Exploring Untested Feasibilities: Critical Pedagogy's Approach to Addressing Abuse and Oppression in Medical Education

Abuse and oppression in medical education persists. Particularly when transitioning to practice, students and residents face dissonance between what they perceive as the ideals of patient care and reality. They witness, and eventually take part in, joking about fellow students and patients, discriminating against minorities, and imposing unbearable workload to subordinates, to mention some practices that have been normalized as the reality of medical training, beyond any possibility of change. We suggest that Critical Pedagogy, an educational movement rooted in Brazil that aims to empower learners and educators as full citizens, can help medical education reinstitute hope for a more humanistic culture by testing new realistic transformative actions, i.e., untested feasibilities, to promote change. We use vignettes based on real situations of oppression to present three concepts of Critical Pedagogy contextualized to medical education: (a) critical consciousness as praxis; (b) pedagogy with learners; and (c) education as a democratic relationship between individuals. The vignettes explore how each one of these concepts can support educators and learners to break chains of injustice and oppression. Perceiving disagreements as opportunities for change, legitimizing the perspectives and values of all engaged in analyzing reality, is needed to nurture critical consciousness. Critical Pedagogy understands education as a partnership of trust between learners and educators and seeks a pedagogy that is built with learners, not on them. Finally, we present suggestions for individual- and systems-level actions that can translate these principles of Critical Pedagogy into a praxis of untested feasibilities for medical education.