Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Contemporary Critical Perspectives Edited by James D. Kirylo BLOOMSB RY ACADEM I C 1.0:-llCl\ • NI.II \ClkK • C>:-Hlkll • :-1:11 Ill.I.Ill•~\ DSI.\' BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Pie 50 Bedford Square, London, WClB 3DP. UK 1385 Broadway, NewYork, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY. BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Pie First published 2020 ©James D. Kirylo and Bloomsbury, 2020 James D. Kirylo and Bloomsbury have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. Cover design: Tjasa Krivec All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Pie does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the t ime of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-1718-1 PB: 978-1-3501-1717-4 ePDF: 978-1-3501-1719-8 ePUB: 978-1-3501-1720-4 Typeset by lntegra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. For Ana Maria (Nita) Araújo Freire vi Contents Foreword On the Road to Social Justice: Reinventing Paulo Freire Ira Shor x Acknowledgments xiv List of Contributors xv Introduction: The Enduring Legacy of Paulo Freire fames D. Kirylo Part 1 The Criticality of Teacher Preparation Preparing Foundational Phase Educators: Reading the Word and World through Transect Walks Deidre Geduld, Ivor Baatjes, and Heloise Sathorar 15 2 W. E. B. DuBois and Paulo Freire: Toward a "Pedagogy of the Veil" to Counter Racism in Early Childhood Education Meir Muller and Nathaniel Bryan 27 3 The Community as a Teacher Educator: Preparing Critically Conscious Teacher Candidates in Detroit Kaitlin Popielarz 39 Part 2 Pedagogy and Practice 4 Making Meaning in the Carceral Space: Freirean Dialogue and Existential Becoming in the Jail or Prison Classroom Gregory Bruno 53 5 Critical Race Counterstories and Freire's Critical Pedagogy: Navigating Race in an Interdisciplinary Literature and Religious Studies Course Soumitree Gupta and Gerardo Rodriguez-Galarza 63 6 Toward a Software of the Oppressed: A Freirean Approach to Surveillance Capitalism Erin Rose Glass 73 7 Freirean Cultural Circles in a Contemporary Social Studies Class Shelley Martin-Young 85 viii Contents 8 The Liberatory Potential for Teacher Mindfulness Amy E. Laboe 95 9 Who's in Charge? Teacher Authority and Navigating the Dialogical-Based Classroom A. J. Tierney 105 Part 3 The Intersection of Paulo Freire and Myles Horton, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Simone de Beauvoir 10 "To Speak a Book": Lessons from Myles Horton and Paulo Freire's We Make the Road by Walking Jon Hale and Alexandra Bethlenfalvy 115 11 The Beloved Community and Utopia: Hope in the Face of Struggle as Envisioned by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Paulo Freire DrickBoyd 125 12 Less Certain But No Less Committed: Paulo Freire and Simone de Beauvoir on Ethics and Education Peter Roberts 135 Part 4 Policy, the Environment, and Liberation Theology 13 Ley de Reforma Educativa de Puerto Rico: A Freirean Perspective Patricia Virella and Jennie Weiner 147 14 Overcoming (In)Difference: Emancipatory Pedagogy and Indigenous Worldviews toward Respectful Relationships with the More-Than-Human World Jennifer Markides 157 15 We Write on the Earth as the Earth Writes on Us: Paulo Freire the (Post) Humanist Tricia Kress and Robert Lake 169 16 The Postdigital Challenge of Paulo Freire's Prophetic Church Peter McLaren and Petar f andric 179 Part 5 Reflections, Experiences, and Considerations 17 Pursuing Critical Consciousness on the Tenure Track: Toward a Humanizing Praxis within the Neoliberal University Rolf Straubhaar, Sascha Betts, and Sara Torres 191 18 Living in the Contradictions: LGBTQ Educators and Critical Pedagogy Dena Lagomarsino 201 Contents ix 19 An Eye-Witness Account ofFreire's Return Back to Brazil after the Exile: Personal Reflections on Fighting Oppression Nelio Bizzo 211 20 Dare to Hope: The Art of Untying the Tongue and Awakening the Resilient Spirit Debora Barbosa Agra Junker 223 Paulo Freire Fifty Years Later: An Afterword Antonia Darder 233 Index 251 Foreword On the Road to Social Justice: Reinventing Paulo Freire Ira Shor Paulo Freire died unexpectedly May 2, 1997, at age seventy-five on an operating table in Brazil. The terrible news spread quickly around the globe, shocking and saddening many. For those who knew him or of him, a big hole suddenly opened in the world. When figures of Paulo’s stature pass, the gap they leave behind can’t be filled quickly or simply, though many have stepped up handsomely to the task. This book offers creative reports from some of the hands continuing the work Paulo Freire left