Saturday, January 29, 2011

'Acts of love,' revolution and what I'm going to do on Tuesday morning

Is Freire's work 'coherent'?  Yes, it is.

Is his project focused on critique of, and overthrow of Capitalism?  Yes, it is.

Can one remain a 'bourgeois subject' and practice Pedagogy of the Oppressed?  uh...probably not—though Freire never uses the familiar Marxist terms, preferring oppressor and oppressed. Here the issues clustered around 'acts of love,' true solidarity, ' 'being and having,' necrophilia, egoism, 'humanist generosity' and the quest for human completion come into play.  I really like my Beethoven, and don't intend to change (that). Liberation is a painful childbirth.

Cool.  Now what do we do on Tuesday morning--assuming we will not be out building the revolution (doing, maybe, what's going on in Cairo)?  In short: can some essence of the Freirean project be saved / extracted to use as a way to 'humanize' instruction in settings where the institutional or disciplinary constraints define what we do as anything but land reform, or overthrow of Capitalism? Where's the Hope? (part is in Pedagogy of hope) I'm liking 'co-intentional pedagogy' (69)
 'Teachers and students co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coning to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge.'
But I'm trying (thanks bell hooks) to be self aware enough to know that his scary construction of the basic goal of all pedagogy is going to make me really, really anxious to find a way to rationalize what I'm doing as 'liberation.'

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