Pedagogy, Oppression and Transformation in a 'Post-Critical' Climate: The Return to Freirean Thinking

Pedagogy, Oppression and Transformation in a ‘Post-Critical’ Climate

Also available from Continuum Education After Dewey, Paul Fairfield Paulo Freire, Daniel Schugurensky Rethinking the Education Improvement Agenda, Kevin J. Flint and Nick Peim

Pedagogy, Oppression and Transformation in a ‘Post-Critical’ Climate The Return of Freirean Thinking

Edited by Andrew O’Shea and Maeve O’Brien

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Andrew O’Shea, Maeve O’Brien and Contributors 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Andrew O’Shea, Maeve O’Brien and Contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. EISBN: 978-1-4411-7522-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data O’Shea, Andrew. Pedagogy, oppression and transformation in a “post-critical” climate: the return to Freirean thinking/Andrew O’Shea. p. cm. Includes index. Summary: “Provides a reflection and reevaluation on Freire’s central principles of pedagogy and praxis” – Provided by publisher. ISBN 978-1-4411-4234-4 (hardback) 1. Freire, Paulo, 1921–1997 – Influence. 2. Critical pedagogy. I. O’Brien, Maeve. II. Title. LB880.F732O84 2011 370.11’5 –dc23 2011016515

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We would like to dedicate this book to Joe Dunne, our teacher who has shown us the good of education.

Contents

Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Andrew O’Shea and Maeve O’Brien Chapter 1: Towards a Pedagogy of Care and Well-Being: Restoring the Vocation of Becoming Human Through Dialogue and Relationality Maeve O’Brien

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Chapter 2: Paulo Freire and the Tasks of the Critical Educational Scholar/Activist Michael W. Apple

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Chapter 3: Resistance, Struggle and Survival: The University as a Site for Transformative Education Mags Crean and Kathleen Lynch

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Chapter 4: Liberal Education, Reading the Word and Naming the World D. G. Mulcahy

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Chapter 5: Conscientization: The Art of Learning Anne Ryan

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Chapter 6: Taking Educational Risks With and Without Guaranteed Identities: Freire’s ‘Problem-Posing’ and Judith Butler’s ‘Troubling’ 102 Karl Kitching

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Contents

Chapter 7: A Post-Modernist Rendering of Freire’s Educational Vision? Some Reflections on the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 120 Jones Irwin Chapter 8: Rethinking Transformation in Light of Post-Modern Education: ‘Freire is Dead, Long Live Freire!’ Andrew O’Shea

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Bibliography

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Michael W. Apple is John Bascom Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. As a leading critical theorist in education, he has written extensively on the relationship among power, knowledge and education, including Cultural Politics and Education (1996), Educating the ‘Right’ Way: Markets (2006), The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education (2009), Standards, God and Inequality Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education (2010). He has worked with social movements, unions, progressive governments and dissident groups throughout the world on critically democratic educational policies, research and practice. Mags Crean is a Ph.D. student with the Equality Studies Centre, University College, Dublin, Ireland. Her work is concerned with social class inequalities. Over the past ten years she has worked in both the non-formal education and community sector, as well as working in a community activist capacity on various issues. As part of her work with Kilbarrack Community Development Project, Crean undertook the CPA/UCD Egalitarian World Initiative Scholarship to carry out research into the development of a popular education model. She was co-author of the 2007 Irish National Rape Crisis Statistics with Dr Maureen Lyons and she also carries out freelance research. Jones Irwin is a Lecturer in Philosophy and co-director of the MA in Human Development at St Patrick’s College, Dublin City University, Ireland. He has published an edited book on War and Virtual War (Rodopi, 2004) and a monograph on Derrida and the Writing of the Body (Ashgate, 2010). His research interests are in French philosophy, philosophy of education and aesthetics. He is currently co-writing a book (with Helena Motoh) on Slavoj Žižek and Slovenian Philosophy and preparing a monograph on Paulo Freire’s philosophy of education. Karl Kitching is a lecturer in the School of Education, University College Cork, Ireland. His doctoral work was completed in 2010, examining school processes and identities during mass immigration to Ireland. This ethnographic

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study developed further links between theories on institutional racism and post-structural ideas. He is currently piloting a ‘Making Communion’ project. This aims to provide a child-centred analysis of a social ritual that is strongly maintained and reworked in the face of vast changes in Irish society. His publications include ‘Understanding class anxiety and race certainty: moments of in/coherent home, school, body and emotion configuration in “new migrant” Dublin’, in Kalwant Bhopal and John J. Preston (eds), Intersectionality and Race in Education. London: Routledge (forthcoming). Kathleen Lynch is Professor of Equality Studies at University College Dublin, Ireland. Her main area of research interest has been developing egalitarian theory with her colleagues in University, College Dublin Equality Studies Centre: Equality: From Theory to Action (2004, 2009 2nd edition) co-authored with J. Baker, S. Cantillon and J. Walsh. Her most recent book is focused on the subject of caring and equality: Affective Equality: Love, Care and Injustice (2009) (co-authored with J. Baker and M. Lyons). It was nominated as one of the ‘100 Best Books of Year’ in 2009 by the Irish Times. She also continues to work with community and equality activist groups and on equality policy internationally (see Gender and Education, with Maggie Feeley, for the European Commission in 2009). D. G. Mulcahy is Professor in the School of Education and Professional Studies at Central Connecticut State University, USA. His books include The Educated Person (2008), Knowledge, Gender, and Schooling (2002) and Curriculum and Policy in Irish Post-Primary Education (1981). His research has also been published in such journals as Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Curriculum Inquiry, Educational Studies (USA), Educational Theory, Etudes Augustiennes, Irish Educational Studies, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Studies in Philosophy and Education and The Irish Journal of Education. Professor Mulcahy is an ex-President of the New England Philosophy of Education Society and of the Educational Studies Association of Ireland. He has twice been the recipient of a Fulbright Award. Maeve O’Brien is senior lecturer in sociology, co-ordinator of Human Development and co-director of the MA in Human Development in St Patrick’s College, Dublin, Ireland. She has worked as a primary school teacher, in school/home/community relations, and as a researcher in the field of education and social justice. Her research has focused on classed, gendered and affective inequalities and their relation to education. Her recent publications include research on educational transitions from first to second-level education and on well-being and second-level schooling (Making

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the Move: Students’, Teachers’ and Parents’ Perceptions of the Transfer from First to Second-Level Schooling (Dublin: Marino, 2004), and Well-Being and Second-Level Schooling; A Review of the Literature and Research (Dublin: NCCA, 2008)). Andrew O’Shea is Lecturer in Philosophy of Education, and Human Development, at St Patrick’s College, Dublin, Ireland. He has worked as a researcher in Dublin City University, Community Office, Ireland, and is founding researcher of the Centre for Culture, Technology and Values in Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland. He is author of Selfhood and Sacrifice: René Girard and Charles Taylor on the Crisis of Modernity (Continuum, 2010), and a number of scholarly articles, including The Lysistrata Project: Intercultural Resistance and the Economy of Sacrifice (Peter Lang, 2007), and Sources of the Sacred: Strong Pedagogy and the Making of a Secular Age (Cambridge Scholars, 2010). Anne Ryan is Professor and the Head of Department of Adult and Community Education in National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Ireland. She is particularly interested in the role adult education theories and practices play in underpinning alternative schooling provision in poorer countries. Most recently she has worked with BRAC to review innovative projects designed to provide primary education to poor girls in Afghanistan and Bangladesh. She is interested in using adult education methodologies to empower communities to respond to the big issues facing twenty-first-century societies – such as climate change – and for communities to become actively involved in seeking the way forward alongside the scientists and policy makers. Among her publications are Ryan, A. and Walsh, T. (eds), Unsettling the Horses: Interrogating Adult Education Perspectives (Maynooth: MACE, 2004).

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our deepest gratitude to the many people who have contributed to helping us to realize this book. In particular we would like to thank our colleagues in Education and Human Development, Jones Irwin, Paula Murphy, Therese Dooley and Madeeha Khalid, and to all our students who continue to inspire us and challenge us to get it right. A special thanks to those colleagues who commented on chapters in the early stages of writing, Darren Kelly and Maggie Feeley. On a personal note, O’Shea would like to thank his parents for their continuous love and support, and his brothers John (for his cool) and William (for the fishing rod), and his sister Caroline (for all her help in the early years with homework ‘at the foot of the stair’). Finally in acknowledging his family O’Shea would also like to mention his uncle Tony whom he only met briefly but whose humanity impressed him deeply and opened the door of real encounter. O’Brien would like to express her heartfelt thanks to her family, her husband Paschal and her children Orna and Finn for the unfailing shelter of their love and support, and to her mother, Eileen, and her belovedly remembered father, Terry, her first teachers, along with her sisters Eileen and Emer and brother Traoloch for the formative dialogues.

Introduction Andrew O’Shea and Maeve O’Brien

The idea for this book began as a commemorative edition to mark the fortieth anniversary of the publication of the English edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed , in 1970. It was intended to use the occasion to take stock of Freire’s ideas in light of today’s educational contexts, and to, in some small way, acknowledge the influence of Freire’s thought within the broad horizon of education. However, the best laid plans to pass through the 2010 window failed to materialize. But in pushing to get there we realized that the essays in the collection each had a very distinctive focus, and the original idea which involved a retrospective in light of current challenges (in the field of education) was only gradually beginning to take shape. We might say, with a polite nod to Freire, that the universal thematic of the ‘post-critical’ was only beginning to show itself and we needed more time. While the collection that follows has no doubt benefited from the extended period of reflection, we hope it has lost none of its commemorative spirit in gathering together something of Freire’s enormous contribution to English speaking educators. The issue of the post-critical in Freirean inspired pedagogy emerged for us in dialogue with a number of colleagues in our attempts to confront what were seen as some of the contradictions in education today. The contradictions in question had to do largely with the absence of value regarding the ‘good of education’, and the increasing technicism and instrumentalism that makes the need for a generous commitment on behalf of educators difficult to sustain. Taking the challenge seriously we asked, what is the point of criticism in the current discourse on education? For us the humanist philosophies that informed educational programmes in the past and those more recent developments concerned with emancipatory modes of education for equality and justice appeared under increasing pressure within a global post-modern classroom/context. On one hand post-modernism as a philosophical style continually problematizes the human agent’s capacity to confront and transform the ideology of the human world. On the other hand the strengthening wind of neo-liberal policies further legitimize the privatization and commodification of education and reinforce

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the allocation of cultural power (and thus economic and political power) to specific groups, perpetuating old forms of injustice as well as new ones. Between these two educationally inhospitable poles we undertook to find shelter for the human and to explore more fully the potential for agency and transformation in Freire’s work today. In other words, we questioned the possibilities for human development, of transformation through education, and through the subjectivities and agencies of its main protagonists – the teachers and learners. The thesis that we set out to explore is that praxis and critical pedagogy as a transformational process comes under increasing pressure in postmodern contexts and, therefore, the possibilities for challenging, resisting and transforming beyond that force are deeply problematized. Some of this territory has of course been explored and analysed by Aronowitz and Giroux in their work on Postmodern Education . In it they seriously challenge the ‘post-political’ and ‘post-critical’ posturing of much of post-modernism suggesting that it unwittingly articulates a conservative political agenda all the more difficult to critique because it sees itself in the cultural and intellectual galaxy of the historical avant-garde (Aronowitz and Giroux, 1991). Not withstanding the challenges, this work has become a kind of manifesto for education in an era of global pluralities. However, the real difficulties of thinking about the challenges for education in a post-modern era, we contend, have to do with understanding and confronting the possibilities of change towards a more just and democratic world in face of a diminishing horizon of human value. Some versions of post-modern education, we believe, fail to address in a substantive way the issue of transformation through humanization, which is central to Freire’s vision of education, as if post-modernism as a humanizing process is a fait accompli. Transformation, as a social and personal ethic – the conditions of political action – is precisely the radical core of Freire’s educational philosophy, so much so, that it is difficult to imagine a version of critical pedagogy, that owes allegiance to Freire, articulating a programme of change without explaining its relationship to the dynamic quality of human development that Freire makes explicit by this insight. However, in recent decades the emphasis in education has shifted from the discrete connections within and between these sites of transformation to an almost compulsive need to chart and gauge the extent of the socio-cultural changes that appear to outstrip all personal potential for change in the rapid flux of globalization. Today it seems impossible to speak of the personal and interpersonal conditions of change in face of the various discursive and structural ‘transformations’ that characterize our so-called post-modern condition. Part of

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the reason for this silence is circumstantial, and therefore, describing the changes alone seems to make the argument that responding to the sociocultural world demands an urgency that relegates all other interpretations of what constitutes transforming action. So much of the work in education in recent times has been preoccupied with keeping apace with the changes taking place not only ‘on the ground’ as budgets dictate but also in the various artistic, intellectual and academic spheres regarding the new theories and discourses that proliferate and define learning priorities. Weeding out the good from the bad, tracing the complex shifts in power, and identifying ‘the real enemy’ of a pedagogy committed to democracy has left little space for reflection on the personal and interpersonal possibilities of change and their relationship to an increasingly impersonal world. To be able to break the silence and name one’s world has remained a central feature of Freire’s critical pedagogy, and one that places him within a long tradition of humanistic thought reaching back to Socrates who, of course, clinches the sentiment when he makes the case that we are not fully human until we can say what it is that moves us. In light of the education debate today we may readily ask – why is the work of dialogue as a fraught but fundamentally trusting relation so difficult to sustain? One possible answer, which has been addressed elsewhere, is that the appeal of instrumental reason has made it virtually impossible to retrieve a space of critical reflection, or a practice that does not owe its allegiance to narrow measures of performativity within the school system (Ball, 2003). Another possible answer is that some post-modern approaches to education have excluded all strong subjectivity, thereby closing down the space whereby meaning, articulation and expression can have any moral force in shaping educational commitments. This growing anti-humanism in education today marks out the field of education as an overtly politically language game that bears little or no relation to persons as authentic moral agents who actually believe in the good of what they do (Noddings, 1999): agents who attempt to stand behind their actions as a genuine expression of their own desire to make a positive difference for individuals and society. And so the contributors to this book, drawing on their own experiences and insights from Freire, speak from within their own particular disciplines and positionings within education, in order to reassert the normative and moral voice of a critical humanizing education for flourishing and wellbeing. Our attempt to address the possibilities for transformation within the post-critical context are reflected in the breadth of dialogue and in the tensions between feminist, post-colonial, emancipatory, ‘revisited’ liberal

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and post-structural/post-modern responses presented here by the different authors. While some perspectives may appear to be in conflict on the nature of praxis, or on the emphasis on the subject rather than the object of transformation, what they have in common is that from within their own discourses and praxis, each of the authors seeks to come to grips with how they as researchers and educators have engaged with Freire’s challenge of a humanizing education, that requires engagement in a dialectic between the deeply personal and the collective/linguistic and the structural. Part of the struggle today to articulate possibilities for an educational praxis that is directed towards social justice lies in the tensions between critical pedagogy and ideological and discursive spaces within the academy itself, in which the historical reality of oppression as an objectively real phenomenon is often diminished. The narrative sickness that Freire diagnoses in terms of education here threatens to become a terminal illness. Increasingly today scholars acknowledge the consequences for criticism of the so-called post-structural turn. Some have tried to reinvigorate subjectivity to cope with the resulting ideological supremacy of discourse but at the expensive of a broader vision of education (Seery, 2008). Post-modernism as a philosophical/theoretical style is no doubt very clever and seductive. Whether we are being too certain in our rational propositions or inappropriately serious in our aesthetic judgements, post-modern criticism reminds us of the matrices of our own complicity in language and power – often with no small degree of irony. Yet the more post-modernism emphasizes a critique of language, in other words the more it becomes synonymous with post-structuralism that denies language any depth resonance, the more it appears to thwart education understood as a form of liberating praxis in the Freirean sense.1 What concerns the contributors in this book within such a post-critical context is the dilemma not just of an absence of value, but of discerning value within shifting and fragmenting identifications and discursive relations of power – where oppression can exist everywhere and yet nowhere. The positivism of modernity which created its own fi xed categories and objects of oppression within education has required radical reinvention, but some suggest that the post-modern turn at its extreme, in careering towards a celebration of possibilities for discursive colonization, play and invention, may cause educators and intellectuals to lose their way – forgetting or rejecting the ongoing dialectic between the material and cultural realities in which feeling and breathing subjects are educated. Freire himself argued that we cannot articulate or develop pedagogical processes, as value free; education is never neutral nor merely discursive. Praxis, which articulates reflection and action, emerges from within particular sets of

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conceptual and philosophical structures that create the conditions for either further oppression or for transformation of the self and its world. Education itself is inconclusive. It depends on human beings taking up the challenge of dialogue. The work of this book is to challenge the new framing of education in a post-critical climate and those pedagogies and processes that pose as education but are in reality a domestication of the self, mere figures of speech masquerading as liberating, while potentially opening up fresh sites for colonization. The theoretical underpinnings of the first five chapters span liberal, critical, emancipatory and radical egalitarian perspectives. They are located within a modern view that maintains that transformation is possible, and that through education as a form of personal conscientization, collective action and solidarity, we can transform our world. Building on Freire’s understandings of oppression, these chapters explore the personal call to transformation through the roles, identities and discursive spaces open to and occupied by the oppressed and oppressors within education today. They also continue to disturb and critique oppression ‘out there’, those now out-of-fashion structural inequalities associated with class, gender and cultural positionings, indicating ways that these can be challenged in pedagogical practice, in the structuring of curricula and in the power relations between taught and teacher, between self and other. The second set of chapters (Chapters 6–8) articulate and problematize a post-modern and post-critical theoretical perspective and explore post-modern and post-structural thinking in relation to Freire’s understanding of pedagogy and oppression, and the possibilities (for a greater international consensus on post-modern education and) for any real rebirth and transformation within this discursive landscape. This is significant for a Freirean project and a return of his thinking, as Freire himself strongly rejects theory and discursive practices that do not lead to action or at least reflection that is ameliorative of the conditions for social justice and dialogue. In returning to Freire at this time, we enquire as to which strands of post-modern thinking can conceive of, or speak to a critical pedagogy that is concerned with humanization through education, albeit that there are real tensions between critical and post-critical views of the human. In Chapter 1, O’Brien responds to the core question posed in this book, the question of transformation in a post-critical climate, by exploring the potential in Freire’s work for humanization and liberation through a radical pedagogy and praxis that takes relationality and the affective dimension of life seriously. Despite criticisms, particularly from feminist quarters, that Freire’s thesis and pedagogy are overly rational, and often contradictory in

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relation to the valuing of emotion, O’Brien sets out to trace the ethic of care in Freire’s vision for transformation, to make it explicit, and to consider its significance for educators today. As education becomes increasingly subject to technicist and performative rationalities, O’Brien observes, along with other educators concerned with social justice and issues of human flourishing2 that understanding and recognizing the emotions as constitutive of caring subjectivity and a moral orientation is an urgent problem. Moreover, she suggests that this ethic of care and relationality in Freire’s work is vital to creating the very conditions for dialogue that can bring about transformation of the self and its world. In articulating this ethic of relationality in Freire’s work, O’Brien undertakes to bring it into dialogue with more recent feminist interdisciplinary scholarship in moral philosophy, equality theory, feminist psychoanalytic scholarship and education that explores the significance of emotions to moral praxis. Drawing on this discourse she suggests that understandings of just ice and just actions are founded in the deeply personal, in our affective selves, in our capacity for love and relationship. For educators concerned with human flourishing and justice this is a serious claim. Freire’s radical educator is required to act in a spirit of love, and in that spirit to name her world in dialogue with the other in order to transform it. O’Brien suggests that this is some distance from the enlightenment Cartesian legacy that has shaped an overly rational and increasingly instrumental mode of educational practice that has become more than ever incorporated to serve the needs of ‘economy’. Placing a care ethic at the centre of educational praxis would have far reaching and revolutionary potential to challenge multiplicities of oppressive relations within the field of education. The personal ‘call’ to commitment on the part of the radical educator is also taken up in Chapter 2. In exploring the tasks of the critical educator/ scholar/activist, Michael W. Apple reflects on and acknowledges our inheritance from Freire and the necessity for the preservation of a critical narrative and a collective project in education at this time. He asserts that today we are often faced with ‘contradictory synchronic and diachronic relations between knowledge and power, state and education and civil society and the political imaginary’ and that the space of education is not immune from these tensions. These contradictions, however, provide us as critical educators with opportunities for seeing the world relationally and for engaging in what was central to Freire’s praxis, dialogical encounters that challenge the relations of power between the dominant and dominated. Apple suggests that within critical pedagogy, post-colonialism and postcolonial approaches have become important conceptual tools with which

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to interrogate relations of domination and subordination in a globalizing post-modern world. However, one of the issues that most concerns Apple in relation to critical pedagogy and its capacity to be truly transformative is the problem of becoming ‘overly cultural’ and the discursive tendencies which occlude and ignore the grim and material realities of the daily lives of millions of oppressed people. In addressing this issue he articulates the continued significance of Freire’s presence in critical pedagogy today, and in a personal vignette, he also takes us back to an educational encounter and a dialogue with Freire in Sao Paulo. In this self reflection and remembering, Apple describes the tensions in the collective critical project but also shares with us his admiration for the faith and courage that Freire demonstrated in committing to real dialogue, for fearless praxis and staying with the problem for as ‘long as it took’. He draws on both his engagement with Freire’s thinking and on lived experiences with Freire the man to challenge us to also bear witness and act in solidarity, not just as passive followers but as critical educators. The question of resistance and how to produce possibilities for transformative educational praxis in solidarity is the theme of Chapter 3. Crean and Lynch explore how, in Freirean terms, creating a place within the university for transformative action represents a major challenge, not least because the dominant groups who control the university, and the dominated, who are generally outside it, operate from different power and interest bases. The discursive and disciplinary power of those within the university in itself creates the conditions to exclude those outside who cannot enter the world of elite practices and cultural production, and to silence and marginalize those inside who do not play by the rules of ‘academic capitalism’. At the same time, as these authors point out, the university can also provide ‘a site of struggle’ and ‘lessons for survival and struggle need to be relearned as university regimes change’ (Lynch et al., 2010, p. 298). This chapter creatively explores the problems, complexities and contradictions in doing resistance within the university by adopting dialogical praxis as a method to utilize and articulate the experiential learning of both authors and to reflect upon the sociological and egalitarian theory that shapes their work. The experiential knowledge of injustice informed the analytical and critical thinking of the first author (Crean) on the role of the university in society. The experiences of the second author (Lynch), in establishing and developing the UCD Equality Studies Centre with colleagues, complements and interfaces with Crean’s autoethnography to provide a joint account of how resistance, struggle and survival, at both personal and public levels, are overlapping narratives in the fight

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for social justice. The chapter highlights the way in which the struggle for justice is both a personal and a political journey. It shows that it is not a superstructural act, a cerebral intellectual experience removed from feeling and passion; it is an account of pain and despair as well as hope and possibility, a reflexive account of action. The work and struggles that led to the co-writing of the chapter was inspired by the Freirean principles of praxis, linking theory to action and enabling theory to inform action. It is immersed in the recognition that we are ‘beings of praxis . . . we emerge from the world, objectify it, and in so doing can understand it and transform it with labour’ (Freire, 1970, p. 106). While Crean and Lynch explore the possibilities for transformation through radical resistance and the creation of new visions for education within the academy, in Chapter 4, D. G. Mulcahy examines and returns to the old and revered ideal of liberal education, and argues that it is something that still has relevance for education today. By drawing out the implications of Freire’s notion of praxis and considering its implications, Mulcahy explores the possibilities for a reconceptualization of liberal education. He explains how the older ideal of liberal education articulated by John Henry Newman, as ‘cultivation of the intellect’, was committed to the pursuit of theoretical knowledge and the development of intellectual skills for their own sake rather than for any ulterior purpose, and while it may have contributed to attaining such ends, it was not shaped by them. With the passage of time, Mulcahy argues, such an education came to be seen by many as useless, and indeed has been criticized more recently as false ideal for universal education. While the dangers of liberal education closing down to dialogue and not keeping apace with the changing times exist, Mulcahy believes they need not determine the direction of this older ideal. In the still prevailing view of liberal education as cultivation of the intellect the focus on the word (as found in the study of the classics in literature, philosophy, mathematics and the sciences) provides the basis of rethinking a liberal ideal in line with a more transformative approach to education. Mulcahy argues Freire’s idea of education whereby the primary focus is on the world, and engaging in reflective action through the process of praxis, points a way to revisiting and revaluing this old ideal. Becoming more fully human in the Freirean sense, as Mulcahy attempts to show, holds out new possibilities for reconceptualizing liberal education. Anne Ryan’s contribution to this project, Chapter 5, is concerned with the concept of conscientization as the key to learning about ourselves and our world in order to transform it. She suggests that adult education and

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the sites in which it occurs rather than traditional formal education are more likely to engage with pedagogies that create the conditions for the ‘art of learning’, a way or state of being in the world ‘that is ever inquisitive and exploratory’ and that counteracts views of learning as static exchanges of facts and information. In a post-critical climate, Ryan warns us against a position of intellectual detachment and urges us as Freirean educators to critically intervene in reality through an active dialogue that can transcend the traditional divide between formal education and ‘adult education’. Ryan suggests that this time of great economic uncertainty and ‘crisis’ is one that creates the possibility for radical change as old systems that have failed now dramatically come under scrutiny. She asserts that the failures of conventional education to deliver a promise of greater justice and equality now allow for an interruption in the ‘logic of conventional education’ by the radical educator. Ryan’s chapter interrogates Freire’s extensive theoretical and practical educational work and puts this in dialogue with her own experiences and insights in education, in Ireland and internationally, to provide a template for radical pedagogy today. Like Apple, she is cognizant of the complexity and multiplicity of tasks and roles this involves for the radical educator/learner and of the stamina required of the educator as critic/commentator, activist, engager and visioner, and the traps that are associated with each of these roles that can derail us from the common project of justice. She argues that it is only in embracing all these roles and ways of being imaginatively in relation to the specifics of particular contexts that we can find our way along a path that is truly radical. Chapter 6 takes a further step into the post-modern frame and Karl Kitching discusses the critical and moral projects of Paulo Freire alongside the work of Judith Butler, to explore how they help us question ‘what we want’ and ‘who we want to be’ as social and educational struggles against inequality are increasingly co-opted by governments and interest groups. The narrow construction and eventual dismissal of struggles for equality by the Irish state is discussed, as are accounts of how education internationally continues to defer, displace and narrowly recognize the voices of the marginalized, often with their consent. Kitching cautions about how desire affords us certain forms of recognition (and consent) as subjects, drawing upon Foucauldian and post-structural feminist ideas around the dis/continuities of post-Civil Rights identity politics. He adopts Butler’s contention that fragmented identities and opaque subjectivities do not absolve us of ethical responsibility for the Other, but rather challenge us ask deeper questions about how we are entirely implicated in each others’ lives. Taking inspiration from Freire’s notions of challenging the

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objective conditions of the ‘now’ through dialogue, and his desire to be a good person and not a ‘good boy’, it is argued that we must constantly risk, trouble or question repeated instances of our recognition as ‘good’, ‘bad’ or otherwise subjects of education in order to effect change. Taking risks with one’s subjective location certainly has higher material stakes for the oppressed. However, the oppressed are already more likely to be put in positions of ‘risk’ not only to their material well-being (as social policy might view risk), but also to their acceptability as subjects (as critical thinkers might further view risk). It is reiterated that critical pedagogy must provide a space for troubling and taking risks with subjectivity as curriculum, and to expect that ‘professional’ teachers and ‘good’ students must risk changing subjective location as part of a mutual, transformative process. In Chapter 7, ‘A Post-Modernist Rendering of Freire’s Educational Vision?’ Jones Irwin sees the ongoing struggle for transformation taking place most acutely for education in intergenerational wars that tend to alienate subcultures in general and youth culture in particular. In addressing the challenges posed by a more post-modern pedagogy, Irwin explores the reception of Freire’s work in two quite distinct but related directions, namely, the Critical Pedagogy movement in the North American context and through the school of cultural studies in the United Kingdom (CCCS). With particular focus on sub- and popular cultures and their dissident tendencies, the problematic is elaborated in terms of the tensions between modernist emancipatory approaches and post-modern deconstructive approaches to Freire. By tracing some of the influences of Freire’s work on cultural and philosophical developments in the West, Irwin suggests that Freire’s work as it is taken up and applied in local contexts, particularly in the United Kingdom under the influences of cultural studies and deconstruction, might through dialogue provide a way of bridging the intergenerational (and arguably class) divide that separates popular culture from the educational sphere. By challenging some of the received wisdom of Freire’s work with respect to today’s cultural landscape Irwin argues that approaches to critical pedagogy that have emerged in the UK context offer pathways towards what Freire calls a more progressive post-modernism. While by no means unaware of the tensions posed between what McLaren calls ‘ludic’ versions of post-modernism and what he describes as Hall’s more ‘deconstructive’ reading of ideology, Irwin asks whether there are not possibilities of a rapprochement between CCCS and Critical Pedagogy regarding the problematic issue of post-modernism.

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If Irwin argues that it is in the struggle between the different post-modern approaches that the legacy of Freire is repeatedly put to the test, in Chapter 8, O’Shea demarcates a particular problem in this regard: that of transformation. By reading Freire’s concept of transformation in light of humanization and of human beings’ ontological vocation, O’Shea’s chapter ‘Rethinking Transformation in Light of Postmodern Education’ looks more specifically at post-modern education as it has developed in the United States. It focuses on the much-vaunted ‘death of the subject’ and how the challenge of this theoretical move has been confronted and taken up in the Critical Pedagogy movement by Aronowitz, Giroux and McLaren. O’Shea makes the case that Freire’s work is more radical than the so-called ludic versions of post-modernism because it confronts the apocalyptic violence of world and word and still seeks an overcoming in the direction of wholeness, an integrating move beyond the particular. He argues that a phenomenological reading of structural linguistics defines the ‘death of the subject’ not simply as the undermining of human agency, but moreover as a form of anti-humanism that refuses a more promising vision – humanization. In failing to grasp the significance of these developments for what Freire calls a ‘progressive post-modernism’, some North American versions of critical pedagogy have underplayed Freire’s concept of transformation through dialogue as the vehicle of humanization and the process of overcoming the oppressor/oppressed contradiction. O’Shea argues that Freire’s call to ‘conversion to the people’ in the context of his own commitment to overcoming oppression may provide a way of confronting and of thinking through the huge challenges of staying with the dialogue of education and remaining hopeful for authentic forms of liberation. Overall this book addresses the tensions that exist between various postmodern perspectives on education and more modernist emancipatory forms; it cannot resolve these problems directly. Nonetheless, we hope that in naming the thorny issues and probing the possibilities for personal and societal transformation, for humanization through education, that at the very least, this collection provides further opportunities to stay with the dialogue and in dialogue across these paradigmatic divides. In returning to Freire and summoning his voice again in these challenging times, the book attempts to confront the anti-dialectic turn in education that maintains a profoundly suspicious stance towards expressive relational philosophies. Hence, anti-dialectical turn implies all dialogue (all interlocution, all possibility of mutual respect and of shared concerns through dialogue) is an attempt to fi x ‘otherness’ in relation to ‘the same’ and is, therefore, a form of ontological reductionism (Foucault, 2002; Derrida, 1978). Arising

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from these concerns the question of how dialogue, as a mode of transformational praxis can be once again given renewed priority in the project of challenging oppression, is present throughout the book. The heart of this humanizing question is continually threatened by the issues that have partly constituted the revolutions in Western culture since the eighteenth century, not least the very question of ‘the human’ itself and its place or legitimacy in discourse. Are we truly finished raking over the coals of the enlightenment? A further challenge to education arises here, one that we have to meet today in any consideration of the possibility of transformative practice, is the ever-more complex analysis of criticism. The revolutions in language alone in the past half century have ensured that all strong meaning that might justify transforming action along the lines of a pedagogy of the oppressed is subject to the rules of discourse at any given time. Textual post-modernism understands criticism as something that arises from the ashes of humanism, or the end of metaphysics as the guarantor of meaning. The event in question is succinctly captured by Nietzsche’s madman when he declares ‘God is dead’. By reading the tradition this way, as a thorough debunking of all grand narratives and master signifiers, textual post-modernism celebrates the bountiful release of meanings – undecidable and infinitely deferred – and hence ‘criticism’ becomes a form of deconstruction that radically challenges any strong naming of the world and any project of amelioration. This can of course be read as a positive development. As Richard Smith has shown recently in the SAGE Handbook of Philosophy of Education deconstruction can effectively highlight how binary terms function in arguments for educational reform. Post-modernism can, therefore, exist as a series of clever interventions in discourse that may generate the ‘elbow-room’ for an alternative perspective, or simply shock and unsettle – strategically disrupt the serious meanings from appearing uncontentious in the hope of putting them out of play altogether. But this ‘play’ also has a serious side if one holds to the importance of language as attempting to express something real, say liberation. In their different ways the contributors attempt to stay with some of these tensions and thereby open a space of dialogue on some of the important issues that emerge for education in what can be described, at least in the context of a Freirean view, as a post-critical climate. By grappling with Freire’s thought and bringing his ideas into conversation with their own work and their experience as educators, the authors in dialogue articulate some possibilities for transformation today. Whether the affiliation of Freire’s work with the metanarratives of ‘history’, ‘humanization’ and ‘liberation’ can be outgrown in a way that holds to his core

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insights into oppression is too soon to say. Perhaps, ultimately, the issue rests on whether we can remain in some nourishing continuity with the past while steering a course that avoids the shallows of post-modern suspicion that mitigate against dialogue, and the overwrought rigidity of modernity that presents humanization as bureaucratic achievement. By confronting some of these challenges and raising the difficult questions again in the context of Freire’s life and work, the authors not only help us to appreciate Freire’s contribution to education, but also his continued relevance to the pressing issues of our day.

Notes 1 Speaking of the ambiguity of the term post-modern in the context of childhood and citizenship Joe Dunne maintains: `I use this by now too-heavily-freighted term quite lightly here. I mean only that we are aware of modernity as modernity, a specific epoch whose defining ideals and agenda, already clearly articulated by the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, we have begun to take stock of. This awareness and stock-taking, by now pervasive in every discipline, including early childhood education, is enough to make us post-moderns, whether or not we go on to press two further claims: that social conditions have recently undergone such seismic change that we are now beginning to live in a new epoch of post-modernity; or, a different proposition, that the core ideals of modernity should be abandoned in the philosophical embrace of post-modernism .’ In `Childhood and citizenship: a conversation across modernity’, The European Early Childhood Education Research Journal , 14, 1 (September 2006). 2 See K. Lynch, J. Baker and M. Lyons (eds), Affective Equality: Love Care and Justice (London: Palgrave, 2009); and Maeve O’Brien, Well-Being and Post-Primary Schooling: A Review of the Literature and Research (Dublin: NCCA, 2008).

Chapter 1

Towards a Pedagogy of Care and Well-Being: Restoring the Vocation of Becoming Human Through Dialogue and Relationality Maeve O’Brien

Introduction Several decades ago Freire’s revolutionary work Pedagogy of the Oppressed articulated a powerful critical analysis of problems of well-being, humanization and education within a grossly unequal society. Reflecting and writing in a context where the majority of the population experienced poverty, illiteracy and oppression at the hands of a powerful wealthy class spurred Freire to a radical critique of what he called ‘banking education’, and to explicate an alternative process of education for liberation and humanization through dialogic praxis. Freire’s explicit and powerful analysis of the dehumanization of individuals and classes through societal orders that legitimate material and cultural deprivation has inspired many educators both within South America and the West more generally. And while Freire’s philosophy of education does not provide a recipe for doing transformation, it articulates the social and individual processes and dialogical conditions that facilitate learning and human development. Despite calls to a revolutionary educational praxis through Freire and those following him, gross inequalities in the socio-economic, cultural, political and affective domains of life still persist globally and act as barriers to individual and collective well-being. Increasingly, in a ‘post-critical climate’, technicist, rationalistic and neo-liberal thinking in education continues to legitimate a rhetoric and drive for ‘school improvement’, efficiency and performativity often at the expense of wholeness and well-being (O’Brien, 2008b). The absence of a normative space within the social sciences, which are foundational to education, means that possibilities for exploring understandings of the human and of development are often limited, and debates around

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what ought to be for our full human development are rendered redundant in paradigms principally concerned with making what currently is merely more economically productive. Responding to Freire’s call for humanization and for a transformation of ourselves and our world through relationship and dialogical educational praxis, I seek to bring recent feminist and egalitarian scholarship on care, relationality and education into conversation with his work. While interdisciplinary care theory might seem an unlikely bedfellow with Freire’s justice ethics, this chapter explores possibilities for an education based in an ethic of care, which has seeds in Freire’s ideas on the significance of love, trust and relationality for educational praxis and indeed for revolution. I hope to develop the conversation between radical education as understood by Freire, and more recent multidisciplinary work on a dialogics of care (Nussbaum, 1995; Kittay, 1999; Lynch et al., 2009), ‘ethical subjectivity’ (Hollway, 2006; Benjamin, 1998) and human well-being, in order to explore the potential of these care discourses to shed light on how we care for the other, how caring relationality can help us to understand our own oppression and that of another, and in the educational space in particular, to explore the possibility for transformation through caring human relationships. This is an urgent task for educators in a current climate of crisis and where structures of power and ideology still continue to systematically reproduce privilege for dominant groups in society and powerfully operate within the cultural field of education. Attempts to tackle inequalities and oppression in education have yet to dismantle neo-liberal constructions of the ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘poor’, discourses that increasingly infuse the educational discourse, and define these groups as less capable others, and cynically as authors of their own oppression. The first section of the chapter engages with Freire’s thinking on the dialectic relationship between self and other, and the centrality of dialogue to recognizing and fighting oppression that is both internalized and in the world. In this section I excavate a care ethic in Freire’s work, exploring his sometimes contradictory but nonetheless frequent articulation of the significance of emotions and relationships to the process of humanization and education. I trace how feminist care scholars across disciplines from political theory to moral philosophy, and the sociology of emotions/care, view caring and relationship with the other, heteronomy or other interest, as core to being human and to our development and to tackling oppressive relations. I draw upon broader and more layered interpretations and understandings of oppression that feminist scholars in particular have focused upon since Freire’s work on oppression, and on the challenges

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that these pose for his philosophy of transformative praxis. Building on Freire and the interdisciplinary care discourse, in the remainder of the chapter, I discuss how we might learn to practice care and a loving relationality in the context of education. While the recognition of care, love and solidarity in educational discourse itself is still only marginal (Lynch et al., 2007), I hope, guided by Freire’s work and the work of feminist scholars and activists across a range of disciplines, to further the dialogue on the significance of care and relationality to the project of becoming human and to education. I raise more questions in this part of the chapter that I can address fully with respect to the following: the extent of the carer/ teachers’ responsibility to her students, the question of teacher preparation and formation for relational work, the need to recognize the dangers of reducing a teacher to ‘carer subject’, and lessons from psychoanalytic understandings of dialogue and relationships that indicate that we need to recognize teachers and students as subjects with unconscious desires and needs that cannot be named within the formal educational space but that are present in their ‘silence’ as part of the relational transformational project. Having undertaken more than I can fully elaborate or explore here, I hope at least to indicate new tributaries to be navigated; that may join the rich channels of thought that Freire has opened and travelled in his journey for transformation.

