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Miscellaneous Rants

Old Favorites#

Dug out an old favorite last night...primarily because Charles and I had a brief discussion yesterday about Freire and I remembered this book.  A Pedagogy for Liberation is based on conversations between Ira Shor and Paulo Freire and still incites my passions, as it did the first time I read it.  One section talks about a "critical theory of knowing" and the "gnosiological cycle" or the "distinct moments in the way we learn."  Freire describes two distinct phases in the gnosiological cycle:  the phase where we produce new knowledge and the phase where the produced knowledge is understood.  Freire discusses the idea of knowledge transfer (when the teacher simply passes along to students the knowledge they wish the students to have) and how that breaks the gnosiological cycle...apprehending the knowledge is only part of the cycle...without the other part, the creation or production of new knowledge, we can never really apprehend something.  With the transfer of knowledge, the teacher takes away from students the necessary opportunities to produce new knowledge for themselves, takes away the need to be critically reflective, curious, inquisitive, uneasy, and confused.  Without these qualities, that is without curiosity, without a critical reflectiveness, without the uneasiness, students can never fully come to know the thing they are trying to know.  Without the completion of both phases of the gnosiological cycle, Freire suggests, schools are nothing more than institutions obligated to pass along the "official" ideas-certainly not places where critical thinkers are not just encouraged, but required.  This then, is what he means by "liberatory education."  When students are subjected to the official "party" line (and every discipline has an official party line as does every institution), they are disempowered, subjects of a greater or higher authority, destined to believe what the authorities believe-a prisoner.  When students participate in the full gnosiological cycle, that is when they are required to produce their own knowledge and then perceive and come to understand this knowledge, they are then liberated, free, no longer prisoners of the prevailing ideology.  Is it possible to do this?  Yes, I think it is...and I don't mean to imply that is it easy, for I think that is not true....but it is possible....one student at a time perhaps.

Posted by Karen McComas on 4/2/02; 9:03:27 AM to the Miscellaneous Rants Department
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