Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Nora
Sternfeld
Learning
Unlearning
First Blockade
Unlearning Learning
Learning is both a
discursive and
performative praxis
and turn power relations around. Antonio
Gramsci sums up the relationship
between power and education6 as every
relationship of hegemony is necessarily
an educational relationship [].7
Gramsci, an organic intellectual and part
of the Italian Communist Party since the
1930s, clearly states that the fact that
power relations are the way that they are
cannot solely be attributed to economics
Second Blockade
Learning Unlearning
From both a teaching and learning
perspective, engaging with power
relations in order to change them is,
as Gayatri Spivak puts it, an equally
unglamorous and necessary task for
current critical educational practices.
Spivak considers unlearning from
the perspective of postcolonial theory,
updating Gramscis theory of hegemony.
For her, unlearning describes the
process of actively interrogating the
powerful divisions and always-already
known power relationsspecifically
from the site of the periphery.15
Concerning this, Mara do Mar Castro
Varela and Nikita Dhawan write:
Post-colonial
pedagogy
problematises
the
learned
ignorance and complicity with
imperialist and nationalist projects
implicit in most educational
programs. This, according to
22 Ibid.
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