On Friday, April 25, my friend and colleague James Kirylo and I made a presentation at the American Education Research Association (AERA) annual conference in Denver, Colorado. Our goal was to draw a parallel between the circumstances that led to Paulo Freire being exiled from his country and our own craziness in the new age of Trump Madness and Chaos. Freire was an educator who taught people how to read so they could pass the voting exam. For this, he was considered subversive and sent into exile. In essence, James andI wanted to mine the wisdom of Paulo and offer living hope to educators today concerned about their jobs and the future of their profession. What follows are my remarks at that event.
A Time to Stand In Defiance
I want to speak to those of us who are educators, especially in the context of higher education. These are tough times for many people in our society, especially those of us working in the field of education. Trump has challenged not only our academic freedom but also those things we teach that we know to be true. And all too quickly, our administrators and Boards of Trustees are caving in to Trump’s demands, be they to get rid of DEI departments, close programs like Women’s Studies or African American Studies, and silence what they consider a “woke” agenda. The line of defense against such outrageous orders has fallen to those of us who are faculty and students. We need to stand up to these demands where our administrators have not.
Paulo Freire lived in a time like our own, even more intensely so. He taught rural peasants how to read so they could pass literacy tests, which in turn made them qualified to vote in Brazilian elections. His teaching encouraged them to challenge the wealthy elites who sought to silence them. Despite the harsh and despotic circumstances in which Freire often had to do his work, he claimed to have developed a “utopian pedagogy,” a pedagogy grounded in hope. And for his literacy work, he was exiled from Brazil for 16 years.
From the beginning, as outlined in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire’s principal concern is the dehumanization of individuals, especially those marginalized and oppressed by a society’s repressive and unjust systems. Freire regarded dehumanization as a condition where a person’s humanity has been stolen.” For Freire, dehumanization is not a person’s destiny but rather the result of an unjust order encouraged by the violence of oppressors, which in turn silences and marginalizes the oppressed.
According to Freire, humanization is our vocation as human beings. Peter Roberts explains, “The vocation of becoming more fully human is what defines us as humans; it is the essence of being human.” The goal of a pedagogy of hope is to create a world in which all people, regardless of their education or station in life, are treated as full human beings deserving of respect, dignity, and the fullness of life, and offering the same respect and regard to others.
The Trump administration, under the leadership of Elon Musk, has engaged in a reckless exercise of depopulating government departments through mass firings and layoffs, often based on false premises of poor work evaluations. While many of these cost-cutting efforts have faced legal challenges, Trump and Musk continue to deconstruct and cut off government funding and programs in defiance of court orders. The Department of Education has especially come under attack, with Trump vowing to get rid of the department altogether. These actions have been carried out without any regard to workers’ experience, expertise, and positive performance. Employees are treated as simply costs to be eliminated. Regarding the cuts in the Education Department, the decisions are made with no input from the administrators, teachers, and students who make up the U.S. public school and higher education systems. In so doing, these actions are dehumanizing and call for a response.
At the same time, many K-12 school districts are facing organized opposition from parent groups demanding changes in curriculum and library collections that offend their sensibilities or challenge their white supremacist ideologies. Instead of being regarded as trained professionals, teachers are too often regarded as promoters of un-American ideas polluting the minds of their students. It is no wonder that many educators are choosing to leave the profession rather than face the stressful onslaught of these detractors.
Developing a Pedagogy of Hope
Despite how difficult the current situation is for we who are educators, we must stand strong together against these changes and pressures. Just as Freire was able to develop a utopian pedagogy in the most oppressive of conditions, so too, educators today at all levels must develop ways of engendering hope in students by stimulating critical thinking, encouraging experimentation, and prompting freedom of thought despite the political efforts to restrict all of these. Like Freire, educators today must bring the real world into the classroom with a problem-based learning approach, which allows for creativity and experimentation, as opposed to replicating the neoliberal project and the increasingly dictatorial state.
A pedagogy of hope begins with the educators themselves. Freire contends that hope is not a choice but rather “a concrete need” and “existential reality,” and “hopelessness is simply hope that has lost its bearing.” Moreover, hope is not something one waits for but rather one moves toward. As Freire states: “As long as I fight, I am moved by hope.” Through engendering hope in themselves, educators inspire hope in their students.
Building and sustaining hope in our roles as educators begins by recognizing and affirming our expertise, our experiences as teachers, and the values that motivated us to enter the profession in the first place. Second, it requires reflection on the forces at work that are disrupting our ability to be the teachers we want to be. Third, we need to enter into dialogue with our students about their hopes, dreams, and frustrations for their education. Fourth, we need to recognize what Freire called our “unfinishedness,” the acknowledgement that just as we expect our students to grow and change over the course of their education, so too we have areas of our lives that can use further development. Finally, we don’t do these practices alone, but in community with other educators and those who share our commitment to quality education for all.
Throughout this process we are seeking to create in ourselves what Henry Giroux calls “a moral imagination that encourages progressive educators and others to stand at the edge of society, to think beyond existing configurations of power to imagine the unthinkable in terms of how [you] might live with dignity, justice and freedom.” Freire refers to this moral imagination as “utopia.” A vision of utopia (a vision of what could and must be) arises out of dialectical tension between a person’s present reality and the desired, hoped-for future, and moves one to actively work to remove those factors that stand in the way of achieving that future. Freire considers utopia to be a realistic possibility and a “fundamental necessity for human beings.”
Acting on the basis of hope requires one to engage in the process Freire calls denunciation and annunciation. In denunciation, we are identifying the systems and configurations of power pressing us down and calling them out and working to undo what is causing that pain. Annunciation is prophetically speaking of a free and just society in all areas of a person’s life, including the way education is conceived and carried out, and then acting with others to build that new reality.
In this time of tragic deconstruction, we must create spaces for discouraged educators to share their fears and frustrations and together build visions of a hoped-for and hope-motivated future. In the process of bringing about change, we can experience liberation for ourselves, our students, and the work of education, which we love and to which we are committed.
Note – The day after James and I made our presentation, I came upon a news article that indicated colleges in the Big Ten Conference were considering ways to support each other if they came under attack by the Trump administration, A couple days later, I read that colleges across the country are beginning to stand up to Trump’s threats. People are not giving in so quickly to Trump’s threats and bullying tactics. This is the pedagogy of hope!
Sources
Darder, A. (2020). Paulo Freire fifty years later: An afterword. In J. Kirylo, Reinventing pedagogy of the oppressed: Contemporary critical perspectives, pp. 233-250. London: Bloomsbury.
Freire, P. (2024). The Man from Recife (Revised and Updated Second Edition), 277-290. New York: Peter Lang.
Freire, P. (1994). Pedagogy of hope: Reliving pedagogy of the oppressed. (Robert R. Barr, Trans.). New York, NY: Continuum.
Freire, P. (1985). The politics of education: Culture, power, and liberation. New York: Bergin & Garvey.
Giroux, H. (2014). Memory’s hope: In the shadow of Paulo Freire’s Presence. In Pedagogy of Solidarity: Paulo Freire, Patron of Brazilian Education. Freire, A. & Oliveira, W. (Eds.). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 7-12.
Goulet, D. (1973). Introduction. In Paulo Freire, Education for critical consciousness. (pp. vii-xiv) New York, NY: Continuum.
Kirylo, J.D., & Boyd, D. (2017). Paulo Freire: His faith, spirituality, and theology. Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense.
Roberts, P. (2000). Education, literacy, and humanization: Exploring the work of Paulo Freire. Westport, Connecticut: Bergin & Garvey.