An Emergent Teacher Community of Praxis: The Dia-logics of Practical Hope and Radical Love

Abstract: Across Western-dominated schooling systems, teacher learning and professional development are often organised as market-driven training measured through logics of efficiency, sidelining relational and ethical conditions through which teachers may become critical subjects.  This article re-centres Paulo Freire’s ontological vocation of becoming more fully human to re-imagine such spaces as dialogic gatherings grounded in practical hope and radical love, which I refer to as a community of praxis.

For Freire, critical educational counternarratives, as communities of praxis intend to be, must be rooted in hope as a fundamental dimension of the human condition and educational practice: an impetus to intervene together in the making of history.  Yet hope is not possible without love as motivational sustenance for struggling against historical determinisms through radical listening, epistemic humility, curiosity and care.  Drawing on four months of weekly gatherings with six schoolteachers in Western Canada, I ponder what becomes possible when educators commit to these principles as a collective struggle over consciousness.

Methodologically, the study adopted an action research-oriented bricolage in which teachers’ lived stories became generative texts, allowing themes to self-organise through dialogue.  Three dia-logics animated the community’s unfolding: trust against time-as-capital; emergence through uncertainty, care and problem-posing; and unfinishedness/becoming as the ethical condition of conscientização (conscientisation). Rather than beginning with strategies to change teachers’ practice, this article argues for the urgency of humanising learning spaces where transformation may first be experienced as an interior-collective movement: starting from what teachers know, where they are, and learning to be more fully human together.

Key words: Consciousness; Praxis; Hope; Love; Professional Development.

Introduction

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress”

(Douglass, 1857: 22).

Much of my research has been oriented by Freire’s struggle over consciousness as the precondition for informed action, or praxis, against systems of domination operating at both discursive and material levels (Freire, 2005).  This struggle unfolds within the dis-logics of patriarchal neoliberal Western capitalist modernity (Escobar, 2018), where teachers’ possibilities to resist commodifying pedagogies are squelched.  Critical thinking is thereby market-washed and data-fied into human-proof, machine-like algorithmic performance devoid of genuine critical contextualisation, while learning is conflated with training-as-capital-accumulation and the fantasy of endless growth.  Together, these dynamics produce an educational regime that manages teachers and students as resources to be endlessly optimised (Han, 2021), while obscuring the historical, political and material conditions that shape who teachers and students are socialised into becoming (Giroux, 2022).

Freire’s struggle against such neoliberal fatalism and determinism is nourished by his courage ‘to speak about love without fear of being called ascientific, if not antiscientific’ (2005: 26): a form of radical love ‘that is at the same time the foundation of dialogue itself’ (Ibid.: 89) and cannot exist without hope.  Hope, for Freire, is not naïve optimism but a practical-political impetus through which we recognise our unfinishedness and move, in solidarity with others, to transform oppressive systems (Ibid.: 92).  Freire also believed that radical love makes liberatory and emancipatory horizons possible and that, without it, teachers would lack the ethical drive to challenge the status quo.  Love, then, as an act of courage rather than fear (Ibid.), has become a fascination of mine; more precisely, what continues to haunt my work is the question of how educators, myself included, may nurture hopeful, caring and loving capacities amid systems that strip individuals of their agency (Giroux, 2022), while still learning to struggle ‘conscientiously, critically, politically, and in a strategic manner’ (Freire, 1998: 44).

This question grounded my doctoral research, through which I sought to disrupt one of the spaces where dominant market-driven ideologies are often left unchecked, and even overtly reinforced: teacher learning and professional development (Kincheloe, 2003; Nawab, Bissaker and Datoo, 2021).  By re-imagining professional development through Freire’s principles of dialogue, hope, love and praxis, I tried to move away from learning-as-training, compliance and standardised efficiency to trace and deconstruct the lived dia-logics of an alternative teacher professional development space I refer to as a community of praxis.

