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The TeachNorthern Blog

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Here is a selection of books by Stephen Brookfield. We have some of them in the LLSC at The Northern College.

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This fully revised second edition features a wealth of new material, including new chapters on critical reflection in the context of social media, teaching race and racism, leadership in a critically reflective key, and team teaching as critical reflection.

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An entertaining lecture by Stephen.

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Stephen Brookfield on Creative & Critical Thinking

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Infed.org article

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Paulo Freire, dialogue, praxis and education. Perhaps the most influential thinker about education in the late twentieth century, Paulo Freire has been particularly popular with informal educators with his emphasis on dialogue and his concern for the oppressed.

contents: introduction · contribution · critique · further reading and references · links

Paulo Freire (1921 - 1997), the Brazilian educationalist, has left a significant mark on thinking about progressive practice. His Pedagogy of the Oppressed is currently one of the most quoted educational texts (especially in Latin America, Africa and Asia). Freire was able to draw upon, and weave together, a number of strands of thinking about educational practice and liberation. Sometimes some rather excessive claims are made for his work e.g. 'the most significant educational thinker of the twentieth century'. He wasn't - John Dewey would probably take that honour - but Freire certainly made a number of important theoretical innovations that have had a considerable impact on the development of educational practice - and on informal education and popular education in particular. In this piece we assess these - and briefly examine some of the critiques that can be made of his work.

Contribution

Five aspects of Paulo Freire's work have a particular significance for our purposes here. First, his emphasis on dialogue has struck a very strong chord with those concerned with popular and informal education. Given that informal education is a dialogical (or conversational) rather than a curricula form this is hardly surprising. However, Paulo Freire was able to take the discussion on several steps with his insistence that dialogue involves respect. It should not involve one person acting on another, but rather people working with each other. Too much education, Paulo Freire argues, involves 'banking' - the educator making 'deposits' in the educatee.

Second, Paulo Freire was concerned with praxis - action that is informed (and linked to certain values). Dialogue wasn't just about deepening understanding - but was part of making a difference in the world. Dialogue in itself is a co-operative activity involving respect. The process is important and can be seen as enhancing community and building social capital and to leading us to act in ways that make for justice and human flourishing. Informal and popular educators have had a long-standing orientation to action - so the emphasis on change in the world was welcome. But there was a sting in the tail. Paulo Freire argued for informed action and as such provided a useful counter-balance to those who want to diminish theory.

Third, Freire's attention to naming the world has been of great significance to those educators who have traditionally worked with those who do not have a voice, and who are oppressed. The idea of building a 'pedagogy of the oppressed' or a 'pedagogy of hope' and how this may be carried forward has formed a significant impetus to work. An important element of this was his concern with conscientization - developing consciousness, but consciousness that is understood to have the power to transform reality' (Taylor 1993: 52).

Fourth, Paulo Freire's insistence on situating educational activity in the lived experience of participants has opened up a series of possibilities for the way informal educators can approach practice. His concern to look for words that have the possibility of generating new ways of naming and acting in the world when working with people around literacies is a good example of this.

Fifth, a number of informal educators have connected with Paulo Freire's use of metaphors drawn from Christian sources. An example of this is the way in which the divide between teachers and learners can be transcended. In part this is to occur as learners develop their consciousness, but mainly it comes through the 'class suicide' or 'Easter experience' of the teacher.

The educator for liberation has to die as the unilateral educator of the educatees, in order to be born again as the educator-educatee of the educatees-educators. An educator is a person who has to live in the deep significance of Easter. Quoted by Paul Taylor (1993: 53)

Critique

Inevitably, there are various points of criticism. First, many are put off by Paulo Freire's language and his appeal to mystical concerns. The former was a concern of Freire himself in later life - and his work after Pedagogy of the Oppressed was usually written within a more conversational or accessible framework.

Second, Paulo Freire tends to argue in an either/or way. We are either with the oppressed or against them. This may be an interesting starting point for teaching, but taken too literally it can make for rather simplistic (political) analysis.

Third, there is an tendency in Freire to overturn everyday situations so that they become pedagogical. Paulo Freire's approach was largely constructed around structured educational situations. While his initial point of reference might be non-formal, the educational encounters he explores remain formal (Torres 1993: 127) In other words, his approach is still curriculum-based and entail transforming settings into a particular type of pedagogical space. This can rather work against the notion of dialogue (in that curriculum implies a predefined set of concerns and activities). Educators need to look for 'teachable moments' - but when we concentrate on this we can easily overlook simple power of being in conversation with others.

