Liberating Paulo: Liberation, Conscientização, and Pedagogy
Michael D. James
2015
Abstract
Since the beginning, even at my most indecisive, I visualized the process of
liberation as more than the struggles of men and women.
A taste for freedom, a love for life that makes us afraid of losing it and places
us in a permanent search, an incessant pursuit of being more as a possibility,
never as a destiny or fate, constitutes human nature.
The concrete conditioning of gender, race, and class, which I cannot minimize, cannot overturn ontological reason.
Our struggle, nevertheless, departs from these conditionings and converges in
the direction of being more, in the direction of universal objectives. Or else,
at least for me, the fight would make no sense.
Paulo Freire, Fifteenth Letter to his niece Cristina, 1995
Popular education is not a movement. It is the educational component of
the revolutionary process.
"Popular teacher" of the Nicaraguan Literacy Campaign, 1983
"Are they still doing that Paulo Freire stuff?"
Professor of theology, Berkeley, 2009
Part One
Searching for Liberation
The philosophy, politics, and pedagogy of liberation comprise a rich and complex body of theory and practice that has transformed Latin America and several emergent African and Asian societies and had significant impact on grassroots social movements based in US communities of color (Mendieta, 2000).
Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972) is the original articulation of the educational dimension of the politics and philosophy of liberation. It provided the foundation for popular education campaigns within political movements in Brazil, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, and several other developing countries during the last four decades of the 20th Century.
This pedagogy is for empowering working class, poor, and indigenous people to participate dynamically in "naming the world," that is, acting consciously not only to end their suffering as victims of imperialism, colonialism, racism, and capitalism- but to transform society as a whole.
In the US, principles of liberation philosophy were embodied in the grassroots nonviolence training of young people who participated in the Freedom Summer, the Citizenship Schools campaign, and other activities of the Civil Rights movement . They have been a long standing dimension of the work of the Highlander Center in Tennessee.
Despite their declining currency in North American and European academic discourses and progressive circles, pedagogies of liberation currently practiced continue to hold deep significance in grassroots and social movements. Today some of the "dreamers," undocumented students who courageously risk deportation for openly participating in the immigration rights struggle, have developed their leadership skills in popular education programs. Aspects of these pedagogies currently appear in numerous working class organizing and mobilizing efforts. A small cohort of grassroots projects in the US, inspired by Freire and the liberation theory of Pedagogy of the Oppressed continue to develop and innovate liberation-centered pedagogy as part of regional and local political struggles and social projects.
This article revisits the philosophy and politics of liberation and examines projects rooted in this framework to provide insight about it as it is developed and practiced as liberation pedagogy.
Lost in translation
The rich theoretical content and ideological structure of the politics and philosophy of liberation often disappears in the work of North American educators and community organizations. Donaldo Macedo states that "in the name of liberation pedagogy, (some educators) reduce Freire’s leading ideas into a method."
The concept of liberation is commonly depoliticized, decontextualized, and dissociated from its philosophical, ethical, and spiritual attributes in academic and political discourses. Over the years liberation pedagogy has been separated from liberation philosophy and its political and cultural roots in struggles of peoples of color. Moreover, research on actual practices of liberation pedagogy is rare. This gap in progressive discourses of social justice and equity puts into question the authority of some of the scholarship about Freire and popular education.
The philosophy and politics of liberation
The philosophy, politics, and pedagogy of liberation are a worldview and praxis rooted in the lives and struggles of the poor and working classes of Latin America, Africa, South and Southeast Asia, global indigenous communities, and communities of color in the United States. It originated as a revolutionary, counter hegemonic discourse that challenges both European and North American power and creates separation from the "Second World" confederation of socialist states (USSR and China) following World War II.
In Latin America and communities of color in the US, the concept of liberation has theological moorings. It is a central theme of the Abrahamic religions ( Islam, Judaism, Christianity), following their heritage as counter-narratives to Egyptian, Hellenic, and Roman imperialism and domination. Liberation theology (Cone, 1986, West, 2002), crystallized an insurgent, radical expression both within Latin American Catholicism and the US African American church as responses to 20th century imperialism, capitalism, and racism. It insinuated ethical and spiritual principles into resistance and revolutionary struggles.
The secular version of the philosophy, ethics, and politics of liberation was being simultaneously developed in peasant and worker formations, armed insurgencies, and left intellectual circles. This articulation was a fusion of the many strains of revolutionary theory surging through 20th century Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Arab world. Among these were various expressions of nationalism, anti-imperialism, and Marxism. These were joined by indigenous philosophies, and an emergent feminism- all challenging religious/colonial/capitalist Eurocentric/patriarchal power. Enrique Dussel, a major intellectual figure of the Argentine left and associate of Freire, is credited for developing the foundational work of the philosophy of liberation (2011) and articulating its philosophical and theological intersections.
Liberation, as a Third World innovation, signified a dramatic departure from Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat as a remedy for capitalism, or pan nationalism as a panacea for Western colonialism. It proposed a politically sophisticated and morally grounded mass movement of the "wretched of the earth" themselves (Fanon, 1965). This complicated the Marxian paradigm which envisioned a vanguard-directed international working class that would rise to usurp ruling class capitalism. It also suggested that anti-imperialism and nationalism by themselves did not substantively address questions of how democracy and equality would be articulated once independence was achieved in places such as post-colonial South Asia, Indonesia, and Latin America.
Unlike existing revolutionary ideologies, the philosophy of liberation made ethical demands upon the newly free. Liberation placed a moral demand upon the oppressed to "liberate not only themselves, but their oppressors as well." (1972, p 28) It required recognition that the "oppressor" was not merely an external enemy, but an internalized disposition, lodged within the oppressed. It required a critical understanding of domination: that dehumanization and the degradation of nature and culture are part of an overarching framework of oppression and exclusion that could easily continue in different forms under nationalist and socialist regimes. The "oppressed," Freire warned, "cannot in turn become the oppressors of the oppressors" or degraders of nature (Esteva, 2010). Yet despite their limitations, those who occupy the "underside" of society, are best situated to clarify and articulate liberation. This articulation is crystallized by the witness and synthesis of those who suffer the violence, cruelty, privations, and contempt of the powerful; those who are victims of physical and psychic trauma through deprivation of basic resources, state and non-state terrorism, institutional exclusion and discrimination, and social isolation.
These principles, according to Dussel, are rooted in the earliest manifestations of social and political organization dating as far back as the neolithic period. They precede, and ultimately contradict European modernity and postmodernity. Understanding this genealogy of liberation is key to articulating and situating it as a value in contemporary society and developing a new synthesis for current and future social movements.
Conscientização
A principle and objective of liberation pedagogy is conscientização, which generates political consciousness, moral courage, and action against great odds to take responsibility for transforming the world. Conscientização signifies the intersection of philosophy, conscience, and praxis. Articulations of this concept by Dussel, Freire, Leyva, and the educators interviewed for this article help to situate and clarify liberation pedagogy’s location and function as a cultural and political factor in society.
Decontextualizing liberation
Liberation philosophy, politics, and pedagogy were developed as components of a political project. However, this foundation has been overlooked or ignored by discourses of the academy and institutional education. Consequently it becomes distorted by their biases. In social and educational sciences, the geopolitical aspect of its genealogy is neglected. Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed is commonly confined to the category of education theory and methodology. This narrowing bypasses its interdisciplinary nature and contextual background, and results in an incoherent interpretation of liberation philosophy in general, and Freire’s work in particular.
A second problem is the rush to methodology of governments, progressive practitioners and community programs, schools, and colleges (Macedo, 2004). This preoccupation with methods can be traced to the disruptive impact of the concurrent publications of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Deschooling Society (Illich, 1970) on educational (and political) discourse in the early 1970’s. Many educators and organizers were animated by the questions, "How can we apply Paulo Freire?" and "How can we deschool society?’ However, when this challenge was posed narrowly as an educational issue- rather than as a political question, it ignored context- the structural contradictions of power, of domination and inequality. Conversely, when organizers and political parties attempted to develop it merely as a political strategy, they too often neglected fundamental educational principles of liberation pedagogy: the rejection of ideological prescription and banking education; recognition and appreciation of the intelligence, agency, and historical authority of working class and poor people; or the necessity of ideological, theoretical, and historical coherence.
A more serious challenge to liberation philosophy and pedagogy is genuine theoretical criticism. This excludes conservative criticism, the largely anti-Marxist reaction that refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of any revolutionary theory, and has routinely demonstrated that it is incapable of critical ideological argument. This article will give closer consideration to criticism from sympathetic postmodernists who, while appreciative of its broader objectives, see liberation theory as fatally tied to modernity, linked too closely to Marxism and radical Christianity. Their critiques challenge that these ties ultimately re-center European, patriarchal, economistic, and colonial power. Postmodernism is suspicious of what it perceives as liberation philosophy’s "privileging" of certain oppressed groups, its ontological propositions, and its utopian disposition.
Some of these postmodern dispositions have become normalized in educational discourses; however, it is apparent in many instances that they are borrowed without careful interrogation or consideration of context.
Minding the gaps
The many attributions to Paulo Freire in education, ethnic studies, anthropology, and cultural studies testify to the authority and influence of liberation philosophy, theology, and politics. Numerous grassroots political projects claim Freire and "popular education" as principal influences. In the case of liberation pedagogy, a number of these references fall short of reflecting theoretical or ideological depth. I regularly come across interpretations in teaching and community practices, many of whom consider themselves "Freirean," that have clearly neglected the political and historical context of his work.
The most comprehensive interrogation (and contestation) occurs in postmodern discourses of cultural studies, feminist studies, critical anthropology, Latin American studies, and urban and adult education. The postmodern critique of liberation philosophy (and liberation philosophy’s critique of postmodernism) is a polemic too dense to cover here. I attempt an overview of relevant aspects of this polemic critical to the findings identified later in the article.
Unfortunately, liberation pedagogy practices have not been comprehensively examined; there are few empirical education studies of work on the ground. Although at one time there were nearly 50 US and Canadian "popular education" projects operating, few of these have been researched or documented. Of these, only a small number of these were grassroots- based, directly affiliated with Third World projects (the others were affiliated with universities), and advised by Freire and other experienced practitioners. IDEPSCA and Education as a Practice of Social Change were in this category. Several youth and grassroots empowerment projects employ dinamicas and methods directly and indirectly influenced by liberation pedagogy, but few of these appear in current studies.
These "gaps" in research, interpretation, and practice have less to do with the integrity of liberation philosophy and pedagogy than with the conscious and unconscious exercise of power/knowledge that truncate and distort its presentation. Michael Apple refers to education’s "failure to situate" itself in its actual historical and economic context (2004) as one cause of its inability to critically interrogate or understand an educational counter narrative such as the pedagogy of the oppressed.
A genealogy of liberation pedagogy reveals that over the past 50 years there have been many creative iterations and syntheses, particularly in the global South. Esteva (2010) describes the Zapatista movement in Chiapas heavily influenced by the "conviviality" theories of the late Ivan Illich. Illich was an important early contributor to liberation philosophy and theology. I currently belong to a group of US-based popular educators who rework the pedagogy of the oppressed into practices that generate power in poor communities. In this context, working class peoples of color today face wage depression and underemployment, racial exclusion in the forms of voter suppression and police and vigilante violence, and the aggressive normalization of structural inequality (McClaren, 1999).
Further research on the theory that produced liberation pedagogy is important for the continuing emergence and enfranchisement of people of color and the working class in the United States. It is needed to identify features of liberation-centered pedagogy essential to the development of current and future political and cultural projects. It also addresses discursive gaps that result from the fragmentation of the disciplines, the lack of power analyses, underdeveloped theories of change, and cultural and class biases. It can inform new grassroots liberatory education projects. It can enhance a more critical literacy about Freire and liberation for the field of education.
Liberation philosophy, as a product of peoples of color and the global South, may also be a victim of cultural and class bias. David Hemphill’s research on codified cultural schemas (1999), suggests that the Western intellectual tradition is yet unable to abide knowledge production from sources beyond Europe. The rejection of liberation philosophy- both conscious and unconscious (and ultimately Eurocentric) needs to be contested.
This article offers theory and evidence to be used by 1) grassroots-based educators, organizers, and community leaders developing organic programs for conscientizacao; 2) educators in primary, secondary, and postsecondary settings in order to more appropriately contextualize, situate, and draw from liberation theory to inform their own work, particularly in schools serving people of color and working class students. It interrogates liberation theory as it is presented across disciplines in the literature and practiced in specific local and current articulations. It includes reflections from two projects that were part of a regional confederation of North and South American popular education programs , both of which were endorsed and visited by Paulo Freire during his tenure as a political consultant with the World Council of Churches (during his period of political exile). The respective coordinators of these projects were advised and mentored by Freire in the early stages of developing their programs. These projects situated themselves within the framework of liberation theory and popular social movements in Latin America, Mexico, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region, and were part of a formal global community of practice. The article attempts to bring new attention to a body of work that continues to evolve and contribute to the enfranchisement and emancipation of poor and working people. This evolution may have profound significance for new political and educational innovations.
Part Two
Discursive Dodges: Marginalizing Liberation
Discursive Dodges: Marginalizing Liberation
It would come as a surprise to many in the popular education community that in some quarters of academia, liberation pedagogy is regarded as well-intentioned, but obsolete. Paulo Freire has been consigned to the vestiges of modernism, and now is regarded as a respected, but less relevant elder. In the field many of us practitioners seem to have been outside of this discursive deconstruction.
However, there are indicators that this may be a problem specific to academia, particularly in North America and Europe. Liberation philosophy and pedagogy continue to be interrogated, reinvented, and practiced in many forms in the global south. Its influence is evident in grassroots and electoral politics of Brazil, Paraguay, Chile, Mexico, the Philippines, and West Africa. The number of projects in the US and Canada today is small; but the depth and impact of them is significant and consistent with the practices and discourses of their counterparts in the southern hemisphere.
The first section of this segment identifies five positions that either delimit or contest Freire and liberation: 1) conservative and reactionary rejection of what is perceived as an anti capitalist/socialist education project; 2) failure to situate Freire as an extension of the philosophy and politics of liberation; 3) the failure of institutional education to situate itself politically and historically; 4) cultural bias and the privileging of Western schemas and worldviews; 5) postmodernist suspicion of the philosophy, politics, and pedagogy of liberation.
