Equality, Justice and Social Change: The Anger-Analysis-Action Praxis of Conscientization

Freire delineated in Pedagogy of the Oppressed [1] that reality is continually socially constructed and that the ultimate aim of any social action, including education, is to contribute to individual humanization and collective liberation from systemic oppression. After observing and questioning approximately 100 high school students over a three year period, these teacher educators feel that the role of education should be to facilitate the praxis of critical conscientization, the process of analyzing systemic inequality and acting on its transformation. Drawing on critical and reality pedagogy, as well as research in neuroscience and educational anthropology and experiences, we propose that critical conscientization is innately tied to the students’ lived experience in their local reality and thus, requires that educators are acutely knowledgeable about and hyper responsive to the students’ realities. The Anger-Analysis-Action Praxis, which was implemented with high school students, is a way to implement these ideas in today’s urban high school classrooms and will help educators and students channel their anger to fuel their conscientization process. This is the kind of conscientization processes that educatorsmust pursue to prepare their students to construct counter hegemonic classrooms that are rooted in students’ lived experiences and which prepare students to act as agents of change. Ultimately, creating a counter-hegemonic classroom is, at root, a process of learning to lead by listening by the educator and reflection by students.