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- IS: Paulo, you've said that teachers are artists and politicans. The politics is fairly clear, but how do we execute it artfully? Aesthetically, even?
- Let's start with "dialogue". Some teachers do more discussion formats, but the majority are lecturing didactically. It's mostly at richer schools that classes are small enough for good discussion, so dialogue is sort of a class privilege.
- Fun idea: let's move money from the military into schools :)
- So what can dialogue change?
- PF: You gotta understand that it's not a "mere technique" we should use to "get results". It's not a way of making students our friends either. That's not illumination, that's manipulation.
- Dialogue is what people do. It's in our historical nature. It's a "necessary posture". Plus, we can be metacognitive. Birds don't know what they know and don't know, as far as we know.
- "Knowing is a social event with an individual dimension."
- "Dialogue seals the relationship between the cognitive subjects, the subjects who know, and who try to know."
- IS: Speaking "confirms or disconfirms" the relation between the two speakers. It's not just a "ping pong" of words and gestures, but a relationship in negotiation. Our job is to negotiate a democratic relationship.
- PF: The object of dialogue is not the *sole possession *of one of its members. It is between them, it mediates them. They meet around it and through it.
- /// The logos is shared
- The teacher chooses and prepares it, but this in no way exhausts it.
- IS: The teacher knows the objects of study better than the students at first, but then *re-learns *along with them?
- PF: Exactly. "The educator remakes her or his cognoscibility through the cognoscibility of the educatees."
- Dialogue is the "sealing together of the teacher and the student in the joint act of knowing and re-knowing the object of study."
- "Dialogue demands a dynamic approximation towards the object."
- /// I'm sort of fuzzy on what "re-learning" means. Retracing the steps of past learning? Learning to re-assume a kind of beginner's position?
- Some teachers think this is *really weird, *some kind of third-world nonsense. It's really just an epistemological position!
- "This is a debate on epistemology, not on demonic arts from a picturesque location."
- IS: Liberating education itself is a process which "remakes authority." It demystifies the teacher's power.
- PF: It does *not *mean that the teacher is pretending not to know. That's just lying. It also doesn't mean that their ideas change every single semester.
- It's not like my ideas about dialogue change every time I talk about it. However, it does appear differently in the shifting light of history, context, and other learning. "all new knowledge awaits its own overcoming."
- Dialogue is not total freedom where all whims can be enacted. It implies responsibility, directiveness, discipline, and objectives. But *not authoritarianism.*
- It's a permanent tension between liberty and authority. Authority continues to be because it authorizes freedoms.
- Nor does it mean that *everyone must speak*.
- IS: I see that. If you're pressured to speak when you have nothing to say, that's "false democracy". It makes dialogue into a dogma.
- PF: Yes. You have the right to be silent. But you *don't *have the right to sabotage the process.
- There should be consequences for students "abusing the openness of the class or from interfering with other students"
- IS: Dialogic class needs a "critical mass" to participate. If too many kids exercise their right to silence, we're dead in the water.
- So how do we get participation? Let's talk about "situated pedagogy."
- PF: To be clear, the teacher knows a lot about the material and also has an idea of the "horizon" they want to get to.
- IS: Yes, this is their competency and where their politics are revealed. The teacher's ideals is, in a sense, what moves the whole thing forward. But often, this expertise can get in the way as much as it can help. So how do we get dialogic with it?
- Finding aspects of the students' lives which are *relevant *but *unexplored*.
- We don't just "look at the familiar", we situate it critically/historically/socially
- The "extraordinary reexperiencing of the ordinary" /// defamiliarization
- Developmental tensions in this situation:
- Familiar objects / new lenses
- Routine curricular opacity / liberatory curricular demystification
- Students' expectations of authoritarian ed / liberatory project of this classroom
- teacher's take / students takes
- A few options: study themes of student culture, or situate formal subjects within their lives
- It's not just presenting materials that are Hip because it'll get their attention, it's challenging their given-ness and seeing beyond their limits
- PF: Let me think out loud here. *I've got to fly around a bit before I can land on my question.*
- In universities, sometimes our academic pursuits become unmoored from the outside world, and it becomes a mere *ballet of concepts*. This takes us away from The People. Intellectuals approach things conceptually, The People approach it concretely.