The second section contains references that "re-situate" liberation pedagogy. It prefaces the themes that surface in the interviews of practitioners and participants: 1) a brief genealogy of liberation; 2) other pedagogies of resistance that name oppression and its disciplinary mechanisms; 3) conscientização as an experience of transformation; 4) indigenous epistemology as a new synthesis of education for critical consciousness.
References to Paulo Freire occur frequently in feminist studies, queer theory, critical race theory, cultural anthropology, critical race theory, theology, labor studies, cultural studies, adult education, political science, and Latin American Studies. Many of these attribute their very existence to Freire’s revolutionary theories of pedagogy. However, a failure to contextualize these attributions in the genealogy and philosophy of liberation has the effect of reducing them to a trope, at which point their critical value is lost.
The scholar who queried, "are they still doing that Paulo Freire stuff?" posed a serious and troubling challenge, particularly to those still doing the "stuff:" How did Freire’s work, and by inference liberation pedagogy, philosophy, and theology, become marginal in academic discourses? Where is the inquiry and research on liberation pedagogy practices in North and South America?
I. Insufficiently Modern
Rejection of liberation pedagogy stems from three sources: 1) Reactionary politics. Educators such as Friedenberg (Glass, 2001) and members of the Tucson Unified School Board who banned Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Rodriguez, 2012), dismiss and censor pedagogies that acknowledge or interrogate economic class, capitalism, racism, sexism and bias or promote social justice as Marxist, or ‘unamerican.’ 2) The corporatization of higher education in the US. The academic adherence of schools and colleges to a neoliberal curriculum may also explain why liberation philosophy and pedagogy is disappearing in academic discourses in the US and Europe (1999, p 85) regardless of its academic and ideological currency in the global South. 3) Its proximity to Marxism and revolutionary formations during the crisis years in Latin America and the Caribbean. This repudiation coincided with the rejection of liberation theology by conservative religious orders and governments. This has made liberation philosophy an unwanted reference for some, particularly those who are romancing neoliberalism as a pathway to hemispheric relevance. The increases in per capita income in many developing countries suggest to some that the need for revolutionary economic and social change has ended. However, the obvious and cruel failures of structural adjustment policies, the dangerous emergence of the narco economy, and the continuing political meddling in developing states by the US and its developed partners has exposed the fraud of the neoliberal project.
Liberation philosophy continues indisputably to be a major subtext in the political and economic transformations occurring in societies such as Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay. The Partido Trabalhadores (Workers Party) of Brazil, responsible for some of the most radical social and economic changes in Latin America, counts Paulo Freire as one of its original architects. At least five current presidents were products of revolutionary movements and influenced by liberation theology and philosophy. The arrival and popularity of Pope Francis- a conservative cleric who embraces key aspects of liberation theory, is an important signifier of this influence.
Uprooting Freire
Liberal educators like much of what liberation pedagogy has to offer. However, they sometimes appropriate aspects to be used as teaching methods without political content or implication. This exercise dissociates it from its political and historical purpose. One pattern among some North American scholars is to decouple Freire from liberation philosophy and theology (from Enrique Dussel, Ivone Gebara, and Leonardo Boff, with whom he co-authored the ‘field’), and reassign him to the genres of liberal philosophy and adult education ( with John Dewey, Jack Mezirow, et al.). This device enables them to interrogate Freire not as a Latin American revolutionary, but as a liberal philosopher and academic. Donaldo Macedo, lamenting this treatment, is critical not only of their political positions, but what he sees as political illiteracy:
(O)ne cannot understand Freire’s theories without taking a rigorous detour through a
Marxist analysis…(a) dismissal of Marx is nothing more than a vain attempt to remove
the socio-historical context that grounds the Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (2004, p xiv)
Nor, it would seem, that anyone could understand Freire’s theories "without taking a rigorous detour" through liberation philosophy and theology. Few liberal scholars pay more than lip service to these, despite Freire’s status as a co-architect of both. Correspondingly, even some Marxists and postmodernists cannot abide its religious foundations. For them, the proximity of liberation theology to the imperial theology that underscored 500 years of Christian supremacism is too close.
Agnosticism is foundational to European modernity and is germane to both left and right expressions. Liberation theology, though tolerated by some secular progressives, has never been fully interrogated or appreciated by them. Theology has never proven itself to be "rational."
One area of liberal education in which liberation pedagogy receives more respectful attention is adult education. However, it has been reduced to an "approach" or "perspective" in the field, compartmentalized like "critical theory, critical multiculturalism, critical race theory, postcolonialism, queer theory, postmodernism and feminist theory (Merriam, 2012)." Even as Freire is made a regular point of reference to inquiries about education reform, equity, "empowerment," and classroom technique, and generally viewed as a central figure in new education theory, he is often undermined by anti-Marxist or anti-Christian bias. Because of this, Macedo sharpens his criticism against those who dissociate Freire from the broader complex of liberation politics.
The misunderstanding of Paulo Freire’s leading theoretical ideas goes beyond the
difficulty of "seeing things in both Christian and Marxist perspectives." The
misunderstanding, even by those who claim to be Freirean, is not innocent. It allows
many liberal educators to appropriate selective aspects of Freire’s theory and practice
it as a badge of progressiveness while conveniently dismissing or ignoring the "Marxist
perspectives" that would question their complicity with the very structures that created
human misery in the first place. (2004, p xiv)
Fetish of methods
"Yeah, we read Paulo Freire. We tried it. And it didn’t work." US teacher
Methodological failure is rooted in ideological error. Freire
The complications of putting the Pedagogy of the Oppressed into practice began soon after its publication. Initially, even literacy campaigns in Nicaragua and El Salvador struggled with the complexities of creating practices based in the theories of liberation philosophy (McFadden, 1982).
Many have mistakenly conflated "pedagogy" and "methodology." Pedagogy is the educational expression of a politics and philosophy. Pedagogy of the Oppressed is the educational expression of the politics and philosophy of liberation. It is not a methodology itself, but a theoretical framework from which a transformative methodology can be created.
Macedo’s criticism exposes how Freire and liberation philosophy have been collapsed into methods. Many urban teachers have claimed to ground their curricula in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Teachers of women’s studies, ethnic studies, critical anthropology, and other insurgent disciplines sometimes attempt to utilize something they call "Freirean methodology." Numerous university professors make similar claims about their classroom instruction. Today there are even business schools instructing financial literacy who purport to use "Freirean pedagogy!"
The field called "critical pedagogy," a derivative work inspired by Giroux, McClaren, Shor, and others has been largely practiced as an alternative pedagogy for university education. It also has become a signifier of practices inspired by Freire or working as ‘popular education’ projects. Ellsworth’s essay "Why Doesn’t this Feel Empowering? Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy "(1992) is a biting criticism of critical pedagogy activities at the University of Madison Wisconsin designed to combat racism and heighten student political consciousness. She describes that they backfired, criticizing that they were prescriptive, caused unnecessary pain and confusion, and that the process seemed to contradict their intention.
Critical pedagogy, as a practice for the more privileged, middle class and educated, may not deserve the harshness of Ellsworth’s critique. Perhaps Ellsworth’s criticism points to the problem of practices that have been developed from insufficient theoretical inquiry or methodological rigor. Critical pedagogy seems neither mature nor developed enough to be responsible for "repressive myths." But Ellsworth’s critique may be rooted in postmodernist criticism of liberation philosophy, which ultimately attributes these failures to Freire and liberation pedagogy.
Neither the Pedagogy of the Oppressed or Education for Critical Consciousness (1973) provides a roadmap or justification for teaching privileged, educated, university students. Although liberation philosophy and pedagogy offer an epistemology and political counter narrative relevant to all classes, they are specifically situated in the conditions and realities of the global working classes and poor, those who are systematically excluded or marginalized in political and economic life.
Freire as a trope
"Freirean" has become a trope, much in the way "Marxian," "Freudian," "Foucauldian," or "Gandhian" have become loose or colloquial representations of highly complex fields. Trope-making exposes a failure to contextualize, interrogate, and respect genealogy. In this case, the integrity of practices authentically grounded in the principles of liberation philosophy and politics are trivialized.
Failure to situate education
Apple (2004) explains that this dissociation is, in part, a function of formal education’s inability to situate itself historically or ideologically:
That is, to gain insight, to understand, the activity of men and women of a specific
historical period, one must start by questioning to them what is unquestionable. As Marx
would say, one does not accept the illusions on an epoch, the participants’
own common sense appraisals of their intellectual and programmatic activities
(though these are important to be sure); rather the investigator must situate
these activities in a larger arena of economic, ideological, and social conflict...
education as a field of study does not have a strong tradition of such ‘situating.’
In fact, if one were to point to one of the most neglected areas of educational
school scholarship, it would be just this, the critical study
of the relationship between ideologies and educational thought and
practice. Such critical scholarship would lay bare the political, social,
ethical, and economic interests and commitments that are uncritically accepted
as ‘the way life really is’ in our day-to-day life as educators.
Some educators regard the very idea of "situating" education as politicizing or "Marxist" and dismiss it out of hand. Others, compromised by their ignorance of the historical and ideological underpinnings of modern education, operate under an assumption that it is neutral and universal. For these educators, Freire and liberation pedagogy are reduced to curricular alternatives or otherwise reconstructed into more palatable concepts such as "transformative learning" and "meaning making."
Hemphill, employing a postmodern device, intimates a controversial proposition that when analogized, suggests that there could be bias against liberation philosophy not due to its content, but because of its source. In his studies on cognition, Hemphill’s appreciation of schemas of non- European origin (e.g., the blues, Confucianism, Taoism, four directions), posits that the Western scientific method is not universal; it has merely been normalized as such. He proposes that it is a "codified cultural schema" comparable to the African-American-based blues:
figure 1
| The Blues: The Blues is a codified cultural schema of African American origin with cultural/aesthetic, sociopolitical, and cognitive structural elements:
Cultural/Aesthetic
• Affirmation in face of adversity
• Improvisation,creativity, adaptability, and continuity in situations of discontinuity
• Grace under pressure
• Unsentimental but heroic struggle
in the face of bad odds
Sociopolitical
Lyrical content expressing critiques and counternarratives of:
• racism
• sexual politics
• ideology
• resistance
• economics
Cognitive/Structural
A 12- or 16-bar musical form with
its own language & syntax:
• riff • vamp • call & response • break
• polyrhythms • chorus
• syncopation • tag • idiomatic timbre
|
Western Scientific Method
a back-and-forth movement in which the investigator: (1) First operates inductively from observations to hypotheses. (2) Then operates deductively from these hypotheses to their implications, in order to check their validity from the standpoint of compatibility with accepted knowledge. (3) After revision as needed, submits hypotheses to further test and inductive analysis through the collection of data specifically designed to test their validity at the empirical level. (4) Then often links together the new findings with other findings or knowledge, again employing deductive reason |
Hemphill’s synthesis of Albert Murray’s "cultural aesthetic," with Angela Davis’ "sociopolitical" framework, and his own "cognitive structural" element has identified something that for African Americans represents much more than a schema; it comprises a liberation paradigm. The blues embody principles that are at the core of African American resilience and resistance. They are epistemological and prophetic; they simultaneously express suffering and liberation, difference and intersection. (Dyson, 2004) Hemphill charges that the marginalization of this schema is another exercise of political domination:
Identifying a potent schema like the Blues as a counter narrative to such dominant
schemas as the Western scientific method, then, is not a trivial act….Neither the arts, nor
music, nor the Blues are trivial areas--they are simply marginalized from a Eurocentric
perspective, and have to date been ignored as cognitive processes... This marginalization
is a function of power and not the result of any universal or abstract measure
of cognitive value. (1999, p 4)
Borrowing from Hemphill’s construct, postmodernism and liberation philosophy are structures that organize knowledge and can be juxtaposed similarly:
figure 2
| Liberation Philosophy, Theology, Pedagogy An epistemology and ethical-political framework rooted in the suffering of poor peoples of the global south, particularly Latin America and Africa, with political and spiritual elements: Philosophical An historical worldview based in the suffering of the victims of the Western Domination system; critical material and discourse ethics; anti-hegemonic formal intersubjectivity; liberating praxis. Theological history viewed and transformed from the underside: human possibility interrogated and articulated by the "non-persons;" rejection of fetishization, idolatry, commodification; acceptance of love, justice, compassion, mercy, forgiveness; Political: conscientizacao: the ability to apprehend social, economic, and political contradiction; evolved and vigilant conscience; acting to transform the world. Source: Peoples of the global south |
Postmodernism An archaeology of knowledge- contingent on existing interests, and historical conditions not given as universals; an "order of things:" human sciences- psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, history, criminology, other social sciences. discourses are entire fields of study, including the language, ideology and rules; self-affirmation of the "other;" historicization of history; question of perception; the decentering of the subject; the death of the intellectual; suspicion of the revolutionary project; demystifying fetishism; the death of history; the code not of law- but of normalization, human science the operative domain; power/knowledge speaks through language; power is something that circulates, privileging certain bodies, discourses, gestures, desires. Source: European intellectual community |
The blues represent the power and complexity of the "living labor" (Mignolo, 2000) of oppressed people. This is the significance of Hemphill’s construct to liberation pedagogy. Moreover, the blues differ from the scientific method in that they do not pretend to be independent of geopolitical context. They declare that they are an expression of the context. The blues acknowledge what the scientific method refuses to admit- that it is geopolitically situated, and not a universal construct. Hemphill’s proposition continues to be controversial, though critics will likely be reluctant to challenge it publicly, for fear of appearing biased. Liberation philosophy seems also to be a victim of Eurocentrism's inability to abide systems and schemas of equal value coming from non-European sources. Hemphill’s proposition of "broadening our conceptions...beyond received Eurocentric categories" identifies the codification of the "myth of European modernity " (Dussel and Mignolo (2000)). To broaden conceptions is not a "trivial act;" it represents a political challenge to dominant power.
