Essay Sample about Occupy Baltimore

Brazilian educator and theorist Paulo Freire (1921-1997) offers in his teaching method tools for inspiring political engagement, but it is necessary to root Freire’s critical pedagogy in the context of his status and his political activities. This becomes clear when assessing the Baltimore branch of 2011’s Occupy movement, one radical leftist effort to reclaim urban space and public decision-making processes. Occupy Baltimore attempted to implement Freire’s dialogical framework of equitable exchange between individuals, but it could not overcome the challenges of a horizontal power dynamic in an urban context. Adherence to Freire’s notion of cultural synthesis might have better linked the encampment to the concerns of South Baltimore residents. However, Freire leaves unsaid important advantages he exploited to impart a problem-posing education that Occupy Baltimore lacked.

Paulo Freire and Critical Pedagogy

​Freire cites his experience of poverty during his childhood as his primary motivation for a vocation in adult literacy, as he found in pedagogy a way to facilitate revolution led by people experiencing the same forms of oppression (Gadotti, 1994). Freire—a self-identified progressive Catholic (Gadotti, 1994)—can be placed within the Latin American tradition of liberation theology, an action-based theorization of extreme poverty and inequality that synthesizes Marxist and Christian themes (Foroohar, 1986). His involvement with Brazil’s leftist Popular Culture Movement in conducting rural literacy campaigns caught the attention of the country’s recently-installed military dictatorship, resulting in his brief imprisonment in 1964 and subsequent exile lasting until 1980 (Gadotti, 1994). Freire emphasizes the revolutionary aims of his teaching philosophy, critical pedagogy, in a retrospective body of work focused on themes explored in his foundational text Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

​The purpose of critical pedagogy is to deconstruct the power differential between teacher and student through dialogical exchange—cooperation between equals—so they jointly interrogate oppressive structures and students reach critical consciousness, defined by Freire as awareness of one’s own oppression and commitment to transformative action (2005/1968, p. 167; 1970, p. 40; 2005/1974, pp. 38-39). His method involves the educator identifying themes of oppression in the participant-observation of students’ conditions; dialoguing with students while providing a “critical and social vision” (Gadotti, 1994, p. 22) re-contextualizing themes; and facilitating students’ recognition that they must act dialogically to improve their conditions (Freire, 2005/1968). Freire’s florid idealism obscures the potential for critical pedagogy to politically indoctrinate and incite not just students, but a range of disempowered and disaffected actors.

The Occupy Movement and Baltimore’s Encampment

In the wake of widening economic inequality exacerbated by the global financial crisis of 2007, Americans on both ends of the political spectrum sought an alternative to the diminished quality of life for non-elites. On the left, the promise of Arab Spring in the early 2010s provided the backdrop for the Occupy movement, which began as Occupy Wall Street’s reclamation of Zuccotti Park in Manhattan in September 2011 (Akbaba, 2013). The movement, growing into a constellation of urban sites including Baltimore’s McKeldin Square at the Inner Harbor (Maza & Rosen, 2011, October 3), attempted to use Freire’s notion of dialogical action in a public urban space to popularize and incite radical political participation.

Occupy’s daily general assembly, intended as a practice of direct democracy and a rejection of more representative forms (Van de Sande, 2020), provided a largely unrestricted platform to anyone wishing to speak and made decisions through direct votes with some facilitation. The permeable urban context of Baltimore’s general assemblies opened up a classroom environment wherein the public could dialogue about social problems and devise a practice of horizontal politics. Freire’s writings on the proper conduct of revolution propose similarly dialogical actions within a movement: cooperation; unity; organization, or building capacity for the people’s self-governance; and cultural synthesis, defined as integrating the needs of oppressed people into cultural values (Freire, 2005/1968, pp. 167, 172, 175, 179). In the encounter with Occupy’s practices, passersby may have been drawn in by the relevance of Occupy’s demonstration to the concerns of their own lives, just as students confront their own conditions in the space opened by Freire’s curriculum. However, the porosity of McKeldin Square’s physical and social barriers in the absence of effective limits to speech diminished the coherence of Occupy Baltimore’s message, which was already vague due to the avoidance of an official list of grievances or aims (Katrandjian, 2011, October 8). Occupy Baltimore was evicted shortly after it had assembled, on December 13, 2011 (Fenton & Hermann, 2011, December 13), without having made a perceptible impact on the city.

Applying Freire to Occupy Baltimore: Cultural Synthesis

​Although it consistently provided food and resources to people with insecure housing, Occupy Baltimore did not venture into the communities living and working in the surrounding area. Regarding cultural synthesis, Freire describes a process through which the needs of oppressed individuals are made central to the cultural values of a place, causing the people to draft new social relations dialogically (Freire, 2005/1968, pp. 179-183). Occupy might have benefitted from similarly rooting a cohesive message in the concerns of less advantaged people in South Baltimore, instead of allowing the meaning of Occupy to hinge on the individual participant. At any rate, impoverished and/or non-White South Baltimore residents had more reason to participate in Occupy than the many White students and academics from universities farther north, given their relative disadvantages. Had Occupy Baltimore made itself place-centric and reached out to those who would have found the general assembly most salient, the resulting network might have endured beyond the encampment’s eviction.

Contrasting Freire with Occupy Baltimore: Exploiting the Status Quo

​On the other hand, Freire’s method is not infallible. As much as Freire emphasized equitable, dialogical exchange, his practice of critical pedagogy relied on advantages bestowed by the status quo to guide the entire dialogical process. With respect to organizational context, the unequal power dynamic between teacher and student remains a cultural norm, and the educator’s authority—let alone Freire’s status as a world-renowned educator—implicitly compels participation from the class. This advantage for Freire reveals its problematic nature in the application of his method to social movements dislocated from the classroom, a strategy Freire himself prescribed (2005/1968, pp. 65-69). Occupy Baltimore was seen as a confounding nuisance for disrupting urban space, and facilitators had little authority to maintain order during general assemblies. Occupy thus lacked external legitimacy and internal structure, and these problems were made worse by the vulnerability of the urban context to agitation and opposition.

​Freire’s overtly partisan proclivities and activities also provide sufficient reason to examine more critically his political context. His early literacy campaigns were conducted in coordination with a leftist political candidate and even gained the attention of Brazil’s deposed president, João Goulart (Gadotti, 1994, p. 32). The literacy campaigns can be interpreted as an instance of clientalism, an exchange of benefits for political support often linked to Latin American governments (Gonzalez-Ocantos & Oliveros, 2019). Prior to the 1964 coup, then, Freire had a comfortable position within the leftist political machine that allowed him to exploit existing hierarchies and dependence in his politicization of rural Brazilians. Occupy Baltimore did not enjoy nearly as much advantage from political apparatuses as it fundamentally rejected established political dynamics. Although the general assembly was a more authentic effort to act dialogically, the relative longevity of Freire’s critical pedagogy suggests the status quo lends important advantages a movement might not be able to forego. This could be especially true for Occupy due to the aforementioned challenges posed by an urban location.