Disruption and Communitas in and against the Formation Plan

Coming back to the quotes that started our writing, disruptive actions has a main place on the grops formation processes and sociocultural animation. The experience that shaped myself as an educator and theater animator more than 20 years ago, in a Bogota’s south peripherical neighborhood, deeded in the warmth of processes influenced by youth catholic pastoral formation (^{Alonso; Lozano; Puche, 2005}), had on their margins a disruptive experience. What was necessary to happen for a youngsters group from a pastoral process agence a disruptive, iconoclastic and challenging proposal in front of catholic and christian tradition? How to classify the educational aspects of this experience? Which concept can allow us to cover formative proposals so much opposed and at the same time so much close to each other? Why it cost so much to me to think this integration?

To answer the first question, following the classic study about popular fests and medieval and renaissance carnivals, from Mijaíl ^{Bajtín (1990 [1973])}, it was not even necessary that it happened something. The seed of transformations was already there, in the diversity of languages, due to its incitation to creativity, due to challenging style of characters, fests and rituals which constitutes a second life for the medieval human being, it means the carnival life, with its irony and comic, burlesque, acute laugh, for what neither abuses of power neither the power itself pass unscathed, and whose mission is to make the land fruitful, to fertilize it to be fruitful again, following a balance logic in accordance with ancestors spirituality, from each time more visible indigenous peoples, at the same time exposing themselves to new risks and getting better conditions to have influence over us.

For the colombian case, Gloria ^{Triana (1986)} made the first conceptual explanations 30 years ago. She showed how the Bajtin’s concepts were easy able to what we can find in cultural expressions of peoples in rural areas of Colombia. She developed the concept of popular culture as one oral, diverse, heterogeneous and vital. During the decade of 1990, various authors advanced in the comprehension of popular culture, expressing it in plural, and including in it the atavistic quality of it, which became also massive and mass mediatic (^{Martín Barbero, 1994}). These aproximations were useful for our understanding about the formation of Latinoamerican urban idnetity (^{Rowe; Schelling, 1993}), but they are no writed to facilitate the understanding of educational processes. It is possible, however, to force our interpretation of it, for instance, from the suggestions of Javier Saenz’s writing on misconfidence dispositives for the citizen formation in the final stage of XXth century in Bogota (we follow it later). A second example fits better than Saenz’s: it is in the academic production from Jose Luis Molina on children internship regimen history, which is inspired on the Foucault’s genealogy of surveillance institutions.

Going ahead with a more concrete exemple, I can tell something about the Cultural Expression Center - called CEC - of Fe y Alegría movement, a pastoral and arts formation experience that started in 1988 and flourished during the 90’s. On the margins of this, it occurred a parody of popular religious ritual known as Christmas Novena⁵. The CEC made events regularly to show the result of arts formation processes, at least two or three every year. Since 1996, a new style of youngsters entered into these celebrating spaces. At that moment, most of the youth was coming from a kind of parish neighborhood style, formed in pastoral processes and catechesis, not contravening norms or calling aggressively the attention of society. As a result of this opening of the scope, the institution opened also to some more challenging artists and youngsters than it was used to be before, some of them came from the urban cultures like hip-hop, which had specific projects starting at the same time. Consequently, the proposal and creation of a challenging ritual became something attractive, as breaking the routine of the institution and giving space to some themes that more advanced students have known in their universities, like Bajtin’s approaches to the fests and popular culture. The alternative novena appears to have some similarities with other group activities, but those academic contents make an original contribution, even practical, like the three ceremonial brays as a password to open the door and enter, as well as to begin and end the ritual. Similarly, as it happens with other symbols and proposals of representing Franciscan poorness, medieval signs result being at the same time transgressive and institutional, what allows sometimes to establish this activity as a heresy game, without constituting itself a breaking off with the catholic church, though it is not what this youngsters looked for with this exercise. Such a mark of heresy ritual can be noticed at the name itself of the novena: Jesús nace feo (Jesus is born ugly)