Fourth, what is claimed as liberatory practice may, on close inspection, be rather closer to banking than we would wish. In other words, the practice of Freirian education can involve smuggling in all sorts of ideas and values under the guise of problem-posing. Taylor's analysis of Freire's literacy programme shows that:

.. the rhetoric which announced the importance of dialogue, engagement, and equality, and denounced silence, massification and oppression, did not match in practice the subliminal messages and modes of a Banking System of education. Albeit benign, Freire's approach differs only in degree, but not in kind, from the system which he so eloquently criticizes. (Taylor 1993: 148)

Educators have to teach. They have to transform transfers of information into a 'real act of knowing' (op cit: 43).

Fifth, there are problems regarding Freire's model of literacy. While it may be taken as a challenge to the political projects of northern states, his analysis remains rooted in assumptions about cognitive development and the relation of literacy to rationality that are suspect (Street 1983: 14). His work has not 'entirely shrugged off the assumptions of the "autonomous model"' (ibid.: 14).

Last, there are questions concerning the originality of Freire's contribution. As Taylor has put it - to say that as many commentators do that Freire's thinking is 'eclectic', is 'to underestimate the degree to which he borrowed directly from other sources' (Taylor 1993: 34). Taylor (1993: 34-51) brings out a number of these influences and 'absorbtions' - perhaps most interestingly the extent to which the structure of Pedagogy of the Oppressed parallels Kosik's Dialectic of the Concrete (published in Spanish in the mid 1960s). Here we would simply invite you to compare Freire's interests with those of Martin Buber. His concern with conversation, encounter, being and ethical education have strong echoes in Freirian thought.

Further reading and references

Key texts: Paulo Freire's central work remains:

Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Important exploration of dialogue and the possibilities for liberatory practice. Freire provides a rationale for a pedagogy of the oppressed; introduces the highly influential notion of banking education; highlights the contrasts between education forms that treat people as objects rather than subjects; and explores education as cultural action. See, also:

Freire, P. (1995) Pedagogy of Hope. Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum. This book began as a new preface to his classic work, but grew into a book. It's importance lies in Freire's reflection on the text and how it was received, and on the development of policy and practice subsequently. Written in a direct and engaging way.

Biographical material: There are two useful English language starting points:

Freire, P. (1996) Letters to Cristina. Reflections on my life and work, London: Routledge. Retrospective on Freire's work and life. in the form of letters to his niece. He looks back at his childhood experiences, to his youth, and his life as an educator and policymaker.

Gadotti, M. (1994) Reading Paulo Freire. His life and work, New York: SUNY Press. Clear presentation of Freire's thinking set in historical context written by a close collaborator.

For my money the best critical exploration of his work is:

Taylor, P. (1993) The Texts of Paulo Freire, Buckingham: Open University Press.
Other references
Kosik, K. (1988) La dialectique du concret, Paris: Plon.

Street, B. V. (1984) Literacy in Theory and Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Torres, C. A. (1993) 'From the "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" to "A Luta Continua": the political pedagogy of Paulo Freire' in P. McLaren and P. Leonard (eds.) Freire: A critical encounter, London: Routledge.

Links

Lesley Bentley - Paulo Freire. Brief biography plus lots of useful links.

Catedra Paulo Freire (Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Sao Paulo) - click for English version.

Blanca Facundo's critique of Freire's ideas, and reactions to Facundo's critique - interesting collection of pieces.

Paulo Freire Institute - a wide range of material available about current work in the Freirian tradition. Click for the English version.

Daniel Schugurensky on Freire - consists of a collection of reviews of his books and links to other pages.

Q&A: The Freirian Approach to Adult Literacy Education, David Spener's review for ERIC.

Acknowledgement: The image of Paulo Freire is by chhhh/flickr.com. It is reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence. [ http://www.flickr.com/photos/chhhh/2973802038/]

How to cite this article: Smith, M. K. (1997, 2002) 'Paulo Freire and informal education', The encyclopedia of pedagogy and informal education. [ https://infed.org/mobi/paulo-freire-dialogue-praxis-and-education/. Retrieved: insert date]

© Mark K. Smith 1997, 2002

Last Updated on April 4, 2013 by infed.org

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Paulo Freire: dialogue, praxis and education

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contents: introduction · contribution · critique · further reading and references · links Paulo Freire (1921 - 1997), the Brazilian educationalist, has left a significant mark on thinking about progressive practice. His Pedagogy of the Oppressed is currently one of the most quoted educational texts (especially in Latin America, Africa and Asia).

