15 Paulo Freire Technique of Teaching Adults

Dr. Surendra Tanna

epgp books

 

Content Outline

  • Introduction
  • Reading
  • Writing
  • Arithmetic
  • Objectives
  • Paulo Freire’s childhood
  • Paulo Freire’s Professional Profile
  • At University of Recife
  • Paulo Freire’s Method of Teaching Literacy to Adults
  • The Banking System of Education
  • Problem Posing System of Education
  • Dialogue at the Core of Problem Posing Education
  • Critique of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy
  • Summary

 

Introduction

 

Teaching Adults is different from Teaching Children; This is true also in the case of ‘Teaching Literacy’ to ‘Illiterate Adults’

 

Teaching of Literacy to adults consists in teaching of ‘3 Rs’ as they are traditionally called. These are: (1) Reading (2) Writing and (3) Arithmetic.

 

It further means

 

Reading: Reading of words sentences, paragraphs, essays, stories etc. in the traditional sense-which basically relates to the recognition of the forms & designs of alphabets/letters in a given language. In practice, it involves reading of the headlines and the contents of the daily newspapers, the bill boards, the name plates, road signs or the names and numbers of the routes of the public transport system in the case of the persons, who are required to commute frequently from one place to another.

 

Writing: Writing on the other hand involves psychomotor skills on the part of the learner. It enables the learner to write them to express his thoughts, and share them for his further use. It brings specificity and clarity in the thought process.

 

It empowers the learner with what we call as writing skills. Writing requires more effort and takes more time and has to conform to the standard rules and regulations of grammar and syntax.

 

Arithmetic: Arithmetic the 3rd R, involves reading and writing numbers in a particular sequence. It gives an idea of ‘quantity’ of a particular commodity and further the addition, subtraction, multiplication and division of these numbers and units of quantity of particular products, where the quantity cannot be counted merely on the tips of fingers – which are basically limited to numbers from 1 to 10.

 

But with the development of the script, alphabets, signs and symbols in the communication process, it becomes a complex phenomenon of ‘the world of Literate Communicators’ – which have common signs and symbols for coding and decoding and re-coding the information messages from one person and one end to another.

 

The ‘Literates’ therefore become and feel more empowered than the ‘Illiterates’.

 

In the case of the children in formal schools, their physical, physiological and psychological growth is limited as compared to adults. Beyond their interaction with their parents and members of their family, they are generally ignorant and also ‘innocent’ of the complex information, ideas and transactions of the world of adults.

 

Hence they require comparatively more time, more repetitive reinforcement of the information and the skills of learning literacy, which we call ‘rote learning’.

 

In the case of ‘Illiterate’ adults, one must know and understand that though they are ‘illiterates’, they are not ‘ignorant’ or ‘uneducated’. They carry with them the whole world of experiences, perceptions, ideas and opinions of the world in which they live,survive and grow. Their capacity to understand, analyze and interpret various realities and situations in the world around them is unlimited.

 

In their own learning situations, they continuously are seeking relevance, purpose and usefulness to understanding and resolving their immediate problems or issues at hand.

 

The challenge for teaching adults therefore is to treat them as equals, to be non-authoritative and ‘non-dictative. The ‘teacher’ of adults has also to be the ‘learner’ of the life and problems of the adults. For the adults, its not the learning of merely the ‘WORD’ but learning about their ‘WORLD’ through the words.

 

In his interactions with the adults, ‘Paulo Freire’ precisely did this in the early decade of 1960 in Brazil and later on in other countries of the Third World in North America, Africa and Europe.

 

Learning Objectives

  • Explains the life and work of Paulo Freire
  • Illustrates the Paulo Freire’s method of Teaching Illiterate Adults
  • Discusses the significance of Paulo Freire’s methodology of teaching adults in the context of the National Adult Education Programme
  • Compares the limitations and weaknesses of Paulo Freire’s methodology of teaching adult illiterates with other methods

 

Now let us understand who Paulo Freire was and his contribution to the field of Adult Education.

