Abstract
Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed was an intellectual and education-changing experience for me in graduate school that continues to shape how I teach, research, and engage the world. Freire’s theory of conscientização (translated from Portuguese as “critical consciousness,” “consciousness raising,” or “critical awareness”) clarified for me Carter G. Woodson’s and Amilcar Cabral’s contentions about the importance of culture in liberating oppressed people. Freire’s book revealed for me the intricate process through which societal systems of oppression, like white supremacy, solidify their domination through organized control of people’s cultural lives.
Similar to C. Wright Mills’s sociological imagination, Freire’s conscientização theory provided me with a collaboration road map for creating my and everyday people’s capacity to transform ourselves and the world. To arrive here, Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed convincingly illustrates how people could be equipped with the ability to “read” the society around them. To develop this efficacy, Freire contends it is important for people to see through the false notion that the educational process is neutral. Accepting this fallacious assumption leads people to be unreflective about how power shapes education, which in turn informs how we make sense of oppressive conditions and ourselves. This simple but crucial insight made it clear to me that my research and teaching must always dispel the notion that education and science are apolitical to facilitate people’s movement away from being passive recipients of knowledge. To ensure this change, Pedagogy of the Oppressed advocates engaging in a “problem-posing” approach whereby people are active participants in the development of knowledge. This approach virtually guarantees that people link knowledge to action to actively work toward changing society.
To liberate oppressed people’s minds and bodies from oppression, Freire, like Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Aimé Césaire, and Stuart Hall, noted that the first step is for the oppressed to reject oppressors’ conceptions of their reality and themselves. By making this break, the oppressed eschew the assumed supremacy of oppressors’ culture (ways of knowing and living) to embrace their own power to make history and transform the world. For culture carries the seeds of liberation from oppression, given it is a reservoir of history that evolves and equips the oppressed with a repertoire of existing and newly created reactions to sociopolitical and economic oppression. Pedagogy of the Oppressed remains my constant companion throughout my endeavor to help create a human-centered world grounded in human decency, dignity, and rights.