Pedagogical Experiments: Course Analysis

During the course of this semester, I attended a significant scholars lecture series about Pedagogical experiments in mobilizing Social Justice with/out the Modern Subject. This talk was held by the Social Justice institute with Dr. Vanessa de Oliveria Andreotti who specializes in Canadian Research in Race, Inequalities and Global Change, Dr Denise Ferreira Da Silva who teachers at the GRSJ institute and Sharon Stein, a PhD student in the Educational Studies department. Three spectacular women with a very interesting lecture title. What I found captivating right off the bat was how they will come about mobilizing Social Justice “with/out” the modern subject. The emphasis on the second part of the lecture title was something I found very different
in comparison to similar areas I have studied. As a GRSJ major, I have not only learnt a lot in my classes about Pedagogical experiments but I have also attended talks on the subject. However, I was very intrigued to learn about the variation of pedagogical experiments that face extremely difficult paradoxes in social justice work carried out through modern institutions as well as subjectivities.

First of all, I find it very important when it is acknowledge at the beginning of a lecture or talk that we are gathered on the traditional ancestral unceded occupied territory of the Musqueam people.
These three women all have a shared vision and desire to put into sustained pedagogical practice. Sharon starts the talk with a Rationale which proves how it lead them to their course development. In the first five minutes of the talk, I was already given a convincing reason to why the course would be beneficial and interesting to a student like myself who studies critically in gender, race, sexuality and social justice. She states that the course they propose is designed to prepare students to examine and address the sources of intersectional violences. Entanglement is a term that is thoroughly used in the lecture and how entanglement in this pedagogical approach functions as a methodological tools that teaches the effects of intersectional violences by denaturalizing the separation that they presume. By teaching against violence, it makes two interconnected moments. Entanglement on one hand allows an approach that denaturalizes intersectional violence which in other words, means that entailment would simply make intersectional violence unnatural. They propose to draw student’s attentions to how desires are allocated. I like this approach because instead of imparting knowledge and info relating to what students desire, their approach teaches us how this allocation can lead to
existential poverty. The invitation is to “untrap the imaginary” she sates. An important quote that Sharon brings up in her speech is “Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the “real” world unless it first happens in the images in our heads” (Anzaldua, 1987, p.87). More specifically, the aim of this course is for students to develop a hyper self reflective approach in observing the struggles. One of my favourite quotes they spoke of as their goal of the course is for students “to learn to unlearn, to listen, to be disarmed and to start to imagine otherwise in our personal and professional practice”. Personally, I like to learn through a variety of ways and this course includes workshops, story telling and case studies. In our CSIS class, we touched upon polarities and polar opposites. Sharon states that we will be able to experiment with creation of a pedagogical space based on Audre Lord’s, sense of difference as a funds of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark. The course talks about facing the intersectional violences of modernity without the modern subject by emphasizing three main terms which are decentering, disarming and displacing.
The “gap” that Vanessa speaks about the pedagogical experiments shown do not represent or describe or creating reality, but mobilizing different relationships we can have with knowledge, language and with reality itself. The first pedagogical mapping shows theories of change which starts from the Soft Reform which I really appreciated. Vanessa says the Soft Reform is to make the same world a little bit better through personal transformation and individual action for example, recycling. In the Radical Reform however is to make the same world a lot better by including more people, voices and perspective in collective action. Instead of recycling, we are reducing. The last reform is called Beyond Reform which is to disinvest in the current unsustainable world and to walk with others into the possibility of new worlds which ultimately mens to imagine the impossible. I found this map very important because this represents the stories we can talk about though this linear process of knowledge. They adapt a new teaching style to the classroom where students are able to drive their own limits and much like the third stage of mapping one, to go beyond their limits and reform in a social, political and economic
sense.

Overall, I really enjoyed the lecture. What I did not find so appealing is when they stated that they book seminars and reading groups that go beyond the intellect and that we must demonstrate willingness to be challenged in our engagements as I think that statement terrifies the student more than it challenges them to engage and participate. However, the course is open to both undergraduates and graduates which would allow students at very different educational levels to be able to learn together.