A Justice Site
Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP - Archives
California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: August 1, 2004
Reviewed:
Latest Update: September 6, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Pedagogy of Hope: Hope As a Human Need
- Introduction
Why I chose to share this reading.- Focus:
Main point of this reading.- Reading
Full identification of source for reading AND excerpt.- Concepts:
Concepts and Key Words.- Discussion
Discussion questions.- Conceptual Linking to Substantive Courses
What this has to do with our class.* * *
- Freire's hope and belief in the ability of each to answer, regardless of colonial circumstances, race, or gender or class is an inspiration.
- I would like you to come away with the ability to explain to anyone who will ask how hope is an ontological need, a need of human beings.
- ontology: the philosophy of being
- From Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, Chapeter 1: Opening Words, pp. 7-49. Continuum Publishing, 1992.
Freire, who was often denied recognition in his own country of Brazil as an educator ("It happened recently in a meeting at UNESCO in Paris---I have been told by someone who was there. Latin American repreentatives refused to ascribe me the standing of educator . . . they crutucuzed me for what seemed to them to be my exaggerated 'politicization.' " Freire then cites the plaint of the other side: "But Paul . . . a Pedagogy of Hope in the shameless hellhole of corruption like the one strangling us in Brazil today?"These opening words set beautifully the context in which we find ourselves today, one in which each side, often of many sidea, shout rhetoric and ideology at one another with little thought to the fundamental issues. Pedagogy of Hope is about having some faith in our ability to take the first steps out of this "shameless hellhole" of corruption, misunderstanding, apathy, "whatever," that grips us in eternal wrangling with only that measure of satisfaction in daily pusuits that each can grab for itself.
On this site, we're going to look at the pedagogy of hope, at illocutionary understanding, at answerability, and at accountability as what Freire calls "ontological" needs, needs we must meet if we are to preserve the humanity of our nature.
The discussion questions for this reading are based on Chapter 1, Opening Words. If you are unable to get the book, an unlikely external possibility (meaning that the book is readily available), but a much more likely personal circumstance, you will need to either share another's book, or wait, maybe a week or so, till I can get summaries of my lectures up. jeanne
- What does Freire mean when he speaks of hope as an "ontological need?"
From p.8:
Conceptual Linking to Substantive Courses:
- Agencies:
Sample linking: Ways in which underlying assumptions of assimilation affect services offered and clients' ability to access and use those services. How does this reading illustrate the need for social agencies, for more generalized agencies, for what Bolman and Deal would call "leadership" AND "management"? How does this reading suggest ways in which we could be more effective in rendering help, and what is the reading's relationship to a "safety net" for those who need help?
- Criminal Justice:
Sample linking: Ways in which some groups are underrepresented in the unstated assumptions of our theories. How does this reading serve to illustrate adversarialism, mutuality, retribution, revenge, illocutionary understanding, the definition and operation of the criminal justice system?
- Law:
Sample linking: Extent to which laws are made on the assumption that we are all essentially assimilated to the dominant culture. How does this reading help us see the need for contextual readings in law? How does it relate to our natural instincts to seek some kind of natural law? What facts and principles does the reading offer for discourse that could clarify for Others validity claims presented by an Obscure Other?
- Moot Court:
Sample linking: Ways in which to make validty claims of harm understood by those who have never experienced many of the world's different perspectives. How can this reading enlighten our praxis in terms of different kinds of discourse, like instrumental, illocutionary, governance?
- Women in Poverty:
Sample linking: The culture of poverty and assimilation. How does the reading deal with our underlying assumptions about poverty, especially poverty of the exploited, the NOT- male? What does the reading suggest of the interrelationship between our society and its children, generally cared for by women, often poor?
- Race, Gender, Class:
Sample linking: The extent to which silence has been imposed by these affiliations so that domination and discrimination have entered our unstated assumptions in interpersonal relations and the structural context arising from them. What does the reading tell us about exploitation and alternative ways to deal with one another? What does it tell us about institutionalized -isms and our denial of complicity? What does it tell us about our common humanity?
- Religion:
Sample linking: The spiritual component. Humans are spiritual creatures, creatures that recognize moments that go beyond ourselves to God, Allah, Isis, Gaia, the Universe, or a deep sense of responsibility to create our own meanng. How does the reading fit into our ability, our need to create such meaning in life?
- Love !A:
Sample linking: What's the aesthetic link in this reading? How does it bring us closer to one another as humans? What does it tell us about our need for love, unconditional love, not rewards for doing well or being well, but caring and acceptance for being who we are?
