Reading Paulo Freire: Linking My World to the Word

• In Event: Reading Critical Pedagogies: Reading Paulo Freire

Abstract

Paulo Freire’s ability to compellingly link the personal to the political and the pedagogical is evident in his discussion of his life as a young reader of both the world and the word. In his essay Freire provides captivating examples of his ability at a young age to discern the relationship between text and context while engaging with print. He poetically describes how “[t]he texts, the words, and letters of the context were incarnated in a series of things, objects, [and] signs . . . [I]n processing these, I experienced myself, and the more I experienced myself, the more my perceptual capacity increased.” Similar to Freire, I too have been “drawn enthusiastically to re-reading essential moments in my own practice of reading whose memory I retained from the remote experiences of childhood” in order to better understand how it is that I learned to concurrently read the world and the word.
Freire’s stimulating discussion of this essential component of reading and writing the world and the word—linking to one’s cultural knowledge and experiences, especially at the initial stages of learning to decode and encode words—reminds me of my own experiences as a young reader of first English and then Spanish. I grew up in a working-class home located in the Mexican/Chicanx Shelltown barrio of Southeast San Diego, California, in the 1960s when bilingual education or native language instruction was not available. With my mother’s assistance, I learned to read in Spanish and to interact with content that was far more culturally relevant than what I found in my school’s English language basal series.
As a result of learning to read in Spanish about Mexican/Latinx characters, I developed a greater sense of agency and pride as I attended mostly low-income, urban, segregated schools. Exposure to literature to that portrayed unsubordinated Mexican characters from all walks of life—from professional to blue collar helped me understand that, unlike life in my barrio where Mexicans worked hard and dirty jobs and were often portrayed as second-class citizens on US television, worlds existed where Mexicans were first-class professionals. My mother’s intervention served to short-circuit any potentially negative effects of my schooling. I developed pride in myself as a reader and as a Mexicana/Chicana. I felt affirmed and proud of my language and culture at a very young age although at the time I did not have the maturity or language to express these sentiments. This pride and confidence propelled me to work aggressively to excel, even when my teachers and other school personnel did not necessarily cooperate.
I believe it was not so much the technical aspects (phonics) of my mother’s instruction that made the difference in my life. The actual strength and success of methods depend, first and foremost, on the degree to which they embrace a pedagogy that values students’ background knowledge, language(s), culture(s), and life experiences, and creates learning contexts where power is shared by students and teachers.

Author

• Lilia I. Bartolome, University of Massachusetts - Boston