Reflections on a pedagogy of love

I have long been an advocate of the place of love in education, simply because it seems to me that if God’s affection for humans is shown in allowing them to grow and flourish in communities, then we have to allow a space for love in that. How that looks, and what it leads to, tends to clash early on with what we find ourselves having to do in the world of education. it clashes, because it is focused on amateur values of personal commitment and longing for others, with the professional constraints that swirl around the world of education. Along with the Christian scriptures, Wendell Berry has been my guide in this, and he remains one of the most powerful voices arguing for love in both education and the way we are in the economy and community. This paper, by Lanas and Zembylas, offers a scholarly approach to thinking about love in education more critically.

Yesterday afternoon I was privileged to listen to Professor Antonia Darder, from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, speak on Reflections on a Pedagogy of Love.

This talk came, partly, from a book she wrote in the early years of the millennium called Reinventing Paulo Freire: a pedagogy of love but today it was a looser, more passionate defence of the role of love in teaching and in revolutionary commitment.

Professor Darder’s outstanding reader on Freire, Freire and Education is probably the best introduction to his thinking as applied to the world of teaching and learning, and has a very good chapter on the pedagogy of love. Students on UEL’s Education Studies course have it as a core text.

Professor Darder began on the premise that in education, love is essentially revolutionary. All change happens in the context of relationship so the possibility of love to impact that is always present. Why it is so hard to communicate love for most of us is because of our unwillingness to be vulnerable and receive that love from others. We are hardwired with a desire to escape vulnerability, to protect ourselves.

The notion of love is also not something that sits comfortably with our ideas of education for the future. Love is essentially only in the present, in present actions, embodied as we express love to those around us. If we move away from the present, we lose relationship (as that also only takes place in the present) and we invalidate the idea of love as action. The embodiment of love is always in the present, in the now, where it can be experienced.

Professor Darder grew up in a US colony, Puerto Rico, and as a colonised woman from a working class background, a woman in a world dominated by essentially foreign men, she, like many others, sees the nature of hidden power and knows that it is real. Those who have suffered oppression of any type see invisible walls and barriers which those on the other side cannot see. This leads to the ability to see all sorts of exclusionary behaviour. You only have to talk as a Welsh person to English people about Wales to see the misreading of these barriers.

The motivation of love lies behind all true revolutionary thinking, argued Darder. Freire understood love as a political force, a struggle for change that resulted from a motivation of love. Why, she asked, do we teach the way we do? Why do we motivate for change and seek justice the way we do? With Freire, she answered: because of love.

Guevara argued that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love, whilst Angela Davis argued that we have not just to feel, but to act as if it is possible to change the world. Thus, life tomorrow is completely tied to how we live today.

The nature of the university

When Antonia Darder came to work in higher education, she discovered that the western epistemology of individualism, the epistemology that is rooted in most universities, is fundamentally warlike: debate is carried out deliberately, adversarially. There are winners and losers. It has nothing to do with a collaborative search for truth, or for a communal identity. Universities who tout themselves as communal are kidding themselves: their whole ethos is geared toward individual achievement. The conditioning imposed by universities marginalises people and keeps them unfree. With Freire, we need to get to a place as faculty where we cannot understand life without love, cannot teach without love, cannot be present without it. Oppression, or unfreedom, is one of the ways that we were taught to not love, and so is exclusionary in its basis. Love challenges the false generosity of those:

whose ideologies and practices work to sustain a system of education that transgresses at its very core every emancipatory principle of social justice and democratic life.

Professor Darder encouraged us to think about the questions that this instrumentalising oppression raises: how useful are we to our university programme? How useful am I to my institution? Is that where my worth lies in this role as an educator? So although we might feel (and certainly the new right feels this) that universities think of themselves as a place for revolutionary work to occur, they are not. They are institutions that mould our thinking, that impact not only how we think but how we are in the world. What she called revolutionary coherence was required: the capacity for self-vigilance in our relationships to our culture, to others, constantly to question our role and stance within a university, as a student, as a teacher.

This means that we have also to consider who has access to what, in universities? Who gets money for what? Who gets funded for what activities and programmes and what and who does this privilege? We talk about love, but unless we are also talking about material reality, about economics, we have missed the true impact of why we love in the first place. Relationship, even a relationship of love, has as a component economic justice and considerations around redistribution of wealth. This becomes the ‘fighting love’ of Freire, the love of those convinced of the right and duty to fight to denounce and to announce. Love and justice go hand in hand and there is no justice more important in the world than economic justice, the ability to earn and be rewarded fairly for your labours.

