In Chapter 1 of Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” Freire asks “How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation?” (48). In thinking about how we can modify curriculum to develop “liberated, skilled, critical thinkers,” this question that Freire poses becomes important to me—how can students be involved in the creation of our pedagogy and our curriculum?
Recently I wrote my 11th grade AP English teacher a message, in which a sentence of her response really affected me. She wrote, “Believe it or not, I thought of you the other day because I've been thinking of my teaching trajectory; from you, l learned the importance of learning about a student's personal life and how it interweaves with their educational experience.” Connecting this with Freire’s question, I believe creating relationships with students can have a great influence (directly or indirectly) on our instructional methods. Our curriculum not only begins to consider students more, but begins to intentionally include students.
Besides giving students choice on activities/writing prompts, I think requesting student feedback often and including dialogue as much as possible in the classroom is one way to begin to include students in developing their own education and liberation.
-Briana
(This is not directly related, but I can't make myself form a new post...)
ReplyDeleteWhile reading Fanon and Freire last week, I found myself trying to reconcile the following quotes:
“A society has race prejudice or it has not. There are no degrees of prejudice.” (Fanon)
"...the solution of this contradiction is born in the labor which brings into the world this new being: no longer oppressor nor longer oppressed, but human in the process of achieving freedom." (Freire)
Reading the Fanon, I couldn't help but wonder about the assertion that racism is so extremely separated from non-racism... Isn’t oppression also a process? If it is a process, can’t a symptom be in various stages of severity? A sickness can be also worsening, going untreated, or being nursed back to health. Aren’t these valuable ways of thinking about racism as well? I asked myself.
Freire seems to be saying that the difference here is that while the society is racist or not, the transformation of individuals, individual development of the whole person, can allow us to see one person moving toward freedom from racism. And together with other humans working toward freedom, I suppose we have a movement and maybe even a society in transition.
Another random thought I had was connecting the idea of colonialism with the atrocities committed during the holocaust. If any society that has racism has the potential for atrocities, Germany goes to show how latent oppression can quickly turn into all-out genocide in a matter of months/years. The history of that region was essentially one of religious colonialism in which politics were inseparable from the Christian institution... for over 1500 years, Jews had been experiencing oppression ranging from massacres to simply the oppression in history that was unacknowledged and seen as unimportant. Jews seemed successful in pre-Nazi Germany. But the oppression of a colonized people was still there. Scary to think about.