Article
A Nepantla Pedagogy Comparing Anzaldúa's and Bakhtin's Ideas for Pedagogical and Social Change
Critical Education
(2014)
Abstract
This paper presents a nepantlan pedagogy that would simultaneously deconstruct and construct
our societal discourses while complicating teachers’ and students’ understandings of the world.
This idea emerged from my experience as an elementary educator, working in linguistically,
culturally, and economically diverse schools, along with my endeavor to earn a doctorate degree
in education. It is heavily informed by the work of Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of nepantla and
Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideological becoming. I illustrate their respective ideas with biographies of
the theorists and review of their work to show how their ideas are similar albeit from radically
different contexts. I further illustrate their ideas through my personal classroom pedagogies that
called for mastery, absolute knowing, and perfection, and how I attempted a nepantla pedagogy
that stood contradictory to this.
Disciplines
Publication Date
May 15, 2014
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Citation Information
Stephanie Abraham. "A Nepantla Pedagogy Comparing Anzaldúa's and Bakhtin's Ideas for Pedagogical and Social Change" Critical Education Vol. 5 Iss. 5 (2014) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/stephanie-abraham/3/
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