Kablogerate

A Short Biography of Paulo Freire
by Peter Fleck
December 12, 2004

Paulo Freire was born on September 19, 1921 in Recife, Brazil. Because of the world economic crisis of the late 1920's, Freire was exposed to poverty early in his life. This influenced his views on education.

He taught in a grammar school while still in high school and went on to study law at the University of Recife where he also studied philosophy and the psychology of language. In 1944, he married Elza Maia Costa Oliveira, a primary school teacher. They had four children together.

In 1946, Freire was made Director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in the Brazilian State of Pernambuco where he was charged with improving the living conditions of factory workers. This work helped in formulating his later theories.

In 1958, Freire presented a paper entitled "Education of Adults and Marginal Populations: the Mocambos Problem" at the Second National Conference on Adult Education in Rio de Janeiro. In this paper, Freire stated that adult education for the Mocambos must have a foundation in the consciousness of everyday situations lived by the learners and that this would help in promoting democracy.

Freire was made Director of the Division of Culture and Recreation for Recife's Department of Archives and Culture in 1961. In 1962, using his theories, 300 sugarcane sharecroppers were taught to read in 45 days. When this experiment concluded, President Joao Belchior Goulart invited Freire to implement a national literacy campaign with a goal to make five million adults literate in the first year and participants in the democratic process as Brazilian law required that voters pass a literacy test.

Unfortunately, a military coup deposed Goulart in 1964 and Freire was imprisoned for two months. He finally received asylum in Bolivia for a brief time before moving to Chile for five years where he worked for Eduardo Frei's Christian Democratic Party.

In 1967, Freire published his first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom. In 1968, he published his most famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He was invited to teach at Harvard as a visiting professor in 1969. He spent a year at Harvard and then moved to Geneva, Switzerland to work with the World Congress of Churches as a special education adviser.

He was able to return to Brazil in 1980. He taught at the Catholic University of Sao Paulo and the State University of Campinas. In 1988, he was invited to take over the position of Municipal Secretary of Education in the new Workers' Party administration in Sao Paulo.

Freire died of heart failure on May 2, 1997.

Theory

Freire is best-known for attacking what he identified as the banking idea of education, where a student is viewed as an empty account to be filled with a "deposit" by the teacher. Instead, he advocated dialog and critical thought. His theories have influenced literacy programs and adult learning worldwide although many of these programs tend to ignore the more revolutionary aspects of his thought.

Freire's method of teaching become known as liberatory education, defined as "mutually supported learning for empowerment" (Heaney). Freire's view was that education is political. Based on his literacy campaigns in Brazil and Chile, which were integrated with programs of revolution and social change, he suggested several pedagogical techniques including reflecting on political content from the learner's daily experience, organizing "culture circles" to promote dialogue and interaction with peers, and using the "people's knowledge" as the basis for a curriculum.

Freire's concept of liberatory education also relies on the learner attaining critical consciousness. He describes this consciousness in three stages. First is "semi-intransitive" consciousness where perception is limited and focus is on survival. Second is "naive transitivity" where represented by traits such as over-simplification of problems, longing for the past, and a disinterest in investigation. Finally comes "critical transitivity," "characterized by depth in the interpretation of problems, by testing one's own findings and openness to revision and reconstruction" (Heaney).

Freire's emphasis on people working with one another (and not on one another) via dialogues and by situating the learning within the experience of the students, has had great influence on informal and adult education. His goal was to incite radical social change through education by using a "pedagogy of the oppressed" or a "pedagogy of hope."

Application

Freire's theories regarding the equality of the teacher and student and a curriculum built on the student's life could be well-applied to current instructional design via the emerging social networking applications. Given the right training and access to a computer, students would be able to use their developing literacy skills on both blogs and wikis to form opinions and carry on conversations. This would be in addition to face-to-face meetings with discussion. This would also allow for worldwide linking and the possibility of a true social-change agenda.

Freire's philosophies fit well with current education and business training theories involving situated learning and communities of practice which share a similarity with Freire's culture circles.

It should again be mentioned that Freire saw his methodology as standing outside of the status quo of the oppressor and preparing the oppressed to work at radical social change. In utilizing his ideas today, practitioners often strip them of these social change aspects.

Sources

Heaney, Tom. "Issues in Freirean Pedagogy." June 20, 1995. [http://www.paulofreireinstitute.org/Documents/freiren_pedagogy_by_Tom_Heaney.html] [Visited December 12, 2004]

Lownd, Peter. Freire's Life and Work. no date. [http://www.paulofreireinstitute.org/Documents/PF-life_and_work_by_Peter.html] [Visited December 12, 2004]

Paulo Freire. Wikipedia. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire] [Visited December 12, 2004]

Smith, Mark K. Paulo Freire. May 8, 1997. [http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-freir.htm] [Visited December 12, 2004]

Resources

del.icio.us social bookmarks for 'freire'

Here is the handout I plan to use. Let me know if you are unable to download.

1. Hand out COP definition paper.
2. Divide class in groups of four. Each group assign spokesperson.
3. Each group to decide:
4. According to the definition above, Is CI 5331 a community of practice?
5. List three reasons why it is or why it isn't.
6. Spokesperson tells class what the reasons are.
7. Aimee maps out.

Do we list on white board too?

I think we just monitor the discussion and try to ask questions. I will have some questions in mind but all of us can contribute here.

I am still thinking that we should define COPs with a handout for the first exercise. One reason is so that we are all discussing the same characteristics and we are not attempting a definition from multiple class sources. This, to me, is somewhat like a control for the exercise.

