Viktoriia Dudar
Professor Barbara Gleason
Adult Language and Literacy
20 April 2010
Zamel, Vivian. “Engaging Students in Writing-To-Learn: Promoting Language and Literacy Across the Curriculum.” JBW: Journal of Basic Writing 19.2 (2000): 3-21. Print.
Engaging Students in Writing-To-Learn is a version of the talk about what writing-to-learn pedagogy represents that Vivian Zamel, Professor of English and Director of the English as a Second Language Program at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, gave at a faculty development event. She was invited to advise the faculty of the City University of New York about the writing-across-the-curriculum initiative that they undertook for the first time in the 1999-2000 academic year. In her article, Zamel addresses difficulties with writing that diverse students face because they are not native speakers of English, and/or they are unfamiliar with academic writing discourse. She describes the range of different writing activities that can help students to acquire the content of a subject through writing and to develop students’ writing and reading skills. Also, she emphasizes the importance of the helpful feedback to the students’ writing assignments that should be an effective vehicle of improvement, but not a destructive critique.
Zamel is trying to dismiss the widely accepted assumption that English or other writing based courses are designed to teach language and writing in order to prepare students for other disciplines. This belief indicates that many professors do not recognize their courses as meaningful contexts in which language can be acquired because they think that students should have learned a language before. Zamel believes that students can acquire a language and develop their writing and reading skills only if they are engaged in the complex ideas of the course, are invited to participate in discussions, and are given opportunities to use different kinds of writing for reflection, articulation of their ideas and thought, and trying out the academic language. Consequently, she regards each classroom as a separate culture with its own expectations and conventions that can be acquired only through meaningful work that is built on students’ experiences and knowledge(8). Thus, Zamel encourages the faculty to look at learning as an ongoing and evolving process that can be supported by a meaningful course work, allowing students to grow through writing.
To better understand students’ needs and challenges with writing, Zamel asked students to reflect on their difficulties while composing in English. Students’ responses indicated that they were well aware about their needs as writers and pointed out the range of typical issues with writing, such as being too careful with choosing words, inability to express their thoughts, intrusion of other language when thinking about a given topic, and unfamiliarity with a given topic. Besides, students identified patience and encouragement of their teachers as the key factors of their success and asked for more explicit directions for assignments and course expectations. Students were afraid that their learning progress was underestimated because of their writing, sometimes confusing and full of errors (5).
These findings were supported and deepened by two case studies of students whom Zamel followed through the courses across the curriculum. For example, Martha, a student from Columbia who majored in biology, suffered because writing was not a part of her science courses. Consequently, she could not express her thoughts, questions, and confusions about the content, and that undermined her learning of the new subjects and interest in them. “There was not a drop of motivation to enjoy my journey of learning. I felt illiterate at the end of the semester. I did not learn a single new word,” (6) reflects Martha on her experiences. On the other hand, Motoko, a student from Japan who majored in sociology, had a successful experience in her philosophy course where a professor used writing assignments extensively. Although she was still making mistakes in her writing, Motoko felt that she was given an opportunity to build her knowledge on the previous experiences and to actively engage into subject discourse through writing (7). Zamel’s research demonstrates that writing is an effective tool that helps students to acquire academic vocabulary as well as the content of the courses across the curriculum.
Zamel argues that the multiple opportunities for writing help students to explain the course material to themselves, to establish connections between their experiences and learned information, and to discover their own thinking. She proposes a range of writing-to-learn assignments that can be easily incorporated into different classrooms. For example, a “one minute paper” written at the end of the class describing learned topics and points of confusion can be a source of establishing students’ needs and direction of future instruction. Also, journal assignments can help students to develop their critical thinking and active reading when they are responding in written form to course readings or particular questions. Another way to engage students in the meaningful use of language is a double-entry journal that gives an opportunity to respond to the passages that drew students’ attention. Through copying short passages of text in one column and writing their responses in another, students connect to their readings, learn academic language, and compile different course readings together. Besides, ungraded in-class writing can help students to construct their point of view and become an active participant of a class discussion. As a result of writing-to-learn assignments, students begin to understand that reading is not a passive activity, but rather “literally a process of composing” (13).
In addition to writing-to-learn assignments, the teacher’s explicit expectations about the course and a constructive feedback to students’ writing can promote learning. Zamel suggests teachers to test their assignments by asking questions about the purpose of writing or reading, expectations about the students work, the extend of guidance provided to students. The deep analysis of the task and explicitly stated requirements can prevent assignment ambiguity and students’ difficulties with writing. Furthermore, the opportunity to draft and revise allows students to think and to write about their ideas in complex ways. On the other hand, it helps teachers to give profound feedback that serves to improve students’ writing (15). Zamels states that teachers’ responses to students’ writing in the form of error correction are ineffective and do not contribute to their progress over the period of time. She believes that the teachers’ goal is the reduction of mistakes (that very often are the signs of progress), but not their entire elimination because language acquisition is a multi-dimensional, complex, and context-dependant process. The mistakes can be reduced through error instruction, and the writing can be improved thorough asking students to review their own writing and clarify their ideas and thoughts rather than simply insert teachers’ markings in their work (16). For example, the samples of Edwin’s writing clearly show his progress as a writer as he is able to articulate his ideas more clearly while using academic language discourse.
In conclusion, Zamel’s article emphasizes the importance of writing across the curriculum as it engages students into the rich and interesting world of ideas, allows them to take risks with learning, promotes their growth as critical thinkers and active readers, and helps them to acquire the language of academia. Furthermore, professors’ understanding of learning as an ongoing process, multiple opportunities to write for understanding and sharing ideas, time for drafting and revising, instructive and meaningful feedback can greatly contribute to students’ academic success. Martha highly appreciated and supported the importance of writing in her own learning, “[w]riting about all these experiences helped me be a resilient learner and to reclaim my voice and love for learning in a foreign country. It is like a metamorphosis with no ending…” (20).
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Monday, April 12, 2010
My Commentaries from the Course Blog
Consortium for Worker Education Class Visit
I really enjoyed our trip to the Consortium for Worker Education and our meeting with Joe McDermott. I was impressed by his liveliness, curiosity, and dedication to the people of New York. The only fact of placing seven thousand people into jobs for the last two years says a lot.
He mentioned the life-long learning movement that started in the late 1970s. I think that the philosophy of CWE is very close to what the movement advocates, namely "the freedom, opportunity and resources for self-learners of all ages, with their families and in community, to choose to learn what they want, when they want and how they want -- to self-learn" (http://www.creatinglearningcommunities.org/resources/lifelonglearning.htm). I looked at the description of the courses that are available at CWE, and they are incredibly useful and address a whole range of different needs starting form basic skills, computer literacy, service job training to French conversation-oriented classes and leadership development workshop.
Finally, it was pleasant to meet the man who helped to "save" our program. Thank you for this great opportunity.
Lives on the Boundary by Mike Rose
I greatly enjoyed reading Lives on the Boundary because it is abundant in vivid images, lively and rich language, meaningful examples, and deep insights into the American education. I found many answers in Rose’s narrative about the educational opportunities for diverse student population, accessibility of education, students’ needs and the ways they can be fulfilled. The chapter on “The Politics of Remediation” helped me to understand the importance of tutorial centers and basic writing courses as effective means to address students’ difficulties with the required work of academia.
Also, I was struck by the politics of educational institutions that believed (and I suspect some of educators still believe nowadays) that “remedial “ courses and tutorial centers only waste the money on educating those “intellectually unwashed” students who do not deserve to be in college anyway. Rose describes the situation when the Tutorial center was almost closed under this assumption –it was regarded as the place unworthy to be housed in the university walls. I appreciate the struggles of many educators who for the last decades were working hard to defend students’ human right on education. It is sad that very often the ground for assumptions about diverse students with different backgrounds, languages and cultures, first generation students, adult students, single parents students is built on false believes, such as test scores and different measurements that are not properly analyzed. Besides, educators could not find a balance between the research and teaching parts of the academia and regarded the latter as a less intellectual thing to do. Thus, these attitudes created a situation in which the real needs of students – especially freshmen – are overlooked.