A more detailed explanation on the sense and contribution or usefulness of this activity for this institution must appeal to the structural anthropology of second half of XXth century. Approaches such as El poder en escenas (^{Balandier, 1990}) or The ritual process (^{Turner, 1969}) show that inversion of status rituals are a liberation mechanism for structural conflicts to be relieved. This means that carnival, the charivari rebellion from premodern Italy (^{Burke, 1990}), and other fests that ironize with power, have an ideological dimension that contributes to keep the social order. However, they can give sometimes guidance to small revolutions in which the power changes its characters, and occasionally generate or contribute to structural changes. If characters understood this, it could be a path to an utopic dimension from these fests and rituals. The possible overlapping of this reflection into the reality could bring us up to some kind of disruptive education what, in its breakings off, give host to day-time dreams, utopia dreams, though this utopia, given the dominant discourse of critic consciousness in this context of youth formation, can address towards aesthetical trends, challenging the establishment on themes like sexuality, creativity and heresy. The first theme is proposed by the “arepitas” joking with sexual organs, creativity is generated by being transgressive on taking non-beautiful materials but rough ones like cow and chicken entrails, the heretical challenge comes from the details taken from bajtinian literature. All of this, during nine days, while other houses celebrated the traditional Chirstmas Novena, and trying to keep the structure of the common ritual for recognizing of it a parody of the official one.

In this ambivalence and contradiction of these ritual proposals, which can be put in favor of friends or enemies according to the circumstances of the field of forces where we can find ourselves, it gets clear that at least, a new and challenging practice contributes with movement, dynamism. On the permanence or maintenance, we learn to live with others on established rules. On the subversion of norms and codes, we make discoveries, we dream and encourage reforms or revolutions what seem like convenient for everyone, even those who have the power, prisoners themselves in the rigidity of their roles. We must remember that during medieval stage not only people participated in popular fests, but clergy people disguise themselves, or they mingled in the crowd, though they also lived within contradictions, and identifying with the anonym equality of the rabble they have the sensation of being part of the same community, but at the same time it masked their true power which rule over the rest of the people all the lasting days of the year (^{Bajtín, 1990} [1973]).

In the face of pessimism from those dreamers who pointed at other possible world but keep complaining of having risk of losing everything against globalization trends, which emanate from economic and technological unequal power, we have the perspective of showing how rituals and popular fests preserve irreducible wisdom that are not going to be destroyed, even there were much “unique thinking”. This irreducible something emanates from popular cultures, from others memory and perspective and from further than exclusion zones. Then, we must acutely see the reality, laughing at it, ridiculing powerful people, ironizing about our problems and contradictions, unveiling to leave nude the games and traps of power, playing, making fun and animating everybody to participate in this rituals and other new ones which are still to be invented.

To think now the educative side of iconoclastic rituals and other disruptive actions are going to move us towards the structure, the rigidity, in our case conformed not only by the institutions and its hierarchies, but also by symbols that encourage it and prepare participants for the institutional life, for its enrichment and the increasing of consciousness of participants. This has been explained with details and evidences from different places and history all over the world in Turner’s The ritual process.

It is as though there are here two major ‘models’ for human interrelatedness, juxtaposed and alternating. The first is of society as a structured, differentiated, and often hierarquical system of politico-legal-economic positions with many types of evaluation, separating men in terms of “more” or “less”. The second, which emerges recognizably in the lyminal period, is of society as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion or equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders. (^{Turner, 1969}, p. 96).

All of this is to justify the entrance of disruption and communitas rituals into the formation planning: a practical idea that has been used to name the planning document or educative project for a non-formal growing process of a group. It has been used to pass by activities such as common meetings, visits to symbolic or religious places, workshops, art rehearsals, raffles, crafts selling or another small entreprenerships, diverse kind of rituals or fests, excursions and outbound activities, among others, including anything that could be an experience for learning and individuals and group growing.

While a community work project try to board several dimensions or work-lines to transform a problematic reality, the formation plan is more specific. It concentrates on the activities that an animator or an animator group facilitates to a whole youth group that is in a formation process. The practical idea of formation planning gravitating around disruptive rituals could be questioned as not enough technical from a rigid or technological position. It does not fit easy in forms or structured records that, looking for order and good management practices, are useful to institutional educative action. It allows precise measurements of educative processes and the educative decision making to correct the orientation and rule properly the group and its processes.

