Amie Césaire asks us to unpack what colonization appears to be; it doesn’t come from the desire to liberate, or to educate others, nor is it a project undertaken for an evangelical savior—colonization is a form of civilization which feels entitled to encroach and encompass the entirety of the world under its “baleful projected shadow” […]
HOW WE READ IS POLITICAL
“Existir, humanamente, es ‘pronunciar’ el mundo, es transformarlo” (70) says Freire. There are certain texts that demand to be met halfway. They expect movement, shifting, breaking, and recognizing – your voice. In words of Boal, “se destruye la barrera entre protagonista y coros” (12). These texts are often declared obscure, not academic. They demand an […]
Catch Me Blah-ing (About Pedagogies & Practices)
When Mom said, “knowledge is power” I thought she was trying to motivate me. Now I understand – she was warning me. Freire’s POTO discusses how knowledge production can allow students to sink or swim (71), and in order to avoid the latter we must reject alienating, (86) hierarchical teacher-student dynamics and opt for more […]
Pedagogies/Practices: Keywords and an Alternative Praxis
Awareness and demystification, contextualization and translation, dialogue and communication, community and organization, action and transformation, reflection… These are some of the keywords proposed by this week’s readings, which work towards establishing an alternative pedagogical practice, a praxis, that is built upon mutual understanding and support, a sense of “being with.” Aimé Césaire posits that we […]
blogging of the oppressed , by Mira mother of judah
“teatro do oprimido pdf” on google said Ricardo, when I asked him where to find original un-translated copies of the two authors we had assigned for Monday. “do?” “yes, do” I don’t speak Portuguese yet, but in my practice of learning language to make clear what translation blurs and erases in academia, the Universe is […]
Dialogics Against Internalization of Oppression
Anyone who has been involved in facilitating the process of teaching-learning has most certainly attempted ways of distancing herself from “the banking concept of education.” The exercise of the practice reveals that something is wrong in a system of education that reproduces the structures of power and perpetuates colonialism, oppression, and above all, the internalization […]
Rejection or Reappropriation? Revolution in Language
Faced with the suffocating hegemony of the English language in his native Kenya, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o calls for “African writers…to do for [their] languages… what all writers in world history have done for their languages by meeting the challenge of creating a literature in them” (452). For, as he rightly asserts, the African languages shunted to […]
The Performance of Language
The performance of language has been a prominent subject matter in the past four readings. How we speak, sing, or utter anything from our mouths’ dictate power and subjectivity over ourselves. In Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire quotes, “Yet only through communication can human life hold meaning.” (Freire 77) Freire emphasizes that dialoguing […]
A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things
Here is the intro of the book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things by Raj Pattel and Jason W. Moore. The authors, writing from another field, analyze the same set of quandaries that we were tackling in our discussion on coloniality and the decolonial turn during our first session. Their concept of frontier can illuminate the idea […]
De Pedagogia, Opressão e Humanos
Como estabelecer uma forma de diálogo, ou educação, libertadora? Longe de uma certa tradição Ocidental que hierarquiza o Mestre e seus Discípulos, o detentor de conhecimento e aquele que seria o repositório desses saberes, à qual Paulo Freire nomeia pedagogia bancária . Essa parece uma das inúmeras questões que perpassam e ressoam em todos os […]