Preface: “…literacy cannot be reduced to the treatment of letters and words as purely mechanical domain. We need to go beyond this rigid comprehension of literacy and begin to view it as the relationship of learners to the world, mediated by the transforming practice of this world taking place in the very general milieu in which learners travel” (10-11).
“Nothing about society or language or culture or the human soul is simple; where there are human beings, there is activity; and human acts are processes, and processes are dialectical. Nothing simply unfolds, either in nature or in history: the recalcitrance of environments and structures of all sorts is necessary to growth and development, to change and transformation. That is something obvious and it takes a good deal of tramping before we can claim an understanding” (Berthoff’s introduction, 13-14).
“Teaching and learning are dialogic in character, and dialogic action depends on the awareness of oneself as knower, an attitude Freire calls conscientization (conscientizacao)” (14).
“…we reinvent our conference and journal formats, and of course our classrooms” (14). We must “study hard” Freire’s philosophy of language, and we must… “reinvent…”
“We are sometimes so used to thinking of language as a ‘communication medium’ that it can be surprising to discover, or to be reminded, that language is the means for making those meanings with which we communicate…When we speak, the discursive power of language—its tendency towards syntax—brings thought along with it. We don’t think our thoughts and then put them into words; we say and mean simultaneously. Utterance and meaning making are simultaneous and correlative” (14-15).
“…it is central to Freire’s pedagogy that learners are empowered by the knowledge that they are learners. This idea is at odds with the conventional wisdom of current educational practice which stresses that whereas know-how is crucially important, knowing-that is a waste of time” (15). ***YES, STILL!
**The Learning Imagination?: “Language also ensures the power of envisagement: because we can name the world and thus hold it in mind, we can reflect on its meaning and imagine a changed world. Language is the means to a critical consciousness, [***Art? Music?], which, in turn, is a means of conceiving of change and of making choices to bring about further transformations. Thus, naming the world transforms reality from “things” in the present moment to activities in response to situations, processes, to becoming…Liberation comes only when people reclaim their language and, with it, the power of envisagement, the imagination of a different world to be brought into being” (15).
Concrete activity: “In naming the world, the people of Freire’s Culture Circles are asked to survey their farms and villages and to collect the names of tools, places, and activities that are of central importance to their lives. These ‘generative words’ are then organized in ‘discovery cards,’ a kind of vowel grid, a do-it-yourself lexicon generator. Some words it produces are nonsense, others are recognizable. The crucial point is that sound and letter (shape) are matched with one another and with meaning or the meaning possibility” (15-16). ***And the point is to bring attention to how our minds create meaning.
“Pre-critical thought is still thought; it can and must simply be not simply rejected but transformed” (16).
“Instead of education as extension—a reaching out to students with valuable ideas we want to share—there must be a dialogue, a dialectical exchange in which ideas take shape and change as the learners in the Culture Circle think about their thinking, and interpret their interpretations. The dichotomy of ‘the affective’ and ‘the cognitive,’ so important in American educational theory, plays no part in Freire’s pedagogy. He sees thinking and feeling, along with action, as aspects of all that we do in making sense of the world” (16).
“…congnition itself is contingent upon recognition, for we never simply see: we see as, in terms of, with respect to, in the light of” (16-17).
“…the essential dialectic of all scientific investigation; it shows us how perception models concept formation; how looking and looking again is the very form and shape of creative exploration and critical thinking; how observation is the indispensable point of departure for the pedagogy of knowing. Indeed, the story is a parable of the ways of the eye of the mind, of the imagination: until the imagination is reclaimed as our human birthright, no liberation will be conceivable” (16).
“Criticism for Freire always means interpreting one’s interpretations, reconsidering contexts, developing multiple definitions, tolerating ambiguities so that we can learn from the attempt to resolve them. And it means the most careful attention to naming the world. Any ‘discourse’ has embedded in it at some level the history of its purposes, but Freire continually reminds us, as well, of its heuristic (generative) character: we can as ‘What if…?’ and ‘How could it be if…?’ By thus representing the power of envisagement, language provides the model of social transformation” (18).
“Such undialectical dialogues are replicated at our conferences, where we allow ourselves to be victimized by architecture, controlled by the design of meeting rooms and the schedules of maintenance staff” (19).
“An unquiet pedagogy means that we must rock the boat” (20).
“…problem posing (If we could define the role of writing this way, what would be the consequence for curriculum design?)”
“…there is no way to transformation; transformation is the way” (21).
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