Presentation given by Dr Tim Herrick (CILASS Fellow and Combined Studies Programme Co-ordinator, The Institute for Lifelong Learning, School of Education, University of Sheffield) at the CILASS Third Mondays research seminar series in April 2009.

1. Tim Herrick
t.herrick@shef.ac.uk

2. Introduction
1.
Freire’s thought
2.
Freire and inquiry
3.
What can Freire
4.
offer us today?
Photo by Marcin Wichary
2

3. This is a conversation,
not a lecture
I’m bringing
experience, not
expertise
You’re bringing
experience, ideas, and
Photo by mwboeckmann
power
3

4. One question to keep in mind:
Photo by Worry Worts
When you learn and teach,
what power do you exercise,
Worts
and for what ends?
One question to respond to
immediately:
Here and now, in this room,
what power do you have?
4

5. Paulo Freire: 1921-1997
Published in Portuguese, 1968;
in Spanish and English, 1970
5

6. “This pedagogy makes oppression and
its causes objects of reflection by the
oppressed, and from that reflection will
come their necessary engagement in the
struggle for their liberation. And in the
struggle this pedagogy will be made
and remade.”
6

7. Photo by Ken Wilcox.
“Instead of communicating,
the teacher issues
communiqués and makes
deposits which the
students patiently receive,
memorize, and repeat.”
“Knowledge emerges only through invention and
re-invention, through the restless, impatient,
continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in
the world, with the world, and with each other”
7

8. “Authentic education is not carried on by ‘A’ for
‘B’ or by ‘A’ about ‘B’, but rather by ‘A’ with ‘B’,
mediated by the world – a world which
impresses and challenges both parties, giving
rise to views or opinions about it. These views,
impregnated with anxieties, doubts, hopes, or
hopelessness, imply significant themes on the
basis of which the program content of education
can be built.”
8

9. “Every educational practice implies a
concept of man and the world”
“Man”: subject and object of history
“Conscientization”: the process of
developing self-awareness
9

10. “In the area of socioeconomic
structures, a critical
perception of the fabric, while
indispensable, is not sufficient
to change the data of the
problem, any more than it is
enough for the worker to have
in mind the idea of the object
to be produced: that object Photo by Balakov
has to be made.”
10

11. An ethical and political commitment to
change
“Humanization [is the] ontological vocation
of human being”
Photo by Dunechaser
11

12. Influence of liberation theology
“Human beings are
because they are in
a situation. And they
will be more the
more they not only
critically reflect
upon their existence
but critically act
upon it.”
Photo unknown, caption by pauly464
12

13. Photo by Worry Worts
Is everything
1.
clear this far?
How does it
2.
relate to what you
achieve in your
teaching or
learning, or what
you aspire to
achieve?
13

14. New structures for
learning and
teaching
The Reinvention
Centre for
Undergraduate
Research
Radically democratising “the process of
knowledge production at the level of society”
14

15. “That the qualities of creativity,
innovation and planning have been
captured by the business-led aspects of
the teaching agenda denies the extent to
which these qualities are capable of
much wider application.”
15

16. What about the giant
“The educational
lizard people?
practice of a
progressive option
will never be anything
but an adventure in
unveiling. It will
always be an
experiment in
bringing out the truth”
16

17. “I have never said, as it is sometimes
suggested or said that I have said, that we
ought to flutter spellbound around the
knowledge of the educands like moths around
a lamp bulb. Starting with the “knowledge of
experience had” in order to get beyond it is
not staying in that knowledge.”
What experiences have our students had?
17

18. “helping the masses articulate
what they’ve known all along”
Could they?
Should they?
What does this mean for
the academy?
18

19. “This kind of
educational practice
is a kind of historico-
cultural, political
psychoanalysis”
Erich Fromm (1900-1980) to
Paulo Freire, California, 1968
How much individual change is required for
social revolution?
19

20. Photo by Worry Worts
Everyone still
1.
with us?
What might
2.
your responses
be to any of the
questions
raised?
20

21. To understand his work
Another photo by Dunechaser
is to develop it – but
how far can we go?
New forms of struggle
Dunechaser
against oppression
Transformative
practice
A collectivist alternative to individualising,
marketising tendencies of current higher
education policy
21

22. “The democratization of the school is not a sheer
epiphenomenon, the mechanical result of the
transformation of society across the board, but is itself a
factor for change, as well”
“Education as the practice of freedom – as opposed to
education as the practice of domination – denies that
man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached
to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a
reality apart from other people”
22

23. Dunechaser really is quite good
To the barricades?
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