This short film illustrates how the filmmakers in this study mobilised Freire's critical pedagogy through the production of socially engaged documentaries. It is a compliation of clips from most of the films produced in our workshops that has been edited by Gaspar, Yusef and Michael to show the three stages of Freire's praxis: posing reality as a problem; critically examining and reflecting on social issues; and, proposing social remedies and calling audiences to action to enact them. This film can be utlised as toolkit for anyone who would like to run workshops similar to ours, or make socially engaged documentary films for themselves.
Paulo Freire (1973, 2000, 2016) recognised that, far from being neutral, education is a site of cultural struggle. In his critical pedagogy, he proposed that literacy learning should be situated in the lives of learners, rather than being an autonomous set of skills imposed upon them. Ultimately, the autonomous model assimilates the learner into the dominant ideology and closes down the critical potential of literacy. When learning fails to accommodate the lives of learners, it denies their culture and their voices, and reinforces their powerlessness. Freire conceived of culture in dialectical terms: seeking to enable learners to recognise their position in this “circle of certainty” (2000: 39), reflect critically upon it and take social action to disrupt it.
Working with groups of illiterate poor people in Brazil in the 1970s, Freire drew upon the lives of his learners as a basis for literacy education. At that time, literacy was a requirement to vote in Brazil, so his endeavours were inextricably tied to democratic participation. By dignifying cultures outside of the dominant group, Freire sought to empower learners by inviting them to reflect upon their lives and, through dialogue, to “perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform” (49). Freire’s educational philosophy is the antithesis of the one-way knowledge transmission model that is prevalent in a “banking” (72) concept of education that, he argues, positions learners as empty accounts to be filled with knowledge.
In Bourdieusian terms, literacy practices can sustain a dominant ideology by framing it in normative terms and transmitting it to new generations of learners in a cycle of cultural reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990). What distinguishes Freire and his adherents from critical scholars like Bourdieu is his emphasis on pedagogical approaches to disrupt this cycle. By learning to read the word and the world (Freire & Macedo, 1987), learners used their literacy as, “the motivating force for liberating action” (Freire, 2000: 49). In this way, unlike Bourdieu, Freire established a nexus between cultural production and power. This process of conscientization empowers learners to act both in and on their world: in Freire’s epistemology, literacy becomes a “practice of freedom” (177), through which learners can take both personal and collective action against social injustice; allowing them to reclaim their place in a social system that might previously have alienated them.
In a critical pedagogy, the role of the literacy educator is to establish discursive spaces where learners can mine their cultural capital so they become, “capable of looking critically at the world in a dialogical encounter with others” (Shaull, 2000: 32). Where a dominant ideology may seek to affirm its own values through the models it claims as cultural norms, Freire sought value and dignity in the cultural identities and voices that did not conform to mainstream culture. Where mainstream literacy practices might narrow the critical faculties of learners, in Freire’s hands, literacy education was transformed into both the motivation and means for subordinated learners to establish themselves as agents of social transformation. Dialogue with, and between, learners triggers a process of critical unveiling, where they come to recognise the inequalities inherent in systems that, often imperceptibly, subordinate them to the will of the powerful. In this social constructivist epistemology, “authentic participation would then enable the subjects involved in this dialogic encounter to unveil reality for themselves” (Thomas, 1994: 51).
Freire’s epistemology aligns with the emancipatory goals of this study, which are to democratise the learning process and provide a platform for critical citizenship. By equipping learners with a framework to articulate and share solutions to the problems that they face, it is intended that they become more empowered to take ownership of their social futures, by directly contributing to the discourses that shape their lives. This intervention provides scope to harness the representational and communicative potential of digital culture to unmask and challenge the ideologies that are transmitted to learners through education and the media.
Potential Pitfalls of Freire’s Critical Pedagogy
Freire assumes a clear dichotomy between the powerful and the powerless, and proposes that it is the role of the critical educator to open the doors to liberation for the oppressed of the world. While Freire did not acknowledge the contradictions inherent in this position, it is important that I do so in this study. There is a certain arrogance in the assumption that the critical educator can intervene in the lives of powerless people and provide them with a “secret formula” (Rahnema, 1992: 123) for emancipation. Blackburn (2000) points out that even in the context of Freire’s own educational work, the learners brought with them a culture and an identity from which they drew power, and could even adopt certain strategies of resistance to their oppressors. Freire largely discounts such forms of power. As a critical theorist, he drew instead on Marx’s notions of empowerment, which frame models of power in economic, rather than cultural, terms.
This contradictory position inevitably leads to moral questions about whether learners would genuinely desire to be empowered according to the terms of an outsider’s emancipatory framework. By assuming the position of knowledge-holding liberators, critical educators may, in fact, be exercising an oppressive power themselves in their paternalistic manipulation of learners to their own ideological agenda. In this case, the pedagogical practices of the banking system, so anathema in Freirean praxis, are merely reproduced in different learning contexts.
To avoid this potential pitfall critical educators must be mindful of the local reality and prioritise the interests of learners over their own: allowing them to frame their own concerns in their own voices, and providing opportunities for learners to draw on their existing cultural knowledge. This ongoing reflexive sensibility is an essential check to ensure they do not threaten or modify the identities or cultural practices of learners. The educator’s role in this learning environment is to provide literacy tools and support to enhance existing literacies: building a space for empowerment, rather than imposing a predetermined framework for liberation (Blackburn, 2000). This requires an educator, particularly one like myself who is emerging from the banking system of education, to take up the difficult task of relinquishing control: to accept that answers to local problems lie in the context of learning, rather than the “wisdom” of the teacher.
This approach might well ensure egalitarian dialogue, but it begs a further question about how a critical educator can guide learning towards an outcome: the imperative in critical pedagogy for ethical social action. Biesta (2017) points out how these pedagogical orientations can be contradictory, and that a Freirean education is inherently non-directional. Whilst I accept that this is, indeed, a possibility, I intend to guide learning through the problem-posing praxis. When faced by the possibility that the forms of social action that learners propose are not socially just, the critical educator should frame the problem in terms of the ethical inconsistencies inherent in their position. Freire (2000) termed such interventions in the dialogical process “hinged themes” (120), which “illustrate the relations between the general program content and the view of the world held by the people” (Freire, 2000: 120).
References
Biesta, G. (2017). Don’t be fooled by ignorant schoolmasters: On the role of the teacher in emancipatory education. Policy Futures in Education, 15(1), 52-73.
Blackburn, J. (2000). Understanding Paulo Freire: Reflections on the origins, concepts, and possible pitfalls of his educational approach. Community Development Journal, 35(1), 3-15.
Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. C. (1990). Reproduction in education, society and culture (Vol. 4). Sage.
Freire, P. (1973). Education for critical consciousness (Vol. 1). Bloomsbury Publishing.
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniv. ed.). New York: Continuum, 35.
Freire, P. (2016). Pedagogy in process: The letters to Guinea-Bissau. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word and the world. Routledge.
Rahnema, M. (1992). Participation. The development dictionary: A guide to knowledge as power. London: Zed Books.
Shaull, R. (2000) Foreword. In Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Continuum.
Thomas, P. (1994). Participatory development communication: Philosophical premises.