Myths of paulo freire

Educational Theory

Volumn 46, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 353-371

  Weiler, Kathleen ^a  

^a TUFTS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0000492942     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.1996.00353.x     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. Paulo Freire, as quoted in Moacir Gadotti, Reading Paulo Freire: His Life and Work (Albany: Stace University of New York Press, 1994), 159-60.
2. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra B. Ramos (New York: Continuum, 1971).
3. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, trans. Robert Barr (New York: Continuum, 1994).
4. Until recently, most English speaking students of Freire have relied on Dennis Collins's brief Paulo Freire: His Life Works and Thought (New York: Paulist Press, 1977[prCynthia Brown's even briefer account of the Brazilian literacy campaign, Literacy in Thirty Hours: Paulo Freire's Process in North East Brazil (London: Readers and Writers Cooperative, 1975).
5. Peter McLaren and Peter Leonard, Paulo Freire A Critical Encounter (New York: Routledge, 1993
6. Peter McLaren and Colin Lankshear, Politics of Liberation: Paths from Freire (New York: Routledge, 1994)
7. Gadotti, Reading Paulo Freire; John Elias, Paulo Freire: Pedagogue of Revolution (Melbourne, Fla.: Krieger Publishing Company, 1994)
8. Paul Taylor, The Texts of Paulo Freire (New York: Open University Press, 1993)
9. These book will be referred to as CE, PL, RPF, PF, and TPF, respectively, with page numbers in the text for all subsequent citations.
10. Freire discusses this in Paulo Freire and Ira Shor, A Pedagogy of Liberation (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1987), 29.
11. Freire, The Politics of Education (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1985), 175.
12. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the City (New York: Continuum, 1993), 100.
13. Freire's account of his work at SESI in his recent book Pedagogy of Hope includes a number of anecdotes from this period, but does not make clear the nature of his work or the ultimate goals of the organization.
14. Paolo Freire, Pedagogy in Process: The Letters from Guinea Bissau, trans. Carmen Hunter (New York: Continuum, 1970).
15. Freire, Pedagogy of the City, 45.
16. It is interesting to compare the conditions Freire describes with those described in U.S. cities by Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities (New York: Crown Publishers, 1991).
17. According to Torres, Freire "instituted drastic changes in municipal education, including a comprehen sive curriculum reform, new models of school management through the implementation of school councils-compromising teachers, principals, parents and government officials-and a movement for literacy training, MOVA-Sao Paulo, built on participative planning and delivery with support from non-governmental organizations and social movements" 102.
18. Paulo Freire and Donald Macedo, Literacy: Reading the World and the World.(South Hadley, Mass: Bergin and Garve, 1887)
19. Freire and Shor, Pediology of Liberation
20. Paulo Freire and Myles Horton, We Make the Road by Walking (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990)
21. Paulo Freire and Antonio Faundez, Learning to Question: A Pedalogy of Liberation (New York: continuum, 1989)
22. Miguel Escober, Alfredo Fernadez, and Gilberto Guevara-Niebla with Paulo Freire, Paulo Freire on Higher Education (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994)
23. An Exception is Freire, Politics of Education, which is Primarily a collection of previously published review and articles.
24. Robert Mackie, Literacy and Revolution (ed., London: Pluto Press, 1980).
25. Mounier, Be Not Afraid (London: Rodcliff, 1951).
26. See Collins, Paulo Freire: His Life and Thought for a discussion of the humanistic qualities of Freire's early work. Collins points out that Freire's conception of "man" is consistent with both Greek philosophy and the Christian tradition.
27. A number of other critics have made this point. See, for example, Ofelia Shutte, Cultural Identity and Social Liberation in Latin American Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993)
28. Daniel Shipani also makes this argument that Freire sees the world as "a moralistic picture of good and evil depicted in terms of the struggle between the oppressed and the oppressors.
29. Daniel Shipani, Conscientization and Creativity (London: University Press of America, 1984), 23.
30. Probably the best know of these was Peter Berger's critical review Januvary, "The False Consciousness of Consciousness Raising,"Worldview (1975): 33-38.
31. Jennifer Gore, The Struggle for Pedagogies (New York: Routledge) for a detailed critique of the disciplinary quality of critical pedagogies in general as regimes of truth.1993
32. A visual example of the iconic use of Freirean pedagogy can be seen in the use of photographs as evidence In Gadotti's Reading Paulo Freire, In one photograph, a group of about twenty people is sitting on the ground of a barren plain. All of the men are Black, most dressed in tribal clothing, although four men are rearing Western style shirts. One of these four men is speaking; next to him is the only woman in the group, a White woman who is also wearing Western clothing. The caption reads: "This Photo was sent to Paulo Freire in 1986 by one of his readers, an educator who applied his ideas in approximately 80 classes with the nomads [sic] people of the desert of Kenya, Gadotti, Reading Paulo Freire, xxi. What are we to make of this image? Who is the "educator who applied his ideas?" What are these people speaking of? What is the relation of modernity and traditional culture? What are the dynamics of race and gender? I mention this photograph because it seems to capture visually one of the major problems in Freire's own thought and the way he frequently has been used: its meaning is expressed as an unproblematic icon. As readers, we are invited to read this image in one way, as evidence of a liberatory and revolutionary pedagogy. We are not invited to consider other possible readings or to reflect upon the process in which meaning is constructed.
33. In my own essay in the McLaren and Lankshear collection, I make a similar criticism of Freire's implicit assumptions in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that the oppressed and the illiterate, the potential revolutionary class, are men.
34. The circumstance of the production of this text are somewhat unclear. There is some evidence that this is a transcript of an exchange between Macedo and Freire that actually took place in the summer of 1991, when Freire was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, participating in a conference at Lesley College. If so, it was before Freire could have read any of the essays in this collection. Macedo's introductory statement here, which includes quotations from an essay I wrote, could not have been a part of an interview conducted in 1991, since the passages quoted were not even written at that time. By framing the interview with reference to a later critique, Macedo provides a more sophisticated meaning to Freire's statements in this interview, and implies that Freire has read feminist analysis of his work, when it is not at all clear that this is the case.