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Intro and first two chapters of the book.
Martin, you may like to read this. Ali

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Stephen Brookfield (1995) 'Becoming a Critically Reflective Practitioner' 

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Stephen Brookfield (1995) 'Becoming a Critically Reflective Practitioner' 

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The 1st chapter of this book exploring hunting assumptions

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Guardian article on Raoul Martinez's book

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'If our choices are produced by a brain we didn't choose, I don't think it makes sense to say we are truly responsible for our actions," says Raoul Martinez, pausing to sip from his glass of stout. I eye him over my cappuccino. If I spilled his pint now, would I deserve punishment for this action, in the form of a punch on the nose from the 33-year-old author of this season's must-have text for thinking radicals? Apparently not. "If that is true," resumes Martinez, "then the moment we blame or say certain actions deserve punishment seems to be incoherent."

This may seem the stuff of a million undergraduate philosophy essays on the free will versus determinism puzzle. Perhaps you wrote one - I know I did, even if it was not as well argued as Martinez manages in his first book, Creating Freedom. Martinez tells me of an epiphany he had walking home from school with a friend when he was aged 12 or 13. "He was religious and wanted to convince me that I should be, too. I wanted to convince him that his position wasn't well grounded. Had he been born to a different family he would be arguing with exactly the same force for the opposite perspective. I don't think the argument changed him, but it did change me. I realised my genes, my inheritance, being born in a particular point of history all made me. I keep returning to the question: how can we be free if we can't control the forces that shape us?"

What makes his arguments unusual is that they lead to some chastening conclusions. Here are a few: prisons need to be emptied of all but those who pose a threat to society. Elections must be exposed as a shabby trick on a deluded populace, a lie of democratic choice in a system controlled by money. The media must be revealed as what it is - a corporate capitalist machine to mass-produce stupidity (with the happy exception of this article). The planet needs to be conceptually reconfigured as something other than a resource to be despoiled to keep us in lifestyles that don't make us happy or fulfilled. The pursuit of economic growth, profit and consumption must be shown up as a damaging value system that, as he puts it, "drives us to chase things that don't matter and disconnect from things that do".

The book comes at a timely moment. If Jeremy Corbyn is looking for philosophical underpinning to his manifesto for a more egalitarian Britain, he could do worse than Creating Freedom. Certainly, its author is a fan of the Labour leader: "We're in desperate need of the politics advanced by Corbyn - anti-austerity, redistribution of wealth, a new approach to climate change rather than being at the behest of the short-term interest of corporations."

Creating Freedom is, in part, a mashup of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, James Lovelock's The Revenge of Gaia, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Karl Marx's Das Capital, David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Nick Davies's Flat Earth News, Owen Jones's The Establishment and Simon Baron-Cohen's Zero Degrees of Empathy. It has already been translated into six languages and is published with dust-jacket encomia from Russell Brand, Susan Sarandon, Brian Eno, Helena Kennedy QC and Paul Mason. The safe money says the Daily Mail won't be putting it on its Christmas reading list.

What makes it exceptional is its sophisticated philosophical argument, one that is all the more intriguing in that it was developed by someone outside academia (Martinez came to writing after establishing himself as a successful portrait painter). Consider, he suggests, the case of a paedophile called John. He has a tumour in his brain, but when surgeons operate to remove it, his paedophile tendencies cease. Later the tumour grows back, and his paedophile tendencies return. The point of Martinez's story is that the discovery of the brain tumour makes John seem to us more victim than moral deviant and deserving of our compassion. In a sense, we are all Johns, luck's playthings, doomed by our genes and our upbringings to be sinners, saints, have nots or have yachts, or, most likely, bumblers in a world we didn't create and can't imagine mastering.

Rousseau argued that man is born free but is everywhere in chains: Martinez denies the first part of that claim. His point is logical: freedom and responsibility only make sense if we chose our own genes and inheritance. But we didn't. So we aren't free and can't be held responsible for anything. QED.

Now imagine if John never had a tumour. "Would you feel more justified in blaming John if, say, his addiction had been the product of childhood abuse rather than the abnormal growth of brain tissue?" Martinez asks. "If so, why? We no more control our upbringing than we do cell growth in the brain and formative experiences have a profound impact on the way we develop."

But the blame game is rooted deep in our religions and our criminal justice systems, not to mention the way we judge people for how they look.

