Is Freirean Transformative Learning the Trojan Horse of Globalization and Enemy of Sustainability Education? A Response to C. A. Bowers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In an earlier article in this journal, C. A. Bowers suggests that transformative learning, particularly Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, is a Trojan horse of western globalization, by deepening the ecological crisis and colonizing indigenous cultures. He charges that critical pedagogues avoid their own complicity in neoliberal globalization; he advocates for an alliance between conservative politics and environmentalism; and he promotes a “conserving education.” This article will critique the first three facets of Bowers’ argument: first, by agreeing with the critique of the enlightenment underpinnings in transformative learning theory but resolving them in more nuanced ways; second, by explaining the ontology implicit in Freire that Bowers misunderstands; and third, expanding the critical stream of transformative learning by arguing that every sustainability educator needs a strong political economic as well as cultural analysis, combined with honoring local contexts, including indigenous traditional knowledge.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.020 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.037 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.019 | 0.027 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".