Liberation Theology and Critical Pedagogy in Today's Catholic Schools

Social Justice in Action

Thomas Oldenski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780815323754
• eBook ISBN: 9781135620134
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Grounded in the work of liberation theologians, this book considers peace, love and social justice within a democratic curriculum and underscores the importance of integrating critical discourses with Catholic education.

CHAPTER ONE

What’s “This” All About?

[Baby Suggs] did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glory bound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they would not see it, they would not have it.

-Toni Morrison in Beloved (1987)

The Queen remarked, “Now I’ll give you something to believe. I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.” “I can’t believe that!” said Alice. “Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.” Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

-Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass (1871)

Both quotations encourage me to shut my eyes, to imagine and to believe in different ways of thinking about schools, particularly Catholic schools, and what could be happening in schools differently than what is happening there now. Baby Suggs teaches us to imagine in order to “have it” and the White Queen encourages us to believe in the impossible. My belief in what appears to be impossible stimulates me to ponder many questions. What is it I would like to see in Catholic schools? What would I like to imagine Catholic schools to be like? Could practices in both Catholic and public schools be informed by critical discourses like liberation theology and critical pedagogy? What can these two critical discourses bring to an understanding of Catholic education? Can these critical discourses help us understand what happens in schools and what could be happening in our parochial, private or public schools?

As I ponder these questions and issues, I draw upon my own experiences as a Catholic school teacher and administrator and my current experiences as a professor at a Catholic university. Besides my own experiences, my interest in liberation theology and critical pedagogy influenced my analysis of the relationship between these two critical discourses as well as the relationship of critical discourses to Catholic education. My own interest in the critical discourses of liberation theology and critical pedagogy further prompted me to wonder if and how these appeared in a school committed to teaching and working with some oppressed or marginalized segment of society. My own teaching in Catholic high schools led me to wonder what shape a Catholic school might take if it were committed to such elements and themes of critical discourses as liberation theology and critical pedagogy.

My familiarity with Catholic schools reflects my life within Catholic education. I attended a Catholic grade school, a Catholic high school and a Catholic university. I have spent my adult life as a religious brother in the Marianists, a religious congregation of brothers and priests within the Catholic church, whose history includes an extensive involvement with Catholic schools in our country and others. As a Marianist brother who served as a teacher and an administrator in Catholic schools, I reflected often on what ideals and realities shape these schools in order to help apply the spirit of the Gospels—or in other words, to help promulgate the Kingdom of God. I believe peace, justice and love characterize this Kingdom. Attaining these values in my life and bringing them to the lives of others have been the driving forces in my life, and this is how I want to spend my energies. This is idealistic talk but I find every effort toward this goal is worthwhile.

Meanwhile I have read and pondered many of the liberation theologians of Central and South America. My own experiences of living and working with people in Nigeria, Ireland and Mexico, as well as living and working in Dayton, Kalamazoo and Memphis, brought their words to life. I find hope that many individuals who have become part of my life share these beliefs in the larger community of Christian believers.

After twenty years as a teacher and administrator in Catholic secondary schools, I undertook doctoral studies in educational leadership at Miami University, Ohio. Here I met a new array of educational prophets who criticized our modern schools and suggested possibilities and strategies for improving the lives of the marginalized, silenced and oppressed. These new teachers included Henry Giroux, Dennis Carlson, Peter McLaren and Richard Quantz. I seized the chance to interact with them both as a doctoral student and in informal conversations. They introduced me to critical discourses—namely, critical theory and critical pedagogy. They also introduced me to the work and writings of Paulo Freire and feminist liberation theologians like Sharon Welch and Rebecca Chopp. My excitement grew as I began to discover connections between liberation theology and critical discourses, and saw how these critical discourses helped me to reflect in a different way upon my experiences in Catholic schools.

During his trip to the United States in October of 1995, Pope John Paul II, like Baby Suggs and the White Queen, encouraged us Catholics to imagine and believe in what seems to be impossible. His homilies and other talks during his visit to New York City, Newark and Baltimore focused on what he termed “the new evangelization,” which is a deepening of faith in the Gospel as “the power which can transform the world” (1995, p. 13) and which is “a new and vital proclamation of the Gospel aimed at integrating your faith ever more fully into the fabric of your daily lives” (p. 3). It seems to me this new evangelization pertains to those involved with Catholic education. Catholic education has as its very purpose the proclamation of the Gospel and the challenge to help young people integrate faith into their daily lives.

This new evangelization includes both these aspects of the role of faith in life and a new commitment in our culture to celebrate diversity, to be welcoming to new immigrants, and to be concerned for the poor of our own country as part of the proclamation of the transforming power of the Gospel. John Paul expressed these concerns upon his arrival at Newark International Airport where he stated that the United States “has been a haven for generation after generation of new arrivals” and that as a country we need to meet the needs of the poor and the disadvantaged (p. 15). Likewise, in his homily at Giants Stadium, the Pope recalled the words of Emma Lazarus’s poem on the Statue of Liberty. He then posed this question: “Is present-day America becoming less sensitive, less caring towards the poor, the weak, the stranger, the needy? It must not! Today as before, the United States is called to be a hospitable society, a welcoming culture” (p. 3).

