Editor's note

Abstract

We looked up from the busyness of our work and discovered it was the 50th anniversary of Paulo Freire's classic text The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (published in 1968). William Myer had sent us a manuscript – a memoir of sorts – reflecting on the book's impact on his life's work as a minister and educator. We knew we needed to publish some kind of retrospective to mark the anniversary. The book was the first shot across the bow, a 1960s radical dismantling and reimagination of the liberative purposes and processes of education for a just society. The book has aged well. It's the grandparent of critical pedagogies and the lodestar for so many of our Wabash Center workshop participants who got into this business to make a better world. But Freire wrote from his teaching context amongst the peasants and slums of Brazil. His purpose was to empower his students to see and resist the structures of power that oppressed them. For fifty years he has been venerated by faculty working in a very different context: teaching privileged students in wealthy North American institutions of higher education. So we asked three Wabash workshop alumni to write short responses to Myer's essay, to analyze how Freire informs their classroom teaching practices. We publish these manuscripts together as a Forum in this, the January 2019 issue of the journal – as we move now into the 51st anniversary of this text that still lives and challenges us to think again about our deepest purposes as educators and the teaching practice these call us to. Freire could not have imagined the internet and the ways that contemporary media cultures could simultaneously democratize and alienate our social fabric, faster than we can absorb or adjust to. The central question of the second Forum published in this issue is: how can online education form students for ministry (see: “Forum on Seminary Teaching and Formation Online” by Deborah Gin, Barbara Blodgett, and G. Brooke Lester). An article by Kyle Oliver asks: ought not our pedagogies make use of these emerging new media tools in order to better prepare our students as leaders in this emergent media culture? (See: “Networked Religion Meets Digital Geographies: Pedagogical Principles for Exploring New Spaces and Roles in the Seminary Classroom.”) But Freire would have been very familiar with, and sympathetic to, Sarah Jobe's project to bring theological education into a woman's prison. Her article, “How Programs in Prisons are Changing the Who, Where, How, and What of Theological Education,” carefully describes and analyzes her purposes and pedagogies, which she argues are emblematic of the cutting edge of theological education today. We've included four Teaching Tactics: strategies for . . . improving students' participation in classroom discussions (Emily Kahm's “Secret Missions”), getting more out of in-class quizzes (Reid Locklin's “The (Mostly) Unmarked Quiz”), helping students become better readers (Ingie Hovland's “ICE QQ Reading Logs”), and the one that shows how we're all Freirean now – Molleen Dupree-Dominguez's “Social Location Project.” But the article I most want to call your attention to is the magisterial, encyclopedic, overview of pedagogical theory in Deborah Gin and Mark Hearn's article, “Why You Do What You Do: The Power in Knowing and Naming Pedagogies.” This 12,000 word essay takes the active learning teaching strategies that we're all familiar with and grounds them in one or another of the great philosophies of teaching that have emerged over the past century. This is an invaluable resource for understanding “why you do what you do” in the classroom (as the title promises), with lots of bibliography for further reading, and two handy appendices that helpfully organize and summarize the material. And you can bet that Freire figures prominently.