The Yoga of Critical Discourse

Reflection on Practice: Social Theories of Education

In a social theories graduate seminar, I paired our reading of Freire’s (2006) Teachers as Cultural Workers with yoga poses and breathing exercises. For a model of reflection on practice, we focused on Freire’s “epistemological knowing”—holding one’s teaching practice apart as an object of study. Through the addition of yoga, we found that we could examine the body and mind in this way, and thereby examine the self who teaches. The physical poses of a hatha practice were originally meant to cause discomfort in the body, to take the mind away from external thoughts. This is not what most people would immediately think of as self-loving behavior. However, in pressing the body and cycling the breath, the life force is felt and one recognizes their participation in the continuous flow of life. This is the body-based experience of pleasure and pain that evokes eros, “that which creates and maintains systems of collective human bonding” (Pryer, 2001, p. 134). And eros cannot be learned secondhand; it must be experienced. Though he does not mention love as eros in Teachers as Cultural Workers, in earlier works Freire places love as the foundation of his pedagogy and recognizes purposeful learning as an essentially pleasurable activity. Certainly, coming to critical consciousness (conscientization) often involves pain. Freire acknowledged love/eros as that which keeps human beings connected with one another and which drives scholars to chase ideas. He recognized that a life-loving personality is created through humanizing education. And, significantly, he also recognized the opposite, the necrophilic personality, which critical scholars identify as the probable product of current neoliberal education reform.

In another social theories course (as a guest teacher at another university), I taught yoga exercises for the classroom, K–12 and beyond, as an example of counternarrative to the prevailing school reform agenda. After a week spent learning about and discussing, for the first time in their lives, the nefarious collusion of neoliberalism and neoconservatism in controlling and focusing the national education agenda toward ever narrowing ends, students are bound to ask: What can we do against this?! It is quite satisfying to have something to suggest and demonstrate that students can try, and experience the benefits from, immediately.

In explaining my pedagogy, and in periodically interrogating my pedagogy, I say to students:

I am here to offer you several discourses, to model positions, to talk you through the logic of those positions, to create some discomfort in your taken for granted assumptions, and to introduce you to the language of critique. By my rough estimate at least 1/5 of all professional educators will use this kind of language in their scholarship, teaching and policy work. Many more will, at some point, want to use critical scholarship and to do that, they will have to understand it. Beyond the requirements of the course, which are as much as possible created to allow for expression of individual learning and which require engagement in intellectual, emotional and personal ways, I am not interested in you adopting any of the positions that I model. I am inviting you into a language –the discourse of social theories. I am going to model how to use this language in both academic vocabulary and (accessible) common parlance. You could leave here thinking ‘I hate this; I don’t want to know this or use this’ and never bother with it again. But if you choose not to engage with this language and its concerns, it won’t be because no one gave you access to it.

This has never failed to make students smile and nod. And once a person learns how to do it, practicing social theory does feel empowering; it opens new views on social realities. They may not be pleasant, but these views do carry some serious satisfaction. And the rhetorical tools that are made of social theories are arguably the only things that can question such politically privileged policies as No Child Left Behind. I share mindful classroom practices and teach the hatha yoga class with the same intention to invite students into a critical discourse with themselves and their beliefs about themselves, others, and the world. And like participating expertly in a discussion of social theory, practicing yoga is immediately personally satisfying and empowering.

Reflections on Practice: Philosophy of Education

I have also taught basic mindful meditation—breathing and guided visualization—in a graduate-level philosophy of education course to compliment a discussion on non-Western philosophies and their influence on K–12 and higher education. Some students, in turn, tried some of the exercises in their own elementary and secondary classrooms. Some also tried a few breathing exercises for themselves during times of stress, both personal and academic. In Fall 2012, around the time we were reading selections from Unfolding Bodymind (Hockings, Haskell, & Linds, 2001), I saw social psychologist Cuddy (2012) on Ted Talks. She was sharing what she learned from her research on the effects of nonverbal communication—body positioning—on students at the Harvard Business School. She was concerned about how some students just could not/would not participate in classes even though it is often a requirement of passing their courses. She also observed that, in most cases, those nonparticipants were women. She started to examine the nonparticipants’ behavior, noticing that they would shrink their bodies and fold their limbs over their torsos in much the same way that apes do when showing submission. This pose communicates the same thing to other humans, but it also effects interesting and measurable physiological and psychological changes in the poser. In clinical tests, students who adopted such submissive poses expressed feeling of vulnerability and a lack of confidence. They also showed a decrease in testosterone and an increase in cortisol. They were actually stressing themselves out and defeating any effort to prepare for performance! Cuddy explains these phenomena by saying “Our bodies change our minds, and our minds can change our behavior, and our behavior can change our outcomes.” Indeed, those of us who practice mind–body techniques know this. Cognitive neuroscientists know this in a different way from clinical studies of longtime meditators. Cardiologists know this from working with patients through Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programs. Cuddy’s point is that we should think of our body positioning as nonverbal communication directed at ourselves. Like so many people who adopt contemplative practices, Cuddy has a story of injury and trauma that was resolved through such practices. We who have experienced such transformation carry an often suspect tinge of the converted. I try to keep this in check in my teaching…although….

