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 […]
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 […]
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 […]