-----Original Message-----
From: Lynn Norris
Sent: Monday, February 08, 1999 9:52 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: RE: Freire in the museum


Cath--I think that's an excellent Freire overview.  The hallmarks of
popular education are the involvement in the learner in what is to be
learned, safety, trust  and mutual respect in the environment in which
learning takes place and feedback by the visitor into the learning
process.  Freire's concept of a constant process for creative human
beings of acting, reflecting, re-acting is an extraordinarily freeing
concept for learners and provides a constant interaction with the world.

For museums that have nonformal programs the application can be quite
smooth as the role of the facilitator can help assure there is a needs
assessment beforehand and can monitor and guide the process of the
learner become a "critical co-investigator" with the facilitator.

In the informal situation, the key element of the facilitator is pulled
out and this means the exhibition must pick up these multiple roles.
That is the great challenge of Freire pedagogy in the informal
environment, but audience research--especially the work of Falk and
Dierking, Marilyn Hood, Ken Yellis and others have been precisely
discussing the role of the museum exhibit in these terms.  The key in
needs assessment is to know the visitor and, since there are many, an
exhibit must provide multiple types of entry--the Gardner discussions
are a good example of this.  The museum must be understood as a
community partner for the long-term to develop trust and the
presentation of the exhibit must be problem-posing, not problem solving.
Ken Yellis makes a wonderful point about museum professionals wanting to
present what we know--Freire's banking approach--a not what we don't
know.   It's precisely what we don't know that interests and motivates
us.  Yellis' points out that what we don't know also interests and
motivates the visitor.  It's the old Myles Horton discussion with Freire
that the facilitator doesn't have to know everything--"you could help
people get the answer.  You have to know something; they know something.
You have to respect their knowledge, which they don't respect, and help
them to respect their knowledge."  Museums in the informal environment
could be best at being conduits and entry points, not end point of being
partners with their visitors and not always "the authority."

Thanks so much to Cath for bringing this discussion to the list.  When I
saw Freire on the subject line I nearly fainted as I didn't know there
were others out there interested in applying his theories.  I would love
to see us form an informal network of those interested in Freire and
connected by this list so that we can share more and see this wonderful
man's theories get more exposure in the museum community.  Please
contact me off list if you are interested in a continuing discussion.

Lynn Norris
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-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Sunday, February 07, 1999 10:33 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: Freire in the museum


A few people have responded to my query re Freire in museums by asking
for
more info about him and his work. A couple of others (George Hein, Bob
Russell) have introduced some publications by him. I thought I would add
my
bit with a brief rave..

Paulo Friere was a Brazilian educator who worked extensively to promote
literacy among peasants of Brazil but also in other contexts (after he
was
imprisoned and then exiled for sixteen years) such as Chile, Tanzania,
Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique, Peru and Nicaragua. When he
returned
to Brazil he taught at universities and from '89-'91 was Secretary of
Education in Sao Paulo. He died a couple of years ago.

His pedagogical practice is opposed to the notion of what he calls the
'banking model' of education by which students are filled with knowledge
and required to store it and retrieve it for future use. Instead, he
sees
education as occurring not from one person to another but between two
people, in a dialogue. It is a pedagogy of problem-posing, in which
knowledge is not fixed but under development by the students and the
teacher according to their local context.

For Freire, the word and the world operate in a continuous dialectic
mediated through people as they reflect on the word and act in the
world.
So in Freirian pedagogy students are active participants in the act of
learning. They draw on their experience and they 're-write' or transform
their world via this process of action and reflection. It is a pedagogy
of
possibilities, a utopian pedagogy, which obliges learners to situate
themselves in relation to the world.

I think there are many ways that museums could engage productively with
Freire's ideas, especially community museums, or museums that are
intended
to promote cultural or media literacy among their visitors, and to
involve
them as active agents in the museum's representation.

An example of the kind of museum exhibition that would resonate with
Freirian praxis: one that acknowledges multiple perspectives on the
issue,
states where each perspective comes from, and recognises that these
perspectives are in tension with one another. For me, exhibitions that
recognise multiplicity, tension and limitation enable visitors to the
exhibition to come to their own position in relation to the material.

Perhaps Lynn Norris and/or others will add to or contest some of this.
So
in anticipation of more dialogue,
Cath Styles