Dialogue, knowledge, and teacher-student relations: Freirean pedagogy in theory and practice

Comparative Education Review

Volumn 49, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 344-364

  Bartlett, Lesley ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 24944527030     PISSN: 00104086     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/430261     Document Type: Review

References (120)

1. For example, ActionAid's Reflect project represents an internationally renowned example of the implementation of Freirean-based literacy; see David Archer and S. Cottingham, Action Research Report on Reflect: The Experience of Three Pilot Projects in Uganda, Bangladesh and El Salvador (London: Overseas Development Association, 1996);
2. Julia Betts, "Literacies and Livelihood Strategies: Experience from Usulutan, El Salvador," International Journal of Educational Development 23, no. 3 (2003): 291-98;
3. Caroline Dyer and A. Choksi, "The Reflect Approach to Literacy: Some Issues of Method," Compare 28, no. 1 (1997): 75-87;
4. Anna Robinson-Pant, Why Eat Green Cucumbers at the Time of Dying? Exploring the Link between Women's Literacy and Development: A Nepal Perspective (Hamburg: UNESCO Institute of Education, 2001).
5. In Latin America, the term "popular" denotes the poor and working classes; popular education is rooted in a Marxist class critique. On popular education in Latin America, see Robert Arnove, Education and Revolution in Nicaragua (New York: Praeger, 1986),
6. and "Education as Contested Terrain in Nicaragua," Comparative Education Review 39, no. 1 (1995): 28-54;
7. Celso de Rui Beisiegel, Estado e educação popular (São Paulo: Pioneira, 1974);
8. Carlos Rodrigues Brandão, A questão política da educação popular (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1980);
9. Anthony Dewees and Stephen Klees, "Social Movements and the Transformation of National Policy: Street and Working Children in Brazil," Comparative Education Review 39, no. 1 (1995): 76-100;
10. Osmar Fávero, ed., Cultura popular, educação popular: Memória dos anos 60 (Rio de Janeiro: Edições Graal, 1983);
11. Marcy Fink, "Women and Popular Education in Latin America," in Women and Education in Latin America, ed. Nelly P. Stromquist (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1992), 171-93;
12. Marcy Fink and Robert F. Arnove, "Issues and Tensions in Popular Education in Latin America," International Journal of Educational Development 11, no. 3 (1991): 221-30;
13. José Willington Germano, Lendo e aprendendo: A campanha "de pé no chāo" (São Paulo: Cortez Editora, 1982);
14. John Hammond, Fighting to Learn: Popular Education and Guerrilla War in El Salvador (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998);
15. Sheryl Hirshon, And Also Teach Them to Read (Westport, CT: L. Hill, 1983);
16. Oscar Jara, Contributions to the History of Popular Education in Peru (Lima: Tarea, 1990);
17. Liam Kane, Popular Education and Social Change in Latin America (London: Latin American Bureau, 2001);
18. Thomas J. La Belle, Nonformal Education and Social Change in Latin America (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, University of California, Los Angeles, 1976);
19. Thomas LaBelle, Nonformal Education and the Poor in Latin America and the Caribbean: Stability, Reform, or Revolution? (New York: Praeger, 1986);
20. Robert Mackie, Literacy and Revolution: The Pedagogy of Paulo Freire (New York: Continuum, 1981);
21. Valerie Miller, Between Struggle and Hope: The Nicaraguan Literacy Crusade (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985);
22. Vanilda Pereira Paiva, Educação popular e educação de adultos (São Paulo: Edições Loyola, 1973);
23. Victoria Purcell-Gates and Robin Waterman, Now We Read, We See, We Speak: Portrait of Literacy Development in an Adult Freirean-Based Class (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2000);
24. Carlos Alberto Torres, The Politics of Nonformal Education in Latin America (New York: Praeger, 1990);
25. Carlos Alberto Torres and Adriana Puiggros, eds., Latin American Education: Comparative Perspectives (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997).
