Week 4

Part 1
Paulo Freire

Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator and influential theorist of critical pedagogy. Freire was born September 19, 1921 in Recife, Brazil and passed away May 2, 1997 from a heart attack. Freire became familiar with the 1928 Great Depression which help shaped his concerns for the poor and helped construct his particular educational viewpoint. In 1943 he enrolled in Law School at University of Recife. He also studied philosophy, phenomenology, and psychology and became a teacher in secondary schools teaching Portuguese. In 1946, he was appointed Director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in the State of Pernambuco. Here he worked primarily with the illiterate poor to improve their learning, training, and education.

Freire became the icon of social change throughout education. He was the original person to establish the tradition of popular education in Latin America and has been disseminating the pedagogy of the oppressed to the world since his book was published in 1972. In this book as well as other he argues the system of education and emphasizes learning as a culture, freedom, and for it to be a dialogical pedagogy designed to raise individuals' consciousness of oppression and to in turn transform oppressive social structures through praxis.

Though exiled from his native country, Brazil, during a military coup in 1964 for his educational work among the rural poor, he still continued his "pedagogy of the oppressed" in Chile, and later under the auspices of the World Council of Churches in Geneva and then throughout the world. In 1969, he taught at Harvard University and ten years later returned to his own country under a political amnesty. In 1988 he was also appointed Minister of Education for the City of Sao Paulo, a position which made him responsible for guiding school reform throughout the nation's schools.


References:
http://www.education.miami.edu/ep/contemporaryed/Paulo_Freire/paulo_freire.html
http://mingo.info-science.uiowa.edu/~stevens/critped/freire.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire

Part 2
Reviews:
1. Alex learned that America is not the only country facing high unemployment.
2. Vannessa trust her gut just like Oprah does and it has always been right and that what makes her the person she is today.
3. Erin learned from Obama’s speech that the tensions between the American people and Muslims are a result of colonialism.
4. Sophia felt that Oprah’s video was very inspirational and realized that it could have a big impact on her own life.
5. Megan felt that in Oprah’s video that the most striking story for her was the flesh eating disease story.
6. Mario felt that the most striking story Oprah gave was the one of Monica George. The lady who gave birth and developed a bacterial disease and had to get her limbs amputated. I found this story very inspiring as well.
7. Kayla did not know how smart the Islam’s were in the way of how they created compasses and math that we use today.
8. Laurel learned that Morocco was the first nation to accept the United States as a country.
9. Raquel hopes that Obama’s speech will become a historical moment that will start a long road to peace and harmony between all citizens in the world.
10. Alexa learned that Muslims helped invent medicine.