"For What You See as Just": Paulo Freire and Asian American Studies in Community-Based Learning

This article analyzes the author's experience teaching an interdisciplinary course where she integrated dialogical pedagogies influenced by Paulo Freire's educational philosophies (2000). The literature explores how teaching service learning with social justice frameworks impacts political engagement (Butin, 2007; Mitchell, 2007). Other scholarship discusses the philosophies of radical educator, Paulo Freire (Giroux, 2001; Glass, 2001). Bridging both strands of literature, this article explores how Asian American Studies interprets radical educator Paulo Freire's pedagogies. With a discussion of one Freirian assignment, the article shows how dialogical pedagogies correlated to increased political engagement. In doing so, the author argues that dialogue is both a pedagogy and an essential political skill and framework for civic engagement (James 2004). The article includes quantitative data measuring the students' political engagement and qualitative data from student assignments and course evaluations. Both sets of data illuminate how the dialogical pedagogies achieved what Freire described as the process and goal of education: concienzacion. For Freire, this means raising critical consciousness to identify social contradictions, to analyze the historical causes, and to generate possible actions to address the social contradictions (Freire, 2000).