Welcome to Week 9 of the Liberation Music Therapy series!
In this episode, we explore Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed as a framework for understanding education, power, and liberation. We examine how traditional “banking model” education can reproduce hierarchy by treating learners as passive recipients, and contrast this with dialogical, problem-posing approaches that center shared inquiry, lived experience, and collective meaning-making. These perspectives highlight education as a relational process shaped by social context rather than a neutral transfer of information.
We also discuss critical consciousness, praxis, and cultural hegemony as tools for recognizing how systems of domination persist—and how they can be challenged through reflection, dialogue, and action. Situating pedagogy within broader social forces such as colonialism, capitalism, and liberation movements, the episode considers how learning itself can become a site of resistance, transformation, and collective agency. The focus remains on critical awareness, harm prevention, and building collective resilience—offering conceptual tools to recognize structural power, navigate complexity, and support liberatory practice in real-world contexts.
This session is designed for mental health professionals, creative arts therapists, educators, organizers, and anyone engaged in healing, cultural work, or liberation-oriented practice.
