A drive towards reconciliation

“I am more and more convinced that true revolutionaries must perceive the revolution, because of its creative and liberating nature, as an act of love.”  (Freire’s footnote on p. 89)

I know that we’ve read a chapter out of Pedagogy of the Oppressed before, but I think that we should have already read the entire book—I feel like Freire’s work should be the bible of urban teaching/culturally relevant pedagogy.  I mean, I’m sure that it kind of is already, but I feel like it should be given out at the beginning of our coursework.  Its philosophy provides the foundation of so much of why we teach the way that we want to teach.  Honestly, I want to make time to return to it every year to kind of ground myself in what I’m doing.  As Freire points out, unless you’re constantly reflecting on what you’re doing, you could fall prey to going back to a position of the oppressed, wherein you “talk about the people, but [the teacher] does not trust them.”  In the Texas public educational system, I think that you constantly have to be at that work of praxis, of action and reflection, because so much of what you have to deal with in order to remain hired as a teacher is the enforced pedagogy of the oppressor.  It’s funny to think that the American public education system wants students to become critical thinkers, but the restrictions that are imposed upon the classroom create the opposite environment for that work to be done. 

At the heart of Pedagogy, Freire emphasizes that teachers/revolutionaries (I kind of just want to call myself a revolutionary from now on) have to be thinkers and doers—he likens praxis to the word, in that there must be both action and reflection.  It’s almost like Freire is talking about that educational term “best practice”; in order for the best practice to occur (and by “best practice,” he means transformation of the world order), teachers have to act and reflect on those actions.  In addition, they must charge their students to be involved in the same praxis through dialogue.  When Freire expounds on what he means by dialogue, I was pretty much swooning.  The language gets pretty New Testament biblical, I think, since he says that dialogue can only exist through love, humility, faith, and hope.  That’s some real talk.  Honestly, I think that we tend to think of those who love and have faith in others and have true hope for change as weaklings, in that they’re not strong enough to face the bleakness of reality.  No.  Freire points out that “love is an act of courage” (89), an act of bravery, and an act of freedom.  Control and manipulation in the classroom, and on an administrational level, is not an act of tough love.  That is no love at all, and when this kind of love becomes acceptable in urban schools, it is no wonder that the schools fail.  The students are still oppressed.

One issue that Freire brings up about the oppressed is the oppressor’s consciousness that they have internalized.  Because the oppressor views the world and those operating in the world as things to be possessed, the oppressed also begins to think of “being” as “having.”  My ELA IV students defined success in a warm-up at the beginning of the year, and most of them explained that success involved monetary comfort.  They may not have said that they wanted to be outrageously rich, but they all mentioned having things as being a measure of whether or not they’ve “made it.”  It’s difficult to work beyond this conception of success because, to some degree, they do need things, and I understand why they want more.  Who am I, a person from a mostly middle-class family, to be the person to tell them that success doesn’t have to be defined through accumulation of wealth?  I’d really want to have a year-long discussion on this idea, and return to it at the end of the year.  (Although, according to Freire, I’d need to make sure that they want to talk about this issue.)  Still, to get there, I need to make sure that I’m being a model of praxis and true dialogue, working with my students side by side.  Sometimes I find it difficult to cede control to others, but my resistance to working with would only mean that I, too, have played into the oppressor’s game where I am more concerned with a love of death rather than a love of life.