An Engaged Pedagogy of Everyday Life

Abstract

This book is a research monograph about everyday life and education. Its aim is to explore the potential (both for cultural theory and practice) of the intersections that can be traced in-between them. To do so, the book starts with a theoretical discussion that builds first on everyday life from a cultural perspective (using the arguments of authors such as Michel de Certeau, Guy Debord, Michael Sheringham and Ben Highmore) and then on education and critical pedagogy (drawing on bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Sara Ahmed) in order to build a common ground from where their joint potential of both subjects can be grasped. This common ground and the way in which it can be articulated and used is further strengthened in a third section that is based on theatre (especially on the methodology of the theatre of the oppressed developed by Augusto Boal) and on the power of the everyday narratives (term used by de Certeau and Sheringham) that theatre introduces. After this theoretical framework, a specific context of a project where education was successfully used to change everyday life in a small city of Colombia is used in order to problematize and illustrate the importance and potential of this approach.