Once more Catholic educators must evaluate how Catholic schools welcome new arrivals and how Catholic schools express concern for the poor and disadvantaged. How the climate, spirit and practices of Catholic education demonstrate these concerns of diversity and the concerns of the new arrivals, the poor and the disadvantaged? John Paul’s recent words animate my desire to enter the dialogue about the identity of Catholic schools and articulate how the critical discourses of liberation theology and critical pedagogy can inform this dialogue.

Melanie Svoboda states that “the essence of all writing is an I hoping to share something with a ‘you’” (1995, p. 23). She states my intention here: to share my ideas and my reflections about what I imagine and believe Catholic education can be and the relationship of Catholic education to the critical discourses of liberation theology and critical pedagogy. I believe that one of the ideals of Catholic education is to become and to be a model of critical theory and practice in a liberation theology context. I believe this is possible. Accordingly, I present the case study of Vincent Gray Alternative High School as an example of one school that demonstrates critical theory and practice in a liberation theology context.

As you read this book, you will ideally begin to think of Catholic education in a different way and see some new possibilities. I hope my ideas and reflections will help you to believe in the impossible. As I bring this book to fruition, I share the feelings Svoboda (1995) expresses in her article, “The Eight Beatitudes of Writing.” She states that “when we write (as when we really live), we are putting ourselves on the line. In some cases, our necks go on the chopping block. We are proclaiming to the world in big bold letters: ‘Look! This Is What I Think! This Is How I Feel! What Do You Think of Me Now?’ Is there anything more frightening than that?” (p. 24).

One of my other goals in expressing my ideas and reflections is to help Catholic education improve our world. Svoboda again states that “writing flows from the innate desire to influence (no matter how slightly) people (no matter how few) for the better” (p. 23). Jonathan Kozol, whose works—especially Savage Inequalities (1991) and Amazing Grace (1995)—have intensified my concern for the poor, also states that he writes “to change the world” (Dreyfous, 1995, p. 19).

My beliefs as a doctoral student encouraged me to focus my dissertation on the relationship between liberation theology and critical pedagogy and the relationship of these two critical discourses to Catholic schools. As I developed my own awareness of such critical discourses as liberation theology, feminist ethics and critical pedagogy, I found myself more concerned about just what actually occurs in Catholic education and whom Catholic schools serve. To what degree do Catholic schools reflect Church documents and Gospel values that urge a concern for the poor? Is it possible to apply the critical discourses of liberation theology and critical pedagogy to Catholic schooling in our country? In light of current discussions within public education of “standards” and “achievement” as well as those proposals involving voucher systems for funding private education, it has become crucial for Catholic schools to struggle with the issue of whom they are serving as well as how they serve. I also find myself asking whether Catholic schools really offer an alternative to public education. Catholic schools like public schools need to confront the reasons for their existence.

In my view, Catholic schools are sites of ethical and social justice. The discourses of liberation theology and critical pedagogy can benefit Catholic education. It is both possible and urgent to understand Catholic schools as political sites in regard to the struggles for social justice, and this conviction led me to identify the site of my research, an alternative Catholic high school in East St. Louis, Illinois.

Subsequently, I focused there on the voices of the students, administrators and teachers of Vincent Gray Alternative High School as I came to know these persons at VGAHS. Their voices express some of the common elements in critical pedagogy and liberation theology and give life to these critical discourses.

A qualitative study focused on the voices of students, teachers and administrators heard in this book became the substance of my dissertation. Likewise, the relationship of the critical discourses of liberation theology and critical pedagogy that led me to develop an integrative model also became a major part of the dissertation. My main thesis became the articulation in these voices of my integrative model of the common elements of the critical discourses in liberation theology and critical pedagogy.

While adjusting now to the life of a university professor, I have been able to focus the implications of this research and my thoughts more on the identity of Catholic schools and how the critical discourses of liberation theology and critical pedagogy can enrich the dialogue of Catholic education. These two discourses can illuminate the current struggle and dialogue over what must become the concerns and focus for a Catholic education of the future. I intend that this discussion encourage those involved with Catholic education who are interested in critical discourses to imagine and believe that what appears to be impossible can become possible.

The students, teachers and administrators of Vincent Gray Alternative High School gave me a way of understanding how critical discourses describe school practices, and their voices helped me start to understand how these two critical discourses can describe, evaluate and influence those practices.

As I ponder the relationship of critical discourse to the identity of Catholic schools, I also struggle to understand modernism and postmodernism, and their effects upon my own thinking in relation to school reform. Patrick Slattery’s Curriculum Development in the Postmodern Era (1995) helped me understand the relationship postmodernism bears to curriculum development. Slattery focuses on the purposes of schools and the structures schooling takes in reflecting these purposes as affected by the tensions between modernism and postmodernism.

Critical pedagogy must draw upon the best insights of modernism and postmodernism (Giroux, 1991 and 1992), and I have concluded that liberation theology must do the same in regard to modernism and postmodernism. As discourses of critique and possibility, liberation theology and critical pedagogy—in their own practices and self-understandings—actually try to draw upon both modernism and postmodernism.

