« constructing with vygotsky (collaborative writing 32/50) | Main | the music of disharmony (collaborative writing 34/50) »
December 25, 2005
everybody sing 'biko' (collaborative writing 33/50)
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy in Process. NY: Seabury P, 1978.
1 sentence summary learners need to be actively involved in creating knowledge about the things they need to know, in ways and via materials relevant to the problems they face and the realities they participate in, not preached-to about others' concerns and curricula in the name of education; viewing knowledge as a process rather than a product makes this not only possible but necessary.
passages:
9. "our political choice and its praxis also keeps us from even thinking that we could teach the educators and learners of guinea-bissau anything unless we were also learning with and from them. if the dichotomy between teaching and learning results in the refusal of the one who teaches to learn from the one being taught, it grows out of an ideology of domination. those who are called to teach must first learn how to continue learning when they begin to teach"
42-3. his ideal is not "instruction in a school that simply prepares the learners for another school, but about a real education where the content is in a constant dialectical relation with the needs of the country. in this kind of education, resulting in practical action, itself grows out of the unity between theory and practice. for this reason, it is not possible to divorce the process of learning from its own source within the lives of the learners themselves. the values this education seeks are empty if they are not incarnated in life. they are only incarnated if they are put into practice. thus, from the earliest cycle of instruction...participation in common experiences stimulates social solidarity rather than individualism. the principle of mutual help, practical creativity in the face of actual problems, and the unity of mental and manual labor are experienced daily. the learners begin creating new forms of behavior in accordance with the responsibiltiy they must take within the community"
54. "in the dialectical unity between teaching and learning, the saying 'whoever knows, teaches the one who doesn't' takes on a revolutionary meaning. when the one who knows understands first that the process by which he learned is social and, second, that in teaching something to another he is also learning something that he did not know already, then both are changed."
89. "knowledge is always a process, and results from the conscious action (practice) of human beings on the objective reality which, in its turn, conditions them. thus a dynamic and contradictory unity is established between objective reality and the persons acting on it. all reality is dynamic and contradictory in this same way. from the point of view of such a theory and of the education which grows from it, it is not possible:
a) to separate theory and practice;
b) to separate the act of knowing existing knowledge from the act of creating new knowledge;
c) to separate teaching from learning, educating from being educated"
Posted by ttobryan at December 25, 2005 04:37 PM