Training for Transformation

Our educational philosophy has been deeply influenced by various writers on the subject, but most particularly by Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Herder and Herder, 1972). In this regard, the most salient characteristics of our own educational philosophy can be summarized as follows:

1. Dialogue. Real education and growth happens in the context of dialogue. Education that liberates the human spirit takes place in those rare moments when we are treated as equals, when we can be both teachers as well as learners to each other since the teacher in teaching is always learning and the learner in learning is always teaching. Everyone has something to contribute, no experts have all the answers, and no one is completely ignorant.

2. Relevance. The content of education should be chosen by the participants. People themselves can be trusted to know what they need to know. When education deals with themes that are important and relevant to people's lives, this will generate strong feelings and active involvement of the person in her or his education.

3. Education is Never Neutral. All education is based on underlying values and interests. According to Freire, education is either “domestication or liberating" it either teaches us to conform to the interests of the dominant culture and values, or it helps us to become critical participants in constructing our own values and culture.

4. Problem-posing. A common search for solutions to problems connected to the life experience of those involved leads to conscientization: a deepening awareness of the structures and dynamics that make up the current reality and our own role in transforming this reality. A skilled consultant can assist participants in identifying problems and their root causes and begin to work on practical ways to begin changing the situation.

5. Reflection and Action. Education that is transformative, that leads to change both of the participant and her or his world, depends on the ongoing interplay between action and reflection, which Freire calls praxis. Just as it is important to act to change our world, it is equally important to stop periodically to reflect critically on our actions: to celebrate our successes, identify our shortcomings and any new skills and information we need to overcome them, and to plan for new action.

6. Transformative. Freirian education is not individualistic but rather communal (the consultant, the participants, and the subject matter). It seeks the active involvement of entire communities in transforming the quality of each person's life, the environment, the community, and eventually the whole society and world. In transformative education one quickly realizes that individually, access to the truth is very limited. In community, however, we are able to share authentically our individual glimpses of the truth and consequently expand the collective intelligence and wisdom of the group.

7. Reciprocity. Education is always a two-way street. We are always learning even as we teach and we are always teaching even as we learn. The very purpose of living may be to learn and planet earth is certainly a good place within which to learn. Learning is also a life-long enterprise that begins before the cradle and hopefully continues long after the grave.

8. Multiple Ways of Knowing. The art of knowing is inherently holistic (mind, body, and spirit). Transformative education therefore acknowledges multiple ways of knowing that expand the scientific, objective, mechanistic, and empirical notions of education. A liberation education allows us to use all of our ways of accessing information by celebration not only the sensory, analytical, and rational pathways but also the subjective, indigenous, spiritual, tacit, and intuitive. Holistic learning consequently permits us to be comfortable with complexity, paradox, ambiguity, incompleteness, and chaos.

9. Experiential. Transformative education takes advantage of experience as a powerful tool for learning. When persons are engaged in "doing" they also understand (to stand under). This is particularly the case with issues of injustice which, for the most part, cannot be learned from a book. In these instances, persons are called to experience for themselves the struggles of "others" by participating in immersion experiences as well as simulations that give them access into the realities of "others". Through this process, we can begin to critically examine the nature of our individual and collective roles in the creation and preservation of systems of oppression.

10. Humility and Certainty. Transformative education is always painfully aware of its own limitations. Even as it attempts to clarify and illuminate the finite known, it realizes the immensity of the infinite unknown. Even as it engages the knower with that which is known, it recognizes the enormous levels of humility necessary to confront the endless reality of that which we don't know that we don't know.