Capacity for Self-Other Dialogue – Freire’s Conditions of Transformation For Freire, dialogue is at the core of a libratory education, a process that can free us from our own internal oppression and oppression in the world, generating a humanization of the self and transformation of our world. Coming to terms with and recognizing our own internal oppressor and oppression is integral to our ability to name our world and to combating oppression in the world. The ongoing dialogue between a conscious self and the world is a form of dialogic praxis (Freire, 1970, p. 68) that requires trust and relationship with self and other. Dialogue, understood as praxis, requires both elements of reflection and action. It is not a mere verbalism about or awareness of one’s own situation; it requires an awareness of self, other and context, and a form of consciousness not just resulting from and in critical thinking and action, but also an emotional responsiveness associated with reflection and action. Speaking to a particular sociocultural and economic context, for Freire it is only the classes or groups

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who are oppressed, and who recognize their oppression, who can create and participate in this form of praxis; a radical dialogical action. The privileged, because of their position, are unable to reflect upon or act for radical change, to be reborn as more fully human, because as privileged, they are too threatened by the possibility of loosing the life to which they have become habituated (already this presents a challenge to privileged educated teachers and academics). As human subjects, Freire suggests that the privileged classes have become dehumanized through the dehumanization of others and incapable of dialogical engagement. He suggests that they are neurotically attached to lives of ‘having’, turning away in sadistic fashion from those who live their lives in dire circumstances. The capacity of a privileged class to respond, in other words, to care about and be in dialogue with less privileged and oppressed groups is lost in their own enslavement to, and rationalization of their privileged existence. Oppressors, he explains, do not have to care about the less privileged because they see them as less than fully human, and therefore, as not entitled to the same conditions of living and freedoms. Currently, in a time of savage public spending cuts in many Western countries, this may explain why the most vulnerable, those on a minimum wage and on welfare are seen as legitimate targets since those who make the cuts are a remove in terms of economic and political power. Freire elaborates the lack of possibility for dialogue between the dehumanized privileged and the objects of their oppression: ‘Humanity is a thing, and they (the privileged) possess it as an exclusive right, as inherited property’ (Freire, 1970, p. 41). The privileged legitimize their right to humanity because they believe that they have courage and take greater risks in order to live well while constructing and blaming the oppressed other: For them, having more is an inalienable right, a right that they have acquired through their own ‘effort’, with their ‘courage to take risks’. If others do not have more, they are incompetent and lazy, and worst of all is their unjustifiable ingratitude towards the ‘generous gestures’ of the dominant class. (Freire, 1970, p. 41) It is such defensive beliefs as these that strip men and women of their capacity to name their world and to humanize it. Moreover, the oppressor’s singular obsession with maintaining control and power is compared to a death drive, a sadistic love, which kills life (Freire, 1970, p. 41). In the language of feminist care theorists (Nussbaum, 1995; Hollway, 2006), this ‘neurotic’ obsession with having/consuming and controlling destroys the

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capacity for dialogue, recognition and empathy with vulnerable others. In Freire’s analysis, the social and material distances created, and strongly defended and preserved by the dominant class over the lower social orders facilitate an internalized psychological process of alienation from the threatening shadow of the other (Benjamin, 1998). In this, Freire’s understanding of alienation and of the humanization process goes well beyond materialist Marxist approaches to revolution and he calls for justice and transformation through relationship, reflect ive dialogue and responsive practice. In this, we begin to see the seeds of an ethic of care, a moral position that requires us to be aware, responsive and attuned (see Tronto, 1993) to the conditions in which we and others are living. Although an ethics based in love and care, and a dialogue of revolutionary practice (conscientization) may initially seem improbable educational/revolutionary companions, Freire suggests that we must see revolution for justice, as a profound act of love, and that moreover, that this revolution should be loving in character. Heller (1994) in her essay on The Elementary Ethics of Everyday Life suggests that care (and care often taken as love) is the universal orientative principle of morals, ‘the most elementary starting point that remains beyond explanation, the arche of morals (pp. 56–58). Taking responsibility through caring is the mark of the ethical human subject. She reminds us that the world can be what it ought to be – a paradise – if each one of us takes responsibility for caring for the other, although of course the content of that care will vary according to specific situations. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed , Freire argues that revolution, transformation and real dialogue are not possible without this orientative moral principle, the presence of love for the world and for people (Freire, 1970, p. 70). Without love, the oppressed becomes the oppressor, occupying the position of dominance within a hierarchical relationality, leading to a necrophilic existence rather than to humanization. Freire’s views on a loving revolution seem to suggest that affect and caring relationality are fundamental to how we change our world, that real change-transformation is personal and can only be fostered in a spirit of love. To fight oppression, Freire does not say that we must only act justly and do the ‘right thing’, this is not to be a revolution based in an abstract principle of justice or a reactive blind revolutionary action; for him, the ‘right thing’ is to invoke the universal moral principle, to love. Love is seen as solidary and heteronomous, as a commitment to others and their cause, without sentimentalization or manipulation (Freire, 1970, p. 70). The kind of love that Freire and others are suggesting is a love based on dialogue, one that leads to speaking and acting with the other towards their and our own humanization. As

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educators today, we are faced with the realities of oppressive systems and structures both in society and within the educational field, and Freire’s ethical call requires a response to the ser ious question of how we can bring about a revolution in love/care; how to engage in a process of humanization that challenges the taken for granted social and cultural conditions of our existence within a global capitalist context. Feminist Critiques and Relational Approaches to Humanization and Education Some feminist critiques of Freire do not find a strong ethic of care and love in his work and suggest that his treatment of emotions and of love (in the earlier works particularly) are contradictory and superficial while Weiler (1994) and Brady (1994) suggest that his privileging of the male peasant as prototype for the oppressed human does not take account of women’s positions and the particular forms of oppression that shape their experiences and lives. bell hooks (1993) has accused Freire of constructing a phallocentric paradigm of liberation and humanization – where freedom is equated with freedom for ‘patriarchal manhood’, obscuring the female, racialized, classed subject. She suggests ironically that this ‘is a blindspot in the vision of Freire and other men of profound insight’ (hooks, 1993, p. 148). Sherman (1980) critiques Freire for falling into a traditional dichotomizing of emotions and critical thinking, thus reproducing oppressive modes of understanding the human. She also suggests that he expresses a contradictory perspective on the significance of emotions, at times warning against their irrationality while also recognizing their fundamental significance to our human capacity for right action. Critics have asserted that his views on critical literacy and education emphasize a naming of the world that eschews feelings as often dangerous to a project of liberation and humanization. More recently, however, Roberts (2003) traces changes in Freire’s perspective arguing that his later work strongly recognizes the significance of caring emotions for radical pedagogy, and, moreover, addresses the problem of dichotomizing teaching as a purely rational activity distinct from emotional responsiveness and affective practices. For example, in Pedagogy of Freedom , Freire acknowledges the emotional and affective aspects of pedagogical practice: [I]t is necessary to overcome the false separation between serious teaching and the expression of feeling . . . Affectivity is not necessarily an enemy of knowledge or the process of knowing. (1998a, p. 125)

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Despite earlier criticisms levelled at Freire for his contradictory treatment of human affect, his work to varying degrees explicitly explores the tensions and inescapable dialectics of relationality, and, at the very least, recognizes the significance of emotion or affect to liberation and transformation. Despite the gross inequalities and oppression witnessed by Freire within the historical and socio-political context, Pedagogy of the Oppressed cannot be reduced to a rational manifesto or manual for social change, it is a work imbued with affect, particularly hope. This is a feeling that has significance for our times, urging us to keep belief in transformative praxis despite the seeming impossibility of acting in a context of uncontrolled change and economic anxiety and loss. Speaking of the tension between oppression and hopefulness, he claims that the dehumanization that results from injustice, is in fact a cause of hope not of despair, because as men and women (Freire’s own recognition of both men and women) engaged in critical thinking we fight injustice with action (Freire, 1970, pp. 72–73). Here, it appears that Freire recognizes a need to overcome the binarization of mind/emotion and acknowledges the potential of positive affect to generate just action, to care about the world and those in the world. Taking his work as a whole, as a thinker, a revolutionary and an educator, I suggest that there is sufficient evidence that Freire eschews a male, detached, rational, self-interested model of the self as homo economicus, adopting a radical position for a subject that can be identified as otherinterested, loving and caring. Despite the contradictions in his work, he recognizes not only the significance of an emotional/affective self, a subject aware of her own rationality, but also of her emotional potentiality, a self in relationship with others and the world. While acknowledging the importance of love and emotions more generally to ‘becoming’ and to processes of humanization, Freire does express a concern that an overemphasis on emotionality can also be destructive and anti-dialogical, that blind emotion is as useless as ‘blunt reason’1 in making moral decisions for action. Freire’s thesis of transformational praxis requires our attentiveness to, and consciousness of the significance of our emotional connections, and specifically, to the expression of deep human feelings such as love and hope. He states that while he needs a theory and a science of revolution, it must be one that is not irreconcilable with a praxis of love. In the language of feminist care scholars, Freire is foregrounding relationship and care, sowing the seeds of an ethic of care, if not a science, one which creates an imperative to love self and other in the process of becoming human. From a social justice perspective we understand that transformation occurs through a transformation of structures and the conditions of living,

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but importantly, for Freire, it also must include a transformation of subjects through a self/other dialogue, through feeling and recognition, and a naming of the oppressor within. Contrary to views held by some of his feminist critics, Freire’s understandings of the dialectics of self /other mean that ‘the personal is the political’. He suggests that: To deny the importance of subjectivity in the process of transforming the world and history is naïve and simplistic. It is to admit the impossible: a world without people. The objectivist position is as ingenuous as that of subjectivism, which postulates people without a world. World and human beings do not exist apart from each other, they exist in constant interaction. (Freire, 1970, p. 32) The process of humanization, of becoming more fully human as individual subjects, is integrally bound to the transformation of our world. Transformation is a powerful yet problematic process, one which necessitates relationship, a dialogue with self and between subjects, between the self and its world. Freire’s perspective highlights the tensions that often beleaguer conceptions of social action for revolutionary change, particularly those located within an enlightenment but overly rationalistic paradigm. Changing structures and material conditions alone is never sufficient for transformation in the Freirean sense. His conception of change demands engagement at a deeply personal level, which includes a change of heart and mind . Freire argues for change as a dialectic process, a journey of personal transformation in thought and feeling which creates transformation of structures and of the social world.

Rationalizations, Oppressions, Emotional (Dis)Connections and Our Need for Care In this section I consider how Freire’s understanding of the relationship between self and the world, including those others in the world, is at odds with the subject of post-modern discourse, a self adrift, disconnected and detached, or without a world or only her/his own world (Bauman, 2000, 2003). This overly individualized view of the human offers little hope for emancipation and equality for those oppressed through poverty and/or ‘non-material’ social inequalities. The ‘post-critical’ view ordains that the individualized and detached rational self must take ultimate responsibility for its own invention and reinvention, its own successes and failures in

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relationships, in work, education and schooling, and for its own well-being. As a detached social and economic actor this self must be continuously alert and ready to respond to the demands of global world and its markets or risk the reality of unemployment, lack of promotional opportunities, lack of status, lack of qualifications and a lack of recognition as a worker citizen (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001). The myth of a rational, independent, self-sufficient and invulnerable self is strongly critiqued by feminist political theorists, moral philosophers and social scientists as dehumanized. Like Freire, these scholars have recognized the inescapable interdependency of human beings, and their need for reciprocal relationships with each other in order to flourish. Moreover, they suggest that at times of vulnerability in our lives we will be dependent to a greater extent on the care of others. Recent scholarship on human development and human flourishing has argued the impossibility of social action for human well-being and society, without a new politics that recognizes the significance of caring and our affectual needs (Allardt, 1993; Nussbaum, 1995, 2001; Sevenhuijsen, 1998, Fineman, 2004; Lynch et al., 2009). These scholars argue that for transformation and development to occur there must be recognition and resourcing of caring engagements between embodied, emotional and rational subjects within their own specific contexts. Likewise, Freire suggests that our development, our humanization, is contingent upon dialogic relations between actors who have feelings, bodies and minds and how these are experienced and expressed within the historical and contextual specificity of their lives. Freire’s emphasis on relationality with/between self and other, one which takes account of emotional expression and connection, is something that care theorists and researchers have argued is fundamental to ethical feminine practice and to an ethic of care, going back to Gilligan’s seminal work In a Different Voice (Gilligan, 1982). Rationalization of thinking and emotions is anti-care and oppressive, and, according to Gilligan, leads to a bolstering of traditional male ethical perspectives based on a universalizing justice model, that does not take account of specificity of relationships and contexts. In a similar fashion, Freire suggests that the impotence of the subject to act upon the world is a consequence of a form of relational de tachment, a rationalization and an absence of dialogue with others, and a closing down of meaningful dialogue with self. From Freire’s perspective rationalization is a distantiation from real feeling and thinking, an excuse or a strategy to avoid responsibility for change at the level of society and the self. Emotional responsiveness towards, and connection with those oppressed others, is too painful for the privileged, and not in their

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interests as privileged. And for the oppressed, emotional connection may be too painful and frustrating as they have not the critical tools to name their oppression in the world, to begin the process of revolution and transformation. Care and feminist scholarship from a variety of disciplines also asserts that rationalization is anti-development, particularly as it involves negation or rendering invisible the needs of the other in terms of their flourishing (Benjamin, 1998; Chodorow, 1999; Hochschild, 1989, 1995; Fineman, 2001).2 The process of rationalization enables us as privileged to continue to justify gross inequalities (Freire, 1970, p. 39) and to maintain traditional oppressive orders within society; it closes down a possibility of dialogue and engagement, and, as Freire states, often legitimizes charity as the appropriate moral response to the material needs of disenfranchised groups and individuals. These rationalizations enable the privileged to see these ‘others’ as not fully human with their own capacities to develop, but as subhuman and lacking in moral fibre, and in need of disciplining and civilizing. The oppressed feel owned and dependent, stripped of power to name their reality, and cannot see or make transparent the order that continues to maintain them as oppressed. Moreover, the privileged rationalize their oppressive material, cultural and affective relations with the ‘other’ in terms of a moral order of being ‘deserving’ of entitlement, based on their superior education, breeding and efforts in the world. While Freire is writing out of a specific time and place, this is not so far removed from the reality of life today for many oppressed groups in Western democracies in the so-called developed world. Within education particularly there has been a long history of intervention and policies targeting the working classes and disadvantaged others to make up for their various ‘educational deficits’ – in their language, thinking and ways of being. For care theorists and scholars, rationalization is understood as a disengagement from deep and empathic feeling, an alienation or mistrust of affectual relationship that may be socialized from our earliest experiences (Gilligan, 1982; Hollway, 20063), a form of unhealthy detachment and a denial of our interdependency, one that is further internalized through subsequent encounters in a world where care and love are not publicly valued and recognized, and remain problematically associated with femininity and the so-called private sphere (Lynch et al., 2007; Held, 1995; Sevenhuijsen, 1998). Theoretically and discursively, rationality and the Cartesian subject have dominated understandings of what it is to be human , overshadowing realities of vulnerability, interdependency and affective life. Freire and feminist scholars are in agreement that a defensive management

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of feelings and a retreat into the cognitive, in place of active and empathic engagement with another or others, are learnt strategies, mechanisms for the protection of our positions and possessions, and moreover, for maintenance of the socio-affective and cultural orders, including the traditional gender order (Hochschild, 1989; Fineman, 2001; and also Irigaray, 2002). Nussbaum (1995) writing on human development suggests that a person who turns from the other, who avoids connection and responsiveness to the pain of an other, even to the pain of an animal, might be considered as less than human.4 She argues that emotional connection and responsiveness are central to human morality, and to the ability to connect with, and reach out, to act in the interests of another, and to fostering the capacity to care about our world and ourselves (Nussbaum, 2001), in Freire’s terms, to humanization, to becoming more human. Taking the work of these feminists alongside Freire we can offer a strong counterpoint to the post-modern perspective that there are no longer any universal narratives and argue that the care narrative and its recognition of significance of the affective is one that characterizes our human needs and possibilities for development and humanization.

Feminist Approaches to Caring, Commitment to Others and to Tackling Diverse Modes of Oppression Today Feminist care scholarship suggests that we care and feel a moral obligation to care because it is linked to our own well-being and development, but most particularly because of our inescapable interdependency and vulnerability (Kittay, 1999; Fineman, 2008). Our moral orientation to care and our related responsibility (Heller, 1994) requires us to be in dialogue with others and to be responsive to their needs for our own and their flourishing. Connection and dialogue are fundamental to processes of development and humanization in Freire’s work. His work calls for a relationality that is grounded in care, commitment to others and in his words, a care that goes beyond mere verbalism (Freire, 1970, p. 26) and that takes account of the affective subject as a profoundly moral subject. Nussbaum (1995, 2001), Tronto (1993), Jaggar (1995), Gilligan (1982), Chodorow (1999), Kittay (1999) and Hollway (2006) have all suggested that the capacity to identify with another is necessarily an emotional one, and one that gives rise to responses of caring about those others we see as similar to us in our common humanity. Our emotional capacity for interrelatedness and for responsiveness to an/other forms the basis for an approach to social

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justice and to tackling forms of oppression. As care scholars have argued and has been suggested above, we may not in our privilege respond to the pain or suffering of another on the basis of a rational argument alone, as disconnection and rationalization may prevent this move, and we may also disagree with the particular principle of justice set forth. 5 What the care theorists suggest is that in emotional attunement, an affective dialogue with the other, we respond emotionally and are enabled to act morally in the interests of the vulnerable other. Where rational argument based on a justice approach alone may lead us to turn away from the call to act in the interests of another, to render invisible their oppression, when we feel compassion or other emotions of empathic quality, we are moved or encouraged to do the ‘right thing’ and reach out to the other (Gilligan, 1982, as Hollway, 2006, p. 42, points out describes empathy, and the capacity for empathic attunement as the highest of sentiments). Nell Noddings (1999) in her essay articulating the tensions between an ethics of justice and care ethics in education suggests that a justice orientation tends to be more abstract and located in universalizing principles, thus creating solutions or interventions that are more formulaic and procedural, and which suit policy makers as the problem can be pronounced and then resolved in an efficient fashion. A care orientation, on the other hand, located in a particular relationship, necessitates attentiveness and emotional responsiveness (Tronto, 1993) and so gives rise to case specific and, therefore, less abstracted, negotiated and co-operative approaches to issues in hand, possibly generating multiple desirable outcomes. Freire’s conception of dialogue within educational praxis appears closer to this care ethic than to a justice orientation that would impose universalizing solutions in a bureaucratic and dehumanizing fashion. Freire critiques systems and interventions of so-called liberation that would be imposed by the privileged upon the oppressed, or indeed we might include, by teachers on students. Despite his recognition of the significance of affect and relationship, it is possible nonetheless Freire’s conception of oppression, as a theorization of experience that does not explicitly recognize or name the specificity of women’s positioning and experiences within a traditionally oppressive patriarchal order. Feminist and indeed post-structuralist understandings of the multifacetedness of human identities and positionings require a more robust theorizing of the relational and of the specificity of forms of oppression. Within Freire’s particular understanding of oppression, the inability to be in dialogue and recognize the needs of the other, to care about self and other, is constitutive of oppression; our inability to perceive

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and critique our reality constitutes an inability to act, and as a barrier to becoming human. Freire’s statement that men find in their oppressor in their models of manhood (1970, p. 28) fits well with a feminist reading of human oppression,6 although Freire may not have intended this statement as an attack on patriarchal relations but rather on hierarchy per se, taken for granted and ordered through the male world-view. Care and care ethics have, however, been typically associated with the feminine and with intimate and domestic spaces rather than with issues of justice and the organization of society. It is largely feminist scholarship, including feminists in the educational field that have developed this awareness of a care ethic, and the significance of care practices to human wellbeing, as not just a private but a profoundly public matter (Noddings, 1992; Lynch, 1989, 2007; Reay, 1998; O’Brien, 2007; Hollway, 2006). Nonetheless, in thinking about oppression and injustice from a feminist perspective, feminists like bell hooks who have lived with the reality of multivalent oppressions that intersect with gender oppression, also remind us of how privileged women of dominant classes, ethnicity and race are capable of the oppression of other women and men. Echoing Freire’s view of the oppressed becoming the oppressor and suggesting that we can be simultaneously oppressor and oppressed, hooks states: White women and black men have it both ways. They can act as oppressor or be oppressed. Black men may be victimised by racism, but sexism allows them to act as exploiters and oppressors of women. White women may be victimised by sexism, but racism enables them to act as exploiters and oppressors of black people . . . . As long as these two groups or any group, defines liberation as gaining equality with ruling class whitemen, they have a vested interest in the continued exploitation of others. (hooks, 2000, p. 16) Connell’s (1995) work on hegemonic masculinities also suggests that our models of manhood and of the ‘human’ with man taken as the prototype are deeply oppressive, and maintain the dominant cultural, class and gender orders. For Connell, and other pro-feminist masculinity researchers, and for scholars like Freire, oppression must also be tackled from within in order to change structure; there is a need to recognize aspects of our own identities that are oppressive. These scholars also suggest a process of humanization and development that is less bound by traditional oppressive hierarchies and fixed categories of gender, race and sex, and move towards a recognition of more diverse dynamic ways of being embodied as human.

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Research on well-being and adolescence, for example, increasingly shows that the ways in which young people experience their gender identities, sexualities and sense of belonging are crucial to their mental health and well-being (see O’Brien, 2008b). The absence of relationship and disconnection has been shown to be associated with mental health difficulties and particularly to increased suicide levels in young men. This issue has also been linked to the dilemma of male identity in a world where the old order of traditional and universalizing masculinity is under criticism, but continues to maintain discursive, material and cultural power to categorize and to institutionally and politically designate non-hegemonic forms as lesser, other and deviant. While Freire’s work does not interrogate the issue of identification and cross-cutting identities and multivalent oppressions, he develops a model and critique of oppressive processes that reach beyond, yet remain true to the gross injustice of poverty from the perspective of material and social deprivation. His insight into the reality of classed and cultural oppressions allows us to view the personal injuries of designation as other; the damage and ill-being that ensues from these processes; the hurt and shame; the moral and emotional wounds of being positioned as lower/other (Sayer, 2005); as peasant; as illiterate, without the power to name one self and one’s world. From Freire’s perspective, it is not that ‘the peasant’ needs education to literally feed his children, but he needs conscientization to enter a dialogue of identification, in order to name his shame and anger and his enforced dependency by the owner class, that is, to name his or her world, to enter the discourse that names him and from which he has been excluded. The concept of conscientization is a powerful one implying dialogue with self and other to change at a deeply personal level how we relate in the world. To initiate this dialogue requires developing a relationship of trust that encourages speech, critique, reflection and action. And this raises the thorny question of how we first begin and learn to trust, and enter into holistic engagement and dialogue, and whether, and how this is possible in the context of education today. While the scope of this chapter will not allow for any in-depth exploration of unconscious processes which facilitate or block our learning to trust, care, engage, and our development as ethical subjects, the work of feminist psychoanalysis, both theoretically and clinically, has a great deal to offer with respect to understanding our (in)capacity for caring, loving, and our need and willingness to reach out in solidarity to more distant others. So far, in this brief chapter, I have tried to weave my way

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through the intertwining social justice aims of Freire’s dialogic praxis and humanization, and feminist care theorists’ perspectives on relationality and human development. Some of the threads that are missing in this weave of humanization, and that are rarely referred to in justice and educational discourses are those that relate to our hidden subjective lives, our unconscious, and problems of vulnerability and desire. While some branches of psychoanalysis may not aim to facilitate wellbeing but are more concerned with understanding, Hollway’s (2006) work sheds light on the development of our capacity to care and our ethical subjectivity. Through the experience of their fi rst relationships in the world and unconscious processes that occur throughout infancy, infants must shift psychically from an imaginary position of narcissistic omnipotence to a realization of fallibility in the ‘depressive position’. Through processes of introjection and projection and the ‘unthought known’ (Hollway, 2006, p. 45) of the unconscious, and the counterbalancing processes of separation and identification with our primary carers, we learn, as individual subjects, to identify with the pleasure and pain of the other, as other, without consuming or being consumed by it (see also Irigaray, The Way of Love , 2002). According to Hollway (2006), as we develop knowledge of connection, and feelings of acceptance and realization of the intersubjective reality of our lives, it creates in us the capacity to reach and engage caringly beyond the ‘face-to-face’ other, to be able to identify with the need of the other at a greater distance from us (p. 117). The logic of the processes of unconscious intersubjective development surely has application to the work of humanization and to education that have yet to be drawn out. But following Rogers (2009), critical psychologist and psychoanalyst explores the problem of attempting to bring disciplines that have diverse aims into conversation with each other; in this case albeit that they are all generally concerned with issues of human development, I understand that there is too much to be done here in attempting more than merely signalling a potential dialogue. All I can do is to acknowledge the ethical in our unconscious processes and our attempts at creative engagement with diverse ways of knowing our world and: [to] fall into a gap, a gap that acknowledges certain discrepancies . . . and [a gap] where the questions we raise in our separate fields lead nevertheless to imperatives to act-in speech and deeds-to sustain our humanity through desire, against the odds of our own destruction and implication in it. (Rogers, 2009, p. 13)

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How We Learn to Care, Love and be in Solidarity as Educators Today It seems ever more pressing in this post-critical context, that as educators, we ‘wake up from the nightmare’ of immanent self-destruction (Chomsky, 2003) so that we can bring about hope and transformation in a deeply unequal world. Almost two decades ago, Nell Noddings wrote her care manifesto, The Challenge to Care in Schools (1992) as an alternative approach to education in developed countries. Her work argues why and how care is significant for education, and what students/learners need to care about in order to create ‘deep change’ for a more humane and equal society. While Noddings’ work outlines in a careful, systematic and detailed way how the recognition of care could shape the process of schooling and education, she does not focus primarily on the person of the teacher as carer, and how the professional educator comes to value care, and embrace the ethic and practice of care within a system that is increasingly knowledge and outcomes driven. In this final section, I want to dwell for a while on the educarer (Lynch et al., 2007),7 how we are challenged as ethical caring educators, how we might be educated into this ethic, and what kinds of tensions this creates for the professional teacher in a system that does not always recognize the labours and sacrifices that are required to care well in particular circumstances. Indeed a great deal of feminist sociology on care, and the labour involved in caring, has demonstrated that in both public and more private spheres, that the efforts that create caring relationships and maintain the well-being of another are often unrecognized and invisible to those who do not care. Nonetheless, with Noddings and others, I agree that a way forward out of technical and instrumental education and its careless privileging of dominant groups and forms of knowledge is the recognition of an ethical care perspective, which could infuse what currently passes as ‘education’; a perspective which takes account of our need for relationship, our unavoidable dependency and interdependency on others (Kittay, 1999), and our vulnerability (Fineman, 2008). Freire’s thinking on justice and humanization suggests that relationship and dialogue are fundamental to education as liberation; we cannot begin to prescribe curricula or pedagogical practices without fi rst entering into dialogue with learners, and particularly those others who continue to suffer various oppressions. The call to care and be in relationship as an educator is not to perform charity for the oppressed in our care, or to fill the schooling deficits of the ‘educationally disadvantaged’ with more of the same schooling. To be a radical educator and to offer real

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alternatives, in Freire’s terms, and that of care scholars, means that we make ourselves vulnerable as educators, that we enter into dialogue to facilitate and hear the naming of the world by those who are oppressed in order to understand and feel the oppressions of those in our care (as discussed previously feeling through empathic attunement is the highest of all sentiments in a moral order (Gilligan, 1982)). In this way, we can begin to work with and alongside rather than for those who are oppressed, to find solutions and to help develop the tools of critical literacy that will equip us in this co-operative process. Feminist scholarship on the ethics and practice of care provides helpful insights about the nature of relationality and intersubjectivity (Benjamin, 1998; Hollway, 2006), of our learnt capacity to care and love, and the ethical demands associated with this. It has created deeper and nuanced understandings of the relation between care, love and solidarity in intimate and in less intimate contexts (see Lynch et al., 2007), and has raised questions about the ethical call to respond to the other, and how strongly to respond to the specificity of that call (Kittay, 1999). These are all important issues for the educarer. The work of these scholars also raises significant issues about the well-being of the carer subject which may prove useful in thinking about the role of the educator/carer (Noddings, 1992; Lynch et al., 2007; Farrelly, 2009). What has already been theorized and found in empirical research demonstrates that to reduce any subject to a ‘carer subject’ is dehumanizing, allowing no space for other aspects of development and subjectivity (Bubeck, 2001). The teacher-carer has other calls on their care besides those experienced in their professional role as educarer. As society is currently organized along the dichotomizing binaries of public and private spheres, how can a teacher/educarer balance the needs that they meet in their professional life and care and relational needs in so-called private and public spaces? From Freire’s perspective, how could a teacher-carer respond to and grapple with gross injustices in the educational system that are reflective of inequalities in wider society, and then leave these questions behind as she returns to her own home as a privileged professional? Freire suggests that she cannot, that to care deeply about injustice involves committing to and being in relationship with others to initiate change in a caring way; the call and commitment to care about others infuses our very identity as individuals and professionals. To care about those we are in an educative relationship with involves sacrifice in a sense; it requires a giving up of something of ourselves and our privileged positions. From Hollway’s developmental psychoanalytic perspective she suggests that the development of our ethical subjectivity is a balancing act between our sense of our

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own individuality and our intersubjectivity. In the current climate, where performance driven ideologies tend to dominate the schooling system, understanding and reflecting upon this balance and naming it, is something that educators require for their survival as professionals and for their flourishing as individual citizens. Given the contradictions and often conflicting demands experienced by educators today, pulled on the one hand towards universalizing outcomes and productivity and on the other towards an ethics of caring praxis and justice that sits at odds in that discursive and ideological space, it is necessary that we conceptualize and describe what we mean by caring for and about those we work with. As educarers we need to recognize and dialogue about what needs to be taught or learnt, and valued, to name what counts for our development as humans individually and collectively. This requires us to foreground care and the labours involved in caring rather than assume their presence, as these are efforts that are not recognized as a significant public issue for the well-being of a society and its citizens (Sevenhuijsen, 1998; Fraser, 1997a). Further challenges that arise for teacher as educarer are the life experiences and educational environments that shape and influence professional teachers. If educators have not had opportunities or experiences to develop tools of critical literacy, to name their own world, their own oppressions, if they are the success stories of a rational and bureaucratic school system that recognizes only particular and measurable forms of knowledge and effort, how will they recognize and respect other kinds of learning and ways of becoming, and moreover, care about these? How will they engage with or even begin to dialogue with learners who bring very different experiences of the world into their classroom? The challenge to care is even greater than before, as Hollway (2006) warns that there are grounds for arguing that individually and at the level of society we are in danger of becoming even less caring. Caring subjectivity, often associated with women and their traditional roles, is itself undergoing radical changes, as women (the traditional carers) spend even more time in the workplace and in environments that do not recognize the significance of care; over time they will internalize experiences that may lead to a new and less caring form of subjectivity, a form of personal transformation that may lead away from care praxis and human well-being. This raises many difficult questions and among them the issue of the professional formation of teachers as educarers in a globalized capitalist and highly individualized world. In short, care scholars suggest that the capacity to care and formation of a carer identity necessarily involves the practice of caring. The implication for

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professional educators is that to create good care that is genuinely heteronomous requires education in care praxis.

Conclusion Drawing on Freire’s insights and the work of feminist educators and theorists, it has been argued here that the process of education and practice of teaching are person-centred relational practices, even with the most highly developed curricula and teaching tools, the personal and intersubjective relationality between teacher and learner(s) is critical to the learning. Moreover, to engage in education that is for humanization, it is necessary but not sufficient to expose students and teachers to ideas about democratic and inclusive education, or respect for the uniqueness and wholeness of persons, if the modes of teaching and learning, assessment and systems of reward reflect a very different paradigmatic view of the individual and of society. To realize Freire’s vision for transformation through dialogical education, the education of teachers themselves needs to reflect the call to the vocation of becoming human, not a call to increase technical skills for a knowledge economy (Ball, 2003b). The process of becoming ethically human is an interrelational one necessitating, as Hollway suggests above, experiences of care and love and the capacity for dialogue with self and others. Given the importance of selfawareness and our capacity for relationships to human well-being, and the collective project of creating a just society, it seems reasonable to suggest that this should be a foundational value and praxis for all education and particularly in the formation of teachers. Yet, research into teacher education and on teacher educators themselves often suggests how little care and relationality are visible, recognized or valued or indeed even given a discursive space within the academy (Furlong et al., forthcoming). While a focus on care and relationality may be taken for granted as contributing to the formation of teachers, if it is not formally recognized, discussed or valued, then it is difficult to see how teachers will understand its significance.8 If programmes of study are predominantly based on individualized cognitive and technical measurable activity, while perhaps only giving an occasional nod to the significance of emotional relationality, then it cannot be expected that students will automatically value what is underemphasized or at worst marginalized. One step towards a more positive scenario for understanding the significance

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of care for teacher education is to engage in intellectual activity, reading and discussion of texts and research in this field. But as Ellsworth’s (1989) critique of critical pedagogy suggests, we cannot ‘unproblematically bring subjugated knowledges to light when I am not free of my own learned racism, fat oppression, classism, ableism or sexism’ (p. 308). As no teacher is completely free of their own internalized oppressions, there are things that teachers as educarers can never know, but nonetheless, in a spirit of care they may try to be in dialogue, to respond and relate to students in ‘awareness of their own unawareness’. While as Ellsworth argues, conventional critical dialogue may not be possible because of my ‘not knowing’ and my positioning as teacher, I suggest that a focus on the orientative principle of love expressed in a caring relationality reintroduces possibilities for empowerment and transformation because of its very acknowledgement of the tensions between the unknowable and the knowable in human relationships. However, even in finding ways of tackling problems of power and position in teaching for humanization, we are still left with the question of the weight of responsibility for care that is assigned to teachers. Perhaps one approach to resolving the tension is through the idea of caring relationship as solidarity and seeing the teacher as a part of the process of transformation, a catalyst for nurturing the conditions of dialogue rather than the sole agent. Feeley’s (2009) work and praxis with adult literacy learners, for example, suggest that learning literacy does not take place where there is an absence of what she terms learning care. From reflection and engagement in literacy work, she theorizes the concept of learning care to describe and account for the appropriate relational environment that takes account of the most vulnerable learners. Today, more than ever, learning care, the respectful and attuned dialogue between teacher and learner is required to reinvigorate a holistic engagement, of hearts and minds, to keep alive the possibility of transformative praxis. This directs us towards the necessity for building a relation of caring trust, not to ‘fi x’ the other, but to enable the other to articulate and feel from their own unique position in order for personal liberation to occur. In this relation of trust, it is possible to develop a pedagogy of care for well-being, a cycle of praxis characterized by heartfelt reflection, challenge, dialogue and further reflection/action to contribute to teachers’ radical education and formation (Ellsworth, 1989; Lather, 1991). But, to trust and to answer a call to dialogic action, students of education and educators themselves must also have courage, the courage to name their world together, as far as they can,

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in their plurality and in their difference, in order to bring themselves into dialogue and real caring engagement about what matters. Hopefully, students from oppressed groups and teachers together may say in solidarity: ‘this feels empowering ’. In his last book, Pedagogy of Freedom (1998), Freire recognized the need to reach heart, mind and soul in educating for humanization. Today, despite the grip of the cold winds of rational performativity in twentyfirst-century education, and the dictats of careless policy and rationalizations, caring dialogue between teachers and learners, having the courage to feel, to have trust in self and other, and the very recognition of our caring intersubjectivity as humans can strongly counteract these dehumanizing and oppressive forces. Freire’s insights remind us of the signifi cance of human affect and desire to the ongoing project of education and liberation: As a strictly human experience, I could never treat education as something cold, mental, merely technical, and without soul, where feelings, sensibility and desires had no place, as if repressed by some kind of reactionary dictatorship. (1998a, p. 129)

Notes 1 Nussbaum (1995) a neo-Aristotelian suggests that blunt reason without use of emotional capacity is too blunt an instrument to make correct moral choices. 2 Hochschild (1989) discusses married men’s rationalization of their everyday needs as needs reduction and as a basis for avoiding domestic and caring for work. Fineman (2001) discusses the legislative anti-care policy in the United States, which in an attempt to get poor single mothers back to work cut welfare payments and did nothing in the way of adequate childcare provision causing even greater strain and financial hardship. 3 Hollway’s work on psychoanalytic perspectives on love and care is insightful in exposing how we learn to separate well and still remain capable of loving the object we also may hate. 4 Nussbaum’s work has been critiqued (see Engster, 2005) on the basis on being overly based in Western understanding of human need. 5 In relation to distribution of goods in a society, these may be according to agreed policies or ideologies that recognize the need to equally divide the resources on the basis of means or affordability and that may not take account of the specific needs or suffering of individuals. 6 While Freire’s discourse in Pedagogy is not gender differentiated in respect of the humanization process and transformation, many feminist scholars would not be slow to point out that through history the model for the human has

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typically been male, and associated with rationality and the public sphere (Sevenhuijsen, 1998). 7 Lynch et al.’s (2007) work discusses the necessity of educating citizens for and in love, care and solidarity. 8 See O’Brien (2007), where mothers’ care work is not recognized formally and publicly, and mothers themselves often experience difficulty in valuing this effort and labour of love.