Postmodernist suspicion
Postmodern discourses that are critical of liberation philosophy and pedagogy pose its most serious challenge because postmodernism and liberation philosophy share common objectives. However, some postmodernist criticism is problematically indirect, inadvertently biased, and contradictory. Batstone explains this ambivalence:
Postmodernism is ill at ease with narratives of emancipation since it deems
it ludicrous to point toward a meta discourse that might legitimate action,
values, or meaning. Postmodernism considers engagement in utopian discourse
as a potentially dangerous form of deception of oneself and others. It further
rejects the notion of an enemy to be overcome a clearly delineated demarcation
along ideological lines, or a binary division such as economic class that might
guide a political struggle. (2000, p 15)
Nervousness from Europe about knowledge production (or any other production) from the Third World raises a number of red flags. Narratives of emancipation have been essential to the emergence of oppressed peoples throughout the 500 years of European domination. Certain utopian discourses of the oppressed have demonstrated a moral impulse to transform emancipation narratives into hopeful, creative visions of a just and sustainable world. Indigenous visions- such as that emerging from Chiapas- are neither utopian or liberation-centered- but non-anthropocentric and spiritually grounded. That these are viewed with suspicion by Europeans is not altogether surprising.
Europe created and imposed its metanarrative of modernity onto the rest of the world, which has indeed produced our current dilemma. Despite that some of its own (e.g., postmodernists) now find Eurocentrism-modernism arrogant and presumptuous, this realization cannot justify their suspicion that all others would behave as Europeans have (historically). This suspicion warrants consideration of both the critique as well as the critics. Nervousness and suspicion toward others rooted in one’s own self-loathing suggests a need for psychoanalytic self-reflection rather than projection of this behavior onto all others.
Identity politics
It is important to examine how this logic unfolds. The case made by Glass encapsulates what he sees as a severe shortcoming in Freire’s approach :
Since...complexities about identity are ubiquitous to liberation struggle, claims for an
authentic subject position from which to challenge domination or oppression
are suspect. This demand for continuous critique extends to the identity of the oppressed, which is
distorted by Freire’s universalistic binary formulations that too often assume a unity of
experiences. Liberation becomes a far more intricate and intimate matter, and requires
theoretical approaches either missing from Freire’s perspective of needing substantive
development. (2001, p 21)
Glass makes two striking criticisms: 1) for him, Paulo Freire did not appreciate the "intricacy and intimacy" of liberation; 2) Freire "distorts" the "identity of the oppressed." One can discern the postmodernist mechanisms whirling in an attempt to deconstruct liberation pedagogy here.
Glass insinuates a politics of identity into liberation philosophy, suggesting that it makes a "claim" for "an authentic subject position" based on identity.
The theory does not adequately recognize that race, class, and gender oppressions are
geared to specific concrete conditions that can be contradictory, such that simultaneous
positions of oppression and dominance can be occupied by particular individuals
(for example, someone privileged by racial and class location but oppressed by the
gender order, as with a White middle-class woman.) (2001, p 21)
Some context is necessary here. Liberation philosophy was developed at a conjuncture in which the US Civil Rights movement was descending. Marxism had been exposed as structurally insufficient to revolutionary processes throughout the Third World (1968-1975). Grassroots actions, including popular education programs were emerging all over Latin America and Africa, and several sprouted in communities of color in the US. Racial, gender, ability, and orientation bias began being critically interrogated as to their function and location in oppression. A significant development at this conjuncture was that Europeans (including white Americans) were no longer the central actors in revolutionary and reform projects. It is around this time in North America and Europe that "complexities about identity" begin to be interrogated- primarily in academic discourses.
Alcoff, in a commentary on Dussel’s philosophy of liberation, addresses the problematic territory that seems to have spawned "identity politics." Her argument challenges Glass’s propositions. Alcoff clarifies the position of liberation philosophy as it relates to identity. Invoking Foucault, she effectively situates identity and location as it is expressed in liberation philosophy:
(L)iberation must involve self-determination over...identity categories...
All identities are dynamic, though to different degrees. But even those such as
gender and sexuality should be approached as "horizons of possibility" rather
than names that correspond to inherent characteristics. ...there needs to be a
reflective awareness about the possible (but not inevitable) ways in which identity
may feed desire or support dominant power/knowledges. Dussel’s use of
identity categories is meant to mark the social locations and collective experiences
that yield a critique of world capitalism. In other words, what he is really after is
the epistemic perspective, not the metaphysics of personal identity. (2000, p 265)
In liberation philosophy, 1) oppression is not an identity, but a condition; 2) it recognizes and situates Glass's "white middle class woman" (1972). Ultimately all people (including the oppressors!) are afflicted by the mechanisms of domination, by their distortion of the distribution of power/knowledge. To engage in an assessment of degrees of oppression is to miss the point of how domination operates. Dyson laments the aspect of the "politics of identity" that has become an "unfortunate competition for victim status. (2004, p 110)." This may be an indicator that some have felt excluded by the binary of "oppressor-oppressed." At worst, is creates a diversion from the racist, classist, and colonialist legacy of European domination. Unfortunately, this competition undermines the importance of the particularity of the social locations and collective experiences of oppressed people of color.
The spectre of ontology: no preferential option for the poor
The foremost postmodernist suspicion of the philosophy of liberation may center in its critique of ontology as a fatal error of Western philosophy. Postmodernists reject the possibility of an "historical task of the oppressed" or the vision of humanization as an ontological vocation.
The theoretical apparatus they (Dussel and others) bring to the problem of oppression
in Latin America is not sufficiently liberated itself to guarantee the liberation of others.
We need a good (critical) theory which can also serve as a theory of liberation.
Such a theory cannot rest essentially on the principle of alterity and on the conflict
between the center and the periphery, for we have seen that these principles alone
do not escape the dualistic, hierarchical, authoritarian, and dogmatic structures
which have characterized other ideological systems in the past.
(Schutte, 2000; cited by Vuola)
The ‘ontological vocation’ of the oppressed (1972, p 28) and ‘preferential option for the poor’ are read as "privileging" of the poor (people of color)- to the exclusion of "others." Who are the "others" of Schutte's proposal? . They fear that a principle of alterity leads inevitably to authoritarianism. However, Alcoff and Mendieta complicate this assertion:
(T)he preferential option for the poor...leads to neither irrationalism nor
irreducible particularity; instead, it grants the basis for achieving universal
truths and norms precisely because only an intersubjective praxis can authorize
a claim of universality. Here was the error of the Enlightenment: to imagine
that universality and truth could be achieved prior to a dialogue across difference
and that such dialogue, to the extent that it was ever allowed, would proceed
with the presupposition that Europe knew what was true and what
was universal. (2000, p 10)
It is difficult to determine the depth of the fissure between postmodernism and liberation philosophy. The postmodern case against liberation philosophy and pedagogy (which seems to come primarily from the global North) is not transparent. However, it seems to be the source of some academics’ marginalization of "that Paulo Freire stuff." On another hand, it could be part of the impetus of the invention of "critical pedagogies" for the educated and groups that are identity-defined.
Glass and Schutte present a postmodernist case that delegitimizes liberation philosophy. They intimate a conditional approval of its intentions, yet ultimately dismiss it as "insufficient." This case seems to have gained traction in academic circles. However, scholars are reluctant to openly criticize a body of work rooted in and still relevant to the Third World. This reluctance to own their rejection of liberation philosophy thinly veils the bias inherent in their critique.
However, the more significant flaw in their argument is their failure to consider what Alcoff and Mendieta have identified as the necessity of a ‘dialogue across difference.’
Dussel, Freire, and Esteva among others have effectively engaged this discussion over the years. They have offered that postmodernism and liberation do not need to precede or succeed one another, but be critically appreciated as part of a genealogical whole.
Mendieta suggests that although there are resemblances between postmodernity
and liberation (theologies, philosophy) due to historical, methodological, and
political reasons, they nevertheless remain very different projects.
(Batstone, et al., pg 21)
Coleman is less magnanimous about this "debate." He suspects a sleight-of-hand in the postmodern dismissal of liberation philosophy and moreover directly addresses cultural bias.
Why not go on about the business of engaging in intellectual reflection and praxis while
crafting meaning and proposing alternative praxes for the 21st century without making
any specific reference to something that is called postmodernity?...This is especially
true in light of the confession that the oppressed have already experienced the traits
of postmodernity long before those who thought of themselves as the cultured
representatives of modernity began to fold under the collapse of their idol.
He then offers proposals to free people from having to justify liberation pedagogy against what he calls "postmodern doubletalk." Coleman is acutely critical of the Eurocentric bias of this critique, and suggests that it is a distraction:
(M)aximum energy should be directed towards the next steps in formulating and
implementing liberative themes, theories, and social praxes. A related observation has
to do with appropriating more of the liberative languages and strategies that are arising
from among the oppressed themselves in lieu of the terminology and categories that are
still drawn primarily from Eurocentric frames of reference. (Coleman, 1997)
II. Insurgent and utopian
Liberation is difficult to find in education scholarship. It is not a common theme in Western philosophy. Following a brief period of popularity, it has recently been pushed to the margins of contemporary Christian, Judaic, and Islamic theologies. It continues to be an insurgent, utopian concept that collides with modernity’s narcissism and postmodernity’s skepticism. Consequently, queer, Latin American, African/Latina/Asian, womens,’ critical race, and postcolonial studies seem to be where it has found a home and can be best interrogated. This section attempts to identify references that have insinuated liberation theory into contemporary discourse, particularly as an educational construct. It will examine five frameworks: 1) a brief genealogy of liberation; 2) definitions and protocols of liberation; 3) other pedagogies of resistance that name disciplinary mechanisms and necessitate conscientizacao; 4) conscientizacao as an experience of transformation; 5) indigenous epistemology as a new synthesis of education for critical consciousness.
Genealogy of liberation: Enrique Dussel’s politics and philosophy of liberation
In Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean and many parts of the global South liberation is an historical project. Freire’s colleague and Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel is considered a principal architect of liberation philosophy. His proposal is that it is a counter narrative to the development-underdevelopment nexus, to neoliberalism, and to modernity itself. It is in this context that the Pedagogy of the Oppressed was invented as the educational component of the liberation counter narrative.
Dussel traces the genealogy of liberation to the advent of the neolithic period and origins of cosmopolitan life (6000-2000 BCE). The invention of the political field ended the disorder and chaos that had become rampant at the end of the Paleolithic Era, and gave rise to urbanization, institutions, ruling classes and military-industrial complexes. Correspondingly, it gave rise to the "rebellion of the victims and the slow invention of the secular state." (2011, p 66 ) Dussel indicates that the secular state indeed created consensus, systems of governance, and economic organization. However, as a construction of the powerful, the secular state did not reject barbarism; it organized it. It did not democratize power/knowledge; it concentrated it. It did not repudiate violence and victimhood, but instead invented mechanisms to utilize human suffering and exploit nature. Hence the political field, having created oppressors and victims, also necessitated another invention: liberation. The philosophy of liberation is rooted in an ethico-spiritual impulse that precedes modernity by thousands of years and has always been a counter narrative, parallel and contradictory to modernity’s assumptions.
After 500 years of hegemony and military, economic, and political domination, Europe has pronounced the "end of history" with neoliberalism as its crowning achievement (Fukuyama, 2006). This "achievement," exposes the cruel shadow side of modernity: 20% of the world producing for itself, with the remaining 80% subsisting in perpetuity as clients, in servanthood, in economic irrelevance, subject to permanent economic insecurity, surviving the dangers of collapsing and rogue states, and sometimes suffering mortality rates higher than those of the early years of Western development. Fortunately, Dussel’s genealogy proposes that this fate is not inevitable.
Eurocentrism has refused to accept that its civilizing project is leading us to
the destruction of the ecology of the planet along with the annihilation of humankind.
Hence, the only way out is to seek, in the world’s societies including Europe, a capacity
to live with otherness or difference (alterity). This impulse which is seen in the
Asian Pacific is also providing the Arab world, Latin America and African nations with
the possibility of creating a multipolar or transmodern cultural world, which protects life
and encourages humans to live together instead of simply facilitating profit,
private appropriations and personal benefits. (Dussel, 2006)
Liberation philosophy is a synthesis of geopolitics and philosophy, "philosophy at the service of liberation." (Mignolo, 2000) By the second half of the 20th century, a philosophy, theology, and politics of "liberation" had disrupted and complicated liberal political discourse. It was rooted in anti-colonial struggles in Africa and Asia, had dramatic expressions in communities of color of the US after World War II, and became articulated most comprehensively in Latin America, anchored in a revolutionary and postmodern liberation theology.
Liberation instead of neoliberalism
Dussel describes liberation as a "goodness" (a "grace," in theological terms). Brazilian theologian Ivone Gebara frames it within intersecting utopian visions:
(We feminists) are invited to keep our particular utopias and be open to others
as ecological, social, and political in order to build new models of living together,
We are struggling for a new international order where people respect each other
and their environments. ..in spite of the strength of evil, in spite of its apparent
victory, love and justice sustain the world, sustain our lives. Love and justice
allow life to be alive. Love and justice nourish hope and are nourished by hope.
(2008, p 325)
Dussel frames liberation as an "ethical problem related to the way we think of the world...its forms of organization and the way it operates its systems of production, consumption and social life. That is, with the different ways in which society has been organized, supposedly with the aim of living better." (2006, p 500)
The "living labor" of the victims who suffered under the European project of globalization is the source of its resolution according to Freire, Gebara, Boff and the many architects of liberation philosophy, which proposes "a solution to the totalitarian thought of oppression through a recourse to what it has excluded; the perspective, and the labor, of its victims." (2000, p 10) Living labor is the unacknowledged by-product of First World domination and centrality.
