Paulo Freire (2005) has been recognised for his conceptualisation of critical consciousness (conscientização). Critical consciousness, in simple terms, refers to the capacity of linking what happens in our personal experience with broader social structures and dynamics. When we develop critical consciousness, we can question the beliefs that we were taking for granted, and that locked us into oppressive dynamics, to start acting towards liberation. For him, the development of critical consciousness cannot be taught in a hierarchical way. Only a critical pedagogy can foster critical consciousness by engaging with what he calls people´s generative themes.
Generative themes are not imposed by educators but emerge organically from the lived experiences, language, and concerns of the students themselves. Because of this active role of the students, they are not only participants but co-investigators of their own experiences. Through dialogue, reflection, and collective inquiry, certain recurring issues arise – issues that touch upon co-investigators´ 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 co-investigators, some of these issues start to recur naturally, signalling that they hold significance and potential for deeper exploration.
From there, the educator/facilitator and co-investigators 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 regard to their current social realities. The limit-situation captures a situation where we feel trapped, as if there is no way out. For example, a student of colour might feel like they cannot avoid being discriminated, ignored, teased or stereotyped in the University context. This is a limit-situation. The 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 (e.g. students of colour are stereotyped and discriminated), 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)
In this project, after the first few sessions, we reflected back to the co-investigators the limiting situations they experience. In Session 1, we posed questions and prompts about their experience in the University in relation to race, ethnicity and difference: How would you define your ethnicity/race? And how do you feel about it? Have you felt different while studying at the University? Have you ever found yourself censoring yourself when the topic of race or injustice comes up, worrying about ‘getting it wrong’ or perhaps being too political?
After a reflexive thematic analysis of their responses, we reflected back to the co-investigators what they shared so that they could further discuss them and let us know what we might have missed or misunderstood. It is from these conversations that we identified the 3 limit situations we describe in this document, with their associated generative themes.
The conceptualisation of limit situations and generative themes is not very clearly delineated in Freire’s work. In this project, we have thought of the limiting situation as ‘containing’ a generative theme in the form of a question that opens up the closedness of the limiting situation. The shape of this question was not defined in advance but appeared 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, 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. 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. The pseudonyms do not necessarily match the co-investigators’ ethnicity to reflect the diversity of names, which sometimes diverges from more common names associated with an ethnicity. Additionally, sometimes (especially when their names might be hard to pronounce for people outside their region), students choose an ´English´ name, whilst other times it was important for them for people to get the pronunciation right and use their original names. We attempted to reflect this diversity in our choice of pseudonymous.
References
Freire, P. (2005). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. Bergman Ramos, Trans.). Continuum.