I agree with Rose that every person has an ability to succeed in learning if his/her needs and difficulties with academic work are understood and addressed. Rose himself is an illustrative example of that belief because he could only succeed in his studying with the help of responsive and sensitive professors that knew what he was missing, believed in his abilities, and were willing to help. So, the first step to overcome “literary crisis” is to understand the multiple reasons of students difficulties with learning, such as different belief system (Lucia’s issues with reading Szasz), misunderstanding of academic conventions (Marita’s plagiarism), fear to recognize one’s difficulties and shyness to ask for help (students that always succeeded before), loneliness and distance between professors and students (Kathy’s experience), different kind of skills that were required (thinking and applying knowledge, but not mere memorization), different from mainstream cultures, languages , and backgrounds (Rose’s own example), and different students expectations about the content of the courses. Furthermore, in order to help students to succeed, all professors should understand that they play an important and sometimes crucial role in the lives of their students who regard them as role models and are looking for help in the difficult journey of learning that they had courage to undertake.
Preparing for Success
“Adult educator Malcolm Knowles stressed the importance of providing instruction that addresses the needs and interests of adult learners. In his introduction to "Andragogy in Action" (1984), he presents an instructional model that builds on the following assumptions:
* Adults are self-directed learners.
* Adults have a rich reservoir of experience that can serve as a resource for learning.
* Since adults' readiness to learn is frequently affected by their need to know or do something, they tend to have a life-centered, task-centered, or problem-centered orientation to learning as opposed to a subject-matter orientation.
* Adults are generally motivated to learn due to internal or intrinsic factors (such as being able to help their children with homework) as opposed to external or extrinsic forces (such as a raise in salary)" (17).
I found the ideas of Knowles to be very important to keep in mind when teaching adults because his assumptions indicate how different children and adults are as students. Consequently, teaching adults requires different approaches that would take into account their experiences, needs, and motivation. The traditional content-centered classroom would not work for adults because it does not teach the skills that are needed right away in their workplace, at home, and in the community life. I think that it is central for adult education to teach how to learn, communicate, plan, organize, solve problems etc., rather than "deposit" simple and isolated facts or information. For example, we were talking already how much better the combined basic skills and vocational training programs work for adults who can see the real results in their lives.
It is interesting that adult learners are motivated by intrinsic factors rather than instrumental or extrinsic forces. I always thought that the most important reasons for learning would be to get a better job or to get a raise in salary etc., but not such personal matters as helping children with their homework.
I also looked for the definition of the word "andragogy," and found that it is defined as the process of engaging adult learners in the structure of the learning experience. The term is derived from the Greek word “andros” which is translated as “adult man” and “ago” which means “to lead." Consequently, andragogy means adult leading that is opposite to pedagogy which literally means child leading. The term “andragogy” was first used by Alexander Kapp, a German educator, in the 19th century, but only later it has been developed as a theory by Malcolm Knowles who published “The modern practice of adult education: Andragogy versus pedagogy”(1970).
It is a very interesting topic. You can find more information at http://www.uni-bamberg.de/fileadmin/andragogik/08/andragogik/andragogy/index.htm
Ruben Rangel’s Class
Thanks to Prof. Rangel for visiting us last Tuesday. I enjoyed the Freirean classroom in practice, but I found it a little intense because the True Word activity provoked us to open up and to talk about the conflicting situations in our lives. It felt like a counseling session in the positive way of the word that helped to identify where I am now and where I want to be. Besides, it created the sense of communion and made us "partners in crime" - the crime of learning together and from each other, but not individualistically.
I definitely see the place for this activity in my classroom as well as other types of Freirean exercises. I believe that any curriculum can be based on the problem-posing model of education even if some particular material is required to be taught. If a teacher believes in the horizontal dialog and sees students as partners in learning, then his/her teaching style will definitely reflect this philosophy.
Freire’s Ideas about Consciousness
Last semester I visited the Literacy Workshop, presented by Michael Orzechowski. Although we talked about Information Literacy, Freirean kinds of consciousness created a base for our discussion.
In the "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," Paulo Freire talks about a lack of a critical understanding of the reality by the oppressed that makes them live in an imaginary world imposed by others. Only through the problem-posing education the oppressed can awake from that sleep in order to transform their reality and become critical thinkers with critical consciousness. Nowadays, critical thinking abilities seem to be valued in our society. However, we still hear words like "it must be true because they said it on TV" or "because it is written in that book." And how about the Internet, the reliable and unreliable sources of information?
In the "Education for Critical Consciousness," he identifies naive, magical, and critical consciousness. Orzechowski gave us an interesting handout with the examples of each one.
"In magical consciousness a person tends to feel fatalistic, needing to submit to some higher power, and rational considerations of causality are ignored."
For example:
"We saw what was happening for years, for decades [referring to current economic crisis], but we ignored or shrugged it off, preferring to imagine that we weren't really had it over the falls. The US auto industry has been in deep trouble for more than a quarter century[...]Even smart, proudly rational people engaged in magical thinking, acting as if the new power of the Internet and its New Economy would miraculously make everything copacetic again. We all clapped our hands and believed in fairies." Kurt Andersen, "That was Then and This is Now," in Time Magazine, 4/6/9.
"In naive consciousness a person that he/she is superior to facts, in control of facts and free to understand them as they please."
For example:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality based community,' which he defines as people who 'believed that solutions emerged from your judicious studies of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about Enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off... 'We are an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality...We are history actors...and you, all of you, will be left to study what we do.'" Ron Suskind, interviewing an anonymous aide in Bush White House, in New York Times, 10/17/04.
"In critical consciousness a person will represent things and facts as they exist empirically in their casual and circumstantial relations. It is integrated with reality and leads to critical action."
I though it will be interesting for you to read it. Sometimes I also find myself up in the clouds. Now back to earth!
“Can Good Teaching be Learned ?”
The article that I recently read in The New York Times can give some reasoning behind the steady increase in the High School Graduation Rates. One reason is that teachers give better grades than students really deserve (Humaira was also mentioning that), another reason directly refers to the quality of teachers' instruction.
I am posting just a short excerpt from the article "Can Good Teaching be Learned?" by Elizabeth Green that I found very interesting - and controversial. The whole article can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html
"...Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half’s worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year.
This record encouraged a belief in some people that good teaching must be purely instinctive, a kind of magic performed by born superstars. As Jane Hannaway, the director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute and a former teacher, put it to me, successful teaching depends in part on a certain inimitable “voodoo.” You either have it or you don’t. “I think that there is an innate drive or innate ability for teaching,” Sylvia Gist, the dean of the college of education at Chicago State University, said when I visited her campus last year.
That belief has spawned a nationwide movement to improve the quality of the teaching corps by firing the bad teachers and hiring better ones. “Creating a New Teaching Profession,” a new collection of academic papers, politely calls this idea “deselection”; Joel Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, put it more bluntly when he gave a talk in Manhattan recently. “If we don’t change the personnel,” he said, “all we’re doing is changing the chairs.”
The reformers are also trying to create incentives to bring what Michelle Rhee, the schools chancellor in Washington, calls a “different caliber of person” into the profession. Rhee has proposed giving cash bonuses to those teachers whose students learn the most, as measured by factors that include standardized tests — and firing those who don’t measure up. Under her suggested compensation system, the city’s best teachers could earn as much as $130,000 a year. (The average pay for a teacher in Washington is now $65,000.) A new charter school in New York City called the Equity Project offers starting salaries of $125,000. “Merit pay,” a once-obscure free-market notion of handing cash bonuses to the best teachers, has lately become a litmus test for seriousness about improving schools. The Obama administration’s education department has embraced merit pay; the federal Teacher Incentive Fund, which finances experimental merit-pay programs across the country, rose from $97 million to $400 million this year. And states interested in competing for a piece of the $4.3 billion discretionary fund called the Race to the Top were required to change their laws to give principals and superintendents the right to judge teachers based on their students’ academic performance."
What do you think about firing "the bad teachers" and replacing them with better ones whose evaluation is based on their students' grades?
“Can Good Teaching be Learned ?”
Hey Jane, I read that article, and I agree that the teaching techniques sound too much as belonging to the banking model of education. It seems that there is no place for the students in there, but just the teacher's image alone is in the center of learning. Besides, the "cold call" will only create unpleasant atmosphere of fear and worries among students who do not have what to say at a particular moment. Yes, this way the class will be quiet, but not because students are afraid to miss the teacher's words, but because they feel insecure. Is this a real learning? It is definitely not a Freireian classroom.
I posted the excerpt from this article as an answer to Mighty's question about the High School Graduation Rates. You can see it above.
Integrating Vocational and Basic Skills Education
Thank you Amy and Wynne for the great presentation. It was very interesting for me to look at the GED Bridge Program at LaGuardia from a different perspective: not from the inside - the classroom point of view, but from the outside - the administrative position.
