Freire and Femagogy

Well folks, it took me a minute, but I’m finally ready to write a few words about Freire and feminist pedagogy. I have struggled, as I initially did upon reading Dewey, to figure out exactly how I wanted to articulate the connection between Freire and feminist pedagogy. Unlike my experience with Dewey, however, feminist pedagogy and Freirian pedagogy were much more glaringly related; nevertheless, I couldn’t quite put my finger on the word for the feminist tenet espoused by Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2000). Although there are arguably many tenets I could list—consciousness-raising, social transformation—I want to focus on one in particular: agency. An emphasis on agency is, I feel, integral in both feminist pedagogy and Freire’s pedagogy of liberation.

Let’s start with a definition. My handy Merriam-Webster Dictionary app on my phone defines agency as, “a person or thing through which power is exerted or an end is achieved.” Questions surrounding women’s agency and the presence of women’s voices in established institutions as well as in society at large have long been important questions for feminist philosophers, according to Meyers (2014). Practitioners of a feminist pedagogy, more specifically, concern themselves with the creating of a space where heretofore-marginalized perspectives and voices can be appreciated and heard; or, in other words, a space where others recognize and respect the agency of people who perform marginalized identities (Weiler, 2001). I use particular language here to foreground the notion that others cannot confer the agency that belongs to members of marginalized groups upon them. All people are necessarily agential; however, society and institutions haven’t always (and in many cases still have not) granted equal credit to the agency of all people, particularly women.

Freire is likewise concerned with the uplifting of previously silenced voices. We find connections between his work and feminist notions mentioned above in Freire’s assertion that the oppressed must liberate themselves; they cannot be liberated by their oppressors. Freire wrote, “Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both [oppressed and oppressor]” (42). To suggest that oppressed people are incapable of liberating themselves is to negate their agency. In this way, the example of the electrical engineering professor who gave unfair advantage to women in his class by offering them extra help and not calling on them in class so as not to put them on the spot is decidedly NOT feminist (this example can be found on pg. 54 of How Learning Works). This is a prime example of a teacher seeing himself as liberator as opposed to seeing his female students as capable of liberating themselves, as possessing agency.

In addition to ways in which Freire’s ideas align with and have helped further feminist pedagogy, I want to also comment on some ways Freire’s pedagogy can be “enriched and expanded” (Weiler, 2002, p. 459) Weiler (2002) lists three areas of Freire’s pedagogy and feminist pedagogy in need of some reconceptualization. They are: the role and authority of the teacher, the reliance on personal experience as a source of knowledge and truth, and the question of difference.

First, regarding the role of the teacher, Freire casts the teacher as a joint learner, but fails to address “various forms of power held by teachers” (p. 460). Feminist pedagogy asks for recognition of the varying positionalities, subjectivities, and identities each party brings to the classroom.

Secondly, when using experience as a source of knowledge, a method supported by feminist pedagogues and Freire, some students and teachers have translated this to mean uncontested, unanalyzed experience. Modern feminist pedagogues urge us to also be critical of those experiences and how they are shaped socially and historically.

Lastly, Weiler (2001) calls for acknowledgement of difference amongst the experience of women. In feminism’s earlier days, particularly in what we have come to call second-wave feminism, women rallied together around their shared experience of oppression, which was arguably a necessity. However, this left women whose experiences differed from the majority—women of color, lesbians, and others—out of the picture. Freire’s pedagogy has indeed contributed to a lack of intersectionality in feminist pedagogy and perhaps feminism in general, a lack that is one of the banes of my existence. Freire’s work has done so in its failure to recognize the multiple positions and therefore multiple experiences of oppressed people. For example, a man that is oppressed in the workplace may then go home and oppress his wife. Or a White lesbian may not be oppressed in a cultural system that values Whiteness, but she is oppressed in a society that values heterosexuality. In this way, a person can be simultaneously an oppressor and oppressed, an idea not acknowledged by Freire. Postmodern feminists have challenged the notion of a woman’s experience as universal and of a person’s ability to exist only as the oppressor or the oppressed. The job of feminist pedagogy, then, is to make a space for these multiple experiences.

And thus, we’re back where we started. A feminist pedagogy must recognize the agency of ALL, despite differences in someone’s experiences of womanhood, and more generally, of personhood.

References

Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C., & Norman, M. K. (2010). How learning works: 7 research-based principles for smart teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.

Meyers, D. T. (2014, September 8). Philosophical feminism. Retrieved October 15, 2015,            fromvBritannica website: http://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophical-                   feminism

Weiler, K. (1991). Freire and a feminist pedagogy of difference. Harvard Educational        Review, 61(4), 449-475.