It is a double articulation: a project of liberation and a critique of First World
philosophy, recognizing, at the same time, the exteriority of living labor...
liberation philosophy, as living labor, is labor that engages critically with the
totality of the system, that constantly marks its borders and limits, instead of
being subsumed… from the perspective of the system. (2000 , p. 4)
I’ll have to think about THAT one.
popular education student
Four requirements of the liberation project
A synthesis of the literature suggests that the liberation ‘project’ must fit the criteria inherent in the following four requirements: 1) Liberation is clarified and best articulated through the witness and synthesis of the Victim: the poor, and all those who suffer the violence, cruelty, privations, and contempt of the powerful. Even a modern-day "victim" has power/knowledge and privileges; but the social location of those who suffer most provides them with a unique vantage point and existential situation from which to observe and experience oppression and exclusion. Their authority is in their location. 2) The process of liberation rejects that which is "established, fixed, normalized, crystallized, dead" (Dussel, 2006) and proceeds to "the procreation of a new order, of its new structure, and at the same time of the functions and beings that compose it." The status quo is not acceptable. Neoliberalism is unjust and unsustainable. 3) "The liberating act ... can only be illegal, contrary to present laws, which, because they are those of an old just order that is now oppressive, are unjust. It is the inevitable position of liberation: "subversive illegality." This is not a new reality. Nonviolent movements are by nature illegal because they challenge immoral laws and statutes. 4) Liberation is at its core, a spiritual and ethical project; it is not a political state, but a personal and collective discipline. (James, 2009). The orientation of humankind toward death or toward life is a spiritual problem, "linked to the material organization of the bodily connection among human beings." ( Moylan, citing Hinkelammert {1991} ) . Modernity attempted to engineer a livable society based on rationalism and materialism. Liberation recognizes, particularly in the wake of the failure of socialism and the disaster of neoliberalism, that power cannot accomplish what compassion must.
Victims must recognize their own condition and become communities of practice. According to Dussel, a liberation project is contingent upon the "victims recognition of their historical task." Liberation pedagogy is a space of situated learning:
... the subject-world relation (apprenticeship) implied in a social ontological,
historically situated, perspective on learning..."Knowing" is a relation among
communities of practice, participation in practice, and the generation of identities
as part of becoming part of ongoing practice. (Lave, 1996)
In US-based education, feminist, queer, pan-nationalist and popular education pedagogies have become communities of practice that testify to the notion that liberation pedagogy is not alone in its recognition of oppressive power/knowledge concentrations and mechanisms. Some of these pedagogies are explicitly counter hegemonic. In resistance to mainstream education, these acknowledge oppression and exclusion of social subgroups as historical, systemic, and structural. Akom (2009) describes the decades-old Nation of Islam’s black achievement ideology as:
a set of cultural elements that are relevant to the problems of educational
and economic mobility in the face of instrumental discrimination (e.g., in
employment and wages), relational discrimination, (eg, social and residential
discrimination) and symbolic discrimination (e.g., denigration of the minority
culture and language), dual responses to conditions of racism and group discrimination.
Britzman (1995) implicates "straight" education as an enforcer of certain kinds of knowledge combined with certain kinds of ignorance. She cites Wickham’s and Haver’s notion that violence against queers is "installed" in the "valorization of everydayness" (as in family values, for example) and in the consciousness of straight and queer persons. A queer pedagogy must enable people to recognize and repudiate this "installation."
Queer theory offers education techniques to make sense of and remark upon what
(education) dismisses or cannot bear to know. This theory insists, using psychoanalytic
method, that the relationship between knowledge and ignorance is
neither oppositional nor binary. Rather, they mutually implicate each other
structuring and enforcing particular forms of knowledge and forms of ignorance.
In this way ignorance is analyzed as an effect of knowledge, indeed, as its limit,
and not as an originary or innocent state. Perhaps the more curious insistence is
the study of what hegemonic discourses of normalcy cannot bear to know.
Tejeda (1993) also indicts mainstream education as a "colonizing" instrument, a device that contributes directly to the exclusion of working class and people of color.
We insist on discussing contemporary notions and issues of social justice from a
decolonizing perspective because we understand that for working class indigenous
and nonwhite peoples and their descendents the materialization of social justice, on
the one hand, and the discrediting and dismantling of the lasting effects and
contemporary manifestations of our capitalist colonialism, on the other, are inseparable.
In each of these pedagogies- Tejeda’s decolonizing pedagogy, Britzman’s queer theory, and Nation of Islam’s Black achievement ideology, oppression is the starting point of the learning process, the problem to be posed. Consciousness of the subjective and objective factors of this location and its political-historical-economic roots and structure in Eurocentric/patriarchy/neoliberalism is a key objective of the learning process. In this sense, like liberation-centered pedagogy, power is interrogated. The victims’ first task is to recognize their own condition as contradiction: this initiates conscientização. Latisha, an Nation Of Islam high school student, explains her emancipation from the Eurocentric, self-blaming education she was receiving in public schools:
Latisha: Once I joined the (Nation Of Islam) I started getting a real
education—a black education—an education that made me see the truth
about me and my history…. (Akom, 2003)
Conscientização
The following four concepts are often conflated:
raising political consciousness
building class consciousness
teaching critical thinking
conscientizacao
‘Political consciousness’ suggests an intellectual perception of basic political concepts and structures, of history, and of power. ‘Building class consciousness’ is a long-standing, but rarely implemented Marxian project describing the process of generating working class awareness of their social and economic oppression under capitalism.‘Critical thinking’ has become a curricular product that suggests a mix of a soft, liberal social awareness with basic common sense. All of these have been stripped from their political moorings in the work of the Frankfurt School, Paulo Freire, and revolutionary theory in general. This dislodging has made it possible for education and social sciences to appropriate, homogenize, and neutralize them.
"Conscientização," first articulated in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is referred to regularly in Latin American political science, theology, and philosophy. Conscientização is structured upon the lived realities of victims of exclusion and oppression. It is a political act; it is an ethical act.
The following are three key principles of conscientização by Freire:
(1) learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions,
and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality. (1972, p. 19)
(2) conscientização requires that the investigators and the people should act as co-investigators; (1972, p. 97)
(3) conscientização is the deepening of the attitude of awareness characteristic of
all emergence. (1972, p. 101)
Dussel, elaborating on Freire, (1997, p 289 ) names three "moments" of conscientização:
(1) an ethical critical consciousness of the dominated and/or excluded themselves,
which is pre-thematic but substantively originary;
(2) a thematically explicit consciousness (critical scientific);
(3) an existential thematic critical consciousness, historical or practical,
of the people itself.
In the paradigm of liberation, the oppressed, the poor, the "nobodies" of the world are not only political revolutionaries- they are to be principal architects of a new world. Recent liberation-centered education activities of conscientizacao have generated political consciousness and moral courage to act against great odds in societies such as Chile, Uruguay, and the Philippines. Levine (2001) draws the connection between the American civil rights struggle and Latin American freedom struggles, Highlander and Freire and describes how the oppressed are situated for conscientização, and thus situated to be leaders of social change:
For example, during the early 1960s, Paulo Freire and his colleagues developed
"literacy circles" with Brazilian peasants that eventually inspired adult educators
around the world. He asserted, "Who are better than the oppressed to understand
the terrible significance of an oppressive society? Who suffer the effects of
oppression more than the oppressed? Who can better understand the necessity
of liberation?" Although hardly identical, there are striking similarities between
his pedagogical ideas and the North American Citizenship Schools: respect for
the culture and intelligence of the despised and exploited poor, the conviction that
teachers and students should act as partners who learn from each other, and the
conviction that learning is an essential ingredient in revolutionary change.
Transformational elements of conscientização
Liberation pedagogy has painstakingly worked and reworked its understanding of human conscience and the elasticity of human intellect. Educators in this project have been contributors to remarkable transformations of once dependent, struggling aggregates of people into powerful communities of practice, such as the indigenous and popular assembly of Oaxaca (Leyva, 2007), and the MST in Brazil. (Issa, 2007) Participants in these learning communities have demonstrated the principles that make up the architecture of conscientização.
Freire argued that conventional and banking education disrupts, distorts, and disorganizes knowledge. It creates and reinforces the myth that only the teacher or expert holds knowledge and authority, and that to be an authority, one is required to complete a series of regulatory regimes, acquire certification from the existing power structure, and commodify her or his "knowledge." Foucault sharpens this critique, suggesting that education should not be perceived as a blunt instrument of reproducing class power- but as a disciplinary mechanism that normalizes Eurocentrism and neoliberalism and arranges the complicity of teachers and students in the enforcement of disciplinary power.
The ethical dimension is an element of the spiritual architecture of conscientização. For many liberation theorists there is an explicit value claim necessitated in part by the violence and injustice of oppression itself. The violated become the repository of rejection, shame, and non-being. Their assailant is also a prisoner of this alienation, which partly explains that contempt the rich have for the poor, or the criminal for his victim. Ethics are defined by and in relationship. This is why the solution to oppression is not simply its removal; liberation necessitates the rejection of oppression as a whole, as an ontology. It also involves reparation, healing, and restoration of "oppressor" and "oppressed" both, though at opposing poles, victims of oppression.
James, in developing the element of 'personal transformation' as part of Education as a Practice of Social Change, recognized that the need for spiritual and psychological healing was as acute as the need for intellectual formation. They were equal aspects of a whole. Poor and working class people endure a disproportionate share of hardship and trauma, and must overcome these injuries, not only as a path to well-being, but as a demonstration of humanization. Each person is challenged to overcome his/her/their internalized oppression and trauma, and simultaneously rejoice, forgive, and embrace. This would be an absurd proposition were it not being demonstrated everyday by people working conscientização: the young "dreamers;" the members of the Mayan/popular community in Chiapas; and a community of domestic workers in the US, all of whom work not only to improve their lot- but to advance a holistic and sustainable world for all of nature.
Freire understood the spiritual depth, emotional stamina, and intellectual range that is tested in the process of conscientização:
Liberation is thus a childbirth, and a painful one. The man or woman who
emerges is a new person, viable only as the oppressor-oppressed contradiction
is superseded by the humanization of all people. Or to put it another way,
the solution of this contradiction is born in the labor which brings into the
world this new being: no longer oppressor nor longer oppressed, but human
in the process of achieving freedom. (1972, p 33)
White people have ideas. Indian people have visions
However, liberation theory, according to Mignolo, cannot be a " monotopic and universal discourse "speaking the liberation of diverse constituencies of civil society that can be identified as "oppressed."(2000, p 42) Moreover, he suggests, invoking Deloria (1977, 1999), that the aim should be to turn liberation against philosophy instead of assuming philosophy as a ground for liberation. (pg. 43) The very tension that creates the current conjunctural moment of the "emergence of the alterity" requires that ontologies and epistemologies of indigenous peoples be carefully recognized and interrogated. Mignolo presents a case for this:
From Native American perspectives, the difference between white and Indian people is
the fact that, according to a Crow Indian chief, white people have ideas while Indian
people have visions. Visions require action and action manifests itself in the community,
whereas ideas have a limited relevance. An idea never reaches the entire community,
since "it only reaches those who have the ability to grasp it and the rest of the
community is left struggling for understanding" ([1990] 1999, 117).
Mignolo challenges us to engage "Occidental categories of rationality from the perspective of Native American visions, African critical philosophy, and Latin American liberation philosophy." (2000, p 44)
Indigenous principles are non-existent in the realm of Western reason and logic, and have only recently been considered by progressive, feminist, queer, and left scholars. Liberation philosophy, which began as a process of decentering Europe, has been swayed by the ‘analectics’ (2011) of Chiapas and other expressions of indigenous autonomy. Dussel concludes Politics of Liberation: A Critical World History with a chapter about how the Zapatista movement in Mexico challenges many of the previous assumptions about the nature of social movements. He cites the power of the Mayan popular imagination and the submission of Marxist and other revolutionary participants to an indigenous worldview and theory of struggle.
Dussel includes a story about an encounter between Commandante Marcos and a Mayan elder. He describes this meeting as a process of conscientização not for the peasant, but for the sophisticated, educated Marcos. Dussel recognizes the power of indigenous epistemology and pedagogy and how they reconfigure the process of liberation.
Gregory Cajete’s Look to the Mountain, An Ecology of Indigenous Education (1994) is not a pedagogy rooted in the struggles of the global south or peoples of color in the developed world. However, it provides some insight as to the synthesis of liberation pedagogy, indigenous education, and the intersectionality of these distinct epistemologies. Cajete lists 40 concepts that define ‘indigenous ways of knowing.’ The following sample of these concepts reveal an epistemology that contrasts dramatically with that of neoliberalism.
Indigenous ways of knowing
A sacred view of Nature permeates its foundational process of teaching
and learning.
Integration and interconnectedness are universal traits of its contexts
and processes.
Its elements, activities, and knowledge bases of teaching and learning radiate in concentric rings of process and relationship.
The ritual complex is both structure and process for teaching key spiritual and cultural principles and values.
Its purpose is to teach a way of life that sustains both the individual and
the community.
It unfolds within an authentic context of community and Nature.
Its processes adhere to the principle of mutual reciprocity between humans and all other things.
It recognizes the power of' thought and language to create the worlds we live in.
It honors the fact that learning requires seeing what is real about a situation, a thing, or an entity.
We learn through our bodies and spirits as much as through our minds. It integrates human individuality with communal needs.
To the extent that a liberation-centered pedagogy is in part, a response to a dominant center, it validates at least one criticism by the postmodernists characterized by this question: is human freedom to be defined only in relationship to its opposite? In contrast to the responsive and political (and anthropocentric) disposition of liberation pedagogy, indigenous ways of knowing represent an originary epistemology, one of human possibility, which situates human being within an ecological framework. It is not a response to oppression. Indigenous ontology does not pursue humanization against the reality of dehumanization. Rather, it is declarative; it defines humanization as a process of realizing one’s linkage to the whole of nature.
However, this difference does not contradict or delegitimize the liberation project. On the contrary, Cajete draws an extensive analogy between liberation pedagogy ("Freire’s method") and indigenous ways of knowing:
Freire's method mirrors, at a social level, the ecologically- inspired
orientation of Indigenous education that I have called "natural democracy."
The democratization of knowledge and the educational process perpetuated by
Freire's approach mirrors what occurs in Indigenous education. A new relationship
among Indigenous people, modern education, and knowledge bases is made possible.
(1994, p 217)
Part Three
Framing Reflections: Questions and Profiles of Local Practices and Practitioners of Liberation Pedagogy
How do Critical Faith (based on Education as a Practice of Social Change), and Ilocos Pedagogy as practices of liberation pedagogy embody the philosophy and politics of liberation?
1. The Philosophy and Politics of Liberation: the foundation of liberation pedagogy.
What makes liberation pedagogy distinct?
2. Conscientização, the primary objective of liberation pedagogy.
What is conscientização, and how does it look in practice today?
