The teacher of pedagogy for liberation, freedom and democracy cannot be rigid methodologist or a didactic teacher as has been possible in traditional classrooms. Freire reacts against the “bureaucratised mind of teachers” within the banking system.51Because knowledge is created in a Freirean pedagogy not merely transmitted the teacher cannot plan the sessions’ learning that will take place in total compartmental fashion nor can they take complete control of its direction. They are not powerless in the process of education yet neither are they all encompassing of the power. Instead, they are co-collaborators in the search for
49
P.L McLaren, P.L Lankshear & C. Collin. “ ‘Being’ and ‘Time’ in Freire’s philosophy,”p.176
50
P. Freire. Pedagogy of the oppressed.
P. Freire. Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy and civic courage.
51
knowledge with the learner or learners who each bring their past knowledge and experience to the situation, as does the teacher. As such, the teacher requires that the students enter into the process of education with them and does not provide the knowledge for them.
This does not mean that the teacher cannot provide tools, texts and instruments that assist in the inquiry along with their previous knowledge about the object of knowing. They do so however in the expectation that through dialogue new knowledge will be created and that the students will contribute to this creation. The educator with a democratic vision or posture cannot avoid insisting on the critical capacity, curiosity and autonomy of the learner52 in his or her teaching praxis. Education in this sense means that the teacher must be prepared for his or her own knowledge to change and transform, just as the students’ knowledge will change and transform. Freire writes that “whoever teaches, learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns, teaches in the act of learning.”53
Within dialectic relations the authoritarian nature of the traditional paternalistic system is removed from the equation of education. Freire writes that
…teachers who take ownership of their student’s desires and dreams are using their position of authority in an authoritarian manner. Neither in the affective nor epistemological sense is this dialogical. Such a teacher is in the class but not with the class. He or she might mechanically teach a lot of biology but nothing about making meaning and democracy.54
The object of knowing becomes the learner’s mediator of progress not the teacher’s validation. Even in situations of teaching primarily attributed to requiring repetition and transmission towards the learner such as literacy, dialogue is possible. In this instance, Freire states that “ the educators role is fundamentally to enter into dialogue with the illiterate about concrete situations, and simply to offer him the instruments with which he can teach himself to read or write.”55 Such education is still a process of communication between the teacher and the student rather than the teacher ‘gifting’ the knowledge to the student. The student must make meaning of the literacy in his or her own world, reflect on this
52 Op cit. p.33. 53 Ibid. p.31. 54
P. Leistyna. Presence of mind: Education and the politics of deception,p.6.
55
meaning and acting to transform reality. As Freire points out, “This teaching cannot be done from the top down, but only from the inside out, by the illiterate himself, with the collaboration of the educator.”56
This does not mean that the teacher is a passive or invalidated part of the educational process. The teacher is vitally important to the process as is the knowledge and experience, they bring with them. Since teachers are learners as well, they are not figures independent of the social process.57 It is not the teacher’s role to hide this knowledge or experience, but rather to enter into dialogue with the students contributing these things to the inquiry. As Freire points out, “ I cannot be a teacher without exposing who I am: the way I relate socially and politically to the world.”58 Freire does not degrade the importance of teachers throughout his work but argues for the teacher as an intellectual who, like the student, is engaged pre-eminently in producing knowledge.59
Freire’s philosophy regarding the role of the teacher has sometimes been mistaken for a call to devaluing their position. In recent times the term ‘facilitator’ has become a popular way of addressing the difficulties of authoritarian teaching stereotypes. Freire spurns the idea of the facilitator in a dialogue with Pepi leistyna. He elaborates:
There is an enormous difference between facilitating and teaching. When someone calls himself or herself a facilitator and not a teacher, deep inside what they are doing is renouncing the task of teaching, and therefore the task of dialogue…they are renouncing their duty of teaching, the task of placing the object of knowledge as a mediator between himself or herself and the students and then assuming the responsibilities as a dialogical educator – that is, an illuminator of the object, a revealor of the object.60
To teach is essentially to form. As such it is not a responsibility undertaken lightly. To devalue teaching is to reduce it to a simple technique of transmission, which denies the fundamental process of humanization and its capacity to form the human person. If we have serious regard for what it means to be human, the teaching of content cannot be separated from the moral formation of the learner.61
56
Ibid.
