This week’s reading centered on the idea of critical consciousness through Freirean and Humanist perspectives. The excerpt we read from Paulo Freire’s Education for Critical Consciousness touched on the main ideas of dialogue, reading the word and the world, and conscientização. Freire’s version of dialogue refers to a social consciousness built from a position of equality and respect among participants and that through dialogue previous assumptions can be altered and new knowledge will be developed. “Reading the word and the world” refers to using what you learn and transform this knowledge in ways that help you think critically about your experiences and the world around you. Conscientização, or conscientization, is the process of developing …show more content…
Freire and his colleagues teach illiterate subjects literacy through a five phase process. In this process, the subjects are taught words that connect to their experiences, words that closely connect to what they actually represent, and breaking down words into parts in order to connect to other words. These phases help the subjects develop critical consciousnesses through this process of self-education. By beginning with teaching words that can relate to the subjects’ common experiences, they are able to then have more critical dialogues about their lives in which they can continue to learn and develop their consciousnesses. I have also experienced reading the word and the world on a personal level. For example, last semester I took my first communication classes for my major. In these classes, we read and learned about different communication styles and verbal and nonverbal behaviors. I never noticed these communication behaviors and patterns in myself and those around me until I read about these concepts. Then, I was able to read body language and understand why we say or don’t say certain things, and then interpret these occurrences to find a deeper meaning. By learning the words of these concepts and behaviors, I was able to apply them to the world around me and the communication patterns I observed to develop my own conscious …show more content…
According to Freire, conscientização, or consciousness raising, should be used reveal the real issues and needs of society that are masked by dominant social concepts, which tend to be false. If one gives into conforming to these social myths, they become a part of a machine that facilitates the mass production of humankind via passive education. By challenging and questioning the supposed truths told to us by those in power, we are engaging in conscientização and transforming into more conscious beings. I experienced conscientização when I worked at a smoothie shop in high school. My boss would make me work over twenty hours a week during the school year and make me stay past 10:00 PM on weeknights. This was my first real job, so I listened to everything she said and performed to the best of my abilities in order to avoid getting fired. As the months passed on, I could tell that this job took so much out of me. On top of working, I played two varsity sports, acted as a board head in my Leadership class, and maintained a 4.0 GPA. Eventually, my grades started to suffer because I had no time to study while working such long hours. I knew I needed to step back and look at my situation from a different perspective. I confided in my parents and friends, and they all told me that I wasn’t being treated with
Other People’s Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy by Victoria Purcell-Gates recounts the author’s two-year journey with an illiterate Appalachian family. Purcell-Gates works with Jenny, the mother, and her son, first grader Donny, to analyze the literacy within the household. Throughout the journey, we learn the definition and types of literacy, the influences of society and the environment, and the impacts of literacy on education from the teacher’s perspective. In order to evaluate literacy in the household, one must study multiple types, including functional, informational, and critical literacy. As the name implies, functional literacy incorporates reading and writing as tools for everyday survival. Informational literacy is used through text to communicate information to others. The highest level of literacy, critical literacy, requires critical interpretations and imaginative reflections of text. In her study, Purcell-Gates strives to teach Jenny and Donny functional literacy.
Language is a skill that, if used properly, can open up a variety of opportunities in life. Throughout the readings of “Homemade Education” by Malcolm X and “Living with Dyslexia” by Gareth Cook, we see many difficulties and challenges that people overcome when they are put in the face of language. Like many things, there are many different aspects that shape the way we understand the art of language. Throughout culture, perspective, and language we see all the components that make language so powerful. It is made very clear, that language has the power to promote the shaping of one’s identity.
It can be quite a shock to confront the possibility that reading, writing, and talking exercise almost none of the powers we regularly attribute to them in our favorite stories. The dark night of the soul for literacy workers comes with the realization that training students to read, write, and talk in more critical and self- reflective ways cannot protect them from the violent changes our culture is undergoing.
Plutarch deduces, “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.” A vessel is often cluttered with useless items while a fire kindles and is truly fascinating as it slowly starts to grow. The mind is always being filled with unnecessary information every single day. The student has the opportunity to mold the mind into storing information that is considered useful. In the academic sense, students should be able to use this information and apply it when they are learning. Students should strive to learn for the purpose of expanding the mind. Every single thing taught in school should be applied in life. That is the only way that anyone can become successful.
This novel can easily be compared to the topics I’ve learned about in class. Topics covered in the classroom are the importance of thinking critically about things in day-to-day life. Levitt’s and Dubner’s book is an excellent example of the things that can be produced from thinking critically about the world around us. Being a critical thinker aids people in making intelligent and educated decisions.
Donald M. Murray, in this article entitled “Reading as a Reader” is talking about how reading is an unique, an essential, and a necessary aptitude for human beings in their society. While illustrating his point of view, the author stresses on the idea that our attitudes towards reading is directly linked to the systematic approaches we have while facing a article or a book. In this article, he said that: “If we approach a text believing that we are not readers, or that we can’t read, that attitude may make it more difficult for us to understand the challenging text.”(Murray, 2). Throughout those words, Murray emphasizes that we should consider the process of reading as a learning process, and as a way of deepening the capacity we have as readers. We should have an open-mind while engaging with a reading, and understand that it may always not be our fault if it comes that the text we are reading is difficult. In clear, it is all part of the process of improving ourselves. Then, Murray, in his well structured writing, portrays differents types of reading and also gives us some tips on how to approach them.
