Writing from a Hopeful Heart

I believe this issue, Pedagogy of the Heart, is particularly timely. At every turn, there is crisis in the world today. I am aware that the word “world” blurs the local – from neighbourhoods to nations – into a modern concept of place. I am aware that the world is not really smaller or more intimately connected despite technological advances. On the global horizon, “that which globalizes also divides…”¹

The late Paul Freire reminds us that there is an absence of human solidarity within our global community. As a global citizen, I confess I often retreat into a detached distance in my local position as North American, academic, mother, as “only one person.” In Paulo Freire’s last essay, “A Sombra desta Mangueira” (translated as Under the Shade of this Mango Tree²), he takes us with him to a deliberate and “unquiet” solitude. In this local place of refuge under a mango tree, he tells us about his first life world as a child because “no one becomes a local from a universal position.”³ It is only afterwards that, following the sharing of the locality and memory of his childhood, Paulo Freire, political activist and critical pedagogue, talks resolutely about his identity as Brazilian, as Latin American, and as world citizen.

From my own unquiet solitude and in the final days of my current position as an administrator, I contemplate the role of the academy during times of crisis in the world. How might we, as a community across communities, engage, participate, contribute? I begin from a local position. Here, in the Centre for the Study of Curriculum and Instruction (CSCI), we are a relatively small community embedded within a Faculty of Education, within a research university, and within the academy at large. Although members of CSCI come from across the world to study and write – from Malawi, Maldives, Korea, Columbia, Estonia, and Pakistan – in our coming together, we have characteristics of a ‘local’ community. Over the past five years, our mandate has been to re-imagine academic space as community. Difference, found among languages, cultures, backgrounds, and academic disciplines, has been our greatest ally. We have valued passion, participation, and our own preoccupations at least as much as theoretical knowledge. We have begun to understand human solidarity and the words of Milton Santos: “That which is global divides; it is the local that allows for union.”⁴

In hindsight and with worldwide situations in sight, I believe that the lived curriculum enacted within our local academic community offers both hope and heart to our research endeavours. Words under a mango tree resonate. In the opening pages of his text, Paulo Freire warns the reader that his passion should in no way diminish that which he announces and denounces in the essay. He acknowledges, “I am a totality and not a dichotomy…I know with my entire body, with feelings, with passion, and also with reason.”⁵ His voice is brilliantly strong. Paulo Freire tells us, “Hope is an ontological requirement for human beings.”⁶ I wonder if he would agree that the heart is an epistemological one.

“The struggle for hope is permanent, and it becomes intensified when one realizes it is not a solitary struggle.”⁷

We hope this issue, Pedagogy of the Heart, invites you into the heart of the local.

Karen Meyer, Director
Centre for the Study of Curriculum & Instruction
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

Endnotes

¹ In the Preface by Ladislau Dowbar in: Freire, P. (1997). Pedagogy of the Heart. NY: Continuum Publishing.

² Ibid. p. 8.

³ Ibid. p. 39.

⁴ Ibid. page 27

⁵ Ibid, page 30

⁶ Ibid. page 44

⁷ Ibid. page 106