Weaving Solidarity

First and foremost, I would like to say that there must be a larger shift in the “University of ______” institutions towards this learning kind of learning model. To put it in pretty practical terms, I feel like I am winding down my undergraduate frustrated and looking back on a memory of classroom environments at UBC that did not function nor were structured in the way of Geography 495. However, the important lesson learned is that in order for these sorts of pedagogies to exist, they must be supported and built from the grassroots. We as students have to voice how valuable they are! A very crucial revelation for me in the unwinding of my experience within the university classroom model is that classes encouraging collective spaces of learning, where the students model and run the classroom, are really the ones where the most truth and happiness is really found in learning. Something about our weekly sessions held lots of truth to me, in that there is no performing element to class participation in 495 like there is in so many other classes that encourage class participation. Our discussions seemed organic, and the space we created was built on personal emotions, individual cosmologies, memories, and ideologies. To put it straight, I feel like I have had to hold myself back so much in other classrooms and discussions in past terms, But not in the space we all created.

In the classic academic space, the learning circle reaches an end, at a three-quarter turn, where the analysis of something stops at a conclusion supposing to be some kind of more objective truth that was framed in your introduction as being more subjective. It’s like a personal conquista of learning. Bringing it home or into your life is never really what is important in the hegemonic academic analysis. Take for example a topic from our group presentation. I presented on the ‘82 debt crisis in Mexico and the practice of using debt as a social discipline in maintaining producer-consumer relations between the south and north in today’s world market capitalism. In the pedagogy of hegemony, the analysis would end here. However, in 495, we met Marla and Celia and learned about the social condition in Chiapas and their comercio justo cooperative in San Cristóbal. From this experience, I can further the conclusion and say, “okay, I see on a very human and emotional level how the global market economy of present is benefitting the few at the expense of the many.” Free of academic citation, we can find truth in the people that we meet.

What this 495 Pedagogy has achieved (from what I have experienced), thanks to our solidarity with our compañeras at Jolom Maya’etik, is a full circle of learning, wherein we are living what we are studying. The south-north link is achieved face-to-face, in the flesh. This is the praxis we talk so much about. And this is the Education we have to foster from the roots. More immediately, considering UBC has got deep pockets at the moment (before their own debt growth becomes unmanageable), demand it from the institution!