behind. Teacher, mentor, author, ally of the dispossessed and nurturer of opposition, Paulo spent his adult life walking the long road to social justice in Brazil and abroad. His passion for a just world inspired similar passion in those who met him, worked with him, or read his books. That passion was activist and insurgent, leading to his arrest and forced exile after the coup of 1964, then to a triumphant return in 1980 to his beloved Brazil and collaboration in founding the Workers Party, for whom he served as Secretary of Education for Sao Paulo, 1989–1991. In life and after, Paulo became an icon of democratic opposition, so much so that in Brazil now he is once again targeted, this time by the right- wing regime of President Jair Bolsonaro. Freire’s stand against autocrats and juntas derives from his faith that a better world is possible, one that enables us to become more fully human. That faith has appealed to several generations who informally comprise what I call a global party of hope and resistance. That party includes the authors in this current volume. Books like this continue the frankly Utopian project that Paulo embraced—to denounce dehumanizing schools and societies while announcing humane and democratic alternatives. Foreword xi The 50th anniversary of Freire’s most-influential work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in 2018, provoked books like this into print as well as memorial conferences like the gathering in Columbia, South Carolina, October 2018, convened by Prof. James D. Kirylo, editor of this volume. On his many travels, Paulo hoped to serve as a “magnet” or “pretense” (as he put it) for activist educators to gather and advance democratic opposition. Each book or gathering succeeds so far as it challenges an unequal status quo while also following Freire’s advice not to copy him but rather to reinvent his work. “I always say,” he wrote, “that the only way anyone has of applying in their situation any of the propositions I have made is precisely by redoing what I have done, that is, by not following me. In order to follow me it is essential not to follow me!” (Freire & Faundez, 1992, p. 30). Freirean critical pedagogy is a situated politics, a dialogic process that “works” by being built from, for, and into the conditions of the students. Because conditions vary at differing sites of practice, educators adapt their practice to address the local situation. In this rich volume, readers will encounter a panorama of reinvention, not standardization, which is what Paulo called for, a praxis of adaptive local agency—action/reflection/action emerging for and from specific sites. Educators who reinvent Paulo are also reinventing themselves as teachers and human subjects. Transforming self-in-society begins with questioning the status quo and imagining interventions against the way things are. From chapter to chapter herein, there is a shared political orientation: questioning the status quo in the name of social justice, which is a general foundation of Freirean pedagogy. The “status quo” or “society as we find it” defines the object of the questioning, interrogating in legible language everyday experience re- presented as problems. I called that disruptive questioning “extraordinarily re-experiencing the ordinary” in my first book, Critical Teaching and Everyday Life (1980). “Questioning the status quo,” the heart of Freire’s original method, is simultaneously the goal and process of problem-posing. Freire conceived of dialogue as a horizontal process of mutual communication opposed to the authoritarian monologue of “banking pedagogy” (curriculum transferring pre-set knowledge from teacher to students). In other words, “Education must xii Foreword begin with the solution to the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students” (Freire, 2018, p. 72). The egalitarian process of learning (dialogue) and the democratic contents of learning (the cultural conditions, speech community, power relations, and ways of seeing of the students) make this a method for intellectual empowerment. For Freire in his Brazilian time and place, empowerment was centered in the poor and working class. Freire called the largely illiterate multitude he worked among “the power not yet in power.” This pedagogy for critical consciousness has evolved to address not only students from the bottom of the economic ladder but also students from diverse identities; inclusion now means not only representing lower class subjects but also engaging the profoundly unequal distinctions based on race, gender, sexual identity, ethnicity, national origin, immigration status, and physical abilities.