Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach (Part 2)

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Nonfiction
Author:	Paulo Freire

I finished reading Freire’s ‘Teachers as Cultural Workers’ this afternoon, and obviously, there is so much more to be said about it. The book has ten more letters including letters 3 to 10, the author’s Last Words, and an afterword from Shirley Steinberg, a Freire disciple and Kincheloe’s better half.

I shall only highlight a few points that I was able to jot down or remember while reading the book in several places today (I spent several minutes reading this marvelous work in the MRT going to Orchard Road, then a few minutes on Bus 143 going to the university, about two to three hours in one corner of the stacks section of the Central Library, then several more minutes on my way home via Bus 189. I realize then that when one is enraptured by the printed word, he becomes totally unmindful of a lot of stimuli that normally impinge on the senses while in the public transport system. These stimuli include very attractive local boys in the National Service uniform, the famed multiracial scent wafting in the air-conditioned buses and MRT, the humming sound of the engines of these public transportation vehicles, and aunties to whom I would normally offer my seat when I feel like performing the role of the most chivalrous gay on the planet.)

Now, the points. One that really caught my attention is the term ‘patient impatience.’ I guess it may be regarded as another permutation of the dialectics of theory and practice and a strong reminder for teachers to veer away from the extreme tendencies of anti-intellectualism that invalidates theory, and intellectual elitism that regards theory as an end in itself (In one of his interviews, Henry Giroux, a Freire disciple in North America, admonished the tendency of English departments to do this. I couldn't agree more.). Freire suggests that teachers should strike the balance between getting impatient in a system that denies them of their dignity and exercising patience (reflexivity) so as not to be rash and judgmental and unscientific.

Then there is the author’s call to allow the imagination to flourish. Coupled with a systematic and disciplined study of concrete experience, imagination should help students and teachers – co-learners – rework, re-invent, and perhaps, re-contextualize others’ readings of the word/world so that they become relevant to their lives.

Freire is explicit in saying that ‘teaching is political.’ In his eighth letter, he asserts that ‘education is a political practice’ (129) and immediately restates this with emphasis, ‘[an] educator is a politician.’ To accomplish this, he recommends that educators ‘know what happens in the world of children with whom they work. They need to know the universe of their dreams, the language with which they skillfully defend themselves from the aggressiveness of their world, what they know independently of the school, and how they know it’ (130).

What is good about Freire’s ‘Teachers/Letters’ is that it does not assume that the readers will take everything that it brings to their attention as relevant or applicable or even agreeable to what they actually do. They are given the choice to accept or reject, transport and transgress from its ideas, and that in itself is empowering. After all, Freire has made it clear from the very beginning (his ‘First Words’) that the things that he shares are borne out of the experiences of the oppressed from the time Brazil was ‘invented’. They cannot be transported wholesale in, say, the Philippine classrooms or in any educational site beyond the Brazilian context for that matter.

The relationship of the ‘concrete context’ and the ‘theoretical context’ is definitely a recurring theme in his letters. On this, he elaborates: ‘[It] is impossible to teach content without knowing how students think in the context of their daily lives, without knowing what they know independently of school so that we can, on the one hand, help them to know better what they already know and, on the other, teach them what they don’t know yet’ (140).

The original Portuguese title of the book is ‘Professora Sim, Tia Nao’ or ‘teacher yes, aunt no’ (thanks to Peter McLaren’s preface for this information). I’ll leave it to the future readers to discover why.

Photo taken from this site: http://www.apafec.org.br

Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Nonfiction
Author:	Paulo Freire

(Part 1)

So far, I’ve only read the first and second letters in Paulo Freire’s ‘Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach’ (2005, expanded edition) and I am already amazed by the wealth of insights that can be derived from the book.

I read Freire’s ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ (1984 translation) back home, and what compelled me to read this classic text was the constant mentioning of his work in my interactions with colleagues and friends in NetWorks and Ugnayan ng Pahinungod, especially those deeply involved in literacy work in the country’s rural areas and indigenous communities. My desire to understand the value of the work was also partly influenced by one of my references in rhetoric which outlines the concepts, definitions and major theorists in the field from antiquity to the latter part of the 20th century. Freire’s name was one of the entries. Apparently, his discussions on the relationship of language, thought, and reality as well as his thesis on the dialectics of reading the word and reading the world (which appears as one of the chapters in the book that I’m currently reading) have earned him a significant place in rhetorical studies in the last century (So much for appropriation and ‘pillaging’ of theorists from allied disciplines – a tendency that rhetorical studies have been unapologetically pursuing.).

So my interest was not so much on how the book (‘Pedagogy’) would influence my philosophy and method of teaching in the university but how I could meander through the discourses of my colleagues who kept on citing ‘praxis’, ‘action-reflection-action’, ‘conscienticization’, ‘banking method’ versus the liberatory ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’, etc. during our interactions. I was also interested in using his ideas and ‘tools’ for the content of the course SPCM 105 (Philippine Public Address). While I had been fortunate enough to have read his work before I began to teach the course, I regret to say that I failed to incorporate his work in my syllabus. I was just too overwhelmed to revisit my notes on analytical frameworks and critical approaches that have mostly emanated from Greco-Roman and European-American traditions.

