A Documentary on Paulo Freire
Five female senior Providence Student Union (PSU) members commenced Brown University’s Education Department Diversity Inclusion & Action Plan Spring 2018 Conference, "Catalyzing Critical Dialogues in Urban Education & Policy,” a one day event packed with pedagogy, opinions, and calls to action. They were extraordinary. Together, they reflected on their discovery of Paula Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It’s difficult not to compare the students in my classroom with the ones sitting in front of me that day, so I invited them to my classroom hoping a few of my ninth graders will see reflections of themselves three years into the future. How do we honor and learn from the exceptional, like the PSU students and Freire, without deifying them, removing them further away from the very people we seek to engage?
I purchased the Teaching to Transgress audiobook so I could listen to hooks’ musings while I took a “break” from reading and writing to go for a walk. At the point of my departure, I was in the seventh consecutive hour of graduate coursework. It was bitterly ironic listening to hooks proclaim the necessary ingredient for an excellent educator lies in becoming self-actualized through spiritual and physical restoration; I am profoundly tired. Does what and how we choose to spend our “free time” automatically develop one’s self-actualization or does one require a conscientious effort towards the actualization? At what point does the edification of oneself become detrimental to the self? Or to those around her?
How do ideas become radical simply because a consensus doesn’t exist? Is it possible to create a school culture that encourages teachers to openly share their political beliefs without harming students?
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