Overcoming the Social Order: The Challenge of Liberatory Education

• In Event: Freireian Dilemmas: Confronting Contradictions in the Practice of Critical Pedagogy and Participatory Action Research in Undergraduate Curriculum

Abstract

Background and Purpose:

The primary objective of a liberatory education is to develop students’ critical consciousness by unveiling and illuminating relationships of power within a curriculum that engages structural analyses of social inequality (Freire, 1974). However, once critical consciousness emerges, what are the necessary next steps? “The roots of the problem [of oppression] are far beyond the classroom in society and in the world” (Shor & Freire, 1987, p. 507). Therefore, “liberatory education must be understood as a moment or process or practice where we challenge the people to mobilize or organize themselves to get power” (Shor & Freire, 1987, p. 513). Hence, incorporation of methods for promoting students’ sense of agency/capacity for engaging in collective social action are necessary, since “the political struggle to change society is not solely inside school, even though school is one part in the struggle for change” (Shor & Freire, 1987, p. 513). This paper therefore examines the affordances and limitations of using Participatory Action Research (PAR) as a pedagogical tool in the attempted provision of a proleptic education within a semester-long undergraduate course.

Theoretical Framework:

This research used Critical Pedagogy and PAR as theoretical frameworks for the development of pedagogical and methodological strategies for prolepsis, i.e., the organization of learning/educational activities for the future (Gutièrrez & Jurow, 2015). Both attend to the political nature of education and the role research, teaching and learning play in the production of students as co-constructors of knowledge and agents of social change (Shor, 1992; Fine & Torre, 2004).

Methods:

This research asks: How do students construe their sense of agency for making social change, and how does that understanding shift through engagement with Critical Pedagogy and PAR? Data was drawn from video transcription of classroom activities, focus groups and interviews, writing assignments, formative classroom assessments (Angelo & Cross, 1993), course entry and exit surveys, and analytic memos. Data were coded for pattern and thematic analysis (Auerbach & Silverstein, 2003).

Preliminary Findings and Scholarly Significance:

This research finds that use of PAR facilitated “small scale instantiations or realizations of a possible future” (Gutièrrez & Jurow, 2015, p. 6) resulting in significant shifts in students’ sense of agency. Students’ perspectives moved from feelings of being objects of the system, to that of subjects’ and intentional actors of/in the system (Freire, 1970). Students were able to engage in a re-imagining of the purposes of education, and the possibilities available to them in the transformation of society. However, dubiety regarding meaningful structural change, despite success with PAR, remained an enduring theme. This research illustrates that exposure to critical pedagogy and engagement with PAR can produce critical, self-aware citizens and social change agents. However, it also demonstrates that the current existing social order, and its material realities, is a formidable challenge that a liberatory education must always work to overcome.

Author

• Christyna Serrano, University of California - Berkeley