¿Who was Pablo Freire?
Paulo Reglus Neves Freire, Ph.D (September 19, 1921 – May 2, 1997) was a Brazilian educator, philosopher, and influential theorist of critical pedagogy. He is best known for his influential work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which is considered one of the foundation texts of the critical pedagogy movement.
Freire was born September 19, 1921 to a middle class family in Recife, Brazil. Freire became familiar with poverty and hunger during the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 1931, the family moved to the less expensive city of Jaboatão dos Guararapes, and in 1933 his father died. In school, he ended up four grades behind, and his social life revolved around playing pick up football with other poor children, from whom he learned a great deal. These experiences would shape his concerns for the poor and would help to construct his particular educational viewpoint. Freire stated that poverty and hunger severely affected his ability to learn. This influenced his decision to dedicate his life to improving the lives of the poor: “I didn't understand anything because of my hunger. I wasn't dumb. It wasn't lack of interest. My social condition didn't allow me to have an education. Experience showed me once again the relationship between social class and knowledge" (Freire as quoted in Stevens, 2002) .Eventually his family's misfortunes turned around and their prospects improved.
Freire enrolled at Law School at the University of Recife in 1943. He also studied philosophy, more specifically phenomenology, and the psychology of language. Although admitted to the legal bar, he never actually practiced law but instead worked as a teacher in secondary schools teaching Portuguese. In 1944, he married Elza Maia Costa de Oliveira, a fellow teacher. The two worked together and had five children.
In 1946, Freire was appointed Director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in the state of Pernambuco. Working primarily among the illiterate poor, Freire began to embrace a non-orthodox form of what could be considered liberation theology. In Brazil at that time, literacy was a requirement forvoting in presidential elections.
In 1961, he was appointed director of the Department of Cultural Extension of Recife University, and in 1962 he had the first opportunity for significant application of his theories, when 300 sugarcane workers were taught to read and write in just 45 days. In response to this experiment, the Brazilian government approved the creation of thousands of cultural circles across the country.
In 1964, a military coup put an end to that effort. Freire was imprisoned as a traitor for 70 days. After a brief exile in Bolivia, Freire worked in Chile for five years for the Christian Democratic Agrarian Reform Movement and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In 1967, Freire published his first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom. He followed this with his most famous book,Pedagogy of the Oppressed, first published in Portuguese in 1968.
On the strength of reception of his work, Freire was offered a visiting professorship at Harvard University in 1969. The next year, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published in both Spanish and English, vastly expanding its reach. Because of political feuds between Freire, a Christian socialist, and successive authoritarian military dictatorships, the book wasn't published in Brazil until 1974, when General Ernesto Geisel became the then dictator president beginning the process of a slow and controlled political liberalisation.
After a year in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, Freire moved to Geneva, Switzerland to work as a special education advisor to the World Council of Churches. During this time Freire acted as an advisor oneducation reform in former Portuguese colonies in Africa, particularly Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique.
In 1979, he was able to return to Brazil, and moved back in 1980. Freire joined the Workers' Party (PT) in the city of São Paulo, and acted as a supervisor for its adult literacy project from 1980 to 1986. When the PT prevailed in the municipal elections in 1988, Freire was appointed Secretary of Education for São Paulo.
In 1986, his wife Elza died. Freire married Maria Araújo Freire, who continues with her own educational work.
Freire died of heart failure on May 2, 1997 in São Paulo.
THEORY
"There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world." —Richard Shaull, drawing on Paulo Freire
Paulo Freire contributed a philosophy of education that came not only from the more classical approaches stemming from Plato, but also from modern Marxist and anti-colonialist thinkers. In fact, in many ways his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) may be best read as an extension of, or reply to, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), which emphasized the need to provide native populations with an education which was simultaneously new and modern (rather than traditional) and anti-colonial (not simply an extension of the culture of the colonizer).
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Freire, reprising the Oppressors–oppressed distinction, differentiates between the two positions in an unjust society, the oppressor and the oppressed. Freire makes no direct reference to his most direct influence for the distinction, which stems back at least as far as Hegel in 1802, and has since been reprised by many authors including Engels, Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Simone Weil and others.
Freire champions that education should allow the oppressed to regain their sense of humanity, in turn overcoming their condition. Nevertheless, he also acknowledges that in order for this to occur, the oppressed individual must play a role in their liberation. As he states:
No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption (Freire, 1970, p. 54).
Likewise, the oppressors must also be willing to rethink their way of life and to examine their own role in the oppression if true liberation is to occur; "those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly" (Freire, 1970, p. 60).
Freire believed education to be a political act that could not be divorced from pedagogy. Freire defined this as a main tenet of critical pedagogy. Teachers and students must be made aware of the "politics" that surround education. The way students are taught and what they are taught serves a political agenda. Teachers, themselves, have political notions they bring into the classroom (Kincheloe, 2008). Freire believed that "education makes sense because women and men learn that through learning they can make and remake themselves, because women and men are able to take responsibility for themselves as beings capable of knowing — of knowing that they know and knowing that they don't".
Banking model of education
In terms of actual pedagogy, Freire is best known for his attack on what he called the "banking" concept of education, in which the student was viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. He notes that "it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads men and women to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power" (Freire, 1970, p. 77). The basic critique was not new — Rousseau’s conception of the child as an active learner was already a step away from tabula rasa (which is basically the same as the “banking concept”). In addition, thinkers like John Dewey were strongly critical of the transmission of mere facts as the goal of education. Dewey often described education as a mechanism for social change, explaining that “education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction” (1897, p. 16). Freire's work, however, updated the concept and placed it in context with current theories and practices of education, laying the foundation for what is now called critical pedagogy.
