Unraveling Education via Tres Cuentos: Centering Liberación and Spiritual Activism in the New University

Abstract

The purpose of our paper is to offer the Tres Cuentos activity as one strategy to resist authoritarian encroachments within education, and specifically within the university, wherein we experience threats to academic freedoms. We offer our Tres Cuentos as examples toward producing knowledge that grapples with and blends the political and the personal so as to interrogate “common sense” knowledge, refusing the binary, dichotomous, and disembodied logics of knowing, or knowledge that is characteristic of individualistic, westernized education (Kumashiro, 2024). Threading together theories of the politics of knowledge production, specifically Ignacio Martín-Baró’s notion of liberation and Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s spiritual activism, we reflect on how authoritarian education is challenged, contested and interrupted in service of liberation and liberatory praxes. We organize our three stories as hilando, desilando and bordando to center liberation and spiritual activism. We see us in the New University where humanizing, decolonial learning unfolds far from what we experience as authoritarian education.