Workshop 3: Identify the main contributors in Didactics

Paulo Freire

1.      What is the historical context of this character?

The historical context in which Paulo Freire was involved was in a period of authoritarianism and protectionism, with paternalistic solutions emerging from silence Brazilian magical consciousness, where there is no society in dialogue and critical capacity that would allow it to discharge its cultural subjugation, where relationships are divided by economic differences.

2.      Describe the character. Mention the main aspects of his life

Freire was born September 19, 1921 to a middle class family in Recife, Brazil. He became familiar with poverty and hunger during the Great Depression of the 1930s. His social life revolved around playing pick-up football with other poor children, from whom he learned a great deal. These experiences would shape his concerns for the poor and would help to construct his particular educational viewpoint, stated that poverty and hunger severely affected his ability to learn. Freire enrolled at Law School at the University of Recife in 1943. He also studied philosophy, more specifically phenomenology, and the psychology of language. He never actually practiced law but instead worked as a teacher in secondary schools teaching Portuguese. In 1944, he married Elza Maia Costa de Oliveira and had five children. In 1946, Freire was appointed Director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in the state of Pernambuco. In 1961, he was appointed director of the Department of Cultural Extension of Recife University, and in 1962 he had the first opportunity for significant application of his theories, when 300 sugarcane workers were taught to read and write in just 45 days. In 1964, a military coup put an end to that effort. Freire was imprisoned as a traitor for 70 days. After a brief exile in Bolivia, Freire worked in Chile for five years for the Christian Democratic Agrarian Reform Movement and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In 1967, Freire published his first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom. He followed this with his most famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, first published in Portuguese in 1968. After a year in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, Freire moved to Geneva, Switzerland to work as a special education advisor to the World Council of Churches. During this time Freire acted as an advisor on education reform in former Portuguese colonies in Africa, particularly Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. In 1986, his wife Elza died. Freire married Maria Araújo Freire, and died of heart failure on May 2, 1997 in São Paulo.

3.      What does this character propound in education?

Freire's most well-known work is Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). Throughout this and subsequent books, he argues for system of education that emphasizes learning as an act of culture and freedom. He is most well-known for concepts such as "Banking" Education, in which passive learners have pre-selected knowledge deposited in their minds; "Conscientization", a process by which the learner advances towards critical consciousness; the "Culture of Silence", in which dominated individuals lose the means by which to critically respond to the culture that is forced on them by a dominant culture. Other important concepts developed by Freire include: "Dialectic", "Empowerment", "Generative Themes/Words", "Humanization", "Liberatory Education", "Mystification", "Praxis", "Problematization", and "Transformation of the World".

4.      What is the role of the teacher in his model?

According to Freire, the role of the teacher or educator is to: break down the barrier between teacher and taught; speak the ‘same language’ as the learner; be aware of how they construct their world of learning; be aware of learning needs; start from where the learners are; encourage them to learn and explore their own experiences; Teachers as cultural workers. Freire claims that the job of a teacher is a joyful and rigorous career, and that they themselves are also learners. He proclaimed that he would never feel ashamed of being a teacher and states that teachers must not act as parents to their students.

5.      What is the role of the student in his model?

Dialoguers (students/teachers) approach their acts of knowing as grounded in individual   experience and circumstance. Learners or students make connections between their own conditions and the conditions produced through the making of reality. Learners/Dialoguers consider the ways that they can shape this reality through their methods of knowing. This new reality is collective, shared, and shifting. Learners develop literacy skills that put their ideas into print, thus giving potency to the act of knowing. Finally, learners identify the myths dominant discourse and work to destabilize these myths, ending the cycle of oppression.

6.      Give an example of his model in a specific situation

The school is cited in Viña del Mar, were most of the students are native speakers of Spanish and a few native speakers of other languages. The problem-posing method used to frame the lesson combines listening, dialogue, and action in flexible ways to promote English literacy.

Listening: Hearing the story. Here the teacher introduces social and historical information related to the topic, and then the teacher suggests individual reflective journaling activities to reacquaint students with their own past experiences.  At the begging of the lesson the teacher may use some examples of her own life to make students think about describing an event from their past. She can show some pictures of her when she was a child and tell the class her own story when she moved (immigrate) from the south to Viña del Mar.

Dialogue: Telling the story. After telling her story, she shows a drawing on a paper that visually tells her story. She asks them to suggest sentences using the past tense they’ve been working on to explain the picture. This generates the language they will use to tell their own stories during the next phase of the assignment.

Action: Your story assignment.  The teacher gives a lesson guide instructing them to:

·         Write a story about your childhood in the past tense  and in your first language

·         Draw a picture of it

·         Tell your story in English

·         Rewrite  your story in English

·         Rewrite it now in present tense

·         Hand everything in to your teacher

Here, students create compositions in their native language. Then they use English to explain what they wrote in their native language and the rewrite it in English.  The problem-posing method of using listening, dialogue, and action combines reflective thinking, information gathering, collaborative decision making, and personal learning choices to teach English to language learners. This provides a safe field where students learn English using their own languages, culture and traditions showing their personal connections and the most important of all, having meaningful learning.

Andres Brenner

Constanza Martinez

Franco Valdés