A note on terminology is necessary here.  I deliberately hyphenate dia-logic as it carries the politics of the concept.  Dia-logic resists the domestication of dialogue in dominant educational discourse (Freire, 2005), returning instead to its etymology, where dia evokes movement through, across and between, and logic/logos centres reasoning and meaning making, both profoundly social.  By dia-logics, then, I refer to the relational movements through which individuals may name, question and re-contextualise their lived experiences together.  The plural form (s) signals the multivocal and unfinished character of this process, juxtaposed against neoliberal dominant dis-logics: institutionalised rationalities of disconnection, fragmentation and dehumanisation that often appear in schools as efficiency, accountability, self-improvement (Giroux, 2022).

The design

The study gathered six teacher-participants working in K-12 public schools in Western Canada, meeting once a week, over four months.  In North America, K-12 refers to schooling from Kindergarten to Grade 12, broadly equivalent to primary and post-primary education elsewhere, though systems are not perfectly interchangeable.  Recruitment first followed school-board channels, with the intention of circulating an open call through formal district pathways, meaning the local school authority responsible for administering public schools in a given area.  However, the pathway that opened was more relational, resonating with action research-oriented bricolage as a critical and flexible research orientation that assembles methodological tools in response to emergent contextual complexity, including the relationships through which inquiry becomes possible, rather than forcing the study to follow a predetermined procedural route (Kincheloe and Berry, 2004).

Early outreach connected me to a cohort of international teachers working within the International Spanish Academy programme (bilingual English/Spanish schools) where an open call was shared in September 2024.  Participants brought more than twenty-three years of teaching experience across public, state-funded/private, and international educational contexts, with current and prior teaching areas including: mathematics, English language arts, social studies, Spanish, science, career and life design, intercultural studies, English as an additional language, and generalist elementary/kindergarten teaching.  Such diversity mattered methodologically since our dialogues resisted the positivistic fragmentation of teacher learning by subject and grade level, allowing a nuanced dialogue across contexts. Bringing together educators differently positioned across school systems meant the gatherings could trace how institutional dis-logics moved through teachers lived worlds, including their sense of space, body, time and relationality, without reducing their narratives to de-contextualised data points.  Instead, their stories were approached as situated structures of experience shaping pedagogical practice (Nigar, 2020).

A foundational dia-logic: trust

“Founding itself upon love, humility, and faith, dialogue becomes a horizontal relationship of which mutual trust between the dialoguers is the logical consequence” (Freire, 2005: 91).

The dis-logics of Western neoliberal capitalist thought have effectively shaped the way time is perceived, normalised and disciplined: linear, measurable, reified, always scarce, always exchangeable (Little Bear, 2000).  Time then becomes capital, and capital in turn becomes the hidden curriculum through which educational life is organised (Apple, 2018); hence, the popular Western saying time is money.  Which is not merely a saying, but an insidious paradigm socialising us into accumulating, spending, saving, managing and extracting time as if life itself were an economic resource to be optimised (Rosa, 2013).  As Han argues, ‘confronted with a time-limited life, we accumulate time-as-capital’ (2021: 7).  Such a dis-logic does not escape teacher learning and professional development, often appearing as efficiency.  For example, a sixty-minute training, clear objectives, transferable strategies, measurable outputs, and an exit ticket, can perhaps create an impression that something transformative has happened because time was used ‘well’.

As our community of praxis began to gather, I came to understand trust as a foundational dia-logic; one embedded in a struggle over consciousness shaped by time-as-capital.  This is not to say that, somehow, we operated outside the constraints of Western understandings of time; we still needed dates, hours, calendars, reminders and the usual logistics that would make collective work possible across different rhythms of everyday life. The shift was rather, as Stuart Hall observes (1997: 295), a type of moral awareness that shifts human consciousness.  It involved refusing time as a ruling despot and beginning to treat it as a dynamic sensitivity within the flux of relationality.  It was all about centring trust-based relationships (Wilson, 2008), and from there, letting the community self-produce.

As such, teacher-participants would arrive at a coffee shop of their preference to meet with me and their fellow peers, who came from different schools in the city.  Tiredness and frustration were often very tangible, so food and a hot beverage, especially during winter, became nourishment for the soul and a fitting segue into our dialogues.  As Shor (2022: 111) reminded us: ‘good food and good companions moved Paulo [Freire] to tell stories.’