 

Paulo Freire’s childhood

 

Paulo Freire *1 was born on September 21, 1921 to a middle-class family in Recife, Brazil. He lived in poverty and hunger during the Great Depression of the 1930s. In school, he ended up four grades behind, and his social life revolved around playing pickup football with other poor children, from whom he learned a great deal. Freire stated that poverty and hunger severely affected his ability to learn. These experiences influenced his decision to dedicate his life to improving the lives of the poor:

 

In 1946, Freire was appointed Director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in the state of Pemambuco, in Brazil. 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 for voting in presidential elections.

 

In 1961, he was appointed Director of the Department of Cultural Extension of Recife University. 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.

 

Freire’s contacts with the state-run trade unions helped him to receive an appointment in the Serviço Social da Indústria (Social Service for Industry SESI) as the chief of the Department of Education and Culture (Freire, 1959, p. 14, 17).

 

Through the framework of the ‘workers’ clubs’, Freire and his colleagues tried to encourage the industrial labour force to ‘discuss their individual problems and also general topics’ (Freire, 1959, p. 15). He was trying to tell the workers that they should not leave the responsibility for solving their problems entirely to SESI. They should themselves try to overcome difficulties and hindrances. (Freire, 1959, p. 17).

 

Paulo Freire’s Professional Profile *2

At University of Recife

 

Paulo Freire’s efforts at reforming education as well as his activities in SESI and in the lay movement of Catholic Church, earned him a part time teaching appointment for pedagogies at the University of Recife (Freire 1971 pg. 499).

 

Paulo Freire worked in the education department as the coordinator for adult education projects. He enthusiastically supported the initiative for the founding of Popular Cultural Movement (MCP).

 

A primer for literacy work with adults (Gerhardt, 1978, p. 65) was developed under MCP. The authors of the primer (Godoy/Coelho, 1962) had chosen a directive political approach with five ‘generative’ words: povo (people); voto (vote); vida (life); saúde (health), and pão (bread). Using the syllables of these words, sentences, such as ‘The vote belongs to the people’, ‘People without houses live in slums’, ‘In the Northeast there will only be peace when the grievances are remedied at their roots’ and ‘Peace emerges on the basis of justice’ were created. They were supposed to inspire political discussion and form its structure and content (Gerhardt, 1978, p. 68).

 

Paulo Freire’s Method of Teaching Literacy to Adults

 

Freire, further began to experiment with his new approach to literacy training in a cultural circle which he himself coordinated as monitor and whose members he knew personally.

 

Freire reports that after only twenty-one hours of literacy training, one participant was able to read simple newspaper articles and write short sentences. The slides, particularly, aroused great interest and contributed to the participants’ motivation. After thirty hours (at one hour per day for five days per week) the experiment was brought to an end. Three participants had learned how to read and write. They could read short texts and newspapers and write letters. Two participants had quit (Freire, 1963a, p. 19; Freire, 1974a, p. 58). *3 Thus, Freire’s ‘method’ of literacy training was born. The ‘method’ had an overwhelming success all over Brazil. It was possible to make the illiterate population at that time 40 million literate (as literates they were allowed to vote) and conscious of the nation’s problems. Reformists and leftist forces invested in Freire and his team, which was soon entrusted with the task of implementing a National Plan of Literacy Training (1963).

 

In this way, Freire and his collaborators began to talk of a ‘system’ of educational techniques, the ‘Paulo Freire System’, which could be applied to all levels of formal and non-formal education (Maciel, 1963). Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, his technique for literacy work, was labeled the ‘Paulo Freire Method’.

 

These steps might best be summarized in the following way:

  • The educators observed the participants so as to ‘tune in’ to the universe of their vocabulary;
  • An arduous search for ‘generative words and themes’ took place at two levels: syllabic richness; and a high degree of experiential involvement;
  • A first codification of these words into visual images, which stimulated people ‘submerged’ in the culture of silence to ‘emerge’ as conscious makers of their own culture;
  • Introduction of the ‘anthropological concept of culture’ with its differentiation between man and animal;
  • The de-codification of the ‘generative words and themes’ by a ‘culture circle’ under the self-effacing stimuli of a coordinator who is not a ‘teacher’ in the conventional sense, but who has become an educator- educatee in dialogue with educatee-educators;
  • A creative new  codification, this one explicitly critical  and aimed at action, wherein those who were formerly illiterate now begin to reject their role as mere ‘objects’ in nature and social history. They undertake to become ‘subjects’ of their own destiny.