3. Spirituality is considered a critical dimension of liberation pedagogy.
How does liberation-centered pedagogy embody spirituality?
4. Practices of projects grounded in liberation philosophy.
What are the implications of these practices for work in the social movements,
alternative cultural and economic organizing, and institutional education?
Why was liberation-centered pedagogy a strategy for addressing your community issues?
Explain (your project’s) political and educational philosophy.
How did Paulo Freire’s theories influence your pedagogy?
What original ideas did you invent and implement?
How did you conduct (Describe) educational sessions (circles)?
Describe yourself- your thinking, your life, how you saw your community- before you became involved with (project).
What was new or different to you about this kind of education?
What was challenging or difficult?
How did the process affect you- your consciousness; your understanding of the issue;
your spirit?
How does liberation-centered pedagogy affect the way participants perceive the world ?
How do they distinguish these practices from other education and development activities?
Conscientização is an objective of your project’s educational process. Could you explain and describe this, and why you believe it is necessary ?
Was the education process different from other education or training you’ve done?
Profiles of educators and their projects
S. Khath
S. Khath entered the United States as a child refugee of the Vietnam War. Her mother was displaced from her village first by the genocidal aggression of Pol Pot, and then by the "Christmas bombing" of Cambodia by the US. She spent her early childhood in a Thai refugee camp and came to Echo Park, Los Angeles at the age of 11. As her mother suffered psychological injuries related to severe post-traumatic distress syndrome, the family survived with general assistance, living in substandard housing with other refugee families. Khath, as the only fully "abled" member of the family (one younger brother) became head of household as a preteen, excelled in school while caring for her mother and raising her brother. In her junior year in high school she was involved in immigration rights activities and the spoken word sector of the LA hip hop scene; these activities led to her selection as an intern in Critical Spirit, a leadership/popular education program based in an ecumenical center in the San Francisco Bay Area. She spent five years with the program, the last two as a facilitator. S. Khath recently completed her baccalaureate program at Mills College, is active in immigrant rights, and is an intern in public policy with the City and County of San Francisco.
R. Gabriel
R. Gabriel was born in Mexico City and immigrated to the US as a child of a Bracero during the late 1950’s. He spent part of his childhood in Chicago, Illinois, finally settling into Boyle Heights, Los Angeles. His working father and mother insulated their six children from material privations; he describes his political consciousness as being formed by the shocking realization that his education was substandard. He recalls that while some students were being driven to orchard-laden Orange County to visit colleges, he was being driven there to harvest fruit. He and his classmates were also being tracked into the military (he was of draft age during the Vietnam War). His academic deficiencies became crystallized to him upon reaching the university. It was there that he realized his public school background was not adequate to meet academic demands. Gabriel turned his deficits into assets; with assistance from progressive professors, he demanded and developed the first ethnic studies (Chicano literature) courses at the University of Oregon, and gathered professorial mentors that would steer him toward a vocation in education and the social movement in Los Angeles.
Returning to LA to teach adult literacy, Gabriel had begun to question both his own teaching methods, and recognize that the deeper needs of his students- mostly immigrants from Mexico and Central America- far exceeded what a GED or ESL certificate could accomodate. His encounter with a teacher from Mexico who had been involved with grassroots political struggles and popular education altered his educational course. Shortly thereafter he created Popular Education Los Alamar (PELA). It would be visited and endorsed by Paulo Freire in 1992, and continues to be the longest standing grassroots popular education program in the US. Some of the key leaders of the "Dreamers" immigration reform campaign were developed in PELA’s youth education program. Gabriel created a Day Laborers Organizing and Education Program, a Domestic Workers Co-operative, and an Urban Landscapers Project while director of PELA. Gabriel officially retired from his directorship in 2012.
J. Ramel
J. Ramel was born at the climax of the "People Power" revolution that deposed the Philippine dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. His family was part of a diasporic wave of migration to the US and different parts of the world. Ramel is a native of the Ilocos region, a region whose language and culture had been subsumed and marginalized by the dominant, ruling class ethnic Tagalog-speaking group of Ferdinand Marcos. He and his sister were separated from their parents in their immigration process. They continued to live in a Manila slum while their parents migrated to Honolulu to work in the hotel industry. They later arrived and settled in the city’s working class Kalihi district, which today is occupied primarily by low-income Filipinos and Pacific Islanders. Upon completion of his baccalaureate program at University of Hawaii, Ramel came to Pacific School of Religion and joined M. James and the Critical Spirit project as a "teacher-student." His interest in liberation theology and Ilokano liberation compelled him to enroll in PSR’s Masters of Theology program.
Ramel’s working class roots in the housing projects of Kalihi are at the core of his current work, Ilocano Pedagogy, which is a collaboration between community organizations and the University of Hawaii, at which he is presently a doctoral candidate. The project is developing a unique liberation pedagogy that blends Pacific Island "spirituality, politics, and epistemologies" and is an extension of the work Ramel began with Critical Spirit. J. Ramel recently completed a term as a Regent of the University of Hawaii and is a doctoral candidate in its Graduate College of Education.
T. Kemoeatu
T. Kemoeatu is African American of Ethiopian and Tongan heritage. Born and raised in San Francisco’ Fillmore District, he has been involved with youth development since he was a teen. Growing up in subsidized housing with a single, working mother and two brothers made T. particularly sensitive to the underlying issues of race, class, and gender that affected his neighborhood. At UC Santa Cruz, he participated as a student and later as facilitator of the liberation pedagogy-inspired student-directed seminar "Engaging Education" for students of color. T. was previously trained as an intern and staff at Critical Spirit.
B. Alma
B. Alma, of Mexican-American/Dutch American heritage grew up in the predominantly African American Inglewood District of Los Angeles. Her interests in liberation pedagogy and mental health stem from the distress she and other young women in her area experienced as working class folks of color. She was familiar with the PELA ‘dreamer’ training in Los Angeles, working in solidarity with their counterparts while a college student at UC Santa Cruz. B.Alma was a student and exceptional facilitator of the previously mentioned "Engaging Education" seminar and began her research into liberation philosophy, feminist pedagogy, and indigenous education there.
M. James
M. James grew up in the streets of the Fillmore and Chinatown districts of San Francisco. He is son of an African American autoworker and Japanese American homemaker. One of seven children, he was the first to attend college, enrolling at UC Santa Cruz in 1970. He is part of a crew of North American popular educators dedicated to the development of working class leaders. Over the years these educators have developed remarkable resources such as conjunctural analysis, social biography, education as a practice of social change, the social history timeline, and creative riffs on participatory research and the theatre of the oppressed. James’ liberation pedagogy work has been advised by Paulo Freire and Myles Horton. His projects have been affiliated with The Highlander Center, the North American Alliance for Popular Education (1995-2000) and The International Council for Adult Education (ICAE). He has been developing a pedagogy called education as a practice of social change with people of color in the US for nearly 40 years, creating programs in diverse venues- as autonomous community-based projects, as well as government, labor, public health, and college settings primarily as programs of grassroots young adult leadership development. His most recent project, Critical Spirit (2003-09), a "blend of liberation theology and grassroots pedagogy" graduated more than 150 progressive young leaders of color skilled in organizing and social analysis, many of whom are currently working in social movement, institutional, and non-profit activities for social justice. M. James served the International Council for Adult Education (Toronto/Montevideo) as North American Vice President from 1990-96 during Paulo Freire’s term as honorary president of ICAE, which he held until his death in 1997. He is the author of this article.
Part Four
The Experience of Liberation Pedagogy
Against these usurpations by the disciplinary mechanisms, against this
ascent of power tied to scientific knowledge...there is no solid recourse
available to us today...To struggle against disciplines and disciplinary power,
we must turn to a new form of right...anti-disciplinary, but at the same time
liberated from the principle of sovereignty.
Foucault, pp.107-108
(On the role of 'mistica' in the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra (Landless Rural Workers Movement-MST, Brazil):
The mistica not only inspires but also serves as pedagogy of empowerment.
This pedagogy relies on symbolism to convey concepts and values to a class
characterized by low levels of formal education and/or literacy and therefore
is not limited to producing knowledge; it narrates history and experience,
reviving the collective memory of the Brazilian peasantry and ultimately
contributing to the formation of a collective Sem Terra identity. The cultural
contribution of mistica as praxis is resisting the homogenization of globalization;
it is the Gramscian counterhegemonic alternative. Therefore, in addition to its
inspirational element mistica empowers members by creating their collective
identity and reviving their culture, contributing to its organization.
from Praxis of Empowerment Daniella Issa, 2007
To me, (mistica) is this secretive thing that motivates us, it gives us impulse.
It's something that you don't explain, you feel it...Mistica is present in our
daily lives as militants, just working at the base is a moment of mistica, of per tenca.
[Mistica] is created in our collective way of life. We inherited a lot from theory,
but in the MST it is enriched in the collectivity. Why is it that these people who
live under 'lona preta' live smiling, singing, and happy? It's because of mistica.
In school we create mistica, a necessity to study more. . . Mistica is a way of
making the struggle happen. There's the mistica of acting out the mystical act,
where we remember martyrs through poetry or in the marches, and there's the
mistica that you live day-to-day. This mistica is carried to professors, intellectuals,
students, the outsiders, who also feel it. It moves you and makes you question,
it's not just a feeling.
Regilma (of the Brazilian MST, interview, 2006)
Elements of liberation pedagogy
Critical Faith (education as a practice of social change) and Ilocos Pedagogy are organized as a learning framework comprising supporting elements. Critical Faith comprises the following elements:
figure 1
Accords
Social Biography
Dialogue
Problem-posing
Research and Study
Personal Development
Praxis
Oppressed by disciplinary powers
The educators were asked to describe popular education/liberation pedagogy. Each person began by first describing the alienating nature of mainstream education- particularly as it excluded or marginalized people of color. Subsequently, they contrasted this with rich descriptions of their experiences and theories in liberation pedagogy. They describe liberation pedagogy as more than education for developing consciousness of structures such as class power and capitalism, but also as part of a "struggle against disciplines and disciplinary power." According to J. Ramel of Ilocos Pedagogy, the individualistic nature of education itself, including its myriad vocational and academic support programs (e.g. Upward Bound), isolated and atomized Pacific Islander and Filipino students in Kalihi, Oahu. The socialization and indoctrination of state education was powerful and numbing. Recruiting and organizing college-aged students to participate in an alternative cultural activity on campus was difficult because they had been trained to avoid programs and activities that were not directly related to employment. Creating and alternative space was an act of resistance in itself.
J.Ramel: Just (to) get them into one space- to talk, with food, and talk story about
themselves…(We would tell them) we’re gonna do a "financial aid workshop,"
" how to go to college," " learn how to sew," "how to cook," - just a vehicle to get
them in the same space, talking to each other…sewing projects, facilitating workshops,
teaching language…(we appreciated) their own knowledge base and used that as a
vehicle to do popular education and explore their own context.
A similar problem for PELA stemmed from trying to address the basic literacy needs of immigrant workers. R. Gabriel initially enrolled them in local literacy programs. For materials that were culturally appropriate, he researched primers from Mexico City . However, neither the programs or the primers reflected the workers’ experiences of war, unemployment, violence, and migration. The literacy curricula contained nondescript stories and instructions for homogenizing into middle class life.
R.Gabriel: So their experience of being immigrants and the challenges we face
were not in those books...The whole system that drove them out of Mexico into the
US... caused by so many years of colonial rule of puppets of the United States
imposed on other countries...There were a lot of issues at the time, but the main
ones was the war in Central America and immigration. People who had been
oppressed all this time could not articulate their struggles and thought it was only
their individual experience.
S. Khath shared a similar assessment. In her eight years of American schooling she had never experienced reference to her Cambodian heritage, or discussion or instruction about the US involvement in Southeast Asia. She was distressed by the schools’ absence of interest or acknowledgment, not only of her own- but of others’ cultures and histories as well.
S. Khath: At school we were told this is how America is formed, and my
story was never in there. There was always two sentences in the history books
and always connected to the Vietnam war. (Teachers said) "You’re at the
losing end" and "we bombed Cambodia and it was a secret bombing."
And that was it?
My family lived in that region that was bombed.
The educators described education as compulsory socialization processes that often whitewash or distort cultural narratives, propagate US nationalism, and present unrealistic proposals for economic and social integration. This experience made each person aware of contradiction: what they were told, the pledges they were required to make in the immigration process versus the realities of segregation, discrimination, and poverty. These realities belied not only the presentations in media and other forms of hegemony- but words that came from the mouths of everyday teachers, social workers, and employers.
Toward "a new form of right:" creating "anti-disciplinary" spaces
Freire’s original structure for creating culture circles (1972, pg 100 )- thematic investigation, generative themes, codification, and problem-posing in a framework of dialogue created an architecture for an "anti-disciplinary" space. Following this structure, R. Gabriel’s pedagogic challenge became twofold. First, he had to put into text workers’ words describing the effects of imperialism, poverty, and exploitation--words rarely found in standardized materials because of their political content: These had been for them unmentionable, controversial themes. PELA’s thematic investigation generated stories that were provocative: people sharing about war and struggle (and US complicity), the perils of migration, and experiences of being exploited by American employers.
R. Gabriel: How to systematize (this content) was to develop primers; so even if we
(facilitators were not) around we could give them the primers and let them learn how
to read and write based on their own issues. So the primers that we developed were a
mirror image of their experience, so that they can talk about what they are reading
from (their own) experience.
R. Gabriel’s approach went completely against the traditional learning form to which the workers were accustomed. Expecting innocuous stories of middle class Mexican life, the workers were initially startled by primers that illustrated their hardships, journeys, and resilience and written largely with their own words. Moreover, they were initially hesitant- but later enthusiastic- about the requirement that they speak as equals, reflect on their own experiences, and have confidence in their own knowledge.
S. Khath described "critical faith/Education as a Practice of Social Change" as having a similar effect. Five participants in her cohort shared her background as Cambodian refugees. In one instance they were assigned to facilitate their own exclusive problem-posing circles on the origins of the Cambodian presence and their current conditions in the US. Not one of them had experienced such a process in any other educational setting. Their knowledge of their history was the often oblique stories shared by their parents, whom as survivors of the killing fields, the Christmas bombing, and the Pol Pot regime rarely spoke of their journeys in any detail. Several of them remembered their time as children in refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines. But examining the historical, political, economic, and social underpinnings of their migration was mind-boggling.
