1.4.1 About critical pedagogy

Historically, formal education has tended to feature a hierarchical model of educators ‘transmitting’ knowledge to their students. Freire terms this a ‘banking’ model, whereby educators ‘deposit’ knowledge in students’ brains, rather than working to create knowledge and shared solutions together in a non-hierarchical relationship. Boal (1995) comments that this banking model is grounded in a view of teaching and learning as preparing students to accept the ‘world as it is’ rather than to imagine and enact the world as it could be (Boal, 1995).

In his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire explains that critical pedagogy moves away from hierarchical, transmissive approaches to education such as the banking model in favour of a ‘transformative’ approach that prioritises dialogue between learners and educators on an equal level, and the critique of social and political structures, as a means of gaining freedom from oppression (among other outcomes). Critical pedagogy, suggests Freire, views education as a process of ‘posing…the problems of human beings in their relations with the world’ (Freire, 1970, p. 79). This combined emphasis on collaboration and critique indicates an obvious compatibility with education intended to address the climate crisis.

Freire is not alone in his conceptualisation of education learning having a significant role to play in struggles for freedom and self-determination. In her book Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks discusses education as ‘the practice of freedom’ (hooks, 1994, p. 12) explaining how critical pedagogy provides a foundation for teachers’ empowerment of students to think critically about their lives and to transgress boundaries, and for teachers’ self-empowerment as agents of transgression. As you’ll find shortly, education addressing a problem so complex and pressing as the climate crisis may require transgression and brave approaches.

Critical pedagogy’s appropriateness as a theoretical basis for climate education is also linked with its emphasis on supporting students’ agency and action. Vossoughi and Gutiérrez (2016, p. 141) agree that critical pedagogy is a ‘humanising pedagogical approach that engages social reality as transformable and treats students as historical actors, subjects rather than objects of pedagogy and history’. In essence, critical pedagogy empowers students to act and to change their own circumstances.