Student-teacher dualism
More challenging is Freire's strong aversion to the teacher-student dichotomy. This dichotomy is admitted in Rousseau and constrained in Dewey, but Freire comes close to insisting that it be completely abolished.
Culture of silence
According to Freire, the system of dominant social relations creates a culture of silence that instills a negative, silenced and suppressed self-image into the oppressed. The learner must develop a critical consciousness in order to recognize that this culture of silence is created to oppress. Also, a culture of silence can cause the "dominated individuals [to] lose the means by which to critically respond to the culture that is forced on them by a dominant culture." Social domination of race and class are interleaved into the conventional educational system, through which the “culture of silence” eliminates the "paths of thought that lead to a language of critique”
¿Who was David Ausubel?
David Paul Ausubel was an American psychologist born in New York. His most significant contribution to the fields of educational psychology, cognitive science, and science education learning, was on the development and research on advance organizers since 1960.
Biography
Ausubel was born on October 25th, 1918 and grew up in Brooklyn, New York.
He studied at the University of Pennsylvania where he graduated with honors in 1939, receiving a bachelor's degree majoring in Psychology. Ausubel later graduated from medical school in 1943 at Middlesex University where he went on to complete a rotating internship at Gouveneur Hospital, located in the lower east side of Manhattan, New York.Following his military service with the US Public Health Service, Ausubel earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Columbia University in 1950.After, a series of psychological professorships ensued at schools of education.
In 1973, Ausubel retired from academic life and devoted himself to his psychiatric practice. During his psychiatric practice, Ausubel published many books as well as articles in psychiatric and psychological journals. In 1976, he received the Thorndike Award from the American Psychological Association for "Distinguished Psychological Contributions to Education".
At the age of 75 in the year 1994, Ausubel retired from professional life to devote himself full time to writing, with which four books resulted.
He died at the age of 90 years old in July 9 of 2008.
About Advance Organizers
An advance organizer is information presented by an instructor that helps the student organize new incoming information.This is achieved by directing attention to what is important in the coming material, highlighting relationships, and providing a reminder about relevant prior knowledge.
Advance organizers are helpful in the way that they help the process of learning when difficult and complex material are introduced. This is satisfied through two conditions:
1. The student must process and understand the information presented in the organizer-- this increases the effectiveness of the organizer itself.
2. The organizer must indicate the relations among the basic concepts and terms that will be used.
Types
Ausubel’s theory of advance organizers fall into two categories: comparative and expository.
1. Comparative Organizers
The main goal of comparative organizers is to activate existing schemas. Similarly, they act as reminders to bring into the working memory of what you may not realize is relevant.By acting as reminders, the organizer points out explicitly “whether already established anchoring ideas are nonspecifically or specifically relevant to the learning material” (Ausubel & Robinson, 1969, p. 146). Similarly, a comparative organizer is used both to integrate as well as discriminate. It “integrate[s] new ideas with basically similar concepts in cognitive structure, as well as increase[s] discriminability between new and existing ideas which are essentially different but confusably similar” (Ausubel, 1968, p. 149).
An example of a comparative organizer would be one used for a history lesson on revolutions. This organizer “might be a statement that contrasts military uprisings with the physical and social changes involved in the Industrial Revolution” (Woolfolk et al., 2010, p. 289).Furthermore, you could also compare common aspects of other revolutions from different nations.
2. Expository Organizers
“In contrast, expository organizers provide new knowledge that students will need to understand the upcoming information” (Woolfolk et al., 2010, p. 289). Expository organizers are often used when the new learning material is unfamiliar to the learner. They often relate what the learner already knows with the new and unfamiliar material—this in turn is aimed to make the unfamiliar material more plausible to the learner.
An example which Ausubel and Robinson Floyd G. Robinson provides in their book School Learning: An Introduction To Educational Psychology is the concept of the Darwinian theory of evolution. To make the Darwinian theory of evolution more plausible, an expository organizer would have a combination of relatedness to general relevant knowledge that is already present, as well as relevance for the more detailed Darwinian theory.
Essentially, expository organizers furnish an anchor in terms that are already familiar to the learner.
Another example would be the concept of a right angle in a mathematics class. A teacher could ask students to point out examples of right angles that they can find in the classroom.By asking students to do this, it helps relates the students present knowledge of familiar classroom objects with the unfamiliar concept of a 90 degree right angle.
Criticism
“The most persuasively voiced criticism of advance organizers is that their definition and construction are vague and, therefore, that different researchers have varying concepts of what an organizer is and can only rely on intuition in constructing one-- since nowhere, claim the critics, is it specified what their criteria are and how they can be constructed” (Ausubel, 1978, p. 251).
In a response to critics, Ausubel defends advance organizers by stating that there is no one specific example in constructing advance organizers as they “always depends on the nature of the learning material, the age of the learner, and his degree of prior familiarity with the learning passage” (Ausubel, 1978, p. 251).
Another criticism of Ausubel’s advance organizers is that the critics often compare the idea of advance organizers with overviews. However, Ausubel has addressed that issue in saying that advance organizers differ from overviews “in being relatable to presumed ideational content in the learner’s current cognitive structure” (Ausubel, 1978, p. 252).
Thirdly, critics also address the notion of advance organizers on whether they are intended to favour high ability or low ability students. However, Ausubel notes that “advance organizers are designed to favour meaningful learning..” (Ausubel, 1978, p. 255).Therefore, to question whether advance organizers are better suited for high or low ability students is unrelated as Ausubel argues that advance organizers can be catered to any student to aid them in bridging a gap between what they already know and what they are about to learn.
