(Reflections on Freire, 1970; Bradshaw, 2018)
This week, I engaged with two deeply resonant works that connect the philosophical roots of critical pedagogy with the ethical responsibilities of instructional design:
- Bradshaw, A. C. (2018). Reconsidering the instructional design and technology timeline through a lens of social justice. TechTrends, 62(4), 336–344.
- Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum.
The videos below, generated through Notebook LM, offer excellent summaries of these works.
Education Is Never Neutral (Freire, 1970)
This video is about Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, one of the most influential and radical texts in education. Freire argues that education is never neutral; it either serves to domesticate learners into existing systems of power or becomes a practice of freedom that empowers them to transform those systems.
He critiques the “banking model” of education, in which teachers “deposit” knowledge into passive students, reproducing hierarchies of domination. As an alternative, Freire proposes problem-posing education, where teachers and students engage in dialogue, question reality, and co-create knowledge. This process builds what he calls conscientização, a critical awareness of how power, oppression, and culture shape our lives.
What struck me most was Freire’s concept of cultural invasion, the way dominant groups impose their worldview, language, and values onto others. This isn’t just a historical issue of colonization; it’s still embedded in Western education systems today. Curricula too often celebrate “great theories” of learning while omitting the colonial histories, racial hierarchies, and political conditions that made those theories possible.
Freire’s framework helps us see education as a moral and political act, one that can either sustain dehumanization or help restore humanity.
The Hidden History of Instructional Design (Bradshaw, 2018)
This video is about Amy Bradshaw’s (2018) critical examination of the official Instructional Design and Technology (IDT) timeline. She exposes how the field’s standard history, featuring Pavlov, Skinner, Bloom, and Gagné, appears linear, rational, and apolitical. Yet when placed beside key moments in U.S. social justice history, a very different picture emerges.
For example, Skinner’s “Science of Learning” (1954) coincides with Brown v. Board of Education, Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956) with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Gagné’s “Conditions of Learning” (1962) with James Meredith’s fight to integrate the University of Mississippi. These timelines, Bradshaw argues, are not parallel but entangled, even though our field rarely acknowledges it.
She calls this silence a form of miseducation, a willful blindness that trains professionals to treat learning as neutral, ignoring the inequities that shape who gets to learn, teach, and design. As historian Howard Zinn warned, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”
Bradshaw invites us to reclaim praxis (from Freire), the continual cycle of reflection and action that bridges our professional practice with social transformation.
From Cultural Invasion to Dehumanization
Freire’s warnings about cultural invasion resonate painfully with today’s world. The ongoing dehumanization of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank is a devastating example of how power continues to control whose suffering counts and whose stories are told. The same epistemic violence that Freire described, the erasure of voice, the denial of humanity, is still alive in how media, institutions, and even education frame these realities.
If education remains silent in the face of such oppression, it becomes complicit. Freire reminds us that liberation is not about reversing power but restoring the humanity of all people.
Praxis as Responsibility
Both Freire and Bradshaw call us to move beyond reflection to praxis, a fusion of thought and action aimed at transformation. For educators, designers, and researchers, this means designing learning that is not neutral, but intentional; not detached, but deeply human.
Final Thought
Engaging with these works together made one thing clear: the stories we tell about education are moral choices. The omissions in our textbooks and timelines are not accidental—they are the products of whose voices are deemed unimportant. To practice freedom, as Freire urges, is to fill those silences with truth, empathy, and courage.
As Freire wrote, “The oppressors, by robbing others of their humanity, lose their own in the process.”
Our task as educators is to help build a world, through design, dialogue, and justice, where, as he said, “it will be easier to love.”
Mahbub Amin 