Response to Pedagogy of the Oppressed

I have finally engaged in a timely reading of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  I feel a sense of urgency to reconcile my work, intellectual, and personal life to Freire’s ideas.   Some recent pedagogical experiences, such as being a student in an experimental class, teaching tap, and participating in workshop about critical pedagogy,  provide demonstrations of my education worldview up to now.  In the spirit of Freire’s unfinished human living in an unfinished reality, I reexamine these ideas.   This is personal for me – Freire’s themes of Subject/Object and human connectivity are challenging to me in terms of creative practice, parenting, and my roles as student and teacher.

In this post I attempt to look beyond my “circle of certainty” to map relationships between Friere’s ideas and mine.  These relationships are particularly important to me regarding aetheism and my own spiritual sensibility.  I hold these in tension and circumvent agreement/disagreement in favor of reframing in terms of a mobile relationship.

My trajectory to and through this book was quite. . . interesting.  I read it because issues in an experimental class led me to question existing educational practices.   Reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed was a commitment I made to honor my inner curiosity about why school is the way it is.  From secondhand experiences, I assumed I’d find the book easy to agree with and get some practical and theoretical basis for my pedagogical interests.  Upon reading I found Freire’s rationale for his theory of pedagogy more challenging than I expected.  Oppression, a state which plagues those on the giving and receiving end with an animalistic life, is an entirely human problem in Freire’s view.  Therefore, his solution is totally human as well.  I was irritated enough to want to quit reading.  What kind of hubris can say that something as large as oppression could be created and solved merely by people?  What kind of thoughtful person can deny the fact of something, at least a force, that lies above, beyond, or outside the reach of human power?

Of course, the totality of my reaction to Freire’s rationale belies my sense of completion, of certainty, which is hubris as well.  I agree with Freire’s concept that people are uncompleted beings.  I chose to keep reading and postpone the reckoning of my faith to Freire’s (and I do consider his position to be one of faith).

Circling the idea, I’d like to consider more closely the class through which I even came to read this book.  In New Ground II class at OSU in dance, six graduate students and faculty Norah Zuniga shaw have been exploring creative practice as research along with other ideas we chose to pursue along the way.  It is quite hard to exactly put my finger on what the class really is because it depends on the contributions and interests of each member from week to week.  One of the challenges for me in this class was the “emergent syllabus”  As the quarter started, I was up to my ears in work, and perceived this term “emergent syllabus” to mean “whatever Norah wants to pile on us at that moment whether we like it or not”.  Looking back, this idea did not come from Norah, who made it clear she valued our process, and that the class would develop from our leadings.  I had brought this sense of obligation to the class myself.

Perhaps I wanted to be a passive student.  I’m used to it — especially having come up in classical ballet.  To me the syllabus has always explained what I have to do, and also what the teacher is obligated to do to me.  Though I enjoyed class discussions, I also wanted to be told what to do.  I found myself wondering what our interesting but meandering discussions were really producing.

I don’t know what we were produced, but in the process of this class, and in reading Freire, I think a profound shift has happened for me personally.   It almost seems laughable now – why would I not just take this open syllabus and run with it from the beginning?  I came to the course already assuming that people really learn actively, and that learning can’t be imposed on someone from the outside.  I’ve dabbled in some John Holt and the world of unschooling.  And I did have a sense that I was too conditioned to try to switch over to that way – I seem need the structures provided by a classroom setting and an authority figure, even if they’re not the best.  But suddenly I’ve gone from not understanding or really seeing this passivity in myself to awareness of it.

Another way to characterize the shift would be from viewing the class as disorganized and thinking that Norah wasn’t doing her job, to consider it a necessary mess.  It was a bit messy, but things which involve numbers of personally responsible adults in relationship are that way.  I would like to be able to put my finger on what about the experience of this class is primarily responsible for the shift.  Actually, the realization that I had been given responsibility for my learning  happened just before I read Freire, as I was sitting in a pub over a La Fin du Monde talking about the class, the book I hadn’t read yet, and my thoughts about it all.  I suddenly thought about my actions in the class, the awkward moments when people looked to Norah for directions; “what do you want us to do?”.  I realized that those moments may have felt that awkward because Norah was looking back at us, waiting for us to take her at her word, and develop for ourselves and the group whatever it was that we wanted to do.

Or maybe I’m wrong.  I’d like to discuss it with the six of them.

It is painful.  What next?  I have no idea.  I am unfinished, after all.  I’d like to focus on the idea that it is through relationship that we become more fully human, particularly in situations where it would be easy for me to stand in the place of subject and treat others as objects – my child, my elective class students.  I’d also like to hold this awareness of my own opression in mind and take on the project of wriggling out of it.  Perhaps Freire would call this my “liberation”.

But the word liberation brings up such baggage for me.  Returning to the theme of oppression and spirituality, how can I authentically position myself in terms of Freire’s liberation while invocating what is so real to me about the spiritual world, the world of personal power outside of the human?  How can I reconcile active liberation with powerlessness?  Maybe the answer is in finding an expentancy that liberation will occur, and in actively creating space in which it may occur while simultaneously holding in my mind that nothing, nothing at all of import, can occur solely as a result human power?  I cringe a little when Freire speaks of the revolution, but I do believe in the revolution too, and long for it.  Who, in their heart of hearts, or when they fall in love, could not believe in the revolution?

Perhaps the answer lies in remapping my cosmology.  If grace is in me while also surrounding me, my actions can dispense grace.  If grace is only above me, my actions are irrelevant.  I would also like to consider remapping my relationships.  Are my relationships with teachers and students linear ones, in which information can be traced back along lines to an original source, or do I relate these as people in a messy web of connection?

I am aware that a traditional liberal argument against religion is that it functions as a tool of opression which keeps people complacent.  This seems overly reductive.   I love being a dancer because of the model movement gives for considering ideas as bodies in motion themselves.  As a final image I’ll posit these consonant ideas as a contact improvisation exercise; two bodies lean together, then pull apart, sharing weight in gravity and time, transfering loads of potential energy into motion.