Walking With Freire: Exploring the Onto-Epistemological Dimensions of Critical Pedagogy

• In Event: 66.073 - Refusing Abstraction: Place-Based Critical Pedagogy as Resistance in a Post-Truth Neoliberal World

Abstract

One of the great misconceptions about critical pedagogy is that transformative learning is an activity that takes place in the mind (hooks, 1994). It is not so difficult to understand why this is the case. The major tenets of critical pedagogy highlighted in Pedagogy of the Oppressed include, reading the word and world, demystifying the subject and object, aesthetic versus anesthetic education, praxis, dialogue and conscientization (Freire, 2007). In abstraction, these tenets entrench the European Enlightenment project’s privileging of mind over body which runs counter to Freire’s commitment to changing material conditions for oppressed peoples, thereby undermining of the fundamental goal of humanization. Mind is divorced from body, content is divorced from context, and students and teachers cannot be fully human as beings in and with the world. However, beyond Pedagogy of the Oppressed in Freire’s later works, critical pedagogy is an onto-epistemological, political, and material project. Democratic education is always rooted first in the material conditions of people’s lives because people are connected to the world through their bodies (Freire, 2005).
In this paper, we disrupt the fallacy that critical pedagogy is primarily a cerebral endeavor and bring to the surface the centrality of context, the body and materiality in Paulo Freire’s autobiographical and philosophical works following Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We utilize a “postformal” (Thomas & Kincheloe, 2006) analytical framework of “wayfinding,” a branch of human geography that seeks to understand people’s experiences navigating built environments (Lynch, 1968), and posthumanism which seeks to decenter the “rational Man” of the Enlightenment and develop a holistic understanding of people within the complex history of a much larger natural world (Braidotti, 2013). We place vignettes from Freire’s work in Brazil, the United States (Pedagogy of Hope, Freire, 1992), Sao Tome (Teachers as Cultural Workers, Freire, 2005) and Guinea-Bissau (Pedagogy in Process, Freire, 1978) in dialogue with wayfinding and posthumanism to illustrate points of synchrony that enable us to identify the relationship between space, place, materiality, non-human entities, the body, and learning in Freire’s praxis. Our analysis reveals how Freire approached knowledge as always in process, always contextual, and informing and being informed by people’s journeys throughout their material worlds. Even in the 1970’s Freire was edging toward the margins of humanist thought, pointing out the gross limitations of the cerebrocentric (Callies, Keller & Lohofer, 2011) tendencies of Enlightenment philosophy. For Freire, ethics, ways of knowing and ways of being are mutually reinforcing as people strive toward a cohesive, critical, creative praxis of becoming. In the post-truth moment, engaging critical pedagogy from this very grounded perspective allows for an escape from the trappings of Enlightenment humanism that compel researchers to hold firmly to decontextualized truth claims that may ring hollow in people’s day-to-day lives. This opens up avenues for reading the world while being both in and of the world, tapping into the relationship between world, body, mind, self and other, resulting in knowledge that is immediately relevant and transformative for the mind, the body and material reality as well.

Authors

• Tricia M. Kress, Molloy College

• Robert Lewis Lake, Georgia Southern University