Managing our privilege

This has some personal implications. It requires us to be honest with ourselves, if we seek to be honest with others. Because love and justice are inextricable (and it is in this understanding that love can be seen to be a political force), it means that my wellbeing is completely tied to your wellbeing. If I think for a moment that your wellbeing is not as important as mine, I start to lose both my own ability to love, but also any capacity I have for solidarity. This anti-solidarity trope is fundamental to the epistemology of the west (Why should I care? You’ve got a good job, I’ve got a good job? Why are we concerned?). We tend therefore to commodify people in the west, put value on them for what they can produce or give us back, and love doesn’t let you do that. This privilege, that which our western culture has encouraged us to achieve (and has made it easier to achieve, which is why it is regarded as privilege), needs to be acknowledged and used in the struggle for change. I went to Oxford? How am I going to use that for good? Or do I see that privilege only in what it enables me to buy, to accrue?

In that respect, affluent people tend to use things to define them, accessing their buying power to sustain their self-view or their identity. Those who are poor, who do not have access to that buying power, tend to use their relationships, their family and friends to define them.

The affluent in a population tend toward individualism, the accrual of wealth being defined in opposition to others who do not have that particular item (and think how possession of stuff gives us so much of what we consider ‘worth’), whilst the poor and oppressed in a culture tend towards communalism, and things, if important at all, tend to be held in common. Thus, cultural differences, which are very real, can be interpreted as the different emphases placed on the individualist and communal aspects of identity.

Bringing our whole selves

Our western culture, and especially our white western culture has highlighted the individualist, accrual model, bestowing value on people whom have a lot of stuff (we shall see later why this is important). What this leads to is an encouragement to promote and see others (and the world and its ‘common values’) in that individualistic lens. And when we do that, we misread what others’ experience actually is. This is happening all the time within capitalism: business people take the desire to hoard and accrue as a given, and cannot understand when different, more communal, more loving motivations arise. This cartoon that Professor Darder had as a slide shows the way that others’ accrual is offered as an incentive to keep capitalism functioning. Again, more on that later.

The invisible wall, which separates those oppressed and those oppressing, or men and women, or that which sits between races, is simply a failure to see and grasp each other’s reality. It can only be destroyed by the willingness to engage in loving dialogue – dialogue because it is essential, love because we seek justice in the relationship – so we can learn from each other. This in turn, requires us to be determined to learn from each other, so that we don’t come at every dialogue with a guarded protectionism that takes our projection of another’s experience as reality. If we are wise, and can sacrifice our guardedness, then we are able to engage in the messiness and vulnerability of relationship, and the joy (perhaps) of finding that our projections were erroneous, and the relationship with others enriched and deepened.

There is an issue here for our professional selves. If we love, we seek to bring our whole selves to the table, to all that we do, and not professionalise a slice of it and pose as if that is all of us. Our academic culture, schools, universities, ask us to be less than ourselves, and this, in western education is compounded by the idea of discipline. We are disciplined to think like mathematicians, like historians, like biologists. So strong are these disciplinary boundaries, that if we transgress them in some multi-disciplinary way, we may find ourselves castigated by the holders of those disciplines.

The impact of capitalism on our thinking

And not just scholarly disciplines, either: think of the disciplining focus of schools on children and adults: you will wear this uniform as a child, you will be smartly presented in your professional workplace, you will conform to these rules. And why? Largely, so we are fitted for function in a capitalist economy that expects these things, that assigns roles which have to be identified by uniform, or by certain behaviours, or (across the board) by a desire for a ‘good job’ or to earn a ‘good salary.’

Thus we cannot talk about education, at all, without talking about economics and the dehumanising effect of capitalism as a prime purpose as Marx noted 180 years ago. Professor Darder quoted an Oxfam report from 2017 that showed that 8 men control more wealth than the 3.6 billion poorest people in the world (she said 6.7 billion, so she might have more recent information!) And we think that that is OK. We live with it. We think that is just the way things are. What disciplining has gone on in our minds so that we accept that as OK? It makes it clear now that global capitalism, or capitalism of any sort, is impossible as an economic system without a large majority of the world’s people being impoverished. There have to be losers, and in the capitalist worldview, no consideration is made for losers. They just lose. And die.

