The Future of Education

        This presentation examines how two professors at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in the United States confront the rigidity and the complexities of traditional institutional pedagogy while attempting to develop the kind of liberatory pedagogy promoted by Paulo Freire in his seminal text Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  We explore how we have addressed the tension between top-down and bottom-up approaches to education. 

       Carol Thompson (of the Department of Applied Communication) and Michael Kleine (of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing) have co-taught, for over twenty years, a course that is core to the Donaghey Scholars Program at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (“Rhetoric and Communication”).  In that course we experiment with methods and assignments that stretch the boundaries of the traditional university by including strategies we see as liberatory.  Along with reading Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed together, we explore with our students themes of oppression and human objectification through a series of scaffolded readings, writing, discussion, and communication projects. 

         We will discuss our pedagogy and our praxis in the session.  We also will review our in-class discussions and assignments.  Especially, we will consider the problematics of situating a liberatory pedagogy within the constraints and requirements of a rigid university setting.

            Our presentation, then, will address what we now believe to be an essential question of our own: Just how far can a liberatory pedagogy go when it is developed in an institutional framework, and among the DISCIPLINES that inhabit that framework?  Both of us believe that dialogical communication has liberatory potential, so we will share a short dialog of our own in which we endeavor to address the paradox and essential question that interests us.  Our hope is that our remarks will unfold into a dialog that includes all of those attending the session.