Paulo Freire zum Todestag (19.9.1921 – 2.5.1997)

In Letters to Cristina – Redflections on My Life and Work von1996 beschreibt Paulo Freire seine Einsichten in die Lernprozesse des Lesens und Schreibens:

«1. Literacy education is an act of knowing, an act of creating and not the act of mechanically memorizing letters and syllables.
2. Literacy education must challenge learners to take on the role of subjects in learning both reading and writing.
3. Literacy education must originate from research about the vocabulary universe of the learners, which also gives us their thematic universe. (…)
4. Literacy education must be characterized by dialogue as a path to knowledge, which does not invalidate informative discourse, without which there is no knowledge.
5. Literacy education must codify and ´read´generative words, allowing for the creation of a number of sentences with the words. (…)
6. Literacy education must not dichotomize reading and writing. One does not exist without the other, (…). Moreover, learning to write and read must also help improve oral expression, thus the need for exercising both.
(…)
8. (…) Working with learners to create a climate of confidence in which they feel secure is beneficial to the learning process.» (pp. 128, 129)

Diesen Punkten kann der Alte nur zustimmen, genau wie dem folgenden:

«(…) liberating education implies overcoming the opposition between educator and learner in a way that makes both educators and learners. In a banking model of education (…) it is not possible to observe such an overcoming.» (p. 162)

Der Alte glaubt, dass sketchblog.lu zeigt, dass Freires Einsichten eingelöst werden können und dass Lehrende zu Lernenden werden können, wenn die Projekte der Kinder das gemeinsame Lernen vermitteln und die allgemeine Kritikfähigkeit steigern.
Es gilt ein ´banking model´zu vermeiden, in welchem die Lehrpersonen zu Bürokraten herabgewürdigt werden und nur Exekutierende von amtlich aufgetragenen Lehraufträgen bleiben.

Zur Erinnerung einfach noch einmal das ganze Zitat von Paulo Freire, welches die Homepage von sketchblog.lu einleitet:

«Teaching kids to read and write should be an artistic event. Instead, many teachers transform these experiences into a technical event, into something without emotions, without creativity – but with repetition. Many teachers work bureaucratically when they should work artistically.» (p. 79)
(1985) The Politics of Education. London, Macmillan.