Freire and Macedo; Luke and Freebody

Freire and Macedo

- "language and reality are dynamically interconnected": Reading is not just words on a page; it is connected to the ways in which you interact with and what you know about the world around you.

- "reading" environments -- objects and signs: learning how to interact with and understand your environment
- dispelling fears by learning to read one's environment

- world vs. "word-world": disconnect between what you experience and the texts that you read.

- understanding in context vs. rote memorization: making texts, words meaningful
- "Mechanically memorizing the description of an object does not constitute knowing the object"

- quality of reading vs. quantity: critical understanding and exploring of the text is more important than reading but not analyzing a large number of texts; longer texts do not necessarily contain more meaning and are not necessarily "better" than shorter ones.

- teachers don't fill students' "empty heads" with knowledge: learning as a creative, collaborative process

- students should learn what is important to their experience, not the teacher's experience

- reading should involve rewriting of what is read (Gramsci and counterhegemony): the purpose of literacy is to develop a critical consciousness and enact social change

I've explained before in my own blog and on comments on the other blogs my strong support for Freire's ideas about popular education. I feel it's important to stress, as Freire does in this piece, that his project is educating adults, specifically those are marginalized/disadvantaged. While his approach, which stresses political involvement and social change, might seem simplistic or idealistic to some, I have seen through work with various organizations that it is actually quite practical and effective. While it might take years to teach someone how to read and analyze classics of modern social theory (most students barely touch these topics until undergraduate study), the basic ideas of these texts can be summarized and explained to someone quite briefly. Especially for adults who work long hours and have little time for or access to books and internet resources, the most effective method of teaching critical literacy is providing summaries of key social theory ideas and then having people engage in dialogue about how these ideas related to their own experiences. As Freire suggests, understanding is more effective than memorizing; for example, you don't need to memorize the term "means of production" to understand Marx's idea that laborers don't own their workplaces or work equipment. Having only had experience with adults, I'm not sure how these techniques could be most effectively applied to working with younger people, but Freire's idea of popular education for social change is a highly effective (and, importantly, non-condescending) way of encouraging critical thinking and organizing people for social justice. Rather than having adults feel like they are being lectured, popular education empowers people to take foundational pieces of knowledge and apply it to their own battles for betterment of wages, working and housing conditions, and a host of other social justice issues.

Luke and Freebody

- Models of reading based on models of the social order and how literate individuals should fit in to that order
- individualistic; "capabilities defined as individual possessions": in our Western capitalist societies, literacy has been perceived as a personal belonging and a commodity useful for improving one's individual conditions (better education, better employment, more opportunity for promotion, etc.). Which individuals have access to literacy education is defined by the power dynamics of the specific society (e.g. colonial education allowed access mostly to men for the purpose of attaining desirable employment). The psychological approach to literacy also emphasizes individual experiences of texts and is thus isolating; more progressivist approaches have recently developed, emphasizing the readers' interpretation of the text in relation to other texts and social context.

Luke and Freebody have several propositions for how literacy education can be better theorized:

1. Reading and writing are social activities.
2. All texts are motivated - there is no neutral position from which a text can be read or written.
3. We learn about appropriate reading and writing positions within the relationships that take responsibility for our learning (we learn which practices are valued by virtue of our participation in particular institutions, which encourage/reward particular forms of literacy practice).
   
4. Institutionally purpose-built repertoires of "selves" are represented to us explicitly or otherwise in all of the texts we read and write (we learn which ways of being are valued).
   

- Reading and the teaching of reading are "connected to and transformed by political and economic outcomes": emphasis on individual experience of a text cannot account for the ways in which access to literacy is limited, and which kinds of literacy practices are encouraged.

- Cultural constraints on reading/teaching literacy -- power dynamics, what kinds of reading is valued: taking into account social norms and power dynamics when attempting literacy projects across various cultural contexts.

- Invisibility of ideological positions in pedagogical texts (e.g., history books): primary education does not generally emphasize examining the ideological position of texts, thus valuing specific viewpoints and approaches to various subjects.

- Psychological vs. sociological perspectives on reading: individuation vs. sociocultural interaction, power structures, knowledge

- The Elements of Reading as a Social Practice: ideas on how to implement a sociological approach to literacy
- Coding, meaning, pragmatic, and critical processes: not levels or a progression of understanding, but all integral parts of reading a text. One element should not be emphasized at the expense of others.

- Foregrounding the ideological positions of texts, comparing and contrasting texts

I wrote my blog comment about Freire's ideas on adult popular education before reading Luke and Freebody; they provide a helpful praxis for implementing a popular education-style method of teaching literacy in the context of formal education for younger students. They are less concerned with politics and social change than Freire, but I suppose that makes sense in that it is difficult for young students to apply social theories to their own lives, as they may not yet understand their own social position in the same way that adults do. However, students can certainly learn to examine critically the ideological assumptions of any text, as is demonstrated in the example from the history texts regarding Third World peoples and colonialism. I firmly believe that our formal education system needs to spend less time on memorizing dates and facts and more time on understanding social, historical and ideological trends. Knowing the exact date that Columbus landed in the Americas is an irrelevant factoid if divorced from the historical context of European colonialism. Unfortunately, the recent predominance of standardized tests has left little time for instructors to encourage critical literacy; it seems as though we've taken a step back toward the factory system of memorization and recall rather than the creative thinking and critical understanding our school systems have claimed to promote. Until we figure out a method of evaluating learning progress that is different from the current standardized test system, reading as a social practice and the development of critical literacy will surely take a backseat to text-as-artefact memorization.