The alternative is to affirm an anti-capitalist antiracist pedagogy – a way of being that centers de-commodified learning for the sake of learning to create class consciousness and work towards the revolution

This chapter is concerned with detailing what is meant by anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy at the level of the classroom. To accomplish this, I build on existent pedagogical theories of critical pedagogy (Freire, 2000), anti-oppressive education (Kumashiro, 2009), and culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2006a). Anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy constitutes a form of Freirean reinvention of these other critical approaches to teaching and learning. I expand on these pedagogical visions and work to detail how such commitments can be made into anticapitalist antiracist practice. These pedagogical theories cannot be neatly teased apart, but rather inform and react to one another. In other words, critical pedagogy overlaps with anti-oppressive education, and of course both speak to and overlap with culturally relevant pedagogy. My aim here is not to discuss the differences between these theories, but rather to bring them together so as to articulate a pedagogi- cal vision of anticapitalist antiracism. I have organized the next sections of this chapter into three segments: learning, curriculum, and consciousness. While of course these concepts are impossible to separate from one another completely, they will allow us to focus in on particular facets of justice work in classrooms and what makes an anticapitalist antiracist stance so powerful. Before proceeding, however, I need to make clear that what follows is not an account of what I do in the classroom. Nor is it a step-by-step guide, or a list of best practices. Instead, I offer a framework: a way of organizing conceptually the tasks of the anticapitalist antiracist teacher and the sociopolitical commitments necessary for such a practice. Thus, my orientation toward peda- gogy, and to writing in advocating a pedagogical position, must be nuanced by the objective conditions of teaching and learning. Joe Kincheloe (2008) reminds us, “There are as many brilliant forms of practice as there are brilliant practitioners” (p. 116). There is no single way of practicing anticapitalist antiracism, in the classroom or outside of it. As pedagogues we must understand ourselves, as both people and as educators, as political actors capable of acting on and transforming our worlds. And the truism that there is no one best way to do this creates openings we may never have even sought out, were we convinced there was something that could always work best if we could only figure out exactly what it was and how to do it. Following this, the caution from Kumashiro (2009) that “[n]o practice is always anti-oppressive” means that even for educators committed to anticapitalist antiracism and the inherently political nature of their work in classrooms, there are no methods one can employ in every possible situation that will always function on the side of justice (p. 3). We must be willing to reject lessons and activities that we have used before if those lessons and activities are no longer grounded in the lived reali- ties of our students and the wealth of experiences they bring with them into our classrooms (Freire, 2000). But this also opens up an endless number of possibilities: for if no practice is always-anti- oppressive the task of teaching in anticapitalist antiracist ways rep- resents an endless array of possible lessons and topics that one can never disengage with, or reduce to an unthinking reaction. This work can seem impossibly daunting at times, yet it is imperative that we see the inevitability of no practice always being anti-oppressive as an opening to newly imagined spaces, rather than disabling our abilities to make meaningful connections between our students and their/our world(s). Gloria Ladson-Bill- ings (2006a) addresses this when asked by her teacher education students why she will not simply explain to them “how to do” culturally relevant pedagogy. She says, Even if we could tell you how to do it, I would not want us to tell you how to do it. . . . The reason I would not tell you what to do is that you would probably do it. . . . Without any deep thought or critical analysis. You would do what I said regardless of the students in the classroom, their ages, their abilities, and their need for whatever it is I proposed. (p. 39) Ladson-Billings is demanding that her teacher education students see culturally relevant pedagogy (and for that matter critical peda- gogy and anti-oppressive education) not as something one does, but rather as something one is. We do not do critical pedagogy; we are critical in our engagement with the word and the world. Ladson-Billings (2006a) is arguing “for why ‘doing’ is less impor- tant than ‘being’. . . . Practicing culturally relevant pedagogy is one of the ways of ‘being’ that will inform ways of ‘doing’” (p. 41). An emphasis on being, then, does not see questions of doing fall by the wayside. I am not arguing here for a directionless pedagogy, nor arguing that we should never consider what we are doing in the classroom. Rather, I am following other critical scholars to argue for a new hierarchy of pedagogical reflection in which the question of “being” comes before the question of “doing.” Teachers are to consider first who they are being with and for their students, and then consider what they are doing in subordinate relation to whom they are being. For an Anticapitalist Antiracist Theory of Learning The famed American psychologist Carl Rogers (1989), while he makes for a rather odd way of beginning this section, offers us sev- eral crucial theories of learning and how particular kinds of learn- ing become valued or practiced more than others. His conclusions 152 A PEDAGOGY OF ANTICAPITALIST ANTIRACISM form the basis of the theory of learning in anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy. First, he