PAULO FREIRE'S EDUCATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

PAULO FREIRE'S EDUCATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

The course was developed within the framework of the projectYes We Can! 2019-1-PL01-KA204-065197

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EDUCATIONAL COURSE

Index

Paulo Freire's Educational Perspective

Banking Model of Education

Problem Posing Education

Dialogue

Conscientization

Praxis – Action/Reflection

Eastern Experience

Generative Themes & Codification

Paulo Freire's Educational Perspective

Banking Model of Education

Problem Posing Education

Dialogue

Conscientization

Praxis – Action/Reflection

Eastern Experience

Generative Themes & Codification

Paulo Freire's Educational Perspective

Paulo Freire, one of the building blocks of critical pedagogy, defines education as a tool that enables the emancipation of the individual. Freire revealed the connection of many difficulties that people face with education, and gained a different place among educational philosophers with his unique ideas.

Freire says education cannot be impartial. Accordingly, education is considered in two dimensions, either as a tool used to facilitate the integration of the human with the existing dominant system or as a tool (practice of freedom) in which people look critically at the reality they are in and at the same time discover how they will be involved in the transformation of this order. Freire takes place in the second dimension.

According to Freire, the main purpose of education is "consciousness" (conscientizaçao), which can be defined as providing learners with a critical perspective on society and being aware of their potential to transform society. Therefore, Freire considers education as an auxiliary factor in the awareness process.

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Paulo Freire's Educational Perspective

The education of Freire should support people to understand the world critically and take action to change it. (Ayhan, 2013). The concept of "dialogue", which is defined as a process where the educated and educator investigate information together, has a very important place within Freire's educational theory.

Freire tried to create a critical consciousness in people through education and to establish a liberated world where human values work. If these thoughts come true, the distinction between oppressor and oppressed will be eliminated (Yılmaz, 2016).

Freire states that the great human and historical duty of the oppressed who have reached this level of consciousness is to liberate both themselves and their oppressors (Yılmaz, 2016).

Liberation can only happen when the oppressed reach the consciousness that they do not oppress like the oppressors. Freire argues that the unity of thought and action must be simultaneously. He explains this human-specific situation with the concept of 'praxis'. Praxis refers to the conscious action in which theory and practice affect each other dialectically, enabling the world to be transformed (Freire, 2015).

Banking Model of Education

Problem Posing Education

Dialogue

Conscientization

Praxis – Action/Reflection

Eastern Experience

Generative Themes & Codification

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Paulo Freire's Educational Perspective

In a dialogue-based educational approach, the teacher's domination of being the sole authority over the student disappears and education turns into a process where knowledge is shared. On the other hand, teacher and student can be both learner and teacher. The teacher and the student participate in the dialogue environment under the same conditions, they take place as discoverers with a critical point of view without establishing power over each other. Students' perceptive capacity improves and they define the world as a dynamic reality that evolves and transforms over time.

Freire defines traditional education, which imposes the knowledge that the dominant society wants to provide, as a "banking education model" and stands against it. In this model, where learners are defined as objects and teachers as subjects, there is a one-sided imposition rather than a dialogue-based structure.

Thus, the traditional education model has an oppressive, authoritarian nature and serves the continuation of the status quo. Freire advocates the "problem-defining education" model, which is based on dialogue, instead of the "banking education model" he stands against. With this model, people become aware of their potential and get the opportunity to define the problems in their relations with the world.

In the literacy method that Freire divided into 5 stages, there are issues that take an important place in the language and lives of the participants as a focal point. Therefore, he argues, the literacy process is as much about reading the world as reading words. According to Friere, literacy is a cognitive tool that separates literate and illiterate people from each other.

Banking Model of Education

Problem Posing Education

Dialogue

Conscientization

Praxis – Action/Reflection

Eastern Experience

Generative Themes & Codification

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Paulo Freire's Educational Perspective

Finally, the most important element that covers the essence of Freire's educational philosophy is the dialectical structure between objectivity and subjectivity. According to him, an objectivity that ignores and excludes subjectivity is unacceptable.

