“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
In societies whose power structure leads to the domain of consciousness, the dominant pedagogy is the pedagogy of the ruling classes. The methods of oppression will never serve the freedom of the oppressed, thus the oppressed needs to learn and claim their own words in order to decode oppression and build another social and political reality.
Este parece ser o principal argumento nas obras de Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal, Aimé Césaire e Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Em diferentes contextos, os autores reivindicam condições para que os sujeitos oprimidos e colonizados descubram-se reflexivamente, conquistando-se como sujeitos de seu próprio destino histórico e aprendendo a ser o autor e o testemunho de sua própria […]
Cisma epistêmica, ferramenta do Oprimido
No Kenya colonial, Ngugi wa Thiong’o aponta o quanto as crianças sofriam diversos tipos de abuso para que abandonassem sua subjetividade, forjada na língua materna, e que aderissem às duras diretrizes da educação anglocêntrica . Esta universalização do pensamento, base do esquema de dominação das metrópoles, silencia violentamente um amplo léxico de linguagens e experiências. […]
The “Classroom Monitor” and the “Instrument of Production”
Aimé Césaire writes powerfully about the colonizer-colonized relationship, refuting the term “human contact” as a descriptor of that relationship. “Human contact” lacks any reference to the dialectical opposition between colonizer and colonized, where the former dominates the latter in order to exploit them. Instead, Césaire describes the colonizer-colonized relationship as “a classroom monitor… and an […]
Protocols of Translation: Re-thinking the Languages of the “Oppressed”
“…So we learnt the music of our languages on top of the content” writes Ngugi wa Thiong’o about the oral heritage and the importance of storytelling in Kenya. I perceived the echo of this voice, that craves moments of creative co-operation, in the frustrations of young Freire trying to grasp the shortsighted methodologies of still […]