Excerpts from Mentoring the Mentor
Donaldo Macedo|Peter
C. Murrell, Jr.|Gloria
Ladson-Billings|James
W. Fraser|William
T. Stokes| Asgedet
Stefanos|Tim
Sieber|Ron
Scapp|Freire's
Response
Paulo Freire
A Response
In A Response, Freire replies to the scholars
who took part in the dialogue by responding to the major themes
that emerged:
The
Key to Critical Dialogue: Listening and Talking
"The one who is a student
of listening implies a certain treatment of silence and the intermediary
moments of silence. Those who speak democratically need to silence
themselves so that the voice of those who must be listened to
is allowed to emerge"(Freire,
1997, p. 306).
"The challenge is to never paternalistically
enter into the world of the oppressed so as to save it from itself.
The challenge is also to never want to romanticize the world of
the oppressed so that, as a process of staying there, one keeps
the oppressed chained to the conditions that have been romanticized
so that the educator keeps his or her position of being needed
by the oppressed, 'serving the oppressed,' or viewing him or herself
as a romantic hero" (p. 307).
Top
What
I Can and Cannot Offer to Educators in Other Contexts
"..not only with respect
to my work, but with respect to other thinkers, with respect to
Dewey, for example, or Montessori, or Frenet, ..what too many
educators expect from these thinkers is that we will provide techniques
to save the world"
(p. 307).
Respect for cultural identity takes place "in
a social and historical context and not in pure air. These things
take place in history, and I, Paulo Freire, am not the owner of
history" (p. 308).
"..the progressive educator must always
be moving out on his or her own, continually reinventing me and
reinventing what it means to be democratic in his or her own specific
cultural and historical context" (p. 308).
Top
Responding
to Race, Class, and Gender in the United States
"I couldn't possibly address
the details of race and gender in the U.S. context if I myself
did not know the context"
(p. 308).
"What I do provide is a general framework
that calls for a deep respect for the Other along the lines of
race and gender" (p. 309).
Top
Allowing
Me Also to Continue Growing and Changing in My Contexts
"It seems to me that many
educators who claim to be Freirian are only referring to Pedagogy
of the Oppressed, which was published almost thirty years
ago, as if that is the first and the last work that I wrote. My
thinking has been evolving and I have been constantly learning
from others throughout the world, particularly with respect to
questions of race and gender in other societies"(p.
310).
"The minute you freeze history,
or ideas, you also eclipse the possibility of creativity and undermine
the possibility of the development of a political project"
(p. 311).
Top
Layered
Multiple Identities: People as Oppressor and Oppressed
"The consciousness of incompleteness
in human beings leads us to involve ourselves in a permanent process
of search. It is precisely this constant search that gives rise
to hope" (p. 312).
Top
The
Ethical Requirements for Teachers
"..we democratic educators
must struggle so that it becomes clearer and clearer that education
represents formation, and not merely training" (p.313).
"The ethical requirements
are becoming more and more critical in a world that is becoming
less and less ethical" (p. 313).
"..because in our preparation
as teachers we were denied access to dialogue about the nature
of ethics, we have been handicapped in our ability to confront
and clearly address the specificity of a context that in its nature
is ethical, because we do not know the ethics"
(p. 313).
Top
The
Absence to Attention of Ethics in Preparation of Teachers
"It is not a coincidence
that the curriculum of most professional programs--in our case,
teacher preparation--often does not include the opportunity for
future professionals to engage in a serious and profound discussion
about what it means to be ethical in a world that is becoming
more profoundly unethical to the extent that human beings are
becoming more and more dehumanized by the priorities of the market"
(p. 313).
Top
The
Need to Maintain Ethical Clarity
"...the teacher who finds
herself or himself entrapped by the requirements of a mechanistic
curriculum which calls for dispensing more and more content without
grounding, needs to revert to her or his conviction that will
determine an ethical posture vis-à-vis the curriculum so
as to negotiate the context" (p. 315).
Top
Ethics
and the Fear of Ethics
"We must ask why so few
teacher preparation programs include serious attention to the
issue of ethics and why a fundamental focus on ethics is such
a small part of today's educational dialogue while methods and
statistics play such a large role"
(p. 314).
Top
The
Barriers to Ethical Dialogue in Totalitarian and "Democratic"
Systems
"This distortion, this distance
or incoherence between the values espoused and the practice of
education also happens in the United States due to notions of
the market and willingness to use any level of oppression to maintain,
and indeed never question, the status quo" (p.
317).
"For example, how many times
do teachers in the United States preach and teach about democracy,
solidarity, justice, and equality for all, on the one hand while,
on the other hand, punish any students who would refuse to say
the pledge of allegiance, thus violating the principle of the
pledge that he or she is preaching or teaching about?"(p.
318).
Top
How
to Survive and Prevail as a Democratic Teacher/How to Build a
Movement
"I think that one of the
great difficulties that a teacher with a democratic perspective
may have is that he or she may find him or herself alone. It is
important to remember that it is not from what is done in the
classroom alone that he or she will be able to support the students
in reconstructing their position in the world" (p.
321).
"...because of the individualist
nature of many teachers, particularly in North America, that after
failing in their individualistic experiment with critical and
radical democracy, they claim that some of my proposals are unworkable
in the North American context" (p.
322).
"Orality is dialogical by
its very nature to the extent that you cannot do it individualistically.
Thus the challenge for schools is to not kills those values of
solidarity that lead to democratic space through a process that
freezes the required dialogical nature of orality through the
individualistic apprehension of reading and writing" (p.
323).
Top
What
is the Role of a Mentor in Supporting the Development of a Democratic
Teacher?
"..for the teacher to become
a mentor it is important that he or she challenges the student's
creative freedom and that he or she stimulate the construction
of the student's autonomy" (p.
324).
"The fundamental task of
the mentor is a liberatory task. It is not to encourage the mentor's
goals and aspirations and dreams to be reproduced in the mentees,
the students, but to give rise to the possibility that the students
become the owners of their own history" (p.
324).
Top
Reinventing
Paulo Freire in North America--or Any Other--Context
"The notion of reinventing
Paulo Freire can only imply reinvention in connection with the
substantivity of my ideas. That is because if you do not understand
the substantivity of my ideas, it is impossible to speak of reinvention"(p.
325).
Top
The
Search for an Icon Comes Out of a Fear of Democracy
"The idea, then, is not
to interact with or engage me and my ideas in bineristic terms--either
Paulo Freire the guru or icon or a total rejection of Paulo Freire
as proposing ideas that are unworkable in the North American context.
The challenge is to engage my theoretical proposals dialogically,
and it is through this dialogue that I think we can create possibilities,
including the possibility that I can be reinvented in a North
American context" (p.
328).
Top
Donaldo Macedo|Peter
C. Murrell, Jr.|Gloria
Ladson-Billings|James
W. Fraser|William
T. Stokes| Asgedet
Stefanos|Tim
Sieber|Ron
Scapp|Freire's
Response
