Pedagogy of Hope

Exploring the Role of Decoloniality in Teaching

Photo by Roman Mager on Unsplash

About the author: Rev. Catherine Tobey is a PhD student in theological ethics at the University of Aberdeen. Drawing on Karl Barth’s theology, her research centers on children as the dynamic, interpretive key to understanding and witnessing to the Kingdom of God. She is a minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and a resident at Tall Timber Ranch, a camp and retreat center in Leavenworth, WA.

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As Barth retired from teaching and published the last of his Church Dogmatics, Paulo Freire was just coming into the spotlight.

Though he was disrupting the educational landscape of Brazil into the 1960s, Freire’s influence was (and is) far-reaching. Imprisoned for teaching farmworkers to read, he was later exiled, at which point he penned Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This work did not just challenge educational theory but the very structures of modern civilization. As opposed to the “banking” model of education, in which teachers “deposit” information into students who “patiently receive, memorize, and repeat,” Freire insisted on the importance of expanding students’ consciousness.¹ Only then, for Freire, can oppression be challenged and transformed. Herein, “the oppressed” do not simply “liberate themselves” but “their oppressors as well.”² Content with the current dynamics, the oppressors will resent and oppose “the humanization of the ‘others,’” seeing it as “subversion.”³ To avoid this, they restrict freedom and enforce “constant control.”⁴

What does this have to do with theology? Well, for me, it all started with Adam Neder’s Christian Theology class at Whitworth University. As any of Adam’s previous students know, taking a course with him is just the best. Luckily, you can get a taste of his pedagogical approach in Theology as a Way of Life. Herein, you will find Adam learned to be a good teacher because he had good teachers, like Bruce McCormack.

“But more than anything else,” Adam writes, “Bruce showed me that good teachers give their students freedom.”⁵ He explains, “Good teachers don’t seek to reproduce themselves in students…Their goal is not to create loyal soldiers who repeat and defend the master, but to train students to listen to God’s Word, discover their own voices, and respond to Jesus Christ’s call in their own ways.”⁶ I think Paulo Freire would like this very much.

Unfortunately, one is hard-pressed to find this pedagogy in practice. Neder explains,

“As students seek clarity and insight, teachers easily fall into the trap of posing as all-knowing oracles, experts with all the answers. Not only is projecting this image ridiculous, but it also betrays a basic misunderstanding of our relationship to students. The moment we begin to operate as quasi-omniscient gurus, experts with the solution to every problem, we exchange teaching for propaganda, instruction for demagoguery, and the Word of God for our words about God.”⁷

Perhaps he had Freire in mind as he goes on, noting God does not “instruct us to deposit definitive theological formulations into their minds.”⁸ Rather, he insists, “We are responsible for thinking with students, not for them. To do otherwise is to confuse education with indoctrination.”⁹

However, creating a classroom (or church) culture of freedom does not start there. Consider Karl Barth’s insistence that pastors must ask themselves:

Are you willing now to deal with humanity as it is? Humanity in this twentieth century with all its passions, sufferings, errors, and so on? Do you like them, these people? Not only the good Christians, but do you like people as they are? People in their weakness? Do you like them, do you love them?

Freire gets at this too, insisting “a profound love for the world and for people” is the basis for dialogue.¹⁰ However, he notes, this cannot be an abstract love where we are “ignorant of, underestimate, or reject any of the ‘knowledge of living experience’ with which [students] come to school.”¹¹ Rather, teaching should engage the “preoccupations, doubts, hopes, and fears” of students and if we lack that critical knowledge, we “[run] the risk either of ‘banking’ or of preaching in the desert.”¹²

This theme comes up in Neder’s book, too. He writes, “Anthropology is the soul of pedagogy. Who we think our students are animates how we teach them.”¹³ What’s more, Neder insists, “Our teaching is always worse when we assume we have nothing to learn from students.”¹⁴ Though he admits, “There may be academic disciplines where…teachers only infrequently learn from their students.” The truth for him is “Christian theology is not one of them.”¹⁵

