<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Dear Trebor, Sergio and the IDC,<div><br><div>Thank you for bringing eloquent appreciations of Paolo Freire into our discussion of education. Posting to a listserve is still an act of will for me. I had to overcome a feeling of the banality of my experience in trying to apply Freire's work to my own pedagogy, but I decided to enter the discussion anyway. What drew me to post was the minimal use of the word dialogue in Giroux's op ed essay. It seemed to me that dialogic capacity was being treated as a given, a natural resource or even as a byproduct of striving for political agency. Furthermore, literacy of a sort is assumed in the pedagogy described. (FYI I have copied the instances in the text in which "dialogue" is used below.) However, I believe that this word is emphatically more productive and important for Freire than than the op ed essay implies. No word meant more to me in 1970 (re the 40th anniversary of the translation of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed into English) than "dialogue." I won't go into all the ways it was significant beyond my teaching. Freire (from afar) was one of several key figures in forging my understanding of what dialogue is.</div><div><div><br></div><div>How was I to apply a process to my university students that I imagined Freire to be addressing to more or less illiterate rural peasants and dispossessed peoples in a postcolonial situation? A key to making literacy meaningful as a goal was to bring the Brazilian students' practical knowledge of their own rural/urban life worlds into dialogue with the teacher and each other students by bringing oral and visual literacy into play. By bouncing sources, formats and ideas against each other (my vast simplification) in discourse, what might seem immanent and god-given becomes contigent and symbolic, one point of view among many. It is an Aha! moment toward subjectification and critical agency. (Again, my reduction for the purpose of brevity.) Believe it or not, I found and have found over the years, that many university students have not had that Aha! moment. Of course, literacy (as the comand of language in reading, but especially writing) is also an issue to some degree or other with a significant number of students in higher education. So, higher educators also need to go back to that fundamental situation of becoming literate in a way that promotes agency and being a subject in language.</div><div><br></div><div>Teaching entry level German--my first pedagogical task-- is a good example of both parroting back what the teacher says and generating sentences that are fundamental to confidence and becoming a speaking subject: My name is... What is yours? I was born in... on.... My father is a....; my mother does.... My favorite things are.... etc etc Eventually we were having a dialog about the most intimate aspects of our individual identities and loving it. Getting a sentence out was an accomplishment. Everyone was thrilled. In my subject courses I developed a way of drawing out the things that students loved to do or were most curious about so that their writing could develop from that. I found I could reach struggling students and help them to greatly improve the quality and critical awareness of their work. However, I never found the appropriate stance for me to take as a dialogue partner. I tended to subordinate the expression of my own ideas and beliefs too much in my quest to further dialogue and avoid lecturing in the old sense. My untutored approach was in tune with the collective wave of the period. I actually needed to be a full partner rather than a mediator, etc. (As an aside, my graduate student peers and I succeeded via protest in rewriting the curriculum of our university department to reflect our own views on pedagogy and subject matter. This was not uncommon in that period. However, the teaching staff remained the same and uncomfortable in their new skin--and people don't do what they should do, they do what they can do.) </div><div> </div></div><div>It is obvious that the life world on which contemporary college students draw has little resemblance to the practical skills of indigenous and mixed-race Brazilians of 40 years ago. Social lIteracy is vastly complicated by as much as eased by the advent of list serves (the most traditionally literate format), FaceBook, Twitter, etc. My key to evaluating the degree of subjectivity and agency in the discourse of a particular show, format or medium was to analyze the specifics of intercourse in terms of "dialogue". As I tried to explain in my work on television in the 1980's and '90's, mediated direct address is not the same thing as dialogue between peers face to face. The differences are as specific as they are fascinating and troubling and at least partially enabling. I also think that dialogue is an encounter with otherness--and that social media as discursive communities are often tacitly formed around economic, racial and gender fault lines of the "same", (Ditto lunch: Have you ever noticed the racial, gender and economic fault lines that appear when many U.S. student populations sit down to eat?) I could go on, but I am likely to be stating the obvious. My commitment to dialogue still fundamentally shapes my life, however near or far I strike from my goals. I felt a wave of emotion when I read the post on Freire--like seeing a bare root or a picture of where I lived 40 years ago. </div><div><br></div><div>Best,</div><div><br></div><div>Margaret </div><div>aka Maggie</div><div>University of California Santa Cruz</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>"Dialogue" cited from: <p class="article_source" style="display: inline !important; "><a target="_blank" href="http://www.truth-out.org/lessons-be-learned-from-paulo-freire-education-is-being-taken-over-mega-rich65363">Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed</a>, </p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; ">Lessons to Be Learned From Paulo Freire as Education Is Being Taken Over by the Mega Rich, </span>Tuesday 23 November 2010</div><div><br></div><div>....</div><div>"Under such circumstances, knowledge is not simply received by students,
but actively transformed, open to be challenged and related to the self
as an essential step toward agency, self-representation and learning how
to govern rather than simply be governed. At the same time, students
also learn how to engage others in critical dialogue and be held
accountable for their views.</div><div>........</div><div>To the contrary, it was about offering a way of thinking beyond the
seeming naturalness or inevitability of the current state of things,
challenging assumptions validated by "common sense," soaring beyond the
immediate confines of one's experiences, entering into a dialogue with
history and imagining a future that would not merely reproduce the
present.</div><div>...</div><div>Any pedagogy that calls itself Freirean must acknowledge this key
principle that our current knowledge is contingent on particular
historical contexts and political forces. For example, each classroom