Chapter 2

Paulo Freire and the Tasks of the Critical Educational Scholar/Activist Michael W. Apple

Introduction: Education and Power Over the past three decades I have been dealing with a number of ‘simple’ questions. I have been deeply concerned about the relationship between culture and power, about the relationship among the economic, political and cultural spheres (see Apple and Weis, 1983), about the multiple and contradictory dynamics of power and social movements that make education such a site of conflict and struggle, and about what all this means for educational work. In essence, I have been trying to answer a question that was put so clearly in the United States by radical educator George Counts (1932) when he asked ‘Dare the School Build a New Social Order?’ Counts was a person of his time and the ways he both asked and answered this question were a bit naïve. But the tradition of radically interrogating schools and other pedagogic sites, of asking who benefits from their dominant forms of curricula, teaching, evaluation and policy, of arguing about what they might do differently, and of asking searching questions of what would have to change in order for this to happen – all of this is what has worked through me and a considerable number of other people. We stand on the shoulders of many others who have taken such issues seriously, with Paulo Freire being among the most important. And in a time of neo-liberal attacks with their ensuing loss of collective memory, I hope to have contributed to the recovery of the collective memory of this tradition and to pushing it further along conceptually, historically, empirically and practically. In the process, I have focused much of my attention on formal institutions of schooling and on social movements that influence them. Of course, no author does this by herself or himself. This is a collective enterprise. And no one who takes these questions seriously can answer

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them fully or without contradictions or even wrong turns or mistakes. As a collective project, it is one in which we not only stand on the shoulders of those whose work we draw upon critically, but also one in which thoughtful criticism of our work is essential to progress. Compelling arguments cannot be built unless they are subjected to the light of others’ thoughtful analyses of the strengths and limits of our claims. I want to do some of that self-reflective analysis here. Thus, my arguments are meant to be just as powerful a reminder to me as they are to the reader. One of the guiding questions within the field of education is a deceptively simple one: What knowledge is of most worth? Over the past four decades, an extensive tradition has grown around a restatement of that question. Rather than ‘What knowledge is of most worth?’ the question has been reframed. It has become ‘Whose knowledge is of most worth?’ (Apple, 2004c, 2000, 1996). There are dangers associated with such a move, of course, including impulses towards reductionism and essentialism. These dangers arise when we assume, as some people have, that there is always a one-to-one correspondence between any knowledge that is seen as ‘legitimate’ or ‘official’ and dominant groups’ understanding of the world. This is too simplistic, since official knowledge is often the result of struggles and compromises and at times can represent crucial victories, not only defeats, by subaltern groups (Apple and Buras, 2006; Apple, 2000). However, the transformation of the question has led to immense progress in our understanding of the cultural politics of education in general and of the relations among educational policies, curricula, teaching, evaluation and differential power. Indeed, some of the most significant work on the intimate connections between culture and power has come out of the area of the sociology of school knowledge and critical educational studies in general. In the process of making the conceptual, historical and empirical gains associated with this move, there has been an accompanying internationalization of the issues involved. Thus, issues of the cultural assemblages associated with empire and previous and current imperial projects have become more visible. Hence, for example, there has been an increasing recognition that critical educational studies must turn to issues of the global, of the colonial imagination, and to post-colonial approaches, in order to come to grips with the complex and at times contradictory synchronic and diachronic relations between knowledge and power, between the state and education, and between civil society and the political imaginary. For example, under the influences of a variety of critical works on the history of literacy and on the politics of popular culture,1 as in a number of other fields, it became ever clearer to those of us in education that the

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very notion of the canon of ‘official knowledge’ had much of its history in a conscious attempt to ‘civilize’ both the working class and the ‘natives’ of an expanding empire (Apple, 2000). The very idea of teaching the ‘Other’ was a significant change, of course. For many years in Europe and Latin America, for example, the fear of working class and ‘peasant’ literacy was very visible. This will be more than a little familiar to those with an interest in the history of the relationship among books, literacy and popular movements. Books themselves, and one’s ability to read them, have been inherently caught up in cultural politics. Take the case of Voltaire, that leader of the Enlightenment who so wanted to become a member of the nobility. For him, the Enlightenment should begin with the ‘grands’. Only when it had captured the hearts and minds of society’s commanding heights could it concern itself with the masses below. But, for Voltaire and many of his followers, one caution should be taken very seriously. One should take care to prevent the masses from learning to read (Darnton, 1982, p. 130). This of course was reinscribed in often murderous ways in the prohibitions against teaching enslaved peoples how to read (although there is new historical evidence that documents that many enslaved people who were brought to the Americas were Muslim and may already have been literate in Arabic). Such changes in how education and literacy were thought about did not simply happen accidentally. They were (and are) the results of struggles over who has the right to be called a person, over what it means to be educated, over what counts as official or legitimate knowledge, and over who has the authority to speak to these issues (Mills, 1997; Apple, 2000). Indeed as Paulo Freire (see, for example, Freire, 1970; Darder, 2002) so clearly demonstrated through his writing and his entire life, these are urgent struggles that must be continued, expanded, and in times of neo-liberal and neo-conservative assaults on the economic, political and cultural lives of millions of people throughout the world. This commitment not only to literacy in general, but to critical forms of literacy as a mode of humanizing the world was not diminished as Freire aged (Freire, 1970), something I witnessed time and again in my interactions with him both here in the United States and in Brazil. These struggles need to be thought about using a range of critical tools, among them analyses based on theories of political economy, of the state and its role in cultural domination, of globalization, of the post-colonial, and so much more. But none of this is or will be easy. In fact, our work may be filled with contradictions. Take for instance the recent (and largely justifiable) attention being given to issues of globalization and post-colonialism in critical education, to which I turn in my next section.

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Globalization, Post-Colonialism and Education At the outset, let me be honest. I no longer have any idea what the words globalization and post-colonial mean. They have become sliding signifiers, concepts with such a multiplicity of meanings that their actual meaning in any given context can only be determined by their use. As Wittgenstein (1963) and others reminded us, language can be employed to do an impressive array of things. It can be used to describe, illuminate, control, legitimate, mobilize, and many other things. The language of post-colonialism(s) (the plural is important), for example, has many uses. However, all too often it has become something of a ‘ceremonial slogan’, a word that is publicly offered so that the reader may recognize that the author is au courant in the latest linguistic forms. Its employment by an author here is largely part of the conversion strategies so well captured by Bourdieu in Distinction (1984) and Homo Academicus (1988). Linguistic and cultural capital are performed publicly to gain mobility within the social field of the academy. In my most cynical moments, I worry that this is at times all too dominant within the largely white academy. But, of course, the post-colonial experience(s) (and again the plural is important and the theories of globalization that have been dialectically related to them are also powerful ways of critically engaging with the politics of empire and with the ways in which culture, economy and politics all interact globally and locally in complex and overdetermined ways. Indeed, the very notions of post-colonialism and globalization ‘can be thought of as a site of dialogic encounter that pushes us to examine center/periphery relations and conditions with specificity, wherever we may find them’ (Dimitriadis and McCarthy, 2001). It is this very focus on ‘dialogic encounters’ that creates connections between the post-colonial imagination and Freire’s work (Torres, 2009). As they have influenced critical educational efforts, some of the core politics behind postcolonial positions are summarized well by Dimitriadis and McCarthy (2001) when they state that ‘The work of the postcolonial imagination subverts extant power relations, questions authority, and destabilizes received traditions of identity’ (p. 10) (see also Bhabha, 1994 and Spivak, 1988). Educators interested in globalization, in neo-liberal depredations, and in post-colonial positions have largely taken them to mean the following. They imply a conscious process of repositioning, of ‘turning the world upside down’ (Young, 2003, p. 2). They mean that the world is seen relationally – as being made up of relations of dominance and subordination and

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of movements, cultures and identities that seek to interrupt these relations. They also mean that if you are someone who has been excluded by the ‘West’s’ dominant voices geographically, economically, politically and/or culturally, or you are inside the West but not really part of it, then ‘postcolonialism offers you a way of seeing things differently, a language and a politics in which your interests come first, not last’ (Young, 2003, p. 2). Some of the best work in the field of education mirrors Robert Young’s more general claim that post-colonialism and the global sensitivities that accompany it speak to a politics and a ‘philosophy of activism’ that involve contesting these disparities. It extends the anti-colonial struggles that have such a long history and asserts ways of acting that challenge ‘Western’ ways of interpreting the world (Young, 2003, p. 4). This is best stated by Young (2003) in the following two quotes: Above all, postcolonialism seeks to intervene, to force its alternative knowledges into the power structures of the west as well as the non-west. It seeks to change the way people think, the way they behave, to produce a more just and equitable relation between different people of the world. (p. 7) Postcolonialism . . . is a general name for those insurgent knowledges that come from the subaltern, the dispossessed, and seek to change the terms under which we all live. (p. 20) Of course, much of what Young is saying here has clear resonances with Freire’s commitments. And what Young says about post-colonialism is equally true about theories of globalization and about the entire tradition of critical educational scholarship and activism. These reminders about insurgent knowledges, however, need to be connected relationally to something outside themselves.

Knowledge from Below If one of the most powerful insights of the literature in critical pedagogy, and in the growing turn towards theories of globalization and post-colonial perspectives, is the valorization of knowledge from below, is this sufficient? We know that the issue is not whether ‘the subaltern speak’, but whether they are listened to (Apple and Buras, 2006; Spivak, 1988). Yet this too can be largely a rhetorical claim unless it gets its hands dirty with the material realities faced by all too many subaltern peoples.

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A focus within the critical community(ies) on ‘knowledge and voices from below’ has at times bordered on what Whitty called ‘romantic possibilitarianism’ (Whitty, 1974). It is all so cultural that it runs the risk of evacuating the gritty materialities of daily lives and of economic relations, something Freire never did. Yet this reality cannot be ignored. With its brutally honest picture of what life is like for millions, even billions of people who live, attempt to exist, on the edge, Mike Davis’ book, Planet of Slums (2006), demonstrates in no uncertain terms that without a serious recognition of ways in which the conjunctural specifics of the effects of global capital are transforming the landscape, we sometimes too abstractly theorize about, we shall be unable to understand why people act in the ways they do in such situations. Work such as Davis’ goes a long way towards correcting the overemphasis on the discursive that so often plagues parts of post-colonial and critical pedagogical literature in education and elsewhere. And many of us need to be constantly reminded of the necessity to ground our work in a much more thorough understanding of the realities the oppressed face every day. Any work in education that is not grounded in these realities may turn out to be one more act of colonization.

Connecting with History It is important to remember that in the Americas and elsewhere the positions inspired by, say, post-colonialism are not actually especially new in education. Even before the impressive and influential work of the great Brazilian educator Paulo Freire to whom this chapter and this book are dedicated, subaltern groups had developed counter-hegemonic perspectives and an extensive set of ways of interrupting colonial dominance in education and in cultural struggles in general (see, for example, Livingston, 2003; Wong, 2002; Lewis, 1993, 2000; Jules, 1991). But the fact that theories of globalization and post-colonialism are now becoming more popular in critical educational studies is partly due to the fact that the field itself in the United States and throughout Latin America, for example, has a very long tradition of engaging in analyses of hegemonic cultural form and content and in developing oppositional educational movements, policies and practices (see, for example, Apple, 2006a; Apple and Buras, 2006; Apple, 2004c). But, as we know so well, the place that Freire has as both an activist in and theorist of these movements is unparalleled. Thinking about Freire is more than a reminder of the past. It points to the continuing significance of Freire and Freirean-inspired work for

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large numbers of people throughout the world. While some have rightly or wrongly challenged the Freirean tradition and argued against a number of its tendencies,2 the tradition out of which he came, that he developed throughout his life, and that continues to evolve is immensely resilient and powerful (Apple et al., 2009). While Freire’s influence is ever present, thinking about it has brought back some powerful recollections. Like others, as I noted earlier I too had a history of interacting with Paulo Freire. I hope that you will forgive me if I add a personal example of my own here, one that ratifies the respect so many people have for the man and his ideas.

Freire and Critical Education: A Personal Vignette After delayed flights, I finally arrived in Sao Paulo. The word ‘exhausted’ didn’t come close to describing how I felt. But a shower and some rest weren’t on the agenda. We hadn’t seen each other for a while and Paulo was waiting for me to continue our ongoing discussions about what was happening in Sao Paulo now that he was Secretary of Education there. It may surprise some people to know that I was not influenced greatly by Paulo, at least not originally. I came out of a radical labourist and anti-racist tradition in the United States that had developed its own critical pedagogic forms and methods of interruption of dominance. I had immense respect for him, however, even before I began going to Brazil in the mid-1980s to work with teachers unions and the Workers Party (PT) there. Perhaps it was the fact that my roots were in a different but still very similar set of radical traditions that made our public discussions so vibrant and compelling. There were some areas where Freire and I disagreed. Indeed, I can remember the look of surprise on people’s faces during one of our public dialogues when I supportively yet critically challenged some of his positions. And I can all too vividly remember the time when I had just gotten off those delayed flights and he and I quickly went to our scheduled joint seminar before a large group that had been waiting for us to arrive. The group was made up of the militants and progressive educators he had brought to work with him at the Ministry of Education offices in Sao Paulo. During the joint seminar, I worried out loud about some of the tactics that were being used to convince teachers to follow some of the ministry policies. While I agreed with the ministry’s agenda and was a very strong supporter of Paulo’s nearly Herculean efforts, I said that – as a former president of a teachers union myself and as someone who had worked with teachers in Brazil for a number of years – there was a risk that the tactics

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being employed could backfire. He looked directly at me and said that he and I clearly disagreed about this. The audience was silent, waiting – for distress, for ‘point scoring’, for a break in our friendship? Instead what happened was one of the most detailed and intense discussions I have ever had in my life. For nearly 3 hours, we ranged over an entire terrain: theories about epistemologies; the realities of teachers’ lives; the realities of life in favelas; the politics of race and gender that needed to be dealt with seriously alongside class; the international and Brazilian economy; rightist media attacks on critical education in Brazil and on him personally; what strategies were needed to interrupt dominance in the society and in the daily lives of schools; his criticisms of my criticisms of their strategies; my suggestions for better tactics; and the list could go on and on. This wasn’t a performance in masculinities, as so many public debates are. This was something that demonstrated to me once again why I respected him so much. There was no sense of ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ here. Paulo and I were fully engaged, wanting to think publicly, enjoying both the richness of our dialogue and our willingness (stimulated constantly by him) to enter into a field that required that we bring in all that we knew and believed. For him, and for me, education required the best of our intellectual and emotional resources. I’m not certain that we ultimately resolved our disagreements. I know that I was taken with his passion and his willingness to listen carefully to my worries, worries based on my previous experiences with political/educational mobilization in other nations. I also know that he took these issues very seriously (see, for example, Apple, 1999). Perhaps a measure of this can be seen when, after that 3-hour dialogue that seemed to go by in a flash, he had to leave for another meeting that had been delayed because of our discussion. As he and I said our goodbyes, he asked the audience to stay. He then asked me if I could stay for as long as it took so that the audience and I could continue the discussion at a more practical level. What could be done to deal with the concerns I had? Were there ways in which the people from the ministry and from the communities that were in the audience might lessen the risk of alienating teachers and some community members? What strategies might be used to create alliances over larger issues, even when there might be some disagreements over specific tactics and policies? It is a measure of Paulo’s ability as a leader and as a model of how critical dialogue could go on, that another 2 hours went by with truly honest and serious discussion that led to creative solutions to a number of problems that were raised as people reflected on their experiences in favelas and in

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the ministry. This to me is the mark of a truly great teacher. Even when he wasn’t there, his emphasis on honestly confronting the realities we faced, on carefully listening, on using one’s lived experiences to think critically about that reality and how it might be changed – all of this remained a powerful presence. He was able to powerfully theorize and to help others do the same because he was engaged in what can only be described as a form of praxis. I shall say more about the crucial importance of such concrete engagements in a later section of this chapter. This was not the only time Paulo and I publicly interacted with each other. We had a number of such discussions in front of large audiences. Indeed, in preparation for writing this chapter, I took out the tape of one of Freire and my public interactions to listen to it. It reminded me that what I have said here cannot quite convey the personal presence and humility Paulo had. Nor can it convey how he brought out the best in me and others. One of the markers of greatness is how one deals with disagreement. And here, once again, Paulo demonstrated how special he was, thus giving us one more reason that Paulo – friend, teacher, comrade – is still missed.

The Tasks of the Critical Scholar/Activist in a Post-Critical Climate But our task is not simply to be followers of Freire – or of any one person for that matter. Yes, much of what we do stands on his shoulders and in the United States on the shoulders of many other critical educators and cultural activists (see Horton, 1990; Horton and Freire, 1990). But no matter whose shoulders we stand on, the critical commitments remain very much the same. Here I am reminded of the radical sociologist Michael Burawoy’s arguments for a critical sociology. As he says, a critical sociology is always grounded in two key questions: (1) Sociology for whom? and (2) Sociology for what? (Burawoy, 2005). The first asks us to think about repositioning ourselves so that we see the world through the eyes of the dispossessed. The second asks us to connect our work to the complex issues surrounding a society’s moral compass, its means and ends. For many people, their original impulses towards critical theoretical and political work in education were fuelled by a passion for social justice, economic equality, human rights, sustainable environments and education that is worthy of its name – in short, a better world. Yet, this is increasingly difficult to maintain in the situation in which so many of us find ourselves. Ideologically and politically much has changed. The early years of

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the twenty-first century have brought us unfettered capitalism which fuels market tyrannies and massive inequalities on a truly global scale (Davis, 2006). ‘Democracy’ is resurgent at the same time, but it all too often becomes a thin veil for the interests of the globally and locally powerful and for disenfranchisement, mendacity, and national and international violence (Burawoy, 2005, p. 260). The rhetoric of freedom and equality may have intensified, but there is unassailable evidence that there is ever deepening exploitation, domination and inequality, and that earlier gains in education, economic security, civil rights and more are either being washed away or are under severe threat. The religion of the market (and it does function like a religion, since it does not seem to be amenable to empirical critiques) coupled with very different visions of what the state can and should do can be summarized in one word – neo-liberalism (Burawoy, 2005), although we know that no one term can actually totally encompass the forms of dominance and subordination that have such long histories in so many regions of the world (Apple, 2010). At the same time, in the social field of power called the academy, with its own hierarchies and disciplinary (and disciplining) techniques, the pursuit of academic credentials, bureaucratic and institutional rankings, tenure files, indeed the entire panoply of normalizing pressures surrounding institutions and careers – seeks to ensure that we all think and act ‘correctly’. Yet, the original impulse is never quite entirely vanquished (Burawoy, 2005). The spirit that animates critical work can never be totally subjected to rationalizing logics and processes. Try as the powerful might, it will not be extinguished – and it certainly remains alive in a good deal of the work in critical pedagogy. Having said this – and having sincerely meant it – I need to be honest here as well. For me, some of the literature on ‘critical pedagogy’ is a vexed one. Like the concept of post-colonialism, it too now suffers from a surfeit of meanings. It can mean anything from being responsive to one’s students on the one hand to powerfully reflexive forms of content and processes that radically challenge existing relations of exploitation and domination on the other. And just like some of the literature on post-colonialism, the best parts of the writings on critical pedagogy are crucial challenges to our accepted ways of doing education. But once again, there are portions of the literature in critical pedagogy that may also represent elements of conversion strategies by new middleclass actors who are seeking to carve out paths of mobility within the academy. The function of such (often disembodied) writing at times is to

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solve the personal crisis brought about by the ‘contradictory class location’ (Wright, 1985) of academics who wish to portray themselves as politically engaged; but almost all of their political engagement is textual. Thus, their theories are (if you will forgive the use of a masculinist word) needlessly impenetrable, and the very difficult questions surrounding life in real institutions, and of what we should actually teach, how we should teach it, and how it should be evaluated, are seen as forms of ‘pollution’, too pedestrian to deal with. This can degenerate into elitism, masquerading as radical theory. But serious theory about curriculum and pedagogy needs to be done in relation to its object. Indeed, this is not only a political imperative but an epistemological one as well. As Freire knew so well, the development of critical theoretical resources is best done when it is dialectically and intimately connected to actual movements and struggles (Freire, 1970; Apple et al., 2009; Apple, 2006a, 2006b; Apple et al., 2003). Once again, what Michael Burawoy has called ‘organic public sociology’ provides key elements of how we might think about ways of dealing with this here. In his words, but partly echoing Gramsci as well, in this view the critical sociologist: works in close connection with a visible, thick, active, local, and often counter-public. [She or he works] with a labor movement, neighborhood association, communities of faith, immigrant rights groups, human rights organizations. Between the public sociologist and a public is a dialogue, a process of mutual education . . . The project of such [organic] public sociologies is to make visible the invisible, to make the private public, to validate these organic connections as part of our sociological life. (Burawoy, 2005, p. 265) This act of becoming (and this is a project, for one is never finished, always becoming) a critical scholar/activist is a complex one. Because of this, let me extend my earlier remarks about the role of critical research in education. My points here are tentative and certainly not exhaustive. But they are meant to begin a dialogue over just what it is that ‘we’ should do. This is again one of the places where I am reflecting on and extending what Freire’s life and work signifies. In general, there are nine tasks in which critical analysis (and the critical analyst) in education must engage (Apple, 2006b). 1. It must ‘bear witness to negativity’. That is, one of its primary functions is to illuminate the ways in which educational policy and practice are

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3.

4.

5.

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connected to the relations of exploitation and domination – and to struggles against such relations – in the larger society. In engaging in such critical analyses, it also must point to contradictions and to spaces of possible action. Thus, its aim is to critically examine current realities with a conceptual/political framework that emphasizes the spaces in which counter-hegemonic actions can be or are now going on. At times, this also requires a redefinition of what counts as ‘research’. Here I mean acting as ‘secretaries’ to those groups of people and social movements who are now engaged in challenging existing relations of unequal power or in what elsewhere has been called ‘non-reformist reforms’. This is exactly the task that was taken on in the thick descriptions of critically democratic school practices in Democratic Schools (Apple and Beane, 2007) and in the critically supportive descriptions of the transformative reforms such as the Citizen School and participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil (Apple et al., 2003). When Gramsci (1971) argued that one of the tasks of a truly counterhegemonic education was not to throw out ‘elite knowledge’ but to reconstruct its form and content so that it served genuinely progressive social needs, he provided a key to another role ‘organic intellectuals’ might play (see also Gutstein, 2006; Apple, 1996). Thus, we should not be engaged in a process of what might be called ‘intellectual suicide’. That is, there are serious intellectual (and pedagogic) skills in dealing with the histories and debates surrounding the epistemological, political and educational issues involved in justifying what counts as important knowledge. These are not simple and inconsequential issues and the practical and intellectual/political skills of dealing with them have been well-developed. However, they can atrophy if they are not used. We can give back these skills by employing them to assist communities in thinking about this, learn from them and engage in the mutually pedagogic dialogues that enable decisions to be made in terms of both the shortterm and long-term interests of oppressed peoples.3 In the process, critical work has the task of keeping traditions of radical work alive. In the face of organized attacks on the ‘collective memories’ of difference and struggle, attacks that make it increasingly difficult to retain academic and social legitimacy for multiple critical approaches that have proven so valuable in countering dominant narratives and relations, it is absolutely crucial that these traditions be kept alive, renewed, and when necessary criticized for their conceptual, empirical, historical and political silences or limitations. This involves being cautious of reductionism and essentialism and asks us to pay attention to

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what Fraser has called both the politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition (Fraser, 1997b). This includes not only keeping theoretical, empirical, historical and political traditions alive but, very importantly, extending and (supportively) criticizing them. And it also involves keeping alive the dreams, utopian visions and ‘non-reformist reforms’ that are so much a part of these radical traditions (Jacoby, 2005; Apple, 1996; Teitelbaum, 1993). 6. Keeping traditions alive and also supportively criticizing them when they are not adequate to deal with current realities cannot be done unless we ask ‘For whom are we keeping them alive?’ and How and in what form are they to be made available?’ All of the things I have mentioned before in this tentative taxonomy of tasks require the relearning or development and use of varied or new skills of working at many levels with multiple groups. Thus, journalistic and media skills, academic and popular skills, and the ability to speak to very different audiences are increasingly crucial. 7. In addition, critical educators must act in concert with the progressive social movements that their work supports, or in movements against the rightist assumptions and policies they critically analyse. Thus, scholarship in critical education or critical pedagogy does imply becoming an ‘organic intellectual’ in the Gramscian sense of that term (Gramsci, 1971). One must participate in and give one’s expertise to movements surrounding struggles over a politics of redistribution and a politics of recognition. It also implies learning from these social movements. This means that the role of the ‘unattached intelligentsia’ (Mannheim, 1936), someone who ‘lives on the balcony’ (Bakhtin, 1968), is not an appropriate model. As Bourdieu (2003, p. 11) reminds us, for example, our intellectual efforts are crucial, but they ‘cannot stand aside, neutral and indifferent, from the struggles in which the future of the world is at stake’. 8. Building on the points made in the previous paragraph, the critical scholar/activist has another role to play. She or he needs to act as a deeply committed mentor, as someone who demonstrates through her or his life what it means to be both an excellent researcher and a committed member of a society that is scarred by persistent inequalities. She or he needs to show how one can blend these two roles together in ways that may be tense, but still embody the dual commitments to exceptional and socially committed research and to participating in movements whose aim is interrupting dominance. And clearly this also implies that our own teaching must embody and model the kinds of commitments and actions we write and talk about.

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9. Finally, participation also means using the privilege one has as a scholar/activist. That is, each of us needs to make use of our privilege to open the spaces at universities and elsewhere for those who are not there, for those who do not currently have a voice in that space, and in the ‘professional’ sites to which, being in a privileged position, you and I have access. This can be seen, for example, in the history of the ‘activist-in-residence’ program at the University of Wisconsin Havens Center for Social Structure and Social Change, where committed activists in various areas (the environment, indigenous rights, housing, labor, racial disparities, education, etc.) were brought in to teach and to connect our academic work with organized action against dominant relations. Or it can be seen in a number of Women’s Studies programs and Indigenous, Aboriginal, and First Nation Studies programs that historically have involved activists in these communities, as active participants in the governance and educational programs of these areas at universities. These nine tasks are demanding and no one person can engage equally well in all of them simultaneously, although Paulo Freire comes as close as any one person can to these ideals. What we can do is honestly continue our attempt to come to grips with the complex intellectual, personal, and political tensions and activities that respond to the demands of this role. And this requires a searching reflexive critical examination of one’s own structural location, one’s own overt and tacit political commitments, and one’s own embodied actions once this recognition in all its complexities and contradictions is taken as seriously as it deserves. This speaks to the larger issues about the politics of knowledge and people of which I spoke earlier and to which post-colonial authors such as Young (2003), Bhabha (1994), Spivak (1988), and others have pointed. Concepts such as ‘hybridity’, ‘marginalization’, ‘subaltern’, ‘cultural politics’, and the entire panoply of post-colonial and critical pedagogic vocabulary can be used in multiple ways. They are meant to signify an intense set of complex and contradictory historical, geographic, economic and cultural relations, experiences and realities. But what must not be lost in the process of using them is the inherently political nature of their own history and interests. Used well, there is no ‘safe’ or ‘neutral’ way of mobilizing them – and rightly so. They are meant to be radically counter-hegemonic and they are meant to challenge even how we think about and participate in counter-hegemonic movements. How can we understand this, if we do not participate in such movements ourselves? Freire certainly did. So did

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E. P. Thompson, C. L. R. James, W. E. B. DuBois, Carter Woodson, and so many others. Can we do less?

Notes 1 Raymond Williams’ work was crucial historically here. See Williams (1977, 1961). See also Apple (2004c). 2 A number of feminist scholars for instance raised serious questions about the Freire’s epistemological, educational and political assumptions. See, for example, Luke and Gore (1992). At times somewhat overstated, these criticisms did have a salutary effect. The literature on critical pedagogy became much more powerful in dealing with issues surrounding gender and race (Apple and Au, 2009). 3 The category of ‘oppressed peoples’ has been and needs to be kept broad. As I note in my next point, this includes dynamics and structures involving not only class, but gender, sexuality, race and disability, as well as other emergent struggles over both redistribution and recognition. It also includes struggles over affective equality. See Lynch et al. (2009). See also Apple (2006a) on how dominant groups attempt to reappropriate the language of oppressed groups, claiming that, say, white people ‘are the new oppressed’.

Chapter 3

Resistance, Struggle and Survival: The University as a Site for Transformative Education Mags Crean and Kathleen Lynch

Introduction Given the embeddedness of the academic world in the business of cultural production and reproduction, and its growing commercialization, it is not at all self-evident how a given discipline or academic discourse can contribute to radical social change. Universities qua institutions are engaged in elite forms of cultural production (Lynch, 1999a, p. 44). Yet, within all institutions there is scope for resistance; there are contradictions that can be exploited and utilized at all levels of education, including higher education (Giroux, 1983). What is really at stake then is how to democratize these spaces once they are created. The key question is how can we link scholarship, which claims to be transformative, with the everyday realities of oppressed people’s lives in a university setting? This chapter utilizes the experiential learning of both authors, guided by sociological and egalitarian theory, to explore the way in which the university can be a site of resistance, albeit fraught with contradictions and complexities. It examines the structural and intellectual questions that arise in creating a dialogue for action for egalitarian social change with the social groups who experience poverty, inequality and injustice first hand. One critical question that presents in an analysis of this kind is whether the academy, which is so deeply implicated in the cultural reproduction of elites, can facilitate emancipatory change via research and education. In Freirean terms, creating a place in the university for transformative action represents a major challenge, not least because the dominant groups who control the university and the dominated, who are generally outside it, operate from different power and interest bases. The dominant according

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to Freire use ‘science and technology as unquestionably powerful instruments for their purpose; the maintenance of the oppressive order through manipulation and repression. The oppressed, as objects as “things”, have no purposes except those their oppressors prescribe for them’ (Freire, 1970, p. 42). Creating spaces for those who have been objectified within universities (as the subjects of studies, as the unknowing) is problematic, therefore. There is a real danger that ‘the converts’, those who go over to the side of the oppressed, may be carrying their prejudicial ‘love of the expert’ with them (Freire, 1970, p. 42). So to create a site of resistance, one has to begin with the kind of humility Freire spoke of so often ‘only in humility can I be open to the life experience where I both help and am helped . . . with others I can do things (Freire, 1997a, p. 73). As Freire (1972b, p. 58) also noted to subvert the culture of silence that pervades our thinking about new ways of organizing and creating knowledge, also requires us to avoid the mechanistic fatalism and the naive idealism that characterizes so much of research and teaching about injustice. The university has the potential to be a site of resistance; however, it also provides sanctuary and spaces for counter-resistance; it is the home of traditional intellectuals in the Gramscian sense of that term, and is exemplified in the growth of academic capitalism in recent history (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004). Consequently the university is a site of struggle. There is scope for change and challenge (Davies et al., 2006) although ‘There is no security for those who resist power, and . . . the lessons of survival and resistance need to be relearned as university regimes change. There is no possibility of standing still’ (Lynch et al., 2010, p. 298). This chapter is autoethnographic in its approach. It uses our personal experiences of struggling for social justice, separately and together, to theorize and explore how change can be realized. The work and struggles that led to the co-writing of the chapter was inspired by the Freirean principles of praxis, linking theory to action and enabling theory to inform action. It is immersed in the recognition that we are ‘beings of praxis . . . we emerge from the world, objectify it, and in so doing can understand it and transform it with labour’ (Freire, 1970, p. 106). The reason we are taking an autoethnographical approach is because it allows us to use experiential learning to inform theoretical insights while allowing theory to act back in reinterpreting learning from experience (Richardson, 1995; Denzin, 1997; Ellis and Bochner, 2000; Patton, 2002). Indeed, the very idea of experiential knowledge that underwrites an autoethnographic or narrative approaches to analysis is the basis of Freirean pedagogy (Freire, 1970, 1974).

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The chapter begins with an account of how the experiential knowledge of injustice has informed the analytical and critical thinking of the first author (Crean). The experiences of the second author (Lynch), exemplified in the establishment and development of the UCD Equality Studies Centre with colleagues, complements and interfaces with Crean’s autoethnography to provide a joint account of how resistance, struggle and survival, at both personal and public levels, are overlapping narratives in the fight for social justice. The chapter also highlights how the struggle for justice is both a personal as well as being a political journey. It is not a superstructural act, a cerebral intellectual experience removed from feeling and passion; it is an account of pain and despair as well as hope and possibility, a reflexive account of action.

Theorizing Resistance Personal and Politicized Resistance My father (Crean) had always proclaimed education as a saving grace. He was acutely aware of the role that education seemed to play in maintaining status and economic privilege for other social classes in society. Unknown to him of course, sociologists have also drawn the connection between educational capital and economic and cultural ‘success’. Scholars from Giddens (1973) to Power (2000) claimed that the middle class in particular is defined by education: unlike the upper class whose wealth and assets can be passed down irrespective of external accreditation, the market power of the middle class is based on educational qualifications (Power, 2000, p. 134). As an Irish emigrant in England who spent his working life being ‘paid from the neck down’, my father was adamant that his children would one day ‘be better than him’. On reflection, the moral connotations of his words are instructive; his feelings of class inferiority were deep and profound. He felt his classed inferiority and named it just as Andrew Sayer has done in his work on the moral significance of class (Sayer, 2005). He knew the world and how it worked but he did not control it; in some ways he had ‘internalised the opinions the oppressors’ and had ‘become convinced of his own unfitness’ (Freire, 1970, p. 45). The shame and disidentification that he endured on a daily basis has also been captured in the work of other class theorists such as Reay and Skeggs (Skeggs, 1997; Reay, 2005). Yet, ironically, it was his experience of this inequality of respect for who he was, his work and what he represented in class terms, that fuelled his children’s desire for social mobility and related economic gain. The economic and educational capital to be gained from working hard at school and

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getting into higher education was acquired at the cost of my father’s low personal esteem and subsequently related poor mental health. So education represents a contradictory space in my life. My early ideas of education as resistance were heavily influenced by my father’s class inferiority and aspirations, and were conceptualized as a personalized resistance. It was about getting a route out of poverty and classed inequalities. Likewise, my first experience of education as transformative was of personal transformation. Essentially, social mobility through education has given me many choices in life that my parents could never have envisioned. It has certainly ensured that I’ll never again experience the levels of economic and cultural inequality that dominated much of my childhood. Paradoxically, the process of social mobility itself has been a painful encounter with both class inequality and class dislocation. The very fact that the structures generating economic and cultural inequality were not challenged by my individual ‘escape’, the very fact that habitus in the Bourdieuian sense was not something I could evade, and the very fact that the university was a middleclass institution, all together, made my experience of the university as a site of resistance a contradictory encounter. These experiences taught me that in an economically and socially stratified society, personal empowerment or personal freedom from poverty through education does nothing to challenge the generative causes of that poverty in the first place. But it was to be some time before I came to appreciate this fact, and to, in essence, distinguish theoretically between personal and politicized resistance. This realization was supported by my encounter with the work of Paulo Freire and other critical education theorist’s such as bell hooks. Apart from my own personal journey and despite developing a more politicized understanding of equality and of education as a site of resistance, the fact remains that people, like me, coming from poor backgrounds generally see the university as a route out of poverty. There are few temptations to look back. Facing the lower rungs of the economic ladder makes a diploma or degree a very attractive option, and it is impossible not to be somewhat assimilated into the status quo when you enter an institution that is about accreditation and institutionalized middle-class culture. Even though I now see the role that higher education can play in aiding transformative social change, a number of challenges related to my own life experiences still trouble me, especially when trying to conceive how poorer people can use the space within a university. Lynch and O’Neill (1994) refer to this social class dilemma as the structural contradictory place that poorer people, poorer working-class people in particular, occupy in relation to higher education. So a key challenge for people from economically

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poor backgrounds is whether they can access the university without becoming ‘incorporated’ in the process. Can they inhabit and work successfully within higher education without being reclassified in the sense of becoming middle class in disposition and practice? They face the danger simultaneously of escaping the oppressed class and becoming part of the oppressor state. They face the danger of becoming professionals, a challenge that exists for all egalitarians who are part of the professional classes: Professional women and men of any specialty, university graduates or not, are individuals who are ‘determined from above’, by a culture of domination which has constituted them as dual beings. (If they had come from the lower classes this miseducation would be the same if not worse.) (Freire, 1970, p. 139) While Freire holds that ‘professionals . . . are necessary to the reorganisation of the new society . . . they not only could be but ought to be, reclaimed by the revolution’ (Freire, 1970, p. 139), the question remains, if people from working-class backgrounds do access higher education, and engage in spaces concerned with critical thinking, what strategies exist to ensure that this is a positive, equal experience? Choules (2006) reminds us that there is a need to consider the context in which critical pedagogy is practised. Dialogue in mixed groups where students hail from various positionings in society favours those who dominate wider societal relations such as men, white people and the wealthy. The practice of higher education can become a recolonizing process if the dialogues, practices and learning within it are not managed in a way that respects the outsider within (Hill-Collins, 1986). The question remains also as to whether working-class people can ever occupy the university as working-class academics as opposed to being academics with working-class backgrounds (Roberts, 2007, p. 203). In other words, can they take ownership of the academic world and make it home to people like themselves, or are they always accommodating their work and being to the classes-in-power (Mahony and Zmroczek, 1997). This is especially problematic in an increasingly commercialized higher education system (Lynch, 2006), where the focus is on servicing the economy and where funding is not directed to interests and issues that would address the class exceptionalism of people from outside the citadel. To focus on the issues faced by the minority of working-class people who are hired, and in particular who ‘come out’, as working class in higher education, is not to underestimate the ways in which all types of groups, including ethnic

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minorities, carers, mature learners, and so on, are structurally excluded from higher education. Mindful of these equality concerns, there are ways of structuring the education system so that it is accessible and in being accessible, respectful of other cultures and positions. One way is the development of alliances between the university and social movements and groups working outside the university. In some cases, this relationship can mean the university reaching out, and in others it can mean bringing people in, but in both cases the idea is to learn from those outside rather than to ‘teach’ them. This type of resolution, even if it cannot fully challenge the elitist site that a university represents, goes some way to achieving what Freire referred to as praxis. It is about recognizing that dialogue is the basis for developing transformative knowledge, that social change that is liberatory is not topdown. Conscientization is an instrument for changing the world through dialogue by acting on the world. A mechanistic consciousness of injustice would produce nothing but verbiage (Freire, 1992b, p. 89). Creating critical dialogues as praxis is about reclaiming those who are formally educated in the universities but who are endangered of becoming domesticated by their professionalism. There is a danger, however, that providing a dialogic space in higher education may generate transformative knowledge but may be limited in generating transformative action. The liberal paradigm dominates educational thinking and practice. It promotes an emphasis on the individual as a source of meaning and value, so dialogue can be easily divorced from ‘liberating praxis’ (Rule, 2004, p. 324). Knowledge, within the boundaries of academia, has the danger of remaining transformative in theory but not in practice. Moving beyond the boundaries of the academy, therefore, goes some way towards bridging the divide between experiential and academic knowledge. It involves taking the outside in and putting the inside out, and changing the character of both in the process. Politicized Resistance Engages the Normative Although I (Crean) had encountered Freire’s work (1970, etc.), it was not until I discovered the Equality Studies Centre (ESC) in University College Dublin (UCD) that I could appreciate, in practice, the possibilities of the university as a site of resistance. The ESC vision of the university as a site for resistance (Lynch, 1995) was markedly different to the meritocratic and selective mobility agenda of liberal equality of opportunity theory. It was not about preparing you for upward social mobility through a ‘career’

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(although recognizing one had to earn a living). In Equality Studies there was a space created that was not about promoting individual academic credentials but driven by a need to create a scholarly space for equality activists. The ESC provided a learning place for what Rule (2004) refers to as a dialogue of discourse; the critical thinking discourse of the ESC and the struggle discourse of activists. One of the key factors leading to the establishment of the ESC for me (Lynch) was the failure of liberal equal opportunities policy to adequately address the structural causes of inequality. For the founders of the ESC 1 this failure was linked to a more generalized problem with the reluctance of mainstream social, political, economic and educational sciences to handle the issue of equality outside the liberal framework. The overriding equality preoccupation within the field of education was with enabling people to move up the class structure using the educational ladder without due regard for how the ladder was set in class stone, with those at the top always pressing down to maintain their positions of advantage. Neither were those oppressed groups, who were the subject of so many social scientific studies, ever enabled to hold scholars to account. A further problem related directly to questioning the binary between the positive and the normative. The positivist tradition in the social sciences seemed unable to go beyond describing and explaining inequality in society, while more critical theories did not examine counterfactual propositions implied by their critiques of social practice. Yet, knowledge produced as expertise has consequential implications, especially when that knowledge is produced about groups who do not name their own world in the academy or in the professions. It develops its own life, exercises power, and has a normative outcome regardless of the intent of its producers. As expert knowledge, it defines both the producers and the subjects of its discourse; it is not normatively neutral no matter how concealed its values may be (Sayer, 2006). Equality Studies set out to try to address these issues. It worked within a Freirean epistemological tradition that recognizes the power of naming and knowing the world. So it recognizes that the purpose of academic discourse is not only to describe and explain the world, but also to change it (Lynch, 1999a, p. 43). What led me (Lynch) to this realization was my early experience of academic life. It became very clear to me in my early years in the university that much of our research and teaching was about reproducing a professional (and legitimated) elite. We were creating the new state nobility (Bourdieu, 1996) even if we taught students about the mechanics of injustice. I was increasingly shocked as I saw and heard people like

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myself, who had never known poverty first hand, becoming ‘experts’ on the subject of class inequality; we were becoming colonizers of other people’s miseries (Lynch and O’Neill, 1994). So, in the late 1980s, with my colleagues, 2 we set about establishing a new type of programme (Equality Studies), one very much inspired by the Freirean ideal of education as conscientization (Lynch, 1995). We tried to develop the Equality Studies Centre on the premise that change cannot be achieved through the production of knowledge in isolation from experience. We established an alliance and dialogue in knowledge creation, with those experiencing all forms of inequality, mindful of the fact that they had the deepest experiential knowledge and the most acute interest in radical egalitarian change. Because of the elite position that an academic occupies in researching and subsequently explaining social reality for oppressed groups, it is inevitable that the work has a power and status that impacts on oppressed groups. Those who experience injustice know that the knowledge produced about the inequalities they experience is not neutral. It will either contribute to their oppression or work towards their liberation. There is no objective place to hide from the challenge of the normative in the face of injustice. In democratizing research relations and focusing on challenging injustices the positive/normative divide must be addressed. If this is not acknowledged, and if the oppressed groups in question have not had ownership of the research process, then a process of colonization occurs (Lynch and O’Neill, 1994). The importance of democratizing education and research arises, therefore, because knowledge is power. In establishing Equality Studies, the founders were mindful of these debates and of the binaries embedded in social scientific analysis between the empirical and the normative, between the academic and the experiential. They did not see the two as separate spheres and made a conscious decision to marry positivist research traditions with normative analysis in both the teaching and research of the Centre (Baker et al., 2004). They recognized that it is not enough to critique social practice if no alternative vision of society can be offered. Indeed, the absence of counterfactual perspectives can be a source of frustration for many people concerned with critical analysis and egalitarian transformative social change (Lynch, 1995, p. 101). Even when knowledge is produced with the intended aim of radical social change, how effective that knowledge is in terms of transformative outcomes is the subject of considerable debate (Lynch, 1995, p. 51). Apple (1991, p. ix) holds that critical theorists need to shift from being ‘universalizing spokespersons’ on behalf of oppressed groups to ‘acting as cultural

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workers whose task is to take away the barriers that prevent people from speaking for themselves’. In effect, the goal of transformative research is to develop organic intellectuals within oppressed communities that will give immediate voice to their oppressions. So the challenge posed by critical and feminist theories for education and research in terms of reflexivity, dialogue and co-operation with marginalized people are considerable. An even greater challenge is how to establish collaborative practices between theorists/researchers and marginalized peoples that will ensure that the understandings arrived at can work towards a transformative outcome (Lynch, 1995, p. 52). Incorporating the normative also involves considerable dialogue and liaising with others, as well as intellectual work. This is because normative analysis is not something that can be created in an academic vacuum. It must be tightly knitted to experiential knowledge holders. There must be a space for academic knowledge to learn from experiential knowledge, with its complex positive and normative dimensions, especially in the study of injustices. There is a need to create structures that support the democratization of the social relations of education in a way that challenges an elitist production of knowledge.

