Paulo Freire and Emancipatory Education

CHAPTER 4 PAULO FREIRE AND EMANCIPATORY EDUCATION INTRODUCTION Paulo Freire was born in 1921 in Recife, north-eastern Brazil. He has been at the fountainhead of a critical and dialogic tradition in education that includes the Brazilian educational theorist Moacir Gadotti and playwright Augusto Boal, Argentinian theorists Daniel Schugurensky and Carlos Torres, and informs American theorists such as Ira Shor, bell hooks, Peter McLaren and Henry Giroux, as well as a much wider ambit of educational scholars and practitioners. He is acknowledged as a seminal figure in critical pedagogy and popular education (Schugurensky, 2011) and viewed as one of the key educational theorists of the twentieth century (Dimitriadis & Kamberelis, 2006). He is an inspirational figure for education in the global South, both for his practical work in contexts of development in Latin America and Africa, and for his recognition of the links among education, politics, imperialism and liberation. There are a number of Paulo Freire Institutes spread across the globe that strive to advance and develop his vision. In South Africa, he was an important influence in the “Education for Liberation” movement and among progressive literacy organisations during the anti-apartheid struggle, and his ideas continues to be a key reference point in adult education. For Freire, dialogue is a feature of human being as well as a method of inquiry and a pedagogical orientation. Freire’s particular dialogic, emancipatory approach to education places him as a pivotal figure within the genealogy of dialogue. LIFE Paulo Freire, the youngest of four children, grew up in a middle class family in the north-eastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco. His family fell into difficulty during the Great Depression. Unlike Buber, Freire’s experience of alienation did not occur within the family but rather in relation to wider socio-economic conditions of depression. He experienced hunger and witnessed first-hand the greater hunger of poorer children. He recognised the relation between learning and nutrition from his own struggles to learn on an empty stomach. He became aware of the wider poverty and inequality that characterised Brazil at the time. From childhood, he recognised that all was not well with the world and a better world was both necessary and possible. His parents were caring and supportive, his father a spiritualist and his mother a Roman Catholic, who respected each other’s religious opinions and had a harmonious marriage. From his mother came his own lifelong Catholic faith. 43 CHAPTER 4 From his father came a concern with political affairs and a critical attitude towards authoritarianism. His father took every opportunity to engage his sons or daughter in conversation. His parents taught him to read his first words, writing them on the ground in the backyard under the mango tree. He did not learn the alphabet as an abstract and meaningless recitation but in the form of words linked to his own experiences. “From them,” writes Freire, “I learned early on the value of dialogue” (Freire, 1996: 13). Both positive and negative school experiences profoundly influenced Freire’s attitudes towards the teaching and learning of literacy. When he started school at the age of six he already knew the alphabet and remembers the joy of combining words to form sentences. He experienced no rupture between home and school. His first school teacher’s “preoccupation was not with making me memorize grammatical definitions but with stimulating the development of my oral and writing abilities” (ibid.: 29). This involved asking Paulo to make his own sentences and questioning him about what they meant. It is worth pausing to consider more closely the dialogic features of Freire’s childhood literacy experiences. First, we notice that his initial reading lessons happened in his home environment, in a setting and using tools with which he was familiar: his parents wrote words with a stick on the ground in his backyard. Second, they chose words that were “his words”, that were meaningful to his reality. This approach was reinforced by his first school teacher, who asked the pupils to write down all the words that they knew and then to make sentences out of them. These literacy experiences were intrinsically meaningful to Freire and he remembers the excitement and joy of creating sentences from these words. In various sources, Freire emphasises the point that both his parents and his first teacher began with words not from a curriculum but from his own experience, “my words”. Bakhtin’s notion of the boundary within one’s words between one’s own (in the young Paulo’s case, his own spoken words) and others’ words (the written form of these words) is evident here. Paulo crosses the boundary in order to make the words of others his own as he writes sentences. However, he is not the only one who crosses this boundary. His parents and teacher make his boundary crossing possible by crossing the boundary to his side first. It is useful to consider in this regard Buber’s notion of “experiencing the other side” as a key dimension of “inclusion”. Paulo’s parents and teacher “take his side” and place themselves in his learning position by encouraging him to begin with his reality and choose his own words, first as a reader at home and then as a writer at school. He is thus able to draw on his own elementary knowledge of the world as he participates in realising these words in a new written code. This enables him to enter into a generative dialogue between living and learning, the familiar world and new knowledge, the oral and the written, all in the context of a relationship with persons whom he trusts. In addition, he is actively involved in the learning event, not only in selecting words but in deciphering their written form and rendering them as text. There is his joy in the magical connection between material scratching on the ground, the page, and what 44.

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