Editorial
Part One appeared in the previous issue of HLT.

The Heart of the Matter: A Short Personal History of SLA Research and What It Has Meant to My Classroom Teaching – Part Two

Lou Spaventa, US

Lou Spaventa teaches and trains in California, the USA. He is a regular contributor to HLT - The Heart of the Matter series. E-mail:spaventa@cox.net

"No one is born fully-formed: it is through self-experience in the world that we become what we are."

Paulo Freire

In the summer of 1983 I had the chance to participate in two weeks of what promised to be radical pedagogical dialogue at Stanford International Development Education Center, Stanford University. We were to create an agenda during our first week of dialogue which we would then present to Paolo Freire, who would lead us in our second week. I travelled to Palo Alto from State College, Pennsylvania, where The Pennsylvania State University is located, and where I was pursuing a PhD in Education Policy Studies. I was fresh from a disappointing diplomatic tour of service in the West Indies, and I wanted to do something meaningful with my life. I felt elated by this opportunity to study with Freire, whose book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I had read with little comprehension over a decade before this educational conference, but had now reread with a deeper understanding because of my experiences in a variety of countries with differing political systems, all characterized by things not going well: Saudi Arabia, The Republic of Korea, Yugoslavia, Mexico, Guatemala, and Barbados.

Freire, of course, is one of modern histories great educational stories. He began teaching and working with the poor in Sao Paolo’s favellas through a commitment to the social gospel of the New Testament. His experience radicalized him and made him – if it is possible – a Catholic Marxist. He was exiled from Brazil during the rule of the generals in the 60s and 70s, but returned triumphantly, as a world acclaimed educator, whose theories of social action for transformation, captured both the world of academia and development. When he died, he was minister of education for Sao Paolo, and had embarked on a program of transforming that city’s schools. His work is carried on all over the world, and Pedagogy of the Oppressed has become a staple of teacher training programs.

For me, Freire represented an educator whose work challenged both common notions of educating people and the power structure that supported that notion. “Banking education” was what the power structure, the dominant political system of any nation employed in educating its young. It assumed they were empty vessels to be filled with received knowledge, knowledge which itself was the privilege of the ruling class. Freire said that educators indoctrinated in this sort of pedagogy made deposits into the empty accounts of their students, ergo the banking metaphor. Freire’s research is what is now commonly called action research in which the educator intervenes in the educational moment to catalyze change. Thus, Freire would go into a community, seek to understand the issues that kept the poor illiterate and needy, and then develop drawings which illustrated those issues. This was the process of “codification.” An example drawing might be that of a peasant holding onto a lamppost. The peasant is obviously drunk. The poor students Freire would teach would look at the drawing and comment upon it spurred on by a question: “Why is the man drunk?” “He is a good man, but he has a hard life.” And so it might go, with Freire and the students engaged in a dialogue designed to uncover the conditions that kept them poor and illiterate. The next step would be for those students to develop ways to overcome their conditions. This last political step was what forced Freire from Brazil. By the time I met him, he was a world-wide phenomenon. In fact, fearing that I would fall under his influence, my professors at Penn State University tried to dissuade me from attending the SIDEC Conference.

The conference at SIDEC was quite instructive for me. Alongside Freire was the educator and economist Martin Carnoy, whose book Education as Cultural Imperialism I had recently read. My fellow conference attendees were radical professors, students, and union workers. We spent our first week developing questions for Freire, and trying to create an agenda. When Freire came, some of us, I was among them, tried to apply Freire’s thinking to our conference. That is, as students, we wanted to take over the agenda and let the instructors teach us what we wanted to know. We were not successful in this effort, largely because the leaders of the conference were in academic mode, and wanted the conference to go smoothly as an academic endeavor. At that moment, I learned that it did not matter who was on top – dictator or democrat – the agenda of those on top was the agenda that was really going to be followed.

When I returned to campus at Penn State, I became the resident radical theory specialist, teaching about Freire, and writing as if his pedagogy were now my pedagogy. I bought every book he wrote, co-wrote, was interviewed in, or was critiqued in. Then an old pedagogical thought came back as a constant refrain: “The only thing educable in man is awareness.” That was Caleb Gattegno speaking to me. I finally acknowledged that thought and added it to Freire’s thought. My addition lead me to the epigraph which precedes this article,” No one is born fully-formed: it is through self-experience in the world that we become who we are.” From that time on, I saw my work as creating myself as a theorist and practitioner. I looked on in amused detachment at the world of academia where book after book and article after article were published about Freire. Finally, his theories came into the world of TESOL, mostly through some immigrant educators in New England. By that time, I had moved away from my expertise and returned to my then and current perpetual state of suspended judgment.

As I look at 21^st century education, I see little beyond the supremacy of technology added to working with students. I teach at a community college where many of the students have had negative experiences in primary and secondary schools. I teach writing and reading. My contention is that until they control the words they write and can understand the inferences about the world in books they read, students will never be fully formed as citizens who realize their own efficacy. I work against a 24/7 tide of infotainment and portable gadgets. Students are more adept messaging with two thumbs on a tiny keyboard than they are at creating a pleasing format to the eye when they write an essay. One is life; the other is school. Somehow this dichotomy must be broken down. Freire tells me that. There is something of magical consciousness in student life. Control over their learning isn’t even on their radar. My work, as I see it now, is to conscienctize them. Good luck, right? But I have got to try.

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