Democratizing Resistance Restructuring the Social Relations of Education and Research Transformative work at a higher education level must go beyond pedagogy as higher education involves writing and researching about oppression. In this way, academics do more than teaching; they also create virtual realities, textual realities, ethnographic and statistical realities. These overhang and frame the lived existence of those who cannot name their own world; it is frequently in the context of these detached and remoter realities that public policy is often designed and enacted. The frame becomes the picture in the public eye. Yet theoretical knowledge has serious limitations imposed upon it by the conditions of its own performance. The relations of cultural production within which critical theory, feminist theory and egalitarian theory are produced are generally no different to those that operate for the study of nuclear physics, corporate law or business and finance. Although some academics may view themselves as radical, reforming, feminist or emancipatory, they occupy a particular location within the class system (Bourdieu, 1993, pp. 36–48). They are part of the cultural elite of society (Lynch,

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1995, p. 52). The dilemma posed by unequal power between researcher and research subject is not readily resolved, even when the researcher works with emancipatory intent (Lentin, 1993, p. 128; Martin, 1996). The fact that the academic perspective is only one viewpoint, and that it may need to be complemented by other forms of understanding by non-academic research subjects, is always in danger of being ignored (Lather, 1986). The parameters within which academic dialogue takes place, therefore, are narrowly defined thereby inhibiting criticism of academic discourse itself, and prohibiting academics from understanding the world from the perspectives of the ‘other’ outside the academy (Lynch, 1995). In establishing Equality Studies, the goal was to do things differently in the university, not just by linking the positive and the normative, but by democratizing the social relations of education and of research production and exchange. Inspired by the Freirean (1972a) methods of dialogical teaching and learning, and by feminist and disability scholarship’s challenge to employ emancipatory research methods (Oliver, 1992; Harding, 1991), new spaces were created for both doing research and for teaching (Lynch, 1999a; Baker et al., 2004). The Equality Studies Centre and (since 2005) the School of Social Justice in which it is now embedded, were compelled to be socially engaged. Freire’s work has been a continued source of renewal for that project, especially at times of crisis and transition. Emancipatory Education and Research Most empirical research is in the domain of propositional knowledge: the outcome of research is stated as a set of propositions that claim to be statements of facts or truths about the world. These theoretical constructs or empirical statements are artefacts or constructs about the world; they do not constitute the world in and of itself. They provide a framing of the world, a context for giving meaning; but they are not synonymous with the experiential knowledge. They exist outside it often framing it in public consciousness. Emancipatory research brings a challenge to conventional ways of doing empirical research. Drawing on Freirean understandings of how one comes to name one’s world, and the power and significance of that naming, it presupposes a dialogue between the producers of the propositional knowledge and experiential knowledge holders. It recognizes that experiential knowledge can inform propositional knowledge as it involves knowing the world in a different way, through direct face-to-face encounter. ‘It is knowing a person or thing through sustained acquaintance’ (Lynch,

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1999a, p. 61). Emancipatory research also recognizes the moral right of research subjects to exercise ownership and control over the generation of knowledge produced about them and their world. It involves developing a reciprocal relationship between the researcher and the research subject. Developing a reciprocal encounter, in turn, requires a democratization of the research relationship so that the research process enables participants to understand and change their situation. A central feature of this type of praxis-oriented research is its use of dialectical theory-building rather than theoretical imposition (Lather, 1991). Feminist theorists have been leaders in developing a theory of emancipatory action through education and research (Harding, 1987; Humphries and Truman, 1994; Lather, 1991; Lentin, 1993; Mies, 1984; Smith, 1987; Stanley and Wise, 1983; Weiler, 1988) while scholars in Disability Studies have also contributed to the field (Oliver, 1992). One dilemma involved in the operationalization of emancipatory research is establishing procedures whereby radical understandings can be utilized for challenging structural inequalities. Even if radical understandings emerge from research, which, for example, happened in Kelly’s (1996) work, there may be no mechanism within the emancipatory method to move this understanding into discourses and political practices which would enable it to become active in the struggle for equality and social justice. As Freire (1970) observed, emancipation cannot be conferred by one group (academics) on another (oppressed or marginalized people) no matter how well intentioned the researchers might be (Martin, 1994, 1996). For emancipatory research to generate activism, educational institutions and research organizations, like higher education institutions, have to enter into new relations of dialogue and coalition with community or other groups that may be anathema to their organizational or cultural traditions. Certainly universities and research institutes have rarely established procedures for entering into dialogue with research participants in marginalized groups and communities. Even when liaisons with such groups may be permitted, they are usually kept at the periphery of the organization where they either exercise marginal power in their relations with established academics, and/or are work largely with adult education or women’s studies departments. Institutionalizing emancipatory research frameworks would require a radical change in the structuring of departments in the university and the management of research operations. It would involve the establishment of Research Coalitions with those marginalized groups and communities

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that are so often the objects of research (Lynch, 1999a). Such groups would move from being objects to subjects, from being respondents to being equal partners; they would have the opportunity to define research agendas relating to their own lives. No one would have the authority to name, codify and claim scholarly understanding and ownership of someone else’s world without debate, negotiation and, ultimately, consent. Under a Research Coalition arrangement, power would be shared. If marginalized groups were to participate effectively in the research process, training, resourcing and support would be essential, although the knowledge differential is not only confined to them. Academics also experience a (frequently unacknowledged) knowledge deficit about the daily, lived reality of the groups about whom they write. Such living knowledge represents an important resource that the community groups would bring to the Research Coalitions. To be effective, Research Coalitions would need to be complemented, therefore, by Learning Partnerships. These would be mutual education forums for academics, researchers and community personnel, so that each could share their definitions and interpretations of issues and events. To institutionalize a truly radical approach to education and research within higher education, however, would require the development of new structures at both university and departmental/school level (and ultimately at central university and research planning level). The academy itself, and academic knowledge in particular is deeply implicated in the business of power (Lynch, 1999a, p. 43). This translates into an inequality of power between the owners and producers of knowledge and the subjects of the research? To democratize the social relations of education and research means challenging these embedded power relations.

Sustaining Resistance A Site of Struggle Reflecting on the role of the university as a site for transformative education has meant moving from a discussion of how the university can be a site of resistance to a discussion of the university as a site of struggle (Lynch, 1995, 2006; Lynch et al., 2010). In a climate of widespread neo-liberal policy and practice in higher education, a key task for intellectuals concerned with egalitarian social change is one of defending any progressive and transformative spaces created within the university (Harkavy, 2006). Although it may be argued that there has always been a struggle to create

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and maintain spaces within academia for more transformative education (Lynch et al., 2010), it has intensified with recent structural developments (Davies et al., 2006; Lynch, 2006). To this end, there is a need to acknowledge the very real challenge that commercialization (especially from the 1990s) entails for the departments, centres and individuals involved in maintaining spaces for resistance. The struggle has a cost emotionally, politically and personally in terms of the time and resources it demands. And the reasons are simple: struggles for justice involve wars of position (Gramsci, 1971) and there is violence in such struggles as those in power bear most arms; change is in their gift. While the violence is not physical, it can be verbal and/or psychological (O’Connor, 2010). Like all forms of domination it involves cultural invasion of the dominated, including attempts to make those dominated ‘convinced of their intrinsic inferiority’ (Freire, 1970, p. 134). In my (Lynch’s) experience, the violation was experienced as dismissal or trivialization; the issues raised are defined as insignificant or deemed too great an administrative burden to address, not the university’s responsibility. A lack of resources is called into play as an excuse for inaction, or the cause of the injustice is attributed to other bodies. In the worst-case scenario, inequalities can be denied or deemed irrelevant to academic scholarship. One has to be prepared not just to be defeated in the struggle but to be dismissed and emotionally ‘beaten up’ by those in power if the change is not deemed desirable or important at the time, or if it challenges powerful interests. There is a very real sense in which carelessness, bordering on neglect and violation at times, is part of higher education culture (Lynch, 2010). The costs of resistance at the emotional and personal level are not trivial and are too often ignored in the theorization of change. While the setting up of Equality Studies, and of the School of Social Justice, was inspired by a Gramscian-informed understanding of the role of culture and ideology in the realization of change, and by the Freirean recognition of education’s lack of neutrality, it was also inspired by lessons learned from the success of Thatcherism in the United Kingdom. One of the major achievements of the Thatcher era was that not only did it change the terms of political discourse in the United Kingdom, but it also successfully institutionalized neo-liberal beliefs and values in law and public policy. One of the reasons why inequalities are often difficult to challenge is because they are institutionalized in the categories of everyday life (Tilly, 1998). Thus, while recognizing the importance of writing and teaching as the tools, academics who want to act for global justice must engage in

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‘strategic organisational innovation’ (Harkavy, 2006, p. 7). It is important to institutionalize ideals in the structures of organizations not just in their language or written policies, no matter how essential the latter may be. By the same logic, if egalitarian changes are to be instituted, they need to be institutionalized in categories, positions, processes and systems that are built on egalitarian and social justice principles. And there is a need to promote the understanding of how to operationalize these principles over time. It was with the understanding that institutions tend to outlive their incumbents that the founders of Equality Studies set out to institutionalize a physical and intellectual space to promote research and teaching on equality and social justice. While it was necessary to have programmes of education and research in the short term, in the medium to long term it was necessary to have institutional status. Much of the struggle over the past 20 years has been about achieving institutional status and recognition. However, the status (albeit marginal) given to Equality Studies in 1990 created the space for further engagement and action even though it is lived out with tensions and contradictions. As it is situated in an elite university, Equality Studies is bound to its hierarchies and differentiations. The staff work in conditions that are not of their making in terms of who is appointed or promoted or on what terms. They do not control the wages or salaries or working conditions. While those who have permanent status are more secure and privileged that many of those who study or work with Equality Studies, the future goals of the university (its strategic plans) do not prioritize the democratization of knowledge. In spite of the internal contradictions of our locations, there is a need to identify the interstices that Habermas (1989) noted, those places between spaces that allow for change and resistances to occur at different times, both personally and politically. Times of transition within institutions are times that offer opportunities for resistance, for finding spaces to create new initiatives. While times of transition are also times of social closure, re-regulation and control, when those in power set out the terms of change and try to control its scope and impact, the transition itself creates instabilities. New orders are created and spaces are opened up to establish programmes and initiatives if there are the resources to fight for these at the time. Institutional change offers threats as well as opportunities and these have also to be managed. In 2005, the principal threat to the Equality Studies Centre was that of closure and amalgamation into a larger ‘established discipline’. ESC staff and allies refused to accept this and demonstrated (using the market rhetoric of the new regime) that the Equality Studies Centre was a ‘brand name’ and necessary for survival. They also used data,

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which they had accumulated (ironically, due to accountability demands over the years) to demonstrate their ability to set up a school. They knew that getting ‘school’ status was necessary to survive, as schools were going to have legal status under the new statutes. It would be more difficult to disestablish a school than a programme of studies or a centre because of its institutionalized standing.3 The media is a space that academics who think critically and differently have to engage with also in order to survive. By 2005, when the most recent wave of changes occurred, and the university moved into restructuring along neo-liberal lines, there was a sustained attempt to force Equality Studies to integrate with (in our view to be subsumed by) bigger departments in the College of Human Sciences. At this time the ESC had a wellestablished reputation fostered through public activities, including media work, not only for research and teaching but also for engaging with civil society and statutory agencies, both nationally and internationally. Our alumni and supporters included a number of well-known activists and commentators. Both the alumni and others who believed in our work lent their support to our position in a number of occasions, both privately and in public. The recognition of interdependency was crucial to survival, as the ESC was not cut off from its constituent teaching and research partners. In addition, the ESC used the university’s own ideology, which promotes the idea that UCD works for the entire community, to challenge closure4 of the ESC and to establish the School of Social Justice; the use of the university’s own ideology to argue the case was an exercise in legitimation (Thompson, 1990). In the neo-liberal age, fear plays a major role in controlling and regulating academic staff (Boden and Epstein, 2006). Moreover, because academics are taken over on a daily basis with anxieties about productivity within an intense system of surveillance, they disavow their own docility (Davies et al., 2006). And fear was a major reason why academic staff (who were working in centres that were naturally aligned with social justice) did not want to join Social Justice, fears over the future of the new school and indeed possible isolation by their own ‘established’ disciplines. However, fear was not the only issue. Some of those who wished to join Social Justice were strongly discouraged from doing so. Others invited to join the school made it clear that they did not wish to be part of a school based on the principle of social justice. The division between the normative and the positive was a priority value in the minds of some colleagues; Equality Studies and Social Justice had broken a taboo by aligning the normative and the positive and this continued to be unacceptable. 5

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The establishment and development of the ESC is a story of resistance, development and change inspired in great part by Freirean concepts of education as praxis (Lynch, 1995, p. 93). The more recent developments in the story of the ESC make it also a tale of struggle and survival in the context of a powerful neo-liberal project (Lynch et al., 2010). The struggles of the early 2000s are also linked to the positive/normative divide and academic resistance to bridging this divide. Although there is recognition internationally of the central importance of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research (Nowotny et al., 2001), there is little status attached to such new areas of scholarship in most established universities (O’Connor, 2006). Fields of study are indeed allowed to emerge but the core activities of the university centre around ‘established disciplines’. The history of the ESC in this respect is salutary.

Conclusion – the Case for Survival The personal account of engaging the university at an individual level as espoused by Crean in this chapter highlights the complex site that the university represents in terms of resistance to social injustice. Lynch’s experience with her colleagues of maintaining a safe space within the academy for critical scholarship also shows that the university is paradoxically positioned as a site with the potential for resistance to social injustice and as a field for the reproduction of inequality. While academic life has always been highly individualized and driven by personal interests and ambitions, it was not always as driven by academic capitalism as it is currently (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004). There is a serious threat to critical thought posed by marketized higher educational systems (Webster, 2004); it is a challenge Equality Studies, Women’s Studies, Disability Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Justice and other transformative spaces within higher education have to confront. However, history is there to be made, it is not pregiven. Being aware of the dangers and challenges facing projects is a key factor in survival and progression. Being aware of the personal and emotional costs (and benefits when one succeeds) is also important. As Freire (1992b, p. 77) observed: [T]here is no authentic utopia apart from the tension between the de nunciation of a present becoming more and more intolerable, and the ‘annuciation’, announcement, of a future to be created, built – politically, esthetically, and ethically – by us women and men. Utopia implies

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this denunciation and proclamation, but it does not permit the tension between the two to die away with the production of the future previously announced.. . . Now the erstwhile future is a new present, and a new dream experience is forged. History does not become immobilized, does not die. In acknowledging and documenting struggle, and strategizing and learning from it, it is well to retain a level of analysis that continues to question the limits as well as the potential for higher education as a site for resistance. Recognizing the latest threat to critical thinking does not excuse us from addressing the difficult questions that always lurk behind all academic defence lines. The challenge is to build a more robust, committed and genuine space for transformative social change within the site of higher education. And this involves continuously questioning and improving these spaces. Egalitarian theory speaks commonly of power inequalities and these are at the heart of academic culture and generation of knowledge. There is a stark inequality of power between those that generate (what is often very theoretical and abstract) knowledge and those that live what is being analysed and described especially in sociology, political and educational philosophy and the social sciences. The need to democratize the creation of academic knowledge therefore arises from the simple fact that expert knowledge is acted upon as the defining understanding of a situation. But democratizing knowledge creation is not a purely intellectual act. It also has structural demands to ensure that structures exist to institutionalize more egalitarian forms of knowledge production and to ensure that knowledge goes beyond the point of creation and interpretation. While critical theorists place considerable store on developing theories, including theories jointly created by researchers and participants, they do not make clear how such understanding will lead to change. Most academic productions remain confined to a narrow community of readers and listeners. The generative power of critical spaces rests in praxis – uniting the experiential knowledge of the oppressed and the actions of people engaged in struggles for social justice outside as well as inside the university.

Notes 1 Alpha Connelly (Law Faculty), Máire Nic Ghiolla Phádraig (Sociology), John Baker (Politics), Mary Kelly (Sociology), Teresa Brannick (Business) and John Blackwell (Economics).

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2 Equality Studies led the movement to create the School of Social Justice in 2005 with the support of Women’s Studies. Although the School of Social Justice is one of the 35 statutorily recognized schools within new statutes of the university, this does not mean that Equality Studies and the School are institutionally unassailable. There will be new transitions to be managed in the future. 3 The UCD logo is ‘Ad Astra Cothromh Féinne’, which means literally ‘Reaching for excellence (the stars) and working for the entire community’. 4 The place where this was forcibly articulated was at a meeting two colleagues and I were called to attend on 19 July 2005. The meeting was called on the pretext that it was to help us work out a framework for developing the EWI Network within the College of Human Sciences. It turned out to be an ad hoc meeting, attended by four senior professors and a few other college staff; it was made clear to us that they were opposed to the work we were doing in the EWI and the new School of Social Justice. We were told we were ‘politicizing the university’ and ‘bringing it into disrepute’. Some of those present had copies of letters in hand that they had sent to the senior management of the university making formal complaints about our work but we were not allowed to see them. 5 At a college meeting in Spring 2008 the vice-president for research (who has a medical background) at UCD referred to the non-traditional subjects in the university as those offering ‘funny degrees’.

Chapter 4

Liberal Education, Reading the Word and Naming the World1 D. G. Mulcahy

In the past, liberal education was focused on the word; nowadays, it must also set its sights on the world. The study of the classics epitomized preoccupation with the word; praxis, by which Paulo Freire means ‘reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it’ (Freire, 1971, p. 36), draws attention to the world and to the enormous possibilities for education and social action it holds out.

Introduction None who speak of education openly portray it as a way to dominate others or exploit them; on the contrary, it is spoken of as liberatory, a means of enabling all to attain their full potential as human beings. Even while facing continuous and growing scepticism on the grounds of cost and usefulness from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, liberal education especially has been viewed not only as free of external constraints upon it but as freeing and fitting for a free people. Additional benefits of education are enumerated by people in public life. Educators as well as politicians stress the role of education in civic formation and in the maintenance of civic order and pride. Those in business and industry draw attention to its potential for promoting economic growth of both individuals and societies alike. Parents frequently look to it as the avenue to good jobs for their children and even to positions of influence and wealth. Such aspirations may be supported by the fact that education can and often does meet these varied and demanding expectations. And thereby it is made a highly desirable ‘acquisition’ and not one to be tampered with; but tampering there is, and distortion and exploitation.

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In his book, A People’s History of the United States , Howard Zinn (2003) adopts the stance that history is often presented from the viewpoint of prominent participants and powerful states and institutions rather than from the point of view of ordinary people: citizens protesting objectionable government policies, workers, soldiers in the trenches, prisoners in their jail cells. In such treatments, the signing of treaties and passage of laws is viewed as serving the interests of states and by implication all of their people, as if the nation-state spoke for all. Not so, according to Zinn; the stories told and the interests served are likely to be those of elites, of the politically powerful or influential who see things the way conventional history says they are. It is much the same with education and schooling: education is often taken to be what the elites suggest what it is, and it might be quite different for one person as for another, for elite and non-elite. This was reflected structurally in Europe in the nineteenth century when a line of demarcation was drawn between primary education for the masses and secondary education reserved for the few. Simultaneously, this dichotomy was reflected in the institutions considered appropriate for the education of primary or elementary school teachers and secondary teachers. The former went to training colleges; the latter went to universities, as would befit those intended to educate future members of the elite. Not only was elementary education intended for the masses but arriving as it did in partnership with the industrial revolution, it may have been chiefly intended to benefit the captains of industry through the provision of new skills required of workers in the industrial age. Of course, schooling was also used as a mechanism of domination or cultural invasion – as the case of Ireland itself bears out – as well as for the betterment of people. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed , Freire referenced the oppressed peoples of his homeland of Brazil. Poverty and deprivation being an ever-present reality for large numbers, through the combined forces of education and revolution, he sought a way of freeing or liberating those so oppressed from this bondage. Here Freire had in mind a particular kind of education, one founded in the experience and conditions of oppression as he had witnessed it, infused by a love of fellow human beings, and maintained by a relentless focus or reflection on this experience, leading to action for liberation and improvement. It is one of the lasting contributions of Pedagogy of the Oppressed that it enables us to discern duplicity in the midst of the opaque and to highlight features of educational thought and practice that easily go unnoticed. In the class oppression of which Freire spoke in Pedagogy of the Oppressed , its

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local manifestations may have most readily caught the eye, but oppression in a variety of forms was and remains ever present. It poses a perennial challenge to the claims of liberal education to be both free and freeing. This challenge is evident when we talk of a free press, the one controlled by the moneyed; a free people, those dominated by politicians and the interests they serve; and freedom of expression to say what won’t get you into trouble – but no more than that. Freire is not the first to recognize that education is a political act expressing a political will. What constitutes a good or liberal education has also long expressed a political will, the will of the elites. Its content has been the content favoured by these elites. Freire’s call is a call to remake this content in the image of all people, not just the few. Here I shall consider how liberal education might respond to this challenge, and how it might be aided by Freire’s thinking, while also paying attention to the sometimes cosy relationship between conventional education and concealed oppression. I focus on liberal education, not because it is inherently misguided; on the contrary, I do so because its promise and its potential are sometimes compromised in practice and even in conception. I shall do so by examining the traditional idea of a liberal education and its legitimate claims and achievements. I shall also consider alternative conceptions. In doing so I shall rely on the thinking of theorists drawn largely from the newer traditions of progressive educational theory, critical pedagogy broadly understood, and feminist theory in education. I shall conclude that by pushing out the boundaries of liberal education through a convergence of all of these traditions one can work towards a revitalization of the idea as well as resolve the persistent if artificial conflict between liberal education and the multiplicity of ways we engage in the world. Where it is warranted, I shall make reference to research in cognitive science, teaching for practical reason, service-learning, as well as to critiques of Freire’s thinking on a variety of issues.2

Liberal Education and the Word Historically, a liberal, general or liberal arts education, as it has been variously termed, has been characterized by its selective focus upon the word, that is to say, the study of great works which we have come to know as the classics (Reagan, 2003; Reagan, 2009, pp. 97–113, 205–208). In the Middle Ages, the seven liberal arts and sciences of the studium generale were employed to demarcate the territory. In modern times, various great books programs, such as that which served as a basis for general

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education at the University of Chicago in the mid-twentieth century, came to represent what these were, at least in the Western world. In the broad course of studies he laid out for schools in The Paideia Proposal , Mortimer Adler (1982), who was himself deeply involved in the great books program at Chicago, also recognized a place for the arts along with mathematics, science, social studies and literature so as to better understand the word. Of importance, too, for Adler, as for John Henry Newman before him, was the involvement of the teacher as a guide and motivational force in the educational experience. As generally understood, the values of a liberal education so defined, and the kind of teaching it called for, were threefold. It provided students with a common core of basic knowledge; it introduced students to the great personal, social and moral questions facing all human beings, and by engaging these questions and one another in the discussion of them, students developed the capacity to critically analyse and develop a philosophical point of view and a moral compass. It is true there are differences among advocates of liberal or general education regarding what counts as the common core of basic knowledge and how it might be organized and justified. Nor does one need to return to ancient or medieval times to encounter attempts to identify and characterize the kinds of knowledge that may be considered suitable. Quite a flowering of such studies occurred in the mid-twentieth century at a time when the notion of the structure of knowledge emerged as an influential principle in curriculum design. It is a general feature of these that once various forms of knowledge were identified as the basis for a curriculum, students were expected to become familiar with all of them if they were to be considered well educated. The sevenfold classification of forms of knowledge originally identified by Paul Hirst (1974, p. 46) as mathematics, physical sciences, human sciences, history, religion, literature and the fine arts, and philosophy is a well-recognized formulation. These forms as distinct from disciplines, and as envisaged by Hirst and Peters (1970, pp. 63–64) could exist in the curriculum as single subjects, as in the case of mathematics, or could be found integrated in different school subjects, such as English or geography. For his part, Philip H. Phenix (1964) devised a scheme based not on what may be the different forms of knowledge that existed but one based on our search for meaning in life. He identified six such realms of meaning, namely, symbolics, empirics, aesthetics, synnoetics, ethics and synoptics. Representative material from each of these realms ought to be reflected in the curriculum and students exposed to it through the study of various disciplines which were identified and aligned with the various realms.

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No subject that did not constitute a disciplinary form of knowledge was considered justified for inclusion in the curriculum. By contrast with Hirst and Phenix, Harry S. Broudy argued for a program of general education shaped by a consideration of the uses of knowledge. Of four major uses of knowledge identified, the interpretative use of knowledge was considered the one suited to providing for a general or liberal education. An introduction to the interpretative uses of knowledge, however, was to be gained largely from the study of relevant academic subjects, that is to say, the word. Between them they provided students with cognitive and evaluative maps that served as a basis for understanding and decision making (Broudy, 1988; Broudy et al., 1964). Related to this and to the claim that a liberal education introduces students to the exploration of these persistent and wide-ranging questions is Adler’s call for the use of maieutic or Socratic questioning and Theodore Sizer’s recommendation to have students study more by studying less, thereby allowing them to grapple with these kinds of questions (Sizer, 1984; Sizer and Sizer, 1999). In regard to the table presented by Adler in The Paideia Proposal (p. 23) containing the three columns of learning he envisages as making up the same course of study for all, namely, organized knowledge, the intellectual skills and enlargement of understanding of ideas and values, it is acknowledged that the separation of these three kinds of learning is artificial and that they actually overlap one another all the time. This, it appears, is especially so in the traditional view of a liberal education where the development of the intellectual skills of analysis and reflection emerge under the guidance of the gifted teacher as the student is both introduced to new knowledge and trained to be analytical towards it and reflective about it. This is a point brought out in both Newman and Adler, for whom the tasks of delivering new knowledge and developing the skills of analysis and reflection called for very different forms of teaching. Both accepted that the one, the delivery of knowledge, can be provided for through lecturing or direct instruction. The second, developing the skills of analysis and reflection, of developing a philosophical point of view of one’s own, calls for tutorial or seminar teaching in which there is constant dialogue between teacher and student and among students themselves. This is where Adler’s Socratic questioning and the intensive interaction Newman envisaged between the teacher or tutor and the student, until such time as the student has made progress, come into play. It is by such teaching and by engaging these questions that students gain the capacity for critical reflection (Newman, 1947; Newman, 1961; Adler, 1982; Adler, 1988).

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Liberal Education and the Limitations of the Word By providing students with basic knowledge, introducing them to the great personal, social and moral questions facing all human beings, and by bringing them to engage these questions, liberal education, it is held, creates the well-rounded or well-educated person, one who can turn his or her hand with ease to any professional or life activity. Since these appear to be eminently desirable educational outcomes, one is forced to ask why liberal education is increasingly falling into disfavour (Humphreys, 2006). The truth is not merely that it is costly and time consuming. Whatever the merits of a liberal education, some of which have been indicated, the traditional idea, concentrated as it is upon the reading of the word, is flawed in a number of ways. While many debated the merits of a liberal education, by focusing on this very point, Jane Roland Martin’s comprehensive, acute, and compelling critique of Hirst’s specific theory of a liberal education exposed deficiencies in the idea not highlighted before. It is, moreover, as much a critique of the theory in general as it is of Hirst’s theory and, as such, it underscores serious deficiencies in the traditional theory of a liberal education. According to Martin, liberal education as represented by Hirst, and as reflected in contemporary philosophizing in curriculum in general, separates reason from emotion, thought from action, and education from life. This it does by ‘banishing both knowledge how and noncognitive states and processes from its conception of mind and hence from the realm of liberal education’ (Martin, 1994, p. 179). As a consequence, Hirst’s theory, and those akin to it, is committed to political models that desire or even require people ‘to be passive rather than active participants in the political process’ (Martin, 1994, p. 180). Combine such passivity with a theory of education that separates reason and emotion, mind and body and you are left with an educational stance that settles for people who are uncaring and inactive even in the face of injustice (Martin, 1994, pp. 179–180). Add in the further view of Martin that this theory is, in addition, gender biased in favour of males and against females, and that its intent is to prepare the young for life in the public world of work dominated by men rather than the private world of home and women (Martin, 1994, pp. 70–87), and you have a serious critique. Martin’s critique of liberal education as the exclusive study of the word, and of its exclusionary nature has opened the doors to a search for alternative conceptions as others, not least Hirst himself, have joined Martin in the quest. In a retraction that reflected many of the concerns pinpointed

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by Martin (Mulcahy, 2003), Hirst expresses the belief that ‘education may at many stages turn out to be best approached through practical concerns’, and now considers ‘practical knowledge to be more fundamental than theoretical knowledge, the former being basic to any clear grasp of the proper significance of the latter’ (Hirst, 1993, p. 197; Hirst, 2005). These concerns taken together remind us that the word may not be the world and that observation is not to be equated with participation nor analysis and examination with doing and making, as critics of liberal education are increasingly bringing to our attention. This being so, one is led to seek a new way forward. In his analysis of banking education and oppression, and the place of praxis, problem-posing, and dialogue between teacher and student in the educational process, Freire helps us see the way.

Going beyond the Word Oppression may not always be physically brutal or as visible as the oppression that Freire writes about in Pedagogy of the Oppressed but it is no less real for that. In fact, concealed oppression or system violence is rampant in education, the most conspicuous expressions of which we are all familiar with. They take the form of disciplinary and labelling practices and even teaching to the test, epitomized in examination rituals such as those introduced or bolstered through the Educational Reform Act of 1988 in England and No Child Left Behind signed into law in the United States in 2002. For his part, Freire recognizes and faces head on the prevalence of oppression in education. He pinpoints this prevalence – what one might even consider the rejection of education – in two words: banking education! According to Freire, ‘education is suffering from narration sickness’ (Freire, 1971, p. 57). Its chief symptom is banking education itself. Nothing more than a false promise, a quick fix, it is the plaything of educational bureaucracies, and to use a Freire word, the farce of all farces. Utterly lacking in authenticity it serves its masters well as the handmaiden of oppression in the guise of education, freedom, democracy and progress. Used to make them feel better about their lot, it has become the officially sponsored opium of the oppressed, not least the well banking-educated oppressed. Making a caricature of a serious reading even of the word, it refuses to recognize the world and is intent on its very denial. Public or tax supported schools are charged with complying with its detailed requirements. Private schools, increasingly the refuge of the rich and famous, are not a stark

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reminder that what is considered education might be quite different from one person to another – for elite and non-elite. As explained by Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed , banking education is ‘an act of deposition, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat’ (Freire, 1971, p. 58). The more students work at storing these deposits, the less they develop ‘the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is’ (Freire, 1971, p. 60). Expressing a theme that later emerges in feminist theory and critical pedagogy (e.g. Martin, 1992, pp. 85–119; Giroux, 1997, pp. 3–34), Freire continues that implicit in the banking concept is ‘the assumption of a dichotomy between man and the world: man is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; man is a spectator, not a re-creator’ (Freire, 1971, p. 62). Using banking education as their tool, oppressors present the world as anything but a problem and show it instead ‘as a fi xed entity, as something given – something to which men, as mere spectators, must adapt’ (Freire, 1971, p. 135). They deposit myths, such as ‘the myth that the oppressive order is a free society’, indispensable to the maintenance of the status quo (Freire, 1971, p. 135). If banking education and its denial of the agency of the student in his or her own education may be viewed as the fundamental if putative critique of contemporary education laid out in Pedagogy of the Oppressed , the emphasis on praxis, dialogue and problem-posing may be seen as pivotal guiding principles for reform. As viewed by Freire, moreover, the starting point for the content of education must be ‘the present, existential, concrete situation, reflecting the aspirations of the people’ (Freire, 1971, p. 85), in which it is recognized that literacy ‘can only be emancipatory and critical to the extent that it is conducted in the language of the people’ (Freire and Macedo, 1987, p. 159), a stance that raises serious questions regarding charges of imperialism brought against Freire (Bowers, 2003, p. 14; Bowers and Apffel-Marglin, 2005). Humans first acted in and upon the world before they spoke or wrote about it (Freire and Macedo, 2003) and action is still a necessary part of growth in knowledge of a reality that is in flux. Accordingly, on a point where Freire may well be vulnerable to criticism, praxis is seen as the only legitimate form of gaining knowledge, and it entails both perceiving and acting upon the world. Liberatory education, moreover, calls for a pedagogy in which in several important respects

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the learner stands on equal terms with the teacher3 and in which through dialogue together they explore the social reality of which, together, they are a part. Such dialogue and exploration may be facilitated through the consideration of generative themes, a point on which Ira Shor elaborates. These focus on issues of considerable significance in the human experience and are conducive to insightful conversation. This is not to deny the young access to technical or vocational knowledge. In a liberatory education, however, such knowledge would be infused with a critical dimension that is always associated with praxis, in which action and reflection go hand in hand (Freire and Shor, 2003). In the first chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in a passage that raises further questions regarding charges of imperialism and a disregard for traditional cultures brought against him (Bowers, 2003, pp. 15–16), Freire states that the pedagogy he presents must be forged with, not for, those struggling to regain their humanity. It is a pedagogy, he explains, that makes oppression and the causes of this oppression the objects of reflection by the oppressed. This reflection, he believes, will bring forth ‘their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation’ (Freire, 1971, p. 33). To achieve this liberation, however, together with those who show solidarity, the oppressed ‘must acquire a critical awareness of oppression through the praxis of the struggle for their liberation’ (Freire, 1971, p. 36). Only when they become involved in the organized struggle for their liberation will they begin to believe in themselves. ‘As long as the oppressed remain unaware of the causes of their condition’, he writes, ‘they fatalistically “accept” their exploitation’ (Freire, 1971, p. 51). Arriving at this awareness cannot be purely intellectual; it must involve action as well as reflection for only then will it be praxis’ (Freire, 1971, p. 52). Like childbirth, Freire adds (Freire, 1971, p. 33), it is painful, just as was the journey of the prisoner set free in Plato’s allegory of the cave to travel into the outer world towards knowledge and understanding. In a manner whereby problem-posing education replaces communiqués with communication, Freire maintains, those committed to liberation ‘must abandon the educational goal of deposit-making and replace it with the posing of the problems of men in their relations with the world’ (Freire, 1971, p. 66). Since the practice of problem-posing education requires that the teacher–student contradiction be resolved, ‘through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach’ (Freire, 1971, p. 67).

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This is not to deny that the teacher makes any input. On the contrary, problem-posing teachers present their material to students for their consideration, and they reconsider their earlier views as students express their own. For, as Freire puts it himself, ‘the role of the problem-posing educator is to create, together with the students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of doxa is superseded by true knowledge, at the level of the logos’ (Freire, 1971, p. 68). It is one, as Au points out, in which Freire recognizes both the rightful place and the limits of authority in teaching (Au, 2007; Freire, 2004, pp. 3–29). Freire elaborates, adding that ‘the more sophisticated knowledge of the leaders is remade in the empirical knowledge of the people, while the latter is refined by the former’ (Freire, 1971, p. 183). This is a point restated by Shor when he writes of the dialogical third idiom as a process in which the idioms of student and teacher are transformed into a new way of communicating, ‘which relates academic language to concrete experience and colloquial discourse to critical thought. Everyday language assumes a critical quality while teacherly language assumes concreteness’ (Shor, 1992, p. 255). In this way, as Freire sees it, ‘problem-posing education bases itself on creativity and stimulates true reflection and action upon reality, thereby responding to the vocation of men as beings who are authentic only when engaged in inquiry and creative transformation’ (Freire, 1971, p. 71). To the end of his life, Freire believed in the inevitability and life-changing potential of change (2004, pp. 31–43). Indeed, for Freire, to exist humanely is to change the world, or as he puts it, to name the world. Once named, the world in its turn ‘reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming ’ (Freire, 1971, p. 76). Unlike the case of banking education, for the dialogical, problem-posing teacher, the content of education is neither a gift nor an imposition, ‘bits of information to be deposited in the students’. It is, rather, ‘the organized, systematized, and developed “re-presentation” to individuals of the things about which they want to know more’ (Freire, 1971, p. 82). Authentic education is mediated by a world which impresses and challenges both teachers and students and gives rise to views or opinions about it. These views, ‘impregnated with anxieties, doubts, hopes, or hopelessness, imply significant themes on the basis of which the program content of education can be built’ (Freire, 1971, p. 82).