- /// ...hm... idk about that
- The reason I'm so insistant on starting with the kids' own descriptions of their lives is so that we can start at the concrete level, at the "common sense" level, and we work from there. But also, I don't dichotomize here. Daily life is not separate from rigor, common sense is not separate from philosophy.
- /// I take him to mean that they are not qualitatively different kinds of knowing; that is, that they can meet, interpenetrate, and transfer, not that they are *identical*.
- IS: The moment you examine your naïvité, you are on longer naïf.
- PF: I had a colleague in Brazil who taught this course called "astrology to astronomy", and I was so mad I couldn't audit it, because it sounded amazing. One of the first things he'd have them do is go out into their neighborhoods and ask ordinary people about *what the sky meant*. How far away was the sun? What are the stars? How do the seasons change? Then they begin to think "scientifically" about that material.
- /// this kicks ass
- You gotta recognize that students have been taught to deny their own freedom.
- /// idk where this came from
- IS: I like that because students *become researchers *before they ever start listening to someone else tell them how it is. They're looking at their own views and popular conceptions as objects of study.
- /// they're not just *learning science facts, *they're learning *how to think scientifically*
- But can we say that it "empowers" them?
- PF: I think so. But I want to back up with this word "empowerment", because I hear a lot of Americans say it in ways I don't feel good about.
- IS: Is it because it conjures this image of a teacher lighting a lamp, illuminating the students, and leaving?
- PF: You get it. It's too easy. This colleague of mine thought of this exercise himself because he believed that he did not *own *knowledge, not because he wanted to *be like Friere*. This pedagogy can develop independence, but it can't *radically transform Brazil.*
- IS: Let's think about this for a bit. Some US progressive educators think of the teacher as a "resource", where students direct their own learning and only ask for help or info when they want it. This self-directed learner is "empowered"-- he needs no supervision. Some anti-authoritarians see this as the ideal.
- PF: I disagree. Education is *always directed*. The question is: towards what and with whom is it directed? **Liberation is a social act.**
- IS: So there's no such thing as personal empowerment?
- PF: Absolutely not. Even if you personally feel free, if you can't liberate others, your freedom is of very limited value. The *feeling *of power, of freedom, is not *sufficient* to transform society, though it is *necessary*.
- For whom and against whom do they use this freedom?
- IS: In the 60s, education for social change was a real current, but terms like "empowerment" have definitely been co-opted into a discourse of individualism and private gain. The emphasis on "personal growth" is just as ideological as the heroic myth of the entrepreneur.
- There have always been ways for cunning people (mostly white men) to make it big in the US. Plus, the culture changes rapidly, and there's always something to "get ahead of". Inequalities persisted, but styles of life changed. Social movements fizzled. Individualism resulted.
- These ideas come from history. "Social intelligence" and "political empowerment" are much less credible ideas to us than individual effort or talent. Capitalism sells us individuality and then makes us the same.
- PF: Let's come back to another topic: is the dialogic method too "third world" to use in the US? Let's start here: empowerment isn't individual as the Americans have been ideologized into believing, but it's not merely *social* either. It's *social <ins>class</ins> empowerment**.*
- American teachers will probably understand this even less. Class analysis in Latin America and the US will definitely be different, and I would argue that it's actually harder in the US. In Brazil, class differences can be profoundly felt even in our geography. It's more obscured in the US. We need tools for social analysis that go beyond the basic Marxist kit to understand the US.
- I'm not saying that "class is everything", to be clear, I'm not that "narrow" of a Marxist. Social class empowerment refers to how the working class *engages itself in getting power *through its own experiences and culture. It's a long historical process where education is only one component.
- IS: American students have wildly differing perspectives on class. You really can't predict it. Sometimes students hold contradictory beliefs within themselves. Many of them recognize inequality, but few see opportunities for change. They can be disgusted with the suffering in their country but also believe in the American Dream. How do you insert yourself into this?
