An Understanding of Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2019

Freire has appropriated the unclaimed heritage of emancipatory ideas in his versions of secular and religious philosophy within the corpus of bourgeois thought. He has also critically integrated into his work a heritage of radical thought without assimilating many of the problems that have plagued it historically. In effect Freire has combined what I call the language of critique with the language of possibility. (Giroux 1988, p. 108) There is no education system in Ireland. The English have established the simulacrum of an education system, but its object is the precise contrary of the object of an education system.

Reading Response: Pashew M. Nuri "Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world" (Freire, 2000, p.34).

Paulo Freire's book Pedagogy of the Oppressed was written in 1968 and first published in Spanish also in 1968. It was subsequently translated to English, Italian, French and German. Although Freire was Brazilian and a native speaker of Portuguese, he was not able to publish this book in Brazil until 1975, seven years after he wrote it. This is because at this time, Paulo Freire was living in Geneva, Switzerland, exiled from Brazil due to political reasons. The following provides biographical and historical background on Freire and Brazil so that we can be better able to appreciate and understand the ideas developed in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

2018

When I think about dialogue in the way Freire framed it in the “Pedagogy of the oppressed”, Freire was referring to the dialogue between two or more people holding different points of view about a subject. This process presupposes equality amongst participants compared to the teacher, student experience, where the teacher pours down wealth of knowledge whereby denying the student the ability to interact at an equal playing field. Dialoging with someone is about learning and communicating to the people we are trying to teach. Freire points out that in other to help either a community or the oppressed, we must have a dialog that brings them to collaborate with us in the said solutions that we intend to enforces. “Dialogue is not a mere technique to achieve some cognitive result, dialogue is a means to transform social relations in the classroom and to raise awareness about relations in society at large. Dialogue is a way to recreate knowledge as well as the way to learn. It is a mutual learning process where the teacher pose critical problem of inquiry” Freire (2000)

Critical and Radical Social Work

This article celebrates 50 years since the publication of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. His key ideas are explored and their continuing relevance for both understanding and resisting the increasingly neoconservative political landscape in Brazil analysed.

2022

This essay analyzes some aspects of Paulo Freire's pedagogy and his most important and notorious book, the Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In order to deepen Freire's approach, it is helpful to recognize that the book also received criticism after its publication. These objections focused on the ideas of "conscientization", Marxist and abstruse jargon, the cultural, educational, and political manipulation of students, the directiveness of his pedagogy as well as on class analysis. By exploring some counterarguments to these objections, this paper investigates the flaws and inconsistencies of these criticisms.

Knowledge International Journal, 2022

Throughout history, the way education has been organized has changed as has its content and character. As an expression of collective needs, education has served as a vehicle for accomplishing societal tasks and goals. Often – amid discrepancies between societal goals and existing school practices – reforms have been planned and implemented, meeting with rigorous criticism. The traditional approach to education faced its sharpest criticism at the end of the 19th and in the first half of the 20th century. Europe was at that time the epicenter of new pedagogic trends founded on the critique of tradition and a struggle for a contemporary classroom. A significant approach was critical pedagogy, put forward by Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (1921-1997). Freire developed this creative thesis in the field of adult education by linking the language of criticism to that of possibility. His revolutionary ideas in literacy and educational practice became the trademark of pedagogy all over the world and the great Pierre Furter described him as “the myth of his own time”. The goal of this paper is to present – through an analysis of Freire’s major works – his philosophy and radical approach to education and the pedagogy of the oppressed. The authors ask the following questions: Is the democratization and revolution of the classroom possible? How can education transform the individual and society? Which lessons have we learned from Freire? The first part of the paper presents an overview of the material, functional, and educational tasks of the school, the traditional approach, and the concept of the active school. The paper includes an illustrative analysis of the didactic triangle, the general model of teaching by Daniel Pratt, and a model developed by Freire – including his banking concept of education, what Freire describes as the oppressive culture of silence, and his centering of dialogue as a key aspect of learning inseparable from practice. Freire’s pedagogy of literacy entails, above all, the development of critical consciousness, the formation of which enables the questioning of historical and social circumstances to create a democratic society. Critical consciousness enables the teacher to understand social reality and develop a list of words and topics that can stimulate discussion. On the other hand, it enables students to learn to understand and then transform reality. Dialogue between the student and the teacher furthers social change, as Freire states, because “human beings are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection”. Although he ranks amongst the most famous representatives of radical education reform, Freire is unfairly neglected in the Balkans. This paper is an attempt to incentivize a more studious investigation into his work and contribution to the social sciences, action research, reform processes, and the educational system in general. With this paper, the authors also wish to mark 25 years since the death of this Brazilian educator, activist, philosopher, and one of the most influential theoreticians of education in the 20th century. Кeywords: education, pedagogy of the oppressed, critical pedagogy, radical education reform, Paulo Freire

Reading Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Why did it feel empowering to me?, 2021

Celebrating the work of Paulo Freire for his healing influence, this paper gives an auto-ethnographic account of the author’s personal, pedagogical and political liberation process reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Raised in a conservative patriarchal middle-class atmosphere in central Turkey, the author analyzes her own story of liberation as a woman, as a young scholar, as nonnative English-speaking language educator and a citizen of a democratic republic. The author describes how she realized her own subjugation by reading Freire (2005) at a time of personal and political crisis and how she tried hard to find her personal voice. She also depicts the impact of the book on her pedagogy, on her relationships with students and on her liberatory praxis. Finally, the author tells how she transformed her understanding of the dynamics of social transformation reading Freire’s dialogic, problem-posing pedagogy of the oppressed.