writes, “My experience has been that I can- not teach another person how to teach. To attempt it is for me, in the long run futile” (p. 301). The irony in a self-identified teacher educator subscribing to this notion may trouble the reader, but if we continue with Rogers’s beliefs on learning, this point becomes more easily understood. Rogers’s next two conclusions address the linkage of learning and behavior, in which he states he is “only interested in learnings which significantly influence behavior” (p. 302). From the perspective of anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy, this commitment can be read as an attention to learning in ways that lend themselves to action on lived reality, rather than mere passive participation. This is central to Freire’s notions of the purpose of learning, that literacy for literacy’s sake is empty: the purpose of learning to read words is so that one is better able to read the world in critical and humanizing ways. Thus, while at first we might con- sider Rogers to be too much of a behaviorist, we find much the same commitment in Freire’s and other critical pedagogues’ work. Rogers goes on, writing that he has “come to feel that the only learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning” (p. 302). For Rogers, this is the kind of learning that “cannot be directly communicated,” the kind that if it were communicated would become a form of teaching that Rogers finds “absurd” (pp. 302–303)—absurd because the results are “inconsequential,” and Rogers cites Kierkegaard here as some- one else who found that merely communicating information to another is generally of little consequence to that other. This can be read, once again, in a Freirean way: so often, teaching represents the attempted transfer of knowledge the teacher possesses into the minds of learners. This, of course, is what Freire called the “bank- ing method” of education, but Rogers’s work helps us understand the Freirean critique more deeply. What Rogers is so troubled by is that his own knowledge that is of value to him is knowledge that he has self-appropriated, internalized, and personalized in such a way that it constitutes a part of who he is, what he does, his behavior, rather than a mere fact to be memorized. Thus, when Rogers says that teaching is inconsequential, he means that the communication of self-appropriated knowledge can only be impactful if it is seen as a knowledge-gathering process on the part of the learner. That is, if a young child asks an adult how to tie her shoes, and the adult then demonstrates and explains how he ties his own shoes, this is not an instance of banking education. Why? Because the agentic character of the learner is never undermined by the teacher: the learner wants to learn how to tie her shoes, thus making asking the question and watching the demonstration an active process of self-appropriated meaning making. Rogers goes on to say that he feels the results of his teaching too often stifle learning, in the self-appropriated way he believes carries the most meaning for the learner. He goes so far as to say that he no longer wishes to teach, only to learn, and in groups if possible. Once again, the Freirean tones should be apparent. For Freire (2000), one of the primary tasks of the teacher is to trouble the traditional power differential between teachers and learners. This does not mean, as has sometimes been assumed by readers of Freire who have not done enough work to uncover his meaning that the teacher merely pretends as though she is not in a posi- tion of relative power vis-à-vis her students. Rather, the teacher is tasked with moving to being on the side of her students, to posi- tioning herself as a learner in the act of teaching and, in radical solidarity with her students, working together to learn in ways that allow for humanization and transformation. Rogers wants us to go a step farther, to “do away with teaching. People would get together if they wanted to learn” (p. 303). But here, we can nuance Rogers somewhat to argue that what is most needed for teachers is that they stop thinking of themselves as the only teacher in a pedagogical site. Rather, teachers must see themselves as another learner, one who may well have read the particular course texts fifty times more than the other learners present, but still as some- one who is fundamentally seeking to learn in humanizing ways with others. Learning thus is the focus of any and all pedagogical activity, and as such we can concretize the common abstraction of being in solidarity with students into an active praxis: of a solidarity premised on the positionality of the learner. When a teacher has made up her mind that she has learned everything about a par- ticular subject, that teacher can almost never be in solidarity with her students, who by definition carry with them the notion that they are incomplete, unfinished. This is not to say that teachers and students must be learning the same thing at the same time, only that the fundamental attitude of both be as learners, as human beings with questions and curiosities about their world(s). Anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy entails a conception of learn- ing that cannot be reduced to the status of a commodity: nothing one learns should derive its primary value based on its exchange- ability. This means that learning cannot be primarily for job train- ing, or preparation for future work. It means, further, that all information be subjected to critical scrutiny on the part of the learner based on their lived experiences. Anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy refuses abuses of teacher power, not only based on com- mitments to redistributing power, but because of the centrality of learning to the pedagogical act. In Freire’s (1998) terms, “[T]here is no teaching without learning” (p. 29). Rather than privileging the teaching act, or making teaching into the mere delivery of infor- mation, teaching becomes