26. The literature on critical pedagogy is vast. For some key texts, see Henry A. Giroux, Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of teaming, Critical Studies in Education Series (Granby, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1988);
27. Henry A. Giroux and Peter McLaren, Critical Pedagogy, the State, and Cultural Struggle (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989);
28. Colin Lankshear and Peter McLaren, Critical Literacy: Politics, Praxis, and the Postmodern (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993);
29. Peter McLaren, Life in Schools: Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (New York: Longman, 1989);
30. Ira Shor, Critical Teaching and Everyday Life (Boston: South End, 1980);
31. Ira Shor, ed., Freire for the Classroom: A Sourcebook for Liberatory Teaching (Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1987).
32. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Continuum, 1990), 76. Freire warned that true dialogue can only occur within egalitarian, respectful relations: "Dialogue cannot occur between those who want to name the world and those who do not wish this naming-between those who deny other men the right to speak their word and those whose right to speak has been denied to them. Those who have been denied their primordial right to speak their word must first reclaim and prevent the continuation of this dehumanizing aggression" (76).
33. Freire as quoted in Peter Roberts, Education, Literacy, and Humanization: Exploring the Work of Paulo Freire, Critical Studies in Education and Culture Series (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 2000), 42.
34. Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1987), 41.
35. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 58.
36. Freire and Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World, 41.
37. Ibid., 151.
38. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 85.
39. Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness (New York: Continuum, 1973), 34-35;
40. see also Paulo Freire, Pedagogy in Process (New York: Seabury, 1978), 51.
41. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 77-78.
42. Ibid., 77 n. 4.
43. Ibid., 53.
44. Moacir Gadotti, Reading Paulo Freire: His Life and Work (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 50.
45. Paulo Freire, Moacir Gadotti, and Sérgio Guimarães, Pedagogia: Diálogo e conflito (São Paulo: Cortez, 1985), 76.
46. See also Paulo Freire and Ira Shor, Medo e ousadia: O cotidiano do professor (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1987);
47. Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990);
48. Ira Shor and Caroline Pari, eds., Critical Literacy in Action: Writing Words, Changing Worlds (Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999).
49. World Bank, "Northeast Rural Poverty Alleviation Program, Paraíba, Brazil," staff appraisal report no. 16757, October 23, 1997.
50. Census data from Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domiclios (PNAD), 2001.
51. See Fãvero, Cultura popular, educação popular: Memória dos anos 60;
52. Calazans Fernandas and Antonia Terra, 40 horas de esperança: O método Paulo Freire; Política e pedagogia na experiência de angicos (São Paulo: Editera Ática, 1994);
53. Germano, Lendo e aprendendo;
54. Afonso Celso Scocuglia, A história da alfabetização política na paraíba dos anos sessenta (Recife: Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, 1997).
55. As Beisiegel argues, however, the literacy movement never regained the momentum it had built in the early 1960s. See Celso de Rui Beisiegel, Política e educação popular: A teoria e a pratica de Paulo Freire no Brasil (São Paulo: Editora Atica, 1982).
56. In keeping with anthropological convention, all names of places beyond the city level and people are pseudonyms.
57. For more information on methods and more background on each field site, see Lesley Bartlett, "Literacy Shame and Competing Educational Projects in Contemporary Brazil" (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001).
58. For critical engagements with Freire's work by Brazilian educational scholars, feminists, and critical pedagogues, see Celso de Rui Beisiegel, Política e educação popular;
59. Diana Coben, Radical Heroes: Gramsci, Freire, and the Politics of Adult Education (New York: Garland, 1998);
60. Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Why Doesn't This Feel Empowering? Working through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy," Harvard Educational Review 59, no. 3 (1989): 297-324;
61. Jennifer Gore, The Struggle for Pedagogies (New York: Routledge, 1993);
62. Jennifer Gore and Carmen Luke, eds., Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 1992);
63. Colin Lankshear and Peter McLaren, Critical Literacy;
64. Peter McLaren and Colin Lankshear, Politics of Liberation: Paths from Freire (New York: Routledge, 1994);
65. Peter McLaren and Peter Leonard, eds., Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter (New York: Routledge, 1993);
66. Maria Pilar O'Cadiz, Pia Wong, and Carlos Alberto Torres, Education and Democracy: Paulo Freire, Social Movements, and Educational Reform in São Paulo (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998);
67. Vanilda Pereira Paiva, Educação popular e educação de adultor,
68. Vanilda Pereira Paiva, Paulo Freire e o nacionalismo-desenvolvimentista (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, Edições UFC, 1980);
69. Daniel Schugurensky, "The Legacy of Paulo Freire: A Critical Review of His Contributions," Convergence 31, nos. 1/2 (1998): 17-29;