These two concepts are two important elements that complement each other, the world and human beings can only exist in interaction with each other. Freire finds it important to implement an emancipatory education, despite the danger of being caught in objectivism in the name of objectivity or, conversely, in subjectivism in the name of subjectivity.

Banking Model of Education

Problem Posing Education

Dialogue

Conscientization

Praxis – Action/Reflection

Eastern Experience

Generative Themes & Codification

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Paulo Freire's Educational Perspective

Banking Model of Education

Banking Model of Education

In this form of education, the teacher deposit in the minds of the learners who are considered to be empty or ignorant, bits of information or knowledge, much like we deposit money in an account. This is why Freire called this model of education ‘banking education’.

Freire criticized this model of education because he believed it made students into passive objects to be acted upon by the teacher. He argued that the goal of ‘banking education’ is to demobilize the people within the existing establishment of power by conditioning them to accept the cultural, social, political status quo of the dominant culture. In the banking education model knowledge/education is seen as a gift given to the student by the teacher who considers the learner as marginal, ignorant and resource-less.

Freire saw this as false generosity from the dominant group (oppressors) and a way of dominating and controlling the people (the oppressed) to improve or maintain their own interests. Freire argued that conventional learning was the tool of the elite because it treated students as objects upon which knowledge is “deposited.” (Rugut & Osman, 2013).

Problem Posing Education

Dialogue

Conscientization

Praxis – Action/Reflection

Eastern Experience

Generative Themes & Codification

Paulo Freire's Educational Perspective

Banking Model of Education

Problem Posing Education

Problem Posing Education

To challenge the banking education model, Freire proposed a problem-posing model of education. In this model, the teacher and learner discuss and analyses their experiences, feelings and knowledge of the world together. Instead of the belief that learners’ and teacher’s situation in the world is fixed, as the banking model suggests, the problem-posing model explores problems or realities people find themselves in as something which can be transformed.

It is not the job of the teacher to provide answers to the problems, but to help the learners achieve a form of critical thinking about the situation, Freire called this conscientization. This makes it possible to understand that the world or society is not fixed and is potentially open to transformation. It becomes possible to imagine a new and different reality. In order to undertake this process successfully, the people (oppressed) must challenge their own perception of the dominant group (oppressor).

Freire argued that the oppressed think of themselves as ‘less than’ or something lacking. He suggested that they have been conditioned to view the practices and behaviours of the dominant groups as complete, whole and correct. To become whole complete and correct means to simulate the practices of the dominant culture. To counter this perception means engaging the learner in a process of dis-identification with dominant culture/oppressor and to help the learner to imagine a new being and a new life according to their own rationality. Learning can best be achieved through critical thinking and analysis of one’s experiences and feelings (Rugut & Osman, 2013).

Dialogue

Conscientization

Praxis – Action/Reflection

Eastern Experience

Generative Themes & Codification

Paulo Freire's Educational Perspective

Banking Model of Education

Problem Posing Education

Dialogue

Dialogue

Freire advocated for dialogue, constant communication unlocks doors for prosperity and victory in any situation. When teachers and learners dialogue, there are always breakthroughs. Dialogic action challenges mediating social realities by posing them as problems that can be analyzed critically by those who have direct experience of them.

Freire argues that dialogue is not just about deepening understanding but is part of making a difference in the world. Dialogue becomes a form of collective praxis directly concerned with unveiling inequitable conditions obscured by the ruling classes. The process is important and can be seen as enhancing community and building social capital that leads to justice and human flourishing.

To enter into dialogue presupposes equality amongst participants. Each must trust the others; there must be mutual respect and love (care and commitment). Each one must question what he or she knows and realizes that through dialogue existing thoughts will change and new knowledge will be created.

Conscientization

Praxis – Action/Reflection

Eastern Experience

Generative Themes & Codification

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Dialogue

Freire’s emphasis on dialogue has struck a very strong chord with those concerned with popular and informal education. Informal education is dialogical or conversational and involves respect and people working with one another (co-operative activity).

Dialogue is an encounter, mediated by the world itself, between men and women to name the world (make sense of the world). Dialogue is the means by which we achieve significance as human beings. Those in the dialogue must each want to name the world. Everyone must be able to speak the word to name the world.

