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A Pedagogy for Liberation: Dialogues with Paulo Friere and Ira Shor

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Introduction

- Book is formatted as common questions teachers have about liberatory pedagogy

- Can third-world education be used in the first?

- The realities of education tend to focus us on practical strategies, but we shouldn't lose sight of theory

- *The challenge of "merging critical thought with daily* life", especially in teaching-- perhaps better accomplished through dialogue than solitary composition or meditation.

Rigor and Motivation

- F: "Rigor is not universal, what is universal is the need to be rigorous."

- I: Rigor is "communication which challenges the other to take part in the search". Students instead are given a "corpse of information" (punning on body of knowledge)

- "Hour after deadly hour and year after dull year, learning is just a chore imposed on students"

- PF: "I can't understand motivation as separate from action, as if I *get* motivated and *then* I can perform. This pov is anti-dialectical."

- "You become motivated to the extent that you are acting and not before acting".

- IS: The fact that teachers always lecture students about school's importance shows how the material and instruction fail to motivate in themselves

- Motivation "inside the action of study itself, inside the students' recognition of the importance of knowing to them"

- in current schools, "****The best thing is always the thing you are not doing*." ***; everything is in service of a distant goal

- Motivation crisis: curriculum refuses to change to be less alienating.

- "I call it a ***'performance strike'*** by students who refuse to study under current social conditions"

- "The job market has few rewards for high achievement"

- Students "move heaven and earth to get" what they truly want. Commercial culture "engages their shrewdness"

- Introducing tension between student-authored texts and "official" ones

- "By saying as little as necessary in the early going, I get some serious exercises and dialogue underway where the students are as active as I am."

- Beginning of class is beginning of my education about the students

- "Students are motivated out of the learning process when the course fully pre-exists in the mind of the teacher... do you see the corpse here? The learning already happened someplace else... The student is supposed to memorize the report."

- A course with more improvisation is exciting but also anxiety producing, but "this openness is required to overcome student alienation"

- Teachers usually only learn this kind of teaching by doing it

Modeling a Critical theory of knowing

- PF: This is bound up in epistemology, the "gnosiological cycle"

- /// (pistis = belief, gnosis = knowledge)

- This cycle has two steps: producing knowledge and then knowing it.

- This is a collaborative cycle, but it's often severed: authorities produce knowledge, teachers transfer it to students to know it

- This cuts out the teacher's and students' capacities to create knowledge: "action, critical reflection, curiosity, demanding inquiry, uneasiness, uncertainty--all these virtues are indispensable to the cognitive subject"

- IS: "opening up new terrain" is motivating, skepticism brings in individual projects

- Without student participation in the creation of knowledge, ideology is reproduced unchallenged

- Knowledge should be "created and re-created" in the classroom

- ///what is re-creation? The rediscovery of facts? The enactment of scripted experiments in the lab? The independent arrival at conclusions many have reached before? moreso the latter i think

- PF: Teachers must also be researchers. Teaching itself is reknowing *what I thought I knew*.

- IS: Some knowledges are valued more than others. Tech for war and business, etc. University knowledge valued more than other scholars.

- Less valued also is "grounded research" directed at students as they really are and speak, and not in their phony academese.

- This kind of classroom can produce "unsupervised" or "unofficial knowledge."

Remaking Knowledge and Power: The Politics of Reading

- "The students do not believe the liberating teacher who does not shove information down their throats."

- Reading not as walking over or flying over the words, but instead as *re-writing them as they are read.*

- Reading as "fighting, even though loving" the text. A "very, very demanding operation"

- Students may not accept your invitation to adopt a critical posture, might think you're a wimpy professor for not having done all the knowing in advance

- IS: Students are good at rejecting authority, but they can reject liberation as well

- Listening to students to determine a "profile of resistances and openings"

- Making concessions to old habits to reduce anxiety: readings, papers, etc.

- It's difficult to get students to work critically with "disorienting" texts

Myth of Neutral Pedagogy

PF: Teachers put away the "intimacy" of a book, its "soul", in order to privilege a predetermined scholarly point of view. The "scientific" task is to describe, not interpret, change, or know intimately.

IS: They emphasize "techniques", not "critical contact with reality"

PF: Not just techniques, not even just "critical thought", but drawing us into "the intimacy of society, the raison d'ĂȘtre of every object of study."

IS: All pedagogy "constructs one kind of society or another", they all relate to power, they all have social organization that confirms or challenges dominant arrangements.

PF: Transformation is possible because "consciousness is not a mirror of reality, but is *reflexive* and *reflective* *of *reality." We can gain distance, discover how we are conditioned, be metacognitive. We can know we are not free.

IS: "the irony of consciousness" -- studying our lack of freedom makes us free because we gain perspective on it

Chapter 2

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