Here is the late Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, discussing Karl Marx. Freire is one of the key figures, some would say the founder, of critical pedagogy (teaching as emancipation). I incorporate Freire’s critical pedagogy into my emancipatory constructionist theory and believe that it can work as one of the groundings of Autistic liberation.
In my personal narrative, I wrote the following:
The objective of such a struggle should be the attainment of what Paulo Freire referred to, in Portugese, as conscientizacao (i.e., conscientization, critical consciousness, or consciousness raising), that is to say, an awareness of the social contradictions of domination and of the emancipatory strategies for subduing them. Indeed, from a Freirian standpoint, the collaborative character of the educational process is encompased by a model of critical pedagogy. As in Mahayana Buddhism, the Bodhisattva becomes a preceptor to others, so the critical pedagogue imparts her conscientization to a tyrannized population. Approached in a thoughtful manner, praxis can become a normative framework for disability activism and self-advocacy.
Posted in Autism Rights