I can situate it now in the wider specter of different educational programs. The GED Bridge Program is designed not only to prepare students to pass the GED exam, but also to transition them into the post-secondary education. Thus, it is a good example of a program that contextualizes basic skills learning. Besides, different services like financial aid and career counseling are explained and presented to students, so they do not have any difficulties when seeking help in those areas. We did not talk a lot about student services, but I find them to be one of the key components of students' success because they can help to plan further career steps and, the most important, to eliminate one of the biggest barriers, namely hardship with tuition payments. So, I find this integrated system (basic skills+career orientation+student services) to be an effective mechanism that facilitates students in moving towards college credentials.
If to speak about classroom environment, student-instructor and instructor-instructor relationship, I imagine constant communication, feedback and reflection network. Only continuous interaction can build an atmosphere that is responsive to students' needs and can help them not only with the short-term plans, but also with their longstanding goals.
The Stigmatizing of Non-English Language Speakers in the USA
I strongly agree that the discussion about stigmatizing of non-English language speakers is very important, and - unfortunately - usually ignored. I think that a better word for stigmatization would be discrimination on the ground of language and culture and that is against all human rights. It seems that it is very normal for many people in the US society today to judge and categorize others because of their accent and country of origin. Many times I was asked where I got that weird/cute accent from, and when I say Ukraine, people say:"Oh, Russia!" (It is the same that to say to an American that you are a Canadian.) After that the following assumptions are common: " So you must have many brothers and sisters in your family that lives in the place where it is always cold and snowy!" There are other questions also:"Do you have cell phones there? Does everybody wear golden teeth?" I feel like I want to say:"Hey, Ukraine is on the planet Earth!" Sometimes it gets even worse. One of my friends, an exchange student from Bulgaria, was looking for a summer job a few years ago. She was refused from one of the restaurants because of "all these foreigners that come,take our jobs, and American economy is getting bad." The whole "American dream" was a nightmare for her. She does not want to come for another summer and urges all her friends to avoid it. She said that the pink glasses that she saw the USA through got stepped on. Unfortunately, this bad image of "the land of freedom" will stay with her for a long time. Unfortunately,she did not experienced that great America, those great people that are not biased against others with an accent. Damage was done not only to that person, but to the image of the US abroad, to the country that is fighting for the democracy in the whole world.
These examples are another reason to fight with the prejudice against "something different" than mainstream views and myths. Education is the strongest and the most important weapon that can bring immediate results. It might seem like an impossible task, but a long journey always starts from the first step.
National Assessment of Adult Literacy 2004
The 2004 NAAL report is another proof of the common myths, such as "the USA is a monolingual nation" and, as a result, "only English literacy is worth being measured." Like many other reports, it ignores the fact that for just the decade of 1990-2000 about 9.1 million immigrants entered the USA (according to U.S. Census Bureau, 2002). Although it is just 3.2% of the total population of the US, it is a huge number that equals the entire population of Sweden, for example. If we look closer, the other numbers in the USA today are striking: 37.7 million are foreign born, and 55.1 million speak a language other than English at home (http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ ACSSAFFFacts?_submenuId=factsheet_1&_sse=on). The latter number alone - either bilingual or monolingual in a language other than English - represents 19.6 percent of the US population. It means that a "national" survey of US adults' literacies did not notice a few dozen millions people that stay "transparent" for the policy makers as well. Let's just pretend that they do not exist!
That is why I think that the numbers of US adults' literacies fail to represent the real picture, as they do not take into account the literacy level in other languages. For an ill person, a wrong diagnosis can bring great suffering or even death. Unrealistic numbers, as history shows, can only aggravate the problems that already exist and impose ineffective policies that fail to benefit the nation as well as the particular individuals.
I really enjoyed our trip to the Consortium for Worker Education and our meeting with Joe McDermott. I was impressed by his liveliness, curiosity, and dedication to the people of New York. The only fact of placing seven thousand people into jobs for the last two years says a lot.
He mentioned the life-long learning movement that started in the late 1970s. I think that the philosophy of CWE is very close to what the movement advocates, namely "the freedom, opportunity and resources for self-learners of all ages, with their families and in community, to choose to learn what they want, when they want and how they want -- to self-learn" (http://www.creatinglearningcommunities.org/resources/lifelonglearning.htm). I looked at the description of the courses that are available at CWE, and they are incredibly useful and address a whole range of different needs starting form basic skills, computer literacy, service job training to French conversation-oriented classes and leadership development workshop.
Finally, it was pleasant to meet the man who helped to "save" our program. Thank you for this great opportunity.
Lives on the Boundary by Mike Rose
I greatly enjoyed reading Lives on the Boundary because it is abundant in vivid images, lively and rich language, meaningful examples, and deep insights into the American education. I found many answers in Rose’s narrative about the educational opportunities for diverse student population, accessibility of education, students’ needs and the ways they can be fulfilled. The chapter on “The Politics of Remediation” helped me to understand the importance of tutorial centers and basic writing courses as effective means to address students’ difficulties with the required work of academia.
Also, I was struck by the politics of educational institutions that believed (and I suspect some of educators still believe nowadays) that “remedial “ courses and tutorial centers only waste the money on educating those “intellectually unwashed” students who do not deserve to be in college anyway. Rose describes the situation when the Tutorial center was almost closed under this assumption –it was regarded as the place unworthy to be housed in the university walls. I appreciate the struggles of many educators who for the last decades were working hard to defend students’ human right on education. It is sad that very often the ground for assumptions about diverse students with different backgrounds, languages and cultures, first generation students, adult students, single parents students is built on false believes, such as test scores and different measurements that are not properly analyzed. Besides, educators could not find a balance between the research and teaching parts of the academia and regarded the latter as a less intellectual thing to do. Thus, these attitudes created a situation in which the real needs of students – especially freshmen – are overlooked.
I agree with Rose that every person has an ability to succeed in learning if his/her needs and difficulties with academic work are understood and addressed. Rose himself is an illustrative example of that belief because he could only succeed in his studying with the help of responsive and sensitive professors that knew what he was missing, believed in his abilities, and were willing to help. So, the first step to overcome “literary crisis” is to understand the multiple reasons of students difficulties with learning, such as different belief system (Lucia’s issues with reading Szasz), misunderstanding of academic conventions (Marita’s plagiarism), fear to recognize one’s difficulties and shyness to ask for help (students that always succeeded before), loneliness and distance between professors and students (Kathy’s experience), different kind of skills that were required (thinking and applying knowledge, but not mere memorization), different from mainstream cultures, languages , and backgrounds (Rose’s own example), and different students expectations about the content of the courses. Furthermore, in order to help students to succeed, all professors should understand that they play an important and sometimes crucial role in the lives of their students who regard them as role models and are looking for help in the difficult journey of learning that they had courage to undertake.
Preparing for Success
“Adult educator Malcolm Knowles stressed the importance of providing instruction that addresses the needs and interests of adult learners. In his introduction to "Andragogy in Action" (1984), he presents an instructional model that builds on the following assumptions:
* Adults are self-directed learners.
* Adults have a rich reservoir of experience that can serve as a resource for learning.
* Since adults' readiness to learn is frequently affected by their need to know or do something, they tend to have a life-centered, task-centered, or problem-centered orientation to learning as opposed to a subject-matter orientation.
* Adults are generally motivated to learn due to internal or intrinsic factors (such as being able to help their children with homework) as opposed to external or extrinsic forces (such as a raise in salary)" (17).
I found the ideas of Knowles to be very important to keep in mind when teaching adults because his assumptions indicate how different children and adults are as students. Consequently, teaching adults requires different approaches that would take into account their experiences, needs, and motivation. The traditional content-centered classroom would not work for adults because it does not teach the skills that are needed right away in their workplace, at home, and in the community life. I think that it is central for adult education to teach how to learn, communicate, plan, organize, solve problems etc., rather than "deposit" simple and isolated facts or information. For example, we were talking already how much better the combined basic skills and vocational training programs work for adults who can see the real results in their lives.
It is interesting that adult learners are motivated by intrinsic factors rather than instrumental or extrinsic forces. I always thought that the most important reasons for learning would be to get a better job or to get a raise in salary etc., but not such personal matters as helping children with their homework.
I also looked for the definition of the word "andragogy," and found that it is defined as the process of engaging adult learners in the structure of the learning experience. The term is derived from the Greek word “andros” which is translated as “adult man” and “ago” which means “to lead." Consequently, andragogy means adult leading that is opposite to pedagogy which literally means child leading. The term “andragogy” was first used by Alexander Kapp, a German educator, in the 19th century, but only later it has been developed as a theory by Malcolm Knowles who published “The modern practice of adult education: Andragogy versus pedagogy”(1970).
