Degrees of LMA Immersion
How to apply Liberation Martial Arts pedagogy
Introduction
When you dive into Liberation Martial Arts (LMA), you're not just learning new skills; you're embracing a new way to interact with the world. Whether you're new to the community or seeking to deepen your existing practice, our immersion levels are designed to meet you where you are. However, where you are is also not a fixed point in time but constantly shaped.
Rooted in our anti-colonial, Taoistic, and Marxist underpinnings, we challenge the colonial view of the learner as a zombie, passively fed dead (decontextualized) information. Instead, learning is alive and happens actively through experience, exploration, and deep engagement with our environment. Here, "environment" extends beyond just physical spaces and encompasses the cultural, social, and economic realities that shape and define the martial arts landscape. Knowledge is understanding in context, which means seeing how things exist in the world and adapting.
The core of our curriculum is about unlearning and dismantling the previous colonial models that may interfere with or override new information: LMA's liberatory pedagogy. Our aim is to restore trust in learners who may have lost faith in their ability to self-learn. The view of ourselves as storage units to be acted upon is not a natural perspective but one foisted upon us. Under coloniality and capitalism, learning is not a way to access the world; it's isolated from it. However, in LMA, learning happens in the world.
Full immersion
Full immersion is about getting into the heart of LMA's embodied pedagogy. You're not just learning the LMA principles but letting them shape your interactions with the world. This involves actively following the online LMA curriculum and engaging with all the modules.
Immersion is about experiential learning—actually doing the things, figuring it out as you go, and engaging with the world, from the superstructure to material conditions. You're embodying the LMA philosophy and carrying it with you into the world.
LMA approach (LMA Way)
The LMA approach serves as the theoretical framework for LMA. It's for those who embrace LMA's liberatory pedagogy and spirit and want to adapt it to their unique contexts. Those applying the approach seek to understand the theory and draw inspiration from our examples or use our examples to better understand the theory. The LMA approach empowers you to take ownership of your sessions while staying true to our fundamental belief in the learner's personhood and their ability to learn.
It's thinking in an LMA model rather than taking a default status quo approach and translating it to LMA language or taking status quo thinking and adding LMA elements to it. That would be more like LMA concepts. The LMA approach is a Way of being. It's meant to be your new coherent starting point rather than a reference point.
LMA concepts
LMA concepts is right for those new to our approach, those who don't fully grasp our theory of learning and its implications, or those in rigid, prescriptive, top-down training environments wishing to incorporate elements of LMA's philosophy into their practice to increase decision-making, autonomy, and exploratory learning.
If you're part of an instruction-heavy, repetitive, teacher-centered pedagogy, LMA can be a transition to a more learner-centered approach. It's ideal for those in commercial gyms or normative learning settings who are beginning to explore alternative or liberatory pedagogical approaches.