This paper served as my final for a graduate seminar in pedagogy.
On the last day of my seminar with Barry Shank on interdisciplinary theory and methods, my friend Logan Favor, a grad student in African American and African Studies, presented. In her presentation, she made a distinction between learning and coming to know, stating that she prefers the latter and rejects the former. This intrigued me.
At the end of her presentation, I asked Logan about how she conceived of the difference between learning and coming to know. She said that she thought learning was something external, whereas coming to know was about the self. I asked her if coming to know was affective. She asked for an explanation of affect theory. I followed this by asking where she located the self, and if it was bodily or cerebral. She said that she doesn’t see the self as limited to the mind or body, and that she believed in the interconnection and shared consciousness of all things.
I take what Logan said in this fast exchange seriously. It reoriented my understanding of knowledge, education, and pedagogy. Logan accurately identified what I bring up repeatedly in classes: that learning through others’ goals, even as noble as they might be, is a coercive and alienating process, removing knowledge (generation) from the self and placing it in the hands of a superior (teacher). Following this exchange, I am interested in what it might mean to reorient pedagogy around coming to know, not learning.
To do this, I will document my own experiences of coming to know through youth liberation theory and praxis. I will draw heavily from Raising Free People by Akilah Richards(1) and my review of it titled Using Personal Experience to Develop Unschooling Theory(2). The first section, titled Coming to Know Through Land, will display how my personal pedagogical practice changed as a result of the essay Land as Pedagogy by Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson(3). The second section, Coming to Know Through DELINQUENCY,will outline how my pedagogical practice changed as a result of works by Aiyana Goodfellow and other youth liberationist authors, thinkers, and zinesters.
Most of this essay is placed unapologetically outside of the classroom, as classrooms are spaces that prioritize pedagogies of learning rather than pedagogies of coming to know. Teaching practices, too, are pedagogies of learning, and as such will also not be placed at the fore.
Land as Pedagogy is my favorite essay. I have written three essays directly inspired by this text (Land is Pedagogy, Against the Pruning of Trees in Public Parks, and Land~Pedagogy(4)), but I am returning to it yet again because I still have more to say. Simpson states in Land as Pedagogy that:
“The land, aki, is both context and process. The process of coming to know is learner-led and profoundly spiritual in nature. Coming to know is the pursuit of whole body intelligence practiced in the context of freedom, and when realized collectively it generates generations of loving, creative, innovative, self-determining, interdependent and self-regulating community minded individuals(5).”
She argues that this process can only happen through land, which western pedagogy disregards, and without coercion, which western pedagogy normalizes. This view of coming to know differs from Logan’s. For Logan, the self is the subject of knowledge; for Simpson, the whole body is the subject of knowledge.
In Land is Pedagogy, I state “[US K-12 pedagogy] is a pedagogy without even acknowledgement for the land.” This can be termed landless pedagogy (analogous to pedagogy of learning), which is contrasted by land~pedagogy (analogous to pedagogy of coming to know). I consider Land as Pedagogy to be a youth liberationist text because of its unabashed criticism of the state-run educational-industrial complex from a decolonial perspective and because it centers the need for youth agency, freedom, and liberation in its analysis and arguments.
In the aforementioned three essays, I established three methods~practices of coming to know through land~pedagogy. The first method~practice is georemembering. This is a form of coming to know that focuses on the knowledge stored and generated in geographically tethered memories. This practice informs not just the first part of Land~Pedagogy (which is titled “Geomemories 2019-2020”) but also the stories in Land is Pedagogy, parts four through seven of Land~Pedagogy, and sections of Against the Pruning of Trees in Public Parks (especially where I write about an american bass). I developed this specific morphology of re-membering (reconstructing) as I studied geography and land. These studies showed me that land, space, and place neccessarily must be brought to the fore in coming to know from my past.
The second method~practice is autoethnography. The latter half of Land~Pedagogy (part six) is dedicated to a detailed autoethnography of a walk I took which was inspired by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s work. Through going on the walk, I came to know deeply about the landscapes I was walking with. My whole body was being modified by interacting with the land, leading to the acquisition of a knowledge that was beyond merely textual or theoretical. When I did write text, it was more expressive and affectively driven as well.
