After reading Chapter 4; Learn by Doing, I began thinking about my retreat experiences during high school. My junior year at Loyola Academy, I had the opportunity to go on a retreat called, Kairos. The theme of the retreat was to Doubt the1st, Cry the 2nd, Trust the 3rd, and Live for the 4th. The theorist Freire believed that, “for learning by doing to occur, there must be reflection. Reflection occurs through dialogue with other oppressed people and those who seek to end oppression. Freire considered dialogue to be the practice of freedom” (134). Moreover, for reflection to occur during the four days at the retreat, there must have been some dialogue.
Throughout the retreat, many of my peers held back and were not opening up about obstacles in their own personal life. Although the retreat had to reflect on some aspect of God acting in your life, for some people that wasn’t the case. It was their time to converse with other “oppressed” and reflect on how that may have made them a better & stronger person.
I believe in Freire’s theory on learning by doing because just as the Kairos retreat helped many of my high school peers to reflect and realizethat they really are good humanized people, Freire’s theory also applies to second language learners. On page 136-137, there are some key ideas to learning by doing that relate to Freire’s belief. One very important one that I saw work on the Kairos retreat is one that I will take in my classroom. It states, “Finally, as teachers, we need to be aware of who is served by knowledge. A literate person has opportunities to influence the world; a non-literate person can reach fewer people and has less of an opportunity to develop a comfortable life. The purpose of teaching literacy is to give students greater choices, which leads to humanization, in the terms of Confucius and Freire” (137).
in doing we learn to be reflective in our practices. Something that Freire brings to the table is the concept of a tension between two classes of people which is more than true in our educational system today. There are the privileged and non-privileged students that struggle for the teachers time and investment. Recognizing these sociocultural models within the classroom and how these two groups interact within the classroom is crucial to be able to teach students how to elevate themselves from their position. This is a concept that I've having trouble seeing in my TESOL Practicum classroom because the students know they are getting the shaft, but are helpless because of motivation (and even capacity) to elevate their situations. They have the tools and some are able to do it and are motivated to achieve "practicality" in the L2, but some of them aren't psychologically capable or have even had enough formal education to be able to absorb abilities to elevate themselves from their social standing.
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