Our meetings regularly went ‘overtime’, even after the recording stopped, the conversation continued, and so did the agency of us-in-place.  This mattered ethically and methodically, since the direction of each gathering, and the following ones, was not predetermined by me as facilitator-researcher, but instead self-organised around the far-from-equilibrium conditions of themes emerging in dialogue and teachers’ rhapsodic curiosity (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984; Berry, 2015).  We opened each gathering with the same grounding question: ‘How do you come to this space today?’  What followed was a series of stories, lived experiences as texts, that served as entry points into the iterative movement of what I have come to understand as critical dialogue: lived experience becomes text; texts make contradictions (dis-logics) visible (naming); contradictions become shared inquiry (problem-posing); inquiry (critical re-contextualisation/backloading literature) locates broader sociopolitical and material conditions (conscientisation); conscientisation leads to informed practice; and back to dialogue where the cycle begins again (Kincheloe, 2003).

Centring trust-based relations to nurture our dialogues required me to continually challenge the extractivist, time-as-capital researcher-participant relationship, where participants are often positioned as sources of information and the researcher as the one who collects, interprets, and legitimises meaning (Flecha, 2015; Wilson, 2008).  This was a conscious struggle because I do not stand outside the very logics I critique; I remain conditioned, yet not determined, by them, even as I attempt to unsettle them.  The gatherings slowly taught me to think less in terms of coverage and more in terms of presence; less in terms of accomplishing and more in terms of learning to know and be with one another.  Teacher-participants wanted to talk, share, debrief, laugh, extend solidarity and support each other by participating with compassion in the ‘funk’, paraphrasing Cornell West (2021).  In such a process, trust was not ‘scheduled’ into existence; it was cultivated through a ‘slow’ pedagogy of care, where no one in the room was expected to perform certainty.  Rather, teachers gradually spoke from places of vulnerability, offering their exhaustion, frustration, humour, doubts, and in turn, hope and love could be observed as part of the messy process of becoming more fully human together.

For instance, what first appeared as a teacher’s frustration at being moved from Mathematics into a Grade 6 generalist teaching load did not remain a discrete anecdote about scheduling or adaptation to a new school system.  As the group stayed with the story, the conversation widened into a critique of teacher de-professionalisation and the cost-saving model of the ‘interchangeable teacher’.  Under this arrangement, teachers’ pedagogy, identity and professional judgement are treated as detachable from disciplinary knowledge, language and philosophies.  Appeals to professional flexibility then become an institutional alibi for deploying teachers across knowledge domains (Giroux, 2022).  While the tension between discipline-based specialisation and interdisciplinary approaches remains an important and ongoing pedagogical conversation (Kreijkes and Greatorex, 2024), teachers’ accounts and critique suggested that when such an approach is disconnected from teachers’ agency and imposed through managerial logics, it cannot become a generative pedagogical project but a mechanism for flattening expertise.

What teacher participants were unearthing in dialogue was mistrust toward the dominant system as a tangible phenomenon.  Mistrust emerged from the ways institutions seemed to position them not as intellectuals and pedagogical experts, but as replaceable technicians whose professional histories, disciplinary knowledge and agency are treated as commodities (Giroux, 2013).  Without looking for definitive answers, we backloaded literature by introducing theory after lived stories had surfaced, as Ira Shor (2022) suggests, to mediate our insights and ground the problem posing process in theoretical complexity (Kincheloe and Berry, 2004).  Lived experience was the starting point, but it was not left alone or unproblematised.  Following Freire’s caution against taking lived experience at face value, these experiences were critically recontextualised through literature and collective dialogue.  For instance, teachers’ questions about tracked curriculum, streaming and Advanced Placement classes allowed us to connect normalised curricular structures with broader histories of discrimination, meritocracy and institutionalised privilege (Follwell and Andrey, 2021).

