Schooling and critical citizenship: Pedagogies of political agency in El Alto, Bolivia

Abstract

This article explores the formation of citizenship as social practice in a school in El Alto, Bolivia. I examine interactions between "banking" forms of education, students' responses, and embodied practices of belonging and political agency, and argue that the seemingly passive forms of knowledge transmission so criticized by critical pedagogy need not preclude the development of critical citizenship in young people. [citizenship, El Alto, schooling, political agency, critical pedagogy] © 2010 by the American Anthropological Association.