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- IS: You can't have good dialogue if you speak mutually unintelligible tongues. Teachers learn "academese", which separates them from student vernacular.
- There's only one dominant, white English, but there are many marginalized languages and dialects, so 'translation' is always a new struggle.
- PF: Tell me about your teaching.
- IS: I speak differently with colleagues, with students, and with you. My working class background is an advantage in talking to "nontraditional" students.
- I spoke academese fluently, but with a bronx accent.
- Working with students, I got a feel for their "conceptual tolerance"; that is, the moment when my language got too alien to them to connect to.
- I tried to use the phrases, rhythms, and humor that students did.
- Students wouldn't ask for clarification if they didn't get it, so I had to assess comprehension in creative ways.
- The characteristics of language is one thing to change, but we also have the "relations of discourse" to modify. Are students speaking? Is the teacher dominating the class with their own subjectivity and leaving no room for theirs?
- Before we can research their language, they have to be comfortable speaking.
- The start of a term is when I'm most vigilant to limit my speech. I study their speech instead. I learn what's important to them and how they talk about it. I get a sense of their cognitive/political development.
- One time students told me I was "real" and didn't talk down to them, but also that I spoke too slowly and bored them. So I sped up.
- I want my *whole speech *to be worth listening to. I must renounce "the right to bore".
- The class is like a long discussion that finds its own themes. Students don't jump in to discuss right away, so I have to leverage the group dynamics to "build a momentum of exchanges".
- You know you're on the right track when they start responding seriously to *each other* and not just you.
- Some teachers start answering their own questions if they don't find an answer right away.
- Fleeing the silence, they intelligently conversate with themselves.
- This is where students learn that the right answer was already formulated in the teacher's head, so why would they bother when their own answers can't compete?
- Teachers saying "we" to create a cheap comeradery in place of a real one. The "we" is only authentic if properly negotiated and truly including students.
- PF: My students tend to enter school thinking quite concretely, and I have to translate my abstract notions into that idiom.
- Workers are used to concrete language. When I saw "slum" or "descrimination", I feel the deep meaning, but I don't truly suffer its weight like the workers do.
- For me, it's not at all a question of removing words like "epistemology" or "alienation". We need those! They're useful! It's a question of how we can situate them within the concrete.
- I know the students' concrete conditions better as I collaborate to change them.
- We shouldn't think of linguistic problems as separate from power.
- I often start the term with everyone just talking about their lives. Jobs, background, etc.
- Most Brazilian college students are middle class. They are in the same linguistic world, but they lack the specialized vocabulary.
- And they need it! They *need *to read Marx. I don't have the right to just say "it's too hard for you."
- After students talk to me about their lives, I bring out some main points and ask them to say more. I'm trying to push them to be more conceptual and pick out themes.
- This has another important lesson: *We all have the right to ask "what do you mean by that?"*
- We gotta start from their language, from their thought-world, not ours.
- IS: Agreed. But when we are simply not understood, when our idiom is too different, what then?
- PF: Look: academese and vernacular are very different, yes. But workers have their own devices for abstraction, often using metaphors, parables, stories. Our task is to understand these ways of speaking and translate our concepts into them.
- They are extremely capable of grasping complicated ideas and we should never pretend they're not.
- IS: So what does that look like?
- PF: If I'm teaching college, I'll use words like "gnosiology" and then define it if I can sense I just lost people. Peasants understand beautifully what this term refers to, but not the term itself.
- If it's an informal gathering that I just show up to, I wouldn't use the academic word, I'd just talk about the concept. I use examples from their lives.
- IS: Do peasants and workers have different speech?
- PF: Yes. The workers are close to the contradictions of capital and can become good students of them quite naturally. Their language reflects this. But still, their language is not academic. And so I defer using academic terms and learn their metaphorical ways.
- IS: What's an example of a metaphor to substitute an academic term?
- PF: One of my students worked with some peasants, wanted to be a kind of "advisor". After a few days, the peasants said "Look comrade, you don't need to teach us to cut down a tree. We know already. What we need to know is if you'll be with us when the tree falls." Beautiful metaphor.
- You'll see in my own writing I use metaphors like this. Some academics read this and think I'm unrigorous.
- When I'd been exiled, I lost touch with vernacular Portuguese, but I got it back upon my return.
- IS: American teachers don't feel at home w/ working-class vernacular. Our training takes us away from it.
- PF: We gotta invite students gradually into the conceptual.
- There's two different ways to mess up and be elitist about it:
- Imposing our language
- Diminishing our language / only copying theirs / caricature
- "Simplicity without simpletons"
- IS: Oh yeah. Students know right away if you're talking down to them.