Capitalism, as a political economy, rules all we do and think about. It is mammon writ large, a dehumanising, international, economic apartheid.

As teachers, we have the power to create different conditions for learning. These might be in the way we approach the voices of authority in our teaching (who has the power? who has the right to speak?), how we approach the content and above all how we approach texts and their authority. Empowerment, both for us as teachers, as well as for the students we seek to lead, comes from a collaborative (literally, labouring together) so that relationship and thus love enters the equation, bringing the affirmation of our roles and of our learning from one another. The best examples I know of this are in David Smith’s On Christian Teaching (2018) and his earlier book, co-edited with Jamie (JKA) Smith, Teaching and Christian Practices (2011).

Student resistance as social agency

Where students become resistant to our teaching, there are usually two reasons (aside from sheer idleness, I propose!): as with any revolutionary movement, people are scared of change. Please don’t change the script on me! And of course, for many, what they have already works well. Freire’s ‘banking education’ was still an effective tool for many: much was learnt. The other reason is the resistance to domination of any sort. Students resist in order to position themselves and to find a space in which to make sense of who they are and why they are feeling oppressed. Professor Darder suggested that we should therefore welcome student ‘resistance by shutting down.’ This is not to say that we shut down – we are called to the exact opposite – but to recognise student agency when they refuse to learn from us. It is connected to acts of social agency, and eventually it is highly productive. We maintain the best relationships with those who push back against our oppressions, whether meant or not, and with whom we can still maintain an attitude of love and respect. It is this dialogue, born out of the conflict and resistance, that becomes transformative, and begins to eradicate judgment and foster openness.

Pedagogy of life

The final theme of the seminar was around the idea that pedagogy is not just something that happens in the classroom, but is an extension of life: how we speak to the waiter who brings a meal, how we help our neighbours, how we regard the lowest – all of this has to be of a piece with how we teach. Do our politics and fine words go out of the window when we speak to the weakest in our society? Is what we teach, in short, coherent with who we are? Do we actively enact the dignity that is in all people?

There is a big emphasis today on self-care. Professor Darder found this somewhat amusing: people of her – and my – generation did not see this as a ‘thing.’ You just got on with the life in front of you. But she saw in the self-care movement a real danger that it would serve to individualise people and thus feed into the capitalist economy and its expectations and thought processes. Self-care needs to be thought of, she argued, as communal, as other-care, as care for our relationships. This feeds back into her idea of revolutionary coherence: a self-vigilance that attends to relationships and to the experience of others, rather than obsessing about ourselves. Martin Luther King talked about an inescapable network of mutuality. This derived from the Christian gospel (read Romans 12 to get an idea of how close to revolutionary views of love Paul was!), and with Paul, King argued that ‘what affects one directly, affects all indirectly.’

---

Some final comments.

How, Professor Darder asked, do we go about undermining the banking method of education that Freire spent so much time assaulting? The key is love: to bring our whole selves to the task, and to invite students to bring their whole selves to the task. There is no presumption about how we are or how our students are. We are seeking to undermine expectations of how a learner should be: revolutionary presence means enlarging the range in which we express ourselves, not closing it down. Quoting Graeber & Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, which looks at history from the perspective of pre-Enlightenment cultures, she outlined this freedom to be in four areas:

• the freedom to say yes or no (and to have that answer accepted fully and without punishment or the threat of punishment)
• the freedom of physical movement – noting that there was a huge rise in incarceration (the absolute negation of freedom of physical movement) since the dawn of neoliberal thought in the west.
• the freedom to participate creatively in the life of a culture
• freedom of sexual expression (here Graeber & Wengrow would depart from more traditional understandings of freedom, such as the Christian scriptures or Wendell Berry’s writing on community).

One way of doing this is to remind ourselves that, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty said, the body is our medium for having a world, and that we know not through our intellect, but through our experience.

There are enormous and disturbing implications for ITE in England from this approach. We want to educate and free teachers to teach, and yet we are feeding them into a professional world of expectations that are governed by DfE standards and school-based understandings of what constitutes good ‘professional’ (that horrible word again) practice. This disciplining oppression that we place on beginning teachers leads them not towards a revolutionary presence, but towards a devastating delivery model on behalf of the political economy that governs us.

Difficult things to discuss, but hopefully, this reflection will open up the possibility of love as a political teaching force for our students….