page_title: Feminist pedagogy
section_title: Paulo Freire
hierarchical_section_title: Feminist pedagogy / Influential figures / Paulo Freire
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of Paulo Freire
context_page_description: Feminist pedagogy is a pedagogical framework grounded in feminist theory. It embraces a set of epistemological theories, teaching strategies, approaches to content, classroom practices, and teacher-student relationships. Feminist pedagogy, along with other kinds of progressive and critical pedagogy, considers knowledge to be socially constructed.
context_section_description: Theorist Paulo Freire is known for his work in the field of critical pedagogy, of which feminist pedagogy is a particular manifestation. In his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed 1968, Freire used Marxist theory to argue that the student-teacher relationship reflected and reinforced problematic societal power structures. He also argued against what he called the banking model of education, in which a student is viewed as an empty account waiting to be filled by the teacher, writing "it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads men and women to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power."
  Freire's work emphasized the need for teachers to eschew their class perspective and see both education and revolution as process of shared understanding between the teacher and the taught, the leader and the led. Feminist pedagogy, as it has developed in the United States, provides a historically situated example of critical pedagogy in practice. Feminist conceptions of education are similar to Freire's pedagogy in a variety of ways, and feminist educators often cite Freire as the educational theorist who comes closest to the approach and goals of feminist pedagogy. Both feminist pedagogy as it is usually defined and Freirean pedagogy rest upon visions of social transformation; underlying both are certain common assumptions concerning oppression, consciousness, and historical change. Both pedagogies assert the existence of oppression in people's material conditions of existence and as a part of consciousness. They also rest on a view of consciousness as more than a sum of dominating discourses, but as containing within it a critical capacity — what Antonio Gramsci called "good sense"; and both thus see human beings as subjects and actors in history and hold a strong commitment to justice and a vision of a better world and the potential for liberation.
caption: Paulo Freire
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