A Glimpse of Popular and Liberatory Education (I)
As someone who read Paulo Freire for the first time as a student (while sneaking into many Philosophy courses due to my lack of undergrad funding), imagining a liberatory education has shaped my pedagogy as a graduate student and community educator. This education I have imagined with others for over five years has driven me to demand more from my professors and from myself.
Freire taught me to understand my position as a student as a potential teacher of my own teachers. My professors have hardly ever made space for me to bring my own knowledge to their classrooms, and so I always yearned to see what it would look like to teach. Freire also taught me that reflection and praxis must happen simultaneously. That is why, though I could have chosen to continue working as a waiter or in retail, I made sure to practice teaching as I theorize about education in graduate school. I could not imagine writing any type of reflection about an education that demands all participants to engage as both students and educators without practicing. I was not sure the university would ever make space for me to act as anything other than a student, so I had to forge my own path.
Though I am a student and an educator, I still wonder if I have seen a glimpse of the education I always envisioned. As a student, it is very easy to grow resentful of the educational institutions that promise to enrich our lives. In fact, I think most of my professors have realized I will always bring criticisms of my own education within the university. As an educator outside of the university, though, the criticism usually falls on my own practices. I continue to critically examine my own curricula and the way I present it to my students. Even though I wish to say I have seen a liberatory education in my own classroom, the truth is that at most, I have seen my kids regain courage to demand for a better education. I am proud of that. The view of the many Black and Brown students trying to not occupy too much space the first day of class compared to their fierceful demands for more playful activities by the end of our programs is priceless. I am proud of that work. However, I also ask for more from my classroom and doubt if I truly practiced liberatory education with my kids.
The truth is that, through foggy memories, I believe I saw a liberatory education beginning to emerge my first time teaching between the Fall of 2020 and the Winter of 2021. I pushed hard. As a newly graduated student, I pushed myself and began realizing I had to push beyond my own boundaries to make this education happen. I opened my arms around my students as much as I could to create a space where they could bring their rage and playfulness into the classroom. I let them push my arms further until I realized the nonprofit organization that was funding my classes did not welcome this push.
I taught my students at the beginning of our program that the classroom could only reach its full potential if everyone involved could, not only demand for their needs to be heard, but also meet everyones’ needs through mutual trust. They learned that demanding for their needs in the classroom was part of learning about themselves and their communities. Together we learned that when our needs are not met, a trusting education cannot happen. I offered this unfamiliar challenge to our classroom and, although we struggled along the way, we found ourselves caring for each other during each lesson. Something I didn't see coming was how organic it became for my kids to teach me about what I needed.
I still remember when one of my students asked me why I looked so tired during our routine emotional check-ins and I shared that I had to take on more classes to support our understaffed education team. One of my kids typed on the chat “go on strike”. After reading that comment, I gained courage to organize our education team to, at the very least, demand for more support. I also remember when one of my kids came out as non-binary so the next day all of my kids added their pronouns beside their names and added the “they/them” pronouns after their preferred name and pronouns because, as they put it “we also feel okay if our pronouns are non-binary”. They have no idea that months prior to this I had come out to my own journal about how I realized I am not a cisgender woman. So I also added the “they/them” pronouns next to my name and cried after class. I had been so scared to do that, but my kids made our classroom the most safe space for me to practice the feeling of expressing my true self.
I wish my kids that year knew the impact they had in my life, my identity expression, and pedagogy. Unfortunately, after a long collective fight to just recognize how underpaid and overworked educators were in the nonprofit, one unforeseen gloomy day I was unlawfully and immediately fired. I was kicked out of all my accounts minutes after my termination and without notice.Without access to any of my work accounts, I had been permanently disconnected from my kids. I never got to tell all of them about the beautiful mark they had left in me. Even though demanding for my own needs to be met cost me my job, I do not regret practicing that I taught them. It has taken me so much reflection and work to dismantle the familiar rhetoric that educators need to sacrifice their needs for their kids. It is a lie that educators must put their needs aside from their practice. In fact, when an educator ignores their own needs, they are unable to model self-respecting behavior. My kids were confused when they learned I was overworked because that was not what our classroom looked like. They were confused when I said I did not think I could ask for more. And when they saw me fight for my own needs to be met, they believed they could push their own school teachers.
It is hard to talk about this tumultuous time, not anymore because of the fear of messing up my legal case against the nonprofit, but because now those memories have become blurred from the trauma it brought to fight back without hope. Those memories have started to fade with my pain. I sometimes even wonder if I truly had those days or if I made all that up. Though I wrote daily reflections after every class, I cannot bring myself to read them yet. The pain and fear of abandonment has not left my body yet. However, my muscle memory to demand for a liberatory education and my co-workers reminding me that what we experienced had happened are the only things that ground me now. My kids’ lessons of care and rage live through me when I criticize my own education, both as a student and an educator.
Today, I still practice as an educator within the nonprofit industry, but now I trust myself and my kids more than the industry itself. I still engage in academia as a graduate student, but now I trust my classmates and my knowledge more than that institution itself. Though my endless push to call out all the attempts to institutionalize education looks like an act of resentment to others, the truth is that I hold my memories of the first time I was an educator as an act of resistance and hope. I often seem “too critical” and “too angry”, but the truth is that all I want is justice for every student, my own kids, myself and my classmates. I hope for an education that liberates every student, from the U.S. to Palestine, from a caring rage that burns in my heart since the first time I read bell hooks.
Though I speak of this time as the time where I most likely practiced and reflected liberatory education, this was not the last time I did. Without blurry sight, today, I can tell you, I have witnessed it this spring. The Liberated Zone at the University of Washington was the last time I saw it and I promise to also hold that experience close to my heart as long as I write about liberatory education.
I cannot wait to share this glimpse of a popular education.
