Liberatory education is an educational approach that aims to develop learners’ critical awareness of social, political, and economic power relations and to strengthen their capacity to act against oppression through reflective and collective praxis [1][2][3][4]. Rather than treating learners as passive recipients of information, it frames education as a dialogic process in which participants co-construct knowledge from lived experience, critical inquiry, and action [1][2]. Liberatory education is characterized by critical consciousness, problem-posing pedagogy, and the linking of learning to social transformation, while emphasizing dignity, agency, and democratic participation [1][2][3][4]. In educational theory, the term denotes a normative and pedagogical orientation toward emancipation, distinct from content-delivery models that prioritize transmission without critical engagement with structural inequality [1][2][3][4].
- liberatory education
- critical pedagogy
- critical consciousness
- emancipatory learning
References
- Richard D. McKirahan. A Vocabulary of the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle; Bloomsbury Academic: London, United Kingdom, 2022. [CrossRef]
- Shor, I. Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change; University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL, 1992. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo4034411.html.
- Hooks, B. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom; Routledge: New York, 1994. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203700280.
- Giroux, H. A. Theory and Resistance in Education: Towards a Pedagogy for the Opposition, rev. ed.; Bergin & Garvey: Westport, CT, 2001. https://philpapers.org/rec/GIRTAR.