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MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School Certificate for Approving the Dissertation We hereby approve the Dissertation of Yolanda Ochoa Dorger Candidate for the Degree: Doctor of Philosophy ____________________________________ Director Dr. Denise M. Taliaferro-Baszile ____________________________________ Reader Dr. Lisa D. Weems ___________________________________ Reader Dr. Sally A. Lloyd ____________________________________ Reader Dr. Michael E. Dantley ____________________________________ Reader Dr. Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis ____________________________________ Graduate School Representative REINVENTING OPPRESSION: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF PAULO FREIRE‘S PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED ABSTRACT by Yolanda Ochoa Dorger This dissertation is a archaeological analysis that traces the reinventions of Paulo Freire‘s idea of oppression in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by using Foucault‘s archeological method; it describes ―radical transformations and discontinuities‖ in the reinvention of oppression in different cultural and political contexts by examining the work of Latin American and United States scholars. I focus on the use of Freire‘s work to redefine the interconnections between literacy, cultures and education that potentially create new theoretical formulations in the United States and Latin America. I emphasize the importance of recognizing the contexts that gave birth to Freire‘s ideas as well as the proliferation of various meanings and other concerns that grow out of the cultural and political contexts of those peoples and places that continue to speak to the power of Freire‘s ideas. I focus on the insights and analytical tools that are especially significant to understanding the forces that underwrite Freire‘s theory and practice. REINVENTING OPPRESSION: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF PAULO FREIRE‘S PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Educational Leadership by Yolanda Ochoa Dorger Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2008 Dissertation Director: Dr. D. Taliaferro-Baszile © Yolanda Ochoa Dorger 2008 Table of Contents Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................1 PURPOSE OF THE STUDY ................................................................................................5 CONTRIBUTION ........................................................................................................... 11 STRUCTURE OF THE DISSERTATION .............................................................................. 12 II. METHODOLOGY ................................................................................................. 14 PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, MEANING, KNOWLEDGE AND POWER .......... 14 ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE ................................................................................. 18 GENEALOGY ............................................................................................................... 20 METHODOLOGICAL LIMITATIONS OF FOUCAULT‘S ARCHAEOLOGY .............................. 22 INTERPRETING FOUCAULT‘S ARCHAEOLOGY ............................................................... 23 THE BEGINNING ......................................................................................................... 24 EPISTEMOLOGICAL ENGINEERING ............................................................................... 30 ACADEMIC DISCOURSES ............................................................................................. 31 NARRATIVE AND VOICE .............................................................................................. 32 DATA COLLECTION ..................................................................................................... 39 NODES ....................................................................................................................... 42 CODES........................................................................................................................ 42 HISTORY AND IMPORTANCE OF THE CENTER OF REGIONAL COOPERATION FOR THE EDUCATION OF ADULTS IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN (CREFAL) ......................... 49 III. REINVENTIONS OF FREIRE’S IDEA OF OPPRESSION .............................. 53 FIRST SERIES .............................................................................................................. 57 FREIRE‘S BIO-TEXT, OPPRESSION‘S REINVENTIONS AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT ........... 58 SECOND SERIES .......................................................................................................... 72 THIRD SERIES ............................................................................................................. 92 iv COROLLARY OF THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF FREIRE‘S PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED 102 IV. CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES .................................................... 107 GRAPHIC OF CROSS DOMAIN ANALYSIS ...................................................................... 107 REFERENCES .......................................................................................................... 114 List of Figures Figure Num. Page Figure 1 . ARCHAEOLOGY AND FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS ...................... 29 Figure 2 . FREIRE‘S SYNCRETIC THINKING ............................................... 45 Figure 3 . TRANSFORMATIONS OF FREIRE‘S PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED ..................................................................................................................................... 46 Figure 4 . CONTINUITIES OR DISCONTINUITIES OF FREIRE‘S IDEA OF OPPRESSION IN THE WORK OF A SELECTED GROUP OF THE UNITED STATES SCHOLARS ................................................................................................................. 47 Figure 5 . CONTINUITIES OR DISCONTINUITIES OF FREIRE‘S IDEA OF OPPRESSION IN THE WORK OF A SELECTED GROUP OF LATIN AMERICA SCHOLARS ................................................................................................................. 48 Figure 6 . TRANSFORMATIONS OF FREIRE'S IDEA OF OPPRESSIONFIGURE 6. TRANSFORMATIONS OF FREIRE‘S IDEA OF OPPRESSION .............................. 108 v I. Introduction This dissertation is about the issues of cultural understanding and the transculturation of knowledge. It is about the flow of meaning and understanding of ideas that emerge in one context and move into another where can be changed, transformed and reinvented. One of the dilemmas of our understanding about education is our limitations on the approaches of the meaning from a position based on culture, location, and language that defined every context. The bigger mission here is to contribute to and stress the importance of cross-cultural dialogue and translation. My understanding of Paulo Freire‘s work from a Latin American context encountered many questions, challenges and reflections when I was exposed to the differences of interpretation and application of Paulo Freire‘s work in the United States. It became very important to me to move from a contextual interpretation of Freire‘s work into a cross-cultural dialogue for re-interpretation of the same work. Freire‘s work has been present in my life as student and later as a teacher twice. My first encounter was in a Latin America context. Later in my time as student at Miami University I encounter Freire‘s work but with a different perspective in comparison with my previous experiences. It appeared to me that these two voices did not talk to each other. The meanings and part of the translations were saying something different. There I notice the importance of the culture from where something has been said. This first reflection pointed me to look critically at the reinvention of Freire‘s work, specifically his concept of oppression from the two different context and try to find and trace the radical transformations, continuities and discontinuities of the reinventions of Paulo Freire‘s (1970) concept of oppression using archaeology as a method of description and analysis of a discourse to help to reveal the social and political forces within this field of discourse. It allows me to describe the perspectives of Latin America and United States and their notions of unity, continuity, tradition and influence. Paulo Freire is one of the most important educational philosophers of the 20th Century. He proposed a synthesis of the traditions of Hegelian dialectics, Marxism and Liberation Theology arguing that the psychosocial method of literacy had the possibility of transforming an act of simply knowing to an act of intervention throughout grass roots political activism. His 1 Literacy programs as political consciousness became a catalyst of such political intervention in contrast to the traditional functional literacy programs that had distilled inertia. Freire was a revolutionary educator who worked with the peasant populations in the poorest region of Brazil in the 1960‘s. He engaged the ‗‖readers‖ with ethics, politics and pedagogy by inviting them to commit with life, justice and liberation and challenging the fatalist immobilizing ideology that supports the liberal discourse that insists that nothing can be done to change social reality. He saw that a ―culture of silence‖ and illiteracy were the roots of oppression and proposed a ―problem-posing‖ model of education that encouraged mutual communication. Freire, an idealist, a communist, a ―theologian in disguise,‖ a phenomenologist and an existentialist,

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