Teaching Liberation Psychology

We have known each other personally for over a decade and although we were developing our praxis in similar directions, we connected professionally at the Eighth European Congress of Community Psychology. Maria was leading a roundtable discussion with Mark Burton, Raquel Guzzo, Steve Melluish and clinical psychology trainees, on what European community psychology can learn from Latin America, where Taiwo was participating. This was the starting point of conversations and Maria inviting Taiwo to teach liberation psychology together. This chapter is based on our experience of joint teaching on a London-based Professional Doctorate in Clinical Psychology course since 2011 (brief excerpts from the tapes of our teaching session in October 2013 appear in quotation marks and italics), and recorded dialogues between us taking place over meetings between November 2013 and February 2014. This chapter has offered us the opportunity to reflect and build on this shared teaching journey and to share our praxis. We start the chapter by introducing our relationship to emancipatory education before contextualising our teaching with respect to the workings of oppression and liberation in educational and professional contexts. We then describe key ideas based on Freire (1972, 1974), Martín Baró (1994) and our joint experience1 of teaching liberation psychology.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Liberation Practices: Towards Emotional Wellbeing Through Dialogue on 27/11/2015, available online: https://www.routledge.com/9781138791138.