Pedagogy › ITE Modules › Critical Pedagogy
Critical Pedagogy & Power
Paulo Freire · bell hooks · Linda Tuhiwai Smith · Decolonising Curriculum
Critical pedagogy asks: who does school serve? Whose knowledge counts? In Aotearoa, these are immediate, practical questions with direct implications for Māori and Pasifika student achievement and teacher professional identity.
“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom.”— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970)
📖 What is Critical Pedagogy?
Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education rooted in the work of Paulo Freire (1970), developed in adult literacy programmes among Brazil’s rural poor. Its core insight: education is never neutral. It always either reinforces or challenges the existing social order.
Schools teach not just content, but which knowledge matters, whose stories are worth telling, and what kind of people students are permitted to become. For Aotearoa teachers, this is immediately relevant: the NZ education system was historically designed to assimilate Māori children into Pākehā culture — what Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) calls epistemic violence.
🏦 Banking vs Problem-Posing Education
- Students are vessels to be filled
- Teacher deposits; student receives
- Memorisation and repetition
- Knowledge is fixed, unchallengeable
- Curriculum disconnected from lived reality
- Domesticates rather than liberates
- Students and teachers are co-investigators
- Dialogue replaces monologue
- Knowledge is provisional and contested
- Student is active agent
- Curriculum rooted in students’ worlds
- Liberates through critical reflection and action
🧠 Core Concepts
- 💡Conscientisation — Developing critical awareness of one’s social reality through reflection and action. Not just knowing about oppression, but understanding how one’s own thinking has been shaped by it.
- 🔄Praxis — The inseparable unity of reflection and action. Critical pedagogy rejects both armchair theory and unreflective activism. Theory informs action; action tests and refines theory.
- 🗣Dialogue — Genuine dialogue requires humility, faith in people, hope, and critical thinking. Not debate — the willingness to be genuinely changed by what you hear.
- 🌍Generative Themes — The thematic universe of students’ own lives — the issues and tensions that matter to them. Curriculum built from generative themes is inherently engaging because it starts where students are.
- 📜Epistemic Violence — Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s term for the colonial project of invalidating indigenous knowledge systems through systematic exclusion from what counts as knowledge.
🇳🇿 Aotearoa: Decolonising the Classroom
Practical decolonisation is not simply adding Māori content to a Western curriculum. It means questioning the assumed neutrality of your discipline — and redesigning from Te Ao Māori values outward.
- Whose knowledge does your subject discipline centre? Who is excluded?
- Use Māori language, land, and community knowledge as legitimate academic content
- Share power with students over curriculum decisions (Freire’s problem-posing made concrete)
- Name colonial violence honestly in curriculum rather than neutralising it
- Evaluate your practice against Tātaiako’s five competencies: manaakitanga, wānanga, whānaungatanga, ako, tangata whenuatanga
Freire’s work has been critiqued — including by feminist scholars — for using androcentric language. bell hooks and others insisted feminist and anti-racist frameworks must be integrated rather than added as afterthoughts. Apply the same critical lens to Freire that he would apply to banking education.
📚 References
- Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Herder and Herder.
🎓 Google Scholar ↗ - hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the practice of freedom.
Routledge.
🎓 Google Scholar ↗ - Tuhiwai Smith, L. (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies. Zed Books / University of Otago
Press.
🎓 Google Scholar ↗ - Ministry of Education NZ. (2011). Tātaiako: Cultural Competencies for Teachers of
Māori Learners.
🎓 Google Scholar ↗