Update 12/1/09:

• Culture: community-based: rules, norms, and conditions of Ss’ society
• Teacher: Facilitator, guide through codes and toward action, co-learner
• Teaching: Ensuring balanace, asking questions, focus on S strengths
• Learners: Active participants, researchers, problem-solvers, generally adults
• Learning: Rehearsing for real life, everyone teaches & everyone learns, language is means to an end (anti-banking)
• Context: From students’ lives and experience to classroom back out into community
• Subject matter: Comes from students, builds from codes, problems and solution(s), based on S experience
• Educational outcomes: Giving control over lives to Ss, learning the language to make positive change in their lives, unpredictable

While this is the easiest of the four approaches so far for me to grasp the logic and philosophical strengths of, it’s the hardest for me to imagine put into practice in the ESL classroom.

I do understand the general framework: students drive the curriculum while teachers facilitate and contribute as equals; the lesson centers around a “code” which must represent a familiar situation, be emotionally charged, be two-sided, and be open-ended. Once the code is define, the process follows five sequential steps (describe the content of the code, define the problem, personalize it, discuss it and discuss alternatives). It is intended for use with adults (and is based on self-directed learning, a central concept in adult learning theory), though one article in the binder (Bob Peterson) uses a similar technique with junior high kids.

Let me plug things into the template. Freire’s original approach (“education for transformation”) has been adapted to a variety of educational settings: second language, workplace, health, etc.

Teacher

• Problem-poser (not problem-solver)
• Co-learner (member of the group rather than expert)
• Facilitate conscientization and analytical thinking

Teaching

• Asking questions rather than transmitting knowledge. Honoring students’ individual stories and diversity.
• Ensuring objectivity and representation of multiple viewpoints, in a peaceful, constructive manner.
• Focus on strengths, not inadequacies. Students encouraged to believe in selves.

Educational Outcomes

• Unpredictable by definition. Qualitative change given more weight than quantitative: students’ ability to address real-life concerns and take action.
• Valuing of subjective as well as objective evidence of progress. Students’ own assessment important; external objective evaluation is irrelevant.
• Rehearse students for life roles.
• Goal is action outside the classroom: students make changes in their lives (it may take months)
• Literacy is not the end but rather the means for participants to shape reality.

Context

• Classroom (focus on students’ being at ease) as a microcosm for real world.
• Classroom is “a model; what happens inside the classroom shapes the possibilities outside the classroom.”
• Content-based context, with cooperative learning through peer interaction.
• Education is never neutral; it can either perpetuate existing social relations or challenge them. (Interesting parallel with last week’s presentation [see notes on ginnama] about educational activism in the Zapatista community.
• Inductive questioning process that structures dialog in the classroom

Subject Matter

• Students involved in curriculum from the start, and at every stage after.
• Starting point is the concrete experience, and ending point is social context.
• Individual experience linked to social analysis. Personal situations examined to find root causes, after which the collective reflection entails depersonalizing problems, providing support and the basis for action.
• Syllabus is more of a retroactive account than a blueprint or roadmap: a syllabus of how rather than what

Language

• Not a language-study approach, though it can be used within any subject area, from general adult literacy to history and even math (I think).
• Authentic dialog, purposeful language use

Culture

• “Language, literacy and culture are explored as part of the content because they are important aspects of the context.”

Learners

• Generally adults
• May be working- or lower-class: those who need empowerment in their daily living/working situations
• “Ethnographers of their own literacy communities”

Learning

• Progress is seen as cumulative and cyclical rather than linear.
• Rehearses people for real-life situations.
• “Everyone teaches, everyone learns.”
• Addressing concerns through collective dialog.
• Literacy is both the instrument and object of study.
• “Reading the word” and “reading the world”: “Literacy education is meaningful to the extent that it engages learners in reflecting on their relationship to the world they live in and provides them a means to shape that world.”
• The opposite of the “banking model” (“domesticating”)

Our readings and handouts go into great detail about methods for defining a code, forms it can take, and how to work with it.

I should have more of a response, I suspect, but I haven’t got one at the moment. Next class we have our small-group experience, so … more to come!