Freireian Pedagogy, Praxis, and Possibilities

Projects for the New Millennium

Stanley S. Steiner, H. Mark Krank, Robert E. Bahruth, Peter McLaren, Stanley F. Steiner, H. Mark Krank, Robert E. Bahruth, Peter McLaren, Stanley F. Steiner, H. Mark Krank, Peter McLaren, Robert E. Bahruth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780815333777
• eBook ISBN: 9781135578565
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Scholar, activist, and educator Paulo Freire was one of the first thinkers to fully appreciate the relationships between education, politics, imperialism, and liberation. This volume is a testament to the works of Paulo Freire in the field of Education as well as the life of the man: a "story of courage, hardship, perseverance, and unyielding belief in the power of love." In this comprehensive collection, prominent intellectuals including Noam Chomsky and Donald Macedo reflect on Freire's "politics of liberation" and add important new dimensions to the revolutionary, innovative ideas that Freire bequeathed to a generation much in need.

CHAPTER 1

Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of Possibility

PETER McLAREN

I “played” so much at being a teacher when I was an adolescent that when I taught my first classes in an orientation course at the Osvaldo Cruz School of Recife, in the 1940s, I had a hard time distinguishing between the imaginary professor and the real one and I was happy in both worlds.

—PAULO FREIRE (IN PRESS)

[W]hat I have been proposing from my political convictions, my philosophical convictions, is a profound respect for the total autonomy of the educator. What I have been proposing is a profound respect for the cultural identity of students—a cultural identity that implies respect for the language of the other, the color of the other, the gender of the other, the class of the other, the sexual orientation of the other, the intellectual capacity of the other; that implies the ability to stimulate the creativity of the other. But these things take place in a social and historical context and not in pure air. These things take place in history and I, Paulo Freire, am not the owner of history.

—PAULO FREIRE (1997, PP. 307–308).

Paulo Freire was one of the first internationally recognized educational thinkers who fully appreciated the relationship among education, politics, imperialism, and liberation. Generally considered the inaugural philosopher of critical pedagogy, Freire was able to effectively recast pedagogy on a global basis in the direction of a radical politics of histor- ical struggle, a direction that he expanded into a lifelong project. Long before his death on May 2, 1997, he was known to workers and theologians as well as scholars and researchers from numerous disciplinary traditions, for fomenting interest in the ways that education can serve as a vehicle for social and economic transformation. What is now termed “a politics of liberation” is a topic of pivotal significance among educational activists throughout the globe and one to which Freire had made important and pioneering contributions.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Born Paulo Reglus Neves Freire on September 19,1921, in Recife, in the northeast of Brazil, Freire has become a legendary figure in the field of education. A courageous scholar, social activist, and cultural worker admired for his integrity and humility, Freire became internationally renowned for developing an anti-imperialist and anticapitalist literacy praxis employed by progressive educators in Brazil.

In his early twenties Freire joined the faculty of law at the Universidade de Recife. His ten-year involvement with the Industry Council’s social service organization in the regional department of Pernambuco and subsequently his general superintendency of that division and his participation in the Movement for Popular Culture of Recife helped to motivate him to devote his energies to the area of adult literacy. Shortly after his first case, he abandoned his vocation as a lawyer in order to study the relationships among pupils, teachers, and parents in working-class communities in the northeast of Brazil.

Freire completed his doctorate in 1959 (titled “Education and the Brazilian Reality”), and in 1961 he was invited by the Mayor of Recife to develop a literacy program for that city. As the newly appointed director of the Extension Service of the University of Recife, Freire began to work with new methods of teaching adult literacy. His approach to literacy was greatly influenced by his activities in the Catholic Action Movement and by Catholic collectivism, Communidades Eclesiales de Base (Basic Church communities), and a close association with the Bishop of Recife, Dom Helder Camara.

