Op-Ed: Epistemology, progressive education, and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the oppressed in the United States

Progressive education has been the dominant trend in the United States since the turn of the 19th century with John Dewey being accredited as the one leading the way.

In Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education, Dewey discusses the importance and social role of education in modern society from a philosophical pragmatist and progressive pedagogical perspective.

Essentially, he describes education as processes of growth and action in a society where individuals interact and learn through group dynamics.

Dewey argues that an individual can only learn certain aspects of living in a society through group interaction, thus creating a social responsibility and necessity for older or established members to educate younger and new members.

In this case, education involves providing young and new members with the understanding of what it means to be an active participant within a group, while also learning about and honing their own interests and talents.

Another individual that is frequently cited in education in the United States is Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist.

Piaget focused on the genetic aspect of cognitive development in terms of epistemology, which addresses the theory and study of knowledge as well as the rationality of belief.

Piaget is accredited with developing a theory of constructivist learning, which proposes that there are numerous factors that go into learning.

He theorized that learning is not simply the act of receiving knowledge. Instead, learning also involves the learners’ participation in the making of meaning with the knowledge.

From a more modern educational point of view, constructivism is commonly interpreted as a learner individually constructing their own meaning from what they learn.

Continuing in the tradition of Dewey, Piaget, and constructivist theorists and practitioners, Jerome Bruner presented the concept of a spiral curriculum in his 1960 text, The process of education.

Bruner’s premise is that no matter the age of the learner, or the complexity of the content or subject, they can learn it if it is designed and delivered in the right way.

Criticism of constructivist learning approaches includes the validity of an individual learning a concept at a certain age if they do not have the mental capacity and memory required to learn it.

Other criticisms include age-related requirements necessary for development, the lack of empirical evidence that constructivist approaches work, which incorrectly compares active learning and teaching, some constructivist approaches lacking a proper structure for learning, and the difficulty of implementing inquiry and problem-based learning environments.

While Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark’s 2006 article drew criticism, in which they grouped Discovery, Inquiry, Problem, and Experiential-Based learning theories under the umbrella of constructivism, they defended it, claiming that these learning theories embody the “learning by doing” technique, which is a key element of constructivism.

Essentially, Kirschner et al.’s argument is that learning by doing is useful for individuals that already have previous knowledge when learning new concepts. However, they did not outright reject constructivist pedagogies.

For example, earlier research by Sweller and Cooper (1985) and then later further explored by Hilbert and Renkl (2007) have reviewed the effectiveness of the “worked-example effect,” which is learning through the studying of a concept accompanied by a technique called “faded guidance.”

Teachers practicing faded guidance create a sort of expert/novice dynamic with their students.

Perhaps this kind of strategy can be best explained in the context of writing instruction in higher education since some theories in writing instruction have promoted an expert/novice approach.

In terms of writing instruction in U.S. colleges and universities in the 1960s and 70s, expressivism was the trend and signaled a departure from teaching grammar and punctuation.

Moderate approaches of expressivism in writing instruction focused on teaching writing as an art form.

Instead of placing emphasis on the final product, writing teachers focused on the process of writing, experimentation, and minimizing the importance of audience.

The more radical approaches to expressivism concentrated on group and community rather than individual experiences.

Students were encouraged to explore their creativity and express themselves in their writing based on what was happening around them at a given time or in a given location.

Cognitivism, which also stressed process over product in the writing classroom, focused on understanding the mental processes behind language and writing in individual writers during the 1970s and 80s.

The “social turn” in composition studies in colleges and universities in the 1980s promoted the idea that language and the mind are one and that writing is a social act.

Social constructivism privileges the notion of discourse communities within the public and academic spheres.

James Berlin, a prominent voice in composition theory since the 1980s, claimed ideology inherently affects learners’ discourse and writing in significant ways.

Berlin suggests a social-epistemic rhetoric in the writing classroom that views the construction of knowledge as being one of ideological struggle.

Within the context of education and writing instruction, Lisa Delpit explored the role culture plays in non-white students learning how to communicate using standard academic discourse.

When Freire published Pedagogy of the oppressed in 1968, which was in written in Portuguese and then was translated into English in 1970, educational reform in the United States was underway.

Constructivist approaches to learning have been flourishing in primary, secondary, and higher education in the U.S. since the mid-20th century.

With the creation and spread of community colleges, and, in some respects, the G.I. Bill at the end of World War II in the United States, the student demographic on many campuses begin to change.

This, along with advancements in technology, a changing workforce, and the development and adoption of new philosophical theories that addressed cultural, social, ethnic, and gender qualities started to gain ground in academic and entertainment institutions under the umbrella of postmodernism.

So, how does Freire fit into all of this?

Freire criticized the “oppressive” nature of education in his native country of Brazil as well as in the United States, describing it as a “banking model of education.”

