Pixel International Conferences

Co-author Michael Kleine and I have experimented with the Brazilian author Paulo Freire's pedagogy in our team-taught classes.  Enacting Freire's ideal of a liberatory epistemology is extremely difficult because institutional constraints increase the psychological and emotional distance between our students and ourselves.  Michael and I devised ways to create a classroom based on Freire's dialogic approach to education.  Using Martin Buber's terminology, we work to establish our students as "Thous" rather than as "Its. Together with our students we explore the texts we read, and generate open and liberatory discussions based on the notion of co-constructing our classroom, and co-constructing what knowledge means to us.  Establishing this "open space" of inquiry, a climate of acceptance,  involves putting into practice Freire's strategies that produce authentic dialogue.  As teachers we are active participants in the discussions as well as the assignments, writing journals and assignments with the students and submitting our work for student examination. The atmosphere in the classroom is decidedly relational and inter-subjective. Mutual respect is a cardinal value.  We also enact behaviors associated with Julien Mirivel's Positive Communication model such as greeting by first name thus bridging the gulf of separateness; we ask questions to discover the known and unknown with our students; we encourage students and compliment ideas; we disclose in our discussions; we listen deeply to our students and work to establish authentic dialogue.  Essentially we manage the tension between traditional, banking classrooms, in Freirean terms, and a classroom that exhibits and even compels the openness of the liberatory classroom.  Our writing (and our teaching) is informed by reviewing the work of Freire, mentioned earlier, but also that of Dewey, Buber, Vygotsky, Palmer and Mirivel as discussed in our chapter. 

Keywords: Freire, Buber, Positive Education, Authentic Dialogue;

References:

[1] Buber, M. (1970).   and thou Walter Kaufmann, Trans). New York, NY:  Simon and Schuster (Original work published 1923).
[2] Cortinas H.  (20). Is a liberatory pedagogy possible? Retrieved from http://www.leftvoice.org/Is-a-Liberatory-Pedagogy-Possibl7
[3] Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. New York:  Macmillian.
[4] Dewey, J. (1997). Experience and education. New York:Touchstone.
[5] Dewey, J. (1910). How we think. Boston, D.C. Heath & Co.
[6] Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. (Myra Berman Ramos, Trans.) New York:  Continuum.  (Original work published 1968).
[7] Mirivel, J. (2014). The art of positive communication.  New York:  Peter Lang.
[8] Parker, P. (1998). The courage to teach. San Francisco, CA:  Jossey-Bass, Inc.
[9] Socha, T.J., & Pitts, M.J. (Eds.), (2012a). The Positive Side of Interpersonal Communication. New York:  Peter Lang.
[10] Thompson & Kleine. (2014). Innovative higher education. 40. 173-185.
[11] Vygotsky, L. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[12] Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Oxford, England:  Harvard University Press.