Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed Chapters 3 and 4 Workshop – Group 2 (Tommy, Chloe, Louie, Meghna)

Part I: General Instructions & Introductions [10 min.]

For this workshop, you will be organized in a Zoom Breakout Room with a group of three to four students, plus a workshop facilitator. Appoint a timekeeper and a scribe.

Please begin today by checking in with one another and looking over the workshop. How is your week going?

Part II: Education with students [25 min.]

Consider this passage where Friere speaks of the necessity of teaching with students:

“It is not our role to speak to the people about our own view of the world, nor to attempt to impose that view on them, but rather to dialogue with the people about their view and ours. We must realize that their view of the world, manifested variously in their action, reflects their situation in the world. Educational and political action which is not critically aware of this situation runs the risk either of “banking” or of preaching in the desert” (p.96)

1. How might beginning a discussion with the student’s view of the world enable true dialogue? [5 min.]

2. Why is the student’s view of the world so important in education for Friere? How is this tied into the situation of the students? [5 min.]

3. Do you have examples from your own educational experience where teachers have made clear they value your perspective? Do you have any examples of when they haven’t? [5 min.]

4. Pretend you’re a teacher. What are some ways you might be able to make students feel like their perspective is important? [10 min.]

Part III: Limit Situation [20 min.]

In chapter 3, Friere speaks about the ways that material conditions and internalized ideologies constrain student growth:

“[A]s they locate the seat of their decisions in themselves and in their relations with the world and others, people overcome the situations which limit them: the ‘limit-situations.’ Once perceived by individuals as fetters, as obstacles to their liberation, these situations stand out in relief from the background, revealing their true nature as concrete historical dimensions of a given reality. Men and women respond to the challenge with actions which Vieira Pinto calls ‘limit-acts’: those directed at negating and overcoming, rather than passively accepting, the “given,” (p.99)

1. What is your understanding of a limit-situation? What about a limit-act? How are they opposed to each other? [5 min.]

2. Do you have an example of a mindset or ideology that you felt has or does limit your growth or learning? [5 min.]

3. How do you imagine the liberating “limit-acts” that Freire describes in the context of your own life? Are there actions you have taken in your life to overcome “limit situations” of your own? [10 min.]

TAKE A 15 MINUTE BREAK

Part IV: Education and Investigation [15 min.]

In this passage Friere goes into detail about the ways that collaborative investigation leads to true education:

“Every thematic investigation which deepens historical awareness is thus really educational, while all authentic education investigates thinking. The more educators and the people investigate the people’s thinking, and are thus jointly educated, the more they continue to investigate. Education and thematic investigation, in the problem-posing concept of education, are simply different moments of the same process.” (p.109)

1. What is the role of investigation of a situation in Friere’s model of education? [5 min.]

2. How is investigation as education a collaborative process? [5 min.]

3. What is the student-teacher relationship in the dialogues he is describing? What is the role of the student-teacher? What about the teacher-student? Is there a difference? [5 min.]

Part V: The Mythicized World [20 min.]

Friere also outlines the forces that must be overcome for education as liberation to succeed:

“The desire for conquest (or rather the necessity of conquest) is at all times present in antidialogical action. To this end the oppressors attempt to destroy in the oppressed their quality as ‘considerers’ of the world. Since the oppressors cannot totally achieve this destruction, they must mythicize the world.” (p.139)

1. Can you think of a myth told to you by the oppressor? [5 min.]

2. Do you believe this myth? If you no longer believe it anymore, what changed? [5 min.]

3. How does investigating these myths lead to liberation? [5 min.]

4. How is dialogue part of this process? [5 min.]

Part VI: The Socratic Method [30 min.]

Consider this quote from Chapter 4:

“Thus cooperation leads dialogical Subjects to focus their attention on the reality which mediates them and which—posed as a problem—challenges them. […] posing reality as a problem […] means critical analysis of a problematic reality.” (p.168).

In chapter 4, Freire elaborates on what he considers to be antidialogue:

“The first characteristic of antidialogical action is the necessity for conquest. The antidialogical individual, in his relations with others aims at conquering them—increasingly and by every means […]” (138).

Think of Meno who accuses Socrates:

“At this moment I feel you are exercising magic and witchcraft upon me and positively laying me under your spell until I am just a mass of helplessness. If I may be flippant, I think that not only in outward appearance but in other respects as well you are exactly like the flat sting ray that one meets in the sea. Whenever anyone comes into contact with it, it numbs him, and that is the sort of thing that you seem to be doing to me now. My mind and my lips are literally numb, and I have nothing to reply to you.” (80a-b)

1. Think back to the Republic. Is the Socratic method dialogue in Freire’s sense of ‘dialogue’? [5 min.]

2. Are Socratic dialogues antidialogical? Could one compare Socrates to an oppressor and the interlocutor to the oppressed? [5 min.]

Again, consider this quote:

“Revolutionary leaders cannot think without the people, nor for the people, but only with the people.” (131).

3. Does Socrates think with the interlocutors or for them? Recall the scene in Meno when Socrates “teaches” the slave boy geometry. Is he thinking with the boy or for him? [5 min.]

Freire also writes in talking about scientific and humanist revolutionary leaders: “They cannot sloganize the people, but must enter into dialogue with them, so that the people’s empirical knowledge of reality, nourished by the leader’s critical knowledge, gradually becomes transformed into knowledge of the causes of reality.” (134).

4. Would you characterize Socrates as a revolutionary leader as Freire describes him? [5. min.]

Finally, consider this passage:

“there are Subjects who meet to name the world in order to transform it” (167).

5. Is this the goal of the Socratic “dialogue”? Do you think that this is the goal of education? [10 min.]

Part VII: Go back to main room and take a 10 minute break