240064 VO Education for social justice in a global context (2025W)

Aims:
Building on the theoretical approaches of Paulo Freire and others, the course aims to provide an insight into the critical education debate and discuss historical case studies in which critical educational practice has been developed. This should strengthen the ability to classify and help shape educational debates in a critical, reflective and yet constructive way.

Course content:
In the context of the liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s in the Global South, education was seen as an effective instrument for liberation from domination and the establishment of independent and socially just societies. It was intended to enable people to self-determine and shape their own lives autonomously. The narrative of emancipatory education may sound like a fairy tale - and perhaps this concept was just a fairy tale that was very quickly overtaken by political and historical developments, wherever it tried to unfold.
This lecture series addresses the question of what has become of the idea of emancipatory education. It is all too obvious that it no longer enjoys much appeal today. Educational policy discussions, whether at national, regional or global level, are based on completely different normative guidelines and are dominated by the model of competitiveness. Emancipatory education was also highly normative, but its norm was the liberation narrative, drawing on Kant, Hegel, Marx and, in the South, pre-colonial approaches to education. From the 1960s to the 1980s, this approach was considered the starting point for any debate on education in development policy discussions, in many places also in the countries of the South itself - and some specific educational policies also attempted to build on this.
After an introduction to the theoretical foundations of education for social justice and liberation, the lecture series will therefore present and critically discuss a whole series of case studies from the history of the (emancipatory) Third World and the Global South. Of particular interest here are those initiatives in which attempts were made in peripheral countries to pursue an independent path of educational policy.
The examples discussed include the “Education for Self-Reliance” concept for auto-centered development in Tanzania as well as socialist attempts in Asia (China, Vietnam, etc.) and Europe (Yugoslavia). For Latin America, the Cuban literacy campaign of 1961 is considered a beacon, as is that in Sandinista Nicaragua in the 1980s. This was followed up in 2000, when literacy campaigns were again launched in several Latin American countries under the motto “Yo sí puedo!” (“Yes, I can”). As part of the Latin American regional alliance ALBA-TCP, interregional educational cooperation also received widespread attention: with the support of Cuba and Venezuela, the “Yo sí puedo!” campaign was able to eliminate illiteracy in Bolivia, according to the government.
Points of reference for this critical debate on education in the Global South are Paulo Freire, Julius Nyerere and bell hooks as well as European theorists such as Antonio Gramsci and Pierre Bourdieu.

Methods: Lectures by the course leaders and individual guest lecturers, supplemented by references to original texts and videos with contributions from the theorists discussed.