From this basis, our classrooms can be a base camp for dialogue. Equipped with critical thinking, we can explore (and create!) a new world. For Freire, this requires the perception of “reality as process, as transformation, rather than as a static entity.”¹⁶ He distinguishes this from “naive thinking, which sees ‘historical time as a weight, a stratification of the acquisitions and experiences of the past,’ from which the present should emerge normalized and ‘well-behaved.’”¹⁷ Put another way, for Freire, naivety is characterized by an adherence to what seems normal today, whereas critical thinking emphasizes “the continuing transformation of reality.”¹⁸ I wonder which expectation lingers in your classroom or the classrooms you entered as a student (or congregant).¹⁹

Good theological pedagogy has a lot in common with Freire’s anti-colonial approach. While some may resist this political term, the bottom line is that “[g]ood teachers do not train students to repeat the theology of the past.”²⁰ According to Neder, “Serious dialogue partners seek criticism. They invite disagreement.”²¹ He explains, “Every important text contains weaknesses, errors, lacunae, and prejudices, and good conversation partners do not allow such defects to go unnoticed or unchallenged. Nor do their colleagues want them to.”²² This is true even for Karl Barth.

Kimlyn Bender explains Barth’s insistence that “reading persons from the past for the purpose of mere mimicry” is inconsistent with “learning from nor honouring them.”²³ He explains that Barth “had no desire for those after him simply to mimic his conclusions, nor did he like his theology being treated as a finished system or a school of thought.”²⁴ Bender examines Barth’s own words to bring home this point: “I have never demanded that someone should parrot me. It is not about me but about the truth, the truth in love. ‘Barthianism’ does not interest me.”²⁵

For Neder, being committed to forging a new way forward is rooted in our understanding of Christ. He explains, “Our default patterns of thought are transformed in light of the fact that God became a man who died in the first century and is currently alive today.”²⁶ This teaches us “to be suspicious of our common-sense theological assumptions and expectations” and “to recognize that God is far stranger than we ever would have imagined.”²⁷

Being unsettled with how things are and believing in a good future is a fair understanding of consciousness among these scholars. According to Neder (and by extension, Barth), teachers sometimes get to participate, by God’s grace, in this “disturbance, awakening, and renewal through which students come to see and embrace who they are in Christ.”²⁸ However, it is important to note that this is not a consciousness rooted in theory but in practice. Neder explains, “It is not a mark of academic seriousness to sever contemplation from action, intellect from existence, reason from affections, or thinking from living. These terms become disconnected from one another only when one forgets what Christianity is.”²⁹ So, too, by bringing Freire into the conversation, we are reminded of the importance of this transformation occurring in folks' real lives now, not just in an ethereal future.

I wonder what keeps teachers (including pastors) from participating in this decolonial, love-filled, and freedom-focused consciousness-raising. As Neder suggests, is it rooted in our desire for the “safety of scripted monologue,”³⁰ or, as Freire suggests, is it more about ensuring the traditional power dynamic?³¹

I wonder if we must look to the relationship between the administration and the educator (and ecclesially, between the presbytery and the pastor) to get to the heart of the matter. How can teachers foster healthy learning environments when they are bogged down by ongoing experiences of disrespect, cultures of control, and rigid expectations tied to traditional success metrics?

In Pedagogy of Hope, Freire tells a story of a teacher who shows a visitor “a series of nearly identical drawings…of a black cat,” explaining, “My students did these. I brought them a little statue of a cat for them to draw.”³² The visitor asks, “Why not bring a live cat into the classroom - one that would walk and run, and jump? Then the children would draw the cat as they understood it, as they perceived it. The children would actually reinvent the cat. They would be free to make any cat they felt like. They would be free to create, to invent and reinvent.” The response was quick: “‘No, no!’ the teacher fairly shouted.” Freire, then, offers the following explanation:

“And that, it appeared, was the way the entire school functioned. It was not merely that one educator who shook with fear at the very mention of freedom, creation, adventure, risk. For the whole school, as for her, the world should not change, and …we ought never to leave the beaten path or deviate from the established norm, in our passage through the world. Walk in the footsteps others have left for us. Lo, our lot and destiny. Blaze trails as we go? Re-create the world, transform it? Never!”³³

Before we return to the classroom, I wonder if we might reflect on this, asking first if we believe our institutions can change and then if we are willing to fight for it. Only then can we begin to provide the education students need.

