Reading Dr Christyna Serrano’s article on Freirean pedagogy and AI was a catalyst for deep reflection on my own pedagogical development. Her insights into problem-posing education, dialogical learning, and AI as a tool for collaborative inquiry resonated strongly with the transformative history pedagogy I am developing. While my foundations have always been Deweyan-centred on structured inquiry, disciplinary rigour, and experiential learning – Serrano’s work illuminated the strong Freirean threads in my thinking.
Freire’s call to “Say yes to life, yeah to it all, and participate with joy, humility, and indignation in the adventurous struggle to remake the world each and every day” captures much of what I seek to achieve in history education. My work is not just about helping students develop historical thinking skills; it is about ensuring that history education fosters agency, ethical reasoning, and critical consciousness. Like Serrano, I see AI as a tool for collaborative inquiry – where students critically question AI outputs, identify biases, and use AI as a partner in knowledge creation. This aligns powerfully with Freire’s emphasis on dialogue, reflection, and co-construction of knowledge. The intersection of Dewey’s structured inquiry and Freire’s transformative, problem-posing approach provides the foundation for my emerging pedagogy.
Inquiry as a Means, Not an End
Dewey championed inquiry-based learning as a scientific, methodical process. He saw education as a space where students develop the habits of disciplined thinking, engaging in problem-solving that mirrors the methodologies of experts in the field. This is particularly relevant to history education, where historical thinking requires structured engagement with sources, evidence, and argumentation. Dewey’s emphasis on experiential learning aligns with my goal of ensuring that students work like historians – interrogating sources, crafting arguments, and developing an evidence-based understanding of the past.
However, Dewey’s pragmatism did not fully account for the ways in which knowledge is embedded within power structures. This is where Freire extends the conversation. Freire’s critique of banking education warns us against assuming that simply engaging in inquiry is sufficient. A student can rigorously investigate history using disciplinary methods and still emerge with an uncritical acceptance of dominant narratives. My work seeks to integrate some of Freire’s insistence on critical consciousness with Dewey’s structured inquiry: not just teaching students how to do history but also guiding them to ask why history is told in particular ways, who benefits from those narratives, and then to take action in their lives as agents of justice.
Reparative and Generative Pedagogy: A Hybrid Model
My evolving pedagogy builds on these traditions by advocating for both reparative and generative approaches to history education. A reparative pedagogy, influenced by Freire, acknowledges that history is often told from a position of power and seeks to redress historical silences. It encourages students to examine marginalised perspectives, confront historical injustices, and rethink how history is constructed.
A generative pedagogy, more aligned with Dewey’s and drawing upon constructivist tradition, asks students to use history as a foundation for imagining possible futures. It moves beyond critique and toward action: Given what we know about the past, what kind of future can we build? This approach positions students as engaged participants in history – not just analysing the world but considering how they might shape it.
AI, Dialogue, and Problem-Posing Education
The emergence of AI in education creates both challenges and opportunities for this hybrid pedagogy. If used passively, AI risks reinforcing the banking model – presenting students with pre-packaged narratives rather than engaging them in inquiry. However, if used dialogically, AI can become a powerful tool for problem-posing education in Freire’s sense.
Serrano’s argument that AI should be fully integrated into learning as a tool for collaborative inquiry is central to my thinking. In this model, students and teachers engage in deep critical analysis of AI outputs, actively identifying biases and limitations while using AI to support their own knowledge creation. AI is not an authority to be passively accepted, but a conversational partner that can stimulate deeper questioning and critical reflection. This connects to Freire’s idea of genuine, respectful exchanges where both parties learn and grow. In Freire’s vision, authentic dialogue requires mutual trust, humility, hope, and critical thinking – qualities that should define the interactions between students, teachers, and AI in the history classroom of the future.
Towards a Pedagogy That Can Do More and Be More
Serrano’s exploration of Freirean pedagogy reaffirmed something I have been working toward: a history pedagogy that is both rigorous and transformative. Freire’s insistence that education must be humanising aligns with my belief that history classrooms must develop students’ ethical reasoning, creative problem-solving, collaborative meaning-making, and critical consciousness. Dewey’s structured inquiry provides the framework, while Freire’s problem-posing approach ensures that learning remains dynamic, reflective, and socially engaged.
My pedagogy seeks to do more than teach historical thinking as a skillset – it aims to make history an active discipline, one that equips students with the tools to analyse, question, and reimagine the world around them. Education, in a cognified world* shaped by AI, must prioritise distinctly human capacities. Freire saw education as an act of transformation, and Serrano’s work helped me see just how deeply my own pedagogy aligns with that vision.
Like Serrano, I believe that history education should position students as empowered knowledge creators rather than passive consumers. A pedagogy that, in the words of Freire, helps students to become more fully human through critical engagement with the world, while honouring Dewey’s call for inquiry-driven, democratic participation.
* A “cognified world” refers to a world where artificial intelligence and advanced digital technologies are deeply integrated into daily life, influencing how we think, learn, and interact with knowledge. AI has become an extension of human cognition – augmenting our ability to process information, solve problems, and generate new ideas. In education, this means AI is not just a tool but a fundamental part of how knowledge is created, accessed, and manipulated. Used passively, AI risks reinforcing traditional “banking” models of education; used critically, it can support inquiry, dialogue, and deeper learning.
Disrupted History 