Teaching As a Revolutionary Act

This week, I have been thinking about why I teach – and teaching as a revolutionary act – for a range of reasons, personal and professional.

For a start, this week, we celebrated the launch of a new Roma Cultural Centre in Govanhill, Glasgow 💙❤️💚 – my work with the brilliant Romano Lav team has included delivering a session with their Community Catalysts on the law as oppression or liberation, grounded in principles of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Earlier in the week, I also attended a showcase event featuring the work of law students in the University of Glasgow School of Law Glasgow Open (GO) Justice programme, and this put me in mind of the powerful connection between learning and teaching, even for students who are still themselves figuring out their relationship to the law and legal practice.

Since 2007, I have taught law at the The Open University alongside legal practice for most of my professional career. I know why I continue to teach, but I honestly cannot remember the reasons I first applied for the role. Why, at the age of 29 and many months’ pregnant – I thought adding a second part-time gig to my already demanding full-time job, just ahead of discovering for the first time what it was to be a parent – was going to be a great idea. 🤷🏻

Teaching as an inheritance

I knew about teaching as a career option because my father was a teacher before me. He taught at a community agricultural college for about 10 years, while raising me and also trying to finish his PhD in the evenings and weekends. My mother was also a college librarian. As they did not have close family nearby, I spent many school nights, sat in the back row of my father’s evening World Civilisation lectures, or falling asleep in piles of unshelved books in the children’s section of the college library.

I knew then that my father taught a required course (history) to students who mostly did not choose to learn that material – they were attending college mainly to gain certificates in agriculture, or animal husbandry, or primary education, perhaps.

I remember the tactics my father used to make his lectures memorable, and worth attending – humour, surprise and relatability. He spoke plainly, he played the clown – and his students laughed, and learned.

The educator has the duty of not being neutral, Paulo Freire

My father was a historian and he taught me this one thing early in life: there is no neutral interpretation of history. History is written by the winners. He referred me to a book called The Whig Interpretation of History which I have never read. Now, many decades later, I reflect this is quite an odd thing to say to your seven-year-old child… I just might read that book.

Teaching as an education

Since picking up that job at the OU, I have never looked back.

My students were keen, hard-working, grateful for the opportunity of an education and – especially in the early years – exceptionally kind and forgiving of my shortcomings as a tutor.

I did a lot of trying, and failing, in the first decade – and in putting in that time, I grew wiser and more confident about what could work, less afraid to try new things in the classroom too.

My students became the reason I continued to teach.

Whoever teaches, learns in the act of teaching; and whoever learns, teaches in the act of learning, Paolo Freire

Teaching is, for me, the best way to learn. You test your own understanding when you try to communicate your ideas with others. You hold yourself vulnerable to critical feedback and to the simplest questions (which are usually the hardest).

And if you ask students the right questions, you broaden your own experiences of the world, expanding your horizons and connections.

Teaching as a revolutionary act

For many years, people have spoken to me about this book: Pedagogy of the Oppressed written by Paolo Freire, a Brazilian educator in 1967/68. He began working with illiterate peasants in 1947 in the NE of Brazil and, two decades later, had organised a popular movement to eradicate illiteracy.

But I have never read the book in its entirety, and that is what I’ve set out to do this month.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far 🌟

• Traditional education adopts a “banking” approach – teachers have a fixed amount of knowledge that they need to transmit to students, who must be filled up, or must “bank” this knowledge. If they are able to reproduce what they have banked, they have demonstrated understanding and the process is a success.
• This process is itself the product of systems that create oppression and therefore reinforces the oppression of those who are worst off in our societies. We cannot expect people who benefit from exploiting others to design systems that liberate the people they exploit.
• If educators are truly committed to uplifting people’s lives through education, we need to change and challenge the system – what we teach, where we teach, how we teach

If the structure does not permit dialogue, the structure must be changed, Paolo Freire

And finally, if we do this thing – if we challenge and question and transform how we teach… we are committing a revolutionary act.

That is the act of dismantling systems of oppression – and this work can be done both from the outside (in communities that are normally shut out from traditional education) and from the inside (in educational settings like universities that are traditionally allies of the establishment).

Concluding thoughts

📚I am not finished with the book yet, and to be honest it is hard going!

I would really welcome suggestions about other media for understanding Paolo Freire’s work (video, lectures, comics or animation) that might be more accessible for grasping the best of his ideas. I would share these, if I knew what they were – so please do write back if you have something to recommend.

Thanks again for reading and thanks also to all of you out there, who spend even a little bit of your time, sharing your knowledge and life experience with others ❤️

Education is an act of love; and love is an act of courage, Paolo Freire

First published on LinkedIn on 7 June 2024:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/teaching-revolutionary-act-jen-ang-cxdve/