Of Word, World, and Being (Online): A Brief Response to Paulo Freire's "The Importance of the Act of Reading"

• In Event: Reading Critical Pedagogies: Reading Paulo Freire

Abstract

I am a little bit older than Paulo Freire’s “The importance of the Act of Reading.” I was six when he addressed the Brazilian Congress of Reading in 1982, and I could not yet read. Thinking through the writing of this short reply to Freire’s seminal talk, has me, as Freire notes, “re-reading an essential moment in my own practice of reading,” in order to think about my early reading of the word (p. 1). It has also provoked a reflective comparison with the experiences of my children.

I don’t remember early acts or practices of reading – but instead the act of having accomplished reading. My success was quantitative. I remember picking up speed, and racing through volume after volume of the short readers, as if going downhill on a bicycle. Illiterate at noon and literate by 4:30pm, this was a technical accomplishment, and it didn’t look very much like Paulo’s entreaties with trees, who were “like persons” to him or like his commune with context, which made up the world he first read in Recife, Brazil (p. 2). The world I first read was formed by cement and people. I never have figured out how to read anything other than people and the things they make.

Words have moved. I recently dropped in to see if they were home, but I couldn’t figure out where they really lived. How do we consider Freire’s assertion of the mutuality of the word and world, and indeed the potential of one preceding the other in light of increasingly digital epistemologies at play in corporate think-spaces such as Facebook™, Google™, Instagram™, Twitter™, Snapchat™, and others which are among our most important learning environments? With unprecedented intensity and concentration, the word and the world are fusing by and within what we might call socio-commercial online spaces (often called search engines and social media/networks), which have become a central location of learning for many children and adults. Many children now learn far more in socio-commercial online spaces than in schools. Bearing in mind Freire’s linking of word and world with the very nature of being (and of being human), we may ask what it means to be online.

Much online learning is critical, dialogical (if not dialectical), and even liberatory. Among the central challenges of a contemporary reading of Freire is thus recognizing the nexus of word, world and monetization, identity formation/location, and the concurrent impacts on being in the world—whether online or not. Key here is noticing and valuing what learning looks, feels, and sounds like when undertaken and facilitated apart from commercial goals: specifically, how can we better support and understand the separation of education from neoliberal capitalism when it comes to online learning? Attention to being in these contexts, to structure as well as to agency and identity, will necessarily guide our liberatory engagements and disengagements with online learning and being.

Author

• Arlo Kempf, University of Toronto, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education