It is a very interesting topic. You can find more information at http://www.uni-bamberg.de/fileadmin/andragogik/08/andragogik/andragogy/index.htm
Ruben Rangel’s Class
Thanks to Prof. Rangel for visiting us last Tuesday. I enjoyed the Freirean classroom in practice, but I found it a little intense because the True Word activity provoked us to open up and to talk about the conflicting situations in our lives. It felt like a counseling session in the positive way of the word that helped to identify where I am now and where I want to be. Besides, it created the sense of communion and made us "partners in crime" - the crime of learning together and from each other, but not individualistically.
I definitely see the place for this activity in my classroom as well as other types of Freirean exercises. I believe that any curriculum can be based on the problem-posing model of education even if some particular material is required to be taught. If a teacher believes in the horizontal dialog and sees students as partners in learning, then his/her teaching style will definitely reflect this philosophy.
Freire’s Ideas about Consciousness
Last semester I visited the Literacy Workshop, presented by Michael Orzechowski. Although we talked about Information Literacy, Freirean kinds of consciousness created a base for our discussion.
In the "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," Paulo Freire talks about a lack of a critical understanding of the reality by the oppressed that makes them live in an imaginary world imposed by others. Only through the problem-posing education the oppressed can awake from that sleep in order to transform their reality and become critical thinkers with critical consciousness. Nowadays, critical thinking abilities seem to be valued in our society. However, we still hear words like "it must be true because they said it on TV" or "because it is written in that book." And how about the Internet, the reliable and unreliable sources of information?
In the "Education for Critical Consciousness," he identifies naive, magical, and critical consciousness. Orzechowski gave us an interesting handout with the examples of each one.
"In magical consciousness a person tends to feel fatalistic, needing to submit to some higher power, and rational considerations of causality are ignored."
For example:
"We saw what was happening for years, for decades [referring to current economic crisis], but we ignored or shrugged it off, preferring to imagine that we weren't really had it over the falls. The US auto industry has been in deep trouble for more than a quarter century[...]Even smart, proudly rational people engaged in magical thinking, acting as if the new power of the Internet and its New Economy would miraculously make everything copacetic again. We all clapped our hands and believed in fairies." Kurt Andersen, "That was Then and This is Now," in Time Magazine, 4/6/9.
"In naive consciousness a person that he/she is superior to facts, in control of facts and free to understand them as they please."
For example:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality based community,' which he defines as people who 'believed that solutions emerged from your judicious studies of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about Enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off... 'We are an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality...We are history actors...and you, all of you, will be left to study what we do.'" Ron Suskind, interviewing an anonymous aide in Bush White House, in New York Times, 10/17/04.
"In critical consciousness a person will represent things and facts as they exist empirically in their casual and circumstantial relations. It is integrated with reality and leads to critical action."
I though it will be interesting for you to read it. Sometimes I also find myself up in the clouds. Now back to earth!
“Can Good Teaching be Learned ?”
The article that I recently read in The New York Times can give some reasoning behind the steady increase in the High School Graduation Rates. One reason is that teachers give better grades than students really deserve (Humaira was also mentioning that), another reason directly refers to the quality of teachers' instruction.
I am posting just a short excerpt from the article "Can Good Teaching be Learned?" by Elizabeth Green that I found very interesting - and controversial. The whole article can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html
"...Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half’s worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year.
This record encouraged a belief in some people that good teaching must be purely instinctive, a kind of magic performed by born superstars. As Jane Hannaway, the director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute and a former teacher, put it to me, successful teaching depends in part on a certain inimitable “voodoo.” You either have it or you don’t. “I think that there is an innate drive or innate ability for teaching,” Sylvia Gist, the dean of the college of education at Chicago State University, said when I visited her campus last year.
That belief has spawned a nationwide movement to improve the quality of the teaching corps by firing the bad teachers and hiring better ones. “Creating a New Teaching Profession,” a new collection of academic papers, politely calls this idea “deselection”; Joel Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, put it more bluntly when he gave a talk in Manhattan recently. “If we don’t change the personnel,” he said, “all we’re doing is changing the chairs.”
The reformers are also trying to create incentives to bring what Michelle Rhee, the schools chancellor in Washington, calls a “different caliber of person” into the profession. Rhee has proposed giving cash bonuses to those teachers whose students learn the most, as measured by factors that include standardized tests — and firing those who don’t measure up. Under her suggested compensation system, the city’s best teachers could earn as much as $130,000 a year. (The average pay for a teacher in Washington is now $65,000.) A new charter school in New York City called the Equity Project offers starting salaries of $125,000. “Merit pay,” a once-obscure free-market notion of handing cash bonuses to the best teachers, has lately become a litmus test for seriousness about improving schools. The Obama administration’s education department has embraced merit pay; the federal Teacher Incentive Fund, which finances experimental merit-pay programs across the country, rose from $97 million to $400 million this year. And states interested in competing for a piece of the $4.3 billion discretionary fund called the Race to the Top were required to change their laws to give principals and superintendents the right to judge teachers based on their students’ academic performance."
What do you think about firing "the bad teachers" and replacing them with better ones whose evaluation is based on their students' grades?
“Can Good Teaching be Learned ?”
Hey Jane, I read that article, and I agree that the teaching techniques sound too much as belonging to the banking model of education. It seems that there is no place for the students in there, but just the teacher's image alone is in the center of learning. Besides, the "cold call" will only create unpleasant atmosphere of fear and worries among students who do not have what to say at a particular moment. Yes, this way the class will be quiet, but not because students are afraid to miss the teacher's words, but because they feel insecure. Is this a real learning? It is definitely not a Freireian classroom.
I posted the excerpt from this article as an answer to Mighty's question about the High School Graduation Rates. You can see it above.
Integrating Vocational and Basic Skills Education
Thank you Amy and Wynne for the great presentation. It was very interesting for me to look at the GED Bridge Program at LaGuardia from a different perspective: not from the inside - the classroom point of view, but from the outside - the administrative position.
I can situate it now in the wider specter of different educational programs. The GED Bridge Program is designed not only to prepare students to pass the GED exam, but also to transition them into the post-secondary education. Thus, it is a good example of a program that contextualizes basic skills learning. Besides, different services like financial aid and career counseling are explained and presented to students, so they do not have any difficulties when seeking help in those areas. We did not talk a lot about student services, but I find them to be one of the key components of students' success because they can help to plan further career steps and, the most important, to eliminate one of the biggest barriers, namely hardship with tuition payments. So, I find this integrated system (basic skills+career orientation+student services) to be an effective mechanism that facilitates students in moving towards college credentials.
If to speak about classroom environment, student-instructor and instructor-instructor relationship, I imagine constant communication, feedback and reflection network. Only continuous interaction can build an atmosphere that is responsive to students' needs and can help them not only with the short-term plans, but also with their longstanding goals.
The Stigmatizing of Non-English Language Speakers in the USA
I strongly agree that the discussion about stigmatizing of non-English language speakers is very important, and - unfortunately - usually ignored. I think that a better word for stigmatization would be discrimination on the ground of language and culture and that is against all human rights. It seems that it is very normal for many people in the US society today to judge and categorize others because of their accent and country of origin. Many times I was asked where I got that weird/cute accent from, and when I say Ukraine, people say:"Oh, Russia!" (It is the same that to say to an American that you are a Canadian.) After that the following assumptions are common: " So you must have many brothers and sisters in your family that lives in the place where it is always cold and snowy!" There are other questions also:"Do you have cell phones there? Does everybody wear golden teeth?" I feel like I want to say:"Hey, Ukraine is on the planet Earth!" Sometimes it gets even worse. One of my friends, an exchange student from Bulgaria, was looking for a summer job a few years ago. She was refused from one of the restaurants because of "all these foreigners that come,take our jobs, and American economy is getting bad." The whole "American dream" was a nightmare for her. She does not want to come for another summer and urges all her friends to avoid it. She said that the pink glasses that she saw the USA through got stepped on. Unfortunately, this bad image of "the land of freedom" will stay with her for a long time. Unfortunately,she did not experienced that great America, those great people that are not biased against others with an accent. Damage was done not only to that person, but to the image of the US abroad, to the country that is fighting for the democracy in the whole world.
These examples are another reason to fight with the prejudice against "something different" than mainstream views and myths. Education is the strongest and the most important weapon that can bring immediate results. It might seem like an impossible task, but a long journey always starts from the first step.
