Dialectical materialism: an alternative way of thinking and doing education alternatively

ABSTRACT

“Dialectic Materialism as a Method of Doing Education” - was written over 30 years ago by one of us – Huebner. Following an interesting dialogue we had over the last years, Dwayne suggested co-re-writing a revised piece to be published under both names. It explores at greater length the ideas that structured the initial piece and offers new avenues toward a better understanding of the importance of dialectical materialism as an alternative way to do education and curriculum. It dissects current dominant traditions of understanding education as undialectical; it explores how ‘undialecticality’ is intimately connected with the yoke of positivism and learning theories fostering what one of us have coined as curriculum epistemicide (Paraskeva, 2011) that colonializes the way we think and debate education, curriculum, and teacher preparation. It explores dialectical materialism as the best way to help educators accurately grasp multiple nexus that determine reality and profoundly impact our schools, teachers, and students’ daily lives. It advances how dialectical materialism provides the tools to engage with non-derivative approaches through an itinerant curriculum theory (ICT) as an alternative dialectical way of a decolonial reading of the word and the world.

KEYWORDS:

• Dialectical materialism
• itinerant curriculum theory (ICT)
• curriculum epistemicide
• non-derivative dialectical decoloniality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Italics original.

2. We make no claim to analyse gaps or controversies between Martin Heidegger and Karl Marx or between the contrasting phenomenological and Marxist veins. Nor do we intend to refute such distances and concomitantly claim a Heideggerian Marxist position (Feenberg, 2005).

3. Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time was originally published in Germany Sein und Zeit in 1927. We are drawing on the 1996 SUNY English translation done by Joan Stambaugh, a U.S. philosopher well known for Heidegger’s translations.

4. The cult of the English only dates back slavery, when “enslaved Africans were the first target of the Anglo-Saxons’ brutal restrictive language policies and rules in North America. Playing a critical role in the growth of the US economy” (Pac, 2012, p. 193; Stewart, 2005). Drawing on Baugh (1999) Pac (2012) argues that ‘Enslaved Africans were socially, economically, and culturally marginalized, forbidden to speak their native languages, and separated from their linguistic groups. Prohibited access to education and forced to communicate in English, enslaved Africans developed the African American Vernacular English (AAVE), which has been denigrated to an inferior status by the Anglo-Saxon elites’ (p. 193).

5. At a later stage Goldmann places Lukács in a different category. While he maintains Lukács is the most important philosophical thinker of the XX century, he argues: ‘I believe I do him a better justice in saying that he is a great essayist, and not a systematic thinker, that is a precursor, one who announces a system but does not construct it. Whilst still fully recognizant of the importance of his work, and of the enormous intellectual debt of gratitude that I owe him, I should hesitate today to put him on the same level as Kant, Hegel, and Marx’. See Goldmann, Lucien (Goldmann, 1971) Immanuel Kant. London: Humanities Press, p. 18.

6. The object of this article is not to examine and discuss affinities between Jean Piaget and Karl Marx. It may even be strange that such approximations stand out. However, the fact is that there are many studies that examine and defend clear approximations between these two approaches. For those who want to delve deeper into this issue, we highlight the works of Lucien Goldmann, Czeslaw Nowinski, Lawrence Paul Hemming and Adriano Oscar Dongo-Montoya, among others. See Goldmann, Lucien (Goldmann, 1970) Marxisme e Sciences Humaines. Paris: Gallimard; Nowinski, Czeslaw. (1967) Biologie, Theories du Developpement et Dialectique. In: Jean Piaget (Ed.) Logique et Connaissance Scientifique. Encyclopedie de la Pleiade, Paris: Gallimard, pp. 862–892; Hemming, Lawrence Paul (2013) Heidegger and Marx: A Productive Dialogue over the Language of Humanism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press; Dongo-Montoya, Adriano Oscar (Dongo-Montoya, 2018) Marx and Piaget: theoretical and epistemological approaches. Educação e Realidade, 43 (1), pp., 7–22; Buss, Allan, R. (1977) Piaget, Marx, and Buck-Morrs on Cognitive Development. Human Development, 20 (2), pp., 118–128; Stoltz, Tania (Stoltz, 2018) Conciousness in Piaget: Possibilities of Understanding. Psicologia: Reflexao e Critica, 31(30), pp., 1–9.

7. The idea of a ‘radical critical curriculum river’ was introduced by Paraskeva (2011) and relates to a particular group of curriculum theorists situated within the critical counter-hegemonic hemisphere and not to the endless platform of critical curriculum thought. Later, Paraskeva (2021) framed such ‘radical critical curriculum river’ as the ‘the generation of utopia’. See Paraskeva, João M. (Paraskeva, 2011) Conflicts in Curriculum Theory. Challenging Hegemonic Epistemologies. New York: Palgrave; Also, Paraskeva, João M. (Paraskeva, 2021) The Generation of Utopia. Interrogating the Current State of Critical Curriculum Theory. New York: Routledge.