Philosophic Foundations: A Theoretical Framework for Dialogue Facilitation - Freire and Moving Beyond Problem Posing
Drew Seidel, one of our Youth and Social Innovation capstone students, draws on his classroom experiences and insights from dialogue facilitation scholarship to offer a set of practical recommendations for faculty on how to better facilitate meaningful discourse in their classrooms. His perspective as a graduate from both the Political & Social Thought and Youth & Social Innovation programs provides a fresh lens on why we want productive disagreement to occur, even if it makes us uncomfortable.
Liberatory education scholar Paulo Freire is one of the most influential thinkers in curricular studies. Cited over 120,000 times, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) is a fundamental text within the field. One framework from Freire's work is of a "problem-posing" pedagogy which leads students towards praxis, the capacity for action and reflection in the world. However, merely "posing" problems leaves space for disengagement from praxis. This article contends that supplementing problem-posing education with the framework of “moral breakdown” would benefit educators by helping them understand their role in facilitating dialogue (Zigon 2007; 2024). Understanding moral breakdown would help professors lead dialogue that requires students to become critical of their worldviews. Thus, moving beyond a problem-posing and towards an ethically expansive and tolerant pedagogy.