This essay tries to examine and settle the dispute between different approaches to knowledge emancipation, which is the rationale of community university movement. It shows that the confusing meaning of critical self-awareness and its actual genesis have resulted in such dispute. The author thus introduces two narratives that provide the necessary condition for the emergence of critical self-awareness. To realize the idea of knowledge emancipation, two pedagogical methods are also recommended-one is called “contextualizing social phenomena,” and the other is called “problematizing theoretical knowledge.”