Paolo Freire
My intention in writing these teacher profiles is not to give scholarly summaries of important educators but to acknowledge sources of inspiration, limn profound ways of thinking about childhood and culture, and explore specific teaching strategies and learning modalities. Paolo Freire is a towering figure in literacy education, critical pedagogy and the role that education can play in either reproducing social inequality or transforming society on a more just, free and beautiful basis. Freire is important to me for two reasons: 1) he provides a workable framework for understanding education as a generative force for radical, positive social change,2) he engaged in ground level education projects designed to help people develop literacy skills, critical/creative thinking strategies, and fundamental ways to access the the powers of the human spirit. Freire informs my sense of what I am trying to do as a teacher, how I can work with students in a non-authoritarian way, and how I can make a transformative difference in their lives. He helps me be the transformative, public intellectual, teacher with an attitude I want to be. He shows me how to make a real difference in the lives of the children I work with, in my community, society and world.
It pains me the way Freire is being erased in teacher education programs that have become certification mills, dominated by standardized syllabi, incoherent, pseudo-scientific, sentimental textbooks, arbitrary lists of standards, and cookie cutter lesson plans. I challenge professors and college administrators to design and support courses that infuse the curriculum with critical theory and a passionate engagement with social justice. Suffice it to say, if you are a teacher please get your hands on some Paolo Freire and read it with other people who are interested. You might start with the essay “The Importance of Reading.”
Talking about a “critical understanding of the act of reading” he writes:
“Reading does not consist merely of decoding the written word or language; rather, it is preceded by and intertwined with knowledge of the world. Language and reality are dynamically interconnected. The understanding attained by critical reading of a text implies perceiving the relationship between text context.”
Freire understands the fundamental connection between reading the word and “reading” the world. Yes, we take intrinsic pleasure in reading, and yes we have to learn how to decode written language to unlock its power, but the ultimate point of reading is how it helps us make sense of and interpret the world. Reading helps us understand our place in the world, the relationship between self and other, the relationship between reality and the limits of the possible, the interconnections between, past, present and future, how we want to live and what we want to do with our lives. Listen to the sensuous, fragile, wondrous interconnections Freire discovers and weaves between the word and the world.
“I see myself then in the average house in Recife, Brazil, where I was born, encircled by trees. Some of the trees were like persons to me, such was the intimacy between us. In their shadow I played, and in those branches low enough for me to reach I experienced the small risks that prepared me for greater risks and adventures. The old house—its bedrooms, hall, attic, terrace (the setting for my mother’s ferns), backyard—all this was my first world. In this world I crawled, gurgled, first stood up, took my first steps, said my first words. Truly, that special world presented itself to me as the arena of my perceptual activity and therefore as the world of my first reading.”
Anyone who works with young children should dive deep into their family and community life. Learn about where they live, do interest inventories, dig out the “funds of knowledge” that the child brings with him or her to school. Make bridges between the world they are making sense of at home and out in the community, and the world they are making sense of at school.
“The texts, the words, the letters of that context were incarnated in a series of things, objects, and signs. In perceiving these I experienced myself, and the more I experienced myself, the more my perceptual capacity increased. I learned to understand things, objects, and signs through using them in relationship to my older brothers and sisters and my parents. The texts, words, letters of that context were incarnated in the song of the birds— tanager, flycatcher, thrush—in the dance of the boughs blown by the strong winds announcing storms; in the thunder and lightening; in the rainwaters playing with geography, creating lakes, islands, rivers, streams.
The texts, words, letters of that context were incarnated as well in the whistle of the wind, the clouds in the sky, the sky’s color, its movement; in the color of foliage, the shape of leaves, the fragrance of flowers (rose jasmine); in tree trunks; in fruit rinds (the varying color tones of the same fruit at different times—the green of a mango when the fruit is first forming, the green of a mango fully formed, the greenish-yellow of the same mango ripening, the black spots of an overripe mango—the relationship among these colors, the developing fruit, its resistance to our manipulation, and its taste). It was possibly at this time, by doing it myself and seeing others do it, that I learned the meaning of the verb to squash.
Animals were equally part of that context—the same way the family cats rubbed themselves against our legs, their mewing of entreaty or anger; the ill humor of Joli, my father’s old black dog, when one of the cats came too near where he was eating what was his. In such instances, Joli’s mood was completely different from when he rather playfully chased, caught, and killed one of the many opossums responsible for the disappearance of my grandmother’s fat chickens.”
I am struck by how much the natural world is of immediate interest to the young Freire, and the porous, labile boundaries between sign and thing in his world. I think it is of great importance how trees and plants, animals, earth and sky dominate and mark the landscape of his learning. There is a clue here to how outdoor education, forest schools and environmental science might add to the progressive education movements of the future!
“Part of the context of my immediate world was also the language universe of my elders, expressing their beliefs, tastes, fears, and values which linked my world to a wider one whose existence I could not even suspect.”
Like every child, the language universe of Freire’s elders links his world to a wider one whose existence he is barely, if vaguely, aware of. And every child brings his or her immediate existence world, including the language universe of his elders and immediate community, into the classroom where he or she learns how to read and write. The child’s world ideally becomes larger, more expansive and richer as she learns more about the people, things, plants, animals, signs, texts, groups, institutions, and social formations that make up successive and various contexts. Freire treats us to some of the decisive experiences in his childhood, adolescence and young adulthood that shaped his “critical understanding of the importance of the act of reading.”
http://liberationschool.org/pedagogy-of-the-oppressed-against-trump-communist-education-in-the-emerging-mass-movement/
He recalls:
“My parents introduced me to reading the word at a certain moment in this rich experience of understanding my immediate world. Deciphering the word flowed naturally from reading my particular world; it was not something superimposed on it. I learned to read and write on the ground of the backyard of my house, in the shade of the mango trees, with words from my world rather than from the wider world of my parents. The earth was my blackboard, the sticks my chalk.”