Consider Fiji. In 1990, Martinez reports, eating disorders were unheard of there. In 1995, television was introduced, most of it American and teeming with food ads. Within three years 12% of teenage girls in Fiji had developed bulimia. Martinez's inference? "Consumption habits, like all habits, are shaped by forces "beyond our control". In the case of food, they are formed at an early age and are lifelong - the $10bn spent annually on marketing food to children is clearly a long-term investment. The ideas, values and images we encounter in our environment shape our dietary habits." But such corporate conditioning masks itself: instead of excoriating Don Draper's successors and US corporations for the rise in food disorders, we blame Fijian girls.

What Martinez calls the responsibility myth is, he suggests, the basis of the American Dream, namely that anyone can become rich and that those who do - even Donald Trump - deserve their money, while those who don't have only themselves to blame. The political corollary of that myth is that we have no obligation to help the poor, the obese, the disabled, the refugees, the homeless or the unemployed. They all deserved it, so screw them.

One of the perverted twists of the past few years has been that those responsible for economic austerity have gone largely unprosecuted, while the poor have got deeper into debt, in part thanks to government cutbacks, and punitively pursued for their indebtedness.

He cites American anthropologist David Graeber: "Mafiosi understand this," wrote Graeber. "So do the commanders of conquering armies. For thousands of years, violent men have been have been able to tell their victims that those victims owe them something." Viewed thus, debt management, as performed by banks or George Osborne, has the same moral basis as Tony Soprano's business model.

Martinez's exploding of the responsibility myth undermines justification for punishing criminals as we currently do. There are two leading reasons for jailing law breakers, Martinez argues, and both are unconvincing. First, there's retribution; but those who are punished are often victims of awful circumstances, he argues. "Many people who are incarcerated are people who have already been dealt a poor set of cards, often suffered from abuse or neglect, have mental health problems. So they're doubly punished. They need our help not retribution."

The second reason for punishing offenders is that it supposedly deters people from committing crimes. But as well as being morally dubious, that strategy doesn't work. Martinez reports that the top five countries with the death penalty average 41.6 murders per 100,000 people, while the top five without the death penalty average 21.6 murders per 100,000 people.

Martinez argues that the vast sums we spend locking people up, to the benefit of shareholders of corporations that run private jails, could be used to reduce inequality. If that happened, people's lives would be improved and many of the conditions that breed crime eliminated. "Every crime is in part a crime against society. What governments of left and right have done is to wrap a cordon around the individual," he says. "That exculpates other social pressures - racism, lack of representation. It's not just profoundly unjust but blinds us to the conditions that caused injustice and inequality and crime, and makes it more likely we're going to reproduce those conditions."

Should all jails be closed, and rapists and murderers allowed to roam free, I ask? "No! If someone poses a significant threat to society we have every reason to remove them from society. We do that to protect society."

We also do it to make criminals suffer, I suggest. "Yes, but I don't think prisons should be places where people suffer. Prisons inflict a form of torture - including beatings and rapes - and no one seems to give a damn." The aim must be rehabilitation, he says. He cites Bastøy prison in Norway as an example of how jails should be run. There, each inmate is offered high-quality education and training, lives communally in comfortable accommodation with five other men and prepares food for themselves funded from an allowance of £70 a month and the £6 a day they receive for a variety of jobs such as repairing bicycles and doing woodwork.

But offering prisoners good conditions, education and rehabilitation courses causes outrage, not least from law-abiding people who don't have such largesse lavished on them at the taxpayers' expense? "I understand that people might be bitter when prisons offer educational programmes when they don't have anything like that, no means of bettering themselves," says Martinez, "but the sufferings of one section of society doesn't justify the sufferings of another."

Surely not all criminals can be rehabilitated? "There are some people who won't be rehabilitated but we can still make it a dignified life in prison for them."

If Martinez's ideas for prison reform sound bracing, his diagnosis of what's gone wrong in education and what should change are even more so. He worries that formal education is a machine producing willing functionaries for an oppressive system rather than, as he thinks it should, helping students develop with critical faculties. To achieve with the latter, we need a new school curriculum with courses that, you'd think, would make the likes of Michael Gove and Justine Greening bring out their blue pencils. He recommends that alongside traditional subjects there should be others provisionally entitled "equality and oppression", "empathy and dehumanisation", "war and peace" and "climate change and survival". Such classes would help students reflect on the "innately political character of whatever is studied". In the war and peace class, for instance, Martinez envisages students would reflect on how different governments have cajoled their citizens into supporting war.

Martinez's proposals for education are especially intriguing given that he left formal education aged 17 to train as a portrait painter. He talks as though he dodged a bullet. "I think doing that enabled me to slow down and think about the issues that obsessed me." Arguably, it spared him the constraining exposure to tertiary education that, he argues, produces graduates to prop up capitalism rather than have the intellectual sensibilities to destroy it. He's particularly harsh on economics as academic discipline. "Economics functions as a way to legitimise class rule. It's a way of making it seem to the public that decisions about wealth distribution and investment are technical decisions rather than moral or political ones."

