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A FIVE COLLEGE
SYMPOSIUM
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BEYOND FREIRE:
FURTHERING THE SPIRITUALITY DIALOGUE
Exploring Paulo Freire's theory and
the spiritual in social justice practice in the 21st Century
AT SMITH COLLEGE
PANEL TITLE: BEYOND FREIRE:
A GENDER PERSPECTIVE
Chair: Frederique Apffel-Marglin, Professor, Anthropology, Smith
College
fmarglin@smith.edu
"After Freire: A Buddhist Perspective on Gender/Sexual Orientation in
Educational Practice"
Professor Lourdes
Argulles, Graduate School of Education,
Claremont University
"Who are the Oppressed?"
Loyda
Sanchez, Director of CAIPACHA,
Cochibamba, Bolivia
"Whose Oppression is this?: The cultivation of compassionate action
in dissolving the dualistic barrier
Phyllis Robinson,
Ed.D. Going Public with Spirituality in
Higher Education, Chancellor's Office, UMass
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS
PANEL TITLE: RE-FRAMING
THE SECULAR AND THE RATIONAL
Chair: Prof. Ashoka Bandarage, Women's Studies, Mt.
Holyoke College
"How the Ideas of Paulo Freire Contribute to the Cultural Roots of
the Ecological Crisis"
Professor Chet A.
Bowers, University of Oregon and
Portland State University, School of Education.
"Beyond Freire and Gandhi: Another way of conceiving political
action"
Siddhartha,
Director and Founder of Pipal Tree, Bangalore, India
"Beyond Critical Theory: Foregrounding race and ethnicity"
Susana
Nakamoto-Gonzalez, Claremont Graduate
School of Education
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LITERACY IN ORAL
CULTURES
Chair: Adjunct Faculty, School of Education, Katja
Hahn-d'Ericco, University of Massachusetts
"The European Impact on Inuit: Dissolving the body and place with
the ideologies of print and price"
Derek
Rasmussen, policy advisor on economic,
social and educational policies to Nunavut Tunngavik, Inc., the
elected body representing the Inuit of Nunavut Territory in Northern
Canada.
"Toward a Pedagogy of Crianza (Nurturance)"
Grimaldo
Rengifo, Director and founder of
PRATEC, Lima, Peru
PLENARY SESSION with all
speakers
Chair: Prof. David R. Evans, Center for International
Education, School of Education, University of Massachusetts
SYMPOSIUM SPONSORS
The Smith Lecture Fund
Five Colleges, Inc.
The Office of the Chancellor, University of Massachusetts.
Third World Studies, Hampshire College
Women Studies, Mount Holyoke College
Center for International Education, University of Massachusetts
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 Scenes
from the Symposium at University of Massachusetts
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Paper Summaries
& Biographical Notes on the Speakers
Lourdes
Arguelles
Lourdes
Arguelles was born in Cuba and educated in North America, Europe and the Tibetan
settlement of Dharamsala in India. She joined the Student Revolutionary Directorate
that fought the Batista dictatorship at age 14 and was a member of the exile
delegation that negotiated with the Cuban government the release of 3500 political
prisoners in 1979/80. She also worked with refugee camps throughout Asia.
She is Professor of Education at Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California
and Director of the Community Learning Network, a series of grassroot learning
exchanges involving faculty, staff, and students of the Claremont Colleges who
work with residents of local communities in the Los Angeles region and U.S.-Mexico
Border cities on issues of homelessness, domestic and police violence, hate
crimes, immigration, and popular education. A former MacArthur Chair in Women's
Studies at the Claremont Colleges, community organizer and psychotherapist,
Professor Arguelles' current teaching and research focuses on grassroots learning
theory, narrative inquiry and therapy, non-industrial ways of living, learning,
and dying, and wisdom traditions. Her work has been published in academic and
popular journals around the world. Professor Arguelles is currently working
on a book entitled "Grassroots Learning: An Unschooling Agenda". She lives with
her life companion, Anne Rivero, in the San Jacinto Mountains of Southern California.
