[iDC] Lessons to Be Learned From Paulo Freire as Education Is Being Taken Over by the Mega Rich
Margaret Morse
morse at ucsc.edu
Sun Nov 28 15:04:15 UTC 2010
Dear Trebor, Sergio and the IDC,
Thank you for bringing eloquent appreciations of Paolo Freire into our
discussion of education. Posting to a listserve is still an act of
will for me. I had to overcome a feeling of the banality of my
experience in trying to apply Freire's work to my own pedagogy, but I
decided to enter the discussion anyway. What drew me to post was the
minimal use of the word dialogue in Giroux's op ed essay. It seemed
to me that dialogic capacity was being treated as a given, a natural
resource or even as a byproduct of striving for political agency.
Furthermore, literacy of a sort is assumed in the pedagogy described.
(FYI I have copied the instances in the text in which "dialogue" is
used below.) However, I believe that this word is emphatically more
productive and important for Freire than than the op ed essay
implies. No word meant more to me in 1970 (re the 40th anniversary of
the translation of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed into English) than
"dialogue." I won't go into all the ways it was significant beyond my
teaching. Freire (from afar) was one of several key figures in
forging my understanding of what dialogue is.
How was I to apply a process to my university students that I imagined
Freire to be addressing to more or less illiterate rural peasants and
dispossessed peoples in a postcolonial situation? A key to making
literacy meaningful as a goal was to bring the Brazilian students'
practical knowledge of their own rural/urban life worlds into
dialogue with the teacher and each other students by bringing oral and
visual literacy into play. By bouncing sources, formats and ideas
against each other (my vast simplification) in discourse, what might
seem immanent and god-given becomes contigent and symbolic, one point
of view among many. It is an Aha! moment toward subjectification and
critical agency. (Again, my reduction for the purpose of brevity.)
Believe it or not, I found and have found over the years, that many
university students have not had that Aha! moment. Of course, literacy
(as the comand of language in reading, but especially writing) is also
an issue to some degree or other with a significant number of students
in higher education. So, higher educators also need to go back to
that fundamental situation of becoming literate in a way that promotes
agency and being a subject in language.
Teaching entry level German--my first pedagogical task-- is a good
example of both parroting back what the teacher says and generating
sentences that are fundamental to confidence and becoming a speaking
subject: My name is... What is yours? I was born in... on.... My
father is a....; my mother does.... My favorite things are.... etc
etc Eventually we were having a dialog about the most intimate
aspects of our individual identities and loving it. Getting a
sentence out was an accomplishment. Everyone was thrilled. In my
subject courses I developed a way of drawing out the things that
students loved to do or were most curious about so that their writing
could develop from that. I found I could reach struggling students
and help them to greatly improve the quality and critical awareness of
their work. However, I never found the appropriate stance for me to
take as a dialogue partner. I tended to subordinate the expression of
my own ideas and beliefs too much in my quest to further dialogue and
avoid lecturing in the old sense. My untutored approach was in tune
with the collective wave of the period. I actually needed to be a
full partner rather than a mediator, etc. (As an aside, my graduate
student peers and I succeeded via protest in rewriting the curriculum
of our university department to reflect our own views on pedagogy and
subject matter. This was not uncommon in that period. However, the
teaching staff remained the same and uncomfortable in their new skin--
and people don't do what they should do, they do what they can do.)
It is obvious that the life world on which contemporary college
students draw has little resemblance to the practical skills of
indigenous and mixed-race Brazilians of 40 years ago. Social lIteracy
is vastly complicated by as much as eased by the advent of list serves
(the most traditionally literate format), FaceBook, Twitter, etc. My
key to evaluating the degree of subjectivity and agency in the
discourse of a particular show, format or medium was to analyze the
specifics of intercourse in terms of "dialogue". As I tried to
explain in my work on television in the 1980's and '90's, mediated
direct address is not the same thing as dialogue between peers face to
face. The differences are as specific as they are fascinating and
troubling and at least partially enabling. I also think that dialogue
is an encounter with otherness--and that social media as discursive
communities are often tacitly formed around economic, racial and
gender fault lines of the "same", (Ditto lunch: Have you ever noticed
the racial, gender and economic fault lines that appear when many U.S.
student populations sit down to eat?) I could go on, but I am likely
to be stating the obvious. My commitment to dialogue still
fundamentally shapes my life, however near or far I strike from my
goals. I felt a wave of emotion when I read the post on Freire--like
seeing a bare root or a picture of where I lived 40 years ago.
Best,
Margaret
aka Maggie
University of California Santa Cruz
"Dialogue" cited from: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed,
Lessons to Be Learned From Paulo Freire as Education Is Being Taken
Over by the Mega Rich, Tuesday 23 November 2010
....
