ENGL 1213
20 January 2012
Paulo Freire takes us back to his house in Recife, Brazil where he was born and describes to us the birds, trees, and structure of his home. It is here that Paulo begins to learn to read and have his first experiences with letters, texts and words. Every one of our students’ first experiences with the written word is never going to be the exact duplicate of another. “The texts, the words, the letters of that context were incarnated in a series of things, objects, signs…in perceiving these, I experienced myself, and the more I experience myself, the more my perceptual capacity increased” (Freire 282). The texts, letters and words would take on images of items of Freire’s world and the more he read the more images and signs would emerge. Reading was something Freire did by using words from his world, which was further continued in his education. In his mention of a private school lessons in regards to reading was its’ congruent relationship with reading word-world. In our school systems today it is very important to realize this word-world relationship is different for every student. The images and signs being brought out by texts, letters, and words can be very different from their classmate. In trying to incorporate culturally relevant pedagogical lessons as teachers we can include a variety of different texts and literature in our classroom and expect that each of our students will have different views and understanding of the text. In Freire’s secondary-school experience, he describes the importance of the act of reading and critically understanding the word. The lessons and exercises were not “aimed at our simply becoming aware of the existence of the page in front of us, to be scanned, mechanically and monotonously spelled out, instead of truly read” (Freire 284). Freire himself taught in a way that did not make his students memorize rules and mechanics of text and words but rather taught in a way that had his students understand its’ underlying significance. Memorizing rules and mechanics does not mean we have knowledge of the text. The art of teaching someone to read and write is “a political act, an act of knowledge, and therefore as a creative act” (Freire 285). Before we read the word we have to read the world. It is a continuous cycle. In organizing a literacy program from our students as teachers we should prepare one “from the word universe of the people who are learning, expressing their actual language, their anxieties, fears, demands and dreams…it should be laden with the meaning of the people’s existential experience, and not of the teacher’s experience” (Freire 286). In a multicultural setting using this ideology we would use literate works to represent the whole of our classroom.