S. Khath: I remember we had problem-posed about (why) Cambodians (were) being
out in the streets... and (why) the other Cambodians’ family worked in the farms
in Stockton...I was able to tap into something that I was never tapped into before.
Being able to identify and point out the history, the politics, why I ended up here
(in the US), being able to trace it back was the most empowering thing for me.
Education as a Practice of Social Change utilizes the ‘social biography’ as an instrument of thematic investigation. For James, the starting point of the social biography is the investigation of oppression itself, the origin point of the individual and collective histories of the participants.
James: (The working class participants experience) a different kind of distress...
They still live in underserved and rougher neighborhoods...they did come through
the crack era - gang violence, police violence. Everybody’s life is contextual and is
influenced by everything that happens in the context. So a social biography is…
knowing the context of your life. The experiences of your ancestors, who may
have been kidnapped and brought on slave ships; the history of your
neighborhood, which may have been destroyed by redevelopment; the
economic recession that caused your family to move.
The social biography involves being able to explicate and understand your experience
as it is influenced by the context, and later as your life begins to influences the
context itself when you take action to change it. How we move in the world,
how we move the world...it’s a really important piece of political instruction.
Humanizing the Learning Process
J. Ramel described liberation pedagogy as "humanizing the learning process." "Humanizing," to him implies an intentional counter hegemonic activity that disrupts the pedagogy that normalizes Eurocentrism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and neoliberalism.
J. Ramel: We always start in a circle. Every beginning of a class or a session.
(There are) three components: Critical pedagogy, indigenous consciousness
and liberation theology. We start with: name, home and an ancestor you want to bring with yourself.
We go around in a circle. The fourth (question) is "how is your
body feeling?" We have a silent meditation before anything else. We have a
Buddhist bowl and we ring it.
We do it for 16 weeks, once a week. For three hours. We begin and end with those
protocols. The silence helps them really calm down. The name and the home is really
an accountability. Who are you? Who are the ancestors you want to bring with you
so that you are not alone. Where is the home you are attached to and the community
that you want to represent? From there on, from the get go it gets
really deep. Sometime they will speak more about the ancestors, because it
(reminds) them that they are not an accident.
A common thread in these practices of liberation-centered pedagogy is the deep consideration of participants’ subjective dispositions: feelings, spirituality, and physical state. This is not merely a matter of psychological "sensitivity." The subjective/objective represents an empirical whole. S. Khath described how unsafe common classroom situations and workplace situations can be.
The accords, which were developed by James for education as a practice of social change, take stock of the conscious and unconscious power dynamics at play in any situation.
figure 4
ACCORDS
Respect
Take Only Your Own Inventory
No Insults
Amnesty
Confidentiality
Right to Pass
Try it On
S. Khath: Dialogue is a huge part of it. It’s definitely a practice because oftentimes we
learn to talk over each other and you don’t really receive what’s being gifted to you.
Talking to each other was really important. In order to do that we have to follow the
"Accords:" (figure 1) ways that we conduct ourselves with each other. Without
(them), I don’t think we can have dialogue."Taking your own inventory" is not judging
and really coming back to yourself and assessing yourself and not other people.
"Confidentiality" means being to confide in each other and hold that space for one
another. That’s what allowed us to have dialogue with one another. It provided a safe
space for us to be with each other. I never felt like I was being attacked for my beliefs
or who I am.
Expanding upon Freire’s Dialogue/Anti-dialogue matrix (1973, p 45-46 ), facilitating authentic, compassionate, provocative dialogue became a key feature of this version of liberation pedagogy.
James: Dialogue is both a practice and a principle. I can’t say it any more profoundly
than it is already described in Education for Critical Consciousness. Dialogue is a
political act. Part of democracy is the appreciation of the word of the other. Dialogue
slows down the social process, slows down culture. It requires meditation and
mediation. Dialogue is a really important principle and praxis at the same time. (In a
circle) someone invariably says, "Wow, nobody ever told me that what I have to say is
important." Some people (in the culture circle) disclaim, "She already said what I was
going to say." I reply, "How could she say what you said? She’s not in your mouth."
And people laugh. It’s not just what you say that is important. It’s important because
it’s what you know. We need to know what you know. Then we can affirm that you
know.
You enter with one question and you come out with ten: problem-posing
There are varying interpretations of "problem-posing." Wink’s (2000) version, for example, depoliticizes Freire’s concept of "problem" and applies the process to general life situations. In contrast, Akom (2000) and Andrade-Duncan (2000), in their work with urban youth of color, reaffirm Freire’s original intention: to problematize political contradiction. S. Khath described this approach:
S. Khath: When we check in, we talk about (themes in our lives). We look,
we analyze, and there’s a whole process that we go through. One thing I remember
is the picking a theme from the neighborhood or a scenario and having that drawn
(a drawing of a ghetto street corner)- and breaking it down.
Why is this happening? Why is this person standing
next to a liquor store? And happens to be a person of color? Why is the street
so decrepit?
One of the tools used in problem-posing is this matrix, 'dimensions of social experience,' usually displayed on a placard, with five words in bold print:
figure 5
SOCIAL POLITICAL
SPIRITUAL
ECONOMIC HISTORICAL
The participants are instructed to analyze the elements, or problems shown in the picture (codification) from the perspective of each of the dimensions, searching for root causes of poverty, alcoholism, or misogyny.
S. Khath: So that’s how we analyze things as a group. We go around and we
connect it to ourselves...How does all this fit into the wider social context, the
social frame? You enter with one question and you come out with ten, twenty.
That’s just kind of the process. It’s just flushing it all out…
One issue links to another and another and its like a chain reaction
The problem-posing process was designed to enable students to transition themselves from a naive consciousness to a critical consciousness. Naive consciousness did not imply unconsciousness or ignorance, but an intransitive awareness of realities that need to be more deeply interrogated. R.Gabriel gives an example of a problem-posing circle:
R. Gabriel: students had to research things. For instance (we problem-posed)
alcoholism in our communities…We (use alcohol to) celebrate birthdays... and
christening, New Years, everything.. the people who suffer the most are the children
and the spouses….the women started sharing their experience about alcoholism or an
alcoholic in their homes…(their analysis then) went further. They started exploring...
how many (liquor) billboards are there that denigrate women. They would ask
questions about those images...it was their initiative to understanding commercialism
and how in our communities commercialism is imposed on our lives...One issue links
to another and another and its like a chain reaction…The process was very liberating
for the women.
J. Ramel found it necessary to ask Filipino workers to contrast their reality as service workers in Hawaii to their lives back in the Philippines, which often were dramatically different.
J. Ramel: So using their cultural context to explore and understand reality as of now..
so "what did they do before they were hotel workers?"..and they were farmers.
"Did they own land?" "Yes, they owned land!" What happened to that land?"
So that has really been our vehicle into talking about these issues within the
community.
Social Biography
James has a comprehensively developed process of social biography (Campos, 2009) which he usually introduces with a one-sentence description diagrammed on a placard:
"My life in the context of the world; the world as it transformed by my life."
Campos’ (2009) study of James’ method describes its nuances:
As trust increases and personal check-ins deepen, the political, economic, religious,
historical and colonial forces at play in participants’ lives are exposed. This is most
apparent in "life mapping" activities that encourage participants to mark significant
life events alongside historical moments in their communities. In these
practices, individual narratives emerge from the broader political, religious and
economic webs that enwrap a people’s experience. The weaving of individual and
social histories invites participants to find resonance across diverse contexts.
Individual narratives thus become social biographies, the interwoven discourse
of the whole. For James,social biographies evoke the retrieval—not the
mere affirmation—of individual agency. This simultaneous gesture of learning
(from another) and unlearning (one’s assumptions) constitutes the
practice conscientization that Paulo Freire describes as necessary for humanization.
James sees the process of biography as a political praxis, particularly significant for historically marginalized people. The social biography is an "annunciation" (Moylan, 1991), an act of public declaration of oneself and one’s agency to the world. It is a social and political claim. J. Ramel elaborates:
J. Ramel: My starting point is that if that person starts to understand themselves in a
historical way, they have historical consciousness, if they understand their historical
selfhood, then after that, they can say, I’m a changing being. That’s the impetus for
them to say the world is fucked up, and the world is beautiful and we have to change
it. That’s when we start from ourselves and our own experiences and then abstract out
to the world.
The social biography is a cornerstone of both Ilocos Pedagogy and Education as a Practice of Social Change. James distinguishes it from "storytelling" approaches and the personal introduction methods used in many education and training activities. It historically centers the person and embraces both her or his or their subjective and objective positions. He was asked, "what's the difference between social biography, biography and story?"
James: The social biography is a process of profundizacion- this
wonderful concept I learned in Nicaragua. The examination of one's life as a life
of consequence. A life having value to others, a life that is an integral part of
the ecosystem. And the human task, the task of history now is to enable those
biographies to intersect in a practical and sustainable way while appreciating
their transcendent nature.
Spirituality: Hope With Dignity
Spirituality is a key element in the genealogy of liberation philosophy and pedagogy; according to each of the educators, it distinguishes liberation-centered pedagogy from other popular education approaches that may focus exclusively on intellectual development and political participation. The element of spirituality in liberation pedagogy is not the spirituality of religious education (Campos, 2009). It is more consonant with Cajete’s notion:
The theology of Nature based on "seeking life and becoming complete" forms
the boundaries of this exploration of the spiritual ecology of indigenous
education. (2000, pg 43)
J. Ramel: Ilocano pedagogy (includes)...indigenous (philosophy), Ilocano theology and
liberation theology, which is largely a...Third World Christian language and
theology. We combined all those three things. We’ve realized in Hawaii, that you
can’t leave them out.
You need the indigenous; you need the faith. The faith part allows you to
not be practical. If you take out the faith part, you just become practical, and you
just operate on what you can see. Without faith, it makes the theory
practical, pragmatic. If you add the indigenous, the spirituality, it transcends all that,
it allows you to hope with dignity.
J. Ramel describes this element by remembering the faith of his mother as she struggled to support her children who remained in a Manila ghetto while she sent remittances from her work as a hotel housekeeper in Honolulu:
It was powerful for her-- to believe in a higher force. To have faith that
despite not having money, being thousands of miles away, that we were still going to
be together. It takes courage. To me that’s the importance of faith. Her faith allowed
her to envision certain things to become possible.
The projects embrace spirituality as a transformative realm that matches cognitive or somatic development. Critical Faith, a pedagogy that saw itself as a descendant of liberation theology, worked to "liberate" spirituality from religious education. The success of this was recognized and affirmed by non-Christian participants, including S. Khath, who is Buddhist.
S. Khath: Going to a critical faith session was learning how to free ourselves, and
the tools that we had- were each other. It wasn’t something that was provided to us-
it was something that was already in us, and it was a way to lift that up and share it
with each other. It was very community-based. It reminded me of breaking bread
and sharing food- except that this is knowledge and love. Which a lot of us don’t get to
do- and this is why this is so special. When I joined (the critical faith program), the
first summer was so transforming for me because I remember crying everyday
throughout the whole program. I was able to tap into something that I was never tapped
into before.
R.Gabriel, who developed PELA as a secular project of political development, queried for years about whether or not to directly address the vibrant spirituality of the workers and students who originated from diverse regions, rural and urban, of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and South America. It was rich and diverse, embodying influences of Catholicism, Pentecostalism, various forms of syncretism, and diverse indigenous traditions. For Gabriel, spirituality appeared in the people as their connecting of consciousness and conscience. He refers to it as the "liberation aspect:"
R.Gabriel: (In some sessions)- people crying because of the struggles they had
gone through…how they lost families (in the civil war), how they sold their farm to
come to the United States...I later learned how traumatized they were. So even if they
worked 8-10 hours to learn Spanish or English, they were so traumatized because they
had lost husbands or sons or had left them behind…
(Then at one point in the process) they realized these weren’t only their
experiences- but it was a whole collective of workers
sharing the same story... So that was...an insight into the liberation aspect of human
beings…I thought there must be something deeper in the questions that we’re
asking. The liberation aspect goes really deep...The sessions were very exhausting…
I wasn’t trained to become a psychologist or even a teacher! I wasn’t trained
to do that! (In some sessions) first nostalgia, then crying, tears. But then jubilation.
Let’s celebrate!
It’s not worth reminiscing, nostalgia! We ourselves can do something about this!
If there’s a church that helps liberate the spirit of the individual, I haven’t found one.
I’m not a religious person but...exploring those issues, and understanding their
stories and sharing their stories with other workers- that in itself was liberating
for all of us, including myself. I said jokingly many years afterwards, "Next time
when I come back I’m going to develop a church (laughs) because it seems
more appropriate to this liberating aspect of education."
Education as a Practice of Social Change was developed as a secular pedagogy, yet James recalls being instructed by a teaching colleague that his approach had resonances of Eastern martial arts and meditation principles.
James: (The educator) said, "You're a sensei. Your session is like a dojo." Then I
laughed and I had this big revelation. I had been thinking all along
that (conscientização) should not be so hard. But education for critical
consciousness is a discipline. I mean discipline as a practice, in the Eastern sense-
in the aesthetic sense- not in the Western, not like what Foucault calls "disciplinary power."
A practice, like meditation, kata, yoga......Freedom itself is a discipline.
It is not a state of being, it’s a discipline.
And you extract that from Eastern philosophy- the principle being
that you have to get on the mat, to "practice freedom," as Freire says. In a sense,
the world is the mat. You have to learn the "moves" of freedom. You have to
understand your body, with your mind, with your spirit, as an instrument,
through which we express express freedom. So I learned from my colleague
that the culture circle is like a dojo. It’s not like a classroom, it’s not like a political
workshop. It’s not just an exchange of ideas. It’s learning moves. It’s learning
how to breathe. Dojos are quintessentially democratic spaces that embrace hierarchy
but this is a hierarchy of discipline and mastery. The liberation space involves the
discipline and mastery of freedom.
