Doing the Work of Love

Every Friday, about 30 Columbia-affiliated folks go to Rikers Island to teach imprisoned youth, strategically using an arts-based curriculum to further both their own and their students’ liberation. By doing so, we have consciously united theory and practice into a praxis of love.

The class, “Youth Voices on Lockdown,” is provided through the Institute for Research in African-American Studies. The class spent the first four weeks of the semester studying Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy and the prison industrial complex. Then, we split into teams of three and prepared workshops to be conducted at Rikers for the remainder of the semester. After each workshop we evaluate their lesson plans, reflecting on what worked and what did not—at the end of the semester we will gather to discuss implications for future work.

Critical pedagogy informs all of the work at Rikers. First and foremost, the traditional teacher and student relationship must be deconstructed. Paulo Freire teaches that we are all learners and that students are not simply empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge. In the sameway, teachers are not simply arbiters of knowledge, dispensing information like an ATM dispenses cash. Rather, we should (re)conceptualize a teacher as a “teacher/student” and a student as a “student/teacher,” highlighting the two-way street that is the learning process. Teachers teach and learn. Students learn and teach.

With this understanding, learning is not just a partnership with knowledge, but it is also a partnership we as learners can build with each other.

Traditionally, a teacher enters a learning space (which has been institutionalized as a “classroom”) with a pre-prepared curriculum. He or she knows what to teach and how to teach it before even meeting with the students. The teacher/student, on the other hand, enters the learning space with a tentative learning schedule with a set of objectives and goals he or she wrote out beforehand. The first meeting is usually dedicated to introductions and the discussion of objectives and goals.

Students/teachers engage the teacher/student and each other in dialogue in order to agree upon a new set of objectives and goals which may or may not be similar to that which the teacher/student submitted to the group. Only after this negotiation takes place is the group prepared to move forward with the formal learning process.

Another aspect of critical pedagogy that informs the work at Rikers is a commitment to liberation struggle. A classic Freireian anecdote goes something like this: The teacher/student enters the learning space and asks the students/teachers what is the subject of study. If the class is supposed to teach literacy, the students/teachers may yell out “writing.” If the class is a mathematics course, some may say “math.” The student/teacher then tells them they are all wrong and turns to write “LIBERATION” on the chalkboard in broad, capital letters. This anecdote demonstrates the larger philosophical foundations of Freire’s pedagogy. The subject of every class session is liberation, regardless of the formal title of the course. Mathematics, economics, political science, and other traditional disciplines are only lenses through which we view our liberation. Within these fields, we develop the necessary skills—thinking, reading, and writing, for example—in order to liberate ourselves. This is education as the practice of freedom.

Now, there will be those that question whether or not education should have an explicitly political function. Education, they would say, should be apolitical and an objective, neutral process. The truth is, education is an inherently political process. In the hands of the oppressor, education is a tool to train individuals to function within society as it stands. For the oppressed, education prepares individuals to shift their position from objects to subjects. As objects, the world acts upon us, but as subjects, we act upon the world. In this way, education as the practice of freedom becomes not only a tool of the oppressed used for liberation. Rather, it becomes a life-sustaining force for every individual interested in transforming the world.

As one can imagine, much can be said of one’s experiences teaching in a prison. Correctional officers, a time-consuming security check, and the salient sexual harassment all contribute to a complex and impactful set of experiences. A number of occurrences could be developed into compelling narratives for our community to engage. I, however, have chosen to highlight the pedagogical approach used in the classroom in order to emphasize the possibilities of an education rooted in the practice of freedom. For those who teach at Rikers every Friday, Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy is not mere theory. It is the theory which informs the practice. Somewhat ironically, Freire encourages educators to not adhere to any particular pedagogical approach. Educators must be flexible and willing to adapt to their students’ needs.

Conceptualizing education as the practice of freedom forces us to ask, “How do we best free our hearts and our minds to live more fully?” I have used the term “liberation” extensively here to articulate this fundamentally human question. “Youth Voices on Lockdown” presented one opportunity for individuals to contemplate this question through Freire’s critical pedagogy. At the heart of Freire’s theory is a praxis of love that requires us to reach the answer together, through partnerships sustained by dialogue. In this way, education becomes the work of love equipping us with the tools necessary for change.

Anthony Kelley is a Columbia College junior majoring in women’s and gender studies. Strength to Love runs alternate Tuesdays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com