nici /danm 203 /freire

Paulo Freire
Pedagogy of the oppressed

It doesn't do any good to try to pour knowledge into a waiting vessel, one has to find ways to inspire and lead the vessle to think critically about the world and seek out knowledge for itself. In this was they gain possesion of the process, you gain greater understanding of them, and the whole thing is much more participatory. Especially in the case of the oppressed, the understanding of the things that keep them from moving forward cannot be imparted through lecturing but their own agency in the world must be demonstrated through dialogue about their world.

• Necessary definition or clarifications
  • Pedagogy
    • (noun)
        1. The profession of teaching
        2. The activities of educating, teaching or instructing
      
  • Praxis

    • (noun)
       1. The practical application of any branch of learning
       2. Custom or established practice
      

    • defined in the peice as: the reflection and action which truely transform reality and are the source of knowledge and creation
  • Polemic
    • (noun)
      An aggressive attack on or refutation of the opinions or principles of another
  • epoch

    • (noun) A particular period of history, especially one considered remarkable or noteworthy.

    • "characterized by a complex of ideas, concepts, hopes, doubts, values, and challages in dialectical interaction with thier opposites, striving towards plentitude." (p. 101)
• Key Ideas
  • The word

    • to exist is to name the world and through nameing the world turn it into an approachable problem the solution for which is to rename the world? This is done through true words, which were defined as the words with the power to transform reality,

  • verbalism
    • The word without its dimension of action
      • cannot denounce the world
      • why is denouncing the world the key to content?
  • activism

    • The word without its dimension of reflection which negates true praxis and makes dialog impossible (p. 88)

  • dialogue

    • "encounter between men, mediated by the world, in order to name the world" (p.88)

    • cannot occure without possibility / intention to allow both parties to name?
    • not a depositing of ideas
    • not a consumption of ideas
    • not a polemic argument
    • no naming on behalf of others
    • needs profound love for the world
    • needs humility, arogance would lead to the self elevation of one party and thier domination of the dialogue denying the other side active part
    • cannot be closed to the contributionof others (p. 90)
    • require faith / belief in other people, without faith dialogue would become a depositing of ideas or a "paternalistic manipulation" that denys the other their role in renaming the world
    • requires hope, not in a passive hoping manner but in that hope reflects the belief that change is possible
    • source of human significance
    • "At the point of encounter there are only people who are attempting, together, to learn more than they know."(p.90)
      • point of encounter being the point at which two or more people can rename the world?

      establishes mutual trust

    • requires critical thinking  which sees reality as a process p.92
  • love

    • "love is at the same time the foundation of dialogue and dialogue itself." (p.89)

    • love cannot exist in a relation of domination?
    • love is a commitment to the cause of liberation and is in nature dialogical (since liberation is a renaming of the world)
  • generative themes / thematic universe

    • "the investigation of what I have termed the people's "thematic universe" -the complex of thier "generative themes"- inagurates the dialogue of education as the practice of freedom."

      • every epoch is characterized by "a complex of ideas, concepts, hopes, doubts, values and challenges in dialectical interaction with their opposites." This is its "thematic universe."
        -from http://www.wwcd.org/glossary.html attributed to Freire

      • the dialogue of education as the practice of freedom: working backwards the practice of freedom is the lifting of oppression which is done by exposing / bringing to light the issues that inforce the oppression in order to rename the world? Does the act of renameing deny the oppression? Or is it the first instance of calling it oppression and as such allowing people to have the power to locate it?
      • the investigation is not an examination of how particular people affect the world, but at the thought-language with which people percieve/construct reality.
      • the investigation is one of how people think about reality and what thier actions on it are and requires not investigator / subject relations but investigator / co-investigator relations to promote critical awareness of reality (which is presumable the goal in investigating these things in the first place) (p. 106)

      Man can separate himself from his actions and reflect upon them. p.97

      • we're assuming animals cannot do this

      • the difference between being merely stimulate or challanged by the world
      • this is the exact dichotomy of dialogue, action and reflection
      • people get to infuse the world with thier creative presence by means of the transformations they effect upon it (p.98) almost a direct quote

      "can only be apprehended in the human-world relationship." (p. 106)

  • limit situations

    • the separations between being and being more, those situations that can be recongized as barriers (to be overcome) in the liberation process. Not blockades but hurdles?

    • imply both someone who benefits by the situation and someone for who the situations is repressing.
      • Must all limit situations have a benefactor?

      since a limit situation is preventing someong from being more beyond the limit situation is an "untested feasability", a unexperienced situation of possibilities that will hold its own new limit situations

  • limit acts
    • those actions taken by people to overcome the limit situations
    • "the critical actions toward achieving the untested feasibility" (p. 102)
  • products

    • the results of a beings activities in the world as a response to the demands of the world, which do not belong to the being  but rather belong to the world and enact a transformation of the world, the context of these products is changed through thier production and given (added? new?) meaning. The context is the world.

• Steps toward a dialogue

  • the educator, the politician, the liberator, these are the examples we consider to see the common mistakes that lead away from dialogue.

  • education should not be teacher to students, it needs to accept that there is a teacher-student and student-teachers and that both address thier act of cognition to the subject matter, not the students to the teacher to the subject
  • the activist / revolutionary is not trying to win people over, out slogan the oppressor, or impose their world view on the oppressed but rather open up dialogue with them and bring to light their objective situation and thie awareness of that situation
    • wouldn't it be a subjective situation?

    the politician, also a educator in a very loose sense, is very akin to the educator. Both must understand the structural conditions under which thought and language of those they wish to dialogue with are framed.

• Example of bringing a literacy program to an area identified as having a high iliteracy rate

  • Aquaintence through secondary sources

  • initial contact with the area, set up meeting to explain purpose
  • enlist co-investigators from the area
  • visit and observe with understanding, look at behavior, idioms, speech, ways of talking about things, customs, relations, etc.
  • talk about the observations as a group, each persons observations inform the group and reorientated further questioning
  • approach the "principle and secondary contradictions" that exist for the inhabitants of the area and represent the limit situation
  • prepare codifications (listed as sketches and photographs) that will be the objects that are used to promote critical analysis.
  • the participants
• My questions

  • Does this rhetoric / theor leave any room for engaging itself in dialogue. It has so many proclimations on what must be in order for dialogue to exist, but dialogue requires me to not accepts these things on faith, to not allow the ideas to just be deposited in my head, how do I reconcile the need to engage the text in dialogue with the delivery of these ideas?

• useful links
  • ~ marxists.org > Subject > Education > Freire > Pedagogy

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