fundamentally the process and practice of the facilitation of learning. If one stands and lectures and the students learn nothing, one is not teaching. Thus, anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy places learning above all other aims and commitments, but learning defined as the self- appropriation of knowledge through a critical engagement with one’s own lived experience. This means that authentic learning is never for an outside need, for economic participation, for creden- tializing, or for the will of others. We can test this rather humbly, if we just stop and think about something we know really well, and then ask ourselves how we came to know it really well. It is our own work to understand, to figure out, premised on genuine interest that produces knowledge we actually possess, what we have actually learned. Thus, the things we are most expert in are things we have largely learned ourselves or with others in a way that sought others’ support as part of our process of knowledge creation and meaning making. We all have favorite teachers, to be sure, but how often is it the case that someone tells of their favorite teacher by launching into a description of the best lesson they delivered? Virtually never. Rather, we most often describe our favorite teachers by the ways they made us feel. To put the former into more critical terms, we celebrate those teachers who created the conditions under which we were able to live out our curiosities and construct knowledge and meaning for ourselves. Not the teachers who taught us the most; the teachers who helped us learn the most. For an Anticapitalist Antiracist Theory of Curriculum On the first night of class, in the course Contemporary Approaches to Curriculum, I ask my students (practicing teachers) to come up with as many examples of what we mean by curriculum as they possibly can. The first few are usually the same every time: text- books, teacher guides, workbooks, or the more abstract but no less accurate “what we teach.” After a while, and with a short pause, someone usually opens up the floodgates with a concept such as “the hidden curriculum” or what we unintentionally teach—those hidden messages embedded in what we do in the classroom and in the texts we take up. In the end, the board is often filled up, to the point that I ask, “So, what isn’t curriculum?” The ensuing conver- sation usually ends with someone making a definitional statement, something along the lines of, “Curriculum is anything you learn from.” For anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy, this is precisely the case, and this opens up a number of possibilities for classroom praxis. We often make the mistake of thinking that the best made plans and course materials are what matter most for teaching. When we think of the work a teacher does outside of class to get ready, we most often think of grading student work and designing course assignments and activities. Yet, how often have we experienced the teacher who cannot help but share a story or anecdote with her students? What if we took just as seriously the anecdotal, the extra, of classroom curricula and the more formal, state standard- esque form? The insight that curriculum is anything we can learn from truly means anything, and this is precisely what the anti- capitalist antiracist pedagogue explodes in terms of course texts and activities. Students are able to bring in their own artifacts and experiences, to be discussed and examined. Students take up inter- esting and new problems, of their own invention, and work to solve challenges in cooperative solidarity. These tasks are enhanced exponentially when it is students’ own desires and experiences that are privileged in this process. The “funds of knowledge” (Gonzalez & Moll, 2002) that students bring with them to school every day must be understood as just as much a part of the curriculum as the formal textbook, scope and sequence, and standards. Why? Because students, as human beings, are always already learning from any number of curricular artifacts. Pretending that only that which is in the official curriculum is what is learned at school is ludicrous. The test is simple. Think of all the ways we learn how to carry ourselves, how to position our bodies, how to dress to achieve a certain affect, how we should wear our hair, and what kinds of foods we should be eating. There is no end to this list, because there is no limit to what we could possibly learn from the staggering array of curricula that we continually experience. This conception of curricula has a special importance in anti- capitalist antiracist pedagogy because it denies the privileged position of the formal curriculum its reified status as the “official knowledge” of a course (Apple, 2000). Curriculum in the formal sense is an exceptionally expensive commodity, and learning imag- ined as consumption is inevitable if we narrowly imagine all that people should (or will) learn as something that could be packaged, bought, and sold. There are, of course, challenges to such a com- mitment of making curriculum a means to rather than an end in itself, and we need to address these here. The first challenge is the role of standards and the academic disciplines as they have come to be practiced and protected in our current historical moment. While it may be surprising, Freire and other critical educa- tional theorists are most often supportive of standards or the aca- demic disciplines as the basis for work in schools. It is not the curriculum itself that makes or breaks a critical classroom, but rather how curricular materials are taken up, and with what limits in place. For Ladson-Billings (2006a), “[T]eachers engaged in cul- turally relevant pedagogy must be able to deconstruct, construct, and reconstruct the curriculum” (p. 32). By deconstruction, she means examining particular curricula for those elements that may well be oppressive and placing them in context, making the learn- ing of an event a form of critique, as we constantly