ABSTRACT
The cynicism that embraces the notion that changes are impossible or too costly (Freire, 1995/2004) is a constant in our battlegrounds: academia, classrooms, scholarship, and praxis of everyday life. “What can we (intellectuals) do to help people in the real world?” is a question we face quite often from colleagues and students alike. We often pause for a moment before this question, not only because the answer requires time and sustained engagement from the part of the questioner, but mostly because our reaction to the basic assumptions that there is a “real world” out there and that the classroom is not part of it require deeper dialogue, as all ideas of ever inclusive social change do. “Wait a minute here, are you saying that ‘this’ classroom is not real? Or, are you implying that a classroom is somehow separated from the world we inhabit?” As betweener (hybrid, mutt, in-between, either/or) instructors inside the always personal, political, pedagogical, and performative space of the classroom, we reject the old yet pervasive binary narratives of reality from old and new colonizing constructions. And neoliberalism, especially in its public mask, controls the new colonizing constructions of the world order.
