Teachers helping teachers respond to the big issues of our time

CALE (the Critical Action Learning Exchange) is a professional learning community for educators around the world who seek to empower their students in responding to pressing, complex socio-environmental issues such as climate change, social and environmental justice, pandemics, and more.

CALE proposes that the school curriculum on complex socio-environmental problems must aim beyond helping students understand the causes, mechanics, and consequences of those issues. Approaches limited to facilitating the acquisition of factual knowledge about these problems may reinforce a perspective that relegates students to a passive position that rationalizes the causes of the problems that affect them while alienating them from consequential decision-making and action. 

To support teachers in adopting approaches that counter the potentially damaging narrative of overpowering, insurmountable calamities, and reinforce students’ sense of agency and community, CALE draws upon the theoretical perspective of Critical Pedagogy. This perspective is based on a philosophy of praxis that stresses the importance of an educative process that interweaves theory, action, and reflection as a means to advance the broader society toward social change and justice (Freire, 1970).

Why Critical Action Education. Why now.

The UN Secretary-General António Guterres opened the 75th UN General Assembly in September 2020 with the following statement:

“We face simultaneously an epochal health crisis, the biggest economic calamity and job losses since the Great Depression, and dangerous new threats to human rights. COVID-19 has laid bare the world’s fragilities. Rising inequalities. Climate catastrophe. Widening societal divisions. […] Our planet is burning. Our world is struggling, stressed and seeking real leadership and action.” (Guterres, 2020)

Guterres, 2020

The current global landscape is characterized by the confluence of multiple socio-environmental crises. Each of these multiple crises—environmental, sanitary, geopolitical, economic, civilizational—has a direct effect on students. In recent years, the term “climate anxiety” (Wamsler & Brink, 2018) was coined to describe a range of psycho-emotional responses to the perceived threat of climate change, including worry, anger, and hopelessness. Similar kinds of psycho-emotional responses have also been reported in groups and communities particularly affected by other situations perceived as oppressive and overpowering, such as systemic racism and other forms of discrimination (Williams, 2018), war (Charlés, 2010), poverty (Ridley et al. 2020), etc. 

The school curriculum on climate change and other complex problems often focuses on helping students understand the causes, mechanics, and consequences of those issues. An unintended consequence of such a somewhat narrow approach is that it may reinforce a perspective that relegates students to a passive position that rationalizes the causes of the problems that affect them while alienating them from consequential decision-making and action. This approach conflicts with research that suggests that anxiety might actually be alleviated by engaging students in some form of committed action (Hoggett & Randall, 2018). 

Educating Future-Makers: A Paradigm Shift

“The future, after all, is not a province that is far away from me, far beyond me, waiting for me to get there. On the contrary, I am the maker of the future.”

Freire, Teto e Chão: a História do Movimento de Defesa do Favelado (video), 1993

To support teachers in adopting approaches that counter the potentially damaging narrative of overpowering, insurmountable calamities, and reinforce students’ sense of agency and community, CALE draws upon the theoretical perspective of Critical Pedagogy, which is based on a philosophy of praxis that stresses the importance of an educative process that interweaves theory, action, and reflection as a means to advance the broader society towards social change and justice (Freire, 1970). 

Critical Pedagogy is grounded on the concept of conscientização, which is described as “The process whereby people achieve an illuminating awareness of the socioeconomic and cultural circumstances that shape their lives and their capacity to transform that reality” (Freire, 1975). Conscientização, therefore, aims beyond “critical thinking” to include a sense of critical consciousness that enables students to make judgements on their current and ideal realities and empowers them as agents for positive change.

CALE aims to provide theoretical and technological support to educators interested in responding to this situation by providing both a pedagogical framework for Critical Action education, and a platform for peer support, in the form of a community of educators engaged in collaborative design, implementation, exchange, and advancement of curriculum that empowers students as agents for positive social change.