Assemblages of nonreproductive spaces and some decolonial possibilities of schooling

Over forty years ago Curriculum Inquiry published Jean Anyon’s (1981) “Social Class and School Knowledge.” Anyon (1981), influenced by contemporary theories of social reproduction and other curriculum scholarship, employed a Marxist class analysis to examine working, middle, affluent, and elite classes of schooling to understand how the standard curriculum reproduces itself in and through its subjects. What Anyon (1981) learned was that the contradictions within and between social groups reproduced ideology but also resisted its reproduction. Anyon (1981) called this resistance to ideological and class reproduction nonreproductive possibilities and knowledge that “facilitates fundamental transformation of ideologies and practices” (p. 31). Anyon’s (1981) foundational work meant that no longer could schooling be the great equalizer if more knowledge is not the answer to increasing economic access. Anyon’s work influenced generations of scholars to question the values and value of schooling from within its contradictions towards more equitable futures through social change, a tradition that Curriculum Inquiry remains invested in and that the articles in this issue continue to examine.

One recent work that draws briefly on Anyon’s (1981) work with the same spirit of interrogating schooling and social transformation, but from a decolonial ethic, is la paperson’s (2017) A Third University is Possible. For la paperson (2017), the university is a worlding or “world-making” (p. xiv) formation that consists of three entities. The first world university aims to actualize imperial colonial futures of a settled world. The second world university aims to humanize and include the world it had formerly excluded, but in the end, remains a colonial institution but will a gentle touch (i.e., liberal multiculturalism or settler reconciliation). Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari (1983), la paperson (2017) framed the third world university as a kind of desiring machine or a multiscalar assemblage driven by decolonial desires for Indigenous, Black, brown, and queer futures, the rematriation of land, and regenerating relationships broken through colonization and global, always racial, capitalism. Importantly, for la paperson (2017), colonial first and second world universities harbor anti- and decolonial resistance. For example, drawing on postcolonial thinker and novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, la paperson (2017) reminded readers that British colonial schooling in Kenya harbored to-be revolutionaries and the critical eye of Thiong’o himself. In other words, the first and second world colonial universities “carry decolonial riders … [with] contradictory desires” (la paperson, 2017, p. xvii) which constitutes a third university with decolonial possibility. To be clear, la paperson (2017) was not trying to save the neoliberal educational institutions from themselves but rather looking to other decolonizing assemblages and networks to plug into from within colonial institutions.

The spaces between these contradictory desires are those wherein both reproduction and nonreproduction can facilitate fundamental transformation toward a decolonial future. All four articles in this issue critique how pedagogical practices in formal education reproduce unjust social relations and systems and offer instances of nonreproduction for decolonial futures. First, Nicole Land, drawing on feminist science thinkers, remains suspicious of colonial developmentalism in early childhood education by reimagining what it means to do metabolisms. Second, Hanadi Shatara examines the emergence of an American-Palestinian teacher’s political consciousness using Anzaldúa’s (2007) notion of nepantla, or in-betweenness, to consider moments of cultural dissonance and border crossing. Next, Claudia Diera traces how students transform educational space intended to be marginalizing and violent to Latinx bodies into spaces of joy and belonging drawing on the spatial theories of Lefebvre (1991) and others. Finally, Paul William Eaton turns to James Baldwin’s writings and dialogues with white people and his use of specificity, confession, and accusation to halt the incorporation and neoliberalized reproduction of diversity work into hollow performances by white students. Together, the articles can be viewed as part of a multiscalar assemblage that is constitutive of a third university.

The first article to illustrate this relationship between reproduction and nonreproduction towards decolonial futures is Nicole Land’s “Thinking Metabolically with Shivering, Sweating, and Feminist Science Studies in Early Childhood Education.” Land asks the question, “What possibilities for doing bodies with children might we open toward if we take metabolism as a postdevelopmental pedagogical question in early childhood education?” (p. 9). This question immediately in the “post” of postdevelopmentalism invokes ideologies of human development premised on linear growth and an individual, autonomous, and rational Enlightenment subject. Land begins from a critique of the fields of early childhood education, scholarship, and practice. These fields are rife with curricula and pedagogies that begin from the child and its body as an object ensconced in a bio-naturalistic, linear, developmentalist trajectory from birth and dependence to adulthood and independence. Drawing on Burman (2016), Land is attentive to how the hegemony of developmentalism that informs education shapes, or reproduces, bodies and minds into upstanding citizen subjects. Land illustrates these relationships and their stakes when children are innocuously told to eat their food so they will grow big and strong. Within this statement is a desire for a colonial figure of the child who is “future-oriented, fit, [and] strong … who is the idealized subject of neoliberalism” (p. 12).