70. Ira Shor and Caroline Pari, Critical Literacy in Action;
71. Paul V. Taylor, The Texts of Paulo Freire (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1993);
72. Kathleen Weiler, "Myths of Paulo Freire," Educational Theory 46, no. 3 (1996): 353-71;
73. Frank Youngman, Adult Education and Socialist Pedagogy (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1986).
74. Quotations from ethnographic materials were translated from the Portuguese to English by the author and then checked by a bilingual Brazilian who taught English in Rio de Janeiro and now teaches Portuguese in the United States.
75. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1972).
76. In reflecting on Rita's interview, I was struck by her sense of social distance from these students. Rita lived in Cruz, the same neighborhood as her students, less than 200 hundred yards away, but Rita lived in a brick house on the flat, top part of the hill, the part with a school, a small grocer, a church, a bus stop, and (dirt) roads. Rita was schooled, as were her children, and she worked with her mind. In contrast, her students lived "down the hill" in cramped, part brick, part daub-and-wattle houses, wedged between the railroad tracks and the occasionally flooded, mosquito-infested mangrove swamp. Their parents foraged the mangrove for fish and crabs to sell or worked in blue-collar jobs as maids or construction workers (if they were lucky enough to have jobs). This social distance called into question the NGO conviction that working-class teachers were like organic intellectuals who felt "in the flesh," as they would say, the problems of their students, or that they were so totally aware of and immersed in their "students' reality." Indeed, this romantic notion of the organic intellectual was the reason that both Vida and Community Works insisted on hiring local teachers, often on the advice of local residents. While these teachers certainly knew more about local culture than the public school teachers, who bused in and out every day, there was still a significant social, economic, and educational distance between these teachers and their students.
77. I elaborate this point in Lesley Bartlett, "Shaming as Education: Literacy, Language Ideologies, and the Politics of Emotion in Brazil" (unpublished manuscript, Columbia University, 2005).
78. Here, I borrow the idea of emotional labor from Arlie Hochschild's feminist analysis of emotion work among flight attendants and other categories of workers; see Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
79. My participant observation in a variety of public school adult literacy classrooms confirmed that, while teachers were usually not overtly rude or disrespectful to students, too often they publicly denigrated their students' abilities.
80. Michael W. Apple, Teachers and Texts: A Political Economy of Class and Gender Relations in Education (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).
81. Megan Boler, Feeling Power: Emotions and Education (New York: Routledge, 1999).
82. See Lesley Bartlett, "Women Teaching Class: Emotional Labor in Brazilian Literacy Classes," Anthropology of Work Review 22, no. 3 (2001): 22-26.
83. Rita suggested that including discussions about objects or information that (economically) were beyond her students' reach might make them feel less "secure." In retrospect, I can think of two plausible explanations for this emphasis. Perhaps Rita felt students should have personal experience of something in order to have knowledge about it; this was a common assumption in Freirean NGOs. Or perhaps she was trying to avoid presenting the experiences of the wealthy and upper middle classes as "normal"; this would be consistent with the Freirean critique of hegemony.
84. See, e.g., Schugurensky, "The Legacy of Paulo Freire."
85. This topic has received considerable focus in the literature on adult learning. See, e.g., David Boud and Nod Miller, eds., Working with Experience (New York: Routledge, 1996);
86. Sharan Merriam and Rosemary Caffarella, Leaning in Adulthood: A Comprehensive Guide (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999);
87. Jack Mezirow, Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991);
88. Peter Reason, "Human Inquiry as Discipline and Practice," in Participation in Human Inquiry, ed. Peter Reason (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), 40-56.
89. See Lesley Bartlett, "Women Teaching Class: Emotional Labor in Brazilian Literacy Classes," Anthropology of Work Review 22, no. 3 (2001): 22-26.
90. See, e.g., Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
91. Feminist scholars, in particular, have critiqued Freire's privileging of class. See Gore, The Struggle for Pedagogies;
92. Gore and Luke, Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy.
93. Thomas Popkewitz, ed., Changing Patterns of Power: Social Regulation and Teacher Education Reform (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 16-17.
94. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980).
95. Popkewitz, Changing Patterns of Power, 17.
96. See Guadalupe Valdés, Con respeto: Bridging the Differences between Culturally Diverse Families and Schools (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996).
97. See also Angela Valenzuela, Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).
98. George J. Sefa Dei, Budd Hall, and Dorothy Goldin Rosenberg, eds., Indigenous Knowledges in Global Contexts: Multiple Readings of Our World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000);
99. Ruth Hayhoe and Julia Pan, eds., Knowledge across Cultures: A Contribution to Dialogue among Civilizations (Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Center, University of Hong Kong, 2001).
100. Bradley Cook, "Islamic versus Western Conceptions of Education: Reflections on Egypt,"
101. and Linda King, "Learning through the Soul: Concepts Relating to Learning and Knowledge in the Mayan Cultures of Mexico," International Review of Education 45, nos. 3/4 (1999): 339-58, 367-70;
102. Timothy Reagan, Non-Western Educational Traditions: Alternative Approaches to Educational Thought and Practice (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2000).
103. Hayhoe and Pan, Knowledge across Cultures;
104. King, "Learning through the Soul";
105. Ladislaus Semali and Joe L. Kincheloe, eds., What Is Indigenous Knowledge? Voices from the Academy (New York: Falmer, 1999).
106. Rodney Reynar, "Indigenous People's Knowledge and Education: A Tool for Development," in Semali and Kincheloe, What Is Indigenous Knowledge? Voices from the Academy, 285-304;
107. Paul Sillitoe, Alan Bicker, and Johan Pottier, eds., Participating in Development: Approaches to Indigenous Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 2002).
108. See, e.g., the case studies listed in the best practices database run cooperatively by the Netherlands Organization for International Cooperation in Higher Education Indigenous Knowledge Unit and UNESCO's Management of Social Transformations Programme at http://www.unesco.org/most/bpikreg.htm. 48 These efforts have been supported by international conferences, the World Bank's Indigenous Knowledge Program (http://www.worldbank.org/afr/ik/), UNESCO's Database of Best Practices (http://www.unesco.org/most/bpindi.htm), newsletters such as Indigenous Knowledge World Wide (http://www.nuffic.nl/ik-pages/ikww), and the development of Indigenous Knowledge Resource Centers (http://www.unesco.org/most/bpiklist.htm).
109. Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000);
110. Paul Sillitoe, "Participant Observation to Participatory Development: Making Anthropology Work," in Sillitoe et al., Participating in Development: Approaches to Indigenous Knowledge, 1-23.
111. For more information on these approaches, see Chris Argyris, Robert Putnam, and Diana Smith, Action Science (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1985);
112. Chris Argyris and Donald Schon, Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1974);
113. Davydd Greenwood and Morten Levin, Introduction to Action Research (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998);
114. John Bray et al., Collaborative Inquiry in Practice: Action, Reflection, and Making Meaning (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000);
115. Robert Chambers, Rural Development: Putting the Last First (New York: Wiley, 1983),
116. and Whose Reality Counts? Putting the First Last (London: ITDG, 1997);
117. Orlando Fals-Borda and M. A. Rahman, eds., Action and Knowledge: Breaking the Monopoly with Participatory Action Research (New York: Apex, 1991).
118. Indeed, development agents of many varieties are using the notion of indigenous knowledge in a way that parallels the development industry's historical and continued use of the notion of culture as either "cause" or "cure" of particular problems. As Frances Vavrus argued, this tendency to blame culture and traditional beliefs for development problems developed in the colonial period and continues in contemporary development discourse; see Frances Vavrus, Desire and Decline: Schooling amid Crisis in Tanzania (New York: Peter Lang, 2003). Alternative development discourse tends to err on the side of praise, viewing indigenous knowl
119. edge as a type of cure for development problems. In short, efforts to define indigenous or traditional knowledge parallel debates about culture to a great extent, in some cases using the words interchangeably.
120. On the influential argument that mass education has created a homogeneous schooling experience around the world, see Francsico Ramirez and John Meyer, "The World Institutionalization of Education," in Discourse Formation in Comparative Education, ed. Jurgen Schriewer (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 111-32.