Briefly stated, modernism offers the ideals of a democratic society —freedom, equity and justice, as well as the notions of individuals’ social responsibilities as agents of critique and change. Modernism values the individual as a critical being able to shape his or her own destiny and meaning. Likewise, modernism upholds high culture over popular culture. Knowledge is perceived as totalizing narratives identified with the development of reason, science and technology. Reason, science and technology become sources of power and dominance in establishing the privileged over those who lack them. The only source of this knowledge and power is, however, the metanarratives of the Eurocentric cultures and histories. Thus, schooling becomes a site of transmission of the canon of knowledge and culture, as defined by rationality, science and technology.

Postmodernism, by contrast, expands the concepts of freedom, equity, justice and a democratic society to include an understanding of these phenomena from the perspective of those histories and voices that have been silenced, erased or excluded from the Eurocentric metanarratives of progress and human development. Postmodernism identifies these histories as “dangerous memories” (Taylor, 1990; and Welch, 1990) since they force one to evaluate history as it has been developed and presented from the perspective of the dominant culture and the oppressor. Postmodernism values popular taste and the everyday in the lives of people as vital to shaping and understanding culture. It celebrates diversity and plurality. In regard to knowledge, postmodernism begins to raise questions about how knowledge is constructed, whose interests knowledge serves, and what values and assumptions underlie this knowledge.

Both liberation theology and critical pedagogy integrate these concepts of equity, justice, freedom and a democratic community by according voice to the many others who were and are oppressed by Eurocentric metanarratives. Each of these discourses encourages a reconstruction of history so as to help others understand their own identities and assimilate a democratic society, justice and freedom into their lived experience. Both critical pedagogy and liberation theology echo the questions of postmodernism in regard to the construction and role of knowledge, especially as a source of power and a vehicle for silencing the voices of the poor, the marginalized and the many “others.” Both of these discourses value the role of ethics, but this ethics is constructed in response less to ethical demands of power and authority of rationality, science or technology than to solidarity and compassion in creating a juster, more democratic human community. Both draw from modernism a protest against unnecessary human suffering and affirm ethics that reduces human suffering caused by oppression of the marginalized.

My own analysis of critical discourses and their relationship to Catholic education celebrates elements of modernism and postmodernism. Within this tension between modernism and postmodernism, I show how critical discourses can contribute to the dialogue about the identity of Catholic schools. Modernism is reflected in a presentation of the students, teachers and administrators as agents of change in creating a society striving to become more just, equitable and democratic. Presenting the common elements between liberation theology and critical pedagogy, I created a model inductively as I read and coded my first five student interviews. Thus, this model includes some of the integrative elements of these two critical discourses. Then I use this model to analyze the voices of the subsequent students, teachers and administrators. I also present their voices in a structural manner in relation to the integrative model of liberation theology and critical pedagogy.

Elements of postmodernism likewise appear. I focus on an alternative school in a community known as being marginalized by the dominant culture, a predominantly African American city as the result of white flight with a high proportion of its people on social welfare. My study celebrates the voices of diversity: African Americans and whites, the educated and those who have not succeeded in schools, students, teachers and administrators. These voices express a day-to-day existence in one of our poorest cities, and in these voices, one can hear many of the themes from the liberation theology and critical pedagogy texts. The chapters of this book also include my own voice as I interpret the voices of this school and the liberation theology and critical pedagogy texts as they relate to Catholic education.

Vincent Gray Alternative High School currently struggles with its own identity as a Catholic school. The chief administrator had earlier withdrawn VGAHS from the lists of Catholic schools of the local diocese, yet some of the teachers and administrators understand VGAHS as a Catholic school in terms of its values, practices and atmosphere. Moreover, the experiences and practices there demonstrate how Catholic schools can respond to the preference for the poor Catholic doctrine advocates.

I have tried to integrate the best of these discourses—both of modernism and postmodernism, and of liberation theology and critical pedagogy. I emphasize common themes and elements of the critical discourses of liberation theology and critical pedagogy as found in the voices of the students, administrators and teachers. I also focus on the history, the culture and the situation during my time at this school site in attempting to articulate its reasons for being and its vision for introducing justice, empowerment and a democratic community within the African American community of East St. Louis.

Conducting Research at VGAHS

Qualitative research in educational circles has achieved a great deal of sophistication in recent years. It employs a variety of strategies including interviews, participant observations, oral histories, and content analysis of texts, classroom behaviors and school life. Meanwhile, I found my experiences at VGAHS and as an education researcher urging this study from ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Chapter One: What’s “This” All About?
• Chapter Two: Catholic Schools: An Identity Crisis
• Chapter Three: What the Research Reveals About Catholic Schools
• Chapter Four: Critical Discourses of Liberation Theology and Critical Pedagogy
• Chapter Five: Catholic School: A Home for Critical Discourses
• Chapter Six: Student Voices
• Chapter Seven: Voices of Administrators
• Chapter Eight: The Voices of the Teachers
• Chapter Nine: Reflections
• Bibliography
• Index