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