Freire owes a lot to Hegel in the way education is framed as a process of completing oneself as a human (Lei, 2016). Hegel is also not the only philosopher or theorizer present in Freire’s work. He references and mines from Marx, Gramsci, Illich, Sartre, and Dewey, among others (Lei, 2016; Macedo (2000); Vandenbroeck, (2019). The way the theory is situated made it difficult to choose who to include in the chart and why. Ultimately, Hegel represents the closest commentary related specifically to psychology as it relates to phenomenology, or the idea that education begins with our own consciousness in relation to others and that through reflection and dialogue we become more fully ourselves (Lei, 2016). In other words, learners are a part of the world they need to know about therefore, knowledge of self is how one comes to the knowledge one gains about a topic in education which is concurrently further knowledge about the self (Villacanas de Castro, 2015). On the face of it, one could equally attribute this phenomenological perspective to Marx (Villacanas de Castro, 2015). However, clear overlaps develop between Freire and Hegel when the phenomenology become relational between the oppressor and the oppressed. The struggle against each other is the catalyst for self-consciousness and in both Hegel and Freire, the education process is centered around both parties’ knowledge of themselves as subject (Lei, 2016). Freire picks up on Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and translates it into the understanding that the oppressed are those that can humanize both groups by a pedagogy of ‘revolutionary praxis’(Lei, 2016).

This was another difficult choice as Freire can also easily be considered in the vein of democratic socialist, Christian socialist, or Marxist (shackles of the Soviet Union notwithstanding) (Irwin, 2018; Macedo (2000). I chose to describe his theory of education as democratic humanist because of its overarching pedagogical goal to create active citizens able to participate in systems in order to free themselves of oppression. Dewey is in the same vein a democratic humanist but Freire might be considered a bit more radical in his humanism. By the oppressed liberating themselves, Freire’s hope is that citizenships become more democratic as power is reconstituted from the oppressor to the oppressed (Irwin, 2018; Jackson, 2007). In terms of education, the locus of control shifts from the teacher to the student in the Freirean model, signifying an altered power dynamic (Aronowitz, 2012). This focus for Freire was born out of the events around Brazil’s 1964 dictatorship, his resulting exile, the poverty of his childhood, and the social movements Freire was involved in in Bolivia, Chile, and back in his native Brazil after his exile had ended (Aronowitz, 2012). To be clear, Freire isn’t only speaking to humanizing education for individual students, he is postulating a way in which we liberate the oppressed through self-directed action (Aronowitz, 2012). By humanizing both the oppressed and through them, the oppressors, we engage in non-zero-sum class struggle with universal net gains.

There is a tremendous amount of debate in the literature about the extent to which Freire’s theory can be construed as pedagogy, not least because Freire himself uses pedagogy to describe his ideas but without a practical method per se (Macedo, 2000). In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the word ‘praxis’ is also adopted and in these cases it might mean the combination of theory and practice. In other words (I think), Freire is using pedagogy in place of theory, and praxis in place of pedagogy. I’m focusing on this here because in terms of thinking about the day-to-day use of educational technology, Freire does not provide a clear roadmap for how teachers can come to employ a pedagogy of the oppressed as an instrument of teaching and learning, so the degree of specificity with which it can be applied to technology in teaching practice is limited. This is an issue as in the literature on using a Freirean lens applied to educational technology, it doesn’t seem to push far enough in the direction of what Freire meant by liberation and shifting the focus to the student. The difficulty for Freire in coming up with a roadmap to liberation lies in part with the fact that the dialogue that achieves liberation comes from the oppressed, and the oppressed are not one ubiquitous group but are comprised of many different individuals and groups. The very idea of the banking model that Freire wants to overcome with the problem-posing model is that the curriculum cannot be imposed. It must come from, through generative themes, those oppressed present at the time. In my view, most pedagogic strategies employed to make educational technology more student-centered, miss the mark on the localized, generative version of education Freire is advocating. I pick this up again in ‘curriculum’.

As stated in the comments on pedagogy, if Freire doesn’t comment on specifics of daily teaching practice pedagogically, he certainly doesn’t go so far as to prescribe a curriculum. Instead, he says that instead of following pre-determined plans, the people involved in the education process, “together create the guidelines of their action” after a process of dialogue reveals shared generative themes to act on (Freire says these are not stages, but are rather woven together) (Freire, 2005, p. 181). This poses practical problems for curriculum planning and outcome creation in education generally, but also poses problems for implementing educational technologies. Taking the learning management system (LMS) as an example, it is designed very much for a banking model of education in which input is added to the system, often for a lifecycle of 3-5 years after a course is created. The system is not designed for hosting generative theme that change with each group of learners, nor is it designed for learners to control exactly what is hosted on the LMS and how. To ensure quality control (this reasoning is dubious at best), and to reduce costs, information on the LMS is input once, then recycled from the master to shells for each course section. The design underpinning the use of the technology is such that creating discussion fora for students to engage with, where they might be able to generate themes, might not do enough to overcome or subvert the overarching way the LMS perpetuates a cultural hegemony.