He talks of an early teacher Eunice who:
“continued and deepened my parents’ work. With her, reading the word, the phrase, and the sentence never entailed a break with reading the world. With her, reading the word meant reading the word-world.”
He writes about how he was taught to critically read and interpret different texts in high school:
“[Where I] gained experience in the critical interpretation of texts I read in class with the Portuguese teacher’s help, which I remember to this day. Those moments did not consist of mere exercises, aimed at our simply becoming aware of the existence of the page in front of us, to be scanned, mechanically and monotonously spelled out, instead of truly read. Those moments were not reading lessons in the traditional sense, but rather moments in which texts, including that of the young teacher Jose Pessoa, were offered to us in our restless searching.”
Then he describes becoming a teacher of Portuguese to high school students and how,
“ I experienced intensely the importance of the act of reading and writing—basically inseparable—with first-year high school students. I never reduced syntactical rules to diagrams for students to swallow, even rules governing prepositions after specific verbs, agreement of gender and number, contractions. On the contrary, all this was proposed to the students’ curiosity in a dynamic and living way, as objects to be discovered within the body of texts, whether the students’ own or those of established writers, and not as something stagnant whose outline I described. The students did not have to memorize the description mechanically, but rather learn its underlying significance.”
Meaning and action are always the be all and end all of the act of reading the word/world. Graphophonic and syntactic cues are a necessary but ancillary support to the primary purpose of reading as a critical, creative, political and philosophical act. Freire summarizes his understanding of the literacy learning process.
“Reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world. As I suggested earlier, this movement from the word to the world is always present; even the spoken word flows from our reading of the world. In a way, however, we can go further and say that reading the word is not preceded merely by reading the world, but by a certain form of writing it or rewriting it, that is, of transforming it by means of conscious, practical work.”
For this reason Freire insists that the words used to make up a reading program come from the student’s experience, the student’s world. The words used should come from
“the “word universe” of people who are learning, expressing their actual language, their anxieties, fears, demands, and dreams. Words should be laden with the meaning of the people’s existential experience, and not of the teacher’s experience. Surveying the word universe thus gives us the people’s words, pregnant with the world, words from the people’s reading of the world. We then give the words back to the people inserted in what I call “codifications,” pictures representing real situations. The word brick, for example, might be inserted in a pictorial representation of a group of bricklayers constructing a house.”
The teacher engages and supports each student in an ongoing process of critical and creative interpretation and reflection, and the student is able to substitute a “more critical reading of the prior, less critical reading of the world.” Thus Freire can see literacy education in the larger context of social change and transformation.
“In this way, a critical reading of reality, whether it takes place in the literacy process or not, and associated above all with the clearly political practices of mobilization and organization, constitutes an instrument of what Antonio Gramsci calls ‘counter hegemony’.”
Counter-hegemony is cultural critique and knowledge production that contests the dominant ideologies that legitimate unequal power relationships. By engaging students in the process of critically and creatively rereading the word/world, teachers can empower (a tricky word for sure!) students in rewriting culture and making a better world for all of us.
Please read “The Importance of the Act of Reading” yourself and make of it what you will! http://libraryeducators.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Reading-the-world-and-word-Freire-and-MAcDeo.pdf
Freire’s work provides a blueprint and a beacon for progressive educators. He has his blindspots, as we all do, but when I need water to sustain my practice and better understand what I am doing as a teacher, the Freirean well is never dry. Don’t miss the opportunity to be altered and enriched by a sustained encounter with Freire’s work. And don’t be afraid of trying out Freirean principles and practices in your own teaching. You will be rewarded with more authentic, meaningful and transformative experiences between you and your students. Freire introduced, refined, or remained in fierce and loving dialogue with many key concepts to progressive education traditions and critical pedagogy. Among these are: dialogue, the distinction between banking and problem posing models of education, the idea of praxis, the centrality of the student’s lived experience to the teaching learning experience, the distinctive position of advocating for and teaching people who have traditionally been marginalized and oppressed, the spiritual resources of liberation theology, educational implications of socialism and Western Marxism, the practical notion of “generative themes” and perhaps most importantly conscientization. Reading his work is the best thing to do, but here are some other resources to get you started.
A short bio and bibliography from the good people at Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed http://ptoweb.org/aboutpto/a-brief-biography-of-paulo-freire/
A short, sometimes critical, review of some of Freire’s central concepts : http://infed.org/mobi/paulo-freire-dialogue-praxis-and-education/
A short overview of some key concepts from the official Freire website : http://www.freire.org/paulo-freire/concepts-used-by-paulo-freire
A good comprehensive overview of Freire’s life and work http://education.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264093-e-10
Image credits
Paolo Freire Mural https://pt.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire#/media/File:Painel.Paulo.Freire.JPG
Child eating mango http://www.sparklingadventures.com/index.php?id=1390
Children playing at Leila Day, photo by Charles Malone
Community group working to save the Capabaribe River that flows through Recife http://www.floornature.com/blog/recife-brazil-a-workshop-to-save-the-river-9432/
Freire cartoon https://www.historyofsocialwork.org/eng/details.php?cps=23
