Rethinking emancipation with Freire and Rancière: A plea for a thing-centred pedagogy

In this article I critically engage with a vital assumption behind the work of Paulo Freire, and more generally behind any critical pedagogy, viz. the belief that education is fundamentally about emancipation. My main goal is to conceive of a contemporary critical pedagogy which stays true to the original inspiration of Freire’s work, but which at the same time takes it in a new direction. More precisely I confront Freire with Jacques Rancière. Not only is the latter’s work on education fully predicated on the idea of emancipation. For both Freire and Rancière literacy initiation practice can be seen as an archetypical model for understanding the emancipatory moment in education.For both, educational practices are never neutral, as they decide to a great extent on the fate of our common world. Reflecting on similarities and differences in both their positions, I will propose to conceive of critical pedagogy in terms of a thing-centred pedagogy. As such I take a clear position in the discussion between teacher- and student-centred approaches. According to Rancière, it is the full devotion to a ‘thing’, i.e. to a subject matter we study, which makes emancipation possible. Over and against Freire’s defence of emancipatory education, I highlight with Rancière the importance of educational emancipation