Departments

• Digital Literacy
• Miscellaneous Rants
• Story Telling as Teacher Inquiry

Clinicians

• Client Abstract Form
• Tx Plan (sample)
• Therapy Script (form)

Miscellaneous Rants

Freedom and Authority#

I wanted to write yesterday morning, and couldn't access my site so I let the time slip by...waiting, waiting, and then all of a sudden the day was over.  At a meeting yesterday, I struggled to verbalize how using social action principles in a writing project summer institute might look.  On one level, I know that what I've been reading is connected to this, but find that my own understanding of the social action principles and transformative education are still forming...and that was apparent in my awkward attempt to explain.  I have a vague sense of my own fears hindering my full understanding...my own fears of giving up control...of being the authority but not the authoritarian...of being directive of the process only and not directive of the students.  Freire says: Freedom needs authority to become free...authority...has its foundation in the freedom of others, and if the authority denies this fredom and cuts off this relationship, this founding relationship, with freedom, I think that it is no longer authority but has become authoritarianism. This is a very, very fine line to walk...and embedded in this process, that is, the process of maintaining authority without becoming an authoritarian, is truth.  That is, truth from me to my students about what I am trying to do in the classroom...the truth of why we do what we do, why it is important (at least to me) that we do what we do...without truth, I'm only being manipulative which Freire describes as "cajoling students with walks through flowery roads."  Pretty damning statement, and yes, I've been guilty of doing just that.  But I digress instead of pressing on to attempt to coalesce the notions of social action and transforming education.  At the foundation of both of these notions is a belief in personal empowerment and personal responsibility.  In a way, social action is more about process and transforming education is about the outcome of social action.  That is to say that by using the principles of social action, education can be transforming.  Shrouding this whole idea is the confines of the educational institution--context, grading, curricula--and this then presents the complications of providing a transformative education.  The difficulties we face with regard to the Summer Institute are no different from those I face in my own classroom.  The Summer Institute has restrictions imposed by both the institution granting the academic credit and the NWP with their own set of requirements.  What we learn from one (the classroom or Summer Institute) we can use with the other and vice versa.

Posted by Karen McComas on 4/7/02; 9:54:06 AM to the Miscellaneous Rants Department
Discuss |