Liberal Education and the World What does such discourse mean for liberal education in the twenty-first century? Where does it lead us in envisioning new educational futures in

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a way that the focus on the word without action does not, and how does it enable us to remake liberal education in the image of all people? This is a discourse that points us beyond the word alone and beyond conventional schooling and liberal education. It points to a form of education that is more comprehensive in character, calling for education in action as well as reflection or theorizing. And it is sensitive to the learning needs of students and to the pedagogical requirements of successful education. Of this much we may be sure: it does not lead us back to a national curriculum of the kind provided for in the Education Reform Act of 1988 or No Child Left Behind, which may be viewed in Foucauldian terms as nothing more than controlling mechanisms or repressive – even reproducing – apparatuses of the state.4 These put little stock in the prior experiences of the learner, allow little or no room for student involvement in determining the course or content of their own education, and reduce education for action to little more than test preparation. Freire is not alone among educational theorists in envisioning an alternative set of educational futures embracing prior student experience as integral to educational decision making and giving prominence to education for reflective action. Alongside more mainstream ideas in education, a band of less highly acclaimed voices that constitutes the minorstream has not only departed from but in some cases explicitly challenged the approach to general education dominated by the theory of a liberal education in its traditional form. This band includes Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Dewey, Richard Pring, Martin and Shor, and others along with Freire. As a group, they have challenged conventional orthodoxy on the fundamental issues of goals and purpose, content and teaching as they have laid the basis for portraying an alternative vision. More recently, research in practical reasoning (Sullivan and Rosin, 2008), and service-learning (DeVitis et al., 1998; Eyler and Giles, 1999; Eyler, 2005; French, 2008; Boland, 2009) add further weight to this challenge. In the version of the theory of liberal education held out by Newman and once championed by Hirst, the ideal of the educated person is of one who possesses knowledge and understanding as developed in relation to recognized forms of scientific or scholarly knowledge – the word. It is through initiation into these forms of disciplined, theoretical knowledge that the mind is developed and becomes analytical and reflective. As Martin has argued, however, human beings are more than minds understood as creatures of just cognition or intellect. They are social beings with emotions and feelings. To this we may add, they experience love and oppression and they dream dreams for themselves and others. In addition, each is

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autonomous with a unique life and body of experience. And, as Freire would have it, it is in responding to the call to reflective action – engaging in praxis – that they become more fully human. Furthermore, ‘dialogue, as the encounter among men to “name” the world, is a fundamental precondition for their true humanization’ (Freire, 1971, p. 133). If this is so, it may reasonably be argued, their education ought to take cognizance of this more complex nature. This, in turn, suggests a redefi nition of what it means to be an educated person and an account of what such a redefinition would look like. In its most recent iteration (Pring, 1976; Shor, 1992; Martin, 1994; White, 2004; Mulcahy, 2008; Mulcahy, forthcoming), this is a view in which, speaking generally, liberal education or any authentic form of education is rooted in the experience of the learner, involves action as well as reflection, and is aimed at both personal and social improvement. It accepts a broader definition of culture of the kind envisaged by Raymond Williams (1958, 1961) and one characterized by Martin as an anthropologist’s view of culture (2002). The new interpretation considers to be false the view that practical knowledge is inimical to liberal education and ought to be excluded. It considers such a view to limit the potential and the promise of liberal education and to sustain the notion that liberal education is independent of dialogue and supersedes the experience of the learner. So what, more specifically, is the promise of a reconceptualization of liberal education reflected in thinking of this kind as it affects purpose, content, and teaching or pedagogy? The promise lies chiefly in the greater respect for the experience and the autonomy of the individual and his or her capacity to exercise judgement and act wisely, in the internal motivation that a pedagogy so informed unleashes, and in the power it generates in the learner through its transformative potential not only to observe the world but also participate in it, not only to accept it and ‘fit in’ but also to change and improve it. That is, in Freire’s own words, to name it. It is found in a search for a more comprehensive range of curriculum content than that afforded by the academic disciplines and in an education that responds to the needs of individuals and of communities as they encounter the challenges, problems and opportunities presented in everyday living. For a reconceptualization of the kind envisaged here recognizes that it is to these rather than to just a theory of knowledge or the literary canon that one looks in search of educational purpose. That is to say, it recognizes that these needs require that one’s education embrace much more than knowledge as traditionally understood in the theory of a liberal education and that the scope of curriculum content ought to take account of

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developmental needs pertaining to emotional growth, interpersonal relations, community integration and enrichment, and action. In The Educated Person I argue for extending the range of legitimate curriculum content and the inclusion of practical education in a reconceived idea of liberal education, and I make a case for engaging students more fully in determining the direction, content and approach of their own education (Mulcahy, 2008, pp. 177–196). Instead of restating this position here, I shall instead focus upon one particular approach that exemplifies the goal of advancing education for reflective action – for praxis – namely, what is called service-learning. To do this, I shall refer to the program of service-learning in Timber Creek High School in Orlando, Florida, and the program once offered at Trinity College of Vermont, although there are many other examples that could also be chosen. These examples show that service-learning clearly embodies and draws support from elements of Freire’s educational thought, in particular its emphasis not only on reading the word but on naming the world, that is, acting upon it to improve it. They also show that it opens up new possibilities for liberal education. This, of course, is not to suggest that this is the only way to advance education for reflection or that it may readily be employed for the purpose of providing one’s entire education.

Liberal Education and Service-Learning In their study of the place of service-learning in liberal education, Joe DeVitis, Robert Johns and Douglas Simpson see a connection between liberal education and service-learning that allows students ‘to be critically reflective participants in whichever settings or callings they choose to enter’ (DeVitis et al., 1998, p. 13). The values of autonomy and service to community are not taught through didactic methods alone, they believe. To achieve this, they suggest, one must experience the consequences of confronting individual and group challenges. To learn citizenship, one needs to experience it at a deep level of involvement and participation. It is with this understanding that the program of service-learning in Timber Creek High School is implemented. There, under the general supervision of Wendy Doromal, who is also the director of service-learning for the Orange County public schools in Florida, students are encouraged to engage in a wide range of projects of service to the community. They are also given considerable responsibility in carrying out the service program in the school. Students in the program work as tutors to younger

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age children in neighbouring schools, for example. In the past they have operated an in-service program in service-learning for certified teachers. In the operation of this in-service program, students raised money that was used to provide grants to participating teachers and they organized and carried out the selection of teachers chosen to participate in the inservice program. They were also involved as instructors in offering the program. This year, students are concentrating on immigration and migrant farmers, with a focus on assisting those exposed to harmful pesticides and chemicals (retrieved on 4 September 2009 from http://servicelearningacademy.blogspot.com/). Speaking of the philosophy that guides this program at the high school level, and reflecting sentiments similar to those of DeVitis and his colleagues, and supported in the research on servicelearning in varied contexts (Boland, 2009; French, 2008; Eyler and Giles, 1999), Ms Doromal (2008) explained that it was one ‘grounded in the idea that it is not until students are engaged at a practical or action level that true learning takes place’. In the program at Trinity College of Vermont, Oren W. Davis and Jennifer Dodge explain that service-learning meant students learn by participating in ‘thoughtfully organized service experiences that meet actual community needs and that are coordinated in collaboration with the college and community’ (Davis with Dodge, 1998, p. 93). Here learning was ‘integrated into the student’s academic curriculum’ and structured time was provided for students ‘to engage in critical reflection about what they did and saw during the actual service activity’. Servicelearning was seen as providing students with opportunities ‘to use newly acquired skills and knowledge in real-life situations in the community’. By enhancing what was taught by extending student learning beyond the classroom into the community, it was also seen as helping ‘to foster the development of a sense of caring for others’ (Davis with Dodge, 1998, pp. 93–94) and additional student outcomes identified by Boland, Eyler, and others as important for civic engagement (Boland, 2009; Eyler, 2005; Eyler and Giles, 1999). The particular course that Davis and Dodge discuss dealt with liberation theology. Here, in order to enhance their theoretical understanding, students were engaged in community service in the belief that ‘the community service project helps students recognize that liberation involves more than theories – it also involves action, doing, praxis.’ Through an academic course in liberation theology, they conclude, ‘consciousness of oppression is raised; learning is enhanced by these practical, concrete experiences; and moral and civic values are reinforced’ (Davis with Dodge, 1998, p. 97).

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To those who are sceptical that service-learning has any place in liberal education, what Davis and Dodge write, what the research suggests, and what is on display at Timber Creek High School, gives reason to pause, for one may reasonably conclude otherwise. In these and other cases, servicelearning may fairly be said to represent a serious and realistic approach to education for reflective action. When such learning is grounded in the personal experience and interests of students it also goes a long way to responding to the pedagogical imperative of building upon the existing experience of the learner in the way that Myles Horton speaks of when he writes, ‘you have to start where people [students] are, because their growth is going to be from there, not from some abstraction or where you are or someone else is’ (Horton, 1998, p. 131).5 Such learning may also contribute to the community in tangible ways and enable students to develop caring, interpersonal, and intercultural attitudes and skills not normally associated with liberal education. All of this it may accomplish while also serving the traditional intellectual ideals of liberal education. For as Dodge, then a student at Trinity College of Vermont, adds, it heightened her understanding in a way that ‘no book or lecture can elicit’ (Davis with Dodge, 1998, p. 98; see also Baxter Magolda, 2006; King and Magolda, 2005). In commenting on the approach taken by Barbara Stengel in the integration of philosophical and practical reasoning in the education of teachers, Sullivan and Rosin go a step further in recognizing this as an example of where theoretical reasoning and understanding are dependent upon prior practical experience. They write, ‘Stengel’s students form meaningful judgments about the normative significance of teaching only through growing participation in the unfolding drama of practice over time. They cannot be predetermined or derived deductively through theoretical reasoning alone’ (Sullivan and Rosin, 2008, p. 43). Service-learning in a manner reflective of Freire’s quest for praxis of the kind found in Timber Creek High School and Trinity College of Vermont presents practices suggestive of new possibilities for liberal education. To sustain it, however, and thereby resolve the age old conflict between liberal education and practical knowledge, these practices need the support of a reformed theory of liberal education of the kind hinted at by Sullivan and Rosin and a new image of the educated person. If the ideal of the educated person is to embrace knowledge, attitudes and skills not previously associated with liberal education, it will obviously differ considerably from the historical tradition of a liberal education. The ideal of the educated person as one of many-sided development, as

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I attempt to articulate it in The Educated Person (pp. 177–196; also Lewis, 2009), may hold promise in this regard. The justification and the content of an education fashioned to reflect this ideal would not be sought merely in the academic disciplines but also in practical knowledge and lived experience. Both the curriculum and its accompanying pedagogy would be appropriately individualized for all students in accordance with their experience, interests, capacities and needs. That is to say, its organizational principle would be shaped by two considerations deeply rooted in Freire: the imperative to engage in action as a duty vital to everyday living and personal fulfilment (Freire, 2004, pp. 31–43) and a respect for societal needs and the autonomy and experience of the individual student. It is in abiding by this principle, in large part, that the transformative potential of such an education would lie: enabling students to contribute to shaping their own education and to take critical reflective action to improve the world by seeking to transform conditions of oppression. A curriculum of the kind envisaged would be multifaceted and varied. Because it would include practical studies and studies aimed at education for action and for emotional formation, alongside intellectual cultivation as understood by Newman and the early Hirst, for example, it would represent a partial departure from a largely academic curriculum. It would, as a consequence, constitute an important shift towards incorporating education for praxis and for transformation in how we view the scope and content of a liberal education. With this shift, it would welcome practical knowledge for what it adds to the formation of the educated person as one prepared for engagement in the world. Let me add, lest there be any misunderstanding, it would not overlook or reject the historical commitment of liberal education to understanding and critical reflection and the foundation this lays for enlightened engagement.

Conclusion The historical aspirations of liberal education are commendable and its past achievements notable and admirable. Through its focus on reading and analysing the word it has enabled many to grow towards intellectual excellence to use Newman’s term, to acquire organized knowledge, develop intellectual skills, and grow in the understanding of ideas and values to borrow Adler’s terminology. Although admirable, these are limited achievements, confi ned as they are to the realm of cognition. These achievements on their own do not realize the historical promise

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of liberal education to enable us all to attain our vocation to become more fully human and to engage in reflective action for the betterment of all. For Freire, this fulfi lment is to be achieved through praxis, that is, through reflection and action; not alone in reading the word but naming the world. Similarly, for Plato, it is achieved by the newborn philosopher not purely in the contemplation of truth and goodness in the heavens but in renaming the cave on terra firma . In so speaking across the ages, Plato, Freire and like-minded thinkers summon liberal education in a new direction.

Notes 1 This chapter is a development of ‘Liberal education and the vocation to be more fully human’, the Keynote Address to the New England Philosophy of Education Society, Framingham, MA, 3 October 2009. I wish to thank Wendy Doromal for the opportunity to interview her regarding the program in service-learning at Timber Creek High School and Ronnie Casella, Joss French and Cara Mulcahy, colleagues of mine at Central Connecticut State University, for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 2 Points of critique raised by critics of Freire and debated by Freire scholars include, for example, the charge that Freire is insensitive to the environmental crisis and insufficiently attuned to difference, including gender difference and oppression in its different forms; that his ideas are ineffective and oppressive towards indigenous peoples; that his pedagogy promotes an individualism representing the mind-set of Western rationalism and the globalization one associates with capitalism; and that he relies unduly on critical reflection as the path to knowledge. For further discussion of these points, see, for example, Darder (2003), Bowers (2001, 2003, 2009), Bowers and Apffel-Marglin (2005), Jackson (2007), Au (2007), Au and Apple (2007), Roberts (2000, 2007, 2008). 3 On this and the related question of the place of authority in education, see Au (2007). 4 For a consideration of controlling mechanisms of a more technological kind, see Casella (2006). 5 In the context of higher education, much the point is made by Barr and Tagg when they advocate ‘producing learning with every student by whatever means work best’ (1995, p. 13).

Chapter 5

Conscientization: The Art of Learning Anne Ryan

Introduction Freire was constant in his belief that education is never a value-neutral activity. It either pacifies learners so that they accept and adapt to an externalized perception of reality or it liberates learners so that they can come to know and transform their reality. Whereas banking education anaesthetises and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the ‘submersion’ of consciousness; the latter strives for the ‘emergence’ of consciousness and ‘critical intervention’ in reality. (Freire, 1972, p. 54) Notions of a constant unveiling of reality, critical intervention in reality and releasing creative power prompted the title of this chapter – Conscientization: The Art of Learning. Freire used the term conscientization (1) to denote education that enabled the emergence of consciousness; (2) to distinguish between this kind of learning and the kind of learning that is primarily concerned with the acquisition of already known facts and information; and (3) to convey a sense of a learning process that is never static, never without further possibilities and never confined to replicating what has gone before; a process that engenders a state of being that is ever inquisitive, ever exploratory and ever active. In the title of this chapter I use the term art to encapsulate the explorative and creative nature of this process; to emphasize how such a process transcends the reverential position afforded intellectual knowing at the expense of other ways of knowing; and to highlight the importance of perspective and insight afforded within this process.

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The chapter explores the timeliness and relevance of Freire’s critique to twenty-first-century educators. It considers key aspects in the application of Freire’s approach and the challenges these pose for educators. While this chapter is primarily aimed at adult educators, it also seeks to transcend the traditional divide between formal education and adult education, a divide that can curtail the potential for adult educators to influence the broader educational agenda. The chapter argues that Freirean educators who seek to critically intervene in reality cannot remain detached from this agenda but must actively engage in dialogue pertaining to all aspects of education provision.

Is This a Good Time to Talk of ‘Unveiling Reality’? It could be argued that in the 40 years since Freire began his critique of education, there has never been a more sustained, intense and extensive questioning of a system that heretofore basked in popular acceptance. In 2006, Lynch and Moran wrote of the growth in ‘a distinctive neo-liberal interpretation of fairness and efficiency based on the moral right and supremacy of the market’ (p. 221). This is no longer the case. The uncertainties and doubts unleashed by the current economic crisis have generated questions to do with power, privilege and responsibility, questions that challenge the moral right and supremacy of the market as an arbiter of worthiness. Such questions probe: •

• •

the appropriateness of an economic system that as it crumbles, reveals an in-built preference to serve the needs of a relatively small coterie of insiders and a capacity to secure the collusion of many others, who themselves had little to gain the checks and safeguards that were in place and whether they were designed to evenly protect all those involved the extent to which those who are least able to withstand the economic cutbacks have been left to shoulder most of the burden while those who are most responsible for the crisis seem to be least scathed.

As the crisis has deepened there is widespread agreement that what we are witnessing is a ‘big system failure’, a failure of critical faculty, a failure of leadership and poor governance. There is also a growing awareness that what is needed to ensure good governance is an engaged and informed citizenry and a scepticism with regard to what appear to be unassailable

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truths. While the crisis is causing many and varied negative impacts on people’s lives across the world, it is also a time of greater openness to appraise the fundamental premises that underpin the organization of society and the provision of services and opportunities. However, as Duke (2009) points out: ‘business as usual’ is very hard to dislodge. It calls for a society-wide cultural transformation in values as well as economic assumptions. Perhaps adult education has something to say, and to do, here. Perhaps, indeed, it should be its central task and duty. (p. 172) There is a discernable enthusiasm in the adult education sector to rise to this challenge. There is also a sense that if adult education shirks this task, it is in danger of missing an opportunity to participate in creating a more egalitarian society and of being consigned to the realm of what is perceived as ‘alternative’, ‘other’ or ‘gap filling’ approaches to learning. Even more importantly, there is a sense that adult education is the branch of education best positioned to spearhead cultural transformation through education. Doing so necessitates a focus on the purpose of education and awareness on the part of adult education of its potential to influence the broader system of education. There is already evidence that teaching techniques more usually utilized by adult educators are being adopted within the formal education sector. In the main this is due to a realization that such techniques enhance the accessibility of education for an increasingly diverse student body. The emergence of Teaching and Learning units within universities over the past ten years is an immediately visible manifestation of this phenomenon. Also in the third-level sector the burgeoning attempts to establish mechanisms to recognize prior learning (RPL) including experiential learning, indicates a willingness on the part of the formal sector to reposition its approach to knowledge acquisition in ways that have long been advocated by adult education. The current challenge for adult education is to build on these inroads and spearhead a sectorwide discussion on cultural transformation as an appropriate overall purpose for education. The Bonn NGO Declaration captures the essence of such an agenda: We understand education as the key to cultural transformation towards sustainable societies . . . [that can meet the] . . . growing challenges of a worldwide economic crisis, climate change, social injustice, and a lack of democratic participation. (Hinzen, 2009, p. 477)

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Thoughts of cultural transformation invariably lead to Freire. It is, therefore, timely to consider the relevance of his critique today.

Is Freire’s Critique of Education Relevant Today? Freire’s critique of education is rooted in his desire for a just and egalitarian social system. When it comes to conventional education today there are many compelling reasons to seek change. Among these are (1) education’s ongoing propensity to entrench socio-economic inequality; (2) its tendency to blame failures on those it fails to serve; and (3) its widespread persistence in continuing to poorly serve particular and easily identifiable sectors of the population. Early school leaving is one, although by no means the only, indicator of these characteristics. It is widely accepted that those whose parents have a low socio-economic status are more likely to leave school early. Early school leaving is important because of the close positive relationship between educational attainment and employment. According to Furlong and Cartmel (2006): Focusing on unemployment three years after the completion of education (which allows time for young people to establish themselves in the labour market), those with university education were far less likely to be unemployed than those who had not completed upper secondary education. (pp. 47–48) Even in these recessionary times when many graduates find it difficult to find work in their chosen field, they continue to fare better than those with lesser academic qualifications. In addition to unemployment, those who do not complete second-level school are also more likely to experience literacy difficulties and more likely to spend time in prison. In Ireland it is estimated that 20 per cent leave school without completing their Leaving Certificate (Battell, 2004). Statistics on early school leaving in other European countries indicate similar patterns (e.g. Malta 45 per cent; Portugal 39 per cent; Spain 30 per cent; Iceland 27 per cent; Romania 23 per cent; Italy 23 per cent; Bulgaria 21 per cent; Cyprus 18 per cent). Efforts to prevent early school leaving tend to focus on correcting deficiencies within those individuals who do not fit in. A report on early school leaving in the Netherlands (Youth Forum Jeunesse, 2008, p. 11) stated that: ‘Studies have shown that early school leavers are less intelligent and perform worse on scholastic tests as compared to students that did not drop out of school.’ An

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EU document on early school leaving details the individual and social characteristics of those who leave school early, their family characteristics, and the characteristics of the schools most involved. It goes on to identify three categories of early school leavers – the disappeared (those for whom there are no data); the disaffected (those who lack motivation to stay in school); and the disadvantaged (those who start education with an economic, social or intellectual disadvantage). While these data serve to highlight the issues and challenges, the focus remains firmly on the shortcomings of those who leave school early. Reports such as these rarely if ever provide an analysis of the system that appears to efficiently and repeatedly push out particular sectors of the population in ways that are very predictable. The patterns of exclusion and responses to that exclusion at third level are similar. A Report of the Action Group on Access to Third Level Education in Ireland (2001, p. 34) found that: • • •

students from lower socio-economic groups were significantly less likely to complete second-level education those students from lower socio-economic groups who sit the Leaving Certificate tended to achieve significantly lower grades, and for students with modest levels of performance in the Leaving Certificate, those from higher socio-economic groups had a higher transfer rate to third level.

A 2006 report on entrants to third-level education in Ireland noted ‘persistent social inequalities . . . reflected in the over-representation of the children of certain groups among new entrants to higher education, relative to their shares of the population’ (O’Connell et al., 2006, p. 136). A particularly underrepresented group in this sector are people with disabilities; they make up over 8 per cent of the population but account for only 1.1 per cent of the student population (AHEAD, 2005). These statistics suggest an educational system that pushes out, or keeps out, significant numbers of people, the majority of whom are the most vulnerable to start with. They also imply an education system that compounds rather than compensates for existing disadvantages. Numerous reports on the practices in third-level education have urged the sector to undertake deep-rooted changes to the structure, content, methodology, purpose, delivery and nature of the system with a view to providing for a wider constituency (Corradi et al., 2006). Notwithstanding calls for reform, efforts to tackle inequality in third-level education in Ireland has resulted in providing opportunities that can only be availed

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of by ‘a small minority of relatively advantaged people within a given disadvantaged group’ (Lynch, 1999a, p. 309). In other words those who are deemed to be most able within such groups are given access while the remainder continue to be excluded. Recent trends among universities to set strategic goals that aim to attract high quality students are particularly worrying. Implicit in this aim is a sense that there are low quality students that these same institutions have little interest in accommodating. In such a climate the rhetoric of widening participation appears to be about increasing the pool of potential students who can be moulded to fit the needs of the institution. It offers little or no indication that these institutions are keen to tackle the more complex underlying circumstances that result in exclusion or institutional frameworks that compound the situation. If the institutional frameworks are not scrutinized, the problem of exclusion is located in those who are underrepresented, and these individuals become the main focus of attention. The reasons why they are excluded are attributed to their failure to engage appropriately with the system (Tett, 2006). This failure is put down to factors such as a lack of motivation to participate on their part, little encouragement from peer group and family, and financial constraints. This analysis is particularly evident in third-level access programmes. Students who enter institutions via these initiatives are categorized as ‘mature’ students, students with ‘special needs’ or disabilities, and ‘non-traditional’ students. Once these students have gained access, special supports are put in place to retain them within the system. Such supports again focus on these students’ differences in terms of how they process information, or respond to established teaching and examining procedures, and lifestyle issues such as their need for childcare or wheelchair ramps. These differences are not seen as a resource to be drawn upon but as deficiencies to be rectified. Access to education under these conditions was described by Freire (1976, p. 38) as working on the student rather than working with the student. Responses that focus almost exclusively on ‘integrating “deficient” people’ (Crowther et al., 2000, p. 179) accept the system as unassailable and imply a degree of benevolence on the part of a system that accommodates these outsiders as exceptional cases. In the widening participation debate a concern with maintaining standards is regularly invoked. One aspect of the maintaining standards discourse is a concern not to overadvantage nontraditional students through the provision of supports. A concern of this nature is only meaningful in the context of the competitive dimension of student performance in examinations. Embedded in this assumption is a

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belief that ranking students according to their relative performances is a worthy educational aim and that a level playing field is a realizable or desirable condition for the provision of education. Another concern that is often raised is that of maintaining the integrity of the system. This concern stems from a belief that conventional educational practices are inherently appropriate for all and that the problem of excluding or pushing out members of particular groups in society is not endemic to the system. This belief is often accompanied by another that credits conventional education with the potential to combat inequality. This is strongly disputed by Furlong and Cartmel (2006) who claim that: [M]ost industrialized nations organize educational provision in ways that lead to a virtual social apartheid. In the post war period all developed countries have made attempts to break down these social barriers, yet in some cases efforts have been somewhat superficial and in most cases ineffective. (p. 15) This claim was tested in a study of graduates in Scotland. It found that when it came to employment, graduates from disadvantaged families received lower net financial returns than their more advantaged counterparts (Furlong and Cartmel, 2005). It would seem that even among those with degree-level qualifications, socio-economic backgrounds continue to play a significant role. The reasons for the income variations were complex, but included disparities in social capital that remained intact despite apparent parity of educational experience. This was compounded by increasing differentiation in status between institutions and between those who enrol in these institutions. The findings of the Scottish study clearly indicated that ex-students of the ‘established universities’ enjoyed the greatest employment opportunities. These findings endorse Freire’s (1972) claim that: There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the [learner] into the logic of the system and bring about conformity to it or it becomes the practice of freedom. (p. 56) Freire is clear that interventions, which do not lead to dismantling existing exclusionary practices within the education system, are not benign but in effect serve to further bolster and sustain what exists. As outlined earlier, the ongoing focus on supporting vulnerable learners to access or remain within the formal system and the lack of attention to

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the deficiencies within the system are in keeping with what Freire described as educational pragmatism: The new educational pragmatism embraces a technical training without political analysis, because such analyses upset the smoothness of educational technicism. . . . To the educational pragmatist, other social and critical preoccupations represent not just a waste of time but a real obstacle in their process of skills banking. (Freire, 1994, p. xii) The replication of the conventional educational system globally makes it all the more difficult to challenge the dominance of educational pragmatism. Across the globe, schools and mass education at the beginning of the twenty-first century are part and parcel of the same ‘common sense’ logic that created them, a logic grounded in a passion for rationality that has seduced the imagination of Northern Europe and its extended cultural spheres for more than two centuries. (Dressman, 2008, p. 13) Dressman went on to highlight the need to critique this common sense logic in order to see through it and to interrupt it. From a Freirean perspective the task of critiquing and interrupting the logic of conventional education is a central component of the work of the educator.

How Can Educators Critique and Interrupt the Logic of Conventional Education? Freire’s writings provide a framework to critically appraise the fundamental principles that have guided the work of radical educators for many decades. In this section I describe how educators can interrupt the logic of conventional education in both their engagement with learners and their engagement with the wider education system. In doing this I draw on Freire’s writings and on the experiences and insights gleaned from countless interactions with practising educators in Ireland and around the world.

Engaging with Learners For Freire the relationship between the educator and the learners is a key determinant to whether the educational experience is one of domestication/

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pacification or freedom/liberation. In the domestication scenario the educator transfers knowledge to the learner, by contrast in the freedom scenario the educator creates the conditions whereby the educator and learners together reflect and act upon reality. If asked, most adult educators would claim that they strive towards freedom and not domestication. A Bangladeshi educator captured the importance of this goal when he said: The greatest threat to our future is not widespread illiteracy, but to have a large passive and docile population who can be exploited by industrialists and politicians for their own ends. Freire had much to say about how to create a learning environment that ensures learners are neither docile nor passive and that builds the capacity of learners to engage in future autonomous activity so that they can actively participate in creating their future. Freire’s approach also seeks to continuously build the professional expertise of educators so that they remain focused on the development of the learners and do not succumb to the lure of pragmatism and skill banking. By positioning the educator as a learner Freire does not undermine the educators’ responsibility to create the conditions that enable learners to actively engage in shaping their future, but he emphasizes that in exercising this role the primary focus is the needs of the learners rather than a prescribed syllabus. The ongoing development of the learner and the educator are two interconnected processes that are essential to education that seeks liberation. The following section attempts to encapsulate the experiences of educators who adopt a liberation approach. It describes the challenges faced by learners as they move from being passive bystanders towards becoming actively engaged and it describes the challenges faced by educators as they facilitate this shift.

Education for Liberation Education for liberation passes through three key phases. The first is awakening awareness; the second is critical analyses; and the third is changing reality. Moving successfully from one phase to the next relies on acquiring particular skills and managing the challenges inherent in each phase. Although these phases form a continuous cycle rather than represent a linear finite achievement, I have used a tabular format to facilitate discussion of each phase.

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Table 1: Phases in education for liberation Phase

Aim

Characteristics

Awakening awareness

To make meaning of personal experience

Critical analysis

To understand how the world works and where individual experience fits

Narrating one’s Naming experience, personal story, recognizing excitement, commonalities shock, anger, across individual resentment, experiences, resistance, openness to new thirsting learning, personal for more development knowledge Contextualizing Social literacy personal through experience understanding within broader discourses, power, context, influence, links empathy with between local and other points of global view

Changing reality

To actively engage in creating a more equitable society

Networking, continuous reflection

Skills

Visioning the future in holistic terms and identifying short-term incremental goals

Challenges Managing emotional responses, harnessing the energy of resistance and anger, avoiding a sense of helplessness Drawing on but going beyond past experience, recognizing difference between cynicism and critique Maintaining a balance between the ideal and the possible

Freire (1998b, p. 93) emphasized that ‘the permanence of education lies in the constant character of the search’. As such it is as important for learners to appreciate how they are learning as it is for them to experience the learning that ensues from participating. Table 1 summarizes the key features of the three phases.

Phase 1: Awakening Awareness The awakening awareness phase is particularly powerful and potent for learners who have experienced disadvantage and who may have assumed the fault was entirely theirs and/or was due to an unfortunate convergence of circumstances. When learners work in groups they come to realize that their experiences, albeit unique stories, resonate with the experiences of others and are imbued with a predictability that belies chance. Each learner begins to see their experience within contexts that reveal in-built inequalities and preferences within systems that they may not have observed before.

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In doing so they begin to develop a critical sensitivity to their own assumptions of how the world works. Moving from subjective knowledge to social knowledge sets learners on a road of critical questioning, reinterpretation of their experiences and a reconceptualization of the political, economic and cultural processes that shape their personal experiences. Once learners become aware, there is no turning back to a place of unawareness. Awareness that remains personalized strips this phase of its broader agenda, which is to enable insight and understanding of the politics of inequality. Without this political context, awareness can be reduced to identifying perceived personal deficiencies and acquiring skills to overcome them. This will enable learners to adapt to the world but it will not enable them to integrate themselves within the world (Collins, 1977, p. 61). Adapting to the world implies an acceptance of the status quo while integration implies active engagement. There is a concern among many educators that their learners are corralled at this stage into an adaptation mode. This is largely due to a view among educational providers and funders that education is an individualized process. Within that perspective they tend to focus on how to questions – such as how to motivate learners, how to integrate literacy skills into other subject areas, how to build confidence in those who believe they are unable to learn. In this kind of environment some educators find themselves confined to dealing with issues of form and methodology but unable to engage with the politics of exclusion. Freire (1974, p. 108) noted that: ‘Merely to perceive reality partially deprives [learners] of the possibility of a genuine action on reality.’ A further challenge in the awakening awareness phase is to guard against learners becoming trapped within either a sense of hopelessness or a blind resistance. Both stem from a feeling of being powerless to create change. Hopelessness leaves learners unable to transcend the emotional and intellectual stagnation that often results from negative educational experiences. Freire (1997a) noted that: hopelessness paralyzes us, immobilizes us. We succumb to fatalism, and then it becomes impossible to muster the strength we absolutely need for a fierce struggle that will re-create the world. (p. 8) Resistance is a powerful experience that provides satisfaction to those who otherwise have had limited opportunities to exercise power. However, resistance that is not focused and has no clear purpose can leave people trapped within a political ghetto where there is little opportunity to exercise influence or to interact with the decision makers and shapers of the

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future. Being isolated in this way is a form of domestication in that learners cannot actively participate in shaping their reality. The energy generated through resistance needs to be harnessed and honed through critique so that it can become a positive asset rather than an additional burden.

Phase 2: Critical Analysis Critical analysis looks beyond the immediate experience of a group of learners, to include wider contexts in which to seek patterns and meanings in how systems operate. Freire (1976) claimed that: By predisposing men [sic] to reevaluate constantly, to analyze findings, to adopt scientific methods and processes, and to perceive themselves in dialectical relationship with their social reality, that education could help men [sic] to assume an increasingly critical attitude toward the world and so to transform it. (pp. 33–34) This phase requires a level of questioning that illuminates the social, cultural, political, ideological and historical factors that contextualize experiences (Freire, 1997a, p. 120). It deals with discourses of power and access to resources; it acknowledges economic and power inequalities with a view to better understanding the values, beliefs, assumptions and practices that sustain these inequalities. Because discourses illuminate the constellations of shared and often unquestioned beliefs and values that shape our perspectives on events, they provide a holistic overview that enables learners to situate their experiences within broad social contexts, thereby protecting them from becoming isolated in their individual experience. A danger in this phase is that as learners come to terms with power inequalities they may succumb to cynicism. This can happen when learners are required to move too fast. They need time to process their individual experiences before they can perceive them within a wider context.

Phase 3: Changing Reality This phase is about doing. Freire points out that: [I]n the domain of socioeconomic structures, the most critical knowledge of reality, which we acquire through the unveiling of that reality, does not itself alone effect a change in reality. (1997a, p. 30)

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Freire is clear that the education he espouses is not confined to the realm of thinking, but has also to be grounded in creating change. For many educators this is the most difficult phase. Augusto Boal, who was heavily influenced by the work of Freire, raised concerns as to who bears the moral responsibility for the actions learners take. Boal’s concerns when combined with a desire to foster independence among learners are not easily resolved. Nevertheless, if we are to adopt a Freirean approach to education, we cannot omit this phase. If learners are aware of the need to revisit each phase then they should be able to critique their actions effectively. It is for this reason it is important that educators work with learners to ensure that they are conscious of the process in which they are engaged. Understanding the cyclical nature of the process also ensures that learners become autonomous and their capacity to critique is not dependent on the support of the educator, the group or the educational setting.

Engaging with the Broader Education System Freirean educators are themselves learners and, therefore, are engaged in the same process as described above. For educators the changing reality phase includes working on the political and social contexts that shape the sector. A major challenge to the educator is to sustain the intellectual and emotional agility and stamina needed to work alongside learners while at the same time attending to these contexts. There is a sense of urgency about all that needs to be done, but it is impossible to have an overnight revolution and make things instantly different. We have to cope or survive in the present as well as critiquing and resisting what is wrong. And all the time we have to keep an eye to the future and what we could create. . . . To simultaneously engage in coping, critiquing, resisting and creating may seem impossible, because they involve contradictory actions of involvement and transcendence, continuity and change. (Ryan, 2009, p. 25) The multiplicity of tasks, described in the quote above, is akin to what is required of the Freire-inspired educator. By way of elaborating on these tasks and identifying the key interventions needed to enable cultural transformation, I have singled out four key roles to be undertaken by an educator: these are the critic or commentator who observes and reflects; the activist who tries out things; the engager who influences; and the visioner

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Table 2: Roles of the educator Role

Concerns

Focus

Critic/ Interpreting Observing in commentator the world order to make meaning from reality

Activist

Grounding ideas

Engager

Wielding influence

Visioner

Imagining what does not exist

Realizing plausible short-term or mid-term initiatives Building networks

Changing discourses

Strengths

Weaknesses

Provides perspective Becomes cynical and cause for reflection, reveals underlying values and cultural and historic contexts Puts structures and Loses sight of procedures in place big picture to institutionalize achievements Mobilizes support, builds understanding

Becomes subsumed in other agendas, seeks to dominate Reveals hidden values Loses sight of and beliefs current reality, becomes selfreferential

who imagines a future and communicates it to others. Through these roles educators create learning opportunities for their students, continuously develop their expertise as educators and ensure their work is part of a broad agenda for social and educational inclusiveness. Table 2 summarizes the concerns, focus, strengths and weaknesses of these roles. Just as the three learning phases discussed earlier – awakening awareness, critical analysis and engaging with reality – are aspects of an ongoing and cyclical development process, the roles described here are also interconnected. Each role informs and is informed by the others. Moving between the roles fosters a range of skills and reflective techniques that keep the educator fully engaged with the world. As critic, for example, educators not only interpret what is going on around them but they also become observers of themselves. They observe themselves when they take on the roles of activist, engager or visioner. At the same time when they take on the roles of activist or engager they ensure that they remain grounded in what is possible to achieve. The role of engager is an extension of the role of activist. It involves establishing partnerships at the levels of policy making and co- ordination of provision as well as at the level of implementation. It involves

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(1) identifying the networks of connections within the systems in which educators are engaged and between that system and others; (2) identifying the formal and informal power structures that impact on decision-making processes that effect their work and the lives of those with whom they work; and (3) identifying potential allies within and outside the system in which they act with a view to working together to make useful interventions. Engaging with others requires patience with their possible caution and fear of what is unknown and untried. It also requires educators to constantly reflect on their beliefs and values in order to interrogate their validity. Uninterrogated values generally mask acceptance of the status quo. As visioner, educators are forced to think through what they want to achieve, to imagine possibilities that do not yet exist. It allows educators to be proactive and to have a sense of what they are striving towards, and as with all creativity, it calls for discipline to seek out the heart of the matter. It is not about copying what has gone before but it is about building on what is known. What educators are striving towards is never static because it will be modified through experience and critical reflection. The weaknesses identified in the table are most likely to emerge as a problem if educators confine themselves to one role. For example, the critic can become a cynic if their observations do not lead to action, and in turn, as activist, educators can become enmeshed in a mechanistic approach if they do not observe and critique their actions in terms of their vision for the future. Similarly, if educators only focus on what ought to be and are not grounded as an activist and engager, they are in danger of losing sight of reality, becoming self-referential and ultimately achieving little. Undertaking these four roles requires an ability on the part of educators to embrace uncertainty, and a willingness to constantly reassess how they work and what they hope to achieve. These challenges and the three learning phases described earlier call for personal insights and a capacity to interpret and reframe experiences. It is these characteristics that resonate with the notion of learning as an art.

Conclusion Given Freire’s passionate commitment to revolutionize education so that it can serve the needs of all, it is not surprising that he has inspired educators for the past four decades. While Freire’s writings have been most influential in the adult education sector, his critique embraced all educational provision. Within adult education there has always been an understanding that

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the different types of educational provision are interconnected. However, this awareness is often such that the primary focus is on the differences between adult education and the formal sector, in particular, the shortcomings of the formal sector. The potential strength of striving towards a common purpose has to date received less attention. If the cultural transformation sought by Freire is to be achieved, adult education has to engage in a system-wide dialogue with a view to enabling fundamental change. This endeavour includes, but goes well beyond, the transfer of expertise in course delivery and assessment methodologies; it necessitates giving expression to the overarching aesthetic purpose of education. In the past decade a number of commentators have called for an education system that reflects the interconnections between the personal and the environment (Spretnak, 1999); that acknowledges that what is taught is often partial and particular (Goodman, 2003); and that recognizes the importance of the imagination in order to generate a sense of hope and the possibility of change (Crowther and Sutherland, 2006). Like Freire, these writers raise fundamental issues that relate to the purpose of education and whether the current provision is appropriate. These are issues that concern all educators. Currently there is no obvious context for dialogue across the full range of educational provision; however, if the term lifelong learning were reclaimed to mean all structured learning from preschool onwards, it would provide a conceptual framework for such dialogue. Now, as we grapple with the national and international economic crisis, the silence and passivity that gave free reign to market forces has been shattered and in its wake there is an openness to critique the negative impacts of power and privilege. This critique must be extended to include education. For adult educators it is an opportunity to highlight the impacts of exclusion on individuals and communities and an opportunity to advocate alongside educators in the formal education sector who are also anxious to provide inclusive educational opportunities. It is also an opportunity to emphasize the important potential of education to release the imaginative capacity of educators and learners. Freire has much to offer to guide us in this endeavour.

