For March 6, for the session on education within social movements (in latin america), colonialism and anti-colonialism, we will use the following texts and recommend you to read some of it before the session. Update: Rolando Vázquez – the author of the 3rd text – will come in person to this session to give a guesttalk! Leave any comments, suggestions for topics to discuss during the session below as a reaction.

Homework:

The ‘obligatory’ 40 pages:

• Chapter 2 (15 short pages) of the classic and influential Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (available for free on www.bookos.org). This chapter criticizes the ‘banking’ method of education, which treats students as empty only to be filled with knowledge and according to Freire is part of a broader oppressive system which inhibits students from asking fundamental questions about society. (By the way, chapter 1 is also useful, but chapter 2 is more specifically on education)

• An article on two alternative education experiences of indigenous peoples (Zapatistas & social movement in Honduras): Cultural capital and innovative pedagogy: a case study among indigenous communities in Mexico and Honduras. Marta Gregor.(9 pages)  Read/download it here.
• ROLANDO VÁZQUEZ. “Translation as Erasure: Thoughts on Modernity’s Epistemic Violence” (2011). (14 pages) Read/download it here.

Optional material:

On Freire:

• A detailed chapter by chapter summary of Pedagogy of the Oppressed: http://www.comminit.com/en/node/27123
• Wikipedia page on the book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed
• Very interesting view on how Freire is misunderstood in the West: http://www.henryagiroux.com/online_articles/Paulo_friere.htm: “[I]t has been frequently appropriated by academics, adult educators, and others who inhabit the ideology of the West in ways that often reduce it to a pedagogical technique or method. […] What has been increasingly lost in the North American and Western appropriation of Freire’s work is the profound and radical nature of its theory and practice as an anti-colonial and postcolonial discourse.
• This review of a book (a book which can be found on www.bookos.org) gives a very short and useful overview of the discussions around Paolo Freire’s philosophies: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1022280930241?LI=true#page-2
• Mentioned in the review above, this article by Elizabeth Ellsworth: “Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy”. http://pedsub.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/ellsworth-1989.pdf
• An audio interview on how Brazil’s Landless Movement retook control over land and education, inspired not only by Freire but also early Sovjet thinkers: https://www.kritischestudenten.nl/bibliotheek/onderwijs-bibliotheek/pedagogy-radical-change-and-topics/
• Popular education and social change in Latin America. Oscar Jara H.

On popular education in Latin America:

• A small booklet about an alternative educational experience in Oaxaca, Mexico, it is very practical about how an alternative university could look like: booklet Unitierra download it here
• An overview of popular education in Latin America, and what we can learn from it: Community development: learning from popular education in Latin America. Liam Kane
• I also like this article on alternative education in Mexico, but maybe its a bit of an overkill 🙂 Literacy, Knowledge Production, and Grassroots Civil Society: Constructing Critical Responses to Neoliberal Dominance ERIKA MEIN

• How can we translate these alternative educational experiences we have just learned about to our own context (ideologically and practically)?
• How do you implement these ideas – which to a great extent are based on working on local – communities – if there is no great sense of community to start with? – In short, can you do popular education without a community. And if not, how to build these two institutions hand in hand?
• leave your own discussion points below …