Teaching as a Healing Craft: Decolonizing the Classroom and Creating Spaces of Hopeful Resistance through Chicano-Indigenous Pedagogical Praxis

Abstract

This paper builds upon the edict for self-determination in El Plan de Santa Barbara: a Chicano plan for higher education (1969), which calls for “strategic use of education,” by placing value on needs of the community (La Causa, p. 9). For me, this passage translates into valuing needs of community-college students entering my classes and life. I believe it is my obligation, as an educator, to problematize ways in which knowledge has been defined, framed, presented, and researched by dominant ideologies informing institutions of learning at all levels. In essence, this work is a meditation allowing readers to witness how I am weaving together various strands of myself including the personal, emotional, professional, intellectual, and spiritual. It captures how my participant-observation of MAS-Tucson educators, while describing their use of barrio pedagogy and critically compassionate intellectualism, has been enhanced by my re-reading of Elena Avila’s (2000) Woman who Glows in the Dark: A Curandera Reveals Traditional Aztec Secrets of Physical and Spiritual Health. This paper represents an ongoing epistemological exercise about my own teaching and scholarship, resulting in an emergence of my own modality as an apprenticing practitioner of Chicano-Indigenous pedagogy.