“The domination implicit in dialogue is that of the world by the dialoguers; it is conquest of the world for the liberation of humankind” (Rugut & Osman, 2013)

Conscientization

Praxis – Action/Reflection

Eastern Experience

Generative Themes & Codification

Paulo Freire's Educational Perspective

Banking Model of Education

Problem Posing Education

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Dialogue

Conscientization

Conscientization

Freire has described this as the process of developing a critical awareness of one’s social reality through reflection and action. Action is fundamental because it is the process of changing the reality. Paulo Freire says that we all acquire social myths which have a dominant tendency, and so learning is a critical process which depends upon uncovering real problems and actual needs.

The idea that “experiences are lived and not transplanted” is a central tenet of Freire’s philosophy. Conscientization is the key process by which students develop a critical awareness of the world based on the concrete experience of their everyday lives. The development of critical awareness through conscientization alters power relations between students and teachers, the colonized and the colonizer, thereby transforming objects of knowledge into historical subjects (Rugut & Osman, 2013).

Praxis – Action/Reflection

Eastern Experience

Generative Themes & Codification

Paulo Freire's Educational Perspective

Banking Model of Education

Problem Posing Education

Conscientization

Praxis – Action/Reflection

Praxis – Action/Reflection

Paulo Freire, whose perspective is derived from both Marxist and Existentialist thought, maintained that for the oppressed to become authentic selves they must fight not only for freedom from hunger, but for freedom to create and construct, wonder, and venture. True knowledge, Freire contended, emerges only through restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful, critical inquiry with other people about their relations to the world.

A core component of Freirean theory is that learning begins with action is then shaped by reflection, which gives rise to further action. Learning is thus a continuous process, directed at enhancing the learner’s capacity to act in the world and change it. For Freire, whether it is called literacy or learning, this is the principal political task of any society committed to peoplepower.

Eastern Experience

Generative Themes & Codification

Dialogue

Paulo Freire's Educational Perspective

Banking Model of Education

Problem Posing Education

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Praxis – Action/Reflection

Freire put forward the notion that authoritarian forms of education such as banking education prevented learners from ‘knowing’ the world and seeing it as something which can be changed. He believed that authoritarian forms of education inhibited the liberation and freedom of the oppressed.

Freire argued that change could come through a process of dialogue and reflection leading on to change through action or intervention and or political change. Freire called this process praxis (Rugut & Osman, 2013).

Eastern Experience

Generative Themes & Codification

Conscientization

Dialogue

Paulo Freire's Educational Perspective

Banking Model of Education

Problem Posing Education

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Praxis – Action/Reflection

Eastern Experience

Eastern Experience

According to Paulo Freire those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly. To him this conversion is so radical and does not allow for ambivalent behavior. Conversion to the people requires a profound rebirth. Those who undergo it must take on a new form of existence; they can no longer remain as they were. 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. The educator for liberation has to die as the unilateral educator of 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 (Rugut & Osman, 2013).

Generative Themes & Codification

Conscientization

Dialogue

Paulo Freire's Educational Perspective

Banking Model of Education

Problem Posing Education

Eastern Experience

Generative Themes & Codification

Generative Themes & Codification

Freire’s literacy pedagogy, or “method” as it has come to be called, was based in learners’ linguistic and social realities. He recommended that literacy teachers conduct ethnographic research in the learners’ community, document their linguistic universe, draw “generative themes” and key words from that local culture, and engage in a dialogical process with students to elaborate a social analysis, while simultaneously studying words at the syllable level, phonetically. In this way, students learn to “read the word and the world” (Bartlett 2005).

Participants explore generative themes which are of interest to them. A generative theme is a cultural or political topic of great concern or importance to participants, from which discussion can be generated. These generative themes are then represented in the form of ‘codifications’ (either represented by a word or short phrase or a visual representation - a picture or photograph). Participants are able to step back from these visual representations of their ideas or history and decode or explore them critically by regarding them objectively rather than simply experiencing them (Rugut & Osman 2013).

Praxis – Action/Reflection

Conscientization

Dialogue

Paulo Freire's Educational Perspective

Banking Model of Education

Problem Posing Education

The course was developed within the framework of the projectYes We Can! 2019-1-PL01-KA204-065197