In 1962, in the town of Angicos, in Rio Grande de Norte, Freire’s literacy program helped three hundred rural farm workers learn to read and write in forty-five days. The literacy worker, by living communally with groups of peasants and workers, was able to identify generative words according to their phonetic value, syllabic length, and social meaning and relevance to the workers. These words represented the everyday reality of the workers. Each word was associated with issues related to existential questions about life and the social factors that determined the economic conditions of everyday existence. Themes were then generated from these words (i.e., words such as wages or government) that were then codified and decodified by groups of workers and teachers who participated in groups known as “cultural circles.”

Reading and writing thus became grounded in the lived experiences of peasants and workers and resulted in a process of ideological struggle and revolutionary praxis—or conscientization. As a result of this literacy process, workers and peasants were able to transform their “culture of silence” and become collective agents of social and political change. The success of this program—supported by the United States Agency for International Development—marked the beginning of what was to become a legendary approach in education.

In 1963, Freire was invited by President Joao Goulart and by the Minister of Education, Paulo De Tarso Santos, to rethink adult literacy programs on a national basis and to work with the national literacy program, the Movement for Basic Education. In 1964, twenty thousand cultural circles were designed to assist two million illiterate workers. However, all of that was brazenly interrupted by a military coup that year.

Freire’s internationally celebrated work with the poor began in the late 1940s and continued unabated until 1964, when a right-wing military coup overthrew Goulart’s democratically elected government. Freire was accused of preaching communism and was arrested. He was imprisoned by the military government for seventy days and exiled for his work in the national literacy campaign, of which he had served as director. According to Freire’s leading biographer, Moacir Gadotti— also one of the founding members of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party), Freire’s Chief of Cabinet in the administration of São Paulo’s Municipal Secretariat of Education—the Brazilian military considered Freire to be an international subversive, a traitor to Christ and the Brazilian people, and accused him of developing a teaching method similar to that of Stalin, Hitler, Peron, and Mussolini. He was furthermore accused of trying to turn Brazil into a Bolshevik country (Gadotti, 1994).

Freire’s sixteen years of exile were tumultuous and productive times: a five-year stay in Chile as a UNESCO consultant with the Research and Training Institute for Agrarian Reform; an appointment in 1969 to Harvard University’s Center of Educational and Developmental Studies associated with the Center for Studies in Development and Social Change; a move to Geneva, Switzerland, in 1970 as consultant to the Office of Education of the World Council of Churches, where he developed literacy programs for Tanzania and Guinea-Bissau that focused on the re-Africanization of their countries; the development of literacy programs in some postrevolutionary former Portuguese colonies such as Angola and Mozambique, programs that were motivated by the work of Frantz Fanon, a reengagement with the works of Marx, and personal gola (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), Frente de Libersympathy for Amilcar Cabral’s Movimento Popular Libertacão de Antacao de Moccambique (Mozambique Liberation Front), and Partido Africans para Independencia de Guinea-Bissau e Cabo Verde (African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde); assisting the governments of Peru and Nicaragua with their literacy campaigns; the establishment of the Institute of Cultural Action in Geneva in 1971; a brief return to Chile after Salvador Allende was assassinated in 1973, working in the area of agrarian reform and provoking General Pinochet to declare Freire a subversive; participation in literacy work in São Tome and Principe from 1975 to 1979; a brief visit to Brazil under political amnesty in 1979; and a final return to Brazil in 1980 to teach at the Pontificia Universidade Catolica de São Paulo and the Universidade de Campinas in São Paulo. Freire would go on to undertake literacy work in Australia, Italy, Angola, the Fiji Islands, and numerous other areas throughout the world.

In São Paulo, Freire witnessed growing resistance to the military government, such as the 1978 and 1979 strikes by the metalworkers of São Bernardo (an industrial region of São Paulo), and he joined the socialist democratic party, Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party, or PT), which was formed in 1980. When the Workers Party won the 1989 municipal elections in São Paulo, Mayor Luiza Erundina appointed Freire Municipal Secretary of Education for São Paulo, a position he held until 1991. During his tenure as Secretary, Freire continued his radical agenda of literacy reform for the people of that city. Under Freire’s guidance, the Secretariat of Education set up a literacy program for young people called MOVA-SP (Literacy Movement in the City of São Paulo), which contributed to strengthening popular movements and creating alliances between civil society and the state. Freire also created the Movimento de Reorientacão Curricular (Movement to Reorient the Curriculum), which attempted to create collective work through a decentralization of power and the fostering of school autonomy and the reconstruction of the curriculum around critical community issues.

