Freirean and Ubuntu Philosophies of Education: Onto-Epistemological Characteristics and Pedagogical Intersections

• In Event: Education, Emancipation, and Political Struggle: Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Paulo Freire

Abstract

Paulo Freire’s philosophy of education, popularized via his magnum opus, The pedagogy of the oppressed (2000 [1970]) ‘shocked’ the world, sort of constructively, with its trenchant, au courant and futuristic meditations on the onto-epistemological lives of the marginalized in Latin America, and by elliptical extension, across the world. The central tenets of Freire’s thought as reflectively (and reflexively) acting upon the world to transform it, are as current today as these were in the late 1960s, majorly because of the subjectively active ways it interacts with our onto-epistemological constructions, locations and intentions. Indeed, when the English translation of this seminal work came out in 1970-, the way especially educational scholars, students and researchers related to it was so much more than the usual conceptual and topical connections that we form with newly offered perspectives and analysis that, in general terms, add something new to our thematic points, with some sparking more provocative thoughts and responses in our mental dispositions and attached analytical and discursive intentions. The arrival of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, on the other hand, represented, from my reading in graduate school, a sizable shift on the way knowledge and pedagogy are conceived and selectively operationalized on the primary onto-epistemological realities of those who are marginalized in especially highly unequal societies such the Brazil of the 1960s-, which also extends the points to our own locations and around the globe. Indeed, such interactively dynamic epistemic and teaching shifts also trigger select tempo-spatial rupturing of the usual order of the world, prospectively, even emotionally conceptualizing novel possibilities to reorder human relations. The emergence of such powerful ideas and related reconstructive
contexts (in their originality or otherwise) in shifting or even problematic social relations, were not, regardless of the topical emphasis (in Freire case, critical pedagogies as potentially
transformational), that new in early or recent social, political, economic and educational platforms and their affiliated learning and teaching intersections. A propos the centrality of the emerging intellectual and related discursive connections to the social context, as situating people’s lives, needs and expectations which expands into the tempospatialities of Freire that connectively also explain the relationship of his overall oeuvre with African Ubuntu philosophies and related educational trajectories and intentions. To be sure, the
relational as intended here, is thickly attached to the processes of humanization that, in manners that could be more interstitial than otherwise, bring together these two perspectives (the Freirean and the African) of being, living and learning. In the most generalized understandings and prospects, African Ubuntu philosophies, pluralized for my deliberations here as although with quasi-similar in the main principles within Sub-Saharan Africa, should still sub-cultural variations int their situatedness and utilities, speak about and promotes, as Desmond Tutu noted, the inter-human notion and practice of seeing our own humanity though the humanity of the other including feelings, needs and behaviors (Battle, 2009). With that heavy, inter-subjectively humanizing perspective, Ubuntu can be described as a philosophy of life in both its ontological and epistemological constructions and desired outcomes.

Author

• Ali A. Abdi, University of British Columbia