The critique sharpened in one teacher’s words: ‘you become an instrument of the system, a transmitting vehicle for what they have decided should be transmitted to the population, and there you have no more room to manoeuvre’.  Trust within the community could not reproduce the same dis-logics teachers were naming.  Instead, as Freire (2005) insists, trust must be founded on love, humility and faith in people as a slow ethical-political dialogical relation that attempts, however imperfectly, to disrupt dominant internalised frameworks.  Such a foundation was necessary for engaging in critical dialogue and vital for even beginning to problematise the time-as-capital paradigm, as we came to realise how many of the teachers’ struggles were already organised through the productivist temporalities of schooling: too little time to teach well, to know and care for students, to be known as professionals, and to become together otherwise (Han, 2021; Spooner, 2018).

A dynamic dia-logic: emergence

“Humankind emerges from their submersion and acquire the ability to intervene in reality as it is unveiled.  Intervention in reality - historical awareness itself - thus represents a step forward from emergence, and results from the conscientization of the situation.  Conscientization is the deepening of the attitude of awareness characteristic of all emergence” (Freire, 2005: 109).

Engaging in the struggle over consciousness, echoed at moments Weiler’s (1996: 370) critique of Freire’s tenets as ‘almost mystical abstractions which may be inspirational’.  Methodologically, I grappled with the questions of ‘How to design for emergence without domesticating it into a measurable sequence?  What evidence could support the claim that we were emerging toward critical consciousness?’  The process felt difficult to enact.  Such a struggle, however, did not imply that Freire’s pedagogy lacks methodological rigour (Steinberg and Down, 2020).  Rather, the questions pointed to my own emergence and process of conscientisation, where I first needed to notice, name and critique how research itself remains entangled with modernist regimes of regulation, including the hyper-rational management systems that assume human learning can and must be precisely measured, controlled and verified through scientific instruments (Kincheloe, 2003; Steinberg et al., 2021).

Such questions were deeply entangled with the self-producing movement (autopoiesis) of the study itself (Maturana and Varela, 1987; Prigogine and Stengers, 1984).  I had initially envisioned the community of praxis as a space where teachers would engage more directly with evidence-based literature and move toward inquiry-oriented transformations in classroom pedagogy (Kincheloe and Berry, 2004).  However, both elements happened only partially, or more accurately, bifurcated from the original design.  I had prepared guiding questions, possible prompts, tentative readings and methodological pathways toward what I understood, at the time, as conscientisation moving into in-class praxis.  While these served as a foundational and reassuring structure for me as a researcher, they did not determine the community’s direction once dialogue began to unfold.

As we gathered, the group began to self-organise, which became one of the most generative lessons of the study.  An action research-oriented bricolage required me not only to be conversant with multiple methods, traditions and literatures, as Kincheloe and Berry (2004) indicate, but also to remain with the uncertainty produced when teachers’ stories began to steer the inquiry.  Emergence, then, was not a lack of methodological rigour.  It was a different kind of rigour: my own discipline, as facilitator-researcher, of noticing where the conversation was becoming more alive, more troubled, and more capable of problem-posing, so that, we could move toward conscientisation (Freire, 2005).

Emergence became more tangible to me as care gradually surfaced as the most salient cross-connectivity in our dialogues.  Across the gatherings, what first appeared as individual accounts of exhaustion, lack of institutional support, and teacher-student relational challenges began to gravitate around care and its complex, even paradoxical, ethical-political dimensions.  One teacher approached this tension sharply when noting how educational institutions ‘want to systematise care so much that in the end there’s no time to care’.  Most strikingly, care did not remain merely as a discursive backbone; I came to recognise it as a relational imperative that could re-orient the community’s emerging learning journey toward conscientisation (Pyrko, Dörfler and Eden, 2017; Monchinski, 2010).

In this vein, emergence was not separate from care.  It was fostered through the caring relations that allowed teachers’ stories to move beyond normalised accounts and become collective sites of inquiry.  The unsettling yet dynamic power of emergence shaped our struggle over critical consciousness while also creating methodological uncertainty and non-normative relational horizons.  As a dia-logic, emergence became an embodied trajectory taking shape as we went, echoing Horton and Freire’s We Make the Road by Walking (1990), always part of a changing practice in a world in the making (Lave, 2019; Varela, Thompson and Rosch, 1991).  As such, emerging toward conscientisation could not be treated as a quantifiable process, nor as a shared threshold everyone was expected to cross at the same pace.  The movement toward critical consciousness began unevenly from the situated experiences teachers brought into the room.