In this context, teachers are expected to treat students as empty vessels to be filled with content.

The banking model of education served the oppressive class in Freire’s view, which allowed them to maintain their status quo and authority over the people through such as a system.

Freire’s Marxist analysis of politics and education largely stems from his upbringing and experiences in Brazil.

The critical pedagogy Freire describes in his text does hinge on an oppressor/oppressed premise, which is borrowed from Marxist philosophy.

In his introduction to the 30th anniversary edition of Pedagogy of the oppressed, Donaldo Macedo, Freire’s frequent collaborator, addressed a colleague’s issue of their using “Marxist jargon” in their academic writing.

Macedo defends using this kind of language because it accurately describes the situation in which the oppressed find themselves.

He also addresses how academics claim that Freire’s use of language in the text is unclear.

To this claim, Macedo argues that academics such as this are privileging the “dominant standard discourse.”

He argues that it is not simply a linguistic issue that academics have with Freire’s discourse, but rather an ideological one.

Macedo also addresses academic scholars Gregory Jay and Gerald Graff and their criticism of Pedagogy of the oppressed.

Jay and Graff’s criticism of Freire’s work is the method he suggests for oppressed people to gain a “critical perception of the world” and their place within it assumes that he “already knows the identity of the oppressed.”

Macedo’s response to Jay and Graff’s criticism is that it “presupposes that education should be nondirective and neutral,” which Freire opposed.

He states that educators “need to intervene not only pedagogically, but also ethically” and this kind of activity requires them to be politically and socially aware of issues outside of the dominant culture, which academics such as Graff might find undesirable addressing in the classroom.

In this sense, Freire’s approach to education would seem radical and only appeal to those that agree with his premises.

Freire’s approach to social class, politics, and education in his text have been studied and embraced by educators within higher education in the United States, becoming part of the canon in many critical literacy and education programs.

In the past, Freire’s text has been singled out by individuals wanting to ban ethnic studies programs in Arizona, claiming texts such as Freire’s cause racial divisions in the United States.

Regardless of such criticism, Pedagogy of the oppressed is still hailed by many as being a crucial contribution to reshaping education at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries.

I first read Freire’s text in 2005 in my graduate program in English at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

The way Freire presented his ideas and the language he used appealed to me and the ideas I had about teaching.

The discussions we had about Freire’s educational and pedagogical theories in my graduate classes helped me to consider all of the angles when interpreting them in the context of our own writing classes.

We did not address his use of Marxist ideology or the references to Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong), scholars from the Frankfurt School, or Che Guevara, even though we read and addressed other postmodern scholars that applied a Marxist lens in their analysis of various literary texts.

Since cultural revolution plays a key role in Freire’s explanation in implementing a critical pedagogy, some of the writing teachers were leery about it since they were unsure how it would translate into helping the students with their writing.

Also, since we were not living in an overtly oppressive country such as Freire’s Brazil at that time, I along with some of the other writing teachers used some of the concepts Freire addressed in his text such as theming our classes around social, cultural and political issues, allowing students to choose the topics they wished to research, and write on and incorporating discussions in the classroom that emphasized dialogue and reflection.

Perhaps in a way we were only scratching the surface of critical consciousness in our writing classes, though, something he and Macedo claimed was a watering down of the significance of such activities.

If I were to teach an English graduate class that incorporated Freire’s text, I would definitely include a discussion on his use of Marxist ideology and the Frankfurt School as well as discussions relating to socialism and communism within the contexts in which Freire wrote the text and our current one.

References

Alexander, T. (1987). John Dewey’s theory of art, experience, and nature. SUNY Press.

Atkinson, R. K., Derry, S. J., Renkl, A., and Wortham, D. W. (2000). “Learning from examples: Instructional principles from the worked examples research.” Review of Educational Research. 70(2), pp. 181–214. 

Bartholomae, D. (1995). “Writing with teachers: A conversation with Peter Elbow.” College Composition and Communication. 46(1), pp. 62–71. 

Berlin, J. A. and R. P. Inkster. (1980). “Current-traditional rhetoric: Paradigm and practice.” Freshman English News. 8(3), pp. 1–14.

Berlin, J.A. (1984). Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP.

Berlin, J.A. (1987). Rhetoric and reality: Writing instruction in American colleges. 1900-1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP.

Berlin, J. A. (1988). “Rhetoric and ideology in the writing class.” College English. 50, pp. 477–93. 

Berlin, J.A. (1996). Rhetorics, poetics, and cultures: Refiguring college English studies. Urbana, Illinois: NCTE.

Bitzer, L. F. (1968). “The rhetorical situation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric. vol. 1, pp. 1–14.

Bizzell, P. (1982). “Cognition, convention, and certainty: What we need to know about writing.” PRE/TEXT. 3(3), pp. 213–43.