However, those non-questionable advantages make us blind to a perspective of deep awareness that follows values more than rules. A youngster that passed by a strong communitas experience, in an outbound activity, group traveling, popular fest, disruptive ritual, etc. does not feel necessarily stimulated to be subject to periodic activities that implies effort or separation from his or her obligations. Even, someone could assume that not only filling forms, but comprehending the sense of a rare new ritual and prepare it makes part of his or her duty activities, opting for the generation of disruptive experiences specifically oriented towards the shock -even visceral questioning- of social structure. It strengthens deep values that are the floor and sense of social life and individual alignment processes that each participant is freely choosing. This could happen in events that Wenger has called commissions, it means temporary practice communities in which participants share intensively knowledges and experiences that they bring from different places and communities (^{Wenger, 2001}, p. 145-147). It could be postulated that disruptive rituals are the strongest communitas experiences when they are commission community practice events. Consequently, it would also imply, the design of formative processes that bring forward disruptive rituals as commission events and communitas experiences, making notable changes or participants engagement with social (and cultural) transformations.

This option does not seem like reasonable, though commission experiences also need to be planned at least to a minimum -with the necessary investment of energy, resources and time-, and there is no reason for choosing to plan only a type of action and less other adrift. This could be a technological practical critic, but there can be found a different critic from the other side of thinking education. This other questioning is coming from Joan-Carles Mèlich’s philosophy of education. It is an attack against the planning concept itself that he has resumed on the idea of a non-intentional pedagogy, which he uses to avoid or elude any teleological possibility. From his point of view, any transcendental values orientation occults a fundamentalism, or has a seed of it, like it was the case with German philosophy previous to the second world war, when it was a tool to justify a terrible genocide in what was called concentration fields. This author finds an exit for the dead end that could null any possibility of educational planning through suggesting of a practical theodicy that do not invoke universal values or principles, but feels its foundation on the touch relation between educator and pupil (^{Mèlich, 1999}). This posture seems to be consequent to the Freirian way of generating a program content that do not emerge from any educator purposes but from what he or she collects from students and what they are capable to build together, answering to the needs of group participants (^{Freire, 1972}).

The reading of a friend text that speaks about “current diminishing of the educational institutional action” (^{Úcar Martínez, 2009}, p. 13)⁶ and my own experience with the changes that have had the community work and socioeducative action since my first experiences with it -when I was still a secondary student- confirms myself in a non-technological way to do things, which allow us to improvise, relativizing general purposes, letting myself be impressed and excited with every new discovery and recognizing territories and communities while learning about society. These manners are collectively built, planning the action, what means that a calculation of resources, effort and necessary time to be successful, and even to express it in a way that achievements can be verified and valued, for the improvement of actions and decisions making in the future. This allowing of improvising must also accept many things that have not been accepted, letting a space to oral memories of deeply meaningful moments, non-predicted answers, rare requirements of participants, and personal reasons for not being recorded that participants in a formation group could have. But this option for improvising is not the only reason for not showing recording tools here, it is also because we know that there are other publications that do it properly (^{Ventosa Pérez, 1992}).

The formation plans

To speak about formation plans, an early modern approach is Pestalozzi’s How Gertrudis educate her children. Typical modern contribution here is the sequentiality of activities that is implicit in the meaning of “plan” and “planning”, with their nuances, which often saturate the school and the whole formal educative system, as well as the technological approach to education and sociocultural animation. Next to us, and more familiar with popular education practices in Latinamerica are Freire’s alphabetization model and liberating education, as well as Augusto Boal’s formation process on theater of the oppressed⁷. More sociological, there are many writings on Participative-Action-Research method which has been a powerful tool for alternative education processes and it is easy to find Freire’s influence on them. Colombian educators often claimed on the valuing the Orlando Fals Borda’s contribution (for instance, Fals Borda, 1991).

This can be balanced if remembering the correlated raising trend on out-of-school education in Europe, named social pedagogy. In its widest meaning, we find ourselves even Laatinamerican trend of popular education covered by it. Instead of this attempt to ubicating myself in a world map of educative practices, theories and trends, I keep having Freire’s perspective as the most universal, complex and fenomenologically clear approach to facilitating-learning processual relation. It is what I offer to my students, attempting to communicate the soul or the sense of critical formation plans, which ones able to encourage and give emotion for getting engaged in reality transformation processes towards a fairer social system, more equitative world or just making better the current social institutions on satisfying individual and collective necessities.