"Under such circumstances, knowledge is not simply received by
students, but actively transformed, open to be challenged and related
to the self as an essential step toward agency, self-representation
and learning how to govern rather than simply be governed. At the same
time, students also learn how to engage others in critical dialogue
and be held accountable for their views.
........
To the contrary, it was about offering a way of thinking beyond the
seeming naturalness or inevitability of the current state of things,
challenging assumptions validated by "common sense," soaring beyond
the immediate confines of one's experiences, entering into a dialogue
with history and imagining a future that would not merely reproduce
the present.
...
Any pedagogy that calls itself Freirean must acknowledge this key
principle that our current knowledge is contingent on particular
historical contexts and political forces. For example, each classroom
will be affected by the different experiences students bring to the
class, the resources made available for classroom use, the relations
of governance bearing down on teacher-student relations, the authority
exercised by administrations regarding the boundaries of teacher
autonomy and the theoretical and political discourses used by teachers
to read and frame their responses to the diverse historical, economic
and cultural forces informing classroom dialogue.
.....
Politics was more than a gesture of translation, representation and
dialogue: to be effective, it had to be about creating the conditions
for people to become critical agents alive to the responsibilities of
democratic public life.
......
On Nov 24, 2010, at 10:03 PM, sergio basbaum wrote:
> Dear Trebor and IDCs,
>
> It is amazing to see Freire's name invoked in this list.
>
> Freire belongs to a great generation of Brazilian intelectuals and
> artists, who had courage to develop very original paths of thinking,
> and I count him with names like Celso Furtado, Darci Ribeiro, Helio
> Oiticica, Lygia Clark and Glauber Rocha, for example -- people who
> were very independent and pointed directions for Brazil to be a
> fair, creative and innovative society.
>
> Military dictatorship has dismounted this energy for sometime, and
> -- although the subject is quite complex --, younger generations
> inherited a cultural environment with quite low self-esteem,
> dominated, as it was, by (neo) liberal discourses that devoured the
> country's landscape during the 80's and 90's.
>
> It should not be counted as a coincidence that such names like Paulo
> Freire may be invoked at the same time as the country breathes new
> perspectives under the new visions and forces that have been
> animating the country in the last years.
>
> Education and learning are, first of all, a matter sense: people
> wants to live in a world which makes sense to them, and students
> learn immediately what makes sense in their lives -- anything you
> say in a classroom that connects with one's effort to make sense of
> her/his life will be remembered for a long time.
>
> Freire noticed anf formalized this, while interested in helping
> people to be autonomous individuals, and not just labor-force for a
> world order which makes sense just for others.
>
> In my modest opinion, one of the main challenges we have in this
> intense times we're living, is to build a world which is meaningful
> and makes sense in the most plural way for everybody. I doubt this
> is what's going on. But antyway, education and knowledge are
> certainly a matter of sense and not of neurons.
>
> best for all
> s
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 2:17 PM, Trebor Scholz
> <scholzt at newschool.edu> wrote:
> Lessons to Be Learned From Paulo Freire as Education Is Being Taken
> Over
> by the Mega Rich
>
> <http://www.truth-out.org/lessons-be-learned-from-paulo-freire-education-is-being-taken-over-mega-rich65363
> >
>
>
> Tuesday 23 November 2010
> by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
>
> “For Freire, pedagogy was central to a formative culture that makes
> both
> critical consciousness and social action possible. Pedagogy in this
> sense connected learning to social change; it was a project and
> provocation that challenged students to critically engage with the
> world
> so they could act on it.”
>
> “What Freire made clear is that pedagogy at its best is not about
> training in techniques and methods, nor does it involve coercion or
> political indoctrination. Indeed, far from a mere method or an a
> priori
> technique to be imposed on all students, education is a political and
> moral practice that provides the knowledge, skills and social
> relations
> that enable students to explore for themselves the possibilities of
> what
> it means to be engaged citizens, while expanding and deepening their
> participation in the promise of a substantive democracy.”
>
> “Critical pedagogy, for Freire, meant imagining literacy as not simply
> the mastering of specific skills, but also as a mode of
> intervention, a
> way of learning about and reading the word as a basis for
> intervening in
> the world.”
>
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>
> --
> -- Prof. Dr. Sérgio Roclaw Basbaum
> -- Coord. Tecnologia e Mídias Digitais
> -- Pós-Graduação Tec.da Inteligência e Design Digital - TIDD (PUC-SP)
>
>
>
> --
> -- Prof. Dr. Sérgio Roclaw Basbaum
> -- Coord. Tecnologia e Mídias Digitais
> -- Pós-Graduação Tec.da Inteligência e Design Digital - TIDD (PUC-SP)
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