As Monchinski (2010) insists, such a process must begin where people are and with what they already know, which methodologically meant accommodating different starting points while centring teacher-participants’ agency in how our dialogues unfolded.  Some teachers moved toward systemic critique and ways to challenge dominant narratives, while others focused on practical strategies and classroom-level interventions.  Yet all these moments constituted the actual ground from which emergence toward consciousness became possible, as care held the space open enough for different forms of knowing, questioning and becoming to surface.

Personally, emergence held profound ethical implications.  Forcing the dialogue toward my original design would have reproduced the same dis-logics I was trying to disrupt, while remaining too loose risked turning emergence into romantic improvisation.  My work, then, was to inhabit the tension: to guide without colonising, to bring literature without silencing lived experience, and to let teachers’ stories bifurcate the study without abandoning its critical commitments.  Such liminality, regardless of how successfully I navigated it, was pivotal in positioning the community of praxis as an alternative possibility to dominant frameworks shaping contemporary teacher learning and professional development, where certainty, accountability and measurability often remain the core organising principles (Gore, Rickards and Fray, 2023).

An ongoing dia-logic: becoming 

“Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming - as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality” (Freire, 2005: 84).

The work of communities of praxis, whether building a community from the ground up or striving for critical consciousness within it, remains situated, perhaps fragile, and unfinished. Our community of praxis sits within the paradigm of constant becoming that Freire (2005) so insistently described at the heart of participatory research, transformative education and praxis; therefore, as a continuum of emergence, it cannot be transferred in any formulaic sense.  The contribution of this experience on building a community of praxis is modest, though no less educationally significant.  Its value rests in the lessons offered to teachers, practitioners and researchers seeking to unsettle, however tentatively, the core assumptions of teacher learning and professional development within Western neoliberal capitalist academies.  Rather than proposing a fixed scheme, this study articulates a principled orientation by tracing a cohort of international schoolteachers’ struggle over consciousness, alongside my own as principal investigator, as a relational, ethically grounded, and unfinished endeavour.

Freire argues that ‘no one educates anyone else, no one educates themselves, people educate each other through the mediation of the world’ (2005: 32).  Teacher-participants did not come together as ‘empty vessels’ waiting to be filled with knowledge nor as ‘fully formed’ professionals needing only to exchange strategies.  They arrived as unfinished yet experienced subjects in relation with an unfinished world: often exhausted yet hopeful, frustrated yet curious, committed to care, and still searching for a language of critique and possibility through which to deconstruct and re-read the systems shaping their identities and realities (Giroux, 2022).  For Freire, then, becoming is far from a romantic notion; it is an ontological struggle worked and re-worked in relationship.  One teacher captured the difficulty of sustaining such relational becoming when institutional hierarchies isolate teachers from one another:

“Here [Canada] I find it harder to find those [allies] colleagues.  I feel they are more accustomed to compliance.  I find it harder to find those colleagues here…. When are you going to show resistance or oppose the system if you are the ‘poor little one’ of the moment?  Do you think the privileged teacher in a school organised like a medieval caste system is going to resist?”.

The recognition, whether tacit or explicit, of our struggle to become was, in my understanding, one of the conditions that drew the cohort into critical dialogue and made learning from one another possible as the primary ground for teacher professional development.  Becoming, thus, cannot be conceptualised as an arrival or a developmental stage, but as the unfinished movement of conscientização through which individuals may begin to emerge from the immediacy of their ontological readings, name the conditions shaping them, and re-imagine their capacity to intervene in the world (Freire and Macedo, 1987).  It is important to note, then, that trust and emergence were not adjacent to becoming. Trust made it possible for lived experience to be voiced without being prematurely resolved, while emergence marked the deepening of awareness through which those experiences could be problematised as historical and political, and therefore open to transformative action.