Pedagogical relation then starts on addressing my attention to quotidian perceptions, including those from nature and those from surrounding people, their presences -not only living beings- print some marks in my body and mind. I am able to evoke them while writing this or while giving an indication to a group on teaching-facilitating a song with theatrical movements that help the memory of everybody -evoking other groups images-, inviting people to dance, dramatize, follow me, express their own way. On this way, we contact my friend who taught me that song and those movements 30 years ago, and who I still admire though lost his trail. I got my own way to dance and facilitate it, looking at the movements of many people who are in my biography, traveling to the origin places of the song that I did not know when I learned it. Another guy from there confirms to me that it is a very traditional song but not the movements my friend taught me… expanssive attitude, joy on the face of this guy connecting to my inner world to favor my educational practices. It allows me to realice that of all of this details are important and they would not be accessible if only thinking on record quickly, not reflexive, reducing everything to the gaps in a form to cover the majority of cases and be able to generalize⁸.

Freirian method has this reflexive style and opens to our perception of ourselves. In the face of formal education sequentiality -heir of the XX century’s new school movement too- what implies to address first to simple things and then towards composed ones, lessing for the end the values, Freire’s sequentiality is a dialog. It even opposses catholic or christian religious youth animation that was common during the 1980 and 1990 decades, generally teleological (as for instance in ^{Londoño, 1995}).

The concept of generator themes -central to the Freire educational practice- appears as the first character in an awakening dialog aimed to facilitate the comprehension of reality as a totality, before starting its analysis, decomposing in its parts, decoding it to make a path to a deeper understanding that bring people again to the initial totality perspective that has now the quality of showing a system, a field of contradictions starting to be unveiled. Now people are able to conceive that we can be more, we can surpass historical situation that limited us before and that impeded to jump into the limit situation to perceive the possibility of change. For facilitating this total comprehension of generator themes, Freire proposes to name them with precision -avoiding generalizing or too evident nominations- but not as precise as looking similar to a guess (^{Freire, 1972}, p. 94 ss.).

We can also understand the totality of the meaningful universe through dialog, letting flourish the different relations between different proposed generator themes, recognizing the main and the secondary, preventing from simplifications and rigid schemes that can avoid verbalization of details, implicit complexity of systemic relations that link every generator theme, exemple or evidence, to the whole system. These Freire’s recommendations, presented whithout schemas, though he did not like to simplify too much. Liberating education become a research process on the selected generating themes, which we can resume in never giving the last word, but challenge group to discover their own problematic words. It means, challenging people to challenge the world, and to do an effort to understand and to stand a challenging dialog, as genuine dialogs must be (^{Lozano, 2006}). Freire proposes five steps, which can be seen as respectful dialog shifts, always acknowledging at the others dignity as from a reasonable and competent interlocutor, not a matter of diplomas or hierarchies, but of a human condition, of someone who feels, thinks and has a point of view for reading, giving meaning to reality and proposing oneself to transform it.

In my sociocultural animation classes, that I give to cultural management students in Manizales since 2009, the steps of Freire’s method have influenced in such manner that several times I proposed to the more motivated students to make a formation plan for an available group process, as the ending work of the course, after a research process on their own generating themes as an university group. In practice, due to they are not a neighborhood or peasant community, but youngsters in a process of academic formation, it is needed to clear that the voluntariness we find among popular education or youth animation is here. There are barriers like the quantitative evaluation system and the hierarchic relation with professors into the institution. Activities that emerge as a result of this dialog into the developing of the subject every year often achieve to emotionally link the students and link with their purposes too. The academic languages is not necesarily a “force shirt” that avoid the giving value to the practical students proposals such as activities, sequency of activities, or small workshop, though they must be accompanied by academical support texts which ideas studens must be able to simplify.

From this kind of work, the following recommendations come. They were proposed for the first time to the student group who took the subject in 2014, when the student movement stopped a political proposal of law that was giving an entrance to the “education with economic profit purposes” into the higher education system. It delayed the ending of the academic period and generated a translaping of classes and Christmas, giving us an opportunity to compose alternative and challenging novenas. This activated creativity on the students, some of them more challenging than others. At a certain moment, after an outbound activity, that was participation in Light Fests, in Salamina -an small town relatively near to Manizales-, I proposed them these orientations for their creative work of composing these novenas. They were at that moment making profit on the whole formation process of the course, where we had our own formation group process, and each of them had facilitated -by shifts- a dynamic or group activity. Each novena must be a formation plan itself for generating desired cultural changes in specific social environments available to each students group⁹:

Thinking on a possible configuring of “tropical education”, I must assume that these ideas are still in a germinal phase, mixing intuition and provocation to be able to otherwise education thinking. The association between the proposed disruptive style and the exotism of images that western modernity has made on the eastern cultures, southern countries and the tropics, gives also an exotic touch that I hope could be reoriented to suggest any contribution to ideas related to an alternative cultural dimension. De-centering ourselves means to put in the middle the ways of doing things on claimed exotic places, until they become familiar to us. Some of this has been meditated and commented in many northern academic meetings and northern diasporic scenarios that convoke every exotized region on the world as well as southern and eastern research centers and universities. Then concept of colonialism, in a critical perspective, generated also the de-coloniality notion, which become very common in sociology to place the wisdom as one of the ambits in which we can move, know and ubicate the knowledge, as one of the ambits in which an engaged group can generate transformations.

Other quality of disruptiveness is the profusion of shapes, colors, tones what emerge from creative processes that are stimulated when opening a way for the differences to be expressed. Rabeleis intuited this from the antipodes of the medieval stage, in representing the grotesque, laughing and creative characteristics of the carnivals of its time. But in the beginnings of XXIth century, diversity is much more. Equally, we can mention disruption and creativeness in Brazilian Tropicalia movement, during the 70’s. It suggests that thansformations -even on education- maybe are coming more on the hand of aesthetics than on the hand of politics. This was what social movements learned in the 90’s, with effects that we still feel on the present. How to induce our students, citizens of the XXIth century, learn it engaging to the bone to entering in global society and world transformation processes for all of us have welfareness? as we have a Mother Land to share with every life being, it is important to be able to enjoy life, nature, and do what is good for all and everybody. I believe that these dialogs with my students in these recent years are a symptom of a way that can be fruitful on this direction.

For ending these experience-based reflections, I share, as an example, provocation and tasting canape, some fragments of my sociocultural animation students work, within we can see some disruptiveness possibilities to facilitate cultural transformations towards a better world. As you can see, both proposals have sense in the context of cultural management formation professional programs, being related respectively to: 1) the struggle against all forms of segregation or discrimination -in the particular context of a school -, and 2) the cultural heritage very engaged practices in the eastern flat lands of Colombia - called Llanos orientales. I hope the contribution of this concepts and practices of disruptiveness and formation planning, from the fields of popular education and sociocultural animation, to the emergent profession of cultural management, and other similar professions and practices, may be clearer after understanding these stories that I am sharing here.

The martians arrival to the Earth. […] This is a Formation Plan thought to be run in a school community in Manizales, during the traditional religious event known as Christmas Novena. Due to the necessity of strenghten values such as integration, union, respect and tolerance between kids in schools, we presents a beautiful metaphora that we call “Arrival of martians to the Earth”, where the kids will receive a “martians” during Christmas days. These are dates where different people congregates from different ages up to different interests, to celebrate a christian event. However, this Formation Plan is nothing related with religious ideals and is no related to any specific church. [...] ¿Why? Because children need to realize that hate and segregation hurt people and cause pain, because with the metaphore of some martians that come mistreated from another planet they could understand that on the Earth people suffer the same too, and that our world deserves a second chance for mutual understanding and love [...] Creation tensions: Currently in Colombia there are many discrimination cases, by condition, skin color, socioeconomical condition, religion, in many schools. These are violence to the kids living together. Equally, some other tensions affects childhood as inequity, non-tolerance, familiar violence, which impulse us to propose this plan (^{Castro Daza; González; Ospina, 2014}).

Pray to Alfonso Niño. […] ¡Oh sweet child! You was born in Sogamoso, music composer that dedicated your life to sing and compose to your land, with your fruitful 30 years artistic biography. You were always with your arpa, capachos, cuatro and bandola. Please, remember that you said these beautiful words for our unpleasant, painful and stressed hummanity: ‘Joropo barajustao that passes through the horizon, making dust rise and be suspended on air and it can be stopped a marota curtía’. Plenty of confidence on you, oh! My child! Who are the truth itself, we came to expose our few knowledge on llanera culture. Help us to bring our hearth up to the joropo music to find a venturous eternity. Give us, in the name of the merits of your talent, the appreciation towards the traditional colombian music that we need so much [...]. We give us to you, oh! Llanero child! Sure of that our hope will be not frustrated and that you will receive and respond to our petition! (^{Gallo, 2014})¹⁰.