 

In 1964, a military coup put an end to Freire’s literacy effort. He was imprisoned as a traitor for 70 days. After a brief exile in Bolivia, Freire worked in Chile, his second country of exile, for five years

 

In his second country of exile, Chile, Freire dedicated himself primarily to the field of adult education for peasants.

 

Freire arrived back in Brazil in 1980 when the Popular Cultural Movement, which he had helped to establish in the early 1960s, was entering its second period of influence at a time of economic crisis and when the military rulers were consequently willing to relinquish power.

 

By his association with Brazil’s working class, Freire became a founding member of the Workers Party (PT) in Sao Paulo and acted as a supervisor for its adult literacy project from 1980 to 86. When the Workers Party (PT) prevailed in municipal elections in 1988, Freire was appointed as Secretary of Education for Sao Paulo.

 

Freire was invited by the Catholic University of São Paulo and by the State University of São Paulo in Campinas to become a professor in their respective educational departments.

 

Paulo Freire has published a vast collection of books that have been translated into a total of eighteen languages. More than twenty universities throughout the world have conferred on him the title of Doctor honoris causa. His most popular publication, Pedagogy of the oppressed, is dedicated to the wretched of this world and to those who identify with, suffer with and fight for the impoverished.

 

Freire died of heart failure on May 2, 1997 in Sao Paulo.

 

Freire’s Critique of Traditional System of Education as:

 

The Banking System of Education *5

 

Through his continuous association and interaction with the traditional system of education, Freire called it a ‘Banking System of Education’. He described and criticized it in the following manner:

 

“In the banking system of education, he said

 

  1. The teacher teaches and the students are taught.
  2. The teacher knows everything and the students know nothing.
  3. The teacher thinks and the students are thought about.
  4. The teacher talks and the students listen – meekly.
  5. The teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined.
  6. The teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply.
  7. The teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher.
  8. The teacher chooses the programme content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it.
  9. The teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students.
  10. The teacher is the subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.”

 

Problem Posing System of Education

 

He therefore practiced and advocated the system of problem-posing education, in which the teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but the one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in their turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. He further said,

 

“The problem-posing educator constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflection of the students. The students – no longer docile listeners – are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher.

 

In problem-posing education, men develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world. They come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation.

 

Problem-posing education regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of cognition.

 

It bases itself on creativity and stimulates true reflection and action upon reality.

 

Problem-posing education is a revolutionary futurity. Hence it is prophetic (and, as such, hopeful), and so it corresponds to the historical nature of man. Thus, it affirms men as beings who transcend themselves, who move forward and look ahead; the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future.

 

Problem-posing education, as a humanist and liberating praxis, basically implied that men subjected to domination must fight for their emancipation.”

 

Dialogue at the Core of Problem Posing Education *6

 

Dialogue is the most essential precondition of the profound love for the world and for men. Love is at the same time the foundation of dialogue and dialogue itself. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause – the cause of liberation.

 

Dialogue cannot exist without humility. How can one enter into a dialogue if he always projects ignorance onto others and never perceives his own? How can one enter into dialogue if he considers himself a member of the in-group of ‘pure’ men and knowledge, for whom all non-members are ‘these people’ or ‘the great unwashed’?

 

Dialogue further requires an intense faith in man, faith in his power to make and remake, to create and re-create, faith in his vocation to be more fully human (which is not the privilege of only an elite, but the birthright of all men).

 

Founding itself upon love, humility and faith, dialogue becomes a horizontal relationship of which mutual trust between the participants is the logical consequence. It would be a contradiction in terms if dialogue – loving, humble and full of faith – did not produce a climate of mutual trust.