Chapter 6

Taking Educational Risks With and Without Guaranteed Identities: Freire’s ‘Problem-Posing’ and Judith Butler’s ‘Troubling’ Karl Kitching

Introduction: The Problem of Post-Critically Educated Subjectivities During the study that the following quote is taken from, Mary Ryan found that students may achieve the syllabus outcomes with respect to their critical pedagogy course, but do not make choices that further an emancipatory agenda. They are prepared at this stage in their lives to accept direction from adults who are largely deemed to possess the authority to guide them in their choices. They are quite adept at intellectualising texts and, to some extent, contexts, however they do not purport to engage in any real transformative social action, and they choose certain ‘trendy’ social causes to ‘support’ at least in theory. They do not seem inclined to problematise their own practices or investments, nor do they show evidence of understanding the subjectification processes which have led them to their current beliefs, actions and values. (Ryan, 2007, p. 259) Why are the above students academically sophisticated, yet their thinking ultimately stops short of action to challenge inequalities in their locality, nation or world? Why does risking one’s identity and shifting away from the subject positions one currently occupies not happen, even when students and teachers are aware of the battles precariously fought by past social movements? Is not-thinking otherwise, and particularly not-thinking that

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a post-critical context may be one where a history of inequalities reorganizes and sustains itself, an artefact of the ‘success’ of ‘previous’ social movements? It is more accurate to say – as Ryan (2007) alludes – that critical action can become unthinkable for both privileged and oppressed students partly because of the changing nature of how ‘oppression’ is considered applicable to Self and Others within ‘benevolent, liberal’ States. Given the shift towards minimal government and strong individualization across Western contexts, evidence across these contexts suggests the late modern Self as somewhat disembedded from stable, traditional family and work structures, and constructed via a DIY project of mobility, reflexivity and ‘risk’ negotiation (Giddens, 1991; Lupton and Tulloch, 2001; Adams, 2003; O’Connor, 2008). Scholars have also elaborated on the difficulties that have arisen since the notion of ‘struggle’ inserted itself into popular and political discourses, leading to the regular eclipse of racialized, classed and gendered identities internationally (Butler, 1990; Mac an Ghaill, 1996; Fraser, 1997a; Skeggs, 1997; Meade, 2005). Critical scholars often argue that action on redistribution of resources along class lines has been decoupled from, and sometimes substituted by (a thin form of) diversity recognition (Mac an Ghaill, 1996; Fraser, 1997a; Bryan, 2010). For example, contemporarily ‘popular’ feminism – when not the subject of backlash – often finds itself attached to the individual entitlement ideology of consumerism. Feminism can thus become diluted and less capable of reaching the experiences of, for example, working-class women who might, perhaps understandably, align themselves with male counterparts along class lines alone (Skeggs, 1997). If variously social(ist) ideas and identities can be commodified, elided or have their meaning narrowly reduced by gaining people’s consent (Apple, 2004b), it is perhaps unsurprising that the espousal of opinion in popular Western media can often be characterized by conservatism, casual and overt racism and the claims of the ‘endangered majority’ (Skeggs, 1997; McRobbie, 2004; Cox, 2010; Gillborn, 2010). But while consent to these processes may often be ‘given’ by the marginalized and benefited from by the privileged, the need for, and the presence of critical reflexivity is never far off, both at grassroots and in critical scholarship. This chapter emerged from a wish to honour and parallel the work of two writers that were formative in my understandings of ‘being critical’: Paulo Freire’s original Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), and the recent writings of Judith Butler. While having developed from quite different geographical, political and academic contexts historically, the work of these scholars returns us to important questions about the parameters of material and political desire, that is, how ‘what we care about’ may lead us

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to maintain or risk changing our identities, by variously being unaware of, ignoring, or critically engaging with multiple, unequal cultural and material conditions to transformative ends. In the forthcoming section, as part of the initial process of ‘being critical’, I name some of the factors behind the contemporary macrolevel management of educational subjects’ conditions and the dis/placement of their desires. While these analyses are well rehearsed internationally (e.g. Mac an Ghaill, 1996; Apple, 2004b), I particularly discuss examples of Irish State discourses of inclusion that are premised on managerial approaches. The analysis does not imply that those experiencing school or society are at any stage passive in having their desires reconstructed. Rather, as I assert in the second and third sections, subjects operate on the basis of a constrained agency, drawing upon available, often contradictory discursive resources that variously align them with, or render them outside of the goals of education processes (Butler, 1997; Youdell, 2006). I particularly draw upon Freire’s ideas about objectivism, subjectivity and ‘problem-posing’ in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and link them with Butler’s ‘troubling’ of the ways in which subjectivities multiply are made desirable, intolerable or put at risk ontologically, physically and emotionally at micro- and macrolevels (Butler, 1990, 1998, 2004, 2005; Freire, 1996b). These ideas are applied at various points to an array of different and troubling problems (which are, admittedly, limited to metropolitan, Anglophone contexts). The purpose of these analyses is to build towards a post-structural reading of critical learning, which involves the shared transformation of uncertain Selves. Rethinking prevailing ‘at risk’ discourses of the marginalized and excluded, I conclude by arguing that educators and learners must be supported to risk the certainty of their identities and world-views, and take action in the contexts that produce the ‘at risk’ subjects of contemporary schooling and society.

Managing Inequality: Substituting, Essentializing and Tacitly Blaming, Rather Than Ending the Need for Struggle As already noted, a well-rehearsed problematic of contemporary critical scholarship is that transnational forms of governance offer Others (e.g. certain minorities and the marginalized) limited forms of life quality, labour and recognition, while at the same time deferring a focus on resource and privilege distribution (Fraser, 1997b; Apple, 2004b; Meade, 2005). A prominent example of this in contemporary Irish life is the turning

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of community and voluntary social movements (trade union members, LGBTQ organizing, environmentalists) into a professionalized, fundingdependent pillar of Irish State ‘social partnership’. This process, rather than strengthening these movements’ political ‘clout’, arguably substituted it with a precarious form of State recognition, well before recession triggered in late 2008 (Meade, 2005). Government austerity measures in the wake of global and domestic crises have seen such struggles – which, by this time were somewhat ‘sectoralized’ – become disposable to the State. Cox (2010) asserts: We have seen, for several years now, a process whereby inconvenient groups have been shut down, shut up or assimilated into the State, across many different ‘sectors’ (because the State strategically stands above these sectors, and is happy to reorganise them when it suits). Thus if we think of the Equality Authority, Community Workers Coop, the Centre for Public Inquiry, Amnesty International, Pavee Point, AfrI, the Community Development Projects and so on we can remember a series of different interventions which have all been directed at silencing whatever vestiges of independent action and voice our organisations retained. This process started before the financial crisis, but the crisis provides a wonderful excuse to generalise it. (Cox, 2010, p. 8) The disposability of social movements is in no small part attributable to, and rationalized via a sustained history of attempts by Irish State institutions to ‘fix’ the subjects of social and educational inequalities, rather than enter meaningful dialogue with ‘them’. The managerial impulse to ‘fi x’ may often be well intentioned, and may deploy the language of equality, care and inclusion, but it can be ultimately exclusionary in its effect. For example, O’Sullivan (2005) discusses how a folk-moral construct of ‘fairness’ in the 1960s drove efforts to abolish Irish second-level school fees. Two other factors were implicit in this drive: ‘distant others’ as the target of moral concern, and ‘sponsorship’ as the principal of intervention by society (2005, p. 249). However, from the 1960s to recent years, the rhetoric of ‘equality of access to education’ in Ireland has been articulated at the same time as, while placed secondary to, a little-contested view of education as providing human capital for the open Irish economy (O’Sullivan, 2005). As the first figures on educational underachievement were produced after second-level school fees were abolished, the Otherness of working-class families and students became constructed, rather than challenged, by the emerging education regime.

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Most publicly, it accorded a special position to those on the edge of society, ‘hard cases’, furthest removed from a normalised ‘us’. Structurally, it operated as an orientation to establish educational inequality as the exclusive experience of ‘distant others’, those so different from ‘us’ as to be almost unknowable. (O’Sullivan, 2005, p. 251) Constantly substituting tokenism for meaningful dialogue, the prioritization of industry over equality has gained hegemonic status in Ireland leading to the disregard of the notion of equality of condition in education (Baker and Lynch, 2005). The absence of a political focus on unequal educational outcomes was quite pointedly obvious at another key moment in recent Irish education history: few lessons were learned about travellers’ exclusion as the Irish education system experienced mass inward migration (Kitching, 2010). Bryan (2010) characterizes Celtic Tiger Ireland’s recent embracing of ‘multicultural’ policies as a corporate version of multiculturalism, which celebrates immigrants ‘so long as they are seen to advance the national interest’. This version of multiculturalism ‘implicitly construct(s) . . . those who are deemed illegitimate and undeserving of the nation’s self-perceived generosity as “Other”’ (Bryan, 2010, p. 254). Freire argued: To substitute monologue, slogans, and communiqués for dialogue is to attempt to liberate the oppressed with the instruments of domestication. Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects which must be saved from a burning building; it is to lead them into the populist pitfall and transform them into masses which can be manipulated. (1996b, p. 47) The ‘moral technology’ of managerial regimes (Ball, 1990) substitutes dialogue by dissimulating not only through institutional organization (e.g. assessment regimes and accountability exercises), but also through the affective relations that forms part of the mutual shaping of institution and identity at the microlevel. For example, rather than ask risky questions about the causes of racist institutional outcomes, the ‘good’ institution encourages its practitioners to reflect on – using (white) ethnocentric rationality – tamer issues such as ‘what percentage of the staff is black?’ (Gilroy, 2002).1 At the same time that Western institutional policies focus on and compel ‘happy’ minority educators and learners, border, asylum and security policies often stoke fears about immigrant and the terrorist Other, and assign responsibility for institutional racism to ‘structure’, instead of

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to practices (Gilroy, 2002; Youdell, 2006; Pilkington, 2008; Ahmed, 2009). From the student and family perspective, central to the maintenance of ‘good’, ‘educated’ subjectivity through schooling in liberal States is active risk-avoidance: appropriately acting one’s place within prevailing discourses of inclusion and meritocratic participation. This is evident in the literature on class strategies: the privileged learn to objectify curricular knowledge as a commodity, mobilize various forms of capital around appropriate qualifications, and demonstrate appropriate and respectable forms of affect and care (Skeggs, 1997; Ball, 2003a; Lynch and Moran, 2006; O’Brien, 2008). Blame for underachievement, and discourses of deficiency are never far away from, and indeed may be made possible alongside the construction of the ‘good’ citizen, family or student. Within these discursive climes, well-meaning educators often revert to culturalist and determinist explanations for the enduring, or ‘fi xed underachievement’ of certain social groups, rather than focus upon reshaping the curriculum and teaching and assessment mechanisms, or politicizing policy more broadly (Gillborn and Youdell, 2000; Kitching, 2011). The manner in which the ‘objectification’ of the oppressed may lead to their popular ‘manipulation’ (Freire, 1996b) is palpable in popular, non-dialogical politics of redefining and contesting ‘who is marginalized’. Examples of this manipulation internationally include the ‘crisis of masculinity’ surrounding boys’ achievement in Britain and Ireland (Epstein et al., 1998; McWilliams, 2006), the concerns of ‘white worrier’ Australians about immigration (Bulbeck, 2004), and fears over British white workingclass boys’ achievement, which trump a focus on black and minority ethnic students (Gillborn, 2010). The articulation of the fears of the ‘endangered majority’ (Gillborn, 2010) are not predictable, and neither do they have to name the Other in overtly negative terms. For example, white workingclass students were recently portrayed in the UK media as victims of the State’s pandering to minority ethnic groups (Gillborn, 2010). At the same time, the immigrant (or new minority ethnic) Other was heralded by an Irish government minister as an example for Irish working-class students, drawing on a recent national study (Smyth et al., 2009). Praise for new migrant students in Ireland in this instance arguably deferred attention from a finding in the report that most of these students attend disadvantaged schools (Kitching, 2010). As a response to the broad effects of managerialism and politics of majority victimhood, scholars informed by post-structural ideas have turned their attention to the ways in which the singular, discrete identity claims made by Civil Rights and community struggles (working class, gay,

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woman, ethnic) ‘circulate in mainstream and hegemonic discourses and in so doing, may well act against the interests of the individual and groups so named’ (Youdell, 2006, p. 28). The multifaceted, emotional and messy nature of identity uncovered by this field serves as a caution about the unexpectedly exclusionary effects of recent political struggles. But it also serves as an opportunity to destabilize contexts where ‘benevolent’ macrologics and micropolitics constantly attempt to define, limit and manipulate the terms of identity. In the next section, I use Butler’s and Foucault’s ideas about power and subjectivation as helpful in understanding the contemporary domestication and substitution of radical, critical projects by macrolevel policy, in popular discourse and at the personal, subjective level (Butler, 1990, 1997, 2008).

Living a Viable Life: A Process of Coming to Know Ourselves and Experiencing Desires in Multiple and Ongoing Ways Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) was an important text in demonstrating the counterproductive logic of political struggle that assumes a selforiginating, singular and united identity as its basis. In this book, Butler posits that ‘feminist theory has assumed that there is some existing identity, understood through the category of woman, who not only initiates feminist interests and goals within discourse, but constitutes the subject for whom political representation is pursued’ (1990, p. 2). Post-structural thinkers often argue that foundational identity categories (woman, race, class) are ‘saturated with the effects of power and prejudice’, and, as MacLure (2003) explains, such thinkers assert that ‘productive social change will not take place if these categories are kept beyond question’ (MacLure, 2003, p. 181). The reason why these categories may be to some degree politically self-defeating, or constrained rather than simply emancipatory has to do with our understanding of power: in Foucault’s terms, the notion of power as sovereign or ‘possessed’ may account for the workings of State legal regulations and protections for social movements. However, it more fundamentally masks the productive (rather than simply coercive) nature of power: practices at the level of the institution normalize, classify and hierarchize subjects: one comes to know oneself through the prevailing discursive frames that make certain forms of subjectivity possible (Butler, 1997). Butler’s (2008) discussion of the recent Dutch immigration application test provides us with an example of how supposedly protective forms of juridicial/legal power interact with disciplinary power. The test asks its

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citizens to identify whether they accept or do not accept an overt display of ‘homosexuality’, a question that may raise multiple issues of faith and values for certain immigrants. Butler’s discussion demonstrates how, in a context of frequent, overtly anti-Semitic political sentiment, this test may not tell the full story about exactly ‘progressive’ it is, as it masks the guiding discursive underpinnings of identification processes. This apparently antihomophobic question homogenizes sexual minorities by the ‘fact’ of their sexuality, and masks the structuring of majority–minority sexual relations and the intersectional nature of religion, sexuality, gender and class (as all four might relate to family and migrant status in determining one’s life conditions). In this instance, the use of a signifier of ‘homosexuality’ (two men kissing) both constitutes and infers a foreclosed, ‘acceptable’ form of sexuality which itself becomes a precondition through which exclusions of ‘Others’ may occur. This example emphasizes the point that modern Selfhood, political representation and asylum are heavily dependent on identification with/through fixed, oppositional, decontextualized and normative criteria. Politics on the basis of identity are never finitely emancipatory, as they do not refer to a priori, self-originating social groups whose ways of life and means of identification are singular or foreclosed. Thus, the law does not simply become confronted with the subjects it purports to represent: those represented or seeking representation are, as stated above, already ‘saturated with the effects of power’ (MacLure, 2003, p. 181). Butler’s (2008) analysis of this test is not mired in a culturalist ontology which presupposes eternal, inescapable clashes between religious beliefs and sexual practices. Rather, it shows how appropriate (homo)sexuality is presented and manipulated to the effect of possibly excluding immigrants living out a particular belief system (a system which in turn is embedded in a range of other cultural and material conditions). She does not suggest that State recognition of homosexuality is always simply ‘progressive’ or helpful to all ‘gay’ subjects, nor the reverse, that non-recognition in other States is simply backward. Butler’s (2008) point is, it seems, that even a previously radical claim for (homo)sexuality, when predicated on a notion of a prediscursive, abiding self that is somehow free from the effects of power, always risks becoming appropriated within, or used towards foreclosing upon the State’s definition of what is a viable, desirable life. If the schemes of recognition that are available to us are those that ‘undo’ the person by conferring recognition, or ‘undo’ the person by withholding recognition, then recognition becomes a site of power by which the human is differentially produced. This means that to the extent that

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desire is implicated in social norms, it is bound up with the question of power and with the problem of who qualifies as the recognizably human and who does not. (Butler, 2004, p. 2) The concept of subjectivation suggests that rather than being intrinsically, or at times biologically acceptable, individuals come to recognize themselves through, and become attached to, legal, cultural and material conditions and rationales that are never entirely of their choosing. The practice of everyday life thus involves making oneself coherently and appropriately intelligible, often in ways that are difficult, and often in ways that go unnoticed (Butler, 1997; Youdell, 2006). The vexing terms of identity are both material and symbolic: importantly, Butler’s thinking refutes the idea that any form of struggle, particularly queer struggle, is ‘merely cultural’, that is, that it is divorced from issues of class and political economy (Butler, 1998).2 However, as the previous section contends, popular and political ways of understanding nationality, class, gender, religion, sexuality, and so forth often objectifies and opposes these ‘aspects’ of Selfhood, rather than viewing them as carefully integrated, and choreographed and politicized in different ways, at different times. Jeong-eun Rhee, a Korean-born scholar now living in the United States demonstrates the complexity, historicity and inevitably contradictory nature of everyday Selfhood. Rhee (2008) reflects below on the violence in variously being subject to an overtly racist rant on the street: ‘Chinese go home.’ It is worth quoting this piece at length, to note how she also notes that she identifies ambiguously with the marker ‘Chinese’ in order to become agentic as ‘Other’ in the United States: ‘Chinese, go home.’ To become or be affiliated with being Chinese, or for that matter, Japanese, Asian, or a person of color in the US as part of my identity, I must set aside my recognition of continuing/historical imperial domination on Korean nation by these ‘names’, Chinese, Japanese and American. What this means is that, for example, while I know that the US atomic bombing Hiroshima in 1945 was a significant force for Korean nation to gain its independence from Japan’s more than brutal colonial ruling, I now question the ethical dimension of atomic bombing, mourn for the loss of those people’s lives in Hiroshima, who in fact were the colonizers of my grandparents and parents. Also I am outraged by the Japanese and Japanese American Internment Camp set up during WWII in US territory. In another example, while I know that Korea’s partition was established mainly due to Cold War ideology interventions of

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the US, China and Russia, I become Chinese in the US and am outraged by Russian women trafficking in Korea. The identities and histories of Japanese, Chinese and American become more than what I used to know and merge with who I am. What this means is that I both remember the insurmountable heterogeneities and violent histories within and recognize the necessity of this political fiction of Asian that imagines solidarity against racism in US society. I painfully de-scribe my identity formed by oppositional Korean nationalist discourse to in-scribe my new identity as Asian. The process of de-scribing and in-scribing generates a palimpsest identity that is messy, responds to intertwined multiple histories, and addresses contradictory (dis)continuities of my subjective location. (Rhee, 2008, p. 32) Rhee’s (2008) analysis affirms the idea that the terms of identity are vexed, contradictory, never fully our own and are open to contestation and manipulation (Butler, 2004; Youdell, 2006). Yet possibly also as a privileged academic, Rhee’s highly complex analysis reiterates the point that structurally organized social positions (e.g. social class) ‘enable or limit our access to cultural, economic and symbolic capital and thus the ability to recognize ourselves as the subject positions we occupy’ (Skeggs, 1997, p. 13). Rhee’s (2008) complex reading above also suggests that (e.g. anti-racist) action is always constrained, as we never escape the material, cultural and historical conditions that offer us certain subjective locations (Ahmed, 2004). But the difficulty in gaining literacy about the complex constraints operating on variously oppressed subjects does not imply fatalism, nor that singular identity forms (e.g. race, class gender) should be returned to, as those who assume an abiding, ‘core’ selfhood and a need for ‘undivided’ class-based resistance might suggest (Butler, 1998). The argument here is that a confrontation of the historically opaque, shifting and contradictory nature of how we continuously ‘come to know’ our Selves provides the basis of analysing and transforming material and cultural realities. Highlighting the notion that power produces speaking subjects as well as coerces them, critical post-structuralists argue that we find our critical voice(s), and our ability to contest, disrupt and interrupt within the ways we come to know ourselves, and the truths generated on, around and ‘by’ us: The ways in which humans ‘give meaning to experience’ have their own history. Devices of ‘meaning production’ – grids of visualization, vocabularies, norms and systems of judgement – produce experience; they are not themselves produced by experience. (Rose, 2000, p. 312)

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Being ‘subject’ can be thought about as a shared condition that may sustain or challenge unequally shared privileges and realities. Resistance does not return us to requiring, or constructing finitely identifiable selves; much in the same way that Freire’s ‘banking’ educator cannot ever possess the entire field of knowledge on which his or her violent attachment to authority is spuriously built. This points us neither towards nihilism, nor towards subjectivism, but towards the fundamental Self–Other relation between humans (Freire, 1996b). Butler urges us to confront the ‘unfreedom at the heart of our relations’ (Butler, 2005, p. 91): The ‘I’ has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation – or sets of relations – to a set of norms . . . the ‘I’ is always to some extent dispossessed by the social conditions of its emergence. . . . This dispossession does not mean that we have lost the subjective grounds for ethics. On the contrary, it may well be the condition for moral enquiry, the condition under which morality itself emerges. (Butler, 2005, pp. 7–8) A confrontation of this unfreedom, which is a space in need of perpetual liberation, can be performed by analysing, for example, the ways in which gender/sex/desire relations are organized and actively cohered to, to offer us certain truths about male/female/trans Others (Butler, 1990); or the continuously changing ways in which ‘the black man’ is always black ‘in relation to the white man’ (Fanon, 1992, p. 220). Questioning how we come to know ourselves as fixed and non-contradictory is, as Butler (2005, above) might have it, not an abdication of responsibility for our actions, but the very grounds for responsibility and action. It is this relationality, or notion of ‘becoming’, but not ‘becoming the oppressor’ that is at the core of Freirean pedagogy to my mind; where the critically reflexive educator invites and is invited by critical students to dialogue, take action, and seek limitless lines of inquiry about the effects of such action. Critical questions that may arise in this openly contested and deliberately uncertain terrain may include the following: 1. When, where, and how are we made – and how do we come to know ourselves as – viable subjects? 2. How do desire, consent and our dismissal of objective inequalities defer our engagement with critical transformation and reflection? 3. When does collective, oppositional struggle become homogenizing and exclusionary, and return us to oppressive models of power-aspossession?

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4. How does the modern State recognize and further narrow the cause of struggle(s)? I find Rhee’s (2008) suggestion that critical learning must involve taking ‘risks’ with our attachments to our Selves particularly helpful. Rhee (2008) argues in the context of anti-racist praxis that there should be space within learning situations to reflect upon ‘not how we build us-ness in relation to them-ness but how we build a community/relation that does not desire oneness but sustains the disjunction and still engages with the practice of antiracism’ (p. 36). I have deliberately positioned the term ‘care’ alongside ‘risk’ in the title of this chapter to foreground the affective dimensions that are at the core of a fear of risking, or letting go of a form of thinking, and of identity that relies upon always discrete, finite self/other dichotomies. ‘Risk-taking’ should be done in the context of praxis that is reflective of human relationality, and in pursuit of equality of love, care and solidarity (Baker and Lynch, 2005). In order to underline and reinforce the shared nature of ‘risky’ transformative learning, it is important to contest the ways individuals may unknowingly take up identities within regimes of truth about ‘risk’ that make them individually responsible for the dangers (of ontological, physical and emotional marginality) to which they ‘expose themselves’ (Giddens, 1991; Lupton, 1999). By placing the notion of subjectivation as central to critical thinking about risk, the marginalized might be collectively supported to ‘take risks’ in order to challenge the material and cultural conditions that constantly put them ‘at risk’.

From ‘Being’ at Individual Risk to ‘Doing Risk’ Collectively as Subjects Those involved in discussions about ‘at risk’ populations in our society often strategically deploy these truths in order to help the State learn ‘what is best’ and where to further intervene on its subjects. Contemporary Irish participants in regimes of truth about ‘risk’ include the charity Children At Risk Ireland, and Focus Ireland, who, at the time of writing, claim that the country is ‘at risk’ from entrenched homelessness (Hough, 2010). Such well-intentioned claims can fail to name these regimes that, for example, constitute persons as insurance, epidemological and clinical risks (Lupton, 1999), and subject them to discrete identity categories in order to profile at a distance, to exclude or to ‘fi x’. Notions of being ‘at risk’ are of course, differently experienced and resisted. Lupton and

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Tulloch (2001) demonstrate this point by examining the ways migrants to Australia come to construct themselves as subjects of risk as they cross borders (in this case, between nations, identities and cultures). Analysing a number of different subjective experiences, the authors demonstrate how risk is ‘contingent on differences of time, space, age, gender, class, sexual preference and other aspects of ‘culture’ and ‘context’. Politically speaking, it is one’s legitimacy in particular places at particular times that might be more fundamentally ‘at risk’ (e.g. for those in poverty, seeking asylum, dropping out of school, suffering with HIV), and the intention to care can be readily undercut by everyday, unreflective assumptions of where responsibility for one’s life lies. Developing liberatory practices with those currently (or previously) close to physical and material harm requires first supporting ‘them’ to come to know how mundane, everyday contexts, that is, material conditions and cultural and linguistic tools, provide the terms of their emergence and identity. Scholars are always finding ways of demonstrating how those ‘at risk’ both intentionally and unintentionally expose, or interrupt the often difficult, sometimes dangerous, but ultimately non-necessary nature of their exclusion. Focusing on the everyday school context, Youdell (2004) discusses moments in Sydney and London classrooms where two teenage boys are designated – both by injurious speech acts and the physical distancing of their classmates – as ‘denigrated, Other homosexual’. Both acts ‘simultaneously and implicitly constitute the hetero-masculinities’ of the injurers (2004, p. 484). A number of discourses are drawn upon to reinforce a bounded hetero-masculinity, and to render certain practices and ‘attributes’ as outside of its boundaries. These include, with respect to ‘Ian’, his: Perceived high ‘ability’; his ambiguous (un)physicality; his adherence to aspects of uniform rejected by other boys; and his primary (friendship) with (one other) boy . . . all practices which seep beyond the bounds of legitimate hetero-masculinity. (Youdell, 2004, p. 485) The practised embedding of the above ‘attributes’ as marginal to acceptable notions of male sexuality and gender identity put those who intentionally or tacitly trouble its coherence at ontological, physical and emotional risk. However, Youdell (2004) demonstrates moments where Ian, and another boy, ‘Scott’ draw upon ‘pop-gay’ discourses in ways that are unexpected and thus breach the boundaries of meanings circumscribing their peer-level context. The point is that these practices are possible, albeit at

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the risk of further rebuke, injury and delegitimization by classmates who constantly attempt to enact an unambiguous, abiding hetero-masculinity. Drawing on Youdell’s thinking, I analyse in Kitching (2011) how the classed and gendered norms circumscribing ‘pro-school’ and ‘resistant’ subjectivities are brittle and non-necessary, but are constantly reinforced and may be worked to accommodate newly local racializations (in a previously ‘monocultural’ Dublin school). I discuss ‘Theresa’, a quiet white-Moldovan student, who is accidentally exposed as ‘foreign’ to classmates, who presume her to be Irish, during the course of a history lesson. I suggest that Theresa previously safely passed under the radar of her peers, rendered the very embodiment of the ‘good girl’ through already-embedded school discourses which view her white skin as unremarkable, and consider her ‘ordinary hetero-feminine’ (acceptable learner, ordinary classmate) behaviour mundane. The moment of her recognition as ethnic Other provides a key opportunity for her teacher and classmates to acknowledge and explore issues of the (white) body, Christian name, and accent as they relate to an unmarked white-Irishness. Instead, even though the scene of Theresa’s ‘exposure’ took place within a history lesson on racism and Nazi oppression in Europe, this accidental moment of rupture was lost to discourses of docile hetero-femininity: in short, students reverted to tacitly thinking about Theresa as ‘unremarkable’. In the above paper, I suggest that prevailing discourses mark femininity and leave whiteness unmarked continuing to provide some form of safe space for Theresa to ‘pass’, and be semi-intelligible in the wider school as an Irish girl. However, these prevailing understandings, and Theresa’s intentional/unintentional use of them, simultaneously left the ongoing injuries attached to the educational and social Othering of Eastern European students along various axes within the school unchallenged. Is this commentary unfair on Theresa? Returning us to the centrality of affect in maintaining particular realities, vulnerable subjects are likely to experience Freire’s ‘fear of failure’ when faced with the notion of shared, mutual transformation. Indeed, taking risks is often likely to result in the continued wounding of those closest to harm (at least until transformation occurs). But if the oppressed adopt similarly ‘self-involved’ strategies as the oppressor, such as risk-avoidance and short-term compromise, only a minority can possibly flourish, and possibly approximate the ‘desirable subjectivity’ privileged by the status quo (see Apple, 2004b). Thus, ‘their responsibility’, as Freire might have it, is always to provisionally name and pursue the complexity of multiple entangled oppressions, past and (past within the) present. Butler (2005) suggests, via Levinas, that the

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responsibility to challenge persecution lies in recognizing the condition, not only of ‘being persecuted’ at rational, conscious level, but, again, the shared condition of being subject : Persecution is precisely what happens without the warrant of any deed of my own. And it returns us not to our acts and choices but to the region of existence that is radically unwilled, the primary, inaugurating impingement on me by the Other, one that happens to me, paradoxically, in advance of my formation as a ‘me’. (p. 85) As already stated, neither Theresa (above), Ian (above, in Youdell, 2004) nor others placed at momentary or ongoing risk of harm should not take individual ‘risk-taking’ responsibility as/for the oppressed: it is highly necessary that a critical pedagogy would provide a space for troubling and taking risks with subjectivity as curriculum , and to expect that ‘professional’ teachers and ‘good’ students might have to risk changing subjective location as part of this mutual, transformative process. As part of a troubling their attachment to traditional teacher–student power relations, educators must also engage with their inscribed affective investments, with the history of interrelated assumptions that draw them to the work, and the routines, cultures and procedures that they construct their personhood from (Kitching, 2009). But they might never entirely own or let go of an educator’s identity, as ‘being critical’ means, to reiterate, seeing intersubjectivity as the grounds for our responsibility towards the circumstances of (student) Others (Butler, 2005).

Conclusion: Moving from ‘Being at Risk’ to ‘Doing’ Risk and Causing Trouble The preceding sections argue for the necessity of critical learning that is focused on context, relationality and the multiple hierarchical and historically complex nature of subjection(s). The ideas expressed above challenge us to continuously rupture and interrupt racialized, classed, gendered, religioned and sexualized norms that inhere between and within institutions, understandings of bodies and our Selves. They are not incompatible with questioning who funds schools and to what degree, what the access and learner organization mechanisms are within schools, and with cultural critique and analysis of curricular texts. Nor does such Foucauldian-inspired thinking necessarily clash with, for example, Martha Nussbaum’s focus

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on fundamental human functioning and capabilities (see Olssen, 2003, for a comparison of Foucault, Nussbaum and others). Returning to Ryan’s (2007) dilemma at the beginning of the chapter, it is clear that successful learners’ attachments to individualized, competitive identity are strongly rooted, and that the risks associated with disturbing certain privileged locations will appear great to certain learners. Ryan (2007) demonstrates how the young people in the context of her research (i.e. State schooling in Queensland) are located in uneven ways at the intersection of ‘youth as trouble’ discourses, discourses of civic participation that focus on adults helping youth rather than asking them to help themselves, conservative discourses which derogate ‘ideology’ in Australian curricula, and watereddown ‘critical’ pedagogy discourses that are problematically reconciled with free market ideology. She discusses how an individualist agenda compels the students described at the outset of this chapter to invest heavily in self-regulation in order to succeed: These students are thus being rewarded by a school system that on the one hand mirrors broader social discourses of fast capitalism and selfpreservation, whilst on the other hand they are being encouraged to critique notions of power and think in ways that can enact change for a more just and equitable society. Further, they are negotiating a multiplicity of value systems regarding what is ‘acceptable’ or ‘cool’ in their lives. This seems to be difficult terrain for students to navigate, and it is understandable that these students provide contradictory accounts of their practices and beliefs. (Ryan, 2007, p. 259) Similar to the arguments presented in the second section, Ryan argues that interrogation of Self should take precedence above, or alongside interrogation of texts. As I have suggested, using Butler’s work, this notion of ‘troubling’ or risking how we come to know our Selves might be moved away from prevailing understandings which place responsibility for being ‘at risk’ with the individual. It might be reclaimed to refer to the collective challenging of the multifaceted, historically embedded danger of non-viability as acceptable persons that those at risk of harm and rejection face. Whether the practices that could follow are a risk that educators and learners in different contexts manage to take is entirely dependent on context, affect and hope. Certainly, to refuse, to think otherwise, and/ or to expose hegemonic conditions that professionalized/formalized education and social projects are implicated in would mean that one could be rendered/emerge as, a different, possibly officially less valued, possibly

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‘trouble-making’ kind of student, teacher, parent or citizen. We have learned in Ireland that he or she who interrupts the status quo, that is, the political and economic mainstream’s high point of desire-satiation and ‘flexible’ lifestyles in the early twenty-first century, may be/become an intolerable or almost unintelligible person in ‘respected’ schools and ‘learning societies’, positioned as negative, unwilling, risky or unworthy subjects by the gendered, classed and racialized norms governing ‘who’ can be seen as a helpful, appropriate or respectable ‘learner’, ‘professional’, or indeed ‘mother’. Nevertheless, it is imperative that a critical pedagogy encourages the oppressed to realize and constantly question how they come to know them Selves and how they are known. In practice, they must move from ‘being’ risk to ‘doing’ risk, and causing trouble as part of a mutual, shared process of humanization.

Acknowledgements This chapter is dedicated to the gombeen in the corner looking out the window, who he tells me, attended school in body only. My arrogant sense of entitlement is frequently demolished by his wit, which is/was to a large degree untainted by schooling. Deep thanks to Maeve O’Brien and to Andrew O’Shea for inviting me to contribute to this book. Thanks also to the scholars (particularly Deborah) that I have cited above who regularly get me ‘into trouble’.

Notes 1 Gilroy (2002) argues that this question suggests racism can be eradicated through efficient administration. 2 Butler (1998) notes that scholars like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy have made it quite acceptable to think ‘race’ is a modality through which class is lived and vice versa. She also notes that in wider academia, feminist struggles are seen as ‘sometimes economic and sometimes cultural’ (1998, p. 38). Butler demonstrates how the cultural is always already material by refuting the idea that queer struggles are the ‘furthest divorced’ from issues of class and political economy. She considers multiple ways in which the US lesbians and gays are excluded from state-legislated notions of family ‘which is, according to both tax and property law, an economic unit’, and how denial of citizenship, denial of the right to speak one’s desire in the military, denial of the right to make emergency medical decisions about one’s dying lover, to receive the property of one’s dead lover, to receive from the hospital the body of one’s dead lover, and so on, ‘mark the ‘holy family’ once again, ‘constraining the routes by which property interests

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are regulated and distributed’ (1998, p. 40). Butler (1998) asks ‘is this simply the circulation of vilifying cultural attitudes or do such disenfranchisements mark a specific operation of the sexual and gendered distribution of legal and economic entitlements ? . . . Even if one takes the “redistribution” of rights and goods as the defining moment of political economy, as (Nancy) Fraser does, how is it we might fail to recognize how . . . operations of homophobia are central to the functioning of political economy? Given the distribution of health care in (the US), is it really possible to say that gay people do not constitute a differential “class”, considering how the profit-driven organization of health care and pharmaceuticals impose differential burdens on those who live with HIV and AIDS?’ (pp. 40–41, my emphases).

Chapter 7

A Post-Modernist Rendering of Freire’s Educational Vision? Some Reflections on the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Jones Irwin

Introduction The discipline of the philosophy of education, since the 1970s rooted in a specific strand of Anglo-American analytical thought, began in the 1990s to manifest signs of more internal dissensus and conflict. Primarily, this was due to an increasing influence of French and German Continentalist thinking on education theory, first in sociology and then in philosophy, for example, the work of Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard, respectively. In the United Kingdom, this evolution of the discipline was being led by thinkers such as Paul Standish and Nigel Blake who applied the insights of the theoretical work to the particular (changing) context of British education.1 The previously dominant analyticity and neo-Kantianism no longer seemed relevant in the context of an increasingly powerful politicization of education. In the United States, this insight, under the guise of the ‘Critical Pedagogy’ movement, was being led by figures such as Peter McLaren, bell hooks, Douglas Kellner and Henry Giroux,2 and sought to answer the analogous needs of the increasing complexification of American youth and urban culture, as they impacted on education. The key intellectual influence on the US Critical Pedagogy movement, if not on the UK strand, was unequivocally Paulo Freire.3 In this chapter, I want to look at the nature of this influence and at Freire’s relevance to the contemporary analysis of education and culture, most especially as these relate to the politicization of education and culture. My particular focus in this chapter will be the problematic of youth culture, as it relates to the question of the authentic direction of Freire’s

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work. Through a foregrounding of the problematic of popular culture, subculture and their ‘dissident’ tendencies, we can see how Freire’s work has been developed in two related but distinct directions. In the first case, the Freirean approach has been developed by the aforementioned Critical Pedagogy, most notably through the work of Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren. However, I want to claim that an analysis of Freire’s work can also be seen as immensely significant in the UK context of education and this will be the primary focus of this chapter. Here, his Pedagogy of the Oppressed can be seen as connected to the evolution of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (hereafter CCCS),4 in its initial forays into adult education and then with regard to the study of youth subculture. This nexus of influence and evolution, which has looked back to Marx, Nietzsche and Gramsci5 among others, can be seen as developing, with significant degrees of tension, through the 1980s and 1990s work in philosophy of education, both in the United States and the United Kingdom. These respective developments of Freire’s work share signifi cant affinities but also manifest tensions with regard to their interpretations of Freire. This chapter will explore how the British example of the CCCS can be viewed as pushing beyond the limits of Freire’s work while maintaining important connections to the latter; such extension should not of course be seen as simply negative. In recent critical anthologies devoted to his work, Freire has acknowledged the need for such challenging of his own approach.6 However, criticism of both Freire and the developments of his work have come from other sources. One accusation posits that Critical Pedagogy has taken an unnecessarily ‘moralistic’ stance on popular culture and contemporary subcultures, especially those associated with youth.7 This would seem to be at odds with the spirit of Freire’s own work, which eschews formulaic or moralistic responses, in its emphasis on historicity. However, some commentators have argued that such ‘moralism’ or rigid essentialism is already present in Freire’s original work and is merely being mirrored in the Critical Pedagogy approaches. Another key aspect of such challenges to Freire and Freirean approaches concerns the relation between modernity and post-modernity. Freire’s work has conventionally been seen as a kind of modernist ‘emancipatory’ approach. However, with regard to the interpretations of both Critical Pedagogy and the CCCS, and especially the latter and the development of a recent British Continentalist Philosophy of Education, Freire’s work has arguably been pushed in a direction that is too accepting of the dictates of post-modernism. As we will see below, in his later work, Freire argues

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for what he terms a ‘progressive post-modernity’. However, the more or less wholehearted embracing of Foucauldian and Lyotardian discourse and politics by thinkers, such as Standish and Blake (as indeed also by later Hall), might be seen as betraying the more balanced perspective of Freire, who has always sought a rapprochement between the demands of an emancipatory modernism and a more ironical or deconstructive postmodernism.

