Border Pedagogy and the Politics of Postmodernism

In what follows, I want to advance most useful and transformative aspects of border pedagogy by situating it within those broader cultural and political considerations that are beginning to redefine our traditional view of community, language, space, and possibility. Border pedagogy is attentive to developing a democratic public philosophy that respects notion of difference as part of a common struggle to extend quality of public life. The notion of border pedagogy presupposes not merely an acknowledgment of shifting borders that both undermine and reterritorialize different configurations of culture, power and knowledge; it also links notions of schooling and education to a more substantive struggle for a radical democratic society. It is a pedagogy that attempts to link an emancipatory notion of modernism with a postmodernism of resistance. What does this suggest for redefining radical educational theory and practice as a form of border pedagogy? There are a number of theoretical considerations that need to be unpacked in reference to this question. First, category of border signals in metaphorical and literal sense how power is inscribed differently on body, culture, history, space, land, and psyche. Borders elicit a recognition of those epistemological, political, cultural, and social boundaries that define the places that are safe and unsafe, [that] distinguish us from them(Anzalduai, 1987, p. 3). Borders call into question language of history, power, and difference. The category of border also prefigures cultural criticism and pedagogical processes as a form of border crossing. That is, it signals forms of transgression in which existing borders forged in domination can be challenged and redefined. Second, it also speaks to need to create pedagogical conditions in which students become border crossers in order