Literature supported this movement not as closure, but as backloaded mediation, grounding lived experiences as the dialogues invited more informed readings of sociopolitical-educational phenomena.  The community, then, offered a space where learning could be detached, however momentarily, from market-driven training and re-imagined as a relational, inquiry-oriented partnership (Kincheloe, 2003).  Emerging through these conversations was a different understanding of teacher professional development and learning, one centred less on acquiring new techniques than on making their craft available for collective problematisation.  I strived to engage teachers in dialogue as lifelong learners, not in the hollow neoliberal sense of endlessly adapting, re-branding and improving oneself in response to new mandates (Danvers, 2021).  Rather, teachers were welcomed as learners in the Freirean sense: unfinished historical-social beings struggling to unlearn, re-learn and act with others in a world still being made through their actions (Horton and Freire, 1990).

Conclusion: practical hope and radical love as praxis

In the attempt to enact a community of praxis, I did not encounter hope and love as discursive mechanisms or abstract values added to our dialogues after the fact, nor as experiences I could presume to name fully for everyone.  Rather, I learned to recognise them through concrete moments of radical listening, epistemic humility, curiosity and care: when teachers named exhaustion not as personal failure, but as an endemic symptom of a commodifying system; when they questioned institutional dis-logics without allowing critique to become withdrawal from caring for students; and when they unsettled care itself as a contested place where institutional demands, student needs and teachers’ agency collided (Monchinski, 2010).  Through these moments, I came to understand hope as a future-oriented practice disrupting neoliberal determinisms about teachers’ professionalism and agency, and love as a radical ethical-political commitment to remain accountable to one another’s humanity while confronting the forces that deform it (Freire, 2005; hooks, 2010).  As one teacher reminded, ‘the first support was among ourselves … you keep talking to one another, you stay in contact; clearly, that is the first support you have’.

Communities of praxis also carry an enactivist implication for hope and love. Knowing does not happen separately from practice but takes shape through the mutually constitutive relationship between people and the world (Kincheloe, 2011).  Knowing and doing are therefore co-implicated, with learning and understanding developing through interaction rather than existing independently of it.  Hope and love, then, were not peripheral to this process, but part of the dialogical movement through which teachers came to read their conditions otherwise.  In this way, dialogue did not simply represent a world already known; it brought forth new (hopeful) worlds of understanding and possibility, even if only temporarily (Reid and Mgombelo, 2015).

Such re-orientation, through which new worlds become momentarily available, is where the contribution of my study lies: not in transferability as a model, but in the orientation it foregrounds.  In contexts where professional development and learning may be reduced to compliance, efficiency and performativity, what becomes disruptive is not replication but grounded re-orientation: re-creating dialogical conditions where practitioners may interrogate the dis-logics of their work-world, situate experience within broader sociopolitical contexts, engage in learning as co-constructed rather than delivered, and resist institutional narratives that fragment, isolate and depoliticise human action.  Echoing Monchinski (2010), this re-orientation may take the form of a pedagogy of care: a praxis that begins where people are, attends to what they already know, and moves professional development elsewhere, toward more humanising, dialogical and politically courageous forms of collective learning.

Since such a pedagogy cannot be scripted in advance, communities of praxis must remain ‘radically open’ to discovering and learning what cannot be known beforehand (Healey, Flint and Harrington, 2014: 9).  Their power lies not in certainty, but in disciplined uncertainty: remaining open without becoming directionless, hopeful without becoming naïve, and loving without abandoning critique.  Communities of praxis offer a way of staying in the struggle over consciousness without surrendering to despair or giving in to the commodifying dis-logics of neoliberal governance.  This study suggests that teacher learning and professional development may need slower, more relational and ethically grounded conditions, where teachers may emerge as researchers and intellectuals, as agentic caring subjects, as contradictory human beings, and as people still becoming in a world still in the making.

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Jaime Alvaro Paredes Paez is a doctoral candidate at the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, where his passion for critical pedagogy drives his exploration of sociopolitical–-educational hope and radical love as frameworks for professional development in teacher learning communities.  His work bridges popular and emancipatory education, dialogic pedagogies, EDIA, socioecological governance, and transdisciplinary collaborations.  With over a decade of teaching experience in K–12 schools in Colombia and the United States, he brings a deep commitment to transformative and inclusive education.