Land then extends her critique of developmentalism through feminist sciences and scholars such as Haraway, Barad, and Stenger. This tradition critiques the biosciences which understand metabolism at an organism level, typically human centered (or related to the understanding of humans i.e., animal studies), autonomic function abstracted from social, political, and cultural life. These influences leave Land suspicious of metabolism as something to be “anticipated, regulated, and pre-empted by an individual responsible for a body” (p. 20). Instead, drawing on Landecker (2019), Land views metabolisms as inclusive of complicated webs of life that extend to human and more-than-human worlds in their relevancy to early childhood education. This extension and complication breaches the boundaries of the individualized body, as well as makes the body in/vulnerable in relation to nutrients and toxins, such that metabolism can be both desirable and undesirable. Such an expansive reframing of metabolism to multiple metabolisms brings into focus the stakes of what it means to actively do and engage in metabolisms pedagogically by thinking about “What lives are made livable and disposable in our metabolic relations?” (p. 18).

To unpack the doing of metabolisms as a postdevelopmental pedagogical question, Land examines data from a collaborative project, Facetiming Common Worlds, to ask, amongst other lines of inquiry, “What possibilities for doing bodies—fats, muscles, sweating, and shivering—do our metabolic relations create and erase?” (p. 18). Here, Land examines what it means for children, educators, and researchers to share their relations to place across colonial geographies of an urban forest in British Columbia, Canada and an urban park in Melbourne, Australia using iPhones. Land thinks about the anticipatory doings or practices in each space, such as dressing warmly, wearing sunscreen, and finding shade, to mitigate shivering and sweating, activities the sciences deem to be undesirable or unsafe for bodies. Land argues that these precautions are tied up with what it means to be good educators/adults, beliefs that children are supposed to be protected from all discomfort, and an individualism that hones rationalism and personal responsibility above all else. These beliefs are in contradiction to the fact that all children do not fit the terms of innocence and therefore are not beneficiaries of protection. It is from within these contradictions that Land considers how the dropped phones by mittened hands are quickly recovered without break in conversation and the smears left by sweaty palms are quickly wiped away to produce metabolic relations of ignoring, minimizing, and obscuring. This leads Land to the question: What anti-colonial knowledges are ignored through these metabolic doings? Instead, Land dwells in the vulnerabilities of sweating and shivering that are mitigated by “good” educators who protect perennially innocent children to offer new interpretations and speculations of doing sweating and shivering. Here, Land links human and more-than-human worlds across molecular and continental colonial geographies in a spirit of anti-colonial practice, all of which is part of a decentered assemblage constitutive of the third university.

In the second article of this issue, “Critical Political Consciousness within Nepantla as Transformative: The Experiences and Pedagogy of a Palestinian World History Teacher,” Hanadi Shatara addresses nonreproductive decolonial possibilities of schooling by documenting and making sense of the political commitments of schoolteachers of colour in the USA who enact critical teaching-learning practices. She argues that attending to and analyzing their practices can reveal important insights about the relationship between experiences of marginalization, the development of political consciousness, and the practice of school education for social transformation. To illustrate this, Shatara presents a case study of the experiences of Layla (pseudonym), a Palestinian-American high school social studies teacher teaching in an affluent public school in New York City. In the case study, she discusses how the feelings of dissonance, displacement, and marginalization associated with living in the contemporary world as a Palestinian-American shaped both Layla’s self-identity and her practices as a schoolteacher.

Shatara draws upon the Chicana/Latina Feminist concept of nepantla to make sense of Layla’s experiences, which can also be thought of as a third space of nonreproduction. Formulated by Anzaldúa (2007), nepantla (a Nahuatl word meaning “in-between land”) refers to the borderland that exists where cultures, dominant, minority, and otherwise, meet, clash, and transform into something distinct. Shatara emphasizes pedagogies of neplantla in terms of constant displacement, shifting and changing positionality and worldviews, questioning dominant ideas and beliefs, and the naming, cultivating, and staying in moments of cultural dissonance. Applying this idea, she analyzes three ways in which Layla’s curricular and pedagogical choices embody nepantla, improvised visionary work borne from the frustration and discomfort of navigating across multiple socio-political and cultural spaces. First, Layla’s personal experiences of traveling across borders and witnessing settler colonialism in Palestine prompted her to become a critical educator resisting the implicit white supremacist and Eurocentric bases of mainstream school education in the USA. Second, her experiences of being tokenized as a Muslim Arab during her high school days (despite having a multi-ethnic, multi-religious family background) shaped her motivation to teach about world history, civilization, and culture without stereotyping and essentializing identities. Third, Shatara analyzes Layla’s experiences of teaching a majority white class about Islam and its cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic contributions. In this particular tension, Shatara describes the dissonance that arises when white students accuse Layla, an openly Arab Muslim Palestinian, of being biased because she does not teach the “other side” of Islam or mainstream Western narratives of terrorism associated with Islam. Here, Shatara describes how Layla pushed back by noting students’ silence on addressing the “other side” of Christianity. Shatara then unpacks how in subsequent years Layla limited positioning herself as Muslim and instead accessed whiteness by passing as white or walking “out of one culture into another” (Anzaldúa, 2007, p. 99) to dwell in the dissonances of nepantla between her desires and those of students. In this first world space of education, Shatara illustrates how Layla uses whiteness as a harbor to hide in plain sight to subvert institutional racism in national discourses.

