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18 Ernesto Che Guevara, Dispositions, and Education for Transnational Social Justice John D. Holst As part of its accreditation process, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE)—the largest and most important accrediting body for U.S. teacher education programs—requires the identification of a set of dispositions, along with knowledge and skills, as core standards of evaluation in the preparation of teachers. NCATE, now with more than six hundred teacher education programs under its wing across the country, originally defined dispositions as the “values, commitments, and professional ethics that influence behaviors toward students, families, colleagues, and communities and affect student learning, motivation, and development as well as the educator ’s own professional growth.”1 In its 2008 professional standards NCATE purposefully placed knowledge, skills, and dispositions in the first standard to highlight the importance of these factors.2 In 2006 NCATE listed social justice as a sample disposition for future teachers—a move that, when it became widely publicized, created considerable debate in governmental, educational, and political talk-show circles. Facing right-wing and governmental pressure NCATE quickly dropped any reference to social justice in its online glossary listing for dispositions and framed its commitment to social justice in terms of leaving no child behind.3 This debate really centers on broader issues. To what end do we educate? Should teachers be expected to adhere to certain principles and be oriented by specific dispositions ? Moreover, in any consideration of the central role of learning and educating in social movements,4 the link between dispositions and education includes but extends well beyond the formal training of teachers or the formal education they provide in schools. The theory and practice of Ernesto Che Guevara—as revealed in his writings , speeches, and interviews—exemplifies this nexus of dispositions and a broadly conceived notion of education within and beyond formal schooling.5 Guevara, Dispositions, and Education for Transnational Social Justice 303 Guevara, generally seen as a revolutionary, but also as a pedagogue, was very much interested in promoting specific dispositions in youth and in the Cuban population as a whole.6 Dispositions are at the heart of his idea of creating the new man and woman (el hombre nuevo). The new man and woman would be of a qualitatively new nature because of the “values, commitments, and professional ethic”7 that would guide their actions in society. Guevara as a social pedagogue understood that dispositions (subjective conditions) were in dialectical relationship with the objective conditions (sociopolitical economic relations) of society.8 Both the subjective and the objective conditions of society had to be transformed for there to be a lasting transformation of society. As Guevara often stated, in different ways, “The aim of socialism . . . is not simply to create shiny factories. These factories are being built for human beings in their totality . Man must be transformed in conjunction with advances in production. We would not be doing our job if we were solely producers of commodities, of raw material, and were not at the same time producers of men.”9 While Guevara developed these dispositions in the context of revolutionary Cuba, he had what we could call today a transnational approach because he also worked to instill these dispositions among the people with whom he worked in the Congo and Bolivia.10 We can even say that it was his transnationalist outlook that took him to the Congo and Bolivia in the first place. We do, however, need to be careful in applying the term transnationalist to Guevara because he himself never used the term. As a Marxist, he used the term internationalist to speak of his efforts at building solidarity among all poor and working-class people across the planet and particularly in the tricontinental nations of Africa , Asia, and America. Still, through the idea of the tricontinental, postcolonial literature shows precedents for extending the term transnationalist to Guevara. Robert Young cites the Tricontinental Conference of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, held in Havana in January 1966, as the watershed moment in which postcolonialism became a truly coherent theory and practice of transnational social justice. Moreover, he argues, it was in Guevara’s message to the Tricontinental Conference that “the epistemology of the postcolonial subject” was born. For Young this apex of postcolonialism as tricontinental or transnational social justice in Guevara’s message is “the first moment where a general internationalist counter-hegemonic position was elaborated by a disposed subject of imperialism.”11 The act...

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