Foucault wrote that self-constitution—creating the self in opposition to dominant discourses about the self (e.g., a good teacher is a creative, autonomous professional not an obedient technician)—is a kind of conversion. In The Hermeneutics of the Subject (Foucault, Gros, Ewald, & Fontana, 2005, pp. 10–11), care of the self is explained as “a number of actions exercised on the self by the self…by which one takes responsibility for oneself and by which one changes, purifies, transforms and transfigures oneself.” Recreating oneself is just one of these actions, a technology of catharsis and self-confession that requires a specific type of “conversion.” This conversion is a “return to the self,” a “turning around toward oneself” (p. 208), which involves taking stock of oneself, and even more fundamentally knowing oneself “in the form of recollection” (p. 210). Foucault suggests that this is a philosophical conversion (like that of a master freeing his slave, p. 213), rather than a religious conversion, that requires “being reborn in a different self which has nothing to do with the earlier self” (p. 211). However, this conversion does involve a break “with what surrounds the self so that it is no longer enslaved, dependent, and constrained” (p. 212). Perhaps, conversion is not such a bad word in referring to transformative practices.

Cuddy’s (2012) work reminds me that those of us who teach mindful practices are empowering people in a concrete way and this is why it can revitalize (must be included somehow in) the teaching and learning of critical discourses, which are for the novice, and can be for the initiated all too often, quite abstract. We yoga educators are not alluding to metaphors of oppression and liberation. We go beyond encouraging, inspiring, or facilitating. We are actually showing people how to activate power in their bodies and in their minds, in their relationships, their societies, and their world. And we now enjoy the legitimizing support of scientific based research (see, e.g., National Institutes of Health, 2012). Mind–body practices, specifically mindful meditation and yoga, have been judged “effective” by quasi-experimental studies, have been found to be significant in producing positive change by statistical test and, are clearly helpful in reducing stress and increasing focus and well-being by self-report and observation (see, e.g., Ross & Thomas, 2010). Like many classical critical theories, yoga and other mind–body practices offer a counternarrative to science but not against science. These practices add to the stories that science can tell us about our minds, our bodies, and our societies.

Reflections on Practice: Hatha Yoga

I also teach a hatha yoga class that is free to the campus community. I root the practice in participants’ immediate needs, which typically involves breathing deeply, staying rooted in the present, letting our minds slow, and moving some blood into our hunched shoulders. It is quite a lovely thing—a hard to describe in words thing—to have a space to practice self-love and stress reduction in a place of business, deadlines, and on-task performance. This is another classroom space where faculty, staff, and students can share community (sangha) and see one another, not as the institutional roles that we occupy but as the Levinasian “Other who stands before us.” In offering verbal cues to bring awareness to the breath or to sink the shoulders back and down, I am asking students to focus and adjust their minds and bodies in the same way that I would ask students to turn their reflections inward to write response papers: Be mindful, inquisitive, gentle, and honest. I offer a home practice sequence for each student, depending on their interests and needs, always being aware of their capacities for movement (change, growth) at present. I model practices and offer extensions and accommodations for each individual student. I also, perhaps primarily, offer all of my teaching as an invited suggestion; yoga students are free to choose to participate to whatever degree they feel comfortable. Likewise, I do not force my college students to speak/take an active part in any class, though they must do the assignments to pass (the university’s rules, not mine) and I acknowledge that my pedagogical authority makes it hard for them to resist/refuse all activities. If they choose not to actively participate in class or complete any particular assignment, there is no reason to think they derived no benefit from simply being present in class. It is the same in yoga.

