Freire:

Freire wants people to activate. He wants youth to access power. He wants to locate change within building networks through education. Freire wants to give individuals and communities the knowledge and support in order to organize, educate each other, build networks of power… its an unstoppable way to activate change and power, because the ripples are as big as the waves.

Noddings:

Noddings wants people to learn to care. She wants ideas and diverse episotomologies to be valued. She is dreaming that we can let go or priveleging different kinds of subjects. She wants learners to be able to pursue their interests and she wants all those interests to be valued. She wants their to be genuine care and hope and love between teacher and learner, learner and learner, learner and community…

Freire and Noddings:

In many ways, Noddings spells out one way of making Freire work in schools. She gives us many ways for kids to explore. But less is her emphasis on transformation and activism and change like Freire- its there, and I think she would support it, but she’s not structuring her work around it. Freire, on the other hand, I think would LOVE Noddings circles, and would build on them in order to emphasize the need to access power and cultivate beleif and empowerment. Freire is a little more about bringing to the center of the discussion the marginzalized, and sparking power and hope that leads to sustainable knowledge about how to work with, access, change, collaborate on or about many subjects. He’s like the spark to discovery. Noddings is a little more about just loving and caring.

And what comes to mind?

La Loma.

Thats not a story I feel like writing right now, but its deeply relevant to this all of this. It has Freire action, organizing, grant writing, accessing power, locating power in the center of the circle of young people doing an ice breaker. It has Noddings caring, in the sheer love and friendship it was built upon. I think it gets at all of Freire’s themes, and I think its beauty takes us back to Noddings.

The whole thing was like Millie’s video. That was hot.

~ by chelseyhauge on December 17, 2008.