Abstract

According to Giroux (2011) we can, through critical pedagogy, engage the world as “an object of critical analysis” and as a place of “hopeful transformation” (p. 14). Giroux’s (2011) approach requires building and maintaining spaces where “the complexity of knowledge, culture, values and social issues can be explored in open and critical dialogue” (p. 124). Through these spaces, he argues, we are able to work to understand and disrupt oppressive power dynamics kept in place by systems of domination and control and move toward struggling for a more socially just world (Giroux, 2011, p. 7).

bell hooks’ (2010) understanding that “love matters and that it brings strength and power (pp. 166-167) can contribute to our understanding of these spaces. hooks (2000) contends that “great social movements for freedom and justice” promote “a love ethic”, one in which we “utilize all the dimensions of love-care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge-in our everyday lives” (p. 94).

Ascribing to the critical pedagogical view that education should be a “critical practice” (Freire, 2001, p. 30) in which those involved “make ourselves different tomorrow from what we are today” (Shapiro, 2012, p. 50), “transform the world we live in” (hooks, 2010, p. 188) and employ an understanding of the power and ethic of love as integral to “working for a collective good” (hooks, 2000, p. 214), I argue that we should engage critical pedagogy as living-loving praxis in all the places of lives, including the personal and romantic. 

Keywords: critical pedagogical praxis, living, loving, relationality and the everyday

How to Cite:

Dominguez, C. M., (2019) “Each and Everyday, Love us Free: Critical Pedagogy as a Living-Loving Praxis”, International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 10(1).