Civic Pedagogy: A Mosaic of Cultural Impressions and Political Stances in the Classroom

Maria de Vasconcelos, English

My new friend, Shakala, told me and my husband a few days ago she had a present for us. When I, moved, asked, what kind of present? She, smiling with her big, beautiful eyes, responded, “a story–the story of my life.”

She is five years old.

I think I understood at that moment when and where creativity, narrative and feminism started.

I like to believe that my pedagogy involves some enlightenment based on Simone de Beauvoir’s lessons, my adventures of the mind and the heart laced with what students already know and have experienced too. It also derives from the understanding of how much our students rejoice in recognizing cultural landscapes that they know exist but have played only a small part in their education. That pedagogy includes some components of constructivism, particularly when students experience the world and reflect upon their experiences, building their own representations and incorporating new data into their preexisting knowledge. I have learned that often a cultural grounding is necessary in understanding the old and current paradigms; present ideological elements of neoliberalism often disparage genuine humanity, empathy, and collective modes of solving social and economic problems, as many of our students’ predicaments reveal. I also like to believe that instruction should be simple, organized, but rich in content and scope. This allows for various cultural exposures and students’ future professional choices.

It is good to listen to or read in class students’ testimonies about changing career paths. I rejoice when they say they will be doctors, lawyers, professors, etc. In this context, I have to recognize that readings and conversations about passages of the seminal book The Second Sex as well as Jean-Paul Sartre’s controversial concept of shame in Being and Nothingness are behind their decisions since they are often shared with the students, for shame in its physical and social vulnerability is one of the major themes that our students enjoy writing about. The topic of shame caused by repressed language(s) and identity/ies and absence of voices so well illuminated in Gloria Anzaldua’s essay, “To Tame a Wild Tongue” studied in our classes, along with Sherman Alexie’s “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me” and Maya Angelou’s “Graduation” has caused them to become favorites of our students. These authors display a variety of languages, painful personal stories, liberation, identity formation and success achieved in the mastery of the language of the oppressor. The ever-present components of feminism, with its denouncement of structural gender oppression and its total inequity, is one illustration of the larger theme of oppression that our students cherish as a favorite trope which I absorbed and introduced throughout the years into every syllabus. This complex theme guides my past and present conversations with my students, obviously adjusted to the current Zeitgeist. The issue of oppression and from time to time my allusions to Portuguese repression in my academic and social conversations also led our colleague, Andrew Levy, on behalf of the Faculty Forum Committee, to invite Phil Eggers and me to present at the last forum this April. Levy wrote in his email, “I would also love to hear your talk at the Robert Lapides Faculty Forum on your experience teaching poor children in the Codfish neighborhood of Lisbon. I’m confident that you could make insightful connections to your work at BMCC.” I thought to myself, yes, I can… I believe that Levy, among other thoughts, also had in mind the word oppression.

When neoliberalism emphasizes personal choices and industrious work as the road to success, and success as only an individual project, and yet there is a lack of really informed educational vision and ephemeral, poor education reforms plus ubiquity of sexism, misogyny, and violence against women and minorities still prevail, and social inequities such as food insecurity are rampant, it is a difficult balancing act to help our students sustain self-awareness of their oppressions, trying to conduct them to variegated, critical intellectual discourses while addressing the basic problems of their being part of a productive group in a classroom, developing academic working habits, and also making them aware of effective writing, grammar, and literary concepts when the discussion topics of racism, inequity are more urgent.

I recognize some paradoxical actions in my own instruction since I acknowledge the limited encouragement of our students by our socio-political system(s), and the system’s emphasis on their choices and lonely paths, but, at the same time, I feel we must help our students to boost their self-esteem, as well as their belief in themselves and that they can and will succeed. But for that to happen, learning academic discipline and academic work habits must be developed and enhanced. This motivation must happen in the collective of the classroom and with the support of their families and communities. When a few students call my attention to the fact that their families and environment discourage them from attending college and studying, we know that we, the instructors, have a difficult, complex function, but students like those certainly might become academically successful.

Moreover, I believe that human awareness is one of the first steps towards social and political change. In this frame, my classes often acquire aspects of happenings of consciousness-raising on topics like the premises of feminist thought and action. I accentuate the initial larger locus of feminism aiming at the freedom and support of all marginalized groups and individuals. The humane and intellectual perception in my classes is that from the very personal, we can arrive at the collective; all of us can discover the needs of our communities and the world, and act.  The obvious association with the fight against wars, World Wars I and II, the War in Vietnam and support of the Civil Rights Movement have created an imaginative climate of present possibility. The old favorites such as Bob Dylan’s, John Lennon’s, and Bob Marley’s lyrics are heard in class as well as students’ own choices of music; students’ understanding of their encapsulated moments of history through those lyrics moves them and influences them to write responses to those verses and social intervention. This call for social and political transformation resonates with Levy’s activism which led him to be curious about poverty in Portugal during the fascist regime of António de Oliveira Salazar, who having come to power under the Ditadura Nacional, called its regime the Estado Novo, a corporatist government that ruled Portugal from 1933 to 1974, leaving it with an illiteracy rate of 13%. It was during this regime that I volunteered to teach the destitute children of the unemployable in Lisbon. Despite the help of the food and agricultural organization of the United Nations, the children of the Codfish slum never ate a meal a day. It was a sad time like the one we experience here with recent attacks on our democracy; the face and behavior of hunger of those children in Portugal mirrored the face of hunger of some of our BMCC students throughout my tenure in our college. As we know, hunger prevents students from concentrating, resting, and learning.  According to the USDA Rural Development, more than 38 million people including 12 million children in the USA are food insecure. And in Portugal, over 250 thousand people suffer food insecurity as well.

