Critical Pedagogy for Social Justice

John Smyth

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781441172266
• eBook ISBN: 9781441127792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

We live in a time when those who wield unrestrained power believe they have the inalienable right to determine the destiny, nature and shape of social institutions like schools. Critical Pedagogy for Social Justice challenges this arrogance by showing how teachers, students, parents, communities, and researchers can develop narratives that amount to working with and for those who are increasingly being silenced, marginalized and excluded. John Smyth sets out to revisit critical pedagogy from a number of key leverage points. The overarching aim of this book is to unmask the deforming and distorting way power operates, while at the same time revealing how a commitment to a more socially just world can exist in the everyday lives and narratives of people who have a passion for transformative possibilities. His clear, concise, and persuasive book is ideal for those who are dissatisfied with the current turn in education and who are seeking an alternative set of views that emerge from the grounded experiences and practices ion schools struggling with the most disadvantaged circumstances.

CHAPTER 1

Critical Hope That Aims to Counter ‘the Crippling Fatalism of Neoliberalism’

OPENING EXPLANATORY COMMENT

We need critical hope the way a fish needs unpolluted water.

—Freire, 1996, Pedagogy of Hope

I have chosen to preface this collection of largely reworked essays and papers of mine by trying to get to the essence of Paulo Freire’s incredible lifetime project of critical pedagogy, but to do this in a way that brings my own somewhat realistic, while at the same time critical, inflection to it. In doing this, I am deeply indebted to Darren Webb (2010) for his most insightful account, that inspired me to pursue Paulo’s quest around the ‘need for a kind of educated hope’.

The intent in my opening comments in this overarching piece is to dip into, but only slightly, some of what Webb (2010) has drawn attention to around what Paulo Freire, in A Pedagogy of Freedom, termed ‘critical hope’ (Freire, 1998, p. 70). Before I go into more detail on this crucial idea, I should say something about my wider reason for doing this. My purpose is to provide some kind of intellectual and philosophical scaffolding with which to gain a wider understanding of, while also advancing, a bundle of ideas I have been worrying and interrogating for quite some time.

In accepting Shirley Steinberg and Anna Maria Freire’s invitation to contribute to such an important series, I am extremely mindful of wanting to present some ideas that fit with their desire, as series editors, to bring together works that reinvent and improve critical pedagogy for the contemporary – albeit extremely dangerous – times in which we live.

It seemed that my work unquestionably fit their agenda of a pedagogy for social justice, and in what follows I want to unpick the ways in which I pose a discourse of critique around some existing educational and social practices while at the same time providing some pointers to what some more socially just alternatives might look like. I hope that in doing this (and feeling most humbled in the process of even attempting to follow someone with the stature of Freire), I can do justice to the spirit of Paulo’s notion of radical education as a project that is always incomplete and in the process of transformation.

I could have taken off in a multitude of different directions in this book – indeed, my commissioning prospectus suggested an extraordinarily ambitious, but ultimately unachievable, constellation of topics. Instead, I have deliberately reigned myself in, in order to meet the editorial requirement of a shorter document that might be accessible to diverse audiences, possibly from cross-disciplinary backgrounds, while able to be accessed through a semester-long window, possibly as a supplementary course text. Hence my quite deliberate triumvirate of the following:

• teachers – as intellectuals;

• students – as activists;

• communities – as politically engaged and connected.

I think this nested troika provides me with an ideal way in which to explore what a critical praxis within and between these topics might look like.

EDUCATED HOPE – A PROLEGOMENON

I am not equipped by training or disposition to explore the philosophical and theological complexities of reading of Freire’s notion of critical hope in the way Webb (2010) has already done. Nor is that appropriate or necessary in this introductory essay. Rather, my intent here is to provide a brief glimpse into a crucial and fascinating aspect of Freire’s works and then to leave the reader to pursue them in depth elsewhere, while I deploy some of these ideas in subsequent chapters to make a bridge to my own work. Many of Freire’s comments in this regard were made up to four decades ago, and they are as challenging, potent and relevant today as when they were initially made.