What is remarkable about Freire’s lifework is that while it is distinctly addressed to educators and literacy workers, it continues to be vigorously engaged by scholars in numerous disciplines: literary theory, composition, philosophy, ethnography, political science, sociology, teacher education, theology, and so on. He has given the word educator a new meaning, inflecting the term to embrace multiple perspectives: border intellectual, social activist, critical researcher, moral agent, radical philosopher, and political revolutionary. To a greater extent than any other educator of this century, Freire was able to develop a pedagogy of resistance to oppression. More than this, he lived what he taught. His life is the story of courage, hardship, perseverance, and unyielding belief in the power of love.

Reflecting upon his lifework and the circumstances and experiences associated with his exile that took him to so many countries around the world, Freire describes his professional mission as a search for unity between theory and practice. Freire writes:

The experiences that I had in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, Mexico and in Canada, discussing with national educators fundamental problems in their educational systems; my participation in courses and seminars at North American, Latin American, African, European and Asian universities; my meetings with leaders of various liberation movements in Africa and Latin America, all of this is guarded in my memory, not as something of the past or something that has passed, that I remember with nostalgia. All of this, on the contrary, is quite alive and vivid. And when I think about all of this, something makes me believe that one of the most visible impressions on my professional trajectory is the consistent search for unity between theory and practice. It is in this sense that my books, good or bad, are theoretical chronicles of the “what was done,” linked to the events in which I was involved.

FREIRE’S PHILOSOPHY OF PEDAGOGY: A PREFERENTIAL OPTION FOR THE POOR

Freire’s life vehemently unveils the imprints of a life lived within the margins of power and prestige. Because his work centered around the issue of social and political change, Freire has always been considered controversial, especially by educational establishments in Europe and North America. Although he is recognized as one of the most significant philosophers of liberation and a pioneer in critical literacy and critical pedagogy, his work continues to be taken up mostly by marginal groups of educators working outside of the educational mainstream. The marginal status of Freire’s followers is undoubtedly due to the fact that Freire firmly believed that educational change must be accompanied by significant changes in the social and political structure in which education takes place. It is a position most educators would find either politically untenable or hopelessly utopian. It is certainly a position that threatens the interests of those who are already well served by the dominant culture.

Freire’s own personal contact early in his life with Brazilian peasants profoundly shaped his assent to popular revolts against economic exploitation in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere. Given the basic contradictions facing a social order encapsulated in the exploitation of the vast majority of Brazilian society, the task or mission of Freire centered on the transformation of the relations of the production of social wealth (together with their ideological-political levels). Yet such an attempt to establish a new social order underwritten by a just system of appropriation and distribution of social wealth was to relegate Freire to the ranks of educators considered to be subversive to the state. For Freire, the very protocols of literacy and the act of “coming to know” must themselves be transformed in order to make a prominent place for issues of social justice and the struggle for emancipation. Freire taught that in order for the oppressed to materialize their self-activity as a revolutionary force, they must develop a collective consciousness of their own constitution or formation as a subaltern class, as well as an ethos of solidarity and interdependence. For Freire, a pedagogy of critical literacy becomes the primary vehicle for the development of “critical consciousness” among the poor, leading to a process of exploration and creative effort that conjoins deep personal meanings and common purpose. Literacy, for Freire, becomes that common “process” of participation open to all individuals. The problem of “critical consciousness” cannot be posed in abstraction from the significant historical contexts in which knowledge is produced, engaged, and appropriated.