- It gets at the "potentials and limits" of liberating education. To be effective, it's gotta connect with other struggles, and in the end my course is just one in their life. I think US teacher are impatient; this can lead to fake solutions or cynicism when change does not materialize, but there's also a kind of nobility to it in how it can drive us to continually seek answers.
- PF: American love self-help books. They're all about self-empowerment, but paradoxically, they tell you exactly what to do. It's such a fascinating ideological phenomenon.
- IS: And these self-improvement fads can spread very quickly.
- PF: It's the exact opposite of a critical effort for social transformation.
- /// Thinking now about the individuating quality of occultism, new-age stuff, etc. So often in modern practice it's these practices that make individuals feel good. There's worth to that, but is it the point? Even the ascetics and mystics of the past have had social functions. *what of* this trope of the solitary seeker? Maybe in conjunction with a personal ritual practice, I should be seeking a community liturgical practice? Something more involved than just "getting together to get talked at".
- IS: American history was a process by which a culture was exterminated and millions were enslaved to the profit of others. This required "great expectations, great capacity for cruelty and inflicting hardship, and the courage to endure hardship and cruelty. The historical experience rested on private dreams of prosperity and freedom, not ideas of class like in European and Latin cultures."
- /// What? I mean, I think there's something in the general direction he's gesturing to? Maybe a bit far afield of it actually? but he's really not doing it with any precision
- "Transformation was demanded by our historical experience"-- getting out of slavery, dreams of financial success, recurring fiction of social mobility.
- /// ...ok?
- PF: The US is crazy, and I think I can say that with some authority since I can see it from the outside. Let's keep in mind that it *is not stable*. First because *no reality is stable. *
- Myth and reality, angel and devil live together so closely "with tremendous vitality" in America. It's difficult to learn about, and I'm still learning more!
- IS: For me, too, it's extremely difficult to know how America really works. Self-help coexists with periodic projects for social transformation. The simultaneous self-community work of the 60s was successfully relegated to self-work by the "me-decade" of the 70s/80s.
- IS: We can see the classroom as a plastic material that is capable of being sculpted into something new.
- What I'm talking about is "desocialization". "Students and teachers... are not educational virgins."
- The liberating teacher has to study the Script of School and find the best points for critical intervention
- It is an artistic process to identify key themes or contradictions of student life and "encode" them, "re-present" them, for the class
- "Recomposing them into an unsettling critical investigation, orchestrating a polonged study"
- "Creative disruption" is aesthetic, not just political, because it involves new ways of seeing
- We rewrite scripts; we are dramatists
- Classrooms have sights, speech, and sounds; where can disruption happen? Is our speech "textured"?
- Let's focus on the verbal texture thing. Normally, teachers are loud and kids are quiet.
- PF: Yep.
- IS: Certain speech patterns or social markers *make *me the teacher. Speaking loud, slow and clear, sitting behind the desk, etc. Likewise for students: I slur my words because no one is listening to me, nobody is taking notes, no more is expected of me than the words sufficient to answer a question
- What I do is speak conversationally, ask students to *really listen *to each other. Instead of saying "good", I say "say more about that". "If I'm asked what I think, I say I'd be glad to say what I think, but why don't a few more people speak first." Continue to reinforce to students the import of their own utterances. Refer to what was said last time. The art is "verbal reinvention".
- Students are not silent by nature. Silence is created by "the arts of domination."
- Comedy as connection. I ask students to write my introductory speech *to them*, *for me*. It's really funny how they mimic the "teacher voice".
- PF: yea lol, they get it
- IS: They'll replicate standard usage for their own creative purposes, even if it seems to not easily come to them in the moment.
- PF: Growing up is an artistic process. I see myself as a helper to this process. Education, then, always has aesthetic moments. If we're not aware of this aspect, we're still artists, we're just bad artists.
- Unveiling a knowledge-object is beautiful. Its knowing brings it new life.
- The "aesthetic relationship" begins at hello.
- Clarity about the educator's role as a politician and an artist will improve pedagogy, since you're always doing both
- Note: Gramsci says "it is not a question of introducing from scratch a scientific form of thought into everyone's individual life, but of renovating and making 'critical' an already existing activity."