Here is the definition that I would recommend, taken from Mr. Wenger's web site.

Communities of Practice

Definition:
Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and who interact regularly to learn how to do it better.

Characteristics:

1. The domain:
A community of practice has a shared domain of interest and shared competence that distinguishes members from other people.

2. The community:
In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other.

3. The practice:
Members of a community of practice are practitioners, not merely a community of interest. They develop a shared practice including a repertoire of resources. This takes time and sustained interaction.

Source: What are Communities of Practice? by Etienne Wenger. http://www.ewenger.com/theory/index.htm

The Book

Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation
by Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger (1991)

• The term "Communities of Practice" was coined in this book.

The People

Jean Lave

Professor of Education and Geography, University of Berkeley, California.

Social anthropologist with a strong interest in social theory.

Much of her work concentrates on the re-conceiving of learning, learners, and educational institutions in terms of social practice.

Selected books:

• Understanding Practice (co-authored with S. Chaiklin, 1993);
• Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (with E. Wenger, 1991);
• Cognition in Practice (1988).

2004 Keynote speaker OKLC 2004 Fifth European Conference on Organizational Knowledge, Learning and Capabilities. "Communities of Practice as Inter-Generation-al Relations"

Etienne Wenger

Pioneer of "community of practice" research.

Author and co-author:

• Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
• Cultivating Communities of Practice: a Guide to Managing Knowledge (Harvard Business School Press, 2002)

Founder of CPsquare: cross-organizational, cross-sector community of practice on communities of practice
http://www.cpsquare.org/

Research Project: Learning for a Small Planet
broad, cross-sectoral investigation of the nature of learning and learning institutions at the dawn of the new millennium
http://www.ewenger.com/research/researchsummary.htm

I went through the settings and found that George had co-opted all email functions! So I took away his admin privileges. Just kidding.

Turns out there is only one email box for the blog. We don't get our own settings as members of the blog. So I have listed all our emails (with comma separators) in hopes that will allow us all to be notified when someone posts or comments.

This will be a test post and then I'll comment and you both the notified.

BTW, I'm in a coffee shop looking out over Lake Superior in Duluth. It's a dreary day but it doesn't seem to have snowed or rained here. We did drive through a snow storm on the way from St. Cloud to Duluth.

Winter has arrived.

We are leaving for St. Cloud and Turkey then on to Duluth and relaxing near the big lake. I have found coffee shops in each city with wireless access so expect to hear from me probably more than my favorite wife would like.


TO DO for PF
I've got the bio of Lave and Wegner. If anyone sees Lave info, let me know. She's a bit elusive. Wegner has material on his site.

I'll also relate the theory to meaningful learning and I think my previous post on this is a good start. Aimee's post should help too.

And I'll do my meaningful activity but I'll want to run the script by yous guys. I'll get on that.

Chatting: can we actually chat on webct? Is that activated for students. George, I'll bet you might know.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING AND TO ALL AND GOODBYE TILL ? I'll probably be off-line until Friday sometime unless Mary's family throws me out (always a possibility) or I find a wireless access point in my mother-in-law's neighborhood.

New Blog Our new blog is at:

http://kablog-tip.blogspot.com/

Feel free to change the template. This one seemed nice.

Kablogers,

go to http://blog.lib.umn.edu/

log-in and you should be at the blog.

Play around if you like. You have almost full settings. George, you do have full settings. Aimee, you have everything except messing with the address book because I thought why would we need that then I thought maybe that is our email addresses when I did George and then I would go back and change yours but I don't know how... yet. I'll get there.

Anyway, let me know what you think.

From Aimee's Email:

Greetings gentlemen,

George, we didn't really talk about much related to our prez--just that we
thought we would have email access over the holiday to chat as needed.

If you don't have any objections, here's my action plan:
- Add the responses to my assigned questions today and post them to
kablogger

- Be prepared to create a concept map of "Peter's Opening Activity"
discussion
- Be ready for brief 5-minute demos of COP tools: Breeze, Groove, and
TappedIn.

- Take the lead on developing a handout for more information on Breeze,
Groove, and TappedIn. I'm thinking maybe it could be the Wenger PDF handout
that Peter sent to us on one side and the additional Breeze, Groove, and
TappedIn information on the other side.

Presentation Roles Still Available:
1. Create the blog or other media that will house our presentation

2. Provide brief prez intro and introduce "Peter's Opening Activity"

3. Conduct the after session for "Peter's Opening Activity" (while I'm
creating the concept map)

4. Conduct the lecture part of our presentation

5. Pass out the handouts to the class (when? Just after the activity
session?)

6. Conclude the presentation, after Peter and George's community examples,
open it up for questions from the class

We've discussed lurking on lists, etc. and I found this in an article I'm reading about blogging. I think it makes an interesting and valid point.

Indeed, Nonnecke & Preece (2001) maintain that lurking is an imperative aspect of an online community and should be regarded as a form of passive or vicarious participation that not only serves to increase the understanding in the lurker, but provides a sense of belonging regardless of whether they ever intend to participate. There is also the possibility that active participants in an online community 'perform' to a potential readership that may or may not eventually become active participants in a community. Thus, active participants may well assume a lurking audience as part of the accepted risk of rebuttal, in creating an argument or expressing a theory in making a blog entry. This risk, in turn, develops skills among active participants in critical thinking and argument creation.

Exploring the use of blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector by Jeremy Williams