The Office of Service-Learning wishes to create a collegial space for faculty engaged in service-learning to gather around and support one another by reading books that address issues of social justice and transformative pedagogy. Our first selection is Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire.

March 15, 2012

4:00-5:30 p.m. ~ Fireside Room | Murray-Herrick

first half of book

April 26, 2012

3:30-5:00 p.m. ~ Fireside Room | Murray-Herrick

second half of book

“Pedagogy of the Oppressed meets the single criterion of a ‘classic’: it has outlived his own time and its author’s. For any teacher who links education to social change, this is required reading.” —Stanley Aronowitz

We invite faculty to join us this semester as we delve into the book that has been identified as a foundation of critical pedagogy—Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire. First published in 1968, and translated into English in 1970, Freire developed a theory of education “based on the conviction that every human being, no matter how ‘ignorant’ or submerged in the ‘culture of silence’ is capable of looking critically at [one’s] world in a dialogical encounter with others, and that provided with the proper tools for such encounter [one] can gradually perceive [one’s] personal and social reality and deal critically with it.” In the process, Freire argues, one’s “world becomes radically transformed.” The one who is ‘colonized’ is “no longer willing to be a mere object responding to changes occurring around him [or her]. …This radical self-awareness, however, is not only the task of the workers, but of persons in all countries, including those who in our advanced technological society have been or are being programmed into conformity and thus are essentially part of ‘the culture of silence.’” (http://www.pedagogyoftheoppressed.com/about/; accessed 1 Feb 2012).

Please RSVP to Paro Pope, pope3625@stthomas.edu, by March 1, 2012. The Office of Service-Learning will send you the book through intercampus mail. Wine and cheese will be served for our collective enjoyment.