Locations of Site Visitors László Szögeczki's CE blog: Paulo Freire

Thursday 11 September 2008

Paulo Freire

“I teach, deal both to change the world and to transform myself.”

(From my statement of being CE teacher)

The key concept-formation behind this sentence is transformation. Transformative action – in all directions. Interaction, dialogue, activity what is able to cause changes possibly towards a better quality of life.
Many “ideas” and many experiences take us to a level of thinking transformative.

Here - in my blog - I think to share some of those “ideas” what made me to think of challenge people with disabilities the way I do through Conductive Education. There is a lot of knowledge about different philosophical interest, educational approaches, methods in rehabilitation, etc. I have learnt and I still learn. They are mixing and living an independent life in my mind.
We can find authors who worked before, parallel and after András Pető, who expressed and fostered ways of changes in individual’s thinking, acting and which were meant to bring great difference in their quality of lives.
Today, I would like to mention Paulo Freire's work – not because it would be the most important thing to CE but because I have never heard about him during my training at the Peto Institute and I think he was such a pedagogue who put remarkable basics down in “transformative” education. Perhaps, it is going to be a good refreshing reading for those who already knew his work and maybe new for some of my colleagues as well.

Paulo Freire (1921 - 1997) was a Brazilian educationalist, has left a significant mark on thinking about progressive practice. His Pedagogy of the Oppressed is one of the most quoted educational texts (especially in Latin America, Africa and Asia). Freire was able to draw upon, and weave together, a number of strands of thinking about educational practice and “liberation”.
Four aspects of Paulo Freire's work have a particular significance for our purposes here.
“First, his emphasis on dialogue has struck a very strong chord with those concerned with popular and informal education. Given that informal education is a dialogical (or conversational) rather than a curricula form. Freire was able to take the discussion on several steps with his insistence that dialogue involves respect. It should not involve one person acting on another, but rather people working with each other.
Second, Paulo Freire was concerned with praxis - action that is informed (and linked to certain values). Dialogue wasn't just about deepening understanding - but was part of making a difference in the world. Dialogue in itself is a co-operative activity involving respect. The process is important and can be seen as enhancing community and building social capital and to leading us to act in ways that make for justice and human flourishing.”
“Third, Freire's attention to naming the world has been of great significance to those educators who have traditionally worked with those who do not have a voice, and who are oppressed. The idea of building‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ or a ‘pedagogy of hope’ and how this may be carried forward has formed a significant impetus to work. An important element of this was his concern with conscientization - developing consciousness, but consciousness that is understood to have the power to transform reality' (Taylor 1993: 52).”
Fourth, Paulo Freire's insistence on situating educational activity in the lived experience of participants has opened up a series of possibilities for the way informal educators can approach practice.”

Additional Source
www.infed.org/thinkers/et-freir.htm

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