Freire’s Project of Posthuman Humanization: Teaching and the Embodied Labor of Dialogue and Disruption

By J. Owen Matson, Ph.D.

Paulo Freire envisioned education not as the transmission of knowledge from teacher to student, but as a shared process of becoming—an unfolding encounter in which both participants are transformed. At the heart of this vision was humanization, not as the arrival at a fixed human essence, but as a dynamic, relational process: one that resists domination, welcomes difference, and affirms the ethical obligation to engage with others as subjects-in-formation.

Freire’s conception of humanization need not be read through the lens of classical humanism. It is not about centering the autonomous rational subject, nor reclaiming a universalized image of the “human.” Instead, it points toward something more radical: a posthuman vision of subjectivity as emergent, embodied, and dialogic. To teach in this register is not to perfect the human, but to open ourselves—again and again—to the unanticipated demands of relation. It is to be shaped by others as much as to shape.

This was never meant to be a pedagogy of mastery. Freire understood that teaching is not reducible to intention or design. It is an improvisational, affective labor that requires attunement to what cannot be predicted or measured. To teach in this way is to risk rupture. To be interrupted. To enter into the uncertainty of a shared world that is still in the making.

Teaching, when it is at its most alive, is not the execution of a plan. It is not the delivery of content. It is an improvisational ethic—a felt, cognitive, and affective responsiveness to what arises between people in real time. The best teaching does not originate in objectives or outcomes but in the capacity to remain open to interruption. To be disrupted. To be changed.

Gert Biesta describes this as the “beautiful risk of education”—a risk rooted in relation, not transaction. It’s what happens when a teacher departs from the script, not to lose the thread but to follow a more urgent one. When a question lands not with certainty but with trouble. When silence calls for presence, not pacing. This kind of teaching is a practice of attunement. It’s not control. It’s encounter.

And yet, the systems that govern education today—from classrooms to compliance frameworks to the dashboards of EdTech—remain structured by a logic that demands legibility. They value what can be measured, captured, optimized. They reward efficiency, not interruption. Mastery, not hesitation. Outcomes, not openings. And so, the most vital aspects of teaching—its embodied labor, its emotional toll, its unpredictable moments of mutual recognition—go unseen, unrecognized, and unprotected.

The problem is not technology. Nor is it AI. The problem is a regime of regulation that cannot perceive what it cannot quantify. A crisis of legibility. What happens in the most meaningful moments between teachers and students often resists capture. It isn’t scalable. It isn’t repeatable. It is vulnerable, context-bound, and profoundly human.

And so we turn to the traces left behind—to the stories, the journal entries, the voices that speak when the metrics fall silent. What follows is one such voice—a fragment of lived pedagogy. Not a case study. Not a best practice. But a testimony to the kind of work that teaching really is.

If we are to take this work seriously—this irreducible, relational labor of teaching—then our task is not to reject technology, but to reclaim the terms under which it enters educational life. The question is not whether AI belongs in education. It already does. The question is whether we can imagine educational technologies that do not simply replicate the managerial logic of standardization, efficiency, and control.

Freire’s project, ironically and profoundly, was already a response to the failures of humanism. His pedagogy of liberation emerged not from an affirmation of the Enlightenment subject, but from a critique of how that very subject was historically constructed through systems of oppression, colonization, and silencing. The schooling model he opposed—the rigid, top-down transmission of content—was justified for centuries as the means through which students might become “more human.” But the human in question was narrowly defined, embedded in hierarchies of race, class, and culture. Freire’s humanization was not a return to that tradition. It was a rupture from it.

Because today, the dominant logic in EdTech remains caught in the oppressively authoritarian banking model Freire so powerfully critiqued more than half a century ago. Knowledge is still treated as a deposit. Learning, as passive receipt. Technology, in this model, becomes a mechanism of delivery—disconnected from the messy, improvisational, embodied work of relation. The very systems that promise to “personalize” learning often strip it of the human conditions that make learning possible: risk, presence, dialogue, care.

Freire’s commitment to dialogue, to mutual transformation, and to education as a site of becoming offers a different starting point. What might it mean to design technologies not around content delivery or behavioral data, but around interruption, risk, and response? What would it look like for AI to participate in the pedagogical relation—not as a substitute for human presence, but as an unstable, dialogic element within it? Not an expert, but an interlocutor. Not a tutor, but a participant in the uncertain work of learning.

This is not a call for posthuman novelty. It is a call for an ethical reframing. For acknowledging that teaching is not simply a knowledge economy transaction, but an encounter between entangled subjects—human and nonhuman, embodied and mediated—working through the tensions of difference and affect. In this view, technology is not the enemy of relational pedagogy. But to become its ally, it must be reoriented. It must learn to listen.

In this emerging terrain, Freire remains vital—not because his ideas offer direct answers to the complexities of algorithmic systems, but because they insist that education, at its heart, is a matter of relation. Of hearing and being heard. Of being changed. That remains the work. Even, and perhaps especially, now...

like when you come home from the whirl of another long day, all excited and incited by the silent dramas, the successes and failures in the daily race of the big game and that second (was it the third?) cup of coffee, either way, you come home, to settle down with the setting sun, and in the silent night, you read a book by an author whom you admire so much that it's fair to call the feeling a kind of love, that book you've been meaning to get back to for years--a reunion you've always been a little scared to host--oh God, the theme is so awful!--and then the red flag in your inbox, and it's a student in trouble, the kind of trouble you do what you can to meet as best you can, even when it feels like your best is next to nothing, and then you go back to your book and find the old trouble you found there so long ago, and you worry about your students working late into the night--I hope not all night--and the pressures that heap and tax them, and you just hope they aren't frightened, hope that they know they're strong, you pray for them and the future that they hold in their hearts and minds, and you turn again to "your books and your business" and those passages so clear about the worst crimes against humanity, crimes of act and thought, and you spend all the time it takes to write and think and teach what you have to write and think and teach about the horror within its pages, and you ask yourself for what--why this writing and thinking and teaching--and you know that you have to do it, and you hope it works some kind of practical magic, the kind of magic which can come from the simplest and slightest brush with Others, and you know only that you don't know what good can come from it, that you can't know, and that anyway it wouldn't count if it was easy to count how it counts, and you finally go to sleep and you wake up earlier than you wished, full of hope that you know must be all the raw materials of some brave new machinery, some homemade device, with which to  compute and contrive a new world… you don't know much or anything at all about computer science, so you have to make it up as you go along.

You don't know much about engineering either, but you know you have to build everyday in some new way, a vast and invisible canal, and you remember that others without advanced degrees in such matters have found ways to bridge that woe, to find a way of getting across your daily Canaan, that sea of pity that separates feeling sorry for yourself from doing something for Others; that sea of pity that lies locked and frozen in each eye; you know what you were born to do: to convert--to try at least--your weakness into an effective love of the world, and then you know it's time for breakfast.

This is for you--all of you, all of everything that has ever mattered to every me and you is a footnote to what has been read and written, no matter how mundane, before. Before you move on, my one request is that you pause and take what light you have been given to do your best to shape your thoughts and acts into thoughts and acts that feature your love of the world, your devotion to a better world.