National Assessment of Adult Literacy 2004
The 2004 NAAL report is another proof of the common myths, such as "the USA is a monolingual nation" and, as a result, "only English literacy is worth being measured." Like many other reports, it ignores the fact that for just the decade of 1990-2000 about 9.1 million immigrants entered the USA (according to U.S. Census Bureau, 2002). Although it is just 3.2% of the total population of the US, it is a huge number that equals the entire population of Sweden, for example. If we look closer, the other numbers in the USA today are striking: 37.7 million are foreign born, and 55.1 million speak a language other than English at home (http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ ACSSAFFFacts?_submenuId=factsheet_1&_sse=on). The latter number alone - either bilingual or monolingual in a language other than English - represents 19.6 percent of the US population. It means that a "national" survey of US adults' literacies did not notice a few dozen millions people that stay "transparent" for the policy makers as well. Let's just pretend that they do not exist!
That is why I think that the numbers of US adults' literacies fail to represent the real picture, as they do not take into account the literacy level in other languages. For an ill person, a wrong diagnosis can bring great suffering or even death. Unrealistic numbers, as history shows, can only aggravate the problems that already exist and impose ineffective policies that fail to benefit the nation as well as the particular individuals.
The Pedagogy of Paulo Freire
Viktoriia Dudar
Professor Barbara Gleason
Adult Language and Literacy
6 April 2010
The Pedagogy of Paulo Freire
A philosophical position of Paulo Freire, an internationally recognized scholar who viewed education as a crucial power behind social and economic transformation, is often described as “an amalgam of Marxism and Christian and humanist schools of Existentialism” (Thampi 92). His multidimensional approach to education, his views on inter-class relationships, oppression and liberation, history and culture are widely popular among educators, theologians, and researches in different professional fields for the last forty years; his critical pedagogy is continuously reinvented in the new sociopolitical contexts around the world. To better understand Freire’s contribution to the theory of education, it is important to analyze Freire’s life and professional experience, his key concepts of praxis, transformation of the world, problem-posing education, dialogical classroom, and the examples of implementation of his pedagogy.
Paulo Freire was born in 1921 in Recife, the northeast region of Brazil that was the poorest and underdeveloped area of the whole country. The social formation of the northeast remained strongly hierarchical: the small class of wealthy landowners marginalized starving population in the search for profit from the cultivation of sugarcane. The forests as well as wildlife were entirely destroyed on the coastal areas in order to free the soil for sugar production. As a result, the population of the northeastern Brazil suffered from a severe hunger, poverty, and a whole range of different diseases. Mies describes the situation as being critical: about 60 percent of population did not eat meat or drink milk; 80 percent did not eat any eggs; about 500 out of 1,000 babies were dying from gastric diseases; 70 percent of population was illiterate; life expectancy was 30 -33 years. Besides, in Recife the unemployment rate was about 70 percent; thus, prostitution (even among children) was in many cases the only way to survive and to support a family (1765). Freire, growing up in Recife, experienced hunger and poverty and that caused him to fall behind in school. Although he belonged to a middle class family, a German piano and his father’s necktie were the only symbols of their class affiliation. “Lourdes’s piano and my father‘s neckties made our hunger appear accidental,” writes Freire in Letters to Cristina (22).
After completing his secondary education, Freire went to Recife University where he studied philosophy and psycho-linguistic, working in parallel as a teacher of Portuguese. In 1944, he married Elza, a school teacher, and his interest in education grew stronger. He was involved in the “catholic action” movement trying to explain Christian faith to bourgeoisie and later to the lower-class population. In 1959, he submitted his doctoral thesis to Recife University on teaching adult illiterates and soon became a coordinator of a literacy program for adults in Recife. In 1963, he accepted an invitation of the Brazilian government and became the Director of the National Literacy Program which was a part of a bigger mass education movement – Movimento de Cultura Popular. The main goal of the movement was not only to teach people how to read and write but also to educate them about their basic democratic rights and encourage them to vote (the illiterate population did not have the right to vote).
Freire started his battle with illiteracy in a small village of Angicos in the state Rio Grande do Norte. During a short period of 45 days, 300 workers were taught to read and to write, which was a great success of his program. It was planned to apply Freire’s method to educate the whole country, but the fast growing numbers of voters (90,000 new voters were added to former 80,000 in the state of Sergipe) who were organizing and trying to shift the political power and to change the well established social structure brought fear among political leaders. As a result, Freire was accused of “international subversion” and jailed for seventy-five days. He could not stay in Brazil anymore and was exiled to Chile where he accepted a position at the University of Chile and implemented his literacy method. At that time he wrote about his Brazilian experience in Education: the Practice of Freedom, described his Chilean work in Education for Critical Consciousness, and completed Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In 1969, he was a visiting professor at Harvard University, and a year later Freire became a special consultant to the Office of Education at the World Council of Churches in Geneva. He was involved in education programs in Peru, Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Guinea-Bissau and received the UNESCO Prize for Education. After fifteen years in exile, Freire was able to return to Brazil where he died in May of 1997 (Mackie 3-8; Mies 1764-1766). Through his life, his books, and his teaching, Freire left a precious legacy to the world.
Freire developed his concept of education as a practice of freedom from a critical reflection on various adult education projects that he undertook in Brazil in the late 1950s and early 1960s and in Chile in the late 1960s. He believes that illiteracy is a result of dehumanization of the world through oppression of workers and peasants by the ruling elites. Freire regards dehumanization as a historical fact that can be changed because it is “not a given destiny but a result of an unjust order” (Freire, Pedagogy 44). Consequently, illiteracy can be overcome by liberation of the masses through education that has transformational character. First of all, through learning to read and write, the oppressed develop critical awareness of the unjust social order, of themselves, and of their own place within the class society. Secondly, they begin to transform the society that regards them as mere objects of manipulation (Freire, Pedagogy 54). Transformation is achieved through praxis – “the process of action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it” (Freire, Pedagogy 79) – that is central to the humanization and liberation of the world. Freire compares liberation with childbirth because it is painful when people often experience fear of freedom as a result of continuous oppression and their identification with the oppressor (Pedagogy 49). This fear can be overcome through a collective struggle stimulated by education against the existing social relations.
Freire maintains that education is never neutral, and it serves either for domestication or liberation of people. The former can be reached through the banking concept of education, and the latter – through the problem-posing education. The banking concept of education is a process in which the teacher is the subject and the students are objects to be acted upon (Pedagogy 73). Freire believes that “[e]ducation is suffering from narration sickness” (Pedagogy 71) because knowledge is considered to be a commodity that belongs only to the chosen ones who have a power to teach it to ignorant masses. People are taught to accept what is handed down to them by the elite (oppressors) and are kept in ignorance and silence. Thus, the teacher is the depositor, and the students are the depositories that can only passively receive and store information. As a result, this education helps the oppressors to maintain the existing social order through mythicizing of reality and by imposing the passive role on the students who adapt to the world without even a though about its transformation - “the individual is spectator, not re-creator” (Freire, Pedagogy 75). As an alternative, Freire introduces the problem-posing education that is the practice of freedom, not the practice of domination. This method embodies a two-ways communication which leads to the true knowledge through the critical perception of reality. It is based on creativity and “stimulates reflection and action upon reality” that leads to awareness about “the unfinished character of human beings” (Freire, Pedagogy 84). The problem-posing education cannot serve the needs of the oppressor because it is “a humanist and liberating praxis” (Freire, Pedagogy 86) that enables the teacher and the students to become the subjects of an education that demythicizes the world and frees from oppression.
The main way through which the problem-posing education is carried out is dialogue. Freire believes that the word that consists of two elements such as reflection and action is the essence of dialogue. If one of the elements is underrepresented, the other one suffers immediately. For example, if the word lacks action, it is changed into “idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating ‘blah’” (Freire, Pedagogy 87). On the other hand, the word without reflection becomes activism that leads to the reduction and absence of dialogue. Freire states that “to speak a true word is to transform the world” (Pedagogy 87) through naming the reality (reflection) and changing it (action). Furthermore, dialogue is nourished by love for the world and for people, by humility that helps to acknowledge equality with everybody else but not superiority, by faith in humanization of the world through its transformation, by hope that inspires the battle for transformation of the world, and by critical thinking that views reality as a process but not as a static phenomenon (Freire, Pedagogy 89-92). Freire believes that only dialogue is capable of generating critical thinking and opposes naïve and magical thinking as the means of dehumanization of the world. For example, in Education for Critical Consciousness, Freire states that “[c]ritical consciousness is integrated with reality; naïve consciousness superimposes itself on reality; and fanatical consciousness, whose pathological naiveté leads to the irrational, adapts to reality” (44). He suggests that people can be helped to move from naïve or magical thinking to critical consciousness only through dialogical education that is implemented at the “point of emergence”. He refers to critical consciousness as conscientização which is the process of learning “to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (Pedagogy 35). Thus, dialogue is seen as horizontal relationships between people that help them to reflect critically on the world in order to transform it. On the other hand, anti-dialogue involves vertical relationships that are loveless, mistrustful, hopeless, arrogant, and non-critical, and it does not communicate but creates communiqués, a one-way communication. Consequently, “[a]uthentic education is not carried on by ‘A’ for ‘B’ or by ‘A’ about ‘B,’ but rather by ‘A’ with ‘B,’ mediated by the world” (Freire, Pedagogy 93). Furthermore, authentic education does not involve memorizing unconnected words and sentences, but stimulates critical thinking, self-transformation and social and political intervention into the surrounding world.
