The Boal-Freire Nexus: Rehearsing Praxis, Imagining Liberation in Bilingual Teacher Education

Abstract

Freire (2005) encourages people to take “critical ownership of the formation of ourselves” (p. 44) in order to be able to act upon the world in what he (1993) calls “praxis.” This praxis consists of the development of critical consciousness leading to transformative action. Critical consciousness and praxis should be conceived as an ongoing and creative process through the actual doing within spaces of authoring (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 2003). Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed might provide Freire’s ideas with a stage where liberation and praxis can be concretized, rehearsed and imagined. A discussion of this Freire-Boal complementation is offered by providing examples of two studies I conducted among Mexican-American/Latinx bilingual pre-service teachers to 1) prepare them linguistically after years of subtractive anglo-centric schooling, 2) to develop political and ideological clarity (Bartolome & Balderrama, 2001), and 3) to encourage them to engage in leadership and advocacy inside and outside of the classroom.