Last Monday on my three hour drive home from NYC to Boston after Joe’s memorial celebration, I was speeding through the dark, iPod blaring through my car stereo, bouncing from one ambient yet upbeat song to another and trying to make sense of my experiences with Joe and the critical pedagogy world, not just from that night, but over the past months and years.  I kept fixing on and then shifting from the word “closure,” which just felt so… wrong.  There was a certain lingering sense of security from being able to share my memories and grief with others, but by no means did I feel, “closure.”  This wasn’t an ending; it wasn’t a book being shut and re-shelved or a letter being sealed; it was something else.

So as I tend to do when I am alone with my thoughts, I started flipping through the thesaurus in my brain, searching for a word/sentiment to capture what this unfamiliar sensation was.  I first started down the path of seeking an antonym to “closure,” but I was unable to come up with one.  “Open,” the opposite of “close,” does not have a definitive equivalent of “closure” because by nature the word open has no ending except in the word close.  So I kept searching, moving in and out of my music and my thoughts, and a phrase surfaced—“cracks in the pavement.”  I have said this particular phrase more than once to students and colleagues—in my work, I like to look for cracks in the pavement, tiny openings in the ostensibly continuous concrete of hegemony and ideology.  In this blog about everyday things, I like to look for cracks in the pavement—imperfections that we can detect and exploit, hurl grenades at and shake the foundation of ideological domination.

And then it came to me, floated gently to the surface of my thoughts and then submerged itself again—“fissure.”  All week long, it has risen and fallen in my brain as I poked and prodded my vocabulary to see if this is truly the word I was looking for.  And then I googled it, a first instinct, cursory, researcher tactic, just to see if this is really what I was after.  And yes, it is in fact what I have been looking for.  My favorite online dictionary definition is as follows:
“A long, narrow opening in the face of a rock.  Fissures are often filled with minerals of a different type than those in the surrounding rock.”

That night was a fissure, not a closure.  And it occurred to me that Critical Pedagogy as both a school of thought and a practice is also a fissure.  Which is, I suppose, why at times it is such a nebulous thing to define.  It’s existence, like the fissure in the rock, is always relative to the larger dominating hegemonic order.  Without this domination, critical pedagogy wouldn’t exist.  Joe’s passing and subsequent memorial was a pretty big critical pedagogical fissure impacting many, as evidence a couple of hundred people jammed into an too small venue, standing room only.  And in this, there was something else, the critical pedagogy community, much of it represented there at the event, fissures upon fissures, grouped together into a bigger fissure.  And then I got it—Fissures everywhere!  As we continue to build and nurture our community here on the Freire site or face-to-face at a memorial, or in our classes we are rupturing the hegemonic rock further, making the fissure longer, deeper, wider, revealing new and different epistemologies and ontologies-- minerals of a different type.