Abstract

Emancipatory education and related research commonly centre on the questions and challenges of how to achieve equity, inclusion and empowerment in the context of education, for individuals and groups that are positioned as marginalized and disadvantaged. Some of the most pressing and widely tackled issues are linked to discrimination with regards to learners’ characteristics, such as racial and ethnic background, as well as gender, class, ability, culture, language, digitalisation and (dis)placed status, histories and characteristics. Freire’s (1996) famed work “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” opened the grand space for discussion on who is education for and who can be educated and how, highlighting the importance of critical consciousness and dialogue, as well as education as a liberation tool. Thoughts on female and racial emancipation gained prominence in the work by bell hooks (2014), who explored racial and gender oppression, calling for a radical change in classroom paradigm and dynamics. Unfortunately, the inequalities concerning demographic characteristics, socio-economic positioning and the legacy of colonialism have not been eradicated. They continue to plague societies and education, despite incredibly useful, needed and well-meaning reforms and policies that challenge them. Much more work still needs to be done to change the centuries long and deep-seated mindsets. We can regulate words and acts but not the minds and inner thoughts that were collectively or individually “inherited”. Emancipatory education is a “form-of-life” in educational practice and discourse (see Pellizzoni, 2022) rather than a tick box mechanism and a simple change of “lifestyle”.