What makes it "liberation" pedagogy? A global and historical project
To a person, each educator viewed liberation pedagogy from a global and historical perspective. They also expressed a deep affinity and appreciation for Paulo Freire, not merely as a theorist, but as a mentor and community leader. This sense of relationship may be particular to certain peoples of color: Paulo is a teacher and a brother. Moreover, each assumed some responsibility for evolving and articulating liberation-centered pedagogy as a necessary political act. The younger participants lamented that popular education has become a low priority in the social movement. Nevertheless, each made a strong case for further and deeper practice.
Oppression is real
R. Gabriel was steadfast in holding up the reality of oppression, which he felt had been relativized by those who point to the demise of repressive regimes and economic improvements in many Third World countries. For PELA, oppression was not an obsolete category. They did not differentiate the suffering of Salvadoran children today under the terror of US-originated criminal gangs from their suffering under the brutality of the ARENA paramilitaries during the civil war. R. Gabriel stated that liberation is defined in part by acknowledging that oppression continues:
R. Gabriel: One aspect of liberation is understanding the systems that oppress…how
systems operate, and how government and corporations and other institutions are in
cahoots to maintain the status quo, to maintain people who are illiterate,
uneducated, misinformed.
J. Ramel echoed the necessity of keeping a focus on oppression, how it is named by liberation pedagogy, and that people continue to be hurt by its cruelty. He then suggested that the pedagogic process works to enable people to reject not only systems and structures of oppression, but also their own internalized oppression.
J. Ramel: The people in my community, they always say of their suffering, "it’s our
problem, our fault." You cannot pathologize people’s ills and sickness. They are not
born sick. They are made sick. Liberation theory says 'No, its NOT your fault. You
gotta understand the context and the condition, you are NOT a pathology.' What I
love about liberation theory, you flip the script on the oppressed, and you say
that actually the oppressed have a significant role in liberation and
dismantling oppression.
James upheld the historicity and currency of Latin American revolutionary discourses as vital to our understanding of liberation as a continuing project. He warned against decoupling liberation pedagogy from its contextual roots.
James: The discourses out of Latin America and Africa after World War II
reflected revolutionary politics. These were philosophical expressions,
theological expressions, feminist expressions, ecological expressions,
indigenous expressions. There were all these different expressions. But they largely
represented a revolutionary politics.
Conscientização: consciousness + conscience
The ability to perceive contradiction, and act to change oppressive elements is a remarkable ability which develops in dramatic ways in collective, situated learning activities. It is transformative in both existential and spiritual aspects. Conscientização is more than "political consciousness;" it implies a transformative process that is often an internal insurgency, a struggle within oneself to admit the inadmissible; to overcome one’s fear of freedom (1972). This is not an easy process; according to R. Gabriel, it is enhanced by doing it with others:
R. Gabriel: Once you understand ourselves in the context, and you’re reading and
understanding and talking and discussing and analyzing (together), that in itself is
a liberating moment.
S. Khath expanded the concept of conscientização in a manner that equalizes its subjective and objective dimensions. For her, it is more than perception and action.
S. Khath: It (liberation pedagogy) provided me more of a way to connect all these
things together…it is about accessing this spirituality, and trying to understanding
each other from that depth, and then connecting that to the historical,
political, economic, and articulating our experiences in that way- and honoring
that and having that be the kind of a pathway to freeing our soul and freeing
ourselves. And it was also just a moment of being very compassionate and raw
with each other. That’s what I really value from that experience.
You are able to come from a place, and every part of you was honored,
and was important, and connected to something bigger.
James lamented that over the years, the idea of conscientização disappeared from conversations and collaborations with other popular educators. He assessed that the teaching dimension of liberation pedagogy challenged some educators, particularly as it began to address moral, ethical, psychological, and spiritual development.
James: The root of the word conscientização is not "conscious" but "conscience".
In the left, it’s often simplified to consciousness-raising. That’s interesting, but it’s
also problematic. Conscientização presents an ethical demand.
It’s not just knowing, but what you do with your knowing, and from what place
inside yourself. I remember I read it as "conscience" the very first time. Maybe
because I come out of a religious, spiritual background.
This is not just consciousness. It’s not just a cognitive thing.
The process is praxis
One question to the educators raised the criticism by Marxists and Alinsky-influenced community organizers who find liberation pedagogy "too subjective" and insufficient for leading people to direct political action. The interviewees had strong reactions to this. Their explanation was consistent: reflection and action are part of a whole. There may be at times too much of one and too little of the other; but one without the other is insufficient (1972, p 75). PELA, which has been highly effective in organizing domestic workers and day laborers using popular education practices, rebuts the over-emphasis on direct action.
R. Gabriel: That question (about mobilizing people) is really deep.....I realized that we
don’t have to follow certain models of organizing. We don’t have to follow certain
models of educating or learning, colonized- European-centric education, white male
dominated. So it doesn’t matter whether we wanted to organize...the most important
thing is the process itself, people understanding their own situation, the root causes.
J. Ramel, familiar with the sectarianism and coarseness of political organizing in the Philippines, was even more adamant about how liberation pedagogy contributes to humanizing political and civic struggle, and critical of mechanistic, utilitarian views of change. To the scholar’s (a progressive theologian) question "Are they still doing that Paulo Freire stuff?" he responded:
J. Ramel: I’d say keep doing it. It’s a dynamic space. It’s always new. It’s a reminder
to us how to live. If we do it right, whatever right means, and if we do it in a sustainable
way, where the goals of the movement doesn’t overpower our vision. Where the
goals of the movement is not equivocated to the educational process.
Whatever happens at the end of the day don’t matter that much.
That’s why people say- are you still doing that stuff? Because they cannot see the
transformation...
They’re not looking for transformation. To me, that’s why they keep asking
(are they still doing that Paulo Freire stuff?). Is it done yet? Is it finished? Did we
overthrow something?
Maybe that’s not the goal, to overthrow stuff. Jesus did not want to try to
just overthrow stuff. He wanted ontological change.
Kamoeatu and B. Alma noted a particular urgency:
Kamoeatu and B. Alma: Liberation pedagogy is really important right now,
because of the way we’re moving away from our own experiences. In the
social movement we take each other for granted. We become so concerned about
the "enemy," that we forget that we have to have a relationship with them when
all is said and done. We’re always moving in and out of ourselves...
Freire gave us a way to build a bridge back to our
own experiences so we can be whole people in the movement.
As trust increases and personal check-ins deepen, the political, economic, religious,
historical and colonial forces at play in participants’ lives are exposed. This is most
apparent in "life mapping" activities that encourage participants to mark significant
life events alongside historical moments in their communities. In these
practices, individual narratives emerge from the broader political, religious and
economic webs that enwrap a people’s experience. The weaving of individual and
social histories invites participants to find resonance across diverse contexts.
Individual narratives thus become social biographies, the interwoven discourse
of the whole. For James,social biographies evoke the retrieval—not the
mere affirmation—of individual agency. This simultaneous gesture of learning
(from another) and unlearning (one’s assumptions) constitutes the
practice conscientization that Paulo Freire describes as necessary for humanization.
James sees the process of biography as a political praxis, particularly significant for historically marginalized people. The social biography is an "annunciation" (Moylan, 1991), an act of public declaration of oneself and one’s agency to the world. It is a social and political claim. J. Ramel elaborates:
J. Ramel: My starting point is that if that person starts to understand themselves in a
historical way, they have historical consciousness, if they understand their historical
selfhood, then after that, they can say, I’m a changing being. That’s the impetus for
them to say the world is fucked up, and the world is beautiful and we have to change
it. That’s when we start from ourselves and our own experiences and then abstract out
to the world.
The social biography is a cornerstone of both Ilocos Pedagogy and Education as a Practice of Social Change. James distinguishes it from "storytelling" approaches and the personal introduction methods used in many education and training activities. It historically centers the person and embraces both her or his or their subjective and objective positions. He was asked, "what's the difference between social biography, biography and story?"
James: The social biography is a process of profundizacion- this
wonderful concept I learned in Nicaragua. The examination of one's life as a life
of consequence. A life having value to others, a life that is an integral part of
the ecosystem. And the human task, the task of history now is to enable those
biographies to intersect in a practical and sustainable way while appreciating
their transcendent nature.
Spirituality: Hope With Dignity
Spirituality is a key element in the genealogy of liberation philosophy and pedagogy; according to each of the educators, it distinguishes liberation-centered pedagogy from other popular education approaches that may focus exclusively on intellectual development and political participation. The element of spirituality in liberation pedagogy is not the spirituality of religious education (Campos, 2009). It is more consonant with Cajete’s notion:
The theology of Nature based on "seeking life and becoming complete" forms
the boundaries of this exploration of the spiritual ecology of indigenous
education. (2000, pg 43)
J. Ramel: Ilocano pedagogy (includes)...indigenous (philosophy), Ilocano theology and
liberation theology, which is largely a...Third World Christian language and
theology. We combined all those three things. We’ve realized in Hawaii, that you
can’t leave them out.
You need the indigenous; you need the faith. The faith part allows you to
not be practical. If you take out the faith part, you just become practical, and you
just operate on what you can see. Without faith, it makes the theory
practical, pragmatic. If you add the indigenous, the spirituality, it transcends all that,
it allows you to hope with dignity.
J. Ramel describes this element by remembering the faith of his mother as she struggled to support her children who remained in a Manila ghetto while she sent remittances from her work as a hotel housekeeper in Honolulu:
It was powerful for her-- to believe in a higher force. To have faith that
despite not having money, being thousands of miles away, that we were still going to
be together. It takes courage. To me that’s the importance of faith. Her faith allowed
her to envision certain things to become possible.
The projects embrace spirituality as a transformative realm that matches cognitive or somatic development. Critical Faith, a pedagogy that saw itself as a descendant of liberation theology, worked to "liberate" spirituality from religious education. The success of this was recognized and affirmed by non-Christian participants, including S. Khath, who is Buddhist.
S. Khath: Going to a critical faith session was learning how to free ourselves, and
the tools that we had- were each other. It wasn’t something that was provided to us-
it was something that was already in us, and it was a way to lift that up and share it
with each other. It was very community-based. It reminded me of breaking bread
and sharing food- except that this is knowledge and love. Which a lot of us don’t get to
do- and this is why this is so special. When I joined (the critical faith program), the
first summer was so transforming for me because I remember crying everyday
throughout the whole program. I was able to tap into something that I was never tapped
into before.
R.Gabriel, who developed PELA as a secular project of political development, queried for years about whether or not to directly address the vibrant spirituality of the workers and students who originated from diverse regions, rural and urban, of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and South America. It was rich and diverse, embodying influences of Catholicism, Pentecostalism, various forms of syncretism, and diverse indigenous traditions. For Gabriel, spirituality appeared in the people as their connecting of consciousness and conscience. He refers to it as the "liberation aspect:"
R.Gabriel: (In some sessions)- people crying because of the struggles they had
gone through…how they lost families (in the civil war), how they sold their farm to
come to the United States...I later learned how traumatized they were. So even if they
worked 8-10 hours to learn Spanish or English, they were so traumatized because they
had lost husbands or sons or had left them behind…
(Then at one point in the process) they realized these weren’t only their
experiences- but it was a whole collective of workers
sharing the same story... So that was...an insight into the liberation aspect of human
beings…I thought there must be something deeper in the questions that we’re
asking. The liberation aspect goes really deep...The sessions were very exhausting…
I wasn’t trained to become a psychologist or even a teacher! I wasn’t trained
to do that! (In some sessions) first nostalgia, then crying, tears. But then jubilation.
Let’s celebrate!
It’s not worth reminiscing, nostalgia! We ourselves can do something about this!
If there’s a church that helps liberate the spirit of the individual, I haven’t found one.
I’m not a religious person but...exploring those issues, and understanding their
stories and sharing their stories with other workers- that in itself was liberating
for all of us, including myself. I said jokingly many years afterwards, "Next time
when I come back I’m going to develop a church (laughs) because it seems
more appropriate to this liberating aspect of education."
Education as a Practice of Social Change was developed as a secular pedagogy, yet James recalls being instructed by a teaching colleague that his approach had resonances of Eastern martial arts and meditation principles.
James: (The educator) said, "You're a sensei. Your session is like a dojo." Then I
laughed and I had this big revelation. I had been thinking all along
that (conscientização) should not be so hard. But education for critical
consciousness is a discipline. I mean discipline as a practice, in the Eastern sense-
in the aesthetic sense- not in the Western, not like what Foucault calls "disciplinary power."
A practice, like meditation, kata, yoga......Freedom itself is a discipline.
It is not a state of being, it’s a discipline.
And you extract that from Eastern philosophy- the principle being
that you have to get on the mat, to "practice freedom," as Freire says. In a sense,
the world is the mat. You have to learn the "moves" of freedom. You have to
understand your body, with your mind, with your spirit, as an instrument,
through which we express express freedom. So I learned from my colleague
that the culture circle is like a dojo. It’s not like a classroom, it’s not like a political
workshop. It’s not just an exchange of ideas. It’s learning moves. It’s learning
how to breathe. Dojos are quintessentially democratic spaces that embrace hierarchy
but this is a hierarchy of discipline and mastery. The liberation space involves the
discipline and mastery of freedom.
What makes it "liberation" pedagogy? A global and historical project
To a person, each educator viewed liberation pedagogy from a global and historical perspective. They also expressed a deep affinity and appreciation for Paulo Freire, not merely as a theorist, but as a mentor and community leader. This sense of relationship may be particular to certain peoples of color: Paulo is a teacher and a brother. Moreover, each assumed some responsibility for evolving and articulating liberation-centered pedagogy as a necessary political act. The younger participants lamented that popular education has become a low priority in the social movement. Nevertheless, each made a strong case for further and deeper practice.
Oppression is real
R. Gabriel was steadfast in holding up the reality of oppression, which he felt had been relativized by those who point to the demise of repressive regimes and economic improvements in many Third World countries. For PELA, oppression was not an obsolete category. They did not differentiate the suffering of Salvadoran children today under the terror of US-originated criminal gangs from their suffering under the brutality of the ARENA paramilitaries during the civil war. R. Gabriel stated that liberation is defined in part by acknowledging that oppression continues:
R. Gabriel: One aspect of liberation is understanding the systems that oppress…how
systems operate, and how government and corporations and other institutions are in
cahoots to maintain the status quo, to maintain people who are illiterate,
uneducated, misinformed.
