Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Drawing from the canon of pedagogy, our seminarians devoted two weeks to digging into Chapter 2 of Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Brazilian scholar Paulo Freire. In this chapter, Freire distinguishes between two models of learning: the traditional “banking model” and his own framework of “dialogic pedagogy.” Influenced by Marxist theory, Freire critiques the banking model as establishing a classroom social relation that reproduces oppression by normalizing and maintaining a dynamic of power inequality between the student and the instructor. He argues that the banking model can only be used to indoctrinate students, even if the instructor’s best intentions are to educate their students about a social justice issue, because it does not provide students the opportunity to think for themselves and form their own opinions (Barros, 2020).
Contrast the banking model with dialogic pedagogy. Here Freire draws from Hegelian dialectics to describe a new framework of learning, and insists that we can only practice liberatory learning when we engage in a relationship with our students in which expertise is equally distributed. Freire urges instructors to remember that our students are sources of expert knowledge, too: students are experts in their own needs, interests, and experiences. For example, Freire argues that the oppressed do not need to be educated about their own oppression, they likely understand it better than anyone else. In this way, instructors are presented with an opportunity to learn from their students. An instructor’s authority, therefore, comes not from what they know but from their curiosity to understand their students.
Aligning his message with his methods, Freire’s call to rethink relationships in the classroom is not prescriptive. Rather, Freire gives us wide latitude to be creative and experimental in the classroom to discover new ways to encourage students to reflect more deeply on content and to engage students’ critical faculties.
In an attempt to emulate Freire’s example, discussions in DIP took an open-ended form, encouraging attendees to apply dialogic pedagogy to their own teaching experiences. You can view our sample note catchers from Week 1 and Week 2.
While Pedagogy of the Oppressed is certainly essential reading in the scholarship of diversity and inclusion pedagogy, Freire himself may not have described his pedagogical approach as “inclusive.” For him the goal of education was not to include the oppressed in the system of their own oppression but rather to empower and partner with the oppressed in a project to transform ourselves, our institutions, and our life circumstances. Still, Freire is cited in scholarship on inclusion (Dewsbury, 2019) and is credited as the father of critical pedagogy, a field of education scholarship home to social justice education pedagogues the likes of bell hooks, Donaldo Macedo, Antonia Darder, and Paul Willis. Whenever a text is so widely cited for decades, it creates an impetus to return to the original work.
Further Reading
Barros, S. (2020). Paulo Freire in a Hall of Mirrors. Educational Theory, 70(2), 151–169. https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.12413
Darder, A. (2012). Culture and power in the classroom: Educational foundations for the schooling of bicultural students (The twentieth anniversary ed). Paradigm Publishers.
Dewsbury, B., & Brame, C. J. (2019). Inclusive Teaching. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 18(2), fe2. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.19-01-0021
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed). Continuum. Available for free online.
hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.
Macedo, D., & Freire, P. (2018). Literacies of Power: What Americans Are Not Allowed to Know (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429499173
Willis, P. E. (2017). Learning to labor: How working-class kids get working-class jobs. Columbia University Press.