Stephen D. Brookfield On Being A Critically Reflective Teacher and Teaching Social Justice

In Part 1 Stephen talks about his background and what drew him into teaching. He models what it means to be a critically reflective teacher—in Freire’s words, authoritative, not authoritarian. He continually searches for what’s new, what is yet to be realized—and that awareness involves a critique of power in the classroom. “There is no such thing as a power-free classroom,” he writes. Everything, including naming, reifies power dynamics. “Efforts to introduce more student-centered, empowering activities sometimes, in a teasing contradiction, underscore teachers’ power,” he has written, and faculty have to know and reflect on their own social locations and privileges as they challenge white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and capitalism.

In Part 2 Stephen introduces us to Eduard Lindeman (1885-1953), a pioneer in adult education who wrote one of the first books on community development (The Meaning of Adult Education, 1926; Brookfield, Learning Democracy: Eduard Lindeman on Adult Education and Social Change, 1987). Lindeman explored “life-centered learning,” believing that “education is life” and that student and teacher experiences and autobiographies mattered in the classroom. The learner is central in Lindeman’s educational theory; the starting point is always the lives of the learners and the primacy of experience. Co-operative education leads to social justice action. Stephen talks about his friendship with Myles Horton, one of the founders of the Highlander Center in Tennessee who linked education with democracy, and the biggest single influence on Stephen. He then talks about his use of aesthetics, the imagination, and storytelling/narrative in the classroom. What does he want to subvert in higher education?—the capitalist ethic. Hear Stephen talk about the dominant ideologies at work in higher education, and how as a counternarrative/action we can begin by taking students seriously as co-learners and creators.