Understanding the Analysis of the Birmingham CCCS8 In this section, I want to look at the work of the Birmingham CCCS, in some detail. My rationale here is that, as with Critical Pedagogy, we can see the Birmingham CCCS challenging the legacy of Freire’s original work in newer, post-modern times. As with Critical Pedagogy, the CCCS’s relation to Freire is not simple or unequivocal. However, an analysis of the respective affinities and disaffinities will, I think, be instructive for us here, most notably because the tensions manifested between the CCCS and Freire are related but significantly different from those of Critical Pedagogy. Here, I will concentrate on the work of two figures, although the work of the school is obviously more wide-ranging and arguably conflictual than this. I will look at the work of Stuart Hall and that of Paul Willis.9 Again, my analysis here will be very selective, only bearing on their relevance for my topic. It is arguable that Freire’s work has a clear and underestimated connection to thinkers such as Stuart Hall and the Birmingham CCCS, who are arguably more subtle in their analysis of the complexity of popular culture and subcultures than Critical Pedagogy, without losing sight of the need for clear political commitments and action. As Hall has put it: [H]ow a politics can be constructed which works with and through difference, which is able to build those forms of solidarity and identification which make common struggle and resistance possible but without suppressing the real heterogeneity of interests and identities, and which can effectively draw the political boundary lines without which political contestation is impossible, without fi xing those boundaries for eternity? (1996b, p. 55) It is the immense challenge of this ‘politics of difference’10 (Charles Taylor’s term) which Freire’s work genuinely confronts.

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If the initial work of the Birmingham CCCS from 1975, in Resistance thru Rituals (Hall et al., 1993), is very much focused on youth subcultures in postwar Britain, it soon develops into a more generalized analysis of the way hegemony is maintained, structurally and historically. The work of Stuart Hall especially can be seen as deepening the Gramscian insight11 that cultural or superstructural elements play a constitutive and not just a derivative role or reflexive role in the constitution of social and political life. Two of Hall’s essays are paradigmatic in this context, ‘The problem of ideology: Marxism without guarantees’ (Hall, 1996c) and ‘Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies’ (Hall, 1996a). The latter essay is important in this context because it is one of the clearest statements of the rationale behind the connection between Cultural Studies and Education from the 1970s onwards. Initially, this stemmed from the origins of the Cultural Studies movement in the Adult Education movement in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. Figures such as Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart explored the issue of ‘culture and education’ from the perspective of those groups or individuals who had been marginalized by the centralized education system and mainstream culture. In the essay ‘The problem of ideology: Marxism without guarantees’, Hall (1996c) points to certain problems in the more traditional concept of Marxist ideology, and he proposes a work of reconstruction that is not too predetermined by ritual orthodoxy. That is, away from an abstract theory of ideology and towards the more concrete analysis of how, in particular historical situations, ideas organize human masses, and create the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, and so on, which makes the work of Gramsci a figure of seminal importance. Ernesto Laclau, according to Hall (1996c), has demonstrated definitively the untenable nature of the proposition that classes, as such, are the subjects of fixed and subscribed class ideologies. He has also dismantled the proposition that particular ideas and concepts belong exclusively to one particular class; ideas and concepts do not occur in language or thought in that single isolated way with their content and reference irremovably fi xed. Hall’s essay ‘The problem of ideology: Marxism without guarantees’ (Hall, 1996c) establishes ‘the open horizon of Marxist theorising, the development and refinement of new concepts which alone is the sign of a living body of thought, capable still of engaging and grasping something of the truth about new historical realities’ (Hall, 1996c, p. 53). Alternative versions of culture, especially working-class culture, and education, especially adult education, were explored as a means of questioning the assumed principles of the centralized education system. Evolving out

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of this work in the 1970s, the Birmingham CCCS extended this new focus of attention to so-called youth culture. According to theorists such as Hall, Phil Cohen and Angela Mc Robbie,12 the explosive changes being wrought in society were creating an acute gap between two sets of groups, between adult and youth culture, each understood in a general sense. Second, this gap manifested itself within youth culture, between more mainstream youth and more marginalized, disaffected youth, who expressed their alienation through the formation of subcultures.13 The pedagogical significance of these subcultures and the relationship between youth alienation and education or schooling was a central concern of the Birmingham group from the beginning. Paul Willis (originally a doctoral student at the CCCS) develops Hall’s eclectic and radically democratic approach to the relationship between education, culture and society, while also maintaining a strong connecting spirit to the work of Paulo Freire, most especially in his seminal fi rst text, Learning to Labour (Willis, 1981). In particular, the emphasis on agency (or subjectivity), on the importance of creativity and on the continuing relevance of class (although now complexified and mediated by culture), is emphasized. Willis continues to evolve this analysis in his later works, Profane Culture (1978), Common Culture (1990) and The Ethnographic Imagination (2000). An important recent collection of essays on Willis, Learning to Labour in New Times (2004), with essays by significant thinkers such as Michael W. Apple and Stanley Aronowitz, demonstrates the continuing influence and legacy of Willis. Two contributions of his own to the volume (an essay and an interview) are significant here, as Willis seeks to recontextualize Learning to Labour (1977) in the light of his subsequent intellectual development (Willis, 2004). In these texts, there is a clear rapprochement between Willis’ and Freire’s work. In Learning to Labour in New Times , Aronowitz speaks of the ‘oppositional working-class culture’ foregrounded by Willis and its misapprehension by much contemporary educational and political discourse (especially of a Leftist kind). Willis teaches us that ‘what youth do is important; they are political actors and not simply dupes . . . Reproduction is never total’ (Willis in interview with Dolby et al., 2004, p. 1). Developing the notion of an irreducibility of human experience to class or ethnicity, Willis allows us to see moments of creativity or new possibilities within social and political situations, which many other commentators see as fatalistic. He also allows educational discourse to ‘decentre school’ and to develop policy from below. For Michael W. Apple, Willis puts forward not

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a representative model but a ‘disclosure model’ (Apple, 2004a, p. 53). He develops an innovative reading of the ‘complex social field of power’ and eschews (contra Althusser, Bourdieu and others) a ‘reductive and economistic reading of class’ (Apple, 2004a, p. 53). Willis allows us to focus on an anti-essentializing problematic, where a class analysis needs to return but as a ‘project’. Again, the connections and affinities to Freire’s work are striking.

Connecting Freire and the CCCS The importance of Cultural Studies can be seen as its refining of a Left Marxist perspective into the 1980s and 1990s, through a new emphasis on the interconnectedness of race, gender, sexuality and youth issues. It is possible to argue that it is precisely this ideological dimension of the work of the Birmingham school which has had the greatest impact on the rise of Critical Pedagogy (Giroux, 2000) as an attempt to analyse this same problematic in a more contemporary setting, and with more specific reference not simply to youth culture, but to youth in educational and school settings. However, as central figures in Critical Pedagogy continue to emphasize (Giroux, 2000), we must not lose sight of the genealogy of these issues in discourse and in the evolution of culture and society – otherwise, we risk tackling the present in an historical vacuum. Just as the Birmingham school looked back to figures such as Antonio Gramsci to develop their conception of the ‘organic intellectual’ who sought to connect academic research with the ‘real world’, so too the more recent work looks back to the example of Hall and others as paradigms of what intellectual work can achieve when it maintains a strong link to political and educational practice. This is intellectual work ‘as a practice which always thinks about its intervention in a world in which it would make some difference, in which it would have some effect’(Hall, 1996b, p. 257). The work of the Birmingham CCCS bequeathed a number of important unresolved questions to the analysts who followed.14 To what extent is ‘youth culture’ a symptom of underlying intergenerational tension and difficulties? Can we distinguish between better and worse versions of youth culture or youth subcultures, that is, ones more or less attuned to their participants’ well-being? What is the relation between this well-being of youth, or its lack, and the institutional educational contexts in which youth find themselves day-to-day, that is, how does school and education impact on the well-being or otherwise of youth?

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These issues were indicated and developed by the earlier CCCS but never resolved. The development of Critical Pedagogy in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s was an attempt to address these issues more directly and this movement was especially concerned with addressing what it saw as the intrinsic connection between education and the well-being of youth (Giroux, 2000), Critical Pedagogy, therefore, as its name suggests, was concerned to focus the insights of Cultural Studies on the school and the youth of the school. Alongside the influence of the CCCS, the work of Paulo Freire was crucial in the evolution of Critical Pedagogy, and here we see somewhat of a missing link – that between Freire and the Birmingham CCCS. From his initially most important text Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1970) right through to his work in the 1980s and early 1990s, such as Pedagogy of Hope (1992), Freire was convinced of the interconnectedness of school and culture, education and society. Moreover, in a manner similar to the feminists’ work in the CCCS, Freire worked out from the fundamental principle that the political is the personal – or the pedagogical is the personal. Developing insights from earlier existentialist thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Freire focused on how the evolution of contemporary society and education produced a culture of ‘sadism’(Freire, 1968) where the individual self becomes enculturated into treating all others as objects for its own use. The corollary of this sadism, however, is an underlying ‘masochism’ (Freire, 1968), a failure of the self to understand him- or herself and to properly relate to others in an authentic manner. Interpersonal relations become stultified in what Freire refers to powerfully as a culture of ‘necrophily’ or death. At the root of this problem, for Freire, is a system of education, which has developed into a pure instrumentalism – what he refers to as a ‘banking system’. Education, far from being a process of self-realization or ethical development, becomes an industry for points scoring and career development exclusively. Education becomes objectified and the individual students (and teachers) become objectified in turn. Although Freire’s work is initially in literacy education with adults, his later work turns its attention to education as such, and here it has significant similarity to the work which we have seen as central to the research of the CCCS. Both Freire and the CCCS are working out of a broadly defined neoMarxist perspective, sensitive to cultural change and youth, and critical of the negative impact of an instrumental educational and societal system that seems to alienate youth and subtract from their well-being. At the same time, the vision of both schools of thought is fundamentally optimistic and

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transformative, arguing for the responsibility and potential of each individual to enact change and progress in their particular situation. While cognizant of the macrodimension and its restrictions on individual agency, both Freire and the CCCS ultimately theorize from the microlevel of individual practices and individual temporalities or ‘history from below’ (Hall, 1996c).

Conclusion In Pedagogy of Hope, Freire calls for an attempt to ‘explain and defend progressive postmodernity’, saying his book ‘will reject conservative, neoliberal postmodernity’ (Freire, 1992). But he also makes clear that this represents a continuity with his earlier work: ‘The debates in which I shared in the 1970s are as current today . . . fear of freedom . . . the tyranny of liberty and the tyranny of authority . . . the urgency of the democratization of the public school’ (Freire, 1992, p. 6). Only a radical politics, he claims, not a sectarian one, however, but one that seeks a unity in diversity among progressive forces, could ever have won the battle for a democracy that could stand up to the power and virulence of the Right. Again stressing the need for an awareness of the dynamics of power in liberatory education, he says, ‘these [students] know more than we do’ (Freire, 1992, p. 7). At the same time, however, ‘a respect for the student’s ingenuousness does not mean that an educator must accommodate to their level of reading the world’ (Freire, 1992, p. 9); the bridge here must always be dialogue. My claim in this essay has been that Freire’s work leaves a complex legacy that must be adapted to new times and new challenges. Critical Pedagogy, so often seen as defining the neo-Freirean legacy, is very explicit in its debts to Freire and it develops an internally differentiated approach which varies from Giroux’s focus on youth culture, to McLaren’s interest in ‘resistance postmodernism’ to hook’s emphasis on feminism and a residual problem of patriarchal language in Freire (hooks, 1994). On the other side, we are faced with a less explicit rendering of the Freirean legacy in the British context, through the work of the CCCS. On one level, there is much connection between Critical Pedagogy and the CCCS, and the former continually refer to the influence of the latter on the development of their work (especially Giroux and McLaren). However, the problems here are somewhat different than with Critical Pedagogy. While beginning with a quite radical understanding of Gramscian politics, it is arguable that the CCSS, and most especially the work of the later Hall develops in a

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strongly post-modernist dimension (under the influence of Derrida, 1982, among others). Here, in contrast to the problem of Critical Pedagogy being too rigid, it might be argued that the CCCS betray their Gramscian and Freirean roots in the United Kingdom, becoming possibly too assimilated into a post-modern discourse (what McLaren refers to as ‘ludic postmodernism’). By the same token, the CCSS powerfully demonstrates the importance of new ways of seeing and new ways of perceiving, Freire’s ‘new saying’. In their very radicality towards culture and post-modernism, they perhaps provoke Critical Pedagogy to become less rigidified and moralistic. Conversely, Critical Pedagogy challenges the CCCS to become less culturalist, perhaps less ‘ludicly’ post-modernist. It would seem to be in this very dialogical encounter between the CCCS and Critical Pedagogy that Freire’s legacy is both eminently manifested and repeatedly put to the test of the most insistent demands of the contemporary epoch.15

Notes 1 Nigel Blake et al., The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Education (Oxford: Blackwells, 2003). 2 On Critical Pedagogy, see, for example, Henry Giroux, Breaking in to the Movies (New York: Routledge, 2000). 3 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (London: London, 1968). 4 For the CCCS, see, for example, Stuart Hall et al. (eds), Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (London: Routledge, 1993). 5 For an excellent discussion of Gramsci relevant to the discussion here, see Stuart Hall, ‘Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity’, in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996). 6 See Paulo Freire, ‘Foreword’ to Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter, ed. Peter McLaren and Peter Leonard (London: Routledge, 1992). 7 For an alternative to the Critical Pedagogy analysis of youth culture, see, for example, Larry Clark, ‘Interview’, in The Guardian , February 2007. Henry Giroux’s analysis of American youth culture is especially scathing of Clark’s film work. 8 Some of the following material is developed from a previous discussion of Freire and cultural studies in Maeve O’Brien (ed.), Well-Being and Post-Primary Schooling: A Review of the Literature and Research (Dublin: NCCA, 2008). 9 For Willis see N. Dolby et al. (with Paul Willis), Learning to Labour in New Times (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004). 10 Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in D. Goldberg (ed.), Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (London: Blackwell, 1994). 11 See Hall, ‘Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity’.

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12 For a representative sample of the diverse CCCS work, see Hall et al. (eds), Resistance through Rituals. 13 See Hall’s introduction to Hall et al. (eds), Resistance through Rituals. Perhaps the most powerful analyser from the CCCS of subculture was Dick Hebdige. See Dick Hebdige, ‘Post-modernism and the other side’, in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996). 14 Hall discusses this issue most cogently in ‘Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies’. 15 The analysis of Freire’s relation to Critical Pedagogy and postmodernism in this chapter is developed in Jones Irwin, Paulo Freire’s Philosophy of Education: Origins, Developments, Impacts and Legacies (Continuum, London, 2012).

Chapter 8

Rethinking Transformation in Light of Post-Modern Education: ‘Freire is Dead, Long Live Freire!’ Andrew O’Shea

Introduction: The ‘Why’ of the Hope of Education Freire has left a rich body of work, ideas reflected upon and recorded over an extended period of a long and fruitful life. The real character of this work, and the thinking expressed therein, emerges and takes shape during turbulent years of Latin American history. During that time, he defended, rephrased but never compromised on his core belief in liberation. Freire’s commitment to liberation, to overcoming oppression, was partly informed by his own felt complicity in an unjust world; ever mindful of the complexity of the structures that both generated and reproduced the conditions that stifle the human spirit and reinforce unjust institutions. In this he was as Peter McLaren points out to the forefront of a ‘dying class’ of modernist revolutionaries,1 who refused to be appropriated to just any radical cause, or indeed to be left misinterpreted. Speaking of one such tendency to misinterpret him in the early days Freire says it ‘failed to take into consideration two fundamental points: (1) that I had not died; (2) that I had not yet written Pedagogy of the Oppressed ’ (2008, p. 75).2 To avoid such error as he saw it he advised a careful reading of his work – one that would avoid downplaying the dialectical nature of the process of humanization and what might be described as the source of his profound identification with the oppressed (Freire, 2008, p. 75). Defending himself against the misunderstanding that trivialized the complexities of his praxis and placed him in the ‘blind ally of the narrow horizons of localization’, he says that he never rejects the universal (2008, p. 72). On the contrary, he maintains that the universal themes that emerge from the concrete investigations of local realities form the basis of the literacy programmes that always reach

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beyond the local. The real challenge for educators is to take serious the complexity of what often constitutes reality in concrete situations. Critical praxis requires that respect for ‘the culture of the peasant’ enables them to go beyond their beliefs – their own common sense; often rooted in a mythological world-view. What is unacceptable, Freire argues, ‘is the attempt to transcend it without starting with it or proceeding by way of it’ (2008, p. 70). This of course is to only underscore the difficulty of achieving an education that is also a humanization. The radical nature of his pedagogy is rooted in a defence of the dreams for which he struggled – the ‘why’ of the hope with which he acted as an educator (2008, p. 70). Transformation as a form of educational praxis remains a deeply fraught proposition within an intellectual climate that increasingly refuses all such transitions from particular to universal, local to global, myth to knowledge, oppression to liberation.3 By insisting on a careful reading of his work with respect to the crucial issue of making such transitions, in Pedagogy of Hope, Freire highlights the more complex problem of interpretation and how, in the absence of the expressive voice, it becomes practically impossible to guarantee meaning (Freire, 1994, p. 40). All he can do is restate his original position and point beyond the text to real concrete situations of oppression. For critical hermeneutical thinkers like Freire, meaning is a peculiar human activity in that it emerges over time, it is seldom if ever precise, is always more or less, and as such is part of the process of conscientization, in dialogue about education. As he reminds us, he was ‘not dead’ when the Marxists misread him, he had in fact more to say on the matter. And he claims that even though he had been clear on the issue of the local, as a beginning and a basis for the direction of pedagogy, he was still misinterpreted.4 By quoting Plato he seems resigned to the difficulty: ‘The written word cannot be defended when misunderstood’ (2008, p. 74). 5 But he nonetheless insists on his original account as if unwilling to be simply left ‘misunderstood’ on the important issue of the direction of the dialectic of transformation. What is striking about this insistence is that, on one hand, it forms the basis of his pedagogy of hope and his version of progressive post-modernism, and on the other hand, it sees him pitch his tent in the very opposite camp of so much of what is influential about post-modernism today: its refusal of grand narratives, its deconstructive style, its debunking of progress in moral argument, the affirmation of partiality and fragmentation – in short a post-critical approach to discourse that denies language any strong meaning. As if to underscore the difficulty of arriving at meaning and of staying the course, Freire announces the challenge quite frankly in Pedagogy of the

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Oppressed: ‘Conversion to the people requires a profound rebirth’ (1970, p. 37). Such a conversion must have been experienced first hand, for in his later work we detect none of the flagging commitment that is in many respects an understandable response to the challenges he faced. On the contrary, his later work is infused by a belief in ‘freedom’, ‘hope’ and ‘love’. Over the course of his life he maintained and articulated an almost impossible belief in transformation: the overcoming of those differences that can somehow form the basis of something shared productively in an ever renewed spirit of humanization. One of the challenges of keeping Freire relevant, fresh, alive for a new generation, who is perhaps now used to the disenchanted language of post-modernism, is just how unreservedly committed he was to the particular and how he was equally committed to the process of humanization without any felt need to fly above the labyrinths of history and experience. Yet when we place him within a field of postmodern ‘post-criticism’ we must ask, can we square this profound faith in transformation as an almost extra human commitment to the oppressed with a discourse that rejects the capacity of language and human expression to mean anything in the strong sense that informs his vision of pedagogy? Everything these days it seems is at an end, a post-modern limit that refuses the accepted co-ordinates of transformation. Yet while Freire too traverses limits, unlike most purveyors of decline his are expressed as a hope always in search of a ‘why’. In this chapter I want to explore some of the difficulties involved in placing the legacy of Freire’s thought concerning human beings’ ontological vocation alongside philosophies that refuse all ontology. In doing so I want to try to make explicit the anti-humanism that appears implicit in much of post-modern discourse. To begin, I will draw out what I feel is most humanly and educationally potent in terms of Friere’s vision of transformation. I will then examine some of the complex issues surrounding the death of the subject that have been the source of so many difficulties today when trying to articulate an education that is also a humanism. To this end I will revisit some of the challenges to critical pedagogy and I will argue that the ‘post-critical’ is a consequence of a phenomenological reading of structural linguistics, which philosophically understood neutralizes the expressive subject and thereby fundamentally undermines the concepts of dialogue and transformation in any strong sense.6 (By asking whether post-modern education has taken stock of the apocalyptic discourse as it bears on Freire’s concept of transformation I will consider whether some of the more influential voices in the American critical pedagogy movement have failed to grasp the full significance of these developments for

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a Freirean approach to criticism. Finally, while acknowledging that these theoretical developments pose a very real danger to education as humanization, I argue that what Freire teaches us is that these apocalyptic limits were always present in his life and work, not as something debilitating but rather as a statement on the nature of his commitment to praxis and humanization.

Dimensions of Transformation in Freirean Thought Perhaps no other thinker has done more to herald a post-critical climate that Jacques Derrida, whose work provides a stark contrast to Freire’s with respect to the latter’s insistence on an original meaning despite being misunderstood. Derrida’s analysis of Plato’s position on speech and writing in the Phaedrus reverses Plato’s privileging of speech over writing, a privileging that deems writing a poison that can be, as Freire also acknowledges, all too easily misunderstood. In his essay titled ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, Derrida uses the ambiguous word pharmakon – which carries the connotations of both poison and cure – to radically unsettle the canonical text making Plato’s ‘original’ meaning undecidable: writing is both a poison and a cure.7 Without any way of knowing whether the text carries an original presence that guarantees meaning, meaning as such must be infinitely deferred. All ‘text’ can now be deconstructed: a decoding that undermines any pretensions to ‘originality’ thus permitting a plurality of interpretations. Freire’s insistence on the part and the whole (the dialectic nature of thought and language) appears to highlight just how significant was his original meaning to his entire philosophy of transformation. The European sources of Pedagogy of the Oppressed are varied (Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Fromm), but all combine to affirm the human process and the historical process. Freire was a complex figure. Arising from his own historical background, from the synthesis of political freedom and religion, he inherits a concept of being and world articulated as two not always compatible forms of liberation: humanism and theism, at times merging in what he calls the need for a ‘prophetic church’ (Freire, 1985, p. 131). Thus critical reflection, the radical core of pedagogy is simultaneously reflection on praxis in light of material conditions and historical forces, and reflection on praxis in light of the gospel; the Christian kerygma to identify with the victim.8 What both forms of reflection share is an understanding of subjectivity that is the basis of a creative becoming in and through language; a becoming that is at once an embrace of

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the material world and an overcoming of the conditions that cramp the human spirit. Criticism for Freire is the medium of this self-legitimating mandate towards liberation, at once challenging the self’s creative agency while ultimately transforming it through praxis and dialogue in the direction of humanization.9 Freire’s later statements concerning the need for a progressive post-modernism never reneges on his earlier faith in the process of humanization. His consistent approach to pedagogy stems from a belief in transformation articulated as a number of interacting features that cohere to help understand this process as something that at once empowers people to act on their world and changes the reality of oppression that is such a profound source of dehumanization. As the following elaboration of three such features attempts to show, transformation as a relational, intersubjective concept – the condition of authentic human becoming – is vital to Freire’s complex understanding of liberation. 1. Overcoming the self/other contradiction is central to the perpetual transformation of reality that characterizes empowerment through conscientization that has been the consistent focus of Freirean philosophy. As the very condition of historical reality, the contradiction is fraught on a number of levels. It is the source of a double consciousness and a double bind, since it discloses in the subject both an ontological insufficiency and a potential for overcoming this insufficiency and the oppressive structures that generate it – structures that keep consciousness submerged and oppression normalized. This difficult awareness of one’s false consciousness in face of overwhelming external pressure to conform to ideologically constructed identities and the immense challenge entailed in overcoming duality leads Freire to conclude: ‘Liberation is thus a childbirth and a painful one’ (1972b, p. 25). Because the tendency to identify with the oppressor is always present, to be aware of the contradiction is to be aware of the extent of the task that such a vocation entails. ‘For the humanistic and historical task of the oppressed is to ‘liberate themselves and their oppressor as well’ (1972b, p. 21). Freire consistently maintains: ‘Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both’ (1972b, p. 21). To overcome the contraction is to overcome in one ultimate movement the oppressor within and the oppressor without. Getting beyond the initial stages of the struggle that unavoidably leads the oppressed into false models of humanity requires a depth perspective that allows for the possibility of confronting the other at the heart of the self. To be led into otherness is to be led into monstrosity since the illusions of false

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consciousness serve to keep at bay the fear of freedom that give the struggle for liberation its force. Once awareness of oppression is awakened so too is this fear. Yet without the love that might be said to rightfully belong to the other the struggle, moreover, can appear pointless and indeed dangerous, since to commit oneself to it is to commit oneself to overcoming mere shadows – to feel the violence of oppression without the hope that comes from believing that the suffering can be otherwise.10 Liberation thus requires a tremendous faith in human beings to continue to struggle to overcome the contradiction in the direction of unity despite overwhelming pressure to desist from this exceptionally difficult human task. What makes this liberation such a radical process and no mere selfdiscovery in the ordinary sense of a liberal philosophy is its engagement with all of reality. Since the contradiction to be overcome is established in a concrete situation, the transformation entailed in resolving it must, according to Freire, be objectively verifiable; it must be a transformation of the concrete conditions of oppression (1972b, pp. 26–27). The social world cannot be given unqualified privilege over the individual, as if material conditions alone can constitute transformation. Such a call for objective change includes the human agent in the struggle to change structures since one ‘cannot conceive of objectivity without subjectivity’ (1972b, p. 27). Freire insists ‘[to] deny the importance of subjectivity in transforming the world is naive and simplistic . . . world and men [sic] do not exist apart from each other, they exist in constant interaction’ (1972b, p. 27). The implications for people and how they are individually claimed by this nondichotomized view of reality is clear: ‘ just as objective social reality exists not by chance but as the product of human action, so it is not transformed by chance’ (1972b, p. 27). Only by overcoming the self/other contradiction as an objective social reality is transformation towards greater humanization achieved. 2. The unveiling of reality is another feature of transformation characteristic of the self’s ontological vocation. The enemy of freedom is a mythic consciousness that all the time works to determine the internal contradiction in the direction of false models of humanity and away from the overcoming of an oppressive historical reality. However, ‘[f]reedom is not an ideal located outside of man [sic], nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion’ (1972b, p. 24). The scandal of oppression is made more scandalous by its being brought to light. However, because no reality transforms itself, the painful awareness is a necessary ontological starting point for

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Freire’s pedagogy. To supersede the oppressor/oppressed contradiction the oppressed must confront reality critically, simultaneously objectifying it and acting upon that reality. Mere perception is not enough as it leads to a further reifying of false consciousness. This rationalizing of the truth of historical reality strips it of its concreteness making it yet another mythic form of ideology in defence of power. The more people unveil their challenging reality (the object of their transforming action) the more critically they enter that reality. Hence the unveiling of reality as a concrete act of liberation and a necessary part of the transformation required is carried out with the victims of oppression in the process of organizing them. To quote Freire on this point: The pedagogy of the oppressed, as a humanist and libertarian pedagogy, has two distinct stages. In the first the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through the praxis commit themselves to its transformation. In the second stage in which the reality of oppression has already been transformed this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all men [sic] in the process of permanent liberation. In both stages it is always through an action in depth that the culture of domination is culturally confronted’. (1972b, p. 31) Only such a depth analysis arising from concrete situations can transform and liberate the universal problematic of oppression and in the process overcome the duality that unmasks the need to resolve the contradictory structure that keeps human consciousness submerged. The conscientization involved in the fi rst phase leads to increasing levels of humanization ‘through the expulsion of myths created and developed in the old order which like spectres haunt the new structure emerging from the revolutionary transformation’ (1972b, p. 31). All the various myths that the victims of oppression internalize in the process of their subjugation are designed to maintain the status quo through a conspiracy of silence that serves to mask the contradiction of historical reality. Hence demythologizing this reality – divesting it of its ideological power – becomes the very condition of conscientization as a vital fi rst step in the revolution. 3. The key feature of revolutionary praxis that unveils reality and overcomes the self/other contradiction is dialogue – the essentially human ingredient of transformation. In what now sounds like a stinging rebuff to those who deny language any expressive power to refer to anything real, Freire claims: ‘There is no true word that is not at the same time a

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praxis. Thus to speak a true word is to transform the world’ (1972b, p. 60). Dialogue, he maintains, is that intersubjective encounter ‘mediated by the world in order to name the world’ (1972b, p. 61). It cannot exist without a profound love for the world and for human beings. It is the condition of transformation in and through a notoriously difficult yet persistent struggle. As a loving commitment to liberation dialogue requires an intense faith in humans to make and remake their world. To be dialogical is to believe unstintingly that ‘the power to create and transform the world even when thwarted tends to be reborn . . . not gratuitously but in and through the struggle for liberation’ (1972b, p. 63). This power is reborn in the process of humanization when it is realized in the overcoming of the oppressor/oppressed contradiction. By attuning language in this way to concrete situations of oppression, by understanding the structural conditions in which thought and language are dialectically framed the complex of ‘generative themes’ of any given period can be identified. These themes form the constituents of the submerged cultural world that gradually emerge to provide the content for the dialogue of education as the practice of freedom through critical reflection stimulated by problem-posing pedagogy. As historical themes that exist in continuity over time, they are not static or disconnected, but ‘are always interacting dialectically with their opposites’ (1972b, p. 73). Because the themes are themselves fraught by the human struggle of any given period – what Freire calls the ‘limit situations’ – they require continual investigation to shed light on the mutually debilitating contradiction that keeps consciousness of oppression submerged. ‘To investigate the generative themes is to investigate man’s [sic] thinking about reality, which is his praxis. For precisely this reason, the methodology proposed requires the investigators and the people (who would normally be considered objects of that investigation) to act as co-investigators’ (1972b, p. 78). It is only through this critical and dynamic view of the world that oppressive ‘mythic-creating irrationality’ is unveiled and the permanent transformation of reality in favour of liberation becomes possible. The extent of the challenge of post-structural anti-subjectivism for positive transformation in the Freirean sense can be detected from the foregoing discussion. Without the capacity of creative human agents to reflect, to name, to objectify and to rename the world in a transforming act of dialogue that supersedes the existing oppressive structures, radical pedagogy loses it way. The radical core of Freire’s criticism is found in what can be wrought through the prism of criticism as a personal and interpersonal bid for liberation – a naming and clarification as a relational act.

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Exploring the Contours of Post-Modern Decline In their influential work on post-modern education Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux spell out the promises and the challenges for a postmodern politics of liberation that is informed by both a criticism that questions traditional modes of power and legitimation, and a tendency to undermine real human agents and their struggles for identity and recognition. While wanting to affirm the promises they remind us that such potential cannot be brought about while the challenges that devalue the voices and experience of the historically marginalized go unmet. They highlight how thinkers such as Nancy Hartsock, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Terry Eagleton among others have criticized the ‘decentering and death of the subject’ so characteristic of post-modernism ‘on the grounds that it makes it more difficult for those who have been excluded from centers of power to name and experience themselves as individual and collective agents’ (Aronowitz and Giroux, 1991, p. 79). Yet the need to name one’s world as self-evident as it may still appear today does not take from the disenchantment felt with any moral injunction that points towards a better way of life for all. Recent developments suggest that a sense that things are changing does not indicate hope for improvement. Despite attempts to assimilate post-modernism into a radical politics, the obituaries of the subject haven’t stopped appearing and with them lessening degrees of individual and collective will towards transformative politics. Tracing the changes that have led to disenchantment with progressive politics is a complex affair, which would itself require considerable time, commitment and expertise. However, some theoretical developments can be identified as significant in the bid to break with the philosophies of consciousness that inform Freire’s work. Foucault, Barthes and Derrida are key figures in the movement to undermine the moral centre of humanism by dethroning humanist subjectivity for once and for all. According to Seán Burke, for these three influential thinkers ‘their phenomenological training had taught them that the subject was too powerful, too sophisticated a concept to be simply bracketed [as in earlier formalism] rather subjectivity was something to be annihilated’ (1998, p. 14). Together what they inaugurate at the limit between phenomenology and structuralism is an era of theory in which language becomes the ‘“destroyer of all subjectivity” – the author of literary studies, the transcendental subject of philosophies of consciousness, the subject of political theory, psychoanalysis, anthropology’ (1998, p. 14). It is this era that is still making its effects felt on academic discourse in ways that seem to proliferate in cultural and media

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studies, and have more recently begun to define the terms in the area of education. Foucault spearheads the attack on any new attempt at a human science that would unproblematically reinscribe modern subjectivity within a theory of knowledge. In suspending the dogmatic metaphysics of classical thought along with its religious and otherworldly emphasis, Foucault claims that enlightenment thought opens up the possibility of another metaphysics, that of a modern transcendental subject ‘whose purpose will be to question, apart from representation all that is the source and origin of representation’ (cited in Kearney, 1994, p. 266). Kearney highlights Foucault’s rejection of this paradigm ‘presupposes the rejection of the phenomenological approach which gives absolute priority to the observing subject, which attributes a constitutive role to an act – which places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity’ (1994, p. 266). Announcing a new paradigm of the structural unconscious Foucault declares that man is but a ‘rift in the order of things’ not the cause but the consequence of a shift in the archaeology of knowledge whose new position generates all the illusions of modern humanism, ‘all the facile solutions of an “anthropology” understood as a universal reflection on man’ (Foucault, 2002, p. xxv). In claiming to discover a new archaeology of knowledge in the structural unconscious, Foucault effectively inaugurates ‘the death of man’. Human consciousness is no longer to be understood as a privileged site of disclosure and transcendental subjectivity – the basis of phenomenology, existentialism, the modern conception of time and historical unfolding, of narrative and the authorial imagination – becomes another blip in the order of things. Two grave consequences for humanism follow from what Foucault ultimately announces: there can be no continuity from one period to another, nothing that we might confidently describe as human development or progress (e.g. from the particular to the universal), and there can be no expression in the sense of human agents expressing meaning or giving some tentative voice to their disaffection or suffering; one that both places a moral claim on its hearer and somehow changes the constitution of what is thought, felt and believed.11 While highly sophisticated in its attempts to break with an oppressive past and emancipate a plurality of meanings, such anti-subjectivist philosophy fundamentally calls into question the kind of progressive ontology that Freire believes can form the basis of a universal programme of education towards humanization. Whether both philosophies are ultimately compatible is very much in doubt. A similar analysis of the devastating implications of structuralist and poststructuralist theory can be made in relation to Barthes essay ‘The Death of

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the Author’ . Like Foucault who is very much influenced by the Nietzschean legacy, Barthes makes no bones about the trajectory of thought that he inherits. The post-modern death of the Author follows from the death of God and announces the death of Man (Kearney, p. 276). Henceforth, literature should not be understood as an expression of a creative subject but as an impersonal play of linguistic signs. Structural linguistics provide a valuable tool for the destruction of the author as subject since the discovery of language as a total system of enunciation functioning independently of persons, for Barthes proves that ‘the author is nothing more that the “instance writing”, just as the I is nothing more than the saying “I”’ (Kearney, 1994, 275). Thus, the life of the text presupposes the death of the author as a creative agent. The text, to be understood, must be ‘depsychologized’ and ‘dehumanized’, such that writing can be seen as ‘the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin’ (Barthes, 1977).12 The analogy to Nietzsche’s death of God suggests that the author is to his text what God is to his world, and just as God was in the nineteenth century said to limit the world, so too is a text limited by authorship. For Barthes, to give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, ‘to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing . . . it is to seal over the ceaseless play of differences that the death of God has opened in its wake’ (Burke, 1998, p. 24). The freedom of the author/subject is made radically subordinate to the text with the result that the ceaseless play of the sign becomes wholly indifferent to the expressive subject and, not incidentally, the voice of the oppressed. Derrida is another recent thinker whose work effectively debunks the humanist subject, one who like Foucault and Barthes takes his cue from the end of metaphysics. However, for Derrida the real problem of thinking consciousness or structure by way of positing an alternative to a previous discourse or system, which in effect debunks the past – as his own theory so eloquently does – is that the very act of thinking anew is caught in a double bind that employs the violence of theory to debunk the violence of theory. The recalcitrance of metaphysical thinking makes it impossible to begin afresh; all we can do is acknowledge our own metaphysical violence which circumscribes a field of meaning at the expense of difference. In his essay ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ Derrida’s sophisticated attack against structuralism and all philosophies of consciousness identifies the moment when everything changes for philosophy and the human sciences in the nineteenth century (beginning with Nietzsche, and continuing with Freud and Heidegger) when what he calls the ‘structurality of structure’ begins to be thought. It is this event, what Derrida also refers to as the ‘rupture’ in modern philosophy, that radically calls into question every possibility

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of rebirth, and all endings that would presuppose the latter. History and agency as basic concepts of humanism are undermined to the degree that they presuppose some progress based of the overcoming of a discredited past, since as Derrida’s analysis attempts to make clear, prior to the rupture, the whole history of the concept of structure must be thought of as a series of substitutions of centre for centre. ‘Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix is the determination of being as presence in all the senses of this word . . . essence, existence, substance, subject . . . aletheia , transcendentality, consciousness or conscience, God, man, and so forth’ (Derrida, 2007, p. 249). Once the substitution of presence as centre begins to be interrogated in the modern period – that is, the substitution of God for man, of existence for essence, and so on – the whole problem of grounding the totality of a system of thought on something that cannot be thought is radically undercut. Henceforth, as Derrida observes ‘it was probably necessary to begin to think that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a being-present, that the center had no natural locus, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign substitutions came into play’ (2007, p. 249). This development is evident in the history of anthropology, particularly in the work of Lévi Strauss where Western science itself is characterized as a kind of myth – a human science that loses its objective bearing. The problem of substituting one centre for another, of announcing an end in order to proclaim a beginning, of overcoming a previously oppressive state by instituting a more progressive mode of becoming, in Derrida’s analysis, is the site of an impossible contradiction that cannot be transformed: one that bespeaks an end without end. According to Martin Jay post-modern versions of apocalypse (influenced by Derrida) have ‘de-dramatised’ the tradition leaving behind any hope of rebirth. Instead of expecting an event that will end or renew history ‘it promotes an emotionally distant attitude of aesthetic indifference which abandons traditional notions of dramatic or narrative resolution in favour of an unquenchable fascination with being on the verge of an end that never comes’ (1994, p. 33). Jay maintains that ‘it is not just apocalypse now, but apocalypse forever ’ (1994, p. 33). He highlights a salient example of this denial of redemptive hope in Derrida’s concern for the problem in Derrida’s essay ‘Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy’, which takes it cue from an essay by Kant. Commenting on Kant’s critique of the ‘exalted, visionary tone’ of certain forms of metaphysical thinking and the danger they pose to the sober work of genuine

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philosophical enquiry Derrida argues that Kant’s own mode of critique as a putting an end to outmoded metaphysics adopts the very model of eschatological prediction that characterizes such thinking (Jay, 1994, p. 34). In other words Derrida highlights the eschatological beam in Kant’s own philosophical eye,13 and as Jay observes, all subsequent proclamations of the end of one thing or another echoes Kant’s unintended apocalyptic tone. ‘[A]ll the going one better in eschatological eloquence . . . the end of history, of class struggle, the end of philosophy, the death of God, the end of religions . . . the end of the subject, the end of man, the end of the West, the end of Oedipus, the end of the earth, Apocalypse now’ (1994, p. 34). Speaking about the widespread exercise today of destroying metaphysics Derrida claims: ‘There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics . . . we cannot utter a single destructive proposition that has not slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulation of precisely what it seeks to contest’ (2007, p. 250). In terms of this peculiar form of logic his deconstruction of Lévi-Strauss’ theory of myth highlights the latter’s double intention: ‘to preserve as an instrument that whose truth-value he criticizes’ (2007, p. 255). Based on the two interpretations of interpretation that he examines (one that seeks the security of an original presence and the other that plays the game of substitution without security) Derrida argues for a concept of being that begins with the possibility of freeplay prior to the interplay of presence and absence; a concept that ‘passes beyond man and humanism’ (2007, p. 264). However in posing the problem of going beyond without a reliable instrument – one that does not incur a metaphysical violence – he indicates the uncertainty of such an enterprise with a glance towards the business of child-bearing. And he admits he himself turns away in face of such business ‘as the yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so as is necessary only under the species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity’ (2007, p. 265). It is here perhaps that we recognize the difficulties that pertain to a pedagogy of the oppressed that requires so much of human beings and guarantees so little. Still, we can wonder, might what Derrida refers to as the ‘yet unnamable’ be announcing itself as something more trustworthy in and through the ‘profound rebirth’ that Freire calls us to?