Teaching in Angicos is an example of an authentic problem-posing literacy program. Freire describes five phases that he and a team of educators undertook in Brazil in the early 1960s. A first phase consists of researching the words and phrases of the group with which a teacher is working during informal conversations. Freire emphasizes the necessity of the close emotional and direct contact with the people of the particular area in order to understand their habits, conflicts, hopes, and believes (Education 49). During a second phase, an educator chooses the most “generative” words that have phonemic richness, correspond to the phonetic difficulties of the language, and carry pragmatic tone that connect them to the social reality of the people, and thus generate the greatest amount of critical thinking. Freire’s team selected seventeen key words such as favela (slum), rain, plow, land, food, salary, government, sugar mill, etc (Education 82-84). In a third phase, a teacher creates coded situational problems in the form of drawings, slides, posters and cards. Then, people decode the situations through discussing particular illustrations, expressing their feelings, hopes, and disappointments, and connecting drawings to the situations from their own life. It helps them to identify their own problems and realize that there is a way to solve them. For example, when discussing the first situation Man in the World and with the World, people learn the difference between nature and culture, and discover that they can transform the world through their work (Education 63). Then, in a fourth phase, the agenda of a program can be easily modified according to the needs of the students (Education 52). A final fifth phase includes the preparation of the cards with the generative words that are broken down into phonemic families. For example, the word tijolo (brick) which is chosen after a discussion of situation of construction work is broken into syllables ti-jo-lo. Then, the initial consonant of each syllable is combined with other vowels: te-te-ti-to-tu, ja-je-ji-jo-ju, la-le-li-lo-lu, which is an example of a phonemic family for the word tijolo. From these syllable people were able to create words in the first night of the program (Freire, Education 54). Freire believes that the most difficult part of teaching a literacy program is maintaining the horizontal relationship of dialogue and viewing students as the subjects but not depositories that need to be filled with knowledge. Nevertheless, his approach was implemented in a number of different classrooms all around the world.
The remedial English program at the College of the Bahamas is a successful example of applying the Freirean approach to education. Nan Elsasser taught an experimental writing course to the group of the first generation working Bahamian women who went to college. Her curriculum was a result of collaboration between a team of educators who find traditional writing programs based on memorizing rules and filling in blank spaces to be ineffective for the future success in college and isolating because it excludes students’ experiences and knowledge from classroom activities. The combination of Freire’s pedagogy of developing critical consciousness through working on generative themes and Vygotsky’s theory of inner speech were implemented for teaching advanced literacy skills (Fiore and Elsasser 89). At the beginning of her teaching that corresponds to Freire’s first phase of problem-posing education, Elsasser learned about the Bahamas and her students through discussing their lives and schooling, investigated students’ habits of organizing their thoughts through the word association exercises, and asked students to give her advice about staying on the Bahamas through writing What You Need to Know to Live in the Bahamas essay. Although the students had difficulties with analyzing and incorporating broader information about their surrounding world, they started realizing similarities between their lives and responded to one another’s comments (Fiore and Elsasser 91). Her next step that corresponds to Freire’s second phase was selecting a generative theme through listing conflicting situations that the students suggested on the board and choosing the most important issue through voting. They selected marriage for their generative theme. Then, Elsasser and the students discussed marriage problems in the Bahamas and different readings on this topic that helped them to realize that their personal problems are influenced by the society that they live in. As a result, they could examine, make connections, critique the world around them, generate their own theories about writing mechanics, and rely in their writing on class discussions and readings (Fiore and Elsasser 93-95). During a next phase that corresponds to Freire’s idea about transforming the world, the students wrote an open letter to Bahamian men that was published in order to solve marriage issues that persist in their society. Furthermore, all of them passed the English exam, and that represented a big difference compare to the previous results – forty- five to sixty percent would usually fail this exam (Fiore and Elsasser 100-103). The success of this program shows that Freire’s approach to education can be easily adjusted to different contexts and needs of students and bring outstanding results.
Many attempts were made to implement Freire’s pedagogy in the third world countries by Freire himself and the educators who claim to practice his methods. His pedagogy became very popular during the Green Revolution when UNESCO and other international organizations were trying to increase food production by educating rural population through literacy programs that combined basic skills education with vocational training in agricultural field (Kidd and Kumar 26). However, some educators believe that Freirean pedagogy is very often distorted and his terminology and methods are used “without its substance as a smokescreen for the continued domestication of Third World peasants and workers in the interests of foreign capital” (Kidd and Kumar 28). For example, the pseudo-Freirean approach avoids the word “oppression” and focuses on “poverty” instead that is believed to be caused by poor and prevents them from better life; the actions of the dominant regime such as low wages, unequal rights and limited access to land and water are ignored. Kidd and Kumar name this concept a “culture of poverty” that can be cured only by changing the poor and educating them, but not by changing the social structure (28). They can be changed through awaking their critical consciousness that is defined as awareness of their needs and different resources that are available for fulfilling these needs. In other words, the poor are taught to see themselves through the eyes of their oppressors and accept their current state of being as natural and unchangeable which is the opposite of Freire’s idea about critical thinking. If the poor could increase food production which is very low because of their ignorance and inability to cultivate plants, then they would be able to end their poverty and starvation. La Belle describes this scenario as deprivation-development strategy that is used to change the behavior of the poor in the existing conditions as a solution to their problems which opposes Freire’s idea about liberation through breaking the social structure of domination (Kidd and Kumar 28).
The pseudo-Freirean method of education can be illustrated through the examples of some literacy programs designed by World Education organization in India and Thailand. The literacy program launched in Thailand in the early 1970s emphasized hygiene, birth control, and obedience to the authorities, ignoring any political or economic intervention by the poor. The main goal of this program was to improve living conditions of rural population by “attempting to correct misconceptions and to change the outmoded behaviors” (Kidd and Kumar 33) through informing masses. This approach opposes Freire’s dialogical nature of problem-posing education that treats students as equal partners in the educational process. “Liberating education consists of acts of cognition, not transferrals of information” (Freire 79). Likewise, a literacy program in India disregarded the economic and political causes of poverty and emphasized the ignorance of the poor as a source of their problems. For example, a Hindi literacy primer stated that “[e]ating rice has a bad effect on health” (Kidd and Kumar 33) without any explanation on why people cannot afford to eat anything else. Freire opposes this “prescription” character of education that implies “the imposition of one individual’s choice upon another” that is the form of oppression (47). These examples show how Freire’s name can be used to disguise the education that domesticates the lower-class population in some third world countries.
In conclusion, Freire’s belief in humanization of the world through liberation of oppressed constantly reminds us about the unjust social structure that domesticates through banking education and vertical relationships between people. However, his concept of problem-posing education is an effective tool in order to liberate ourselves and our students through recognizing our own position in the world, critically examining our conflicts and problems, and finally, transforming the world around us. In the modern world, where the global wealth increased six-fold, but the poverty gap between the poor and rich countries has also tripled over the last decades, Freire’s philosophy can become a powerful vehicle in the battle of humanity for its right to live as valuable members of the society who have their own opinion and are not just mere puppets on the invisible strings manipulated by the ruling elites.
Works Cited
Fiore, Kyle, and Nan Elsasser. “‘Strangers No More’: A Liberatory Literacy Curriculum.” Freire for the Classroom: A Sourcebook for Liberatory Teaching. Ed. Ira Shor. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1987. 87-104. Print.
Freire, Paulo. Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Continuum, 1986. Print.
---. Letters to Cristina: Reflections on My Life and Work. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print.
---. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Continuum, 2008. Print.
Kidd, Ross, and Krishna Kumar. “Co-opting Freire: A Critical Analysis of Pseudo-Freirean Adult Education.” Economic and Political Weekly 16.1/2 (1981): 27-36. JSTOR. Web. 29 Mar. 2010.
