Lachney_Annotation_3

====Freirean approaches to libratory pedagogy have become a staple in Western social justice discourses that seek to bring about some form of fundamental or incremental change in education – from primary to higher. On the one hand this is something to celebrate in the United States. In a time of the charter school movement, distance learning norms at K-12 and university levels, corporate and government initiatives to weaken teacher unions, and disproportionate achievement gaps between white and minority students, Paulo Freire’s praxis of read/writing the word/world in theory and practice is rhetorically attractive to emancipatory minded pedagogues who view public schooling as a triumph of liberal democracy. On the other hand, Freirean vocabulary such as “individualism,” “democracy,” “critical reflection” and others that appeal to and underwrite notions of Western liberal democracy are part of the problems that are rooted in the global ecological crisis. Interestingly enough, it appears that globalization and environmental atrophy are precisely what critics claim Freirean pedagogies cannot deal with. If this is the case, it may appear that Freirean followers and practitioners, or what some call “true believers” (2), who aim to make visible the political underpinnings of education and economy are ill equipped to deal with some of the most politically important topics of the 21st century: globalization and environmental crisis. ====

====This is made evident in C. A. Bower and Frederique Apffle-Marglin’s edited collection, Rethinking Freire: Globalization and the Environmental Crisis (2008). According to a range of post-colonial scholars and popular educators in the collection, the deep roots of Freirean critical pedagogy in Western frameworks of literacy inevitably takes on underlying themes of linear evolutionary development and modes of Marxist industrial consciousness raising not relevant to alternative ways of knowing, especially in the Global South. Articles throughout the book, in particular Barbara Loyda Snachez Bejarano’s popular education work with peasants in rural Bolivia, re-tell of the Freirean pedagogues subject position as one that is conservative, universalizing, colonizing, and, therefore, not appropriate, even violent for Global South contexts. Bejarano write, ====

====Freire’s Popular Education, in spite of his critique of “banking education,” is both imperialistic and reactionary and thus unable to resolve the contradictions between the desire to not be invasive culturally by not imposing a particular form of knowing and the desire to empower the oppressed by teaching them to adopt a Western pattern of emancipatory thinking. What Freire and his followers overlooked is that the latter establishes from the start a hierarchical relationship with non-Western cultures. By making critical reflection the only reliable method of knowing, Freire’s approach to emancipation has the ironic effect of negating all other forms of being and of living in the world.(54) ====

====Bejarano’s critiques center on the universality of Freire’s approach to “critical reflection” as a singular and uni-focused view on what literacy is and how it should be used. Considering that Freire worked for the state during his famous literacy campaigns in Brazil, it is not too farfetched to consider that these efforts would channel official government attitudes and policy lines not necessary symmetrical with the interests of workers and peasants. This is the second major critique that comes out of the collection. ====

====The failure of Freirean praxis to account for the diversity and complexity of oral culture, the importance of intergenerational knowledge, and culturally situated intelligences also renders critical literacy efforts as hegemonic in terms of homogenizing communication through written modes of expression. Indeed, Freire equates the dominance of orality within indigenous cultures with “regressive illiteracy” (3). Bowers explains that ====

====By ignoring a significant body of scholarly writings on the differences between orality and literacy, Freirean thinkers failed to understand that literacy itself is a colonizing process that reinforces a modern sense of individualism, privileges sight over the other senses, and fosters abstract thinking that is integral to critical reflection. (3). ====

====This critique brings up some major issues around Freire's place in ecological literacy. If Freirean pedagogy is not attuned to indigenous knowledge, then this means that Freire pedagogy is not able to draw from other cultures' ways of thinking about ecology and the earth. However, I find that Freirean pedagogy does help me understand some ways of interacting with indigenous knowledge in my worth with CSDTs. ==== ====Bowers’ insights into the colonizing influences of critical literacies, as written culture, is particularly relevant today given widespread funding and research into new literacies or multiliteracies that draw on digital forms of communication. In particular how do these critiques by Global South popular educators and post-colonial scholars map on to my own work with Culturally Situated Design Tools (CSDTs). ====

====A commonality between Freirean literacy campaigns and the research, design, and implementation of CSDTs is a focus on “generative themes.” Generative themes are what Freirean pedagogues use as a foundation for the content of their literacy campaigns. They are what Freire calls “meaningful thematics” (2000, 110), which, in terms of written literacies takes the form of words in the students everyday life that are used by pedagogues to re-present the word/world through the adversarial method of problem-posing pedagogies. While CSDTs differ in that problem-posing is not pedagogical the method (CSDTs pedagogical method could be called “deep design”), a similar process of theme generation takes place. Rooted in ethnomathematics, CSDT programmers draw on the embedded algorithms and math in the design of artifacts found in students’ heritage and vernacular culture for the development of the CSDT software. Researchers go into a particular cultural setting, say a stamping village, study the material production processes of indigenous design for embedded math and algorithms. They then “translate” their findings into the software development process. The design tools then become entryways for teachers and mentors to connect culture with computing and mathematics. While this is a gross simplification of generative themes in both Freirean pedagogy and CSDT development, the point is that themes from the culture that is the target of pedagogical intervention is the main source of content. ====