A similar kind of transformation from within can be read in Claudia Diera’s article “Shaping Enjoyment and Belonging at School: The Spatial Perspectives and Practices of One Latina Student Leader.” In this project, Diera works to center the desires of a Latina student leader, Azul (pseudonym), and her space-making activities at a teacher-led pilot school in Los Angeles. While Diera’s spatial analytic is not directly decolonial, Azul’s community, subject to the racialization of space (Razack, 2002), can also be read as embroiled in racial capitalism and its symbiotic development alongside colonialism (Melamed, 2015). Ideologies of racial inferiority that manifest in racially segregated and economically impoverished spaces continue to be reproduced through schooling, which disciplines students into neoliberal subjects often through targeted and disproportionate violence on bodies of colour. However, Diera, also a Latina from Los Angeles, is attentive to how race, space, and Latinx lived experience come together from within the harbors of racist spaces to create new narratives that are not only resistive but desire centered.

The high school Azul attends is one of three small teacher-led pilot schools that share a larger facility. Some spaces are dedicated to each school, such as hallways to access classes, while others are shared, such as the welcome center, library, cafeteria, and the quad (a large central space defined by the encircling buildings). Drawing on spatial and curriculum theory, Diera understands space as socially produced, not an innocent and neutral Cartesian plane (Lefebvre, 1991) but rather a social and cultural product manifest through a kind of living curriculum of its inhabitants (Aoki, 1993). Diera theorizes spatial perspectives, or the meanings that young people ascribe to space, and spatial practices, or what they do within school space, to unpack Azul’s transformation of institutional space. Diera focuses on two spaces, in particular: the quad and the hallway. The intended and reproductive spaces of the quad and hallway are transitory spaces, again which are often violent toward students of colour. However, the hallway and quad are also spaces which students linger in, occupy, and ultimately transform into spaces of belonging. For example, Diera unpacks how, through Chicanx traditions such as rasquache (being resourceful with available means), Azul and peers transform the hallway from a transitory space to one that “evokes feelings of excitement among peers for being at school, and centers enjoyment as a possibility for schooling” (p. 62) which is historically loathsome and disintegrative to marginalized cultures and bodies. Again, colonial arrangements of reproductive space harbour possibilities for transformation, regeneration, and the remapping of meaning by young people who occupy space. In this way, the third university can be found in small contradictory spaces within larger colonial assemblages out of which the nonreproductive practices can emerge from the desires of historically marginalized subjects.

In the final article of this issue, “James Baldwin’s Curricular Voice: Interrogating Whiteness as Curriculum,” Paul William Eaton engages with conceptual and practical dilemmas that need to be resolved in order to disrupt the ways in which formal education in the USA reproduces social systems premised on colonial and neo-colonial notions of whiteness. Eaton reflects on his own diversity work and the performances of diversity, such as statements of commitment to equity, which white students, in particular, utilize to demonstrate their learning. These kinds of speech acts are “non-performatives” (Ahmed, 2012, p. 117) or statements that do not bring into effect that which is enunciated. Eaton frames these non-performative statements as abstract or non-specific statements about racism, inequality, and efforts of inclusion. These tendencies in anti-racist education, especially through approaches that focus on deconstructing “white privilege,” deploy abstractions about race and racism that obscure directly confronting whiteness. Effectively, non-performatives function to reproduce inequality by way of abstracting inequality in the form of platitudes, expressions of guilt, and public forms of mourning.

In turn, Eaton argues for practices of racial justice and anti-racist education that are specific in terms of persons, place, temporality, and action in order to dismantle whiteness as curriculum. To accomplish this, Eaton turns to four essays written by James Baldwin (“The White Problem”; “On Being White … And Other Lies”; “The White Man’s Guilt”; and “White Racism or World Community”), or a discursive third university where colonial and racial reproductive logics can be sidestepped. In these essays, Baldwin, a Black, gay man, directly interrogates white people in the USA about why they do not question their psycho-social system of reality which informs their perceptions of and investments in whiteness. These perceptions are rooted in historical amnesia and processes of mythologizing away the violences of white supremacy. Baldwin addresses white people, often in dialogue, to point out that white identity emerges from historical and psychological experiences of pain, fear, and terror and is sustained through violent carceral and capitalist systems. He exhorts them to let go of and transform these notions and systems to both end the violence unleashed on Black people in the USA and to reclaim their own morality and humanity.