The last method~practice I would like to point out is autotheorizing. All three of these texts, including the sections I mention above, are autotheoretical. The parts where I am reorienting my own and the audience's understanding of land, pedagogy, and other phenomena are the most useful to think through in the frame of autotheory. In both texts, I am using my lived experience to realign pedagogy towards my interpretation of Simpson. An example of this is the conclusion of Land~Pedagogy. Here I state:
“When I walk through the land, I am embodying several situated knowledges at once, and I can only hope that they come together in a beautiful way. Land has to be my teacher, because I am land’s teacher. We shape and mold and embrace and reject each other. We give and take each other's agency. We define and redefine what knowledge is. We love each other relentlessly, even if we are sometimes annoyed by each other's actions. Land is pedagogy, and I am land.”
Throughout all three pieces, I appropriate the language of western pedagogy while also rejecting its tenets, assumptions, and practices. In this essay I do the same. Although I have presented binaries and trinaries in this essay, land calls into question the lines that separate them. As I state in Land~Pedagogy, “land… makes you realize that there are no definite edges.”
After first reading Simpson in 2020, my orientation to land has fundamentally changed. I recognized the ways in which I was severing myself from land through a scientistic, anthropocentric, and egoistic worldview where land constituted merely a resource to be used. I tried to reconnect with the land by going on more intentional walks, by learning about the history and geography of this city, and by slowing down my pace to observe. Through these seemingly simple steps, I came to know so much more about the land that I’m on, as well as my naivete in comparison to its vast knowledge.
I have recently been reorienting myself towards coming to know through other materials, especially air(6). These days, it feels as though I primarily come to know through breath. This reflects the alignment of my pedagogical approach and my research, which is currently primarily oriented around queering the non-living parts of ecosystems(7). In coming to know through air, the solidity of knowledge comes into question, allowing for a coming to altogether new forms of knowledge.
Aiyana Goodfellow is a comrade of mine that I met through my work with former unschooler Lark(8). Aiyana(9) is a neurodivergent Black non-binary minorized (not the legal age of majority) youth liberationist scholar, organizer, and theorist based in London. One of Aiyana’s theories revolves around the term DELINQUENT. The homepage of the DELINQUENTS noblogs states:
“DELINQUENT (always in all capitals) is a reclamation of how ‘misbehaviour’ and ‘disobedience’ have been used as tools to weed out rebellion. Delinquency is weaponised to often specifically exclude and oppress Black, brown, neurodivergent, queer, and poor teenagers who are labelled as ‘too much’ before we’ve even walked in the door. DELINQUENTS are in solidarity with all those across the world who experience repression through school, foster care, ‘juvenile’ prisons, their families or any other forms of adult supremacy.
DELINQUENCY is a rejection of adult supremacy, ageism, and respectability politics. A DELINQUENT, as defined by the dictionary, is someone who “fails to fulfil their duty”. The so-called duty of children and young people is to be obedient. We reject this narrative. We will be seen and heard.”(10)
The page clarifies that anyone (of any age) can be a DELINQUENT, so long as they adhere to the philosophy of freedom and resistance that goes along with the term.
In my theorizing, I move the category of youth away from markers rendered through false temporality (age) and towards the affective, comparative, relational, and legal. I do not believe that teenager is a useful category to organize around or with(11). As such, I divorce DELINQUENCY from its teenage signifier to not limit it in this way.
I believe that DELINQUENCY is an underanalysed pedagogy of coming to know that is deeply resistant to the (landless) pedagogy of learning. To show this, I will display how several modes of DELINQUENCY, advanced by disparate youth liberationist thinkers, have resulted in my own coming to know.
Youth liberationist utopianism is one such mode of DELINQUENCY. In Lark’s 2022 speech at the Youth Liberation General Assembly(12), she makes a series of claims about the role of radical (utopian) imagination in youth liberation politics. She states:
“We’ve been told that our dreams of youth liberation are foolish. That we aren’t being realistic. That young people’s oppression is simply the natural state of the world, and that thinking things could be otherwise is absurd. But realism is not the basis of profound political and social change. Imagination is. Our imagination is one of the most powerful tools we have for radical change. When it comes to youth liberation, it’s an incredibly necessary tool.”
Here Lark points to how imagination is disruptive to the powers that be. The speech details two visions of the future, one draped in fatalism, and the other in optimism. She holds onto imagination as an important part of youth life, and calls the audience to imagine, with someone younger, the future.