Freire lamented the brute reality that witnessed the oppressed as always living as the detachable appendages of other people’s dreams and desires. It seemed to Freire that the dreams of the poor were always dreamt for them by distant others who were removed from their daily struggles and who were either unable or unwilling to recognize the dreams that burned in the habitats of their hearts. Based on a recognition of the cultural underpinnings of folk traditions and the importance of the collective construction of knowledge, Freire’s pedagogical project created a vivid new vocabulary of concern for the oppressed and revealed a new and powerful political terminology that enabled the oppressed to analyze their location within the privileging hierarchy of capitalist society and to engage in attempts to dislodge themselves from existing cycles of social reproduction. Literacy programs developed by Freire and his colleagues for disempowered peasants are now employed in countries all over the world. By linking the categories of history, politics, economics, and class to the concepts of culture and power, Freire managed to develop both a language of critique and a language of hope that work conjointly and dialectically and that have proven successful in helping generations of disenfranchised peoples to liberate themselves. Freire recognized that there is no way of representing the consciousness of the oppressed that escapes the founding assumptions of the culture and society in which the teacher or cultural worker is implicated (Freire, in press). Long before postmodernists brought us their version of “identity politics,” Freire understood that the subjectivities of the oppressed are to be considered heterogeneous and cannot be represented extratextually, that is, outside of the discursive embeddedness of the educator’s own founding value and epistemological assumptions (McLaren and Leonard, 1993).

Influenced by the work of Lucien Febvre, the French nouvelle pedogogie of Celestin Freinet and Edouard Claparede, and the writings of Leszek Kolakowski, Karel Kosik, Eric Fromm, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Mannheim, Teilhard do Chardin, Franz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Jean Piaget, Emilia Ferreiro, Madalena F.Weffort, Lev Vygotsky, Amilcar Cabral, and the Christian personalism theory of Tristiande Atiade and Emanuel Mounier (not to mention the classic works of Hegel, Marx, Rousseau, and Dewey), Freire’s pedagogy was antiauthoritarian, dialogical, and interactive, and put power into the hands of students and workers. Most important, Freirean pedagogy put social and political analysis of everyday life at the center of the curriculum. The concise rendering of Freire’s basic argument in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1973) is that knowledge is a dialogical act—a political act of knowing. Freire’s central importance in critical pedagogy can be traced to his model of emancipatory knowledge as praxis. Freire expresses this as a shift from “naive consciousness” to “critical consciousness.” He is worth quoting at length:

[T]rue dialogue cannot exist unless the dialoguers engage in critical thinking—thinking which discerns an indivisible solidarity between the world and the people and admits of no dichotomy between them—thinking which perceives reality as process, as transformation, rather than as a static entity—thinking which does not separate itself from action, but constantly immerses itself in temporality without fear of the risks involved. Critical thinking contrasts with naive thinking, which sees historical time as a weight, a stratification of the acquisitions and experiences of the past, from which the present should emerge normalized and “wellbehaved.” For the naive thinker, the important thing is accommodation to this normalized “today.” For the critic, the important thing is the continuing transformation of reality. (1973, p.)

Freire’s writings exhibit a singular awareness that the oppressed will not recognize their oppression simply because somebody has pointed it out to them. They will come to recognize their oppression through their own daily experience of struggling to survive. Struggle and critical reflection are thus dialectically related. Daily struggle provides a reason for the oppressed to take seriously the type of self-reflection that empowers their daily efforts to fulfill their material needs and to be treated with dignity and respect. Engaged in Freirean praxis, people who suffer abuses take up the cause of liberation with increased courage and dynamism.

Freire understood that as the oppressed take more control of their own history, they assimilate more rapidly into society but on their own terms. He warrants the reputation as a preeminent critical educationalist in the way that he was able to foreground the means by which the pedagogical (the localized pedagogical encounter between teacher and student) is implicated in the political (the social relations of production within the global capitalist economy). Whereas mainstream educators often decapitate the social context from the self and then cauterize the dialectical movement between them, Freire stresses the dialectical motion between t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• A Pedagogy of Transformation: An Introduction
• About the Contributors
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15