Document Type

Article

Version Deposited

Published Version

Publication Date

5-15-2014

Publication Title

Critical Education

Abstract

This paper presents a nepantlan pedagogy that would simultaneously deconstruct and construct our societal discourses while complicating teachers’ and students’ understandings of the world. This idea emerged from my experience as an elementary educator, working in linguistically, culturally, and economically diverse schools, along with my endeavor to earn a doctorate degree in education. It is heavily informed by the work of Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of nepantla and Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideological becoming. I illustrate their respective ideas with biographies of the theorists and review of their work to show how their ideas are similar albeit from radically different contexts. I further illustrate their ideas through my personal classroom pedagogies that called for mastery, absolute knowing, and perfection, and how I attempted a nepantla pedagogy that stood contradictory to this.

Comments

Readers are free to copy, display, and distribute this article, as long as the work is attributed to the author(s) and Critical Education, it is distributed for non-commercial purposes only, and no alteration or transformation is made in the work. More details of this Creative Commons license are available from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. All other uses must be approved by the author(s) or Critical Education. Critical Education is published by the Institute for Critical Educational Studies and housed at the University of British Columbia. Articles are indexed by EBSCO Education Research Complete and Directory of Open Access Journals.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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