Border Pedagogy as Postmodern Resistance

Dear Colleagues,

I've been reading material from Henry Giroux for many years as my experience and knowledge of being an adult educator matured. A great place for those unfamiliar with his writing: www.henryagiroux.com/

As I work to draft my thesis findings I have been encouraged to re-read Border Crossings: Cultural workers and the politics of education. For Giroux borders are not just physical, but political, philosophical and ideological, for example in the construction of the neo-liberal university and the commodification of learning and knowledge. Border crossing is about the role of educators shaping the capacity of others to know of the restraints placed upon them through for example, racist ideology. Thus we must cross the border between those restraints to understand, for example, the way in which the poor portrayal of black people across the media perpetuates racist assumptions and stereotypes.




Ultimately, the pedagogical approach here is the formation of a postmodern resistance. It's relevance to my research findings is the encouragement by Giroux of educators to work collaboratively. Thus, one of my over-arching arguments is a greater degree of inter-play between educators in the trade union and allied social movements around knowledge production and education.

This interplay should involved a dialogue which as Giroux states in the book:

Such a discourse must be informed by a postmodern concern with establishing the material and ideological conditions that allow multiple, specific, and heterogeneous ways of life to come into play as part of a border pedagogy of postmodern resistance. This points to the need for educators to prepare students for a type of citizenship that does not separate abstract rights from the realm of the everyday, and does not define community as the legitimate and unifying practice of a one-dimensional historical and cultural narrative. Postmodernism radicalizes the emancipator possibilities of teaching and learning as a part of a wider struggle for democratic public life and critical citizenship. It does this by refusing forms of knowledge and pedagogy wrapped in the legitimizing discourse of the sacred and the priestly; its rejecting universal reason as a foundation for human affairs; claiming that all narratives are partial; and performing a critical reading on all scientific, cultural, and social texts as historical and political constructions.

In Solidarity

Ian