Abstract
As the title of this special issue suggests, popular education depends on the embodiment of democratic leadership and a pedagogy for liberation, where dialogue and critical reflection empower adults to become change agents rather than passive participants in disenfranchising practices.
During the years of segregation in the United States, Myles Horton embodied authentic leadership by facilitating integrated sessions at the Highlander Center without explanation; modeling rather than merely discussing, equality (Horton & Freire, 1990). How can popular education become a focus for our future, rather than an approach situated in a historical event like demanding civil rights? How can the academy become the launching point for critical thinking that shapes and motivates adult learners to influence their communities for the common good?
Most college and universities in this country are organized by hierarchies of power and control. Hooks (2003) pointed to a fear-based helplessness in students that is cultivated to maintain those hierarchies, and the lingering effects of passive schooling are evident in adult students who are resistant to active engagement in complex cognitive processes. Given that teachers, as well as students, are a product of this educational culture, where do educators learn a pedagogy grounded in participatory, democratic ideals that empowers adults to effect change in their personal lives, communities, and society? How do they shift the story of social justice from the historical roots of the Highlander Center to the average college classroom?
As a first step, Palmer (2007) suggested we “debunk the myth that institutions are external to us and constrain us, as if they possessed autonomous powers that render us helpless” (p. 205). Teaching situated within a framework of power and control historically produces authoritarian pedagogy. When democratic dialogue replaces a static transfer of knowledge from teacher to student, learning is co-created and authoritarian power can be demystified. Ultimately, educators must develop a process of inquiry into the ideologies which drive their personal worldview and assumptions about teaching and learning, separate from the institution of which they are a part. Then they will be in a position to make an authentic call to their students to engage in the same process.
A subsequent step would be to view popular education as a process that weaves any content and experience into knowledge that effects positive change. Lacking models of liberating education, it is tempting to blame content heavy curriculum as inappropriate for dialogic engagement. In a conversation on education and social change, Freire said to Horton, “A biology teacher must know biology, but is it possible just to teach biology?” (Horton & Freire, 1990, p. 104). To both men, claiming that content is neutral was simply aligning with the existing system. Even in a biology class, content can be explored in a social context and examined through the lens of many related disciplines. How can scientific knowledge be abused? Leveraged for good? Where does science intersect with literature, world health or ethics? In their minds, education is forever linked to social change.
Looking for a Process
Popular education is driven by leadership that creates learning opportunities designed to replace helplessness with authentic empathy, courage, and action. The critical classroom can provide a space for the process of examining assumptions, anchoring relevant theory into current contexts, and transferring learning into personal and collective change.
Because knowledge construction is contextual, it is important to begin the process with students’ comprehension of their life experience. Shor (1992) noted that intellectuals can become isolated by their language and affection for concepts, while their students typically first describe concrete experience and then construct meaning by applying unexamined assumptions. The teacher needs to understand what the students know and how they know it. Beginning with reality as the student views it, rather than from the teacher’s perspective, provides the base from which a different and deeper reading of reality can develop. So the course content is not reality, rather it is the consciousness of the student in relation to the content that is real.
Vella (2001) strongly advocated for a process that begins with an inductive task situated in the reality of learners’ experience. For example, in a research course, the open, prompting questions might simply be as follows: Examine the table of contents in the course text. Name the chapter that most excites you. Name the one that is most intimidating. What do you expect to know at the completion of the course? How would you utilize that information?
Looking for a process to replace helplessness with empathy, courage, and action is no small task. One tool is to build a safe space and to practice dialogic tools. Discussion guidelines will be of little use if learners are not genuinely interested in another person’s reasoning, and willing to expose the limitations of their own thinking. Following Argyris, Isaacs (1999) outlined a balance of advocacy and inquiry that can support a discourse of understanding and respect. Advocacy is understood as saying what you think, providing data to support that view, following with an example, and then inviting others to test your thinking. Inquiry means looking into, by way of open questioning, what you do not yet know. As a communication tool, inquiry can be initiated with phrases such as “What leads to you think that?” or “Can you give me an example?” Interpreting experience through new and different points of view in a safe space, followed by engagement with theoretical frames, can open a sense of responsiveness and understanding between people who might otherwise be apathetic, or even confrontational, toward the other.
Taking subsequent action can be a messy business, and a new consciousness may take a lifetime to live into. The classroom, however, can be a place of micro-practice that generates momentum toward transfer into the community as teachers and students partner in meaning making. Horton’s expertise at the Highlander Center was in creating and sustaining a collaborative learning process, rather than dispensing information as the expert. When pushed by a student to simply solve an issue, he replied,
No, let’s talk about it a little more. In the first place I don’t know what to do, and if I did know what to do I wouldn’t tell you, because if I had to tell you today then I’d have to tell you tomorrow, and when I’m gone you’d have to get somebody else to tell you. (Horton & Freire, 1990, p. 126)
Making full disclosure of one’s position and intentionality in the classroom is one of the chief ways a teacher demonstrates authentic leadership (Brookfield, 2011). That stance empowers students toward a role of discovery and decision making, so that learning outcomes are relevant to their context and needs. Our role as educators is to guide the process of determining and implementing the next steps, not as an expert with specific answers.
An epistemology of dialogue holds that knowing is an active verb (Vella, 2001) and idiosyncratic, culturally specific knowing generates a sense of energy and agency toward effecting change. The opposite of helplessness, as previously cited by hooks (2003), is courage and action transferred from the knowing of the classroom to the needs of the learner in her context. Then the role of education will shift from reproducing the dominant ideology to expanding collective awareness with the freedom necessary for new knowledge construction and change.
The work of looking for a process is in itself a process, and valuable development for the authentic educator. Shor (1992) reminds us that
Critical teachers do not have to wait for everything to change before anything can be changed. What goes on in each classroom is significant. Critical learning is by itself a form of social action because of its transforming potential, its challenge to the dominant culture inside and outside us. (p. 195)
When students are provided any experience of creative, democratic engagement in meaningful learning and relevant action, we have created the possibility that their education will expand beyond the classroom to a critical exploration of society. That transfer of learning will generate the future narratives of popular education.
Footnotes
Conflict of Interest
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Author Biography
Nancy Winfrey, PhD, has been educating adults for 20 years in corporate and non-profit settings. She is also an experienced instructional designer. Her current research interest is the critical theory underpinning experiential learning, action research, and group processes.