- I start my own classes in a similar way to your self-introduction practice, but I'm careful not to press them with too many conceptual questions, because "the verbal environment feels unfamiliar+judgmental"
- I ask students instead to "interview" each other and report to the class. I pose questions and connections, but I don't "pounce on a theme."
- I need students to know that *a question is not a trap.*
- PF: Interesting. In Brazil, I haven't really had that problem. If I ask a student to explain their point of view more because I'm not sure I agree with it, they'll go ahead and do it. But what you say makes sense in your context.
- Here's how I think of it: If you want to get to the other side, you have to cross the street. But you can't *arrive* at the same side you *depart* from. Our *here* is their *there*.
- IS: Instead of getting students from one side to the other, teachers will make gestures from far away and ask students to imitate them. So let's say that our first task as educators is to actually cross to their side and meet them there. What next?
- Is our goal just to bring students back to where we came from?
- IS: Here's my question: do students move towards the teacher, or is the teacher also mobilized? I think we should aim for both teachers and students to wind up in a new place altogether.
- Being a teacher has taught me so much. The process of translation and "crossing over" has been transformative for me.
- PF: Yes, let's be open to new things, but we must *keep our dream with clarity*.
- Be wary of "laissez-faire" ; "pure sponteneity". It's a consequence of "losing touch with your politics."
- I must have some sense of my destination. I must be clear that I have a dream, *and that there are other dreams that I think are bad.*
- But at the same time, you can't manipulate them! It's a delicate tension.
- No leaving-alone, no frog-marching. Instead: Radical, Directed Democracy.
- I convince without conquering. Students have the right to bad dreams. I in turn have the right to say these dreams are bad.
- IS: So we need a point of view and a goal, we can't really be "neutral" or casual.
- PF: I love how you said that, say more.
- IS: The teacher can never be neutral. Every choice a teacher makes is an expression of their politics.
- PF: Good, good. This is stimulating stuff.
- I think that education has an "inductive moment." This is the moment when students will not develop further without a push.
- The liberating teacher will inhabit this moment with the intention of overcoming it. Finding a way to transform their singular action into comradery.
- The *domesticating* teacher will seize sole control of how the moment develops.
- IS: Tell me more about inductive moments. Are they times when the educator intervenes to "draw together the pieces of knowing"? To "gather the threads into a whole" which shows a new perspective, one which students can then look through?
- Does the liberating teacher "induce" in ways that develop the students' own initiative?
- PF: Yes, yes, and yes. Take the moment and work with it such that you can hand it back to them as quickly as possible.
- IS: Let's bring the abstract/concrete distinction into this inductive moment. It's a big obstacle.
- Summarizing the past hour before the bell rings is, at its best, a nice inductive moment. But too often it's mechanical.
- Teachers like to interrupt student speech to translate, clarify, and anticipate their points. This sends the message that their speech is other and that they cannot be trusted to self-explicate.
- When I repeat or clarify, I do so very carefully. I "presrve the integrity of the original remark." I mingle my idiom and theirs.
- I invite students to summarize *with *me. I don't give one unless a couple other students do first. That way it's a real reflection, not a "ceremonial stamp."
- When silence falls on the classroom, sometimes it's up to us to subvert expectations by *not filling it*. Let them think. Invite them to share in the responsibility of keeping conversation going.
- PF: I agree, I like that approach to silence. But let's avoid giving these out as universal prescriptions. We can imagine a setting where a teacher-led summary is just what's called for. If they are extremely timid, you first have to show them what "summarizing" is.
- Let's be clear: you're not just proving you can do it. It's not an ego thing. You're *showing them how.*
- *Education is above all the giving of examples through actions*. Call attention to what you're doing and how you're doing it. Reflect on it out loud.
- IS: You're definitely right. Let's not be prescriptive or mechanical.
- PF: Let's say that on the first day of class, you start your summary. Maybe start off asking questions. What is a summary? Why do we do it? It's not just bureaucratic now, it's a learning moment.
- IS: Yes, but it's delicate, isn't it? You can fall into taking it back over so easily. You're good at it and they might not be. It might need a conversational tone to get students in on the discussion.
- PF: To be clear, I don't do this every day, but it's a good example. Here's why.
- Learning has a few steps. You receive the thing in its totality, then you take it apart / analyse it. Then you put it back together with a new understanding. Summary is part of this "retotalizing" phase. It's not just a re-iteration. It's *a moment in which we try to know*.
- IS: Traditional classrooms are boring and unemotional. Does dialogic education address this?
- PF: Absolutely. Humor is essential. To me though, irony or sarcasm are detrimental. They reveal insecurity. But *humor *unveils reality in such striking ways.