Construction, Investigation, and Enactment of the (Teacher) Self

The field of Contemplative Studies posits three ways of knowing: the rational, the sensory empirical, and the contemplative. Mindful practices such as vipasana meditation, mindful eating, and hatha yoga employ the sensory empirical and the contemplative—a “3rd way of knowing,” which is actually “critical first-person scientific investigation” (Roth, 2006, p. 1787). In a 1998 collection on curriculum studies, edited by Bill Pinar, Wen-Song Hwu describes his Zen/Taoist conceptualization of curriculum as transcendence which requires a “critical ontology of the self.” Pulling from Foucault, he quotes

The critical ontology of ourselves has to be…conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment of their possible transcendence. (Foucault, 1987, p. 174, quoted in Hwu, 1998, p. 21)

Hwu (1998) reads transcendence in the Zen-informed meaning of crossing over or through curriculum, not in the sense of leaving one belief for another or of rejecting a material reality for a monolithic standpoint. Hwu’s is another contemplative pedagogy which observes that a thorough understanding of critical philosophy or social theory necessitates recognizing—and then accepting a challenge to—dominant ideologies and master narratives, especially those most beloved (Douglass, 2011; Hyde, 2011; Orr, 2002). To accomplish this requires something more than an intellectual or empirical approach. It requires the “third way.” This way is always tentative, groundless, and unfinished. It requires constant vigilance (Foucault) and revision informed by others (Dewey). It mitigates against moral harm to others committed by rational thought operating in isolation, above, or upon others.

Writing about “Recovering the Heart of Learning Through Contemplation,” Zajonc (2006), Director of the Amherst’s Contemplative Mind in Society program, writes

[K]nowing itself remains partial and deformed if we do not develop and practice an epistemology of love instead of an epistemology of separation … . Our conventional epistemology hands us a dangerous counterfeit in truth’s place, one that may pass for truth, but in fact is partial and impoverished. (p. 1743)

Also in “What is Enlightenment?” Foucault says that we should not confuse humanism with the enlightenment. This means that those of us who have shot through the emancipatory project of the enlightenment (human liberation) may still work on some other kind of humanism (self-transformation). Yoga education and practice, therefore, represent both knowledge and action taken for transformation (of self), while yoga service organizations work toward (human) liberation of others. Yoga is something shared by those who have experience, with those who seek it. Yet, it is ever afterward something that people can do for themselves and adapt to their own interests, needs, and beliefs. Yoga is for everybody.

Professor of English Kirsch (2008) describes her attempts at opening spaces in the classroom for sustaining the inner lives of students. In the same way, I continually look for ways “to bring my whole self into the classroom” and “to invite students to do the same” (p. 57). In describing the reward of risking vulnerability in the classroom by introducing a new assignment, Kirsh notes

[O]nce I realized that I didn’t have to live up to the many images of teaching I carry within me (e.g., being funny, witty, and entertaining like some teachers I admire or, alternately, being challenging, demanding, and tough as other teachers I admire), I could bring all of myself into the classroom, be more fully present in the moment, attentive to others, engaged by the interactions among students and myself. (p. 57)

In the Fall of 2012, just after midterm, and a week or so after I had introduced mindfulness exercises and facilitated a discussion on mindfulness in education as a particular philosophy of education not typically associated with the West, I had finished reading the first formal assignments that students handed to me and entered a score for each of them—x/20. During the following class meeting, I presented my graduate students with a confessional on the dirty business of grading. (They get to hear more of these self-interrogations of practice in the social theories course and I invite them to contribute their own in discussions or writing.) I explained that “in education, no one is innocent.” Formal education is an intentionally coercive act. Choosing topics and readings and arranging assignments is a political act, even if just teaching to a prescribed curriculum. I told them that by marking their student selves numerically, I declare—with real consequences—the quality of their learning as represented by the degree to which they conform to the dominant conceptions of the “good student.” Even classroom participation, which I value highly, is fraught with difficulties. Higher education classrooms that use “progressive” or “student-centered” pedagogical styles fetishize talk and normalize class participation as being expressible only as speech. I then referred them to Boler’s (2004) brilliant edited collection on “troubling” democratic dialogues. The students and I ended up having a lengthy, productive, and quite emotional conversation about grading and the violence that it does. I cannot imagine presenting this idea to novices through didactic teaching, alone.