Cultural Strategies

The Value of Experiential Education

Our programs, activities and cultural strategies are inspired by a Latin American history of radical pedagogy associated with Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. In the Community Stations, education is understood as an emancipatory tool, a generative framework for increasing agency and capacity in contested zones and divided communities. In his classic statement, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire said that it was necessary “to know how to want.”[1] In conditions of deprivation, marginalization and injustice, the imagination “is often conditioned by a lack in our concrete reality.” In other words the horizons of expectation are constrained within the limits of experience. Critical pedagogy intends to emancipate the imagination of oppressed and marginalized people, and increase a sense of agency and community capacity. But this was not simply a matter of imposing expert knowledge from the top, of filling empty vessels. Freire saw teaching and learning as a process that unfolds through a dialectical convergence between the common-sense knowledge of communities and the specialized knowledge of educators, incrementally shaped into new knowledge through performance, practices, and critical dialogue.

[1] Paolo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2007.

Cartographies of Coexistence

An expanded visual cognition of place is essential to recognizing interdependencies, and reimagining possible futures for the border region.  In our “Cartographies of coexistence” exercise, youth on both sides of the border draw cognitive maps of the border region. Can a child in Tijuana draw her city’s main attributes, natural and artificial? Can she name and draw the shape and location of mountains, rivers, valleys, mesas, shores, etc.? Can a child in San Diego do the same for San Diego? Can each of them draw their immediate walled territory, and beyond the wall? How do we imagine the larger region, regardless of the political artifact that bisects those geographic features? By drawing and performing the information they draw, their imagination becomes “un-walled”, and they can. They gain consciousness of the meaning and value of their environmental context.

Transgressive Technologies

Of course, collaboration and “seeing anew” works best when the border is porous enough for people to move back and forth without danger or difficulty. It is still fairly easy (though time-consuming) for US citizens to cross into Tijuana and back into the United States. But increased militarization of the border wall in recent years has made it difficult and dangerous for residents of Tijuana to cross into the U.S. We have therefore developed a telecommunications platform with Opti-Portable units, that enable virtual transgression. Large monitor-consoles are installed in our Community Station sites, programmed with cameras and conventional web-based technologies like Skype and Google Hangout, that enable virtual cross-border dialogues, workshops, and performances with people who cannot or do not wish to cross the border physically. We also have a mobile trailer that enables nomadic access into otherwise inaccessible sites in the informal settlement in Tijuana.