<![CDATA[This article examines how Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy can be employed to liberate Indonesian language learning from the still-dominant “knowledge transfer” paradigm, both in conventional and digital classroom practices. The concern underlying this study stems from the phenomenon that the shift in learning medium from face-to-face to online does not automatically transform the banking-style teacher-student power relation, as evidenced in problems of digital-based Indonesian language and literature learning during the pandemic. Employing a qualitative-conceptual approach grounded in library research, this article uses Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed as its primary data source, alongside more than twenty nationally and internationally accredited journal articles (including Scopus-indexed ones) as secondary sources. Data were analyzed through conceptual qualitative content analysis structured around four keywords: banking education, problem-posing education, critical consciousness (conscientização), and dialogics. The findings reveal that these four Freirean concepts though formulated within the context of Brazilian peasant literacy in the 1960s–1970s find latent empirical parallels in a number of contemporary Indonesian language and literature education practices and studies, ranging from project-based literacy learning and contextual ecological poetry reading to personal psychospiritual literary reading, none of which explicitly draws on Freire’s framework. Based on these findings, this article develops a conceptual novelty termed the dialogical-emancipatory paradigm in Indonesian language education, which reformulates Freire’s ideas into four operational indicators: generative-theme-based text selection, interpretation-and-argumentation-based evaluation, the teacher’s position as an interpretive partner, and project-based, collaborative learning structures formulated while accounting for the structural tensions within Indonesia’s education system, rather than applying Freire’s ideals uncritically. ]]>
