[AAACE-NLA] Boomerang Brings Deja Vu

[tsticht at znet.com]

George: You work at a level of abstraction and interpretation of Paulo's
writings that are outside of my own rather concrete observations of Paulo's
work. I listened to him for three days a week for eight years and read about
what he actually did in teaching literacy. That is the basis for my placing
him in the line of those who applied Functional Context Education
principles in their teaching. Paulo did not invent learner-centeredness,
though he greatly popularized the ideas in his writings and presentations
around the world. My review of historical pioneers in adult literacy in the
U.S. reveals others long before his work who based their teaching on the
expressed interests of their learners. I have found his work was functional
in its search for social justice, as was other's work in my historical
line-up. Instead of any paradigmatic shifts, Paulo was quite conventional in
how he actually taught literacy, using the syllabary approach to teaching
Portugese literacy. Septima Poinsette Clark focused on social justice,
overcoming oppression,and the interests of learners (paticipatory
programs)well before Paulo's work. One of Paulo's practices was in teaching
adult literacy was the use of the pictures to teach "reading the world"
before learning how to "read the world." But this approach was extensively
used in World War II. It has also been used under the name of the language
experience approach. But Paulo's rhetoric caught the attention of third
world countries trying to emerge from colonization and became a favorite
rhetoric, even if not always the same practice, for literacy campaigns and
programs in these countries. My work in the military was not in the
tradition of the Post WWII UN modernization efforts but rather in the
tradition of the WWI and WWII military programs that taught literacy within
the functional contexts of military life. My work developing programs in
civilian contexts was more in line with human capital development and the
intergenerational transfer of literacy from parents to their children, what
today is often aimed for in family literacy programs. You may find the
historical review in the Functional Context Education notebook for 2005 of
interest. Thanks for your comments. Tom Sticht























Quoting gdemetrion at msn.com:

> Tom and others,
>
> I view Frieire's historical impact from a dynamic perspective in
> fundamentally challenging the then pervasive modernization thesis.  Your
> early work on literacy as I understand it was broadly in line with the
> presuppositions of Post WWII UN modernization efforts at and the
> political precepts of the Kennedy administration.  That's not a criticism
> it's an observation.
>
> Thus it's not just time sequencing and some broad affinities at the level
> of functional-contextual pedagogy but cultural-political impact and the
> fundamental paradigmatic shift that emerged as a result of Freire's
> understanding of the politics of literacy.  In the US there have been
> liberal and radical appropriations of Freire's vision, the former
> stressing the critique of "banking" pedagogy, the latter, the politics of
> capitalism. As I interpret Freire his politics informed his pedagogy as
> its undergirding filter, though there was as well a theological
> underpinning in the then emergent liberationist theology. In that respect
> he focused on agape love as the ultimate source of unity among people,
> but was not short on using such terminology as the oppressed and the
> oppressors.  This is usually not emphasized much, but it is a critical
> aspect of his work.
>
> I've spent some time on Freire with critical appreciation of his
> underlying project.  My objection here is neither to defend nor to
> critique him, but to place the discussion of the relationship between
> functional context theory and critical pedagogy in its historical setting
> circa 1965-1975 and in that respect to note the paradigmatic differences
> in their fundamental political orientation.
>
> George Demetrion
>