For starters, Freire’s central notion is that ‘hope’, as an idea, ‘is rooted in [our] incompleteness’, and that what makes us human is the ‘constant search’ to become more fulfilled. This is something we pursue collaboratively and in communion with others – a theme that was given particular expression in his defining Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972a, p. 64, my emphasis). This notion is considerably at variance with the dominance of neoliberal ideas today, in which the overwhelming emphasis is upon individualism, materialism, consumption and personal acquisition.

The latter are ideas that Ira Shor pursued in conversation with Paulo Freire in A Pedagogy for Liberation: Dialogues on Transforming Education (Shor and Freire, 1987). Ira summed it up in respect to US society (although as a non-American, I would argue it applies equally to all other western societies) as follows:

With our deep roots in individualism . . . [we have a] devotion to ‘making it on your own’, improving yourself, moving up in the world, pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, striking it rich by an ingenious personal effort. (p. 110)

Shor goes on to point out that this misplaced emphasis on individualism is a chimera – an evaporating myth:

This emphasis on ‘self’ is the educational equivalent of the capitalist infatuation with the lone entrepreneur, that romantic and fading factor in an economy now monopolized by giant corporations. (p. 110)

‘Hopelessness’, according to Freire (1972a, p. 64) is ‘a form of silence’ that amounts to a gross case of denial of the world. It is akin to ‘fleeing from it’ (p. 64). To be fully human, he says, is tantamount to confronting the world, challenging it, asking questions about how the social relations we live by have been constructed and what it is that keeps these relations in place. To put this even more sharply, Freire (1972a) argues that ‘hope . . . does not consist of folding one’s arms and waiting’ (p. 64). For him, this kind of passivism is ‘empty and sterile’ and is likely to invoke from us encounters and responses that are ‘bureaucratic and tedious’ (p. 64). To embrace the world in static or inert ways is to be infused with fear – the very antithesis of risk – which underpins critical approaches to thinking and learning.

From this vantage point, we can begin to envisage all kinds of possibilities. For example, notions of ‘not learning’ or ‘failure’ to become engaged with school learning – which frequently ends up being falsely labeled as ‘dropping out’ of school – could be considered as an illustration of a failure to teach what is meant by hope. Invoking the work of Snyder (2002), Webb (2010) says that people who are labeled ‘hopeless’ (p. 328) are quite literally that way ‘because they were not taught to think in this manner’ (Snyder, 2002, p. 253). This is a very different inflection to the notion of ‘failure’, which in common parlance is taken to mean failure to achieve or learn due to a lack of application, aptitude or effort. This positions failure, and who and what has failed, in a very different light.

Webb (2010) goes to some considerable lengths to draw our attention to Freire’s mindfulness of false, simplistic, unsophisticated, undisciplined and naïve approaches to hope – which can only end up in ‘frustration’, ‘disappointment’, ‘despair’ and ‘immobilization’ (p. 334). As Freire (1996) states in Pedagogy of Hope: ‘hope, as an ontological need, demands an anchoring in practice’ (p. 9) – something that I will demonstrate in later chapters as a feature of my own attempt to follow Freire’s project of cultural action.

