Dreaming and Living Emancipatory Educational Space: Studying Mediation and Learning in Freirean Pedagogy

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Paulo Freire insisted on the need to transform both the means and ends of schooling, treating classrooms as arenas for the analysis of social life and the practice of more liberatory forms of thought and action. This session takes up this call—and the conference theme—by offering close analyses of pedagogical "re-inventions" aimed at instantiating education as it could be. We are specifically concerned with the processes of mediation and learning that emerge within educational spaces that are not only rooted in critical social analysis, but aim to imagine and inhabit alternative social and intellectual relations. This focus emerges from what we perceive as the practically consequential but relatively under-theorized place of learning as a complex, micro-genetic process within Freirian pedagogy.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Paulo Freire

Chair

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University

Papers

• Epistemic Openness and Heterogeneity as Relational and Ethical Practices Within Critical Pedagogy - Ava Jackson, Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy Human Development and Social Policy; Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University

• Re-Mediation, Social Dreaming, and This Bridge Called My Back: Coalitional Relations in a School/Community Change Effort - Linnea Kristina Beckett, University of California - Santa Cruz; Cindy Cruz, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Dialogue as Love, Humility, Faith, Hope, and Critical Thinking: Possibilities and Challenges in Teacher Education - Thomas M. Philip, University of California - Los Angeles

• Unsettling Colonial Innocence: The Complexities of Decolonial Imaginaries - Alejandro E. Carrión, Northwestern University

Discussant

• Miguel Zavala, Chapman University