Bizzell, P. (1994). “‘Contact zones’ and English studies.” College English. 56(2), pp. 163–69. 

Brown, J.S., Collins, A., and Duguid, P. (1989). “Situated cognition and the culture of learning.” Educational Researcher. 18(1), pp. 32–42. 

Bruffee, K.A. (1984). “Collaborative learning and the ‘conversation of mankind.’” College English. 46(7), pp. 635–52.

Bruner, J.S. (1960). The process of education. Cambridge, MA: The Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College.

Bruner, J.S. (1961). “The act of discovery.” Harvard Educational Review. 31(1), pp. 21–32.

Crowley, S. (1998). “The bourgeois subject and the demise of rhetorical education.”In Composition in the University (pp. 30-45). Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P.

Delpit, L.D. (1995). Other’s people children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. The New Press: New York, London.

Delpit, L.D. (1998). “The silenced dialogue: Power and pedagogy in educating other people’s children.” Harvard Educational Review. 58(3), pp. 280–98. 

Demetriou, A., Shayer, M., and Efklides, A. (1992). Neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development: Implications and applications to education. London: Routledge.

Demetriou, A. (1998). “Cognitive development.” In A. Demetriou, W. Doise, K. F. M. van Lieshout (Eds.), Life-span developmental psychology (pp. 179–269). London: Wiley.

Dewey, J. (1910). How we think. Lexington, MA: D.C.  Heath & Co. Publishers. 

Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. New York: Macmillan. 

Elbow, P. (1987). “Closing my eyes as I speak: An argument for ignoring audience.” College English. 49(1), pp. 50–69.

Flower, L., and J. R. Hayes. (1981). “A cognitive process theory of writing.” College Composition and Communication. 32(4), pp. 365–87.

Freire, P. (1968, 1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum Books.

Freire, P. (1970). “The adult literacy process as cultural action for freedom and education and conscientizaçāo.” Harvard Educational Review. 40(1), pp. 205–12.

Hairston, M. (1982). “The winds of change: Thomas Kuhn and the revolution in the teaching of writing.” College Composition and Communication. 33(1), pp. 76–88.

Harris, J. (1989). “The idea of community in the study of writing.” College Composition and Communication. 40(1), pp. 11–22.

Hilbert, T. S. and Renkl, A. (2007). “Learning how to learn by concept mapping: A worked-example effect.” Paper presentation at the 12th Biennial Conference EARLI 2007 in Budapest, Hungary.

Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., and Clark, R. E. (2006). “Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: an analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching.” Educational Psychologist. 41(2), pp. 75–86. 

LeFevre, K. B. (1986). Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 

Lunsford, A. (1979). “Cognitive development and the basic writer.” College English. 41(1), pp. 38–46. 

Mayer (2004). “Should there be a three-strikes rule against pure discovery learning?” American Psychologist. 59(1), pp. 14–19. 

Murray, D. (Fall 1972). “Teach writing as a process not product.” The Leaflet. pp. 11–14.

Nick, D. (May13, 2010). Addressing Arizona’s ethnic studies ban on Hardball with Chris Matthews.

Nilson, L. B. (2010). Teaching at its best: A research-based resource for college instructors. San Francisco: John Wiley and Sons. 

Piaget, J. (1950). The psychology of intelligence. New York: Routledge.

Piaget, J. (1971). Psychology and epistemology: Towards a theory of knowledge. New York: Grossman.

Prawat, Richard S. and Floden, Robert E. (1994). “Philosophical perspectives on constructivist views of learning.” Educational Psychologist. 29(1), pp. 37–48. 

Sweller, J. (1999). “Instructional design in technical areas.” Australian Education Review. Camberwell: ACER Press. 

Sweller, J (2003). “Evolution of human cognitive architecture.” In Ross, B. Psychology of Learning and Motivation. San Diego: Academic Press. 

Sweller, J. (1988). “Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning.” Cognitive Science. 12(2), pp. 257–285. 

Slezak, Peter (2010). “Radical constructivism: Epistemology, education and dynamite.” Constructivist Foundations. 6(1). 

Renkl, A.; Atkinson, R. K.; Maier, U. H.; Staley, R. (2002). “From example study to problem solving: Smooth transitions help learning.” Journal of Experimental Education. 70(4), pp. 293–315. 

Sweller, J. and Cooper, G. A. (1985). “The use of worked examples as a substitute for problem solving in learning algebra.” Cognition and Instruction. 2(1), pp. 59–89. 

Ryan, A. (1995). John Dewey and the high tide of American liberalism. W.W. Norton & Company. New York, London.

Rud, A. G., Garrison, J., and Stone, L. (eds.) (2009). John Dewey at 150: Reflections for a new century. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press.

Tobias, S. and Duffy, T. M. (2009). Constructivist instruction: Success or failure? New York: Taylor & Francis.