Freire (1996) argues that in developing this focused approach we need passion, commitment and persistence, but equally ‘we must take every care not to experience [hope] in a mistaken form’ – by which he means approaches that are ‘vain’, frivolous’, ‘reckless’, ‘irresponsible’, ‘over-zealous’ and that lose their ‘grip on reality’ (Webb, 2010, p. 334). In other words, hope needs to be tempered by a high level of realism. Developing this kind of disposition, Freire (1996) says, requires ‘serious . . . political analysis’ to enable us ‘to unveil opportunities . . . no matter what the obstacles may be’ (p. 9). Grace (1994) labels this ‘complex hope’, which means ‘recogniz[ing] the historical and structural difficulties which have to be overcome’ (p. 57). This seems to me to be simply prudent! In Daring to Dream: Toward a Pedagogy of the Unfinished, Freire (2007) urges us to ‘speak about . . . limits’ (p. 64) and to discuss what can be accomplished ‘where’, ‘how’, ‘with whom’ and ‘when’ (p. 64), and in the process to realize that our work as educators ‘is not individual, but social, and that it takes place within the social practice he or she is a part of’ (pp. 64–5). Carlson (2005) captures this point in his study of democratic renewal in a high school when he says we need to ‘construct narratives of hope without illusion’ and that doing so involves a recognition ‘that culture is contested and thus open rather than determined’ (p. 21).

Part of Freire’s argument in Cultural Action for Freedom (Freire, 1972b) is that the forces of domination ‘have nothing to announce but the preservation of the status quo’, with the result that they are totally committed to the ‘domestication of the future’ (Webb, 2010, p. 331) in order to ensure that it is a tame ‘repetition of the present’ (Freire, 1972b, p. 41). In Daring to Dream, Freire (2007) responds to this construction of inequality and deprivation by labelling them a ‘resounding obscenity’ (p. 22). What we see coming through here is the notion that critical hope is not about being ‘patient and serene’ (Webb, 2010, p. 334); rather it is infused with ‘outrage, indignation and restlessness’ (p. 333). Neither is there unrealism about timelines or what can be achieved within them, but rather a process of calculative ‘active waiting’ (p. 333), nicely captured in the title of Freire’s (2004) book, Pedagogy of Indignation. Freire (1972a) put it in these terms in Pedagogy of the Oppressed: ‘As long as I fight I am moved by hope: and if I fight with hope then I can wait’ (p. 64).

GETTING ‘CONTROL OF DESTINY’

Duncan-Andrade (2009) is especially helpful in the way he confronts and challenges a range of what he calls ‘enemies of hope’ and the effects these have on groups placed at the bottom of the social gradient. He labels these variants of false hope ‘hokey hope’, ‘mythical hope’ and ‘hope deferred’, and his argument is that these constitute a collective, illusory framework that in the end presents an entirely misleading facsimile of the real thing.

‘Hokey hope’ (which is derived from ‘hokum’, meaning, bunkum, sensational, sentimental or unreal), is based, as Duncan-Andrade (2009) puts it, on the naïve view that somehow things will get better, even when there is no evidence to warrant this view and even less indication as to how the existing situation might be changed. Hokey hope is false and misleading because it flies in the face of and ‘ignores the laundry list of inequalities that impact the lives [of excluded groups]’ (p. 182), and it denies the demonstrably uneven playing field upon which their lives are lived and experienced. The consequence of this unreality is that relationships get played out in veneered, synthetic and entirely ‘pragmatic’ ways. For example, in the educational arena, we see relationships dominated through ‘impersonal and objective language, including such terms as goals, strategies, and standardized curriculum’ that are unashamedly used to justify ‘decisions made by one group for another’ (Valenzuela, 1999, p. 22).

Duncan-Andrade (2009) puts his criticism in the most direct and sharp way when he points to hokey hope as amounting to a form of ‘false caring . . . in which the more powerful members of a relationship define themselves as caring despite the fact that the recipients of the so-called caring do not perceive it as such’ (p. 183). Hokey hope is thus predicated on a ‘middle-class opportunity structure that is inaccessible to the overwhelming majority’ (p. 183) of the social groups it is supposed to benefit. Even more problematic is the way in which it ‘largely delegitimizes the pain [experienced by such groups] as a result of a persistently unequal society’ and positions them such that the privileged and oblivious class, who persistently fail to understand the plight of the less advantaged, are prepared to metaphorically ‘let them eat cake’ (p. 183).