In March of 2022, I hosted a small rally at the Ohio Statehouse(13). During that rally, I delivered a speech that tied together theories created by José Muñoz(14) and Audre Lorde(15) to argue in favor of queer utopian longing as a strategy against gerontocracy. I also told the crowd that it was my memory of when things were getting better for queer people that motivated me to think of a future where things are better, even though they’re getting worse. In other words, I engaged the crowd in a process of thinking back to think forward(16). We came to know a utopian vision in body, heart, mind, and community.
My friend Ty wrote a poem called My Trans Joy Will Take Over The World(17) which he read at a march we planned together. The poem includes the following lines:
“The people that yell slurs and carry big guns to let everyone around them know that they should be afraid are not looking for my joy. They’re not expecting me to skip down the street or to chalk on my sidewalk or to pick up every piece of litter that I see.
Here, Ty displays the DELINQUENCY of trans youth joy and utopianism. Instead of fulfilling the role of a depressed fatalistic trans youth, he comes to know and embody resistance through his joy.”
In Communiqué from an Absent Future: On the Terminus of Student Life, a leftcomm zine published by Research and Destroy in 2009(18), the student author(s) state the following:
“We must begin by preventing the university from functioning. We must interrupt the normal flow of bodies and things and bring work and class to a halt. We will blockade, occupy, and take what’s ours. Rather than viewing such disruptions as obstacles to dialogue and mutual understanding, we see them as what we have to say, as how we are to be understood. This is the only meaningful position to take when crises lay bare the opposing interests at the foundation of society. Calls for unity are fundamentally empty. There is no common ground between those who uphold the status quo and those who seek to destroy it.
The university struggle is one among many, one sector where a new cycle of refusal and insurrection has begun – in workplaces, neighborhoods, and slums. All of our futures are linked, and so our movement will have to join with these others, breeching the walls of the university compounds and spilling into the streets.”
This is a call to DELINQUENT direct action, a way of (coming to) knowing and doing that is oppositional to pedagogies of learning through sheer negation.
My organizing, both on and off campus, is influenced greatly by this call to negation and disruption as a technology of communication, knowledge sharing, and coming to know (“what we have to say… how we are to be understood”). It is in the disruption of a normative/hegemonic understanding of the world that altogether new ways of knowing and coming to know are created (Camus might call this the absurd(19), Deleuze and Guattari might call this deterritorialization(20), others call this queer(21)). DELINQUENT negation and termination reorient pedagogy, forcing into existence new ways of coming to know.
In organizing, I come to know much more about my body. I come to know how to handle stress, how to handle conflict, and how to communicate effectively and quickly. When things go wrong or when someone is hurt, I come to know how to simultaneously hold onto and let go of the tension in my body. It is a process not of knowledge holding, but of knowledge assembling(22). Of social and cultural (re)production, grounded in land, praxis, air. What is a march but an assembled walk with friends through land in air? DELINQUENCY brings me to the land, through walking, marching, loitering, and dancing. Perhaps the binary between DELINQUENCY and land needs negated as well.
In the video YOUTH LIBERATION NOT SCHOOL(23), Diod talks about how he incorporates youth liberation into his schoolwork.
“I, for one, make essays and artwork for my assignments to be about anarchism whenever I can… Talking about anarchism whenever you can in class, like in an AP US Government and Politics class, for example, is also a great way of revolting against the system. It’s akin to talking about your wages and unionizing when you’re at work with your coworkers.”
This is truly DELINQUENT activity.
Every final that I have ever liked or reread has gone against the given instructions. The essays Land is Pedagogy and Land~Pedagogy were both finals that I ignored the instructions for so that I could write within a frame that would be productive and generative for me. The essays I have written where I stay within the guidelines are my least favorite and have helped me develop as a person and scholar the least. Despite this, I almost universally got good grades on the papers within the guidelines. I learned, but I didn’t come to know.
Coming to know, and coming to know what you KNOW and not just what you’ve been taught, is difficult in the academy. It is oppositional, and requires a break from learning. It is enacted through land and DELINQUENCY. In Land~Pedagogy, I state:
“I think it’s important to note that all of the times I’ve most enjoyed my pedagogical experience in school were either at the far margins of or acting in direct opposition to that school. Liberatory and land-based education in schools is something that is done in spite of schools, not because of them. Perhaps in addition to abolishing schools, we should eat current schools alive by demanding and implementing oppositional liberatory and land based education. Doing this can both make people’s material conditions better in the short term as well as sow the seeds for radical futures. After all, I don’t think I’d still be alive if not for the liberatory and land-based education I received in state universities.”
