Exploration of students' thoughts about their right to freedom of education: “Terrified to love this way of learning, its idea of being free”

Abstract

In this reflective paper, I respond to Dr. Matusov's (2020) eloquent philosophical exploration of “students' right to freedom of education. In doing so, I pursue a narrative inquiry (Bruner, 1987; Clandinin, Murphy, Huber, & Orr, 2010; Clandinin, 2013; Hong, Falter, & Fecho, 2017) to explore my students' self-generated meanings of their educational freedom in our teacher education classroom. I wonder whether freedom of education can be presented as a transcendental concept of self-examination and taught as the student's right for it without a critical deconstruction of the tentious and fictitious materiality of freedom. Also, I wonder what my students think when they are provoked to claim their right to freedom of education. This reflection reveals that students' right of freedom is not necessarily about their own self-examination, freedom is a creative force of self-expression. More specifically, freedom is the self-conscious act of discovery of itself (i.e., freedom) in everything my students do as a part of their classroom learning and education. All in all, freedom does not have any meaning at all since meaning emerges in the act of freedom itself, or rather in the creative act of being free.