Reading of the World to Understand the Word

It was way back in higher when I first read Paulo Freire'due south book, the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, merely one idea has stuck with me since then: the distinction between reading the word and reading the world.

Every bit an educational organization today, what is our focus – the former or the latter?

Paulo Freire and Learning to Read the World

Freire's concept was pretty simple. The act of reading cannot happen independently of the world in which the reader exists.

In the get-go, when a student is learning to read, she needs to exist able to connect the words on the paper dorsum to her own experience. The word "domestic dog" or "cat" are meaningless if you don't know what a canis familiaris or a cat is.

At this stage, reading the globe around you is a prerequisite to learning to read the give-and-take. Talking and thinking about your experience in the globe gives yous a foundation on which to build. Really, it's pretty basic education 101.

After learning to read the word, the next stride is to use it to read the world – to interrogate information technology and call back critically almost it. Read a book, like 1984, not merely for the pregnant of the words simply to help understand our own earth.

Reading the globe always precedes reading the world.

In this view, literacy education is cyclical. You offset with the student'southward experience, y'all larn to read words on a folio, and these words on the page help refine the pupil's understanding of the world and create a new, modified feel. The value in this is the richer understanding of the earth – that'southward the stop goal. Reading is simply a ways by which to achieve it.

So what does all this have to exercise with civics education, and why am I rambling on near an old literacy educator from Brazil…?

Focus On What's Important – The Ends Not the Means

Starting time, this illustrates an of import thing to keep in mind nearly pedagogy – the deviation betwixt means and ends.

When you're designing a lesson, you have a goal in listen – something you lot desire the students to larn or experience. Then, you get together resources and methods that help you facilitate that learning or feel.

The resources themselves are inconsequential. If yous collect a serial of documents to aid students analyze the Boston Massacre, information technology doesn't much matter if they remember the individual documents. What matters is that they contain what they learn from those documents into their agreement of the world. The goal is the theme, the big idea.

Writ large, this suggests that much of the twenty-four hours to day details of school are simply ways to an end. The details of the Battle of Gettysburg, the plot to Romeo & Juliet, how to calculate the boilerplate of 10 numbers, the affect of pressure on the volume of gas are all tools in service of a larger goal.

Sure, they are important in the brusk term. Students will demand to remember these details for a while to engage with the lesson or the unit of measurement. Simply in the long term, the details fade away and what should remain is the end goal – a ameliorate, more than critical understanding and reading of the world.

Reading the World is Civics Education

Which brings usa to the 2d thing that Freire helps the states think nigh hither. "Reading the world" is simply some other style of proverb "civics didactics." Although Freire was a literacy educator by merchandise – he taught people how to read – he was in actuality a borough educator. He used literacy every bit a tool to aid people understand and engage with the world around them.

Here's the full quote from Paulo Freire featured in the epitome at the peak of this post:

Instruction either functions every bit an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present organisation and bring virtually conformity or information technology becomes the practice of freedom, the means past which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and observe how to participate in the transformation of the world.

If you focus exclusively on the ways – the reading skills, the math skills, the historical facts, the scientific formulas – then you are facilitating conformity. That is not the goal of pedagogy. That is not our purpose.

But if you lot use those means to help students read the world, then you lot are helping them deal critically with the earth and facilitating its transformation at their hands.

That is our purpose, and that is the reason I launched this project. I'thousand passionate about civics instruction, but it's not simply about the nuts and bolts of civics. Information technology's about helping students call up more critically about the earth and exist engaged citizens in their community.

That's a task for all of us.

Are yous going to facilitate conformity or transformation?

More from Paulo Freire

Desire some more than Paulo Freire?

Check out this collection of Paulo Freire quotes, which also includes information on several of his books. If you've never read it, you should definitely get started with Pedagogy of the Oppressed. If y'all're familiar with that, check out his afterwards works, including Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Borough Courage.

What are your thoughts on Paulo Freire, and his relationship to civics education?

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Source: http://civiceducator.org/read-the-word-or-read-the-world/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CReading%20the%20world%E2%80%9D%20is%20just,with%20the%20world%20around%20them.

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