‘Mythical hope’, on the other hand, has some of the same features, with the addition of a ‘false narrative of equality of opportunity’, which is completely evacuated of any sense of the history or politics of how inequality has been created and is sustained. There is a kind of mythmaking taking place here, asserting that somehow people who have been placed at a disadvantage (my terminology and emphasis) can transcend the obstacles and succeed despite adversity. The most disturbing aspect of mythical hope, as Duncan-Andrade (2009) states, is its ‘profoundly ahistorical and depoliticized denial of suffering that is rooted in celebrating individual exceptions’ (p. 184). In other words, in accordance with mythical hope, anyone can succeed, despite debilitating backgrounds, provided they make the appropriate investment of effort; and there are many examples that can be cited of people who have done this – albeit, the pathways they have taken to overcome obstacles in a way that has fundamentally transformed the landscapes from which they have come remain unclear. These are serendipitous instances that come across more as lone examples of successful escapees than they do as stories of transformations of the underlying conditions that remain uninterrupted and as a result continue to afflict others.

‘Hope deferred’, Duncan-Andrade’s (2009) third variant, involves shifting the focus, albeit only a little, by avoiding outright ‘blaming the victim’ and instead pointing the finger of blame at ‘the economy’, ‘the lack of social services’ or ‘the system’ (p. 184) – all of which largely miss the mark, because their superficiality masks their inability to manifest ‘any kind of transformative pedagogical project’ (p. 184). Underlying deferred hope is the vain wish that somehow society will undergo some kind of reform that will enable those excluded to magically ascend to the middle class. This kind of hope is manifestly unreal, because as Duncan-Andrade (2009), invoking Syme (2004), argues, it fails to understand the powerful effect of the absence of ‘control of destiny’ (p. 184). By this term Syme (2004) means ‘the ability of people to deal with the forces that affect their lives (even if they decide not to deal with them)’ (p. 3).

The argument being rehearsed here by Syme (2004) around ‘control of destiny’ and reinforced by epidemiological research (Wilkinson and Marmot, 2003; Wilkinson, 2005; Marmot, 2007; 2010; Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009) is that social groups who experience ‘chronic stress’ on a prolonged basis are susceptible to becoming sick because inequalities expose them such that ‘their primary human needs [are] under constant attack’ (Duncan-Andrade, 2009, p. 185). Refusal to confront and address these realities of social inequality and, in the process, to ‘cultivate their control of destiny’ (p. 185) in the social groups concerned, means that all we have left to offer them is ‘hope deferred’ (p. 185). That is to say, what they need to do is get better at setting individual goals and targets for themselves and they will make it. The problem with this line is that wearing the problem individually in this way belies the fact that those who are supposed to be working with and for such groups are themselves unprepared to make ‘the level of sacrifices’ (p. 185) necessary to close the gap, and the result is sadly predictable.

What ‘control of destiny’ means, practically speaking, is being prepared to reframe the issues in other ways – ways that are more mindful of the real lives and circumstances of the people most directly affected. To take an example from another area, as Syme (2004) argued in his work regarding the attempt to reduce the health effects of smoking, focusing on disease and risk factors is unlikely to work when people have other, more pressing priorities in their lives. Coming at the issue by getting people to articulate how reducing smoking or substance use might affect hopes they have for the future might have possibilities. For example, working with them on

ways of implementing their dreams; how to make things work for their benefit; how to select a problem and succeed in solving it; how to develop strategies for getting done what they want to get done; how to take control of their desti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series editor
• Chapter 1  Critical Hope That Aims to Counter ‘the Crippling Fatalism of Neoliberalism’
• Chapter 2  Teachers-as-Intellectuals in Neoliberal Times
• Chapter 3  Students-as-Activists in Their Own Learning
• Chapter 4 Critically Engaged ‘Community Capacity Building’ That ‘Speaks Back’ to Social Exclusion
• Chapter 5 Continuing the Struggle . . . Pursuing the Light on the Hill through a Conversation with Joe Kincheloe
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• eCopyright