“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]