Freire in the book argues that contemplating the world and taking concrete actions within the world is linked. It isn’t enough to talk out against oppression if people don’t fight it oppression, then those words are futile. Freire uses this idea of combined reflection and action in his discussions of liberation, praxis, and dialogue, because it is necessary to his vision of a free society.
Friere begins the chapter with discussion of dialogue which he says it is a form of communication and a strategy that employs words to convey and express needs and information between two or more humans. Friere says speaking true words can transform the world as true words create a radical interaction with reflection and action. If words used in dialogue don’t embody reflection and action, they’re talks useless to implement change. Palaver cannot denounce everything and there’s no transformation without reflection and action. For genuine dialogue to occur it must be authentic and accomplished by someone, not for somebody.
Freire says, dialogue is an act of radical love “for the world and for people,” because it is a commitment to giving people control and agency as they investigate everything around them. Dialogue is additionally an act of humility, because it discourages anybody from having authority over another. Dialogue is an act of faith which must take into account the oppressors’ efforts to stop oppressed people from using that power.
Lastly, dialogue cannot exist without hope and important thinking which Freire says comes from human beings constant to finish them. Within the context of his pedagogy, the “problem-posing” model, Freire says that dialogical education should address what students want to understand about and have interaction with what they know already. Problem-posing education builds up hope because it pushes oppressed people to not see oppression as a permanent fact, and start to ascertain it as a changeable problem.
A primary job of educators is showing that the problems that affect people’s lives have concrete solutions the people affected can use their own experiences to come up with solutions. . While the banking model simply presents facts without contextualizing them, problem-posing education allows oppressed people to attach the large ideas that shape society with their personal experiences.
Friere adds that as people begin understanding their relationship to the world, they understand that they’re limited by their concrete experiences within the world—Freire calls these “limit-situations.” Limit-situations are a product of history, which suggests that they are not permanent and may be overcome. Freire, divides history into a series of “epochs,” periods of your time that are characterized by peoples’ ideas, values, and beliefs during that point which exist in the world, and he calls their representation within the world “themes.” He further adds that “Themes” and “limit-situations” are closely related—sometimes, oppressed people stay in conditions that prevent them from understanding the ideas that created those conditions
He says that education should push oppressed people and political leaders to research the “themes” of their time and this can happen through “decoding “which consists of presenting a classroom with a “coded situation” or a sophisticated condition that reflects a topic and therefore the class then responds to and analyzes things. But decoding is merely one part of the larger “thematic investigation,” which happens in the classroom. Thematic investigation is how educators and students can become critically conscious of reality and of their own beliefs.
The process of thematic investigation starts with the educators, who identify a place to figure in and start to observe it and its residents. . Freire uses the instance of an course class “in a peasant area with a high percentage of illiteracy.” He says the educators should observe many various aspects of the peasants’ lives, communicating with them and enlisting them as volunteers to know their views too. Freire uses the instance of a “codification” about alcoholism—while an educator might see it as automatically bad, the peasant might see himself as someone who drinks to deal with an oppressive job.
Throughout this process, the educators listen and document the responses, and eventually begin to review them to form out themes and eventually, the educators use these results to make new class materials, which they present to the peasants as a part of a more organized curriculum. This curriculum is now a product of the educators’ research, and reflects the topics that the peasants care about. Most importantly, this curriculum allows the peasants to possess authority and to think for themselves.
References
- Paulo Friere, MyraBergman Ramos, Donaldo Macedo- Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th anniversary
- Pedagogy of the oppressed- freebook summary
- Directed Readings Fall 2011: Pedagogy of the Oppressed