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Miscellaneous Rants

Walking on Words#

More from A Pedagogy for Liberation (Paulo Freire and Ira Shor) today.  Freire says: ...reading is not just to walk on the words, and it is not flying over the words either.  Reading is re-writing what we are reading.  Reading is to discover the connections between the text and the context of the text, and also how to connect the text/context with my context, the context of the reader... When did I learn, and how did I learn, to do this?  As a student, I remember flying over the words (I had precious little time to even walk on them) and rarely did I sense any connection between me and the words themselves.  I've always loved books, but in my younger days, my favorite books were fiction and my least favorite were text books from my classes.  It was the latter, the textbooks, that had me flying over the words.  But, even with the fiction, I walked on the words...I wasn't in love with words but in love with the stories.  Over time I've come to appreciate the words themselves...finding here and there phrases which take my breath away, independent of the story.  As for textbooks, or academic writings, there are some that compel me to fly and some that compel me to re-write what I'm reading...and what I want to discover is the nature of those readings that compel me to re-write, to make those connections between the text and the context of the text and then the connection of those to my context. This book is a good example of one that compels me to re-write (see, I'm doing it right here!).  What is it about this book that does that?  An obvious, and key, function of this book is not the book itself, but what drew me to the book.  The fact that a general dissatisfaction with the learning that was (or wasn't, as the case may be) going on in my classes when I first began teaching sent me off on a search to understand what was (or wasn't) happening within the confines of each classroom community.  My first discovery was simple, that is, I did not have classroom communities.  There was me, and there was them.  Focusing on community, and how to develop that within a classroom, made me want to understand what happens in communities.  From there, I discovered the notions of constructivism, learning within a social context, and a host of other invigorating and hopeful theories to provide a frame for my teaching practices.  The ideas discovered have recharged my batteries, but more importantly, they have made me hungry to know and it is this hunger that causes me to read more and in that reading, to re-write the text.  Later, Ira Shor talks about student resistance to changing from a traditional information delivery pedagogy (this seems weird...kind of like military intelligence) to a liberatory pedagogy.  He says: I have to rediscover the distance that this new group can travel [to the new pedagogy].  It may resist transition all the way, even if I am teaching the same course that produced noticeable transformation just the term before.  I can take very little for granted from class to class...This was my education into 'situated pedagogy' or situating the learning process in the actual conditions of each group.  On the other hand, because student consciousness so determined the outcome of any class, I could stop blaming myself for classes that didn't go anywhere.  If a class did not work out, it did not invalidate the process of dialogue.  If a course did not transcend the transfer-of-knowledge pedagogy, it did not make me feel like I was a failure.  I just concluded that the situation was not open to transformation.  The human beings in the process could not begin transformation at this time, in this place, through this means. Yes!  The notion of situated pedagogy is useful to me at this time.  I've noticed these differences in classes, and have written about the personalities of classes, but have not been able to understand these differences in a useful, informative way.  Realizing that each group is different, that each group comes to me with a myriad of experiences and experience, both collective and individual, makes it easier to understand this notion.  I'm experiencing this a little in one of my classes right now.  In previous offerings, I've only to offer a few comments at the beginning of class and discussion has ensued that has allowed the content I wanted addressed to be explored in more depth than I would have been able to explore by transferring information to the students.  In this situation, this has not happened, and while I was slow to respond to that, I recently intuited (because I was unaware of why this was happening in a way that would be useful to me) that I could keep attempting what wasn't working, or I could change and adapt.  To that end, I've taken more control of the class back...serving to transmit information.  What was bothering me most about this was the idea that I had given up on them...I don't think it bothered them, but it bothered me a great deal.  Shor's views help me realize that it wasn't a matter of giving up, it was simply a matter of realizing that now was not the time for transformation for this class of students.  I have hope that transformation will come to them at another time, in another place.  For now, I need to listen to what they've been "telling" me and attempt to meet their perceived needs.  I tried, they tried, and things just didn't click...yet! And, this whole rambling piece is really not about walking on words, or being ready for transformation...it's really about motivation.  What I learned about being able to read critically, to re-write a text according to my context, was that my motivation was the key factor behind my work...behind the change that allowed me to move from being a walker on words to a re-writer of words.  The same is true for my classes, when the situation provides a strong motivation, students will be able to make the transformation.  They will be driven by their own contexts...by the questions that arise out of their own clinical work that were unanswerable at the time.

Posted by Karen McComas on 4/3/02; 10:01:07 AM to the Miscellaneous Rants Department
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