On Language & Disruptive Pedagogy

There was a social media storm recently after a Rhodes University lecturer used isiXhosa in a history class – and then told unhappy students it was their duty to learn the local language. A version of this event posted on Facebook prompted many discussions on issues of language, privilege and power. After two weeks of debate, the lecturer, Naledi Nomalanga Mkhize, explains the reasoning behind her assertion. The Con

With almost 10 years’ experience in teaching and education activism behind me, having taught hundreds of students each year, one of the things that remains a mainstay of my career is that delicate combination of teaching through nurturing and through disruption.

Salim Vally on Education & the Unemployment Crisis in South Africa

Fanon and the Counterinsurgency of Education

Fanon and the Counterinsurgency of Education by TigersEye99

“We Are Poor, Not Stupid”: Learning From Autonomous Grassroots Social Movements in South Africa - Anne Harley

“WE ARE POOR, NOT STUPID”: LEARNING FROM AUTONOMOUS GRASSROOTS SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN SOUTH AFRICA by TigersEye99

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

To the oppressed, and to those who suffer with them
and fight at their side

- dedication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed

First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. The methodology of the late Paulo Freire has helped to empower countless impoverished and illiterate people throughout the world. Freire’s work has taken on especial urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is increasingly accepted as the norm.

Pedagogy of the Poor

Pedagogy of the Poor: Building the Movement to End Poverty presents a new kind of interdisciplinary pedagogy that brings together antipoverty grassroots activism and relevant social theories about poverty. Closely linked to the Poverty Initiative at Union Theological Seminary, this unique book combines the oral history of a renowned antipoverty organizer with accessible introductions to relevant social theories, case studies, in-class student debates, and pedagogical reflections. This multilayered approach makes the book useful to both social activists committed to eradicating poverty and educators looking for ways to teach about the struggles for economic and social justice. Pedagogy of the Poor is an essential tool of self-education and leadership development for a broad social movement led by the poor to end poverty.

The Ignorant School Master: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation

 by Jacques Rancière

The book was published in the early 80s as a contribution to a debate happening in France over education. The debate was over the push by the left to make school a nicer, more welcoming and inclusive place for students. A socialist published a book criticising this arguing that schools should be for education, the issue of how students feel in them is secondary. They are only there to be taught and it is on teaching that people should be focused. Against this Ranciere argued that education does not happen through the transference of knowledge from one subject to another. The teacher is not the holder of knowledge. Rather education is a process of self-education. The learner struggles through problem and through that learns.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Chapter One

The first chapter of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). The full text of the book is online here.

While the problem of humanization has always, from an axiological point of view, been humankind's central problem, it now takes on the character of an inescapable concern. (1) Concern for humanization leads at once to the recognition of dehumanization, not only as an ontological possibility but as an historical reality. And as an individual perceives the extent of dehumanization, he or she may ask if humanization is a viable possibility. Within history, in concrete, objective contexts, both humanization and dehumanization are possibilities for a person as an uncompleted being conscious of their incompletion.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Chapter Two

The second chapter of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). The full text of the book is online here.

A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness.
The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to "fill" the students with the contents of his narration -- contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.

Feminist Praxis and the Politics of Literacy: A Conversation with bell hooks

Audio Interview
 

Interviewed by Gary A. Olson and Elizabeth Hirsch, The Theory Project

Feminist and cultural critic bell hooks is resolutely committed to promoting literacy. For hooks, literacy is essential to the future of the feminist movement because the lack of reading, writing, and critical skills serves to exclude many women and men from feminist consciousness. Yet, as hooks argues in the interview that follows, “The class standpoint of much feminist theory leads to a deprivileging of and a disrespect for the politics of reading and writing.” She makes a cogent case for encouraging “every feminist thinker in the academy” to acknowledge literacy to be “an important feminist agenda,” and she expresses “anguish” over the neglect of literacy among feminists: “If we truly want to empower women and men to engage in feminist thinking, we must empower them to read and write, but I really don’t see any large group of committed feminists making that a central agenda.”

Paulo Freire

Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Excerpt from Chapter One

by Paulo Freire, 1970

Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed has been described as a response to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. The full text of this book is online here. The first part of the first chapter is below. 

Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Chapter One.

While the problem of humanization has always, from an axiological point of view, been humankind’s central problem, it now takes on the character of an inescapable concern.[1] Concern for humanization leads at once to the recognition of dehumanization, not only as an ontological possibility but as an historical reality And as an individual perceives the extent of dehumanization, he or she may ask if humanization is a viable possibility. Within history in concrete, objective contexts, both humanization and dehumanization are possibilities for a person as an uncompleted being conscious of their incompletion.