Paulo Freire’s (2005) concept of generative themes is an important aspect of his pedagogy towards developing critical consciousness (conscientização). These themes are not imposed by educators but emerge organically from the lived experiences, language, and concerns of the students themselves. Through dialogue, reflection, and collective inquiry, certain recurring issues arise – issues that touch upon participant’s realities, struggles, and hopes, and capture a topic of crucial interest for the people involved in the conversation.
Generative themes serve as entry points for deeper exploration. As the name indicates, they generate more discussion and open up deeper conversations. Beginning with the real-life issues, words, and experiences of the participants, some of these issues start to recur naturally, signalling that they hold significance and potential for deeper exploration.
From there, the educator/facilitator and participants work together to uncover the deeper meanings behind these themes to notice what forces shape these realities, what social structures are involved, how power and culture impact these realities, and what possibilities exist for going beyond the current situation. In this process, learning moves from the part to the whole and back again – from personal stories and local issues to broader social and historical structures and then returning to concrete reality with new understanding and agency. The goal is not to analyse, but to generate further conversation, critical thinking, and collective action.
Limit Situations:
Freire emphasises that generative themes are closely linked to limit-situations – the boundaries and edges of what people believe is possible in their lives with regards to their current social realities. Limit-situations themselves do not create hopelessness but rather it is about how they are perceived. When generative themes are hidden and unrecognised, people are unable to see the whole picture instead noticing only the consequences thus being trapped in the limit situation. However, when these themes are uncovered and examined, they can allow for a change in perspective that leads to actions that challenge and move beyond existing barriers.
“In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform” (Freire, 2005, p. 49)
In this way, discovering generative themes allows people to transcend limit-situations and imagine an alternate and more just reality.
“In the last analysis, the themes both contain and are contained in limit-situations; the tasks they imply require limit-acts. When the themes are concealed by the limit-situations and thus are not clearly perceived, the corresponding tasks—people’s responses in the form of historical action—can be neither authentically nor critically fulfilled. In this situation, humans are unable to transcend the limit-situations to discover that beyond these situations—and in contradiction to them—lies an untested feasibility.”(Freire, 2005, p. 102)
The conceptualisation of limit situations and generative themes are not very clearly delineated in Freire’s work. In this work, it has been helpful to think of the limiting situation as emerging from the first encounters with the co-investigators, where we pose questions and prompts and reflect back to the participants what they have brought, before starting to problematise their experiences in a more direct way.
The limiting situation has inside itself a generative theme in the form of a question that opens up the closedness of the limiting situation. The shape of this question is not defined in advance but appears in its full form retrospectively to account for the developments of the dialogue through the sessions.
Through the eight sessions with our co-investigators, we observed three generative themes, that is, initial questions that ran as a thread throughout the eight discussions, taking on additional meaning and uncovering underlying layers of meaning. In each generative theme explored in the following sections, we will be focusing on a few co-investigators to follow their process closely and unpack significant moments of shifts or changes. However, it is important to emphasise that these shifts and changes happened in the context of the whole group coming together and dialoguing with one another, thus the generative themes are indicative of common themes that arose for the group as a whole. The decision to focus on a few Co-Is per generative theme is to capture larger themes through vivid examples from particular experiences.
The generative themes reflect a process of unfolding understanding, where earlier conversations sowed the seeds for later insights. By tracing these themes sequentially, we aim to capture the movement and growth of collective inquiry across sessions – how participants’ reflections, questions, and interactions impacted one another, how their moments of dialogue provided an impetus for further exploration, and how their affective responses to each other sparked deeper conversations on not only shifts in perspective but also possibilities for action. Thus, the analysis represents an experience through time and will mostly be offered sequentially, tracing the journey from the first session through to the end.
Note on confidentiality: We have fictionalised the names of the co-investigators and have removed any personal identifiers such as nationality, language, etc. We have also randomly chosen pseudonyms so that they cannot be traced back to the co-investigators’ ethnicity. We reflected on what this does, when they are assigned a pseudonym that is clearly from the dominant culture and what we may be producing through that, especially given the discussions around name and culture that were prominent in the group. Yet, in the interest of confidentiality, we have retained pseudonyms that do not correspond to the culture of the participant. While context to their ethnicity and race is integral to the project and its outcomes, we believe that a broad understanding (denoted through wide categories of East Asian, Arab, African and so on) is sufficient to grasp their experiences, and their specific national identities need not be compromised.