The Politics of ‘Post-Critical’ Transformation While accounting for transformation has been largely taken up with attempting to map the shifting boundaries of an increasingly interconnected world

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and to define more clearly the new sites of struggle and contestation often to the neglect of personal transformation, the difficulty in striking a balance here has been compounded by the persistent attacks by post-modern philosophies against subjectivity and human agency. These attacks and their consequences for education have been documented by Aronowitz and Giroux.14 In a more recent exploration of post-modern education, Politics of Liberation: Paths from Freire, Peter L. McLaren and Colin Lankshear set out some of the ways in which Freire’s work offers a way out of the current malaises into which education and culture have fallen – malaises that are evident with our concern for the ‘end of everything’. Rightly or wrongly Freire is placed among contributions by a number of thinkers whose work was in its own way also revolutionary: ‘Alain Touraine, Daniel Bell, and other early, theoretically worked-through warning bells of New Times: post-industrialism, post-Fordism, the age of information, the end of ideology, even the “end of history”’ (McLaren and Lankshear, 1994, p. 2). Today a prevailing disillusionment marks the spot where allegiance to such revolutionary politics was relatively unproblematic. What I have sketched perhaps too crudely above is no doubt contestable. However, I am not suggesting that the three thinkers I have treated all fit neatly under the heading post-modern, although they seem to represent most forcibly the tendency to debunk the modern subject.15 Only in the latter case is this debunking taken up and incorporated into the form of critique that not only attempts to pass beyond humanism but also attempts to do so through a refusal of rebirth. Wherever we may wish to place the thinkers in question here, it is these theoretical moves that are so characteristic of post-modernism as a philosophical style today. The threat posed by the modern debunking of subjectivity is only half the problem. The more determined threat and indeed challenge for educational praxis comes from the inability to go one better – to overcome the contradictions, liberated and renewed. In his essay ‘Postmodernism and the Death of Politics’, McLaren describes the theoretical ailments of post-modernism as not only lacking ‘a well developed theory of the subject’ but also, arising from this lack, an inability to further social change through ‘a substantial political project’ (1994, p. 194). While acknowledging these considerable ailments McLaren is reluctant to dismiss post-modern political theory as mere relativism – whatever the actual politics might look like. Rather he argues, after Anthony Giddens, that there is an overdetermined ‘logic endemic to the very nature of postmodern theorizing whereby the primacy of the semiotic overshadows the concern for the social or the semantic’ (McLaren, 1994, p. 195).

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This ‘retreat into the code’ fails to seriously consider ‘human agency as a mode of resisting cultural hegemony’ (McLaren, 1994, p. 195). It is this fi xation on the code, as a means of unravelling meaning that McLaren refers to as ‘ludic’ post-modernism, in that it is preoccupied with breaking up the system rather than instituting a viable alternative. Rejection of the code obsession will, he believes, give rise to more constructive forms of politics. The purely destructive focus of deconstruction needs a wake-up call in terms of its ability to foster a sustainable political project. While McLaren’s analysis of post-modernism has much to commend it, he fails both to confront the seriousness of ‘ludic’ post-modernism’s active politics of subversion as an end in itself, and to spell out the radical nature of Freire’s concept of the human as a means of transforming reality, or getting beyond the stalemate of an endless apocalypse. As already discussed, deconstruction refuses all forms of rebirth and identifies the very move towards destruction and renewal as the condition of ‘freeplay’. As a consequence McLaren’s emphasis on human agency as a site of resistance does little to articulate the radicality of human transformation as a praxis towards human liberation and wholeness in face of post-modern fragmentation and decline. Instead of clarifying the transformative potential of human beings working in dialogue, which is central to Freire’s pedagogy, this emphasis on resistance arguably plays into the hands of the debunking antagonistics of the post-modern posturing that he is keen to expose. It is hard to deny that there is a dignity in human beings capacity to resist oppression, but surely our ability to overcome, however piecemeal, the oppression that has shaped our self-consciousness is something far greater. Conscripting fragmentation and diversity into a unified political project remains a challenge for many who are committed to praxis and transformation. Thinkers such as Aronowitz and Giroux, in their work on post-modern education are no more likely to articulate a strong conception of agency that includes a complex interiority as the site of a struggle that is transformed in the act of naming and clarifying the world. Taking full account of the ways human beings transform their world underscores the very real problem of how such a huge commitment to liberation can be sustained amidst the utter suspicion of all extra textual claim. While broadly speaking Aronowitz and Giroux accept the post-modern critique of enlightenment rationality and want to reject post-structuralist antisubjectivism, they end up with unlimited difference without any coherent centre to anchor a political project in a genuinely shared commitment, one that is actively involved in transforming reality for all.

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The problem with the ‘post-analytic’ approaches, according to McLaren, is that they ‘lack the requisite sociology on which to build an ethical foundation’ (1994, p. 197). However, the claim that the sociological is the condition of the ethical assumes that social structures are the bases upon which people are transformed. While ‘a sociology of change’ is no doubt hugely important, to prioritize it in this way is disempowering of individuals when culture already denies them a truly creative capacity. Does this not unduly attenuate Freire’s ethical vision? Quoting Arnowitz and Giroux, McLaren argues that an ethical language, a language of possibility, points to ‘forms of analysis that move beyond theories of critique to the more difficult task of laying the basis of transformative modes of praxis’ (1994, p. 198). Assuming that ‘critique’ is a mode of criticism here, can we not acknowledge after Freire that praxis is a form of critique; critique that cannot be easily left behind without leaving behind the reflexive subject (arguably the core of Freire’s concept of agency). What appears to emerge in McLaren analysis as the ‘post-critical’ is a need to move beyond an apparently ineffective criticism, too ‘ludic’ perhaps in its analysis. But this concedes what is truly radical about Freirean praxis – its reflexive and dialogical nature. The very basis of transformation has become relegated by the more procedural task of putting structures in place that will bring about the necessary political and ethical transformation. Why not a reappraisal of Freire’s ontological vision of humanization as the genuinely ethical conditions of transformative politics? McLaren’s ‘post-critical’ politics, which arises from the limits of postmodern theorizing, has the effect of moving away from subjectivity, and, therefore, reneging on critical consciousness. In effect this makes the political sphere more difficult to sustain because any politics worth its salt will require a considerable degree of consensus and commitment. This, ironically, is the kind of personal investment that is undermined by placing the onus of change on external social structures that appear instrumental and non-engaged with the affective dimension of people’s lives. Arguably, people can change the conditions of oppression but this requires conscientization if they are not to uncritically reproduce unjust power structures. The very act of staying the course in today’s centrifugal societies and arriving at consensus or even continuing to believe in a unified project itself requires a form of personal transformation that is committed to – if not outwardly enlisted in – active politics; in other words it requires a transformation of people who are sensitively engaged in a real confrontation with the oppressor/oppressed contradiction. By moving away from conscientization in an intellectual climate that is hostile towards humanism and

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by assuming a cohesive commitment on behalf of particular groups has post-modern education not de facto become ‘ludic’ in its surrender of the personal potential for transformation? For McLaren the ‘mixed-blessings’ of post-modern politics boil down to a profound distrust of scientific knowledge, reason and consensus on one hand and an understanding of truth as a contingent and shifting set of relations on the other, make it difficult ‘although not impossible’ to construct a common project (1994, p. 198). Where a politics of resistance is the primary focus of liberation, social transformation becomes the default position for understanding human agency. Insisting that the personal is political, as many feminist thinkers rightly do, may allow us to extend the space of contestation, but other than reminding us how deep the roots of power plunge, when we push the concept we soon run into trouble. This happens most evidently if we include in the personal some sense of interiority as a fraught but trustworthy space of reflection. For although we can after Freire accept as part of our discourse a divided consciousness as the basis of a contradiction that needs to be overcome we are unlikely to get very far if on the basis of this divided consciousness we attempt to set up a two-party system! The real condition of a politics of liberation, as ambitious as Freire’s, is a depth dimension with respect to human agency, one that will to some extent always be off limits to an ethic of resistance and a politics of liberation, and precisely for this reason will remain fragile and uncertain for the individual whose own agency is at stake. But this is all the more reason it should be protected as it is susceptible to the post-modern assault that tends not to accept that anything worth naming can break through the web of language. The ‘ludic’ forms of post-modernism, McLaren believes, are ‘hopelessly restrictive in re-strategising the pedagogical as political and in marshalling concerted and sustained attempts at renewing the leftist project of democratic rebirth’ (p. 198; my italics). The tension that appears irresolvable to McLaren here is a problem for post-moderns to the extent that they really do want democratic rebirth. However it is the so-called ludic accounts of post-modernism those that most categorically owe their allegiance to deconstruction that emphatically reject all human projects of rebirth or recentring that unfailingly, as they see it, sneak in by the back door the very metaphysics that these projects have in other respects destroyed with such moral gusto. But, we may ask, is this really what Freire is up to when he claims: ‘Conversion to the people requires a profound rebirth’? Is his dialectic not different in kind – a making different?

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McLaren argues that Freire manages above all to put theory into practice within a larger ethics of subversion and transformation. However, I would add, this ethic is only possible through the resolution of the contradiction at the heart of the subject that forms the basis of a divided consciousness; a resolution that is found in the process of dialogue, education and social action. To stress Freire’s work as something that places ‘primacy on the political’ and to see this as a way out of the post-modern malaise, as McLaren does, is to not enter far enough into the problem. It is to downplay the subject’s interiority as the deeper locus of the contradiction that plagues the unequal power relations of the external world, and it is to, once again, concede valuable ground to ‘ludic’ post-modernism, which is happy to collapse this inner/outer distinction as something based on yet another metaphysical illusion.16

Conclusion: The Order of Criticism The post-critical as I have been articulating it within the terms of a postmodernism allows a certain radical space for difference in view of the fact that the rebirth that would tend towards unity is denied – differences do emerge, however, unless they are really not worth defending, so too does conflict. What is not discussed by the views that attempt to marry critical pedagogy with a chastened form of post-modernism that allows for some form of history and ontology is precisely the extent to which the potency of the post-modern critique – that which gives it its sting – resides in its unflinching attack against all forms of metaphysical thinking, especially, humanism. The desire to enlist post-modernism in the cause of liberation can at times appear like inviting in a Trojan horse. Admittedly, emphasizing the strong dialogical nature of Freire’s pedagogy risks underplaying structural inequalities and class divisions, but when set within his dialectic of education it can underscore the challenges and crucially the possibilities of such a wholistic vision of education. As Freire reminds us the concept of oppression is effective precisely because it transcends the material conditions that thwart conscientization and thus can help integrate the conflicts of the social world with the conflicts in our own hearts. The stress on resistance requires complementarity. Without finding a balance with respect to an engaged humanizing vision of transformation, postmodernism may actually serve to downplay the plight of oppressed peoples. The oppressor/oppressed contradiction is a binary opposition more obvious than most but no less immune from the cross-hairs of deconstruction.

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Within the undecidable stasis of deconstructed opposites there is no way of privileging one over the other – of feeling confident that your hope is grounded in anything real, for example, in the sense that Freire believed in justice.17 Thus everyone is potentially oppressor and oppressed, without knowing where we stand at any given moment in the dialectic. This is no mere semantic problem today as more and more people lay claim to being victims of one form of violence or another. If in one sense everyone is a victim then in another sense no one is a victim since the significance that gives meaning to the term has been abolished by deconstructive fete. And part of the trouble for the more historical approaches that want to hold the contradiction in some dialectical tension is precisely the growing conditions whereby increasing numbers of people stake a claim to being oppressed. In other words the post-critical perspectives that refuse rebirth and integration through dialogue (sustained at least as a reasonable hope and a commitment) may drown out the claims of those victims who require justice as part of the condition of transformation, of overcoming, and of moving beyond their oppression. While appearing to provide a trump card against forms of metaphysical thought, they are ill equipped to respond to the changing social circumstances that place immense pressure on the explanatory capacity of a dialectical account that relies on a discrete opposition as part of its ontological self-understanding. There is another critique of metaphysics that does not rest on an argument from pure immanence. Describing the difficulty in understanding the background conditions of human agency Charles Taylor points out how pre-modern ideas of political order, which were still wedded to the recurrent cycles of higher time, denied individuals the possibilities of acting on their world in any strong way that was likely to transform the given order of things. What appears strange to us today is a doctrine like ‘the kingstwo bodies’ which believed that the king’s ‘individual biological existence realized and instantiated an undying royal “body”’ (2007, p. 161). But this view was nonetheless part of a metaphysical order that reigned in Europe for centuries. As Taylor makes clear, ‘[w]ithin this order what constitutes a society as such is the metaphysical order it embodies. People act within a framework which is there prior to and independent of their action’ (2007, p. 192). It is perhaps easy to recognize our modern political order as something that rejects this older order; something that debunks the authority of the past and liberates individuals with the promise of a better future. This story is still being told and increasingly so in education today.18 The emergence of a universalist ethic of humanizing action from the eighteenth century onwards is inaugurated not only by a critique of metaphysics, but also

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by a critique of the violence that legitimated such an order at the expense of many victims, often interwoven ritually with the death and return of the King. In turning this violence on its head, Western society has internalized an old division and made the establishment of order a individual and collective act based on consent. However, without the unity of order rooted in the guarantee of a ‘gold standard’, divisions are always at risk of multiplying. Freire’s faith in overcoming such divisions rests largely on a belief that human beings in shaking off oppressive structures can become agents of humanization whereby meaning and order is generated in and through their intercourse and not simply conformed to out of external necessity. The history of metaphysics is associated by Derrida with mythological death and rebirth but it is denied the efficacy of going one better, thereby characterizing the very condition of crisis. For Freire, whose identification with the victim of oppression is part of the dialectic of transformation, this crisis is only another stage of the unveiling of reality on the path to overcoming an historical contradiction. Philosophies of consciousness that owe their allegiance to the more expressive side of modernity that sees our inner nature as ultimately good do not accept that the dialectic between ‘truth and myth’, ‘knowledge and ignorance’, and so on – confronted in the oppressor/oppressed contradiction – must yield only ‘monstrosity’. Part of the reason that ‘ludic’ post-modernism is so unbiddable to philosophies of consciousness and humanism more generally is its reliance on certain decentring strands of modernity that completely reject that human beings have inner depths to be revealed, ‘which we imperfectly understand and need help to decipher and do justice to’ (Taylor, 1994b, p. 488). Within the confluence of forces that give shape to our identity and agency, negation of the past need not require a complete rejection of the Good beyond our own often limited awareness, but can like so many currents within modernist literature reject the received order for the sake of a more personally derived vision of things: hence the ‘negation of the epiphanies of being has often been just a step towards the new kind of epiphany’ (1994b, p. 487).19 Highlighting the ‘counter-epiphanic’ trend evident in the works of Derrida and Foucault, Taylor argues that both thinkers draw on a reading of Nietzsche which focuses on the arbitrariness of interpretation, on interpretation as an imposition of power, but completely neglects the other facet of this baffling thinker, the Dionysian vision of the ‘eternal return’ which makes possible the all englobing affirmation of ‘yea-saying’. As a result, both philosophies have taken up the negative thrust of modernism – its anti-Romanticism, its

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suspicion of the supposed unity and transparency of the disengaged self, of the alleged inner sources of the expressive self – while neglecting its opening to epiphany. (1994b, p. 488) If true, what is remarkable about this insight is the way it not only exposes the anti-subjectivism of ‘ludic’ post-modernism but also its anti-humanism. In other words, it is no mere attack against the rational side of the enlightenment. It also exposes the ‘ludic’ absolute debunking of humanism which includes a rejection of the very conditions of understanding ourselves more fully in some dialogical relationship with others, and hence transforming our vision of things in the direction of liberation. Because the ‘ludic’ philosophies are not simply fixated on the code (thereby breaking up the system) as McLaren argues, they are also fixed on pure immanence and a rejection of the opening to epiphany of the expressive self. Furthermore, if Taylor is right, the danger of the Nietzschean vision is its embrace of the Dionysian violence of the eternal return, which involves an overcoming of self and world irrespective of the suffering of others. In exposing this danger do we not also expose the impossible tension in post-modern education that simultaneously wants to reclaim human agency, embrace a ‘root and branch’ critique of modernity, and reject the ‘ludic’ debunking of subjectivity? Everything these days seems to be at an end, yet for those who dream and try to give reasons for their dreams the challenge remains. There are no easy solutions to the problems discussed above, but perhaps education, while no panacea, is well suited to hold the contradictions in dialectal tension if it can trust in the resources of its own humanistic heritage. This is a heritage that believes in the power of language to not only corrupt, but also and more importantly to liberate. In other words, it is a heritage that believes language can open us out of what Taylor calls our ‘cramped postures’, and help us see a way to the Good. Freire is part of this heritage, and his vision goes on – as a consistent thread within his own life and his own discourse, one that never stopped trying to reach the differences that keep sectarian divisions in place, and by reaching them overcome them for the sake of celebrating other differences, more real for their shared acknowledgement and understanding. Speaking of this process for educators he says: ‘Once teachers see the contradictions between their words and their actions, they have two choices. They can become shrewdly clear and aware of their need to be reactionary, or they can engage in action to transform reality. I call it “making Easter” every day, to die as the dominator and be born again as the dominated, fighting to overcome oppression’ (Freire, 1996b, p. 146).20 And perhaps for this reason, Freire’s vision goes on in our own time too.

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Notes 1 ‘Positioning Freire’s work within the . . . discussion [of post-modernism] places him to the front of that “dying class” of modernist revolutionaries for whom liberation remains the banner behind which to fight for social justice and transformation.’ Peter L. McLaren (1994), ‘The death of politics: A Brazilian reprieve’, in P. L. McLaren and C. Lankshear (eds), Politics of Liberation: Paths from Freire (London and New York: Routledge, p. 198). 2 On being misrepresented by certain Marxist styled criticisms of him in the 1970s. Paulo Freire (2008), Pedagogy of Hope (London and New York: Continuum, p. 75). 3 This process of educating the young has been described as a journey from ignorance to knowledge, not just didactically, but also in a more progressive way that attempts to reclaim ‘ignorance’ as a positive value. As such the absence of knowledge can be understood as a kind of wonder that opens us up to the world. Being open to learning is not unlike the openness of the early pre-Socratics who were absorbed in myth and wonder as a stimulus to knowledge. The loss of such wonder in the context of education should be minimalized in the transition to the knowing adult world. Joe Dunne (1998), ‘To begin in wonder: children and philosophy’, Arista: Journal of Association of Teachers for Philosophy with Children, 1, 1. 4 ‘But let us go back a way to my fi rst book, Educação como prática do liberdade , completed in 1965 and published in 1968 . . . “It is local situations [emphasis in the original], however, that open perspectives for an analysis of national (and regional) problems”’. Freire, Pedagogy of Hope , p. 74. 5 Freire follows this quote with the comment ‘I cannot accept responsibility, I must say, for what is said or done in my name contrary to what I say or do’. Freire, Pedagogy of Hope , p. 74. In text quotation by Plato taken from Paul Shory, What Plato Said: A Resumé and Analysis of Plato’s Writings With Synopses and Critical Comment , limited edn (Chicago: Phoenix Books/University of Chicago Press, 1965, p. 158). For an insightful article on Freire’s ‘non-essentialist’ reading of Plate see Peter Roberts (2003), ‘Epistemology, ethics and education: addressing dilemmas of difference in the work of Paulo Freire’, in Studies in Philosophy and Education , 22, 157–173 (Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers). 6 For an important work on the reception of ‘new’ French theory in the USA see R. Maskey and E. Donato, eds (1970), The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Also, for an explanation of the influence of a certain ‘non-dialectical reading’ of Hegel on French phenomenology see H. Spiegelberg (1994), The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (London: Kluwer Academic Publishers), pp. 440–441. 7 Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Dissemination (London: Athlone Press, 1981). 8 Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation (London: SCM Press, 1974). 9 On the need for a ‘critical perception of the world see Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed , trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1972, p. 82).

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10 ‘Making real oppression more oppressive still by adding to it the realization of oppression’ corresponds to the dialectical relation between the subjective and the objective’. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed , p. 28. 11 In The Order of Things Foucault attempts to write a history of thought within which the role of individual thinkers is entirely subordinate to impersonal forces; forces that are themselves determined by a prior epistemic configuration (or system of relations) that provide the ground and possibility of all thought. It is on this epistemological foundation, Burke explains, that Western discourse has been constructed – ‘the role of individual authors is no more than of epistemic functionaries’ (1998, pp. 62/63). Contra what is ordinarily believed, people do not make history. Indeed, history from any perspective, understood as something that reflects a form of development, on Foucault’s account is thoroughly debunked. Rather than being a tangled but more or less coherent network of influences by so-called great thinkers through the ages – influences that might be said to encompass an identifiable history of ideas and associated personages – periodic change has no real human ingredient. The epistemological arrangement of any period (all now observable through language) can be understood as nothing but a ‘single network of relations that made the individuals we term Hobbes, Berkeley, Hume, or Condillac’ (quoted in Burke, 1998, p. 63). Like Arthur Schopenhauer’s concept of ‘Blind Will’ that is wholly indifferent to human endeavour the epistemic arrangements that have had such a determined effect on the different eras which they undergird leave ‘no residue but the remotest nostalgia for a lost order’ (p. 64). Nothing is conserved from one tradition to the next. The humanist philosophies when subject to Foucault’s archaeology suffer the same fate as every other configuration in the network of knowledge – man in time will also disappear ‘without residue’. Compare this analysis to Freire’s notion of historical continuity in Pedagogy of the Oppressed , p. 73. 12 R. Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image-Music-Text (London: Fontana, 1977, p. 142). Quoted in R. Kearney, The Wake of Imagination (New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 266). 13 ‘If Kant denounces those who proclaim that philosophy is at an end for two thousand years, he has himself, by marking a limit, indeed the end of a certain type of metaphysics, freed another wave of eschatological discourse about philosophy.’ Derrida, ‘Of an Apocalyptic tone recently adopted in philosophy’, Semeia , 23 (1983). 14 The post-modern emphasis on refusing forms of knowledge and pedagogy wrapped in the legitimizing discourse of the sacred and the priestly, its rejection of universal reason as a foundation for human affairs, it’s claims that all narratives are partial, and its calls to perform critical readings on all scientific, cultural and social texts as historical and political constructions provide the pedagogical grounds for radicalizing the emancipatory possibilities of teaching and learning as part of a wider struggle for democratic public life and critical citizenship (Aronowitz and Giroux, 1991, p. 82). 15 Derrida has resisted incorporation into the discourse of post-modernism but as Jay argues it cannot be fully grasped without taking his work into account. See M. Jay, ‘The Apocalyptic imagination and the inability to morn’, in G. Robinson

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17

18

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and J. Rundell (eds), Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity (London and New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 44, n. 18). Speaking about deconstructed imagination Richard Kearney says it ‘abandons all recourse to the metaphysical opposition between inner and outer. There is no way out of the cave of mirrors, for there is nothing outside of writing’. The Wake of Imagination (New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 294). ‘For Derrida, there is nothing but deconstruction, which swallows up the old hierarchical distinctions between philosophy and literature, and between men and women but just as readily could swallow up equal/unequal, community/discord, uncoerced/constrained dialogue, and the like’ Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1994). I refer to a number of recent publications in the area of human rights education, for example, F. Waldron and B. Ruane (eds), Human Rights Education: Reflection on Theory and Practice (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2010); also, L. Lundy (2007), ‘“Voice” is not enough: conceptualising Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child’, British Education Research Journal, 33, 6, 927–942. For an insightful account of Taylor’s work in the context of current dilemmas in education see P. Hogan, ‘The politics of identity and the epiphanies of learning’, in W. Carr (ed.), The RoutledgeFalmer Reader in Philosophy of Education (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2005). I would like to thank visiting Korean scholar Eun-Joo YANG for this reference. She was exceptionally generous in conversation regarding Freire in the final stages of this book.

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Index

Page numbers in bold denote tables. academic capitalism 9, 52, 66 Adams, M. 103 Adler, M. J. 72, 73, 84 The Paideia Proposal 72, 73 Ahmed, S. 107, 111 alienation 18, 23 Allardt, E. 22 Althusser, L. 125 anti-humanism 3, 11, 132 Apple, M. W. 6, 7, 9, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 58, 103, 104, 115, 124, 125 Aronowitz, S. 2, 11, 124, 138, 143, 144, 145 Au, W. 78 Baker, J. 58, 60, 106, 113 Bakhtin, M. M. 48 Ball, S. J. 3, 32, 106, 107 banking education 14, 75–6, 78, 112 Barthes, R. 138, 139, 140 The Death of the Author 139, 140 Battell, A. 89 Bauman, Z. 21 Baxter Magolda, M. B. 83 Beane, J. A. 47 Beck, U. 22 Beck-Gernsheim, E. 22 Bell, D. 143 Benjamin, J. 15, 18, 23, 30 Bhabha, H. 39, 49 Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) 121–5 Freire and 125–7 Resistance thru Rituals 123

Blake, N. 120, 122 Boal, A. 98 Bochner, A. 52 Boden, R. 65 Boland, J. 79, 82 Bourdieu, P. 39, 48, 54, 57, 59, 125 Distinction 39 Homo Academicus 39 Bowers, C. A. 77 Brady, J. 19 British Continentalist Philosophy of Education 121 Broudy, H. S. 73 Bryan, A. 103, 106 Bubeck, D. 30 Bulbeck, C. 107 Buras, K. L. 37, 40, 41 Burawoy, M. 44, 45, 46 Burke, S. 138, 140 Butler, J. 11, 103, 104, 108, 110, 111, 112, 115, 116, 117 Gender Trouble 108 care 26, 29 care ethics 6, 18–19, 26, 29 vs. ethics of justice 25 care theory 15 Cartmel, F. 89, 92 Celtic Tiger Ireland 106 Chodorow, N. 23, 24 Chomsky, N. 29 Choules, K. 55 Cohen, P. 124 Collins, D. 96 connection 24

170

Index

Connell, R. W. 26 conscientization 5, 8, 18, 27, 56, 58, 86, 131, 134, 136, 145, 147 conventional education interrupting the logic of 93–100 Corradi, C. 90 Counts, G. 36 Cox, L. 103, 105 Crean, M. 7, 8, 56, 66 critical pedagogy Freire and 42–4 main feature of 3 nine tasks in 46–9 critical sociology 44, 46 criticism 4, 12 as a form of deconstruction 12 Crowther, J. 91, 101 cultural politics 37–8, 49 Darder, A. 38 Darnton, R. 38 Davies, B. 52, 63, 65 Davis, M. 41 Planet of Slums 41 Davis, O. W. 82, 83 death of the subject 12, 132, 138 deconstruction 10, 12, 142, 144, 146–8 deconstructive post-modernism 122 democracy 3, 45, 75, 127 Denzin, N. K. 52 Derrida, J. 11, 128, 133, 138, 140, 141, 142, 149 “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy” 141 “Plato’s Pharmacy” 133 “Structure, Sign and Play” 140 Descartes, R. 6 DeVitis, J. L. 79, 81, 82 Dewey, J. 79 dialogue 1, 3, 5–13, 15–17, 18, 21–5, 27, 28–30, 31–4, 51, 55–7, 59–60, 73, 76–7, 80, 87, 106, 132, 136–7, 147 Dimitriadis, G. 39 Disability Studies 61, 66 Dodge, J. 82, 83 Doromal, W. 81, 82

Dressman, M. 93 DuBois, W. E. B. 50 Duke, C. 88 Eagleton, T. 138 early school leaving 89–90 educarer challenges 31 education 7, 29, 75, 92, 147 Freire’s critique of 89–93 globalization, post-colonialism and 39–42 as humanization 133 libratory 16, 69, 76, 77, 127 as personal transformation 5 as person-centred relational practice 32 as resistance 54 as transformation 54 educational pragmatism 93 educational praxis 4, 6, 7, 8 critical pedegogy vs. discursive spaces 4 Educational Reform Act of 1988 (England) 75, 79 educator roles of 99 Ellis, C. 52 Ellsworth, E. 33 emancipatory modernism 122 Enlightenment, the 38 Epstein, D. 65, 107 Equality Studies 57–8, 63–6 Equality Studies Centre (ESC) 56–8, 60, 65–6 establishment of 57, 66 equality theory 6 essentialism 37, 47, 121 ethical subjectivity 15 Ethnic and Racial Studies 66 Eyler, J. 79, 82 Fanon, F. 112 Farrelly, M. 30 Feeley, M. 33 feminist care scholars 15–17, 20 feminist psychoanalytic scholarship 6

Index Fineman, M. 22, 23, 24, 29 Foucault, M. 108, 116, 117, 120, 122, 138, 139, 140, 149 Fox-Genovese, E. 138 Fraser, N. 31, 48, 103, 104 Freire, P. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 69, 76, 77, 80, 84, 93, 95, 96, 97, 103, 106, 107, 112, 121, 126, 127, 131, 133, 150 feminist critiques of 19–21 Pedagogy of Freedom 19 Pedagogy of Hope 126, 127 Pedagogy of the Oppressed 1, 14, 18, 20, 70, 75, 76, 103, 121, 126, 133 Sherman’s critique of 19 French, J. 79, 82 Freud, S. 140 Fromm, E. 133 Furlong, A. 32, 89, 92 Giddens, A. 53, 103, 113, 143 Giles, D. E. 79, 82 Gillborn, D. 103, 107 Gilligan, C. 22, 23, 24, 25, 30 In a Different Voice 22 Gilroy, P. 106, 107 Giroux, H. 2, 12, 51, 76, 120, 121, 125, 126, 127, 138, 143, 144, 145 globalization 2, 38–41 Goodman, A. 101 Gramsci, A. 46, 47, 48, 52, 63, 121, 123, 125, 127, 128 Gutstein, E. 47 Habermas, J. 64 Hall, S. 122, 123, 124, 125, 127 “Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies” 123 “The problem of ideology” 123 Harding, S. 60, 61 Harkavy, I. 62, 64 Hartsock, N. 138 Hegel, G. W. F. 133 Heidegger, M. 140 Held, V. 23 Heller, A. 18 The Elementary Ethics of Everyday

171

Life 18 Hill-Collins, P. 55 Hinzen, H. 88 Hirst, P. H. 72, 73, 74, 75, 79, 84 Hochschild, A. 23, 24 Hoggart, R. 123 Hollway, W. 15, 17, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 30, 31, 32 hooks, b. 19, 26 Horton, M. 44, 83 Hough, J. 113 humanism 12, 132, 138–9, 141, 145, 149 humanity 17 humanization 11, 14, 34, 118 dehumanization 17, 20 Humphreys, D. 74 Humphries, B. 61 Husserl, E. 133 hybridity 49 identity categories 108–9 identity politics 9, 109 ideology 1, 10, 15, 63, 65, 103, 110, 117, 123, 136, 143 introjection 28 Irigaray, L. 24, 28 The Way of Love 28 Irwin, J. 10, 11 Jacoby, R. 48 Jaggar, A. 24 James, C. L. R. 50 Jay, M. 141, 142 Johns, R. W. 81 Jules, D. 41 justice ethics 15 Kant, I. 141, 142 Kearney, R. 139, 140 Kellner, D. 120 Kelly, M. 61 King, P. M. 83 Kitching, K. 9, 106, 107, 115, 116 Kittay, E. 15, 24, 29, 30 knowledge 112 democratization of 67

172

Index

four major uses of 73 sevenfold classification 72 transformative 56 Laclau, E. 123 Lankshear, C. 143 Lather, P. 33, 60, 61 Learning to Labour in New Times 124 legitimation 138 Lentin, R. 60 Levinas, E. 115 Lévi-Strauss, C. 142 Lewis, D. L. 41 liberal education and the limitations of the word 74–5 Martin’s critique of 74 reconceptualization of 80–1 and service-learning 81–4 and the word 71–3 and the World 78–81 liberation 5, 11, 12, 13–14, 19–20, 25–6, 29, 33–4, 58, 70, 77, 94, 106, 112, 130–1, 133–8, 144, 146–7, 150 education for 94–8 phases in 95 freedom for patriarchal manhood 19 significance of emotion to 20 unveiling of reality as an act of 136 liberation theology 82 limit situations 137 Livingston, G. 41 love 18 ludic post-modernism 128, 144, 146–7, 149–50 Lupton, D. 103, 113 Lynch, K. 7, 8, 15, 16, 22, 23, 26, 29, 30, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 66, 87, 91, 106, 107, 113 Lyotard, J.-F. 120, 122 Mac an Ghaill, M. 103, 104 McCarthy, C. 39 Macedo, D. 76 McLaren, P. 10, 11, 120, 121, 127, 128, 144, 145, 146, 147, 150

Politics of Liberation (with Colin Lankshear) 143 Postmodernism and the Death of Politics’ 143 MacLure, M. 108, 109 McRobbie, A. 103, 124 McWilliams, D. 107 Mahony, P. 55 Mannheim, K. 48 marginalization 49 Martin, J. R. 74, 75, 76, 79 Martin, M. 60, 61 Marx, Karl 121, 133 Meade, R. 103, 104, 105 meaning six realms of 72 Mies, M. 61 Mills, C. 38 modernity positivism of 5 moralism 121 moral philosophy 6 Moran, M. 87, 107 Mulcahy, D. G. 8, 75, 80, 84 The Educated Person 81, 84 neo-liberalism 36, 38, 45, 62, 63, 65 Newman, J. H. 8, 72, 73, 79, 84 Nietzsche, F. 12, 121, 140, 150 nihilism 112 No Child Left Behind (United States) 75, 79 Noddings, N. 3, 26, 29, 30 The Challenge to Care in Schools 29 Nowotny, H. 66 Nussbaum, M. 15, 17, 22, 24, 116, 117 objectivism 104 O’Brien, M. 5, 6, 14, 26, 27, 107 O’Connell, P. J. 90 O’Connor, P. 63, 66, 103 official knowledge 38 Oliver, M. 60, 61 Olssen, M. 117 O’Neill, C. 54, 58 ontological reductionism 11

Index oppressed 23, 75, 107, 115, 130, 134, 136, 147 objectification of 107 as oppressor 26 oppression 4–5, 11, 13–20, 23–7, 29–33, 58–9, 70–1, 75, 77, 79, 82, 84, 103, 115, 130–1, 134–7, 144–5, 147–50 Freire’s conception of 25 and hopefulness 20 internal 16, 33 traditional 23 in the world 16 oppressor 26, 76, 134, 147 oppressor/oppressed binary 147–9 organic intellectual 125 organic public sociology 46 O’Shea, A. 11 O’Sullivan, D. 105, 106 Patton, M. Q. 52 Peters, R. S. 72 pharmakon 133 Phenix, P. 72–3 Pilkington, A. 107 Plato 85, 133 Phaedrus 133 politics of difference 122 post-colonialism 38, 40, 45 post-colonialism(s) language of 39 post-modernism 1, 2, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13 147 and post-modernity 1 post-structuralists 108, 111 power 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 15, 17, 27, 33, 36, 37, 52, 57, 60, 61, 87, 101, 108, 111, 138 Dutch immigration application test 108–9 recognition as site of 109 as sovereign 108 Power, S. 53 praxis 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 25, 28, 31, 32, 33, 44, 52, 56, 61, 66, 67, 69, 75, 76, 77, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 113, 130,

131, 133, 134, 136, 137, 143, 144, 145 dialogic 16 nature of 4 transformative 16, 20, 33 Pring, R. 79, 80 problem-posing 75–6, 104 problem-posing education 77–8, 86, 137 progressive post-modernism 122, 127, 133 projection 28 rationalization as anti-development 23 as disgagement from empathy 23 Reagan, T. G. 71 Reay, D. 26, 53 reductionism 37 relationality 20, 113 research emancipatory 60–2 dialectical theory-building 61 transformative 59 resistance 112, 147 democratizing 59–62 personalized 54 politicized 56–9 theorizing 53–6 resistance postmodernism 127 responsiveness 24 Rhee, J. 110, 111, 113 Rhoades, G. 52, 66 Richardson, L. 52 risk being at risk 113–16 doing risk 116–18 Roberts, I. 55 Roberts, P. 19 Rogers, A. 28 romantic possibilitarianism 41 Rose, N. 111 Rosin, M. S. 79, 83 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 79 Rule, P. 56, 57 Ryan, A. B. 10 Ryan, M. 98, 102, 103, 117

173

174 The SAGE Handbook of Philosophy of Education 6 Sartre, J.-P. 126 Sayer, A. 27, 53, 57 Seery, A. 4 self 103, 117, 126 detached and invulnerable self, myth of 21–2 and the world 16, 21 Sevenhuijsen, S. 22, 23, 31 Sherman, A. 19 Shor, I. 77, 78, 79, 80 Simpson, D. 81 Sizer, T. R. 73 Skeggs, B. 53, 103, 107, 111 Slaughter, S. 52, 66 Smith, R. 12 Smyth, E. 107 social justice 4, 5, 6, 8, 20, 28, 44, 52–3, 61, 63–7 Socrates 3 Spivak, G. 39, 40, 49 Spretnak, C. 101 Standish, Paul 120, 122 Stanley, L. 61 Stengel, B. 83 subaltern 49 subjectification 102 subjectivation 108, 110 subjectivism 21, 112 subjectivity 21, 104 Sullivan, W. M. 79, 83 Sutherland, P. 101 Taylor, C. 122, 148, 149, 150 teaching as a purely rational activity 19 Teitelbaum, K. 48 Tett, L. 91 textual post-modernism 12 Thompson, E. P. 50 Thompson, J. B. 65 Tilly, C. 63 Touraine, A. 143 transformation 2–8, 10–12, 14–16, 18, 20–3, 29, 31–3, 54, 78, 84, 88–9, 98, 101, 104, 115, 131–2, 134–7, 142–8

Index features of 134–7 as a social and personal ethic 2 Tronto, J. C. 18, 24, 25 Truman, C. 61 trust 27 Tulloch, J. 103, 114 university as a site of resistance 51–2, 56 as a site of struggle 62 unthought known 28 value absence of 4 Voltaire 38 Webster, F. 66 Weiler, K. 19, 61 Weis, L. 36 well-being 10, 14–15, 22, 24, 26–7, 29–33, 125–6 sense of belonging and 27 White, J. 80 Whitty, G. 41 Williams, R. 80, 123 Willis, P. 122, 124, 125 Common Culture 124 The Ethnographic Imagination 124 Learning to Labour 124 Profane Culture 124 Wise, S. 61 Wittgenstein, L. 39 Women’s Studies 66 Wong, T. H. 41 Woodson, C. 50 Wright, E. O. 46 writing 133 Youdell, D. 104, 107, 108, 110, 111, 114, 115, 116 Young, R. 39, 40, 49 Zinn, H. 70 A People’s History of the United States 70 Zmroczek, C. 55