Teaching History for the World We Need
By Marlen Rosas
Haverford College
I don’t know it for certain, but my brief time at Haverford College has led me to gather that the decision to hire me was prompted at least in part by the campus-wide strike of Fall 2020, led by a group of sagacious BIPOC students. After taking part in a summer of Black Lives Matter protests that shook awake American society and empowered young people to lead a multi-racial, intergenerational movement against the forces that oppressed the most vulnerable in our society, Haverford students returned to campus ready to make their school a place of empowerment. Among students’ demands for institutional change were the addition of courses that centered decolonial praxis, that is, philosophy and action. Their privileged education in the distant suburbs of Philadelphia would no longer mean their isolation from integrated approaches to grassroots activism.
I wish I could say I came to Haverford equipped to be the perfect conduit for political community activism that our students yearn to and successfully pursue. Nevertheless, I have had the distinct honor to have my pedagogy be guided by the existing zeal for social justice that our impressive students bring to their studies. As a first-generation Latina PhD from a working-class immigrant family, I understand higher education as a space in which diversity has historically been under-prioritized, but where a greater commitment to inclusion and equity has the potential to make education a primary catalyst of social change. In my teaching, I aim to foster dialogue among students about how imbalances in access to education shape knowledge production. My approach to decolonizing higher education is therefore guided by the claim, as elaborated in the pedagogies of Paolo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) and bell hooks (Teaching to Transgress), that education must be geared towards liberation. The purpose of learning should be to make the world a more equitable, free place for all. That means that engaging critically in any debate affecting our society should include both theory and practice. Emancipatory education happens through reflection and action. Listening to people, collaborating, deciding on principles that will guide our collective efforts towards a more just society, are actions that are integral to a proactive and inclusive education.
In my own research, I deconstruct the historical archive to understand it as a pedagogical space that can be acted upon. In fact, my scholarship on political education projects in Ecuador would not have been possible without the work that Indigenous women did to contribute their voices to an archive of records that had previously excluded them. When Indigenous labor organizers constructed socialist schools in their communities, they did so to teach literacy in order to more effectively defend their rights as laborers, and to uphold their cultural traditions as the basis of their collective expertise and political authority. Moreover, activists recorded oral histories in which they presented themselves as leaders of a new historical paradigm: they made Indigenous knowledge integral to the advancement of leftist political discourses. They challenged the notion solidified by an exclusionary discourse that they could not understand nor participate in national politics with their local knowledge. Indigenous activists understood that their problems lay not only in economic factors, but significantly in the realm of knowledge that the dominant society deemed valuable.
Accordingly, I recognize that in teaching, the sources we regard as authoritative shape the histories we tell and the emancipatory futures to which we strive. My pedagogical practice thus focuses on developing students’ ability to critically analyze a variety of sources. I encourage students to think like historians by working in small groups to analyze and articulate an argument about a historical issue using a primary source of their choice. When I teach the Haitian Revolution, for example, they read a letter between two French officials that reveal their rhetorical construction of enslaved people’s acts of rebellion as mere violence. I ask my students, in denying slaves the intellectual capacity to organize politically, were French officials reflecting reality or articulating their own version of it? Engaging with historical events in this way allows students to leave the course better equipped to ask thoughtful, critical questions about sources they encounter, whether in another class or in the news they learn about every day.
When I taught Pedagogy of the Oppressed in my “Knowledge, Power, and the Production of History” seminar at Haverford last fall, the conversation turned unproductively to a student’s praising of Haverford’s liberal arts model. I listened with suppressed exasperation as Freire’s devastating critique of the education system’s design to uphold the power of the oppressor class, turned, in the student’s analysis, to a criticism of the lecture-style model of teaching, complete with an expression of gratitude for the dialogic nature of our small classrooms. Was this all that a student understood from Freire? Did they really think a liberal arts education was the revolutionary solution that he was offering to the contradiction between the oppressors and the oppressed? I knew my student could take on the challenge that these questions posed, so I asked him just that.
Fortunately, he and the other students took the opportunity to reflect more on Freire’s project, as well as on their expectations for and understanding of the limits of higher education. Another student mentioned the student strike, a topic that still causes the air in any room to stiffen when it is voiced. Haverford is not Freire’s solution, said this student of color. We are clearly in a privileged space, said a white student. Are we talking in circles? I asked. What do we do with this privileged space? What is your education for? What would Freire say? Praxis: continuous, simultaneous reflection and action. Freire doesn’t give a clear guide for his version of revolution, and we concluded that this was on purpose. This was because his project was to argue that whatever one’s definition of liberation is, it could only manifest through theory and practice. What will we do with our privileged education? Will we be on the side of the oppressed? Or will we revel in our privilege, count our lucky stars, defend our position by declaring that we worked hard to enter these halls? Will we work hard for the liberation of others, or only of ourselves?
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References
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, (Routledge, 1994).
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, (1968) (Penguin Books, 1996).
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As a first-generation Latina PhD from a working-class immigrant family, Marlen Rosas understands academia as a space in which diversity has historically been underprioritized, but where a greater commitment to inclusion and equity has the potential to make education a primary catalyst of social change. As a faculty member in the History Department at Haverford College, Marlen has been fortunate to have her engagement with DEI initiatives be guided by the existing activism of the college’s sagacious students. She’s been inspired by students who are vocal in their demands for institutional change that would enable their education to help them become better citizens of the world. By challenging students to reconsider the myth of objectivity in the pursuit of knowledge, by guiding student research, and encouraging student engagement in community activism, Marlen hopes to enrich the academic community with all who wish to contribute.
Institutional Context: Haverford College is a private liberal arts college outside Philadelphia founded on Quaker principles.
Snapshot Institutional Profile (for comparative purposes as part of the broader project described below):
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This entry is part of a Public Writing Project, Higher Education for the World We Need, co-edited by Eric Hartman, Shorna Allred, Jackline Oluoch-Aridi, Marisol Morales, and Ariana Huberman. Initial reflections in that writing project will be posted here, on the blog of the Community-based Global Learning Collaborative (The Collaborative). The Collaborative is a multi-institutional community of practice, network, and movement hosted in the Haverford College Center for Peace and Global Citizenship. The Collaborative advances ethical, critical, aspirationally decolonial community-based learning and research for more just, inclusive, sustainable communities.
Join us for the next Collaborative Summit, Collaboration for a Better World: Global Learning, Hope, and Justice, from November 8-10, 2024, at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA.