Border is the space where the nation and identity either end or begin. (Saldívar, 1997, p. 14)
The representation of these shape-shifting, multiplying, increasingly fragmented subject positions has become a central transdisciplinary object of study and a particular concern of border pedagogy. Indeed, the constitution of transnational identities in Englishes, springing from interconnected ―travelling cultures‖, characterises the experience of both border and diasporic communities the world over. However, these cultures are endowed with different identity configurations, and are characterised by different material conditions.
On the one hand, border cultures inhabit a defined geopolitical territory, whose boundaries divide two sides at the same time as they create a borderland. It is in this contact zone where border subjects engage in intricate processes of cultural conflict, interaction and crossing-over. Border subjects refuse to fuse into a single conglomerate and struggle for
79 both the acceptance of difference and the (re)territorialisation of the deterritorialised (Deleuze & Guattari, 1977, p. 155).
On the other hand, diasporic communities result from migration, cultural transplantation and displacement processes (Ashcroft et al., 1995, p. 430). And even though the diasporic experience binds the multiple communities of a disperse population together, there is no specific geo-political boundary framing them. Diasporic cultures mythologise home as a desired place, impossible to return to (Rushdie, 1991). There occurs a split by means of which longing for the imagined home prevails over the actual geographic location which is inhabited. These migrants, as well as their descendants, have a discontinuous relation between their illusory home country and the experience of the physical return to it as visitors (McLeod, 2000, p. 209).
Nonetheless, what brings both diasporic and border communities closer together is their interstitial condition. Interstitial subjects acquire knowledge in the various specific locations in which they inhabit and resist their aggregation to an arbitrary unified whole. Speakers of Englishes the world over enact and recreate their identities in the breaches left open within discursive and social relations (Johnson & Michaelsen, 1997, p. 173), being discontinually located as insiders/outsiders. The relation they establish with the places they inhabit is that of a dichotomy: fluctuating between being, and not being, either at home or within the border. Border pedagogy posits that it is in this ―border zone‖, such as the one that English language represents, where cultural symbols, references and meanings can be read transculturally.
80 5. Broadening the borders of pedagogy
Border pedagogy decentres as it remaps. (Giroux, 2005, p. 22)
Against the background of such evolving Englishes, cultures and identities, which frame our rapidly shifting global environment, it is necessary to generate and promote evolving pedagogies; that is to say, pedagogical apparatuses that can offer fruitful educational responses to transculturality, hybridity and liminality. Our multiplying identities, cultural configurations and communities (postcolonial, diasporic, border) pave the way for the development of new pedagogies that can create and/or scaffold more glocal perspectives and literacies, that is to say ―the meaningful integration of the local and the global‖ (Brooks & Normore, 2010, p. 50). A central vehicle for the development of the glocalisation of culture is the deconstruction of literacy within the very educational arena. This implies including previously marginalised reading stratagems, pedagogical apparatuses and curricular designs such as the ones posed by critical pedagogy, intercultural pedagogy and, in particular, border pedagogy.
Critical pedagogy is posited as central to any educational practice that takes up questions of how individuals learn, how knowledge is produced, and how subject positions are constructed. This pedagogy has regained a sense of alternative by means combining strategies for the critique of hegemonic discourses with stratagems to construct new forms of identity and social relations (Giroux, 2005, p. 70).
The tenets of critical pedagogy have been crucial to ELT‘s rite of passage, from assimilationist (―English only‖) educational policies to integrationist (multicultural/ intercultural) ones; from monolingual transmission models, based on native speaker-like
81 performance, to multilingual transactional models, more sensitive to multiculturalism and built around ―expert-speaker‖ (Jenkins, 2003, p. 81) and/or ―intercultural-speaker‖ (Byram, 1997, p. 21) achievement. These educational responses to the transculturation of English have contributed to the democratisation of knowledge and ―cultural capital‖ (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 47). While multicultural policies fostered the coexistence and mutual understanding of cultural and linguistic differences, intercultural policies encouraged the exchange and interaction between them, dwelling on the ―in-between spaces‖ that enable the flux and interplay of identities.
This is when border pedagogy can complement and even supplement other pedagogies. Border pedagogy uses school, the classroom, as a site of active reading, reflection and hands-on work on our evolving languages, cultures and identities. It proposes using our ―travelling cultures‖ to work glocally and transdisciplinarily. This presupposes not merely an acknowledgment of the shifting borders that both undermine and reterritorialise different configurations of language, culture, power, and knowledge. It also links the notion of schooling with the broader category of education to a more substantive struggle for a democratic society that acknowledges that culture happens in the interstices, the borderlands, ―the spaces between and within‖ (Clifford, 1999, p. 5). Border pedagogy points to the necessity to create suitable conditions for students to write, read, speak, and listen in a language in which meaning becomes multi-accentual and dispersed, and resists permanent closure (Giroux, 2005, p. 21). This entails a language in which one speaks with, rather than exclusively for or about, others.
Border pedagogy offers the opportunity for students of English to become border crossers by means of delving into the multiple references that constitute different cultural
82 codes, experiences and languages. In this way, issues on transculturation, hybridity and liminality naturally come to the fore and pave the way for active work on critical cultural awareness and intercultural interpretation.