Tenets of Body-Soul Rooted Pedagogy: teaching for critical consciousness, nourished resistance, and healing

ABSTRACT

For marginalized communities, schooling is mired in social/bodily control, tracking, and cultural erasure circumscribing difference/culture as obstacles, as opposed to sites of wisdom, connectedness, and critical consciousness. Authors shape a transformative pedagogical framework across teacher education and partnering schools by utilizing spiritually embodied, land-based Chicana Feminist and Indigenous Epistemologies. We outline six tenets of Body-Soul Rooted Pedagogy which: 1) construct education politically, 2) enact schooling as decolonization/empowerment, 3) center epistemologies, multiliteracies of marginalized groups, 4) foster critical frameworks navigating oppression, 5) engage social action pedagogy, and 6) engender hope, well-being. Scholarship has implications for educational theory and practice at all levels.

KEYWORDS:

• Inequality/social exclusion in education
• language
• culture
• identity
• multiculturalism/multicultural education
• pedagogy
• teacher education

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Corrigendum

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We capitalize People(s) to name unity within a multiplicity of cultural groups while honoring distinctiveness.

2. Minoritized (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012) unmasks a discursive phenomenon circumscribing large groups of marginalized People(s) as minorities, irrespective of population. This is especially telling in a state like New Mexico where ‘minorities’ constitute the underserved numerical majority (U.S. Census BureCensus Bureau, 2016) and experience the lowest socioeconomic outcomes (New Mexico Fiscal Policy Project, 2011; U.S. Department of Education, 2016).

3. Although soul conjures European Imperialism’s conversion, domination, colonization, and attempted extinction of Indigenous Peoples (Cajete, 1994; Smith, 2012), we utilize soul as it resonates through Anzaldúa’s (1990, 2015) work – an entity which seeks not release from the material world but which finds life and meaning within the expanse of body and in relationship to ancestral lands. Soul is the symbiosis of flesh/land/spirit, a sacred chromosomal essence which both lives through and transcends humanity.

4. We recognize the limitations of translated language and that debate exists surrounding Western constructions of Indigenous epistemology. Indigenous knowledge is not a monolith, and the holders of this knowledge ‘often cannot categorize it in Eurocentric thought, partly because the process of categorization are not part of Indigenous thought’ (Battiste & Henderson, 2000, p. 35). We lean upon the work of our Navajo co-author, Shawn Secatero, as well as Indigenous scholars, Greg Cajete (1994) and Linda T. Smith (2012) who utilize ecological language of spirit and land to communicate epistemology.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation Awarded to the University of New Mexico’s College of Education.

Notes on contributors

Mia Angélica Sosa-Provencio

Dr. Mia Angélica Sosa-Provencio is bilingual, multigenerational inhabitant of New Mexico and Assistant Professor in the Department of Teacher Education, Educational Leadership, and Policy at the University of New Mexico.

Annmarie Sheahan

Annmarie L. Sheahan is a high school Language Arts teacher and current doctoral student in Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies at the University of New Mexico.

Shiv Desai

Dr. Shiv Desai is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Teacher Education, Educational Leadership, and Policy at the University of New Mexico.

Shawn Secatero

Dr. Shawn Secatero is a member of the Canoncito Band of Navajo and Assistant Professor in the Department of Teacher Education, Educational Leadership, and Policy at the University of New Mexico.