The Brazilian, iconic Paulo Freire teaches us that the fundamental nature of education is to be narrative, which is true of my method of storytelling with the children of the Codfish neighborhood and my series of escalating assignments with BMCC students. I have learned that we can succeed with our students by creatively conveying to them the gems of our training and the tools for researching in the specialties of our disciplines. At BMCC, in my classes, we start with simple, enthusiastic personal narratives, then incorporate the perspective of the Other, and expand and revisit those stories by the aid of research exercises, later to be compared nationally and transnationally with other stories real or fictional, moving to higher research and finally to academic writing on those very same topics, now enlarged and moving from the private to the collective. Their final meta-thinking writing enacts a new level of critical posture. As bell hooks said in 1994, “The critical analysis of oppression has left out the complexity, voices, and lived experiences of individuals who have been severely impacted by injustice and oppression.” These thoughts go along with Freire’s denunciation of anti-dialogical actions, including conquest, manipulation, dividing, ruling, and cultural invasion instead of governments’ and individuals’ actions of unity, compassion, organizational and cultural synthesis. As our student N wrote in her essay on “Compassion” by Barbara Ascher, “Compassion is a complex and contentious subject matter to discuss because so many emotions are attached to the word. Ascher describes misery, hunger, and homelessness in the streets of our New York City…I feel overwhelmed because of my disquieting feelings connecting those to my personal experiences of hunger, homelessness, and depression. Yet, my expanded critical thinking, empathy, and strength developed in our class, now can be brought to my community organizations.”

Actions like this one will contribute to our fight against dehumanization. In remembering the wisdom of President Nelson Mandela, I still hear his speeches, in which he always conveyed that both oppressors and oppressed are deprived of their humanity: the oppressor is a prisoner of anger while the oppressed have no confidence in humanity. It seems this humanity is often stolen from our students by the ideological advocates of neoliberalism pretending that their political is our personal instead of vice versa. When de Beauvoir implicitly makes use of the statement “The Private is Political” in The Second Sex (1949), she has already addressed the issues of women’s invisibility, reproductive rights, ownership of the body, and abortion–rights which are under threat and are pressing issues for our students.

With conversations and research on these topics, students arrive to the conclusion that The Second Sex influenced the second and fourth waves of feminism. The Second Sex is still a foundational book for feminism. Moreover, they realize that if a woman is being abused by a male partner, a situation too often present in our classrooms, not only with our students but often their mothers, then societal oppression of women is an important factor in understanding and explaining this abuse. “The personal is political” indeed. Experience of abuse is pervasive in the narratives in my classrooms. Z writes on the Chat, “He was violent, often slapped my face, grabbed me by the hair, threw me on the floor, but the main abuse was an emotional one. The hateful words that could flow from his mouth were how my day started and ended. I am so relieved that I am at a healing spot.”

Unfortunately, Z’s healing spot is not represented in the stories we read in class. In Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” and “Desirée’s Baby,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Raymond Carver’s “A Small Good Thing,” and Luisa Coelho’s novella Monique, despite the representations of different races, nationalities, and social classes, all voices are subtly or openly suppressed, and the solution to their personal recurrent oppressions, from not having voices to the silenced voice, in addition, obviously, to no room for choices, the theme of intersectionality is still depicted in a romantic manner. Students face still idealized settings, often glamourized women figures, and unrealistic loves, and the resolution of women’s problems is either death, madness, disappearance, or isolation. Suffering and trauma connect well to the battered, abandoned, unskilled grandmas and mothers of the children of the Codfish slum and to many of those of our students. Fortunately, our students’ narratives often end not in suicide but some in apathy and depression, a result of their harsh realities. With the children of the Codfish slum, food and my warm embrace were the basis for a transformative miracle for students to focus on in the class just as some food and a balance of warmth, tolerance and yet clarity of guidelines and its demands are possibly the miracle in our classrooms at a time of stressed crisis.

These private experiences nowadays happily allow many students to take flight from the personal to political activism and to larger collective settings such as the participation of our students in CUNY protests, trips to Albany, Black Lives Matter demonstrations, the Women’s March in Washington uniting them with local, national, and international activism. The social media are allowing for communication and conjoined efforts such as presently the embracing of the craft of sewing masks. Digital platforms are allowing for creative collective movements on a local, national, and transnational scale. Examples of digital feminism have emerged in the past 12 years and more recently DIY Balaclava Masking. The occasion for personal stories, like previously quilting, is a personal form of resistance. This cultural feminism, which connects to the liberal and radical, but according to Hester Baer, paradoxically digital feminism, shows instability and precarity that according to her reflects “both the oppressive nature of neoliberalism and at the same time the possibilities it offers for new subjectivities and social formations.”  Having achieved some understanding of power, resistance, privileged dynamics, and the intersectionality of self-identity and group identity, my students and I have begun to research the 4^th feminist wave. I hope it will allow for much more just exercise of power and ethics, which will serve to benefit our students.

Works Cited

• Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Knopf, 1953.
• Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum, 1970.
• hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Philosophical Library, 1956.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’Être e le Néant. Editions Gallimard, Philosophical Library, 1943.

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