- IS: I think laughter builds comradery. You don't really laugh with people who are absolutely superior or subordinate to you. Co-workers stop laughing when the boss walks in.
- PF: Let's be careful, there's a difference between humor and "just laughing." The humorist isn't just a "smile maker". Sometimes good humor doesn't even make you laugh. Good humor makes you think.
- Cracking jokes and causing laughter often times just covers up insecurity. It's like self-defense. They're trying to conquer the audience.
- Last night, I was telling some other LatAm exiles about my exile from brazil. I was talking about my foibles in different cultures and laughing at myself. I dare say I was pretty funny.
- IS: Humor can't be taught like a mechanical skill. It's part of your character. I think teachers often forget that in their own way, they are performers. I think we can try and wake up teachers' imaginations with certain courses.
- Comedy is a big part of subjectivity. A humorless school breeds anti-intellectualism.
- I agree, "humor" is richer and more demanding than "a cheap laugh", as we say in the states. But you can also be very politically advanced and rigorous, very rich and demanding, without humor. And you'll just lose students. They'll think intellectual life is "a drag".
- Humor helps make school "real". But being a witty teacher who competes for attention with the class clown is a low aspiration.
- IS: Let's talk about it. We never really avoid it. In my classes, men talk over women. If a man wants to speak, a woman can't finish her speech. I interrupt men when they do this and tell them it's sexist. I'm interfering with an automatic behavior and thereby inspiring insight into it. Like Vygotsky talked about when he discussed the "law of awareness" from Piaget.
- I frequently have to encourage women to speak louder. I try and invite women to speak more before male students can tackle her with rebuttals.
- I hear students say that women belong in the home, that sexual violence is amusing, that women should be chaste. I re-present these statements to the class for study. I don't lecture them, I begin a dialogue.
- Non-white students are more silent in class, too. I try and invite them in in different ways and offer texts relevant to the issue. I think non-white men have a harder time of it than white women do.
- PF: Racism is strong in brazil. It's an authoritarian society, a *machista *society. When I came back from my exile, women and black people were fighting to be recognized, to re-evaluate their history, to have dignity.
- Funnily enough, when I see men put women down in class, the female students fight back and put them in their place. Which isn't to say that Brazilian society is becoming any less *macha, *it's just an anecdote.
- I agree with your interrupting strategy, but we have to be careful not to *save *women. They must liberate themselves (alongside male allies).
- I was on brazilian TV recently. A female facilitator asked me about the women's struggle. I responded that *I am a woman. *Obviously, this caused a huge problem. We got so many phone calls.
- /// Paulo.................. no keep going I wanna see what you mean here
- I really meant it though! Not to be agreeable to women, not to be demagogic. Not because I thought I could be a leader in the women's struggle. But because *I have the duty and the right to participate in the transformation of society.*
- Women who do not allow men to have opinions about women's issues are naive.
- /// He's (in?)(directly?) deriding being strict about *who counts as a woman, *despite probably never thinking about trans people in his life. This rules.
- I'm certain that women *should lead *the movement, but it does not *wholly belong to them*. That would be the opposite of solidarity.
- It's the same thing with race! I'm white-passing, but my race is complicated. But whether I'm "really white" is less important than the degree to which I fight alongside blackness against white supremacy.
- ///...........Paulo................. You're a real one
- IS: I wonder, Paulo, if we can work against sexism and racism without ever addressing them explicitly. If we're just talking about bodies of knowledge or themes of life that are unrelated. Will critical thinking be a transferable skill in this case?
- PF: I'm not sure. Racism and sexism are linked to capitalist production. We can't get rid of them in the current society. But a socialist society wouldn't necessarily be free of them.
- The new society must be created on equal terms, though. We can't wait for The Revolution to start undermining these hierarchies.
- IS: So dialogical education can help prepare the way?
- PF: I think and hope so. But let's not fall into the trap of thinking that first comes education, then comes revolution. No, we should keep them as simultaneous as possible.
- IS: I feel like critical dialogue about anything at all can undermine sexism / racism / capitalism. It's like getting distance from your position and reflecting on your beliefs, which is universal in application.
- Reactionaries are really afraid that schools are a danger to the social order, though. Do you think that they're overreacting when they clamp down on schools?
- PF: I think they know what they're doing. They're rendering reality opaque. But in school, liberating educators also *demystify*, and that is threatening to elites. They can do this in any subject matter.
- It is sometimes our task to analyze critical issues indirectly or cleverly, namely when you are being watched. Don't ask me how, because I don't know your country well. In Brazil, I know how. The recent democratic turn has opened up doors. Goes to show you how political conditions condition our best practices.