Teaching Activists for Social Change: Coming to Grips with Questions of Subjectivity and Domination
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56105/cjsae.v7i2.2230Abstract
Education for social change seemed to be a more straightforward endeavour when we thought only in terms of unitary subjects: Blacks in South Africa, women in the world, Francophones in Québec. Once we started filling in the categories so that we had such subjects as Black women, White women and women with disabilities, for example, and confronted multiple layers of oppression and privilege, we were faced with understanding the interrelationship between systems of domination and the construction of subjectivity. For radical educators, the challenge is to devise a curriculum to facilitate critical reflection where personal privilege meets political practice in these multiple locations. We have to build into our critical education projects a commitment to exploring the depths of discourse as that discourse constitutes us in and out of the classroom. In this article I describe the pedagogical steps in one such experiment: a Canadian Summer College for human rights activists to reflect critically on how power is organized in Canadian society and hence to gain a deeper understanding of their group's strategies for social change.
RésuméL'éducation à des fins de changement social semblait une entreprise relativement facile quand nous pensions seulement en termes simples: le Noirs en Afrique du Sud, les femmes dans le monde, les Francophones au Québec. Mais quand les catégories se sont complexifiées, nous donnant des femmes noirs, femmes handicapées et des femmes blanches, par exemple, et que nous avons dû confronter des communautés multiples, et donc des couches multiple d'oppression et de privilèges, il faut comprendre le rapport entre les systèmes de domination et la construction de la subjectivité. Pour les éducateurs critiques, le défi est de créer des programmes qui facilitent une réflexion critique où les privilèges personnels rencontrent la pratique politique, et qui tient compte de cette complexification des catégories. Nous devons bâtir nos projects éducatifs critiques en nous engageant à explorer les profondeurs d'un discours qui nous constitue à l'intérieur comme à l'extérieur de la salle de classe. Dans le présent article, je décris les étapes pédagogiques d'une telle expérience: un cours d'été canadien pour les militants des droits de la personne qui visait à les faire réfléchir de façon critique sur l'organisation du pouvoir dans la societé canadienne, et ainsi les amener à acquérir une compréhension plus profonde de leurs stratégies de changement social.
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