Eaton argues that Baldwin’s analysis of whiteness in these essays is a curricular intervention. More specifically, Baldwin’s dialogues critique “whiteness as curriculum” (p. 75), a colonial and racial framework of knowledge and practices that were invented to order social systems and that are sustained through processes of teaching and learning. As a curricular intervention, Baldwin’s critique points to educational practices that can be pursued to generate alternative or non-reproductive curricula to support the creation of a racially just society. Eaton observes that the specificity, in contrast to the abstractions of non-performatives, of Baldwin’s critiques of whiteness in dialogue with whites offers a helpful indication for strategies that can be employed in anti-racist and racial justice education. Finally, Eaton offers two of Baldwin’s strategies to work towards non-reproductive curricula in the form of accusation and confession.

First, anti-racist education ought to centre practices of accusation that specifically call upon white people to interrogate their investments in the wider social curriculum of whiteness. In turn, these interrogations can facilitate collective experiences of confession where white people can name, unpack, and move past the ways in which they sustain and reproduce a false system of reality that emerges from conceptions of whiteness.

To add to Anyon’s (1981) binary of non/reproduction, non-reproduction is not the opposite of reproduction but rather sidesteps reproduction as “every non-reproduction is in some sense a reproduction by another means” (Jaquet, 2014, cited in Hurley, 2015, p. 156). These fractals of reproduction and non-reproduction can be thought of through la paperson’s (2017) builders of the third university, the scyborg. The scyborg, building on Haraway’s (2013) cyborg, is not an ontology or identity, but a technological reality in postmodern life. It is a partial being embedded in assemblages of machines such as the first, second, and third world universities. This composition and embeddedness of the scyborg of and in human and more-than-human systems (and where the s is inherited) also constitutes a form of agency that unfolds in and across all three universities. This agency is not an individualized capacity concept of agency but understood as the in-between or the relationships between assemblages and their parts. Subsequently, “Different scyborgs have different powers in shaping assemblages” (la paperson, 2017, p. 62) or put differently, scyborgs spark change and create yet another assemblage committed to decolonial futures in the form of the third university.

The scyborg scholars in this issue and the systems they are embedded in all work in the in-between of the first world schools to sidestep the reproduction of colonial and racial social orders. For example, Land, in-between and across assemblages, from the molecular to the continental, works to interrupt the reproduction of consolidated beliefs and practices of childhood as a bio-developmental object and subject by asking what it means to do metabolism, an otherwise passive autonomic mechanism in scientific discourse. This question leads Land to ask, “What lives are made livable and disposable in our metabolic relations?” (p. 18) and at another scale, “What possibilities for doing bodies—fats, muscles, sweating, and shivering—do our metabolic relations create and erase?” (p. 18). These erasures Land argues are tied up with what it means to be a good teacher which is hinged on racial and colonial ideological discourses of childhood development. These erasures are similar to Eaton’s identification of non-performatives that obfuscate critiques of racial inequality and ultimately reproduce racial injustice. Instead, Eaton, drawing on Baldwin, calls on the indeterminate processes of confession (self-interrogation) and accusation (critiques of whiteness) to sidestep a curricular project of whiteness toward another future. This side-stepping of colonial and racial social orders should not be confused with what it means to dwell in the discomfort of accusation or a critique of whiteness. Shatara for example does precisely this; she sidesteps by sitting in and accusing the manifestations of whiteness that desire a monstrous Muslim other. Similarly, Diera shows how Azul makes a third school nested in first and second world schools to attend to the desires of a predominantly Latinx population. Here, the hallway and quad are transformed from the colonial machine that desires Brown death to one that instead harbours joy, which can be read as a fundamental resistance to the project of curricular whiteness in schools.

The interventions, disruptions, and resistances that the authors in this issue perform or hope for in the assemblages of schooling they are part of, and what we have framed here as nonproductive knowledge, should also be understood as provisional. These critical knowledges grow out of specificity and a certain degree of intentionality, but oftentimes take shape and become recognizable as nonproductive knowledges after the fact of wanting and living a future that sidesteps white colonial futurities. Take again the example from Shatara in which attempts to focus on the contributions of Islam are met with resistance to white desires for the monstrous other. Shatara notes that this particular student was “lost” for the remainder of the semester, yet Layla builds on that experience to hide in a plain sight harbor of resistance and the experience becomes part of Layla’s conscientization. Here, still, after the fact of losing the intended subject of change (Layla’s student), this failure of education, this nonreproduction of whiteness, is reproduced as both assemblage and node that educators can plug into to strategize their own pedagogies. Curriculum Inquiry has tried and continues to support and plug into nonreproductive knowledges, and we ask how you and your networks do so as well.