The Performative Act of Culture as Public Pedagogy

We are in drastic need of new methodologies and applications of public pedagogy. In an age where vulgarity and cruelty are taking hold of the public culture of the U.S., we must show all stakeholders the plurality of alternatives that exist. The first step must be to reinvigorate public space to once more be a space for critical and creative discourse, encounters, and interactions between community members who all have a stake in the quality of participation of their shared space. (Response to “Corporate Media and Larry Summers Team Up to Gut Public Education: Beyond Education for Illiteracy, Vulgarity and a Culture of Cruelty”)

My search also begins with the interplay between power and agency. To fully analyze and present my ideas, I want to reflect upon my personal context and present the public pedagogy of my cultural heritage. But, before I do this, I’d like to start with Foucault (as Simone suggested in her post) and Freire.

To start, I’d like to discuss the ways in which culture is defined within the texts aforementioned in the previous post. I stand upon the postulation that culture is not simply the “common ground” of everyday life, “culture is recognized by many advocates of cultural studies as both a site of contestation,” accommodation “and a site of utopian possibility” (60). Cultural studies stand on the side of a similar moralist education, and we can see that through the way they define the possibility of education’s idyllic mission for the community, which for me, is an essential tenet of Soka Education. But this viewpoint is deeply connected to a larger project for education; “expanding the possibilities of a democratic politics, the dynamics of resistance, and the capabilities for social agency” (60). These I see at the core of my personal praxes. But herein lays the question: how may we define educations that energize social agency, resistance and democratic politics? I believe that our clues rest in the work of Foucault and Freire.

Foucault is synonymous with ideas of power; he believed that knowledge and power were inseparable. From his perspective, knowledge was always interwoven through the context of power relations in a society. When Henry Giroux posits in “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals” that he believes “that pedagogy represents both a mode of cultural production and a type of cultural criticism that is essential for questioning the conditions under which knowledge is produced,” he is suggesting that pedagogy is cultural feedback and critical reflection on the way that power is enacted within relationships of culture (63). Looking now to Freire, we can appropriate his methodology into a Foucaultian perspective by affirming that the ontology of humanity is open-ended. Power, history, culture, and the like, attempt to regulate and discipline human ontology by assuming the interplay of dynamics between people. With problem-posing education as our guide, the purpose of pedagogy must be the unveiling of reality so that it may be confronted and transformed. Or stated in a different way, the practice of our pedagogy becomes a critical reflection on our interactions to help us redefine each of our encounters as the exercise of complete possibility. Shane Gunster, quoted by Giroux, insists that the main contribution cultural studies makes to pedagogy is “’that any kind of critical education must be rooted in the culture, experience, and knowledge that students bring to the classroom,’” (61) but what happens when we presuppose the need for public pedagogy? “Pedagogy is not simply about the social construction of knowledge, values, and experiences; it is also a performative practice embodied in the lived interactions among educators, audiences, texts, and institutional formations. Pedagogy, at its best, implied that learning takes place across a spectrum of social practices and settings” (61). And if pedagogy is displaced from the classroom, how must teacher-students change?

To search for part of this answer, I turn to my faith and culture. Carl Rogers proposed the foundation for a facilitative education, I believe that the culture of Rastafari adds onto that definition and turns the performative act of culture into public pedagogy. In many ways Rastafari can be seen through the lens of the Sacred Clown of the Heyoka, where a clown shows what is wrong with the ordinary way of doing things and shows how to do ordinary things the wrong way. The way that Rastas live is a public dialogical performance meant to unveil realities so that we can confront them as a community. Please forgive me for only bringing up these ideas without discussing evidence or investigation too thoroughly, but that’s what culture as public pedagogy looks like from the inside out. But using this brief extrapolation, I’d like to respond to the final question posed by Simone; ‘how can I now utilize the purpose and goals of education in my interactions with people outside of the classroom?’ How may we continue to teach outside of a ‘controlled classroom setting’ when we can only teach when people want to learn and out in the real-world people do not have to stay and listen to what we have to say? I return to the performance of culture as public pedagogy and the legacy of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. We must be the corrupter of words at all moments, subverting people’s realities through our very presence, through our questions; we must be doubt creeping into the back of staled perspectives and the catalyst for transforming them. We must continuously go under and consistently go over.