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1. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010), 72.

2. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 44.

3. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 59.

4. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 59.

5. Adam Neder, Theology as a Way of Life: On Teaching and Learning the Christian Faith (Baker Academic, 2019), 13. While most teachers may like to think of their students as free, Paulo Freire explains, “To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce” (Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 50).

6. Neder, Theology as a Way of Life, 13.

7. Neder, Theology as a Way of Life, 52. Further on in the book, Adam insists, "Good teachers do not speak the final word” (128). He explains, "teachers are not responsible for providing students with tidy conceptual schemes that eliminate theological loose ends and smooth out the ambiguities of experience….The explanatory power such instruction generates is a mark of propaganda, not faithful Christian witness….We make fools of ourselves and we fail our students when we teach as though our views (or those of our favorite theologians) are the definitive conclusion to a previously unsatisfactory history of reflection” (129–30).

8. Neder, Theology as a Way of Life, 52.

9. Neder, Theology as a Way of Life, 52.

10. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 89.

11. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Bloomsbury, 2014), 49.

12. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 96.

13. Neder, Theology as a Way of Life, 15. When I reread this line recently, I immediately thought of how Dr. Katie Cross handled a question during the recent Chalmers Lectures hosted by the Church of Scotland. When someone began to criticize young people’s resilience, she quickly said, “No, I have so much respect for young people; they are so strong, and I am in awe of them.”

14. Neder, Theology as a Way of Life, 139–40.

15. Neder, Theology as a Way of Life, 139–40.

16. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 92.

17. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 92.

18. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 92.

19. Neder imagines the polar opposite of critical dialogue as lectures where “teachers…deliver prepared remarks from behind their podiums, and…allow students to listen silently at their desks.” He goes on to explain this isn’t a condemnation of lectures in themselves but to question “a style of lecture that leaves no room for students to raise questions, express critical reservations, and otherwise engage in probing discussion of the material”(Neder, Theology as a Way of Life, 133). For Freire, this discussion considers elevating the voice of students vs. fostering a “culture of silence.” He insists on “enabling the popular classes to develop their language: not the authoritarian, sectarian gobbledygook of “educators” but their own language - which, emerging from and returning upon their reality, sketches out the conjectures, the designs, the anticipations of their new world” (Freire, 31).

20. Neder, Theology as a Way of Life, 123. Freire puts it this way: “The moments we live either are instants in a process previously inaugurated, or else they inaugurate a new process referring in some way to something in the past” (Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, 20).

21. Neder, Theology as a Way of Life, 122–23.

22. Neder, Theology as a Way of Life, 122–23.

23. Kimlyn J. Bender, “Swimming against the Theological and Pedagogical Stream: Lessons from Karl Barth on Teaching within the Theological Disciplines,” in Scottish Journal of Theology 75, no. 4 (2022): 301.

24. Bender, 301.

25. Bender, 301. Moreover, Adam highlights Barth’s comment, “It is not the point to become servants of some particular ‘Fathers.’ The only thing that matters is the one person: Christ” (Neder, Theology as a Way of Life,  125).

26. Neder, Theology as a Way of Life, 58.

27. Neder, Theology as a Way of Life, 58–9.

28. Neder, Theology as a Way of Life, 32. Freire puts it this way: “The moments we live either are instants in a process previously inaugurated, or else they inaugurate a new process referring in some way to something in the past” (Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, 20).

29. Neder, Theology as a Way of Life, 44.

30. Neder, Theology as a Way of Life, 133.

31. Freire writes, “How can I dialogue if I am closed to — and even offended by — the contribution of others? How can I dialogue if I am afraid of being displaced; the mere possibility causing me torment and weakness?” (Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 90). Earlier on, he describes the oppressor who attempts to support the oppressed but “feels alarm at each step they take, each doubt they express, and each suggestion they offer,” using every opportunity “to impose his “status” (Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 61).

32. Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, 133.

33. Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, 133.