The Last Americans: Applying Paolo Freire’s Theories of Critical Pedagogy to Improving Literacy Among Non-Literate White Appalachians

Paulo Freire’s teachings have created a profound and enduring impact on critical pedagogy, from the first publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1970 until today. His ideas offered a fundamentally new way of looking at how the education process takes shape, explicitly incorporating Marxist philosophy and laying more responsibility on the part of educators to not only teach their students, but acknowledge their role in creating a more equal society. Freire’s approach to education links the identification of issues to positive action for change and development. Freire was particularly interested in issues of adult literacy and how different approaches to pedagogy can yield positive results. How can we apply his teachings to the problem of illiteracy in the United States today? Specifically, we can look to Other People’s Words, where Victoria Purcell-Gates examines the seldom talked-about population of non-literate white people. In examining white, non-literate populations of the Appalachian region, we see a pattern emerge that suggests Freire’s theories – both economic and pedagogical – may yield positive results in increasing literacy rates. One of Paolo Freire’s key principles was the analysis of most contemporary education systems as what he describes a “banking system.” In this model, the model preferred by educators in civilized society for millennia, students are seen essentially as passive vessels, waiting to be filled with information by the teacher: Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits, which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking' concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other. (Freire, Chapter 2) Freire’s concepts, which burst onto the academic scene in 1970 with the publication of Oppressed, were a clear indictment of the prevailing ideas in pedagogy at the time. Freire challenged the notion that students were merely products on an assembly line waiting to be topped off with knowledge from a professor whose job was over at the end of the school day. The psychology of the dynamic described by Freire is explicitly “oppressive,” he argues because it puts the student in a position of feeling less than the teacher. Conversely, the teacher validates his or her position by feeling superior: “The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence.” This, Freire argues, can only result in the oppression of student psychologically. As a pedagogical result, this concept negates the “process of inquiry” in learning, i.e. the student asking questions, figuring things out on their own and drawing his or her conclusions, because that idea places too much agency on the part of the “ignorant” student (in the banking model). “Critical consciousness” refers to a process where the student develops the ability to “analyze, pose questions, and take action on the social, political, cultural and economic contexts that influence and shape their lives.” (Dirkx) This is the type of approach Freire favored, which can be traced back to the Socratic method, heavily influenced by Plato. This is not an idea favored by the banking model. The banking model aims to create knowledge-machines of students—what they do with that information is immaterial, as they long as they absorb what they are supposed to. Thus, the status quo is preserved. To challenge the banking model as Freire does, requires, to some extent, agreeing with certain Marxist or progressive economic and political ideas that place an emphasis on systemic change and creating a more just society. Accepting these precepts begs the question: how can one fix not just the students, but also the system itself? Freire offers: “the oppressed are not ‘marginals,’ are not living ‘outside’ society. They have always been ‘inside’ the structure which made them ‘beings for others.’ The solution is not to 'integrate’ them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become ‘beings for themselves.’ ” (Freire). In Freire’s mind, that students “critically consider reality” is a key notion to becoming more developed as a human being, and not just a robot who can regurgitate information. If we accept that this is a noble goal, how would this approach objectively improve efforts to educate people? Specifically, in the case of economically marginalized, illiterate whites in the United States today, how would a more critical pedagogy help ameliorate their learning skills and increase literacy? Moreover, how can we measure those results, and are there more progressive, economic ways to facilitate and measure those results applying Freire’s theories? “Transformative learning” is the natural outcome of applying Freire’s teachings. It essentially proposes that teachers must not just give information to students, but help transform their worldview, that they cast a more critical lens on reality. Transformative learning “posits experience as its starting point and as its content for reflection. Engaging the life experience in a critically reflective manner is a necessary condition for transformation. Finally, the entire process is about change—change that is growth-enhancing and developmental.” (Merriam, 149). Looking at certain demographics, like non-literate White Appalachians, whose backgrounds and cultural norms are so different than the urban, middle class literate-based model we hold as the ideal (or superior, in the banking model), we can see how a transformative process might accelerate attempts at promoting literacy in individual students. Our entire concept of literacy is typically in sync with the so-called banking model proffered by Freire. In his essay Writing is a Technology That Restructures Thought, Walter Ong asserts: “Literacy is imperious. It tend to arrogate to itself supreme power by taking itself as normative for human expression and thought.” That is to say, being literate in the written word is the only, and normative, way to communicate and without that skill set – even the term “illiterate” he argues—persons are deviant from the norm, and by association inferior. We can see the cycle of oppression first described Freire at work here. Ong argues that a deeper understanding of how people communicate learning requires a separate emphasis placed on spoken word—and academicizing it and legitimizing as an equally substantive learning tool and communication method. Ong writes that we “take for granted” that writing is a “technology.” Indeed, without acknowledging its technological features, we cannot understand that it works in a different way for each