Participatory Practice
And so, the process of neoliberal globalisation took hold. Before too long, a global super-rich appeared. Strangely, they had more in common with each other than with their own cultures. They were full of ideas about social status, and bought lots of really expensive stuff to show us all how very important they were. Consumerism was born! Not only did this create enormous social divisions, but it polluted the Earth with throwaway consumption! The well-kept secret, though, is that people are not naturally selfish – this is another Big Lie. We have an empathy circuit in our brains, and to be more fully
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human, we need to be connected in community and society; we have a natural propensity to be compassionate and caring, and to cooperate with each other rather than compete! The trouble is that sometimes people don’t tell the truth and the story they tell leads to a different reality, a reality that is quite the opposite to the one we need in order to thrive!
The year of the barricades that heralded an opportunity for change 1968 was a critical juncture in world history. Social unrest sought change, and popular protest reverberated around the world. It was a year of rebellion in the form of race riots, student demonstrations, civil rights marches and anti-Vietnam protests, which also witnessed the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. It was a time of the emergence of new ideas which prompted new social movements. Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks both became available in English in the early 1970s, profoundly influencing people’s understanding of power and oppression. … Inspired by new thinking, grassroots movements erupted during the 1970s and 1980s, generating theory from lived experience – second-wave feminism, anti-racism, greens, LGBTQ rights, ‘dis’ability rights … – and street protests abounded. Ideas and action are a symbiotic unity, a unity of praxis. Neither is much use without the other!
The way we make sense of the world has a direct impact on our being, how we behave towards each other and towards the planet. Ideas and action as a symbiotic unity, straddling the divide between theory and practice, constitute a unity of praxis. This is the foundation of Paulo Freire’s education for critical consciousness. Freire developed his critical praxis by listening to the stories people told about their lived reality in the favelas. He heard the consequences of structural discrimination in their stories, how power reaches into personal lives to privilege some and punish others. Practice for social justice begins by listening from the heart to people’s everyday 46
