Teaching to discern. Hernando Arturo Estévez Cuervo
that must engage students in global issues and global concerns. As a whole, the program is designed to prepare students to interact globally and to get a significant glimpse of the world through interaction with various disciplines, languages, and peoples.
As a philosophy professor at Universidad de La Salle, the invitation to be part of such a unique program was exciting and challenging; my academic and personal experience with study abroad programs rests on the traditional programs organized by universities in the United States that primarily provide students with the personal experience of adapting to different cultural values, being immersed in a language, acquiring coping skills and tools for internationalization while developing opportunities for personal growth. Prior to working at Universidad de La Salle in Bogotá, I had the opportunity to be the co-director and faculty member of a study abroad program in the Caribbean for students from John Jay College (CUNY). This study abroad program was primarily designed for undergraduate students interested in the humanities, and all course contents were developed in topics that provided students with an understanding of the reality in which they were being immersed while they focused on issues of justice and social change as part of the university’s overall academic research interest.
Both programs shared the common interest of providing students and faculty with an opportunity to enhance their understanding of the world in an academic setting that celebrates cultural diversity while enriching the vibrancy of academic themes, topics and issues. Besides the commonalities and distinctions of the programs, that is, the difference between “bringing the world to the university” versus “taking students to the world,” and the common goal of aiming at gaining a greater perspective on the world. In this scenario, I argue that, regardless of the aim and the academic content of the program, study abroad programs need to provide a level of awareness to both students and teachers of the power and privilege endemic to travelling abroad. Although I do not intend to reduce the experience of study abroad programs to a simple relationship of power and privilege, I do believe that the content of the classes, the pedagogy used in each class as well as the function of education during the study abroad will greatly benefit from such awareness.
The complexities of my suggestion become obvious especially when one considers both students’ reality and the way such reality is presented while recognizing the intrinsic relation to the content that will be presented to the students participating in the study abroad program. In other words, my initial claim is that there is a correlation between the content of education, the context where the educational practice occurs and the pedagogy that is used to share any given knowledge. The relationship between the content of education, its context and pedagogy serve as the bases for communication between individuals in the classroom. However, such a relationship reveals an epistemological approach that unfolds forms of privilege and power for students and faculty of both versions of an aforementioned study abroad program.
I would also like to argue that education is always a political act that involves a theory, a method, and a value of truth — that is, it is never neutral nor impartial because to educate is to politically commit oneself to either reproduce what is already in place or to create new social and political paradigms. In that sense, the content of education becomes a tool for mediating between the classroom and reality and a medium for proposing novel ways to understand the complexities of reality and the continuum need to reflect upon the role education plays in the construction of reality. In that sense, one does not engage in education through knowledge alone; on the contrary, knowledge contains judgements, values and perceptions of the world that are impossible to avoid. In other words, we are all defined by a subjective account of our own understanding of reality and, as such, education and teaching are practices that are aware of the unequal relation between teacher and student, which in many cases is reinforced by a content that reproduces reality and leaves no room for creativity towards novel social and political paradigms.
This awareness is the bases for Paulo Freire’s work on education, teaching and social change. According to Freire (2005), education’s end is driven by the possibility of liberating individuals from the oppressive quality of their reality. This form of education demands individual and collective liberation through the process of “conscientization.” Freire’s pedagogy is mainly concerned with the construction of a less dehumanized world. A liberating process of becoming aware, of regaining humanity implies, for Freire, a move from a naïve consciousness to a critical consciousness. Individuals possess an understanding of the world but they do not always comprehend that their reality has been imposed by an oppressive social order and justified by historical accounts claiming its reality as necessary or normal. Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2005) makes us aware of the traditional conditions that affect education and pedagogy by dismantling the inner practices that constitute traditional and normal education. The level of normalization to which peoples’ consciousness and system of beliefs have been accustomed is, in Freire’s opinion, the state of oppression. However, it is also the source of a need to transform individuals’ perception of the world and understanding of the place they hold in society. Human beings make history and, simultaneously, history constitutes humanity. Human nature is not predetermined; rather, it is constructed socially and historically. And it is within history and society that individuals can find not only the source of their oppression but also the means to escape their own situation.
In this liberating process, individuals take possession of their reality by denouncing their dehumanized order and proposing a humanized structure. For Freire (2005), individuals are not solely beings in the world; rather, they are constituted in their context, having a role in it and with others. Once individuals’ consciousness has become aware of their role in history and society, through the educational process of “conscientization,” then they come to realize that their place in society can be transformed and that they are the protagonists of their own history.
For Freire, education can only take place in a community of inquiry in which the content of education comes from the participants through dialogue by creating a dynamic process in which education and action are interwoven. Understanding and participating in individuals’ reality is probably the first step in the Freirian awakening process. For this reason, the relationship between teacher and student must exist outside the “banking concept of education” (Freire, 2005, p. 72), which forces students to replicate old dynamics of social oppression; it is opposed to an “Education as the practice of freedom” (Freire, 2005, p. 81). This education allows students to critically think about their socio-historical conditions in order to try and change them.
The banking system does not acknowledge the value of students’ life experience, but rather it considers them empty minds in need of education and knowledge. The process of education is then reduced to a simple imparting of knowledge rather than a sharing of knowledge. At the center of Freire’s proposal is a call to overthrow all forms of a social order based on power and privilege containing precepts for the preservation of a society based on power dynamics.
For Freire, the world is divided between the oppressor and the oppressed. In some form or another, every individual is part of what Hegel (1977) expressed in the master-slave dialectic. In order for an individual to be liberated from this existential dichotomy, according to Freire (2005), he or she must first engage in a pedagogie vraiment liberatrice (“truly liberating pedagogy”) capable of distinguishing between humanistic education and humanitarian education. Only a humanistic education would enable a process of conscientization through which individuals would engage in a pedagogical practice animee d’une generosite authentique (“animated by an authentic generosity”). I would like to argue that authentic generosity constitutes the core of Freire’s educational theory. For Freire, (2005), the desirable goal is to liberate individuals from their oppressive realities through generosity and humanization. Beneath this claim lies the belief that all individuals, regardless of their contingent place in society, are entitled — if not by education, by their own humanity — to participate in the construction of their own realities and communities. To reach such goal, Freire (2005) advocates an educational theory conducive to the empowering of individuals by the development of a critical consciousness capable of pushing education beyond its instructional limits. The force behind Freire’s educational project surpasses traditional education as a social tool, by making it a necessary and transforming political resource. In that sense, education and pedagogy for Freire (2005) are political practices