Knoblauch argues that there are many definitions of literacy that impact people’s lives. Although he argues there are many definitions, he focused on four types of literacy that are most common in society. Knoblauch labels them as functional, cultural, personal-growth/liberal, and critical literacy. He defines functional literacy as a level of literacy that is “readying people for the necessities of daily life—writing checks, reading sets of instructions”(1990, p. 3) and other basic reading and writing skills. However, he also warns that there are hidden agendas in these types of defined literacies. Ill prepared teachers who do not connect to and challenge their students result in no critical literacy and very little
Freire talks of his home country of Brazil, and the primary method of education used there as being one in which students are treated as objects that need filling with information instead human beings with varying opinions and experiences. There was a belief that essentially all students learn best this way. However, Freiere saw it as more than that and tied the method to socioeconomic and political oppression. His view was that those in charge wanted to stay in charge, and that the best way to do so was to keep the people truly uneducated, or as Freire refers to them as becoming automatons, and disenfranchised. He saw the teachers as oppressors due to his experiences in his own educational career.
In today’s society, a vast number of people are well educated. They have the equal opportunity to choose their own path in life by getting an education. A primary educational aspect of every human being is to learn to read. Being able to read is a primary goal of people in human society, as well as important in itself to society; it takes people far beyond their wildest dreams. A person who is literate has few limitations on what they can do; the world is an open playing field, because a person that is literate has the ability to become very successful in life.
Learning by critical reflection creates new understandings by making conscious the social, political, professional, economic, and ethical assumptions constraining or supporting one’s action in a specific context (Ecclestone 1996; Mackintosh 1998). Critical reflection’s appeal as an adult learning strategy lies in the claim of intellectual growth and improvement in one’s ability to see the need for and effect personal and system change. Reflection can be a learning tool for directing and informing practice, choosing among alternatives in a practice setting, or transforming and reconstructing the social environment (Williamson 1997). Can critical reflection be taught in a classroom? Does the new knowledge created foster change? This Myths and Realities investigates the extent to which critical reflection can be taught to adult learners.
This epistemological approach appears to be in sharp contrast to the contemporary view of someone like Paulo Freire who insists that knowledge must be democratically available to everyone in order to politically transform society transformation through social justice.(1) This aim is achieved when the noetic process becomes a critical reading of reality, a reflection in action which is applied so that traditional ways of thinking constitute a permanent subject for reinterpretation. Knowledge is perceived in Freirean epistemology as a medium of communication between human beings, a process in which there is no permanently unaltered noetic data but rather an ongoing dialectic strategically pursued through contradiction and constantly aimed at radically redefining how people can coexist in a state of social equality. According to this view, knowledge offers everyone the possibility to think more critically about the world so as to act on it in a more humanising way.
Education is at the core of humanity and its teaching has been mistreated. Based on Paulo Freire’s theory, education has been torn apart from its truthful purpose. It is now used to alienate human beings instead of promoting unity. Throughout this chapter, Chapter 2 in Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he concentrates on the teacher-student relationship in classrooms. He sees education as information that is being passed on or “banked” from teachers to students.
Freire wrote of education from a more political point of view, with words like oppressed and freedom in titles of his books. In his home country of Brazil, the 1960’s were important years both educationally and politically, which probably inspired Freire’s writing. In 1964, a military dictatorship took control of Brazil (WEBSITE), and in the same year, Freire was imprisoned and then exiled from the country. This would definitely have inspired Freire to write about education with the thought of freedom snuck in between the lines. Freire’s audience of the time would not have been in Brazil until it was published there in 1974, however it was published in Portuguese, English and Spanish (Readings for Writers). Teachers and students alike were able to relate to relate to The “Banking” Concept of Education in the late 1960’s and they still can relate to it in modern times. Students relate to the feeling of being oppressed and disrespected. Teachers will connect with Freire’s purpose by realizing that they actually do need to teach using his proposed problem-posing method.
There are some theoreticians who view literacy in a form of social practice. In their view, social issues are also important components, as well as linguistic competence and understanding cognitive processes in language studies. Freire (1974) views literacy not only as a process of knowledge transformation, but also as a relationship of learners to the world. Vygotsky (1978) suggests two stages of development at social and individual level. In his view, literacy is a phenomenon that is created, shared, and changed by the members of a society. Gee (1996) similarly argues that becoming literate means apprenticeship with texts and apprenticeships in particular ways of being. In summary, literacy practices are not just about language, but about their interrelation with social practices.
Essentially, the critical consciousness looks to find authentic truth through finding discrepancies in everyday life and focuses on freedom, humanity as critical consciousness that fights for a world that is progressive. As people continue to develop and grow within this society, individuals become subject to the oppressive institutions and corporations set in place as “the advancing one-dimensional society alters the relation between the rational and the irrational” as “the ability to act with good conscience… [testifies] to the extent in which the Imagination has become an