Pedagogy According to Paulo Freire
The Communist University will recommence its live session with set of
studies called Basics, one of eight CU Generic Courses, designed for
study circles without a lecturer.
The exact date, time and venue of the year's first session will be
communicated soon. Our collective intention is to return to the weekly
five o'clock weekday afternoon format, finishing at six-thirty sharp.
When the details are finalised, they will be communicated here.
Meanwhile, here is the introduction and a link to the text for the
first session, Chapter 2 of Paulo Freire's "The Pedagogy of the
Oppressed".
It helps to have an overt theory of “pedagogy” - a simple theory of
learning and teaching - as a starting point. Hence this, our first
topic, linked below.
The great 20th-century theoretician of liberation pedagogy was Paolo
Freire. It was Freire who gave us the word “conscientise”. It was Paulo
Freire, more than any other, who showed how the bourgeois education
system, with its “banking” theory of pedagogy (see today’s text, linked
at the bottom of this document), is not well designed to educate, in
the fullest sense, but rather tends to reproduce the class relations
that suit the bourgeoisie. Education, which should by nature liberate
the student, is made by the bourgeoisie into a means of repression,
said Freire.
How can we make sure that education is part of the building of
socialism and communism? To ask such a question is to “problematise”
education. To ask such a question is to begin a “dialogue” about
education. Freire thought that for the political education of the
oppressed, if it was not to be patronising and therefore
counter-productive, by reproducing and reinforcing features of the
oppressive bourgeois state, then the method for this purpose would have
to be different and new.
In the dialogical method that Paulo Freire devised and called the
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, or otherwise Critical Pedagogy, there is no
elementary, junior, senior, matriculation, undergraduate,
post-graduate, doctorate or professor level. Teachers are learners and
learners are teachers; yet all are free-willing subjects, capable of
leadership.
As much as there may be a room and a gathering of individuals, each
known by name, and a “codification” which is the text or other object
for the occasion, yet the dialogue admits no limits. The Freirean
gathering is not sheltered. It is one of the essentials of Freirean
Pedagogy that we refuse the fiction of the sheltered classroom, and
instead recognise that the oppressor is around us and even within us,
while we strive to liberate ourselves through our mutual pedagogical
dialogue.
In Freirean practice, there is no such thing as a basic level, or an
advanced level. All that we can do is to begin a process of
“problematising”, beginning with education itself.
As a rule, we will use original authors, and not commentaries on their
original texts. In that spirit, the first of the chosen building blocks
is the second chapter of Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, here
supplemented with a glossary of “critical pedagogy” terms (the link to
the download is below). This text provides an opportunity to reflect
upon what you are trying to do by learning and teaching. You may ask
each other: What is political education for?
For the late Freire (pictured above), and for the Freireans of today,
all education is a political act and a social act; an act of liberation
and self-liberation.
The link given here is to the MS-Word download of the main text for
this week. Three supplementary (optional) reading texts are also given.
Click here to view the Index of the full ten-part course, plus optional
texts, all downloadable as MS-Word files.
Click here to download the text of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, C2, plus
Glossary and Pol Ed
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Posted By DomzaNet to Communist University on 1/13/2010 03:58:00 PM
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