How did Raoul Martinez become the man he is? Thanks to forces beyond his control, no doubt. One was his ancestry. He is the son of Barcelona-born London-raised novelist and playwright father Alex and half-English, half-Swedish environmental campaigner and writer mother Christina. "My dad said to me when I was seven or eight years old that the most important word in the language is why."

When the teenage Martinez wasn't immersing himself in books, he also spent two and a half years developing his talent for painting as an apprentice with British portrait artist Paul Benney. His work has been selected three times for the BP Portrait Award. In 2013, for example, his portrait of one of his heroes, Noam Chomsky, was shown in London's National Portrait Gallery during the 2013 BP Portrait Award exhibition. The following year, though, he used his increased notoriety to protest against BP's sponsorship of the prize.

Creating Freedom developed from an ongoing film of the same name co-directed and written by Martinez. Episode one, The Lottery of Birth, was nominated for best documentary at London's Raindance film festival and won the Artivist Spirit 2012 award at Hollywood's Artivist festival. Episode two is in production.

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A still from Martinez's documentary Creating Freedom: The Lottery of Birth.

Martinez is clearly an enviable overachiever, but isn't he also a contradictory thinker? He spends the first part of Creating Freedom denying we can be free, then devotes the rest of it to imagining how we can create freedom. But how can we create what can't exist? Martinez denies the contradiction. "We may be less free than we think, but only through understanding the freedom we lack can we enhance the freedom we possess," he writes. He's calling for a different kind of freedom from the delusive sort that makes us seem responsible for actions beyond our control, or the neoliberal inversion of the term that surreptitiously enslaves us to a system we should despise. "Freedom as I understand it is to use values that are most inspiring to us to create the circumstances in which they can be realised," he says. It is then, an artist's conception of freedom, one that involves ideologically enslaved humans imagining and then creating what they value.

To explain, he goes back to his granddad Paco, who wound up in a Franco concentration camp. "He managed to survive through the capacity to exercise his imagination. Even if it was just imagining being in Hollywood making love to Marilyn Monroe while he was in prison." This echoes a passage in the book in which he quotes the Holocaust survivor and psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl, who recalled men in Nazi death camps who would walk through the huts comforting others and giving away their last pieces of bread. "They may have been few in number," wrote Frankl, "but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

What Martinez takes from this is that we can use our imaginations to create the values we live by, rather than live in thrall to what he calls "that very strange concept of freedom that privileges those who have wealth over those who do not".

He also insists that creating freedom involves something he sees lacking everywhere: empathy. Planning to build walls to keep refugees out, assuming there is something exceptional about our homelands, are all symptoms of the selfish, individualistic, hubristic subjects that neoliberal polities produce, he argues. "We dehumanise those beyond our group - that's the function patriotism fulfils. This sense that our nation or our culture is inherently morally superior is very dangerous."

Creating such a world as the one Martinez wants sounds hard, particularly when the forces of control have erased themselves from scrutiny so effectively. Why not despair of realising political change, as some of the Frankfurt School did? Martinez smiles across the table at me. "What's the point of being despairing? Optimism is a political strategy. Many people wouldn't identify as activists because they fear their capacity to change things is limited, but it isn't." In fact, Martinez says, just as there is a kind of freedom that he wants to defend from delusive ones, there is also a different kind of responsibility that he insists we should accept. "The responsibility to change things rests with us."

Creating Freedom is published by Canongate, available from Guardian Bookshop, priced £16.40 (RRP £20).
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Raoul Martinez on writing this year's essential text for thinking radicals

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'If our choices are produced by a brain we didn't choose, I don't think it makes sense to say we are truly responsible for our actions," says Raoul Martinez, pausing to sip from his glass of stout. I eye him over my cappuccino.

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What is Assessment for Learning?

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Dylan Wiliam, 2011 - What is assessment for learning

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From 'More Time to Think' by Nancy Kline

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by Michael Young

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by Richard Wilson

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by Gert Biesta

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Closing the Book on Hate

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by Knut Illeris

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by Ewart Keep

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by Veronica McGivney

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From More Time to Think by Nancy Kline

Mark you might like to read this - Lou.

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by Michelle Ortlipp

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by Gwyneth Hughes

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by Tribe, Honggen and Chambers

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by Helene Ahl

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by Alison Wolf

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by Anne Bartlett-Bragg

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An interview with him in 2013