Deepening Freire Through Place-Based Critical Pedagogy: Territoriality and Conscientização in Socio-Environmental Praxis

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

Abstract

This paper discusses how territoriality, as a critical conceptualization of place and identity that is historically rooted in local social struggles, mediates the relationship between conscientização and praxis. Key questions include: How can Freirean theories of conscientização and praxis inform a critical approach to “place” in critical pedagogy? How can the notion of “territory” be used in place-based critical pedagogy in ways that foster radical socio-environmental praxis? Insights are gleaned from a case study of a critical EE program conducted in urban and rural public schools of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The program, Elos da Cidadania (“Rings of Citizenship”), is a public sector initiative run by the State Secretary of the Environment. Elos mobilizes resistance to dominant environmental regimes by democratizing local environmental management and increasing grassroots control over territory. This strategy in public schools creates platforms for participatory environmental governance to develop a social justice-oriented conception of environmental citizenship.
Territoriality, defined as a cultural, social, and political phenomenon that produces spatial practices and configurations reflecting relations of power in society (Sacks, 1986), signifies “place” in its abstract/symbolic as well as concrete/material moments of political activity. This makes territoriality an interesting concept to relate to the process of conscientização. For Freire (1970), concrete and abstract elements of reality need to be maintained “as opposites which interrelate dialectically in the act of reflection.” (p. 105). Thus, territoriality is used in this Brazilian case as a counter-hegemonic ideological construct essential to place-based conscientização, and territorialization as “the strategic action taken by social actors over space in efforts to command and govern space” (Robertson, 2002, p. 476) links territoriality/conscientização to socio-environmental praxis. This builds on previous efforts to analyze the links between critical place-based pedagogy and territoriality (Meek, 2015).
Data from this critical qualitative case study (Merriam, 2009; Bartlett & Vavrus, 2014) included:
• over 35 in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted on-site (in Portuguese) over the span of nine months, with Elos program managers, trainers, teacher mentors, and with public school teachers and administrators participating in the program.
• over 100 hours of observation of teacher professional development, educational workshops, and other professional/educational activities of the program;
• archival research and document analysis (reports, policy briefs, curricula, etc.);
• and dozens of in-depth reflections and discussions with key agents involved in the leadership of the Elos program.
For Elos, territoriality fosters a critical consciousness of place that is attentive to the structural elements of environmental injustice and relations of power, and nurtures socio-environmental praxis through a process of territorialization. From a theoretical standpoint if critical pedagogy intends to foster conscientização, a critical pedagogy of place, by extension, generates a place-based conscientização. Territoriality may be a key ideological ingredient of socio-environmental praxis, as illustrated by data from the Elos program. This work helps deepen an understanding of Freirean legacy in critical pedagogies of place, while contributing to debates about the critical theories of place used toward this end.

Author

• Nicolas Stahelin, School for International Training