This sentiment still runs inside of me, even as I have my criticisms of it. In my current reading of Simpson, I believe she wouldn’t support either liberatory classroom education (because it is divorced from land) or land-based education (because it views land as capital, not process).
I am in alignment with both Logan Favor and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson regarding coming to know. I believe that knowledge is held throughout the body, not just in the brain. In this way, I consider it to be affective, not cerebral. I also agree with Logan that in mainstream western pedagogy learning is external, and I also agree that knowledge expands past the body.
Simpson does not make a distinction between learning and coming to know; evidence of this appears in her quote above. As this essay winds up, perhaps now is a useful time to say that I don’t believe in a distinction between learning and coming to know. It was a useful device to frame this paper within, as it allowed for me to push away concerns with classroom pedagogy and other forms of mainstream western pedagogy, but I still plan to use the term learning in my vernacular, where it will retain an almost identical meaning to coming to know. I do think some types of learning are more valuable than others though, and I retain my stance on where knowledge is held.
With all this said, I came to knowledge through this class (Comparative Studies 6500 - Pedagogy). I came to know about my instructor. I came to know about my peers. I came to know when I played a podcast clip of Refaat Alareer speaking about genocide in Gaza and I came to know when he died in an blaze from an Israeli bomb the week after. I came to know about “critical” discourses inside mainstream western pedagogy. Ultimately, and perhaps most or least importantly, I came to know myself better.
1) Richards, A. (2020). Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work. Book. PM Press.
2) Eterna, K. (In Press). Using Personal Experience to Develop Unschooling Theory: A Book Review of Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work. The Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Education.
3) There exists two published versions of this essay. The one I am citing is: Simpson, L. (2014). Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/22170/17985
4) These are: Eterna, K. (2021). Land is Pedagogy. https://komencanto.neocities.org/land-is-pedagogy. & Eterna, K. (2022). Land~Pedagogy. https://komencanto.neocities.org/land-pedagogy. & Eterna, K. (2022). Against the Pruning of Trees in Public Parks. https://komencanto.neocities.org/against-the-pruning-of-trees
5) Simpson, L. (2014). Page 7.
6) See my short film: Air where air should not be: The end of student life. https://youtu.be/K_q44DMQ2oE
7) See the section of my website dedicated to queering earth systems: https://komencanto.neocities.org/queering-earth
8) Lark also goes by the name Genevieve Shade. She published her zines under the name Lark, so that is the name I use here.
9) I use Aiyana’s first name because we are on a first name basis, and referring to her as “Goodfellow” would seem strange.
10) DELINQUENTS NoBlogs. (2023). About. https://delinquents.noblogs.org/
11) See: Eterna: K. (2022). Introduction. https://youtu.be/4VR2THjmqiY
12) Lark. (2022). Youth Liberation and Radical Imagination. https://medium.com/@youthlibnow/youth-liberation-and-radical-imagination-fb7afeb5191c or https://youtu.be/DBv8UYNHQis
13) Graphic announcing this march: https://www.instagram.com/p/CaKsIqUuLkx/
14) Muñoz, J. (2009). Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Book. NYU Press.
15) Lorde, A. (1984). Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Book. Crossing Press.
16) See: Eterna, K. (2023). Exercises in Youth Liberation.https://komencanto.neocities.org/exercises-in-youth-lib
17) Johnson, Ty. (2023). My Trans Joy Will Take Over The World. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cs1PkM5u9W6/
18) Research and Destroy. (2009). Communiqué from an Absent Future: On the Terminus of Student Life. https://wewanteverything.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/communique-from-an-absent-future/
19) Camus, A. (1942/1955). The Myth of Sisyphus.
20) Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1980/1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Book. University of Minnesota Press.
21) This is the contemporary basis of queer theory, there are too many usages for single citation.
22) See: Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Book. Oxford University Press.
23) Diod. (2021). YOUTH LIBERATION NOT SCHOOL.https://youtu.be/4Kie2NWUDQY