination or freedom. How do we begin to span this division?

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As I think of collapsing the Cartesian split in/and the classroom, Parker Palmer's (2007) concepts of the "undivided self" comes to mind. Palmer's (2007) critical pedagogy posits an investment in "the undivided self, [wherein] every major thread of one's life experience is honored, creating a weave of such coherence and strength that that is can hold students and subject as well as self" (p. 16). Exacerbated by the pandemic and subsequent shift to online learning, such interconnectedness is crucial to practicing critical and liberatory pedagogy which accounts of the reality that resources are uneven, life experiences are radically different, and the (white, western) education system privileges the...privileged. 

Palmer's (2007) articulation of binary division in the education systems includes the separation of:

• head/heart
• facts/feelings
• theory/practice
• teaching/learning

However, when we are teaching from a place of wholeness and vulnerability, out inner and outer lives align, creating space for the complexity of classrooms built on paradox. As undivided selves, we become capable of negotiating dualisms and implementing pedagogical practices that embrace the paradox of learning in classrooms that, according to Palmer (2007):

• are bounded and open
• are hospitable and "charged"
• invite the voice of the individual and the group
• honor the "little" stories of the students and and "big" stories of the discipline and tradition
• support solitude and surround it with resources of community
• welcome both silence and speech

Classrooms that account for the paradox of learning (and life) allow students to breathe - "even if just for a (joyful) moment" (Cargle 2020). Here, the differences between ourselves and our students, our students and one another, and the Cartesian dualisms that would seek to divide across binary lines of difference are not flattened, but celebrated. Difference and duality is welcomed to harmoniously coexist as complementary, rather than threatening, to the undivided self (that is, the students and teacher). 

Banana Split > Cartesian Split

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Paradoxical thinking requires that we embrace a view of the world in which opposites are joined, so that we can see the world clearly and see it whole. Such a view is characterized by neither flinty-eyed realism nor dewey-eyed romanticism, but rather a creative synthesis of the two. 

The result is a world more complex and confusing than the one made simple by either or thought - but that simplicity is merely the dullness of death. When we think things together, we reclaim the life force in the world, in our students, in ourselves. (Palmer, 2007, 68)

I cite the passage above at length because is speaks to the imperative to imagine new ways of being in the world that are better than what we know now. To me, this means striving for more radically connected - undivided - selves, communities, and futures. 

Undoubtably, a step toward the future is a step toward the unknown. But, like heterotopia, welcoming uncertainty can create space for transformation - it's a both/and, not an either/or. 

Today, I'll celebrate with a banana split and engage #ImaginationWork to envision a collective future released from the material and rhetorical violence of the (white, western, rational) Cartesian divisions.  I'll be reevaluating my positionality - as both oppressed and oppressor - and how to actively deploy my privilege - as a white individual and educator - in service of antiracism and organizing efforts toward pragmatic collective change. 

As a queer person, and a queer person in the academy, I embrace the joy of a future a more welcoming than the past four years and welcome the conviction that it will take far more than four years to organize in favor of equity and racial justice, to work to decolonize the future to come. In our classrooms and most certainly beyond. 

Finally concluding thought, I turn once again to Freire (1970) and a renewed commitment to the personal and political struggle on behalf of the liberation: 

Concepts such as unity, organization, and struggle are immediately labeled as dangerous. In fact, of course, these concepts are dangerous - to the oppressors - for their realization is necessary to actions of liberation. (p. 141)

In the words of Vice-President Elect Kamala Harris - marking the election of the first woman and, importantly, the first Black and South Asian woman to hold the office:

It takes sacrifice. There is joy in it and there is progress.

Inhale. Exhale. Forward.

References:

Dannels, D. P. (2015). 8 essential questions teachers ask: A guidebook for communicating with students. New York: Oxford University Press.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Continuum.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge.

Palmer, P. J. (2007). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life. San Francisco: Wiley & Sons.