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Loyda
Sánchez Bejarano bsalsa@supernet.com.bo
Who are the
Oppressed?
This article explores the
author's journey of personal change via political
activism and ultimately de-colonizing herself by living
with Andean peasant farmers (campesinos). After suffering
many hardships and exile in the 70s, the author turned to
participatory education (PE) as a tool for organizing
social-revolutionary change among Bolivian campesinos.
This was an expression of a deep commitment to
Socialist-Leninist views to societal liberation grounded
on the premise that the working masses could never form
their own philosophy of change. However, dialectics, has
little meaning from an Andean-centered perspective. The
authors relationship to the communities was based on
workshops stressing action-reflection-action, which
started with the campesino's practical experiences, then
moved on to reflection and the realization of larger
patterns at play in their lives. But the campesinos were
not able to abstract their own practices as phenomenon at
the margins of their lives. Instead they lived their
feelings, ideas, and thoughts; they stayed in their
immediate life contexts; they did not live life as a
class struggle; they saw life as a series of
circumstances.
The author later acknowledges
that action-reflection-action is based on a way of
thinking of the world that is very rational and
scientific. The author and her team tried to organize
campesinos into syndicated cadres, to no avail - because
they never had the same person twice in their workshops,
given the Andean sense of knowledge sharing. A notion of
class struggle was meaningless within the Andean-centered
perspective where hierarchical authority was
non-existant. Instead, authority was based on a communal
sense of rotating leadership responsibility.
Understanding this notion of
community from the Andean perspective came slowly to the
author and her team, where every aspect of life saw the
presence of mutual cooperation. Ultimately, they came to
understand that their way of thinking was
methodologically flawed. A notion which had previously
assured them that revolution not only was possible but
necessary, was based completely on "faith" and governed
by universal laws. Under this conception, what was
understood was that the oppressed were the peasants and
the day laborers, when in fact, the author and her team
themselves felt oppressed because they sought to change a
world that did not conform to their ideas. While at same
time the Andean campesino, simply nurtured everything. In
time the author and her team found themselves transformed
by the nurturing they received throughout the workshops,
activities and fiestas with the campesinos.
 Loyda
Sanchez is Bolivian, born in a small town on the Brazilian border. She
studied economics at the Universidad Mayor de San Andres in La Paz, and
later studied pedagogy in Cochabamba, both in Bolivia.
Since 1970 she was a militant of the ELN, the army founded
by Che Guevarra. Due to this activity she was exiled to
Chile, Argentina and Peru. She was incarcerated in 1976 by
the Bolivian military government until 1978 and then
deported to Argentina. Back in her country she worked for
the Central Bank for a year until there was another military
coup that forced her to take refuge in the city of
Cochabamba in 1980.
From 1980 until 1990 she has worked with indigenous peasant
communities in the valleys around Cochabamba as a member of
several NGOs. During this time she worked intensely with the
Freirian methodology of Popular Education. Toward the end of
the 80s she begins a critical reflection on this
methodology, grounded in her experiences with the
communities she worked with.
She is currently the coordinator of CAIPACHA, an NGO
dedicated to Andean/Amazonian cultural affirmation and
mental decolonization. CAIPACHA accomplishes this
principally through a Graduate Course on "Andean Culture and
Agriculture" as well as through projects dedicated to the
revalorization of peasant knowledge and technology, to the
increase of bio-diversity and of the phytogenetic resources
of the peasant communities.
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Phyllis
Robinson PfierroRob@aol.com
Whose Oppression Is
This? The cultivation of compassionate action
in dissolving the Dualistic
Barrier
When finding the cause and
imagining the solution to another's suffering is our profession, a
barrier is erected. Our expertise separates us from those we wish
to help. This paper examines this dilemma from the personal
perspective of a participatory education practitioner who
attempted to take Freire's theories of oppression into her work
with Cambodian Buddhist nuns in the refugee camps on the
Thai-Cambodian border. The paper is a subjective view of the
author's journey; a painful awakening to the harmful effect which
an attachment to an ideal of liberation can have. Insights from a
Buddhist practice of mindfulness help the reader see how the
author now views her work as"suffering with"–a more open and
flexible view. In the words of physician, Naomi Remen: "she serves
life not because it is broken, but because it is holy".