 

Nor yet can dialogue exist without hope. Hope is rooted in men’s incompleteness, from which they move out in constant search – a search which can be carried out only in communion with other men.

 

Finally, true dialogue cannot exist unless it involves critical thinking – For the critic, the important thing is the continuing transformation of reality, for the sake of the continuing humanization of men.

 

Critique of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy

 

It requires a great charismatic, loving, critical and dedicated personality like Paulo Freire to successfully implement and carry out such programme of adult-education, or for that matter any meaningful programme of education of the poor and the deprived.

 

As the programme and its dimensions keep on expanding at various levels, a kind of ‘dilution’ and ‘digression’ and sometimes ‘degeneration’ starts taking place, affecting the true spirit and commitment of the functionaries at various levels.

 

But this will be true of any noble idea, programme or plan of action, when it is applied to a variety of situations and different geographic, cultural, economical and political situations.

 

SUMMARY

 

Paulo Freire’s Life, Work, Philosophy and Method of Education

 

Paulo Freire’s life among the oppressed and his work for the education and consciousness raising of the poor had their profound effect on his philosophy of education and his method of teaching literacy to adults.

 

He has explained the process of raising consciousness among the adults in details in various books, especially the ones like:

 

Education: The Practice of Freedom and Pedagogy of the Oppressed and the Cultural Action for Freedom.

 

The main thrust of his Pedagogy was the active involvement of the learners as participants in their own process of education, right from the stage of planning the development of content and the curriculum of the education, development of the learning resources etc. It also emphasized actual process of teaching and learning in a totally non-authoritative and democratic way, where there is a constant interchange and exchange of the roles of the teacher and the students, including measuring the outcome (evaluation) of the process of learning. The learners in this approach would themselves acknowledge their learning achievements.

 

In his process, he emphasized on the importance of ‘Dialogue’ between the teacher and his students based on their understanding of mutual trust, humanity, faith, love, hope, critical analysis, reflection and conscious action for the liberation of both the oppressor and the oppressed consciousness. Literacy in this process is a tool, a weapon to fight their conditions of dehumanization and starting for their complete humanization, which is essentially their historical function or ‘ontological vocation’ as he has stated.

 

Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and the National Adult Education Programme (NAEP) launched by the Government of India in October 1978.

 

In the policy statement on NAEP issued by the Government of India, the components of the NAEP were outlined as Literacy, Functionality and Social Awareness, all three integrated in developing the learning resources and the training processes of the Audit Education Functionaries, right from the national to the grass root level situations of learning by the illiterate adults.

 

This threefold integrated approach to Literacy Training in NAEP apparently had its origin in the Literacy Training methodology of Paulo Freire

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References

  • Paulo Freire https://en.m.wikilipedia.org.Retrieved 2017-7-18.
  • Heinz – Peter Gerhardt. 2000. Prospects: The quarterly review of comparative education Vol. XXIII no. 3/4 1993 p. 439-58. PAULO FREIRE – International Bureau of Education, UNESCO Paris 2000
  • ibe.unesco.org.sites.files.freire Retrieved 2017-7-19.
  •  Freire 1970d. Cultural Action for Freedom. Cambridge, M.A. Centre for the Study of Development and Social Changes.
  • Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York N.Y. Herder and Herder.
  • Freire 1974 P. 78 Education: The Practice of Freedom London. Writers and Readers Cooperative also published in the United Kingdom as Education for Critical Consciousness London Sheed and Ward 1974.
  •  Freire Paulo 1985. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin Books Ltd. England 1972 (First Published in Great Britain by Sheed and Ward) Reissued in Pelican Books 1985 Chapter 2 P. 45-59. (Translated by Myra Benjamin Remos)
  • Freire Paulo 1985. Pedagogy of the Oppressed Penguin Books Ltd. England 1972 (First Published in Great Britain by Sheed and Ward) Reissued in Pelican Books 1985 Chapter 3 P. 60-95. (Translated by Myra Benjamin Remo)