Is Emancipatory Pedagogy Empowering?
Critical examinations of practices underlying emancipatory learning have revealed that they do not always have the desired effect and that relationships between and among instructors and students are not straightforward. Elsworth (1989) was one of the first to examine critically the assumptions underlying critical pedagogy based on her experience using critical pedagogy in an education course. She found that the classroom is a site for complex interactions of power in which relationships of privilege and oppression around race, gender, and class are formed in unpredictable ways and that these relationships cannot be understood through universal theories about structures of power and oppression. In a similar vein, based on an experience in an adult education classroom, Durie (1996) found that irrespective of where one stands within the relations of privilege and oppression, it is not possible to know the multiple subjective experiences of others, within and between the borders of race,