Mackie, Robert. Introduction. Literacy and Revolution, the Pedagogy of Paulo Freire. Ed. Mackie. New York: Continuum, 1981. Print.
Mies, Maria. “Paulo Freire's Method of Education: Conscientisation in Latin America.” Economic and Political Weekly 8.39 (1973): 1764-1767. JSTOR. Web. 29 Mar. 2010.
Thampi, Mohan. “The Educational Thought of Paulo Freire.” Social Scientist 2.1 (1973): 91-95. JSTOR. Web. 29 Mar. 2010.
Professor Barbara Gleason
Adult Language and Literacy
6 April 2010
The Pedagogy of Paulo Freire
A philosophical position of Paulo Freire, an internationally recognized scholar who viewed education as a crucial power behind social and economic transformation, is often described as “an amalgam of Marxism and Christian and humanist schools of Existentialism” (Thampi 92). His multidimensional approach to education, his views on inter-class relationships, oppression and liberation, history and culture are widely popular among educators, theologians, and researches in different professional fields for the last forty years; his critical pedagogy is continuously reinvented in the new sociopolitical contexts around the world. To better understand Freire’s contribution to the theory of education, it is important to analyze Freire’s life and professional experience, his key concepts of praxis, transformation of the world, problem-posing education, dialogical classroom, and the examples of implementation of his pedagogy.
Paulo Freire was born in 1921 in Recife, the northeast region of Brazil that was the poorest and underdeveloped area of the whole country. The social formation of the northeast remained strongly hierarchical: the small class of wealthy landowners marginalized starving population in the search for profit from the cultivation of sugarcane. The forests as well as wildlife were entirely destroyed on the coastal areas in order to free the soil for sugar production. As a result, the population of the northeastern Brazil suffered from a severe hunger, poverty, and a whole range of different diseases. Mies describes the situation as being critical: about 60 percent of population did not eat meat or drink milk; 80 percent did not eat any eggs; about 500 out of 1,000 babies were dying from gastric diseases; 70 percent of population was illiterate; life expectancy was 30 -33 years. Besides, in Recife the unemployment rate was about 70 percent; thus, prostitution (even among children) was in many cases the only way to survive and to support a family (1765). Freire, growing up in Recife, experienced hunger and poverty and that caused him to fall behind in school. Although he belonged to a middle class family, a German piano and his father’s necktie were the only symbols of their class affiliation. “Lourdes’s piano and my father‘s neckties made our hunger appear accidental,” writes Freire in Letters to Cristina (22).
After completing his secondary education, Freire went to Recife University where he studied philosophy and psycho-linguistic, working in parallel as a teacher of Portuguese. In 1944, he married Elza, a school teacher, and his interest in education grew stronger. He was involved in the “catholic action” movement trying to explain Christian faith to bourgeoisie and later to the lower-class population. In 1959, he submitted his doctoral thesis to Recife University on teaching adult illiterates and soon became a coordinator of a literacy program for adults in Recife. In 1963, he accepted an invitation of the Brazilian government and became the Director of the National Literacy Program which was a part of a bigger mass education movement – Movimento de Cultura Popular. The main goal of the movement was not only to teach people how to read and write but also to educate them about their basic democratic rights and encourage them to vote (the illiterate population did not have the right to vote).
Freire started his battle with illiteracy in a small village of Angicos in the state Rio Grande do Norte. During a short period of 45 days, 300 workers were taught to read and to write, which was a great success of his program. It was planned to apply Freire’s method to educate the whole country, but the fast growing numbers of voters (90,000 new voters were added to former 80,000 in the state of Sergipe) who were organizing and trying to shift the political power and to change the well established social structure brought fear among political leaders. As a result, Freire was accused of “international subversion” and jailed for seventy-five days. He could not stay in Brazil anymore and was exiled to Chile where he accepted a position at the University of Chile and implemented his literacy method. At that time he wrote about his Brazilian experience in Education: the Practice of Freedom, described his Chilean work in Education for Critical Consciousness, and completed Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In 1969, he was a visiting professor at Harvard University, and a year later Freire became a special consultant to the Office of Education at the World Council of Churches in Geneva. He was involved in education programs in Peru, Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Guinea-Bissau and received the UNESCO Prize for Education. After fifteen years in exile, Freire was able to return to Brazil where he died in May of 1997 (Mackie 3-8; Mies 1764-1766). Through his life, his books, and his teaching, Freire left a precious legacy to the world.
Freire developed his concept of education as a practice of freedom from a critical reflection on various adult education projects that he undertook in Brazil in the late 1950s and early 1960s and in Chile in the late 1960s. He believes that illiteracy is a result of dehumanization of the world through oppression of workers and peasants by the ruling elites. Freire regards dehumanization as a historical fact that can be changed because it is “not a given destiny but a result of an unjust order” (Freire, Pedagogy 44). Consequently, illiteracy can be overcome by liberation of the masses through education that has transformational character. First of all, through learning to read and write, the oppressed develop critical awareness of the unjust social order, of themselves, and of their own place within the class society. Secondly, they begin to transform the society that regards them as mere objects of manipulation (Freire, Pedagogy 54). Transformation is achieved through praxis – “the process of action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it” (Freire, Pedagogy 79) – that is central to the humanization and liberation of the world. Freire compares liberation with childbirth because it is painful when people often experience fear of freedom as a result of continuous oppression and their identification with the oppressor (Pedagogy 49). This fear can be overcome through a collective struggle stimulated by education against the existing social relations.
Freire maintains that education is never neutral, and it serves either for domestication or liberation of people. The former can be reached through the banking concept of education, and the latter – through the problem-posing education. The banking concept of education is a process in which the teacher is the subject and the students are objects to be acted upon (Pedagogy 73). Freire believes that “[e]ducation is suffering from narration sickness” (Pedagogy 71) because knowledge is considered to be a commodity that belongs only to the chosen ones who have a power to teach it to ignorant masses. People are taught to accept what is handed down to them by the elite (oppressors) and are kept in ignorance and silence. Thus, the teacher is the depositor, and the students are the depositories that can only passively receive and store information. As a result, this education helps the oppressors to maintain the existing social order through mythicizing of reality and by imposing the passive role on the students who adapt to the world without even a though about its transformation - “the individual is spectator, not re-creator” (Freire, Pedagogy 75). As an alternative, Freire introduces the problem-posing education that is the practice of freedom, not the practice of domination. This method embodies a two-ways communication which leads to the true knowledge through the critical perception of reality. It is based on creativity and “stimulates reflection and action upon reality” that leads to awareness about “the unfinished character of human beings” (Freire, Pedagogy 84). The problem-posing education cannot serve the needs of the oppressor because it is “a humanist and liberating praxis” (Freire, Pedagogy 86) that enables the teacher and the students to become the subjects of an education that demythicizes the world and frees from oppression.
The main way through which the problem-posing education is carried out is dialogue. Freire believes that the word that consists of two elements such as reflection and action is the essence of dialogue. If one of the elements is underrepresented, the other one suffers immediately. For example, if the word lacks action, it is changed into “idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating ‘blah’” (Freire, Pedagogy 87). On the other hand, the word without reflection becomes activism that leads to the reduction and absence of dialogue. Freire states that “to speak a true word is to transform the world” (Pedagogy 87) through naming the reality (reflection) and changing it (action). Furthermore, dialogue is nourished by love for the world and for people, by humility that helps to acknowledge equality with everybody else but not superiority, by faith in humanization of the world through its transformation, by hope that inspires the battle for transformation of the world, and by critical thinking that views reality as a process but not as a static phenomenon (Freire, Pedagogy 89-92). Freire believes that only dialogue is capable of generating critical thinking and opposes naïve and magical thinking as the means of dehumanization of the world. For example, in Education for Critical Consciousness, Freire states that “[c]ritical consciousness is integrated with reality; naïve consciousness superimposes itself on reality; and fanatical consciousness, whose pathological naiveté leads to the irrational, adapts to reality” (44). He suggests that people can be helped to move from naïve or magical thinking to critical consciousness only through dialogical education that is implemented at the “point of emergence”. He refers to critical consciousness as conscientização which is the process of learning “to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (Pedagogy 35). Thus, dialogue is seen as horizontal relationships between people that help them to reflect critically on the world in order to transform it. On the other hand, anti-dialogue involves vertical relationships that are loveless, mistrustful, hopeless, arrogant, and non-critical, and it does not communicate but creates communiqués, a one-way communication. Consequently, “[a]uthentic education is not carried on by ‘A’ for ‘B’ or by ‘A’ about ‘B,’ but rather by ‘A’ with ‘B,’ mediated by the world” (Freire, Pedagogy 93). Furthermore, authentic education does not involve memorizing unconnected words and sentences, but stimulates critical thinking, self-transformation and social and political intervention into the surrounding world.