57
P. Freire. Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy and civic courage, p.12. 58.Ibid.,p.87..
59
Ibid,p.9
60
P. Leistyna. Presence of mind: Education and the politics of deception, p.7.
61
As such, the process of teaching cannot be entered into authentically without a concern for humans and humanization. A teacher cannot enter into dialogue without the desire to hear the voices of others or to include all voices in the creation of new knowledge. Freire stated that, “If I do not love the world - if I do not love life- if I do not love people – I cannot enter into dialogue.”62
Teaching is therefore concerned with formation and humanization. But it is not solely the formation and humanization of the students with which the process of education is concerned. The teacher must come to the recognition that in education that is for liberation. All participants are being formed and humanized in the process and, as such, they are also included. The person in charge of education is being formed or re-formed as he or she teaches, and the person who is being taught forms him or herself in the process.63 Since teachers also have historical locations and live in the context of social processes they are not independent of these as neither are their students.64 Such teachers are not static or rigid beings. They are instead human beings who are following their ontological vocation to become more ‘fully human’ also.
If teachers are to consider education as a process where their own humanization is not a secret but rather an integral part of the process of education then classrooms will be distinctly altered from the way we have known them. Freirean critical pedagogy requires that the teacher share their ontological perspective rather than being a neutral administrator of knowledge. Traditionally teachers have being encouraged to not own the knowledge that they are promoting to the students. In other words, they [teachers] create mechanisms that give the illusions that their position in the world is not informed by ideology. Only the other has ideology. Of course, this is not possible – we are all ideological beings.65
Ideological beings have emotions and perspectives and experiences. Critical pedagogy invites the teacher not to disguise these aspects of the self behind the bureaucracy of formal education practices but instead to own them as each participant in the educational process does. Teachers are allowed to ‘feel’ in a
62
P. McLaren. “A pedagogy of possibility: Reflecting upon Paulo Freire’s politics of education,”p.20.
63
Op cit.
64
Ibid
65
Freirean critical pedagogy. In fact, the pedagogy necessitates that teachers feel for other human beings in order to take up the challenge of transforming the world. Feeling does not exclude the realistic possibility of at times being angry or frustrated. As Freire reflects:
I feel this anger because I love. I do not need to hide this anger. But I also need to understand the anger of the students. They have this very right to be angry. Teachers working in coordination with the ideology of most formal institutions of schooling often forbid the students to expose their anger, frustration, and disappointment with the teacher and the institution itself.66
Teachers in this modern age cannot forget that they are teaching within the oppressive conditions of the capitalist regime and, as such, anger from the teacher and the student is natural at times if they are at all concerned with equality and humanization in the world. Anger is not necessarily a bad thing although the recognition of allowing feelings into the educational setting can come as a shock to some students. Students are used to being passive recipients to information and doing what the teacher instructs. If they are asked to expose who they are and what they feel about the world they are often initially perplexed. If they are then asked to elaborate on what things mean in the world they can become sceptical of the whole situation, so different is this situation to that of their previous experience with teachers. Freire points out that if a liberating teacher asks students to co-develop the class with him or her, the student often doubts that this is ‘real education’.67
What it means to be a teacher of a pedagogy of liberation and democracy is to be an individual who has the courage and critical capacity to join with others in order to seek new knowledge and a new reality. There are no strict guidelines or complete teaching plans given that there are no fatalistic assumptions about the knowledge that will occur around the object of knowing. There is a clear aim of humanization and democracy for all which can be reached through the learner firstly discovering their own historicity, then through collaboration in dialogue and praxis which leads to a critical consciousness. Yet despite this pedagogy is uncompleted, and powerful in its incompleteness. Freire writes that “ the progressive educator must always be moving out on his or her own, continually
66
Ibid,p.7.
67
reinventing me and reinventing what it means to be democratic in his or her own specific cultural and historical context.”68 To teach is to take up the challenge to want to be part of the struggle to fight for humanization for all and also the self and to care about the students being taught enough to want to include them in the process. As Freire puts it, “First of all, I understand the process of teaching as an act of love”.69