My interest in reading Freire now is not so much anchored on the need to work my way through the language game of my friends and colleagues or to cover up my insecurity in teaching rhetoric and public address. While I grapple with several ideas, concepts, theories that I need to apprehend well for my comprehensive exams in the middle of this year, I wouldn’t deny that I have been blessed with a little luxury of time to read what I like to read. After all, I am currently not tied to teaching, marking papers, reading both well- and haphazardly written student essays, not to mention regular staff meetings and phenomenal departmental ‘intramurals’ – activities which had taken most of my time for eight years before coming to Singapore to study.

On Friday afternoon, the last day of classes in the university, I headed towards Vivo City, the largest mall in town which houses a favorite bookstore called ‘Page One’. There I was drawn to checking out titles in the humanities and possible additions to my mini-library. I purchased two books, one of which is Freire’s lesser known work. The other book is Michel Foucault’s ‘Archaeology of Knowledge and Discourses of Language’ (thesis related but something I have to grapple with much later. This is only my second Foucault book, the first one being ‘Madness and Civilization’, the author’s dissertation. Quite embarrassingly, I’ve only read a few pages of that ‘critically acclaimed’ work. It is probably now accumulating dust in my bookshelf in Bay, Laguna. I sincerely hope to save it from my superficial display of erudition (a thing I am most guilty of) when I get back home this year.)

Now back to Freire's ‘Teachers’. What is it about Freire’s ‘Teachers’ that is so compelling? In his first two letters (preceded by a foreword by Donaldo Macedo and Ana Maria Araujo Freire, a preface titled ‘Pedagogy for Life’ by Peter McLaren, an introduction by Joe Kincheloe, and Freire’s ‘First Words’), he talks about reading the word/reading the world (the dialectical relationship of theory and practice, of experiencing and critical analysis of experience, of texts and contexts) and grappling with ‘the fear of what is difficult.’

Several points are inspiring from where I stand. One is the need to discipline oneself to reflect on his readings quite regularly. Freire suggests that one who professes to teach reading/writing the word/world should be able to write quite regularly and to critically examine what he has written, that is, to scribble down his reflections ‘at least thrice a week’ and to examine them after some time.

Another interesting point has to do with performing one’s capacity for radical love. Here are lines from the book whose significance is underscored in the preface by Peter MacLaren (in Freire 2005:xxx-xxxi):

'We must dare in the full sense of the word, to speak of love without the fear of being called ridiculous, mawkish, or unscientific, if not antiscientific. We must dare in order to say scientifically, and not as mere blah-blah-blah, that we study, we learn, we teach, we know with our entire body. We do all of these things with feeling, with emotion, with wishes, with fear, with doubts, with passion, and also with critical reasoning. However, we never study, learn, teach, or know with the last only. We must dare so as never to dichotomize cognition and emotion. We must dare so that we can continue to teach for a long time under conditions that we know well: low salaries, lack of respect, and the ever-present risk of becoming prey to cynicism. We must dare to learn how to dare in order to say no to the bureaucratization of the mind to which we are exposed everyday. We must dare so that we can continue to do so even when it is so much more materially advantageous to stop daring' (Freire 2005:5-6, emphasis added).

The ‘radical love’ thesis is further explained in the fourth letter (which I have not read as of this writing) but which MacLaren liberally quotes in the preface (xxx-xxxi)

'[To] to the humility which teachers perform and relate to their students another quality needs to be added: lovingness, without which their work would lose its meaning. And here I mean lovingness not only toward the students but also toward the very process of teaching. I must confess, not meaning to cavil, that I do not believe educators can survive the negativities of their trade without some sort of ‘armed love,’ as the poet Tiaglo de Melo would say. Without it they could not survive all the injustice or the government contempt, which is expressed in the shameful wages and the arbitrary treatment of teachers, not coddling mothers, who take a stand, who participate in protest activities through their union, who are punished, and who yet remain devoted to their work with students.
It is indeed necessary, however, that this love be ‘armed love,’ the fighting love of those convinced of the right and the duty to fight, to denounce, and to announce. It is this form of love that is indispensable to the progressive educator and that we must all learn' (Freire 2005:74-75).

Having read only a few pages of Freire’s work, I can already glean that there is so much passion, so much soul in his writing about teaching. There is, however, a caveat to merely adopting this ‘armed love’ thesis without much reflection. I think this is the point most often abused by people who profess to ‘fight for what is right’ when in fact they only fight for their personal interests. I have been witness to this abuse and arrogant display of dissent in the name of ‘academic freedom’ and ‘collegiality.’ I choose not to spell out the details. Because of this tendency, there is so much reason to heed Freire’s call for social praxis in teaching – to engage in the dialectics of action and reflection so as to avoid both intellectual elitism and uninformed/uncritical ‘reading of the world.’ That engagement, at the very least, requires the humility to accept that our assumptions about ourselves and about the world are tentative, to listen to what others (usually from the opposite end of where we stand) have to say, and to constantly engage in the negotiation of meanings.