Teaching in Angicos is an example of an authentic problem-posing literacy program. Freire describes five phases that he and a team of educators undertook in Brazil in the early 1960s. A first phase consists of researching the words and phrases of the group with which a teacher is working during informal conversations. Freire emphasizes the necessity of the close emotional and direct contact with the people of the particular area in order to understand their habits, conflicts, hopes, and believes (Education 49). During a second phase, an educator chooses the most “generative” words that have phonemic richness, correspond to the phonetic difficulties of the language, and carry pragmatic tone that connect them to the social reality of the people, and thus generate the greatest amount of critical thinking. Freire’s team selected seventeen key words such as favela (slum), rain, plow, land, food, salary, government, sugar mill, etc (Education 82-84). In a third phase, a teacher creates coded situational problems in the form of drawings, slides, posters and cards. Then, people decode the situations through discussing particular illustrations, expressing their feelings, hopes, and disappointments, and connecting drawings to the situations from their own life. It helps them to identify their own problems and realize that there is a way to solve them. For example, when discussing the first situation Man in the World and with the World, people learn the difference between nature and culture, and discover that they can transform the world through their work (Education 63). Then, in a fourth phase, the agenda of a program can be easily modified according to the needs of the students (Education 52). A final fifth phase includes the preparation of the cards with the generative words that are broken down into phonemic families. For example, the word tijolo (brick) which is chosen after a discussion of situation of construction work is broken into syllables ti-jo-lo. Then, the initial consonant of each syllable is combined with other vowels: te-te-ti-to-tu, ja-je-ji-jo-ju, la-le-li-lo-lu, which is an example of a phonemic family for the word tijolo. From these syllable people were able to create words in the first night of the program (Freire, Education 54). Freire believes that the most difficult part of teaching a literacy program is maintaining the horizontal relationship of dialogue and viewing students as the subjects but not depositories that need to be filled with knowledge. Nevertheless, his approach was implemented in a number of different classrooms all around the world.
The remedial English program at the College of the Bahamas is a successful example of applying the Freirean approach to education. Nan Elsasser taught an experimental writing course to the group of the first generation working Bahamian women who went to college. Her curriculum was a result of collaboration between a team of educators who find traditional writing programs based on memorizing rules and filling in blank spaces to be ineffective for the future success in college and isolating because it excludes students’ experiences and knowledge from classroom activities. The combination of Freire’s pedagogy of developing critical consciousness through working on generative themes and Vygotsky’s theory of inner speech were implemented for teaching advanced literacy skills (Fiore and Elsasser 89). At the beginning of her teaching that corresponds to Freire’s first phase of problem-posing education, Elsasser learned about the Bahamas and her students through discussing their lives and schooling, investigated students’ habits of organizing their thoughts through the word association exercises, and asked students to give her advice about staying on the Bahamas through writing What You Need to Know to Live in the Bahamas essay. Although the students had difficulties with analyzing and incorporating broader information about their surrounding world, they started realizing similarities between their lives and responded to one another’s comments (Fiore and Elsasser 91). Her next step that corresponds to Freire’s second phase was selecting a generative theme through listing conflicting situations that the students suggested on the board and choosing the most important issue through voting. They selected marriage for their generative theme. Then, Elsasser and the students discussed marriage problems in the Bahamas and different readings on this topic that helped them to realize that their personal problems are influenced by the society that they live in. As a result, they could examine, make connections, critique the world around them, generate their own theories about writing mechanics, and rely in their writing on class discussions and readings (Fiore and Elsasser 93-95). During a next phase that corresponds to Freire’s idea about transforming the world, the students wrote an open letter to Bahamian men that was published in order to solve marriage issues that persist in their society. Furthermore, all of them passed the English exam, and that represented a big difference compare to the previous results – forty- five to sixty percent would usually fail this exam (Fiore and Elsasser 100-103). The success of this program shows that Freire’s approach to education can be easily adjusted to different contexts and needs of students and bring outstanding results.
Many attempts were made to implement Freire’s pedagogy in the third world countries by Freire himself and the educators who claim to practice his methods. His pedagogy became very popular during the Green Revolution when UNESCO and other international organizations were trying to increase food production by educating rural population through literacy programs that combined basic skills education with vocational training in agricultural field (Kidd and Kumar 26). However, some educators believe that Freirean pedagogy is very often distorted and his terminology and methods are used “without its substance as a smokescreen for the continued domestication of Third World peasants and workers in the interests of foreign capital” (Kidd and Kumar 28). For example, the pseudo-Freirean approach avoids the word “oppression” and focuses on “poverty” instead that is believed to be caused by poor and prevents them from better life; the actions of the dominant regime such as low wages, unequal rights and limited access to land and water are ignored. Kidd and Kumar name this concept a “culture of poverty” that can be cured only by changing the poor and educating them, but not by changing the social structure (28). They can be changed through awaking their critical consciousness that is defined as awareness of their needs and different resources that are available for fulfilling these needs. In other words, the poor are taught to see themselves through the eyes of their oppressors and accept their current state of being as natural and unchangeable which is the opposite of Freire’s idea about critical thinking. If the poor could increase food production which is very low because of their ignorance and inability to cultivate plants, then they would be able to end their poverty and starvation. La Belle describes this scenario as deprivation-development strategy that is used to change the behavior of the poor in the existing conditions as a solution to their problems which opposes Freire’s idea about liberation through breaking the social structure of domination (Kidd and Kumar 28).
The pseudo-Freirean method of education can be illustrated through the examples of some literacy programs designed by World Education organization in India and Thailand. The literacy program launched in Thailand in the early 1970s emphasized hygiene, birth control, and obedience to the authorities, ignoring any political or economic intervention by the poor. The main goal of this program was to improve living conditions of rural population by “attempting to correct misconceptions and to change the outmoded behaviors” (Kidd and Kumar 33) through informing masses. This approach opposes Freire’s dialogical nature of problem-posing education that treats students as equal partners in the educational process. “Liberating education consists of acts of cognition, not transferrals of information” (Freire 79). Likewise, a literacy program in India disregarded the economic and political causes of poverty and emphasized the ignorance of the poor as a source of their problems. For example, a Hindi literacy primer stated that “[e]ating rice has a bad effect on health” (Kidd and Kumar 33) without any explanation on why people cannot afford to eat anything else. Freire opposes this “prescription” character of education that implies “the imposition of one individual’s choice upon another” that is the form of oppression (47). These examples show how Freire’s name can be used to disguise the education that domesticates the lower-class population in some third world countries.
In conclusion, Freire’s belief in humanization of the world through liberation of oppressed constantly reminds us about the unjust social structure that domesticates through banking education and vertical relationships between people. However, his concept of problem-posing education is an effective tool in order to liberate ourselves and our students through recognizing our own position in the world, critically examining our conflicts and problems, and finally, transforming the world around us. In the modern world, where the global wealth increased six-fold, but the poverty gap between the poor and rich countries has also tripled over the last decades, Freire’s philosophy can become a powerful vehicle in the battle of humanity for its right to live as valuable members of the society who have their own opinion and are not just mere puppets on the invisible strings manipulated by the ruling elites.
Works Cited
Fiore, Kyle, and Nan Elsasser. “‘Strangers No More’: A Liberatory Literacy Curriculum.” Freire for the Classroom: A Sourcebook for Liberatory Teaching. Ed. Ira Shor. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1987. 87-104. Print.
Freire, Paulo. Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Continuum, 1986. Print.
---. Letters to Cristina: Reflections on My Life and Work. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print.
---. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Continuum, 2008. Print.
Kidd, Ross, and Krishna Kumar. “Co-opting Freire: A Critical Analysis of Pseudo-Freirean Adult Education.” Economic and Political Weekly 16.1/2 (1981): 27-36. JSTOR. Web. 29 Mar. 2010.
Mackie, Robert. Introduction. Literacy and Revolution, the Pedagogy of Paulo Freire. Ed. Mackie. New York: Continuum, 1981. Print.
Mies, Maria. “Paulo Freire's Method of Education: Conscientisation in Latin America.” Economic and Political Weekly 8.39 (1973): 1764-1767. JSTOR. Web. 29 Mar. 2010.
Thampi, Mohan. “The Educational Thought of Paulo Freire.” Social Scientist 2.1 (1973): 91-95. JSTOR. Web. 29 Mar. 2010.
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