A Marxist Education by Wayne Au

Author:Wayne Au
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2018-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

Freire’s Critical, Liberatory Pedagogy

We need praxis or, in other words, we need to transform the reality in which we find ourselves.

—Paulo Freire, “Education for Awareness: A Talk with Paulo Freire”42

Freire’s formulation of critical, liberatory pedagogy is built with three goals in mind. First, it must be a pedagogy that enables both teachers and students to develop more critically conscious, systematic understandings of their relationship with the world. This is what Freire refers to as “education for freedom” where we learn to better understand our “concrete situation” by seeing the relationships that impact that situation.43 Classroom examples of this abound, as documented by both Rethinking Schools and the Zinn Education Project.44 One such example can be found in New Orleans third-grade teacher Rowan Shafer’s lesson on global warming.45 Using the students’ concrete experiences with climate change as a starting point (i.e., Hurricane Katrina, coastal erosion, sea level changes, and shifts in weather patterns), Shafer helps them understand how what is happening in New Orleans is connected to larger, global shifts in climate, as well as how human actions like burning fossil fuels are contributing to these changes. In a Freirian sense, Shafer is getting his students to understand their concrete situation better through the ways it is connected to a larger system of relationships. This is also entirely consistent with a Vygotskian conception of moving from an everyday understanding of climate change to a more scientific one.

The second goal of Freire’s critical, liberatory pedagogy, interrelated with the first, is for students and teachers to become “consciously aware of [their] context and [their] condition as a human being,” thus becoming “an instrument of choice.”46 In this way teachers and students are positioned as cognitive subjects, and as “critical agents in the act of knowing.”47 In Vygotsky’s terms from the previous chapter, this is “conscious awareness.” In terms of classroom practice, we can return to the above example from Shafer’s classroom.48 Shafer’s third graders are literally becoming more consciously aware of their contexts. This is important for Freire and for Shafer’s students because, once you develop this kind of conscious awareness of how we fit into our contexts, it creates the capacity for choice—either to choose to take action about those conditions, or to choose to do nothing and perpetuate those conditions. In this case, Shaver’s students, in learning about global warming and climate change and in connecting that learning with their local/personal experiences, are then positioned to decide whether they want to do anything to address this problem facing their own community and the world.

The development of conscious awareness, and being put in a cognitive position to decide whether or not to take action, leads to the third goal of Freire’s pedagogy: transformation. For Freire it is not enough to merely reflect on the world in a critical manner as part of the development of consciousness. Rather, the point of critically understanding our relations is to take action to change the world around us because, as Freire explains, once we discover our

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