Looking Within, Looking Near: Interrogating Freire and Learning for Place

• In Event: Freire in Focus: Exploring Power and Pedagogy Through Language, Methodologies, Identity, and Sustainability

Abstract

How might centering place-based learning in our critical social inquiries help achieve democratic social praxis? This paper responds to Paulo Freire’s call for an authentic praxis that is locally relevant and sustaining. Scholarly inquiry into the relationship between place and learning is not new to critical pedagogy; recent publications in the Freirean tradition clearly point to an active dialogue around democratic education from a situated context. For Peter McLaren, the significance of a contextual specificity arose during a conversation with Freire, in which he is advised to translate his work according to the given conditions from which McLaren locates himself during the learning process. Here, Freire identifies this localization as a context-specific “point of departure for the knowledge” that learning communities generate with the world (Freire, 1994, p. 85). It is critical that we recognize the material context of this point of departure as fertile ground for both the inception and expansion of a critical consciousness, without the felt need to leave behind the local knowledge base. From this critical stance, Freire and McLaren provide an intellectual base to outline how theories of learning can carry a disposition towards research methodologies of place. This view encourages us, in our social-educational inquiries, to look more intentionally into the place-based learning systems inherent in the racialized communities with and for whom we work.
This paper builds on the democratic learning practice ripe in critical pedagogy by linking it to recent literature on critical place inquiry in education (Kusenbach, 2020). I draw broadly on critical pedagogy and critical place inquiry in an effort to define and synthesize both strands for the learning qualities and intellectual nearness that emerge from these. I contend that critical place inquiry provides the empirical blueprint by which to situate the concrete learning base that critical pedagogy calls attention to. Specifically, I point to the starting point within critical pedagogy as a tool that can bridge the material and social conditions that place calls attention to.
To visualize this methodology, I draw on a critical qualitative case study of an online course for Chicanx urban youth that explores how learning processes amongst Chicanos are located. This 7-week course, Indigenous in Me, arose from a San Fernando Valley-based cultural center and supported a cohort of 4 Chicanx-identifying students in re-searching their relationships to Indigenous identity/ies. By illuminating this position, along with belief systems foundational to Indigenous identity/ies, students actively engaged in democratic, place-based learning that encouraged a rekindling towards collective group membership. Data sources include field notes, participant observation, and analysis of class transcripts.
The study contributes to Freire’s call to democratize education through a critical qualitative analysis of a learning space designed to develop a culturally sustaining pedagogy and methodology (Paris, 2012). I focus on learning processes in the case study for insights into how such learning takes place, and the implications for democratic praxis. The study illuminates how the above theories can be synthesized for learning in everyday places.

Author

• Brian Zamora, University of California - Los Angeles