Learning to learn from the Other: subaltern life narrative, everyday classroom and critical pedagogy

Abstract

The critique of education in recent critical humanistic scholarship has pressed for everyday classroom to embrace critical pedagogy that enables the learner to understand, interrogate, and transform not only the discursive functioning of classroom teaching and learning practices but also of everyday life practices in the larger social world. When society is marred with issues of class, race, caste, gender, colour, and of many other dehumanizing (human) problems, the practice of education can no more remain uncritical of what is going on, why, and in whose interest. Drawing on the philosophy of education of Paulo Freire and Gayatri Spivak, especially their critical pedagogical engagement with the subaltern Other, this paper makes a case for how critical pedagogy informs, performs and transforms education in everyday classroom and, in the case of subaltern life narrative(s) as teaching/learning material, how it enables the learner(s) toward critical learning: learning to learn from the Other in a dialogic praxis. To address this, we present C. K. Janu’s life narrative Mother Forest: The Unfinished Story of C.K. Janu as a case study that documents the existential precarity of tribal lives in contemporary India.

Keywords:

• Critical pedagogy
• subaltern life narrative(s)
• other
• C. K. Janu
• Mother Forest
• critical learning

Notes

1. The course constitutes the canonical poets such as Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, and Eliot.

2. See Alison Flood’s piece.

3. Similar campaigns followed in the United Kingdom calling for fair representation of women and ethnic minorities in GCSE and A-levels curriculums. See Aftab Ali’s piece.

4. The campaign found place in the Yale Daily News, Slate, Guardian, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Le Monde, Fox News, New York Post, among others. See Department Chair’s note.

5. See Adriana Miele’s critical piece.

6. See Victor Wing’s article.

7. She draws the idea from Derrida’s notion of learning, living and responsibility.

8. For an overview of the emergence of the “memoir boom,” see the first chapter in Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith’s Human rights and narrated lives: The ethics of recognition.

9. This includes biography, autobiography, memoir, testimonio, diary, oral history, collaborative auto/biography, and other that recently find place in many general and specialized literature courses.

10. For instance, the struggle of working class people against exploitation, various ethnic and national liberation movements, women’s rights, gay rights, refugee rights, disability rights, and rights of indigenous people, environmental activism, among others.

11. “Adivasi” as an umbrella term is used to represent the tribal groups/Indigenous people in South Asia.