compare our values and beliefs to practices and histories as they exist in formal curricula. Next, construction here means simply that teachers and students are both seen as able and capable of making curriculum, of naming the objects and subjects of their studies in powerful ways. Reconstruction, for Ladson-Billings, means putting things back together in new ways, taking both the “official knowledge” and the critical knowledge students have brought to bear on the curriculum to place it in context in ways that both enable students to have access to dominant theories and concepts while affirming their own lived experience. Lisa Delpit’s (2006) work around making the culture of power explicit to students from historically marginalized communities makes for a powerful example of Ladson-Billings’s theories of curriculum in practice. Delpit is clear that not engaging dominant modes of discourse, white ways of being and speaking, and capi- talist financial skills with students who do not experience these things at home is doing these students a profound disservice. Anti- capitalist antiracist pedagogy places every person in the context of our present historical reality, which is profoundly oppressive and dehumanizing. No amount of socially just pedagogy in one iso- lated classroom is going to transform white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (hooks, 1994). This means that while we must place an emphasis on those curricular artifacts and funds of knowledge that students bring with them into our classrooms, we also must engage the official curriculum. Failure to do this is a failure to support stu- dents in their self-appropriation of learning. But this does not have to be an either/or dilemma, as Ladson-Billings has demonstrated above. We engage the official curriculum in ways that privilege our own experiences and knowledges. We work within disciplinary boundaries because they offer unique lenses to ask different kinds of questions and different ways to respond. The point is this: cur- riculum cannot be viewed as an end in itself. Rather, curriculum is a means to, through learning. It is a resource, which we can learn from in order to develop anticapitalist antiracist consciousness. For an Anticapitalist Antiracist Theory of Consciousness In the work of Paulo Freire the aim of pedagogy is humaniza- tion, through liberation. We can read Freire as offering a peda- gogy of Marxism, and at the center of this pedagogy, as it was at the center for Marx, is a concern with developing the conscious- ness necessary for revolution, for transforming our oppressive reality. Conscientização, in Freire’s terms, critical consciousness of consciousness must be the aim for our learning. Ladson-Billings (1995) makes a case for a form of critical consciousness, what she calls sociopolitical consciousness, as a part of culturally relevant pedagogy. She writes, “The first thing teachers must do is educate themselves about both the local sociopolitical issues of their school community (e.g., school board policy, community events) and the larger sociopolitical issues (e.g., unemployment, healthcare, hous- ing) that impinge upon their students’ lives” (p. 37). Consciousness thus has the function here of working to connect the local and the universal, both what is immediately at hand and the structures, systems, and frames that inform and act on both individuals and groups. The need is for teachers to come to position themselves as conscious political actors, in an inherently political reality, and to draw connections between what they experience in their local contexts and how those experiences inform the larger context in which those experiences take place. For Marx, revolutionary consciousness is tied to an under- standing of one’s position in relation to the means of production. When workers understand that the owners of the means of pro- duction alienate and dehumanize in the pursuit of profits, that this is fundamentally what capitalism functions to do, they can then articulate their aims for liberation with the understanding that the present economic system denies them their capacity to be fully human. For anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy, this form of revolutionary consciousness is the product of learning and critical engagement with curricula, as outlined above. This consciousness is premised on the ability to see, in both local and global contexts, the present realities of white supremacy and the ways in which the logics of white supremacy function to legitimate capitalist exploita- tion. It is this ability to see that consciousness offers, not merely an abstract principle, but rather a self-appropriated ability to read both the word and the world in critical ways. Seeing the connec- tion between local manifestations of white supremacy and global manifestations of capitalist abuse as a part of the same overarch- ing system of signs and meaning is the principle aim of anticapi- talist antiracist pedagogy. Importantly, however, this cannot be thought of as merely an intellectual skill, and, further, cannot be learned through banking methods. These last two points need to be explained in further detail. Consciousness, and critical consciousness in particular, should be thought of less as an ability, and more of a way of being in the world. We can make rules for finding racism in practice, and we might learn those rules and then always be successful at identifying the racist connotations of a particular phrase or practice. But merely being able to name these processes offers us nothing. Rather, being able to name these processes while understanding their historical, social, and political dimension and the ways in which race and racism intersect in myriad other systems and forms of oppression offers us the ability to not only understand racism, but to orient our lives in opposition to it. This orientation, this way of being, carries with it the profound capacity to act on oppressive realities because it refuses to take any system or reality as an inevitability. That is, no creation by human beings is devoid of context, and if we understand capitalism, positivism, and instrumental reason as unnatural, as made by human beings, we can position ourselves in relation to these systems in ways that enable us to see cracks in the edifice. Consciousness of our oppressive order and the ways in which it has been created for particular aims is the precondition for radical solidarity. There is a tendency, perhaps, to seek to accelerate the conscious- ness of others through banking methods. Anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy rejects the idea that one can acquire critical conscious- ness as if it were merely a technology, something to be used toward particular ends, rather than a practice. Freire (2000) warns us, “In the revolutionary process, the leaders cannot utilize the banking method as an interim measure, justified on grounds of expediency, with the intention of later behaving in a genuinely revolutionary fashion” (p. 86). Rather, the revolutionary process itself must be dialogical, in Freire’s terms, from beginning to end. The process of coming to consciousness is one that must be self-appropriated for it to have any actual impact or bearing on individuals in their daily experience. This means that, rather than banking notions of white supremacy and capitalist exploitation, the learner must come to see these systems as they impact on their actual lives. We cannot treat oppression solely in abstract terms, as though the purpose of our work for justice was to elaborate a metaphysics of oppression. The purpose is, rather, to abolish the oppressive systems as such, to use the capacity for critical reflection and action to usher forth a new reality premised on justice rather than the accumulation of wealth and power. Anticapitalist antiracist consciousness is thus a practice of liv- ing, a way of being in relation to others in the world. This con- sciousness is never finished; the end of capitalism will not create the end of the need for critical consciousness. Rather, it is only through the practice of critical consciousness that a more just real- ity is possible. This is the optimism inherent in the work of both Marx and Freire, though we should be clear that neither thinker should be thought of as utopian.1 To claim that a more just reality is possible is not utopian; it represents the conscious desires of bil- lions of men and women to live worthy lives. There will never be a time, even after capitalism is no more, when the need for critical scrutiny, for placing our immediate reality in context, is no longer necessary. It is only through the cultivation of critical consciousness that a more just reality can ever come about, but this does not mean that there will not be disagreements on how we ought to organize our lives. Marx is famously ambiguous about what he thinks the postcapitalist world will look like, because it will be up to the women and men of the world to dictate what their lives are to be and how best to organize society for achieving justice. These are not future people, but rather existing human beings, in the world now. Thus, anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy holds out no vision for the contents of daily life in a world where white supremacy and capitalism have ceased to be the dominant ideological formations of the globe. Rather, what is necessary is the capacity for creating such a society—a way of being that will enable both the revolution and postrevolutionary existence to be premised on the same aims of humanization and critical interrogation of the ways in which power and wealth function in human groups. Consciousness is not a preparation for revolutionary action; it is the lifeblood of revolutionary action. Anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy resists any claims for learning premised on future needs because those needs are not those elaborated by learners them- selves, but rather by the oppressive system learners find themselves in. Education as preparation for later employment can only func- tion on the side of capitalism and the existing global order. Dewey (1897/2010) was critical of the idea of education as preparation, and, rather, sought to make democracy a way of being in much the same way as I am describing anticapitalist antiracist consciousness as a way of being. For Dewey, education is always already happen- ing, human beings are always making meaning from their experi- ences, we are always learning. To behave as though learning was something that only happened in school, and then only at certain times, and with only certain predetermined subjects or facts, is to deny what it means fundamentally to be human. Thus, anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy as a practice of being must transcend the space of the classroom in order to fully realize itself in consciousness. Anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy is not a technology, a tool to be used, but rather a way of being and living. And while this may seem overly daunting, we already have prac- tices embedded in our present capitalist order that make this more easily imaginable. In the United States, we commonly define our- selves based on our occupations. “What do you do?”—to return to the example raised in earlier chapters—is perhaps the most com- mon question asked when two adults meet for the first time. When we answer, “I’m a teacher,” we often mean that that is what we do for employment. What is called for here, in an anticapitalist antira- cist consciousness, is that we never stop acting as though “what we do” is not “what we are doing” and thus, “who we are.” The call then, is to live our pedagogies, not merely in the classroom, but in any and all social spaces where human beings are creating meaning for themselves. This process never stops, and thus consciousness never stops, but rather leads to more consciousness, to conscious- ness of consciousness, and thus to revolutionary action.