J. Ramel echoed the necessity of keeping a focus on oppression, how it is named by liberation pedagogy, and that people continue to be hurt by its cruelty. He then suggested that the pedagogic process works to enable people to reject not only systems and structures of oppression, but also their own internalized oppression.
J. Ramel: The people in my community, they always say of their suffering, "it’s our
problem, our fault." You cannot pathologize people’s ills and sickness. They are not
born sick. They are made sick. Liberation theory says 'No, its NOT your fault. You
gotta understand the context and the condition, you are NOT a pathology.' What I
love about liberation theory, you flip the script on the oppressed, and you say
that actually the oppressed have a significant role in liberation and
dismantling oppression.
James upheld the historicity and currency of Latin American revolutionary discourses as vital to our understanding of liberation as a continuing project. He warned against decoupling liberation pedagogy from its contextual roots.
James: The discourses out of Latin America and Africa after World War II
reflected revolutionary politics. These were philosophical expressions,
theological expressions, feminist expressions, ecological expressions,
indigenous expressions. There were all these different expressions. But they largely
represented a revolutionary politics.
Conscientização: consciousness + conscience
The ability to perceive contradiction, and act to change oppressive elements is a remarkable ability which develops in dramatic ways in collective, situated learning activities. It is transformative in both existential and spiritual aspects. Conscientização is more than "political consciousness;" it implies a transformative process that is often an internal insurgency, a struggle within oneself to admit the inadmissible; to overcome one’s fear of freedom (1972). This is not an easy process; according to R. Gabriel, it is enhanced by doing it with others:
R. Gabriel: Once you understand ourselves in the context, and you’re reading and
understanding and talking and discussing and analyzing (together), that in itself is
a liberating moment.
S. Khath expanded the concept of conscientização in a manner that equalizes its subjective and objective dimensions. For her, it is more than perception and action.
S. Khath: It (liberation pedagogy) provided me more of a way to connect all these
things together…it is about accessing this spirituality, and trying to understanding
each other from that depth, and then connecting that to the historical,
political, economic, and articulating our experiences in that way- and honoring
that and having that be the kind of a pathway to freeing our soul and freeing
ourselves. And it was also just a moment of being very compassionate and raw
with each other. That’s what I really value from that experience.
You are able to come from a place, and every part of you was honored,
and was important, and connected to something bigger.
James lamented that over the years, the idea of conscientização disappeared from conversations and collaborations with other popular educators. He assessed that the teaching dimension of liberation pedagogy challenged some educators, particularly as it began to address moral, ethical, psychological, and spiritual development.
James: The root of the word conscientização is not "conscious" but "conscience".
In the left, it’s often simplified to consciousness-raising. That’s interesting, but it’s
also problematic. Conscientização presents an ethical demand.
It’s not just knowing, but what you do with your knowing, and from what place
inside yourself. I remember I read it as "conscience" the very first time. Maybe
because I come out of a religious, spiritual background.
This is not just consciousness. It’s not just a cognitive thing.
The process is praxis
One question to the educators raised the criticism by Marxists and Alinsky-influenced community organizers who find liberation pedagogy "too subjective" and insufficient for leading people to direct political action. The interviewees had strong reactions to this. Their explanation was consistent: reflection and action are part of a whole. There may be at times too much of one and too little of the other; but one without the other is insufficient (1972, p 75). PELA, which has been highly effective in organizing domestic workers and day laborers using popular education practices, rebuts the over-emphasis on direct action.
R. Gabriel: That question (about mobilizing people) is really deep.....I realized that we
don’t have to follow certain models of organizing. We don’t have to follow certain
models of educating or learning, colonized- European-centric education, white male
dominated. So it doesn’t matter whether we wanted to organize...the most important
thing is the process itself, people understanding their own situation, the root causes.
J. Ramel, familiar with the sectarianism and coarseness of political organizing in the Philippines, was even more adamant about how liberation pedagogy contributes to humanizing political and civic struggle, and critical of mechanistic, utilitarian views of change. To the scholar’s (a progressive theologian) question "Are they still doing that Paulo Freire stuff?" he responded:
J. Ramel: I’d say keep doing it. It’s a dynamic space. It’s always new. It’s a reminder
to us how to live. If we do it right, whatever right means, and if we do it in a sustainable
way, where the goals of the movement doesn’t overpower our vision. Where the
goals of the movement is not equivocated to the educational process.
Whatever happens at the end of the day don’t matter that much.
That’s why people say- are you still doing that stuff? Because they cannot see the
transformation...
They’re not looking for transformation. To me, that’s why they keep asking
(are they still doing that Paulo Freire stuff?). Is it done yet? Is it finished? Did we
overthrow something?
Maybe that’s not the goal, to overthrow stuff. Jesus did not want to try to
just overthrow stuff. He wanted ontological change.
Kamoeatu and B. Alma noted a particular urgency:
Kamoeatu and B. Alma: Liberation pedagogy is really important right now,
because of the way we’re moving away from our own experiences. In the
social movement we take each other for granted. We become so concerned about
the "enemy," that we forget that we have to have a relationship with them when
all is said and done. We’re always moving in and out of ourselves...
Freire gave us a way to build a bridge back to our
own experiences so we can be whole people in the movement.
Part Five
Something to Practice in the Now
Something to Practice in the Now
This article examined the separation of liberation pedagogy from liberation philosophy and interrogated outside of its historical and theoretical context. It attempted to illustrate how disciplinary power and hegemony contribute to censoring liberation philosophy and relegating it to the status of a passing trend.
The article then examined the genealogy of liberation and its meaning to several generations of people, particularly people of color in the so-called developed world, and people of what was once referred to as the "Third World." A genealogy dating back to the neolithic cities reminds us that the human impulse for liberation has always complicated programs of social organization and economy governed by narrow interests or compromised by political conveniences. This impulse today confronts the worst aspects of neoliberalism: its inherent cynicism and unconscious nihilism. Liberation pedagogy offers the practice of dialogue as an antidote to both: dialogue across differences, dialogue for consensus, dialogue for instruction, and dialogue as praxis.
Conditions in the neighborhoods, in small, deindustrialized towns and cities, strain social and cultural life. The greater political culture, dominated by elites and reactionaries, has largely abandoned working class, people of color, and youth. The spate of police killings of unarmed African American children seem to be a metaphor for a US national fear of losing economic and political dominance to a world that is made up largely of the non-white "other."
These challenges notwithstanding, a new generation, unfettered by the metanarratives and prescriptions of the old, is enthusiastic about liberatory, holistic, utopian processes. New immigrants bring life and critique into the US grassroots, and their familiarity with struggle and political discourse in their home countries energizes ours. Queer and transgendered young people inject hope against the closed consciousness of times passed.
Grassroots projects attempting to practice liberation pedagogy have wrestled with its complexity. It was born of mass organization, yet is focused intimately on the transformation of the individual. It is the byproduct of a historical materialist politics, yet finds itself embracing spirituality. It presents itself as a strategy of working class mobilization, yet rejects political or ontological prescription that reduces the person to a role player in mechanics and theories of social engineering.
There will likely be more interest, practice, and development of liberation pedagogy in the developing world than in the US and Europe. However, the Pedagogy of the Oppressed continues to be read and celebrated by a new generation of working class and people of color actors. I work with over a hundred students and teachers a year who vouch for its relevance and currency. There are so many ways that is is dated, yet, because of its ideological coherence, it maintains itself as the educational component of the liberation project. The new wrinkles are what Cajete, Issa, Akom and ecofeminists such as Ivone Gebara add: the insistence upon intersectionality; embracing the holism of indigenous thought; honoring and practicing matters of the spirit; demanding the end of dehumanization; respecting the historical and existential authority of those who pay the most severe price just to walk on the planet.
Although in this postmodern moment it is difficult to imagine a new revolutionary project, it is less problematic to integrate and affirm the spirit, coherence, and best intentions of the old. Liberation will always have revolutionary implications and will be aspired to even when revolutions do not honor liberation. The educators seem to appreciate revolution as something to be lived in present time, something to practice in the now. As this pedagogy has evolved, its spiritual dimension has become one of its defining characteristics. It has elevated the meaning and process of conscientização, reminding us that this is as much a pedagogy of conscience as it is of consciousness.
Liberation pedagogy is not likely to be widespread at the grassroots level. However, it has an analogy in the grassroots non violence of the Civil Rights Movement of the US and the independence struggle of India. Herein lie its implications for education: it should be studied as a politics, as a component of a movement. Its epistemological and pedagogical foundations should be carefully interrogated so that students and teachers can imagine learning for a greater purpose. Its practitioners and participants can be sought out to help imagine and create spaces for learning and teaching within and beyond schools and institutions.
As for introducing liberation pedagogy into grassroots community life, people will likely respond excitedly to the idea of interrogating their social biographies. They will continue to appreciate generating their own critical consciousness, and experiencing even small praxes of resistance, solidarity, cultural invention, and celebration. It can be infectious in places that have been deprived of hope such as Stockton, Birmingham, and Detroit. It's working in Kalihi.
This article revealed the fresh and complex ways that people integrate utopian visions and imagine justice and compassion as societal possibilities. The educators each demonstrated that despite their modest origins, they have a radical stake in history, and a profound moral conviction toward justice and love.
S.Khath, a survivor of post war Cambodia, tough LA streetlife, and gentrification, continues to work for immigrant justice; T.Kamoeatu and B.Alma are working to integrate liberation pedagogy into mental health practices for young men and women of color. J.Ramel creates sacred and revolutionary spaces that everyday residents of the Kalihi District celebrate- and use to challenge Honolulu power brokers and bureaucrats to do the right thing.
Paulo Freire, Myles Horton, Ella Baker, Ernesto Cardenal, Rigoberta Menchu, and Subcomandante Marcos advanced the liberation project by insisting upon its democratization. For this they imagined a pedagogical project, one that should be energized by the oppressed- those who continue to pay the highest price for survival in a neoliberal world. When these one-time "no-ones" of the world step forward to engage in the utopian project, their authority is rooted in the fact that they know the reality of being rendered "less than" and "other," and the preciousness of being "someone." When they are true to the task of humanization, they are well-suited to teach of life's fragility, and inspire others to, as S. Khath proclaims, "be a part of something greater than yourself."
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The Good Society , Vol. 5, No. 3 (FALL 1995) , pp. 28-35. Penn State University Press.
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Hall, Stuart. 1981. "Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular’ ;" People’s History and Socialist Theory, Ralph Samuel, ed. Kegan Paul-Routledge. London. 231-5; 237-9
Hammond, John L. (1999).Popular Education As Community Organizing in El Salvador
Latin American Perspectives , Vol. 26, No. 4, Liberation and Pedagogic Empowerment: Identities and Localities: Social Analyses on Gendered Terrain (Jul., 1999) , pp. 69-94.
Sage Publications, Inc.
Hemphill, D. & Blakely, E. (In Press). Language, Nation, and Identity in the Classroom: Legacies of Modernity and Colonialism in Schooling. New York: Peter Lang (in press).
Hemphill, D. & Leskowitz, S. DIY Activists: Communities of Practice, Cultural Dialogism, and
Radical Knowledge Sharing
Hemphill, D. (1999) The Blues and the Scientific Method: Codified Cultural Schemas and Understanding Adult Cognition from a Multicultural Perspective
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Hostetler-Diaz, Jean (1999). Introduction: Latin American Perspectives. Vol. 26, No. 4, Liberation and Pedagogic Empowerment: Identities and Localities: Social Analyses on Gendered Terrain (Jul., 1999) , pp. 3-7. Sage Publications, Inc.
Issa, D. (2007). Praxis of Empowerment Mística and Mobilization in Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement. Latin American Perspectives, 34(2), 124-138.
Illich, Ivan (1970). Deschooling Society. New York: Harrow Books.
James, Michael (2009). Popular Education 2.0. (website: www.mjcriticalteaching.blogspot.com )
Kates, Susan (2006). Literacy, Voting Rights, and the Citizenship Schools in the South, 1957-1970. College Composition and Communication , Vol. 57, No. 3 (Feb., 2006) , pp. 479-502. National Council of Teachers of English.
Kivel, Paul and Creighton, Alan (2011). Helping Teens Stop Violence, Build Community, and
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Mainwaring, Scott (1984). The Catholic Church, Popular Education, and Political Change in Brazil. Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs , Vol. 26, No. 1 (Feb., 1984) , pp. 97-124. Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Miami.
McLaren, Peter and Farahmandpur, Ramin (1999). Critical Pedagogy, Postmodernism and the Retreat from Class: Towards a Contraband Pedagogy. Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory , No. 93, Science and Civilisation (June 1999) , pp. 83-115. Berghahn Books.
Mignolo, Walter D.(2000). "Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation: Ethics and the Geopolitics of Knowledge." Article in "Thinking from the underside of history: Enrique Dussel's philosophy of liberation. L. M. Alcoff, & E. Mendieta (Eds.). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
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Needleman, Ruth (2004). Going Back to School: What Should Union Education Be About?
New Labor Forum , Vol. 13, No. 2 (Summer, 2004) , pp. 100-110. Joseph S. Murphy Institute, City University of New York.
Pardue, Derek (2007). Hip Hop as Pedagogy: A Look into "Heaven and "Soul" in São-Paulo, Brazil. Anthropological Quarterly , Vol. 80, No. 3 (Summer, 2007) , pp. 673-709.
The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research.
Perlstein, Daniel (2002). Minds Stayed on Freedom: Politics and Pedagogy in the African-American Freedom Struggle. American Educational Research Journal , Vol. 39, No. 2, Education and Democracy (Summer, 2002) , pp. 249-277. American Educational Research Association.
Rodriguez, Gregory (2012) "Why Arizona banned ethnic studies." Article for the Los Angeles Times, February 14, 2012.
West, C. (2002). Prophesy Deliverance!: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity. Westminster John Knox Press.
Wiggins, Noelle (2010). La Palabra es Salud: A Comparative Study of the Effectiveness of Popular Education vs. Traditional Education for Enhancing Health Knowledge and Skills and Increasing Empowerment Among Parish-Based Community Health Workers (CHWs). Dissertation for Portland State University.
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