will be affected by the different experiences students bring to the
class, the resources made available for classroom use, the relations of
governance bearing down on teacher-student relations, the authority
exercised by administrations regarding the boundaries of teacher
autonomy and the theoretical and political discourses used by teachers
to read and frame their responses to the diverse historical, economic
and cultural forces informing classroom dialogue.</div><div>.....</div><div>Politics was more than a gesture of translation, representation and
dialogue: to be effective, it had to be about creating the conditions
for people to become critical agents alive to the responsibilities of
democratic public life. </div><div>......</div><div><br></div><div><br><div><div>On Nov 24, 2010, at 10:03 PM, sergio basbaum wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div class="gmail_quote">Dear Trebor and IDCs,<div><br></div><div>It is amazing to see Freire's name invoked in this list.</div><div><br></div><div>Freire belongs to a great generation of Brazilian intelectuals and artists, who had courage to develop very original paths of thinking, and I count him with names like Celso Furtado, Darci Ribeiro, Helio Oiticica, Lygia Clark and Glauber Rocha, for example -- people who were very independent and pointed directions for Brazil to be a fair, creative and innovative society.</div> <div><br></div><div>Military dictatorship has dismounted this energy for sometime, and -- although the subject is quite complex --, younger generations inherited a cultural environment with quite low self-esteem, dominated, as it was, by (neo) liberal discourses that devoured the country's landscape during the 80's and 90's.</div> <div><br></div><div>It should not be counted as a coincidence that such names like Paulo Freire may be invoked at the same time as the country breathes new perspectives under the new visions and forces that have been animating the country in the last years.</div> <div><br></div><div>Education and learning are, first of all, a matter sense: people wants to live in a world which makes sense to them, and students learn immediately what makes sense in their lives -- anything you say in a classroom that connects with one's effort to make sense of her/his life will be remembered for a long time.</div> <div><br></div><div>Freire noticed anf formalized this, while interested in helping people to be autonomous individuals, and not just labor-force for a world order which makes sense just for others. </div><div><br></div> <div>In my modest opinion, one of the main challenges we have in this intense times we're living, is to build a world which is meaningful and makes sense in the most plural way for everybody. I doubt this is what's going on. But antyway, education and knowledge are certainly a matter of sense and not of neurons.</div> <div><br></div><div>best for all</div><div>s <div><div></div><div class="h5"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 2:17 PM, Trebor Scholz <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:scholzt@newschool.edu" target="_blank">scholzt@newschool.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Lessons to Be Learned From Paulo Freire as Education Is Being Taken Over<br> by the Mega Rich<br> <br> <<a href="http://www.truth-out.org/lessons-be-learned-from-paulo-freire-education-is-being-taken-over-mega-rich65363" target="_blank">http://www.truth-out.org/lessons-be-learned-from-paulo-freire-education-is-being-taken-over-mega-rich65363</a>><br> <br> <br> Tuesday 23 November 2010<br> by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed<br> <br> “For Freire, pedagogy was central to a formative culture that makes both<br> critical consciousness and social action possible. Pedagogy in this<br> sense connected learning to social change; it was a project and<br> provocation that challenged students to critically engage with the world<br> so they could act on it.”<br> <br> “What Freire made clear is that pedagogy at its best is not about<br> training in techniques and methods, nor does it involve coercion or<br> political indoctrination. Indeed, far from a mere method or an a priori<br> technique to be imposed on all students, education is a political and<br> moral practice that provides the knowledge, skills and social relations<br> that enable students to explore for themselves the possibilities of what<br> it means to be engaged citizens, while expanding and deepening their<br> participation in the promise of a substantive democracy.”<br> <br> “Critical pedagogy, for Freire, meant imagining literacy as not simply<br> the mastering of specific skills, but also as a mode of intervention, a<br> way of learning about and reading the word as a basis for intervening in<br> the world.”<br> <br> _______________________________________________<br> iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (<a href="http://distributedcreativity.org" target="_blank">distributedcreativity.org</a>)<br> <a href="mailto:iDC@mailman.thing.net" target="_blank">iDC@mailman.thing.net</a><br> <a href="https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc" target="_blank">https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc</a><br> <br> List Archive:<br> <a href="http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/" target="_blank">http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/</a><br> <br> iDC Photo Stream:<br> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/" target="_blank">http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/</a><br> <br> RSS feed:<br> <a href="http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc" target="_blank">http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc</a><br> <br> iDC Chat on Facebook:<br> <a href="http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647" target="_blank">http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647</a><br> <br> Share relevant URLs on <a href="http://Del.icio.us" target="_blank">Del.icio.us</a> by adding the tag iDCref</blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br></div></div>-- <br>-- Prof. Dr. Sérgio Roclaw Basbaum<br>-- Coord. Tecnologia e Mídias Digitais <br> -- Pós-Graduação Tec.da Inteligência e Design Digital - TIDD (PUC-SP)<br> </div> </div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>-- Prof. Dr. Sérgio Roclaw Basbaum<br>-- Coord. Tecnologia e Mídias Digitais <br>-- Pós-Graduação Tec.da Inteligência e Design Digital - TIDD (PUC-SP)<br> _______________________________________________<br>iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (distributedcreativity.org)<br><a href="mailto:iDC@mailman.thing.net">iDC@mailman.thing.net</a><br>https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc<br><br>List Archive:<br>http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/<br><br>iDC Photo Stream:<br>http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/<br><br>RSS feed:<br>http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc<br><br>iDC Chat on Facebook:<br>http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647<br><br>Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref</blockquote></div><br></div></div></body></html>