person. Sentences structures vary depend on the context and what we are talking about. Informal person-to-person conversations between literates are not structured like those among persons in a primary oral culture. Simple queries for information acquire a new status, for oral cultures typically use words less for information and more for operational, interpersonal purposes than do chirographic and typographic cultures. Writing is only one of the various developments making for the transformation of consciousness and of society, but once writing takes over, it appears to be the most crucial development of all. (Ong, 36) This idea is critical: different cultures may communicate in different ways, and crucially Ong is pointing that a non-literate culture, like the culture non-literate White Appalachians come from, still has its own communication habits and customs—and they need to be legitimized and treated with the same amount of seriousness as literate culture in order to provide those people with literacy tools. The idea should not simply be to change their consciousness into being the same as people who grew up in a literate household, but to help them develop literacy tools that they may continue to communicate in the way that is customary to their culture, as well as function more thoroughly in a literate society. In Other People's Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy, by Victoria Purcell-Gates, we hear the story of Jenny and Donny, a mother and son from deep within the Appalachian Mountains, both illiterate, who move to a Midwestern city in search of a better life. Hailing from one of the most economically disadvantaged regions of the country, they are described as "urban Appalachians.” Jenny and Donny live in the central city, but are for the most part segregated from the African-Americans who make up the majority of their economic class in the urban area where they reside. On the contrary, they live in a neighborhood with other urban Appalachians. What Purcell-Gates describes in the book is a system that is a designed to fail people like Jenny and Donny. Just as Freire enumerated the ills of an “autonomous” system that uses a one-size-fits-all method to fill “empty vessels” with knowledge, Purcell-Gates acknowledges that without understanding the cultural nuances of certain demographics, we cannot hope to adequately provide an education that will better their circumstances. Non-literate, Appalachian whites have their own dialect, their own cultural values, their family attitudes towards education itself—without incorporating those ideas into a curriculum, argues Purcell-Gates, we won’t see the same effectiveness as we would using the same methods on white, middle-class students from literate households. (Purcell-Gates, 102). "Contrary to popular impression, it is the white urban Appalachian children, not the urban African American, who occupy the bottom of the educational ladder, at least in this city. Dropout rates for urban Appalachians range from 40 percent to near 75 percent in the poorest areas. Absence rates are more than twice that of the system as a whole. Those students who remain in the school achieve at a low level relative to national norms and at significantly lower levels than their non Appalachian peers, black and white." (Purcell-Gates, 33) Jenny wanted something from the city, specifically from the city schools. She wanted literacy, for herself and for her children, She did not want to “become” middle class. She did not want to change herself, her cultural “ways of being,” or her language. She only wanted to learn to read and write for her own needs and desires. This goal, however, proved elusive, given the cultural and societal walls standing between her and the literacy controlled by the mainstream schools (…) Jenny’s desire for literacy, both for herself and for her child, was impeded by a wall of exclusion erected by a society that willfully failed to see her and Donny, and thus to consider and include them. (Purcell-Gates, 156) Here, Purcell-Gates directly echoes Freire’s argument for systemic change—and the rejection of the assimilation viewpoint that attempts to instruct all types of learners using the same methodology. Time and again, we are shown scenes of Jenny, Donny’s mother, struggling with myriad issues related to her son’s education, because of her illiteracy, and the school administration’s insistence on communicating with her via written word, and often using a more difficult to understand register and vocabulary than she would be able to use even in speech. One point Purcell-Gates is keen to make is that “print is present to an individual only to the extent that it is used by members of one’s sociocultural group.” (Purcell-Gates, 124) Using Freire’s theories of oppression, we might infer that instead of using the same texts to teach to all populations, we use texts more closely associated with that of similar demographics, socioeconomic and sociocultural traditions and values, so that they gain a better introduction to the technology of writing and can more easily use its building blocks as tools, rather than obstacles. Donny was seen as a “hillbilly” by his educators (Purcell-Gates, 185). His teachers did not respect his unique background and cultural associations, and thus could not work with him to help him and Jenny achieve their goals. Transformative learning posits that “trust, friendship and support,” (Merriam, 153) are critical to the educational process. In Donny’s case he didn’t have that with his teachers. From Freire’s initial Marxist-influenced philosophies on a more egalitarian approach to pedagogy, to later academic approaches to incorporating transformative learning, we can see how a more inclusive and progressive approach to literacy might be enormously beneficial to specific, highly differentiated cultures like that of non-literate White Appalachians. The challenge remains for institutions to adopt these more progressive methods. Works Cited Dirkx, John. “Transformative Learning Theory in the Practice of Adult Education: An Overview.” PAACE Journal of Lifelong Learning, Vol 7, 1998, 1-14. Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Merriam, Sharan B., Rosemary S. Caffarella, and Lisa M. Baumgartner. Learning in Adulthood: A Comprehensive Guide, 3rd ed. (San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons/Jossey-Bass, 2007). Ong, Walter. “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought.” From The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, edited by Gerd Baumann. Clarendon Press: Oxford 1986. Purcell-Gates, Victoria. Other People's Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. Print.