Phyllis
Robinson, Director of "Courageous Crossings", an organization which provides
meditation retreats for international development workers, is based in Amherst.
She has spent 10 years working with women in Cambodia and prior to that in the
refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border. Her training in Freirean approaches
to education came from her doctoral work at the Center for International Education
at the University of Massachusetts.
Her experience of the limitations of Freirean pedagogy came early during her
work with Cambodian Buddhist nuns in the refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian
border. Her PhD thesis explores the issues raised by this experience.
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 Grimaldo
Rengifo grimaldo@ddm.com.pe
Grimaldo Rengifo was born in Tocache, a small town in
the Upper Amazon region of Peru. He holds a B. Ed. From the
National University del Centro, Huancayo, Peru and went on
to study anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica
del Peru. He is the founder and coordinator of PRATEC, which
was created in 1988. PRATEC started teaching a graduate
course in 1990 on Andean Culture and Agriculture. This was
the first time that Andean agriculture - world famous for
its astounding bio-diversity and creativity - was being
taught at the University level. None of the 24 Faculties of
Agronomy of Peru include native agriculture in their
curriculum.
Before creating PRATEC, he held various posts in government
and international organizations, including UNEP and FAO. He
also worked for several years as a trainer at the Centro
Nacional de Investigacion y Capacitacion (National Center
for Research and Training) for the agrarian reform. It is
during that time that he employed Freire's method of popular
education. After this he became the Executive Coordinator of
an international rural development project funded by the
Dutch government at CENCIRA. He is the author of numerous
books and papers.
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Chet
Bowers chetbowers@worldnetATT.Net
Chet
A. Bowers has served on the faculty of the University of Oregon and Portland State
University, and is now semi-retired. He is the author of 11 books, numerous articles
that address the connections between education, culture, and the ecologicl crisis.
His most recent books include: Educating for an Ecologically Sustainable Culture:
Rethinking Moral Education, Creativity, Intelligence and Other Modern Orthodoxies
(1995); The Culture of Denial: Why the Envrironmental Movement Needs a Strategy
for Reforming Universities and Public Schools (1997); Let Them Eat Data: How computers
affect education, cultural diversity, and the prospects of ecological sustainability.
(2000)
His most recent book, The Practice of an Eco-Justice Pedagogy is now
in press
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Siddhartha
Siddhartha studied law in India and Anthropology at the Sorbonne in
Paris. From 1982 to 1984 he was the international coordinator of INODEP
International in Paris and before that was INODEP's Asian coordinato r
during 4 years. INODEP's founder and first president was Paulo Freire.
He founded several organizations in India and in Europe
including the South-North Network on Cultures and
Development, both in Brussels. In India he founded the
following organizations: The Institute for Cultural Research
and Action (a training institute for social activists partly
utilizing the Frierian methodology); Fedina (a field
organization working in 15 tribal and peasant villages in
South India); Pipal Tree (a network for fighting
fundamentalism and promoting communal harmony as well as
cultural and spiritual renewal).
He is currently the Asia-Pacific coordinator of The Alliance
for a Responsible and United World, an international program
on social alternatives. He is also the coordinator of a
global alternative media program called "The Transforming
World".
Siddhartha publishes regularly in the Indian as well as in
the international press on social issues. He also has
published chapters in several books. He is currently editing
a book on Culture and Democracy in the Asia-Pacific region
for the Intercultural Library in Paris.
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Derek
Rasmussen derekr@nunanet.com
The
European Impact on Inuit: Dissolving the body and place
with the ideologies of print and price
Paulo Freire called for "intervention",
"liberation" and "transformation"; he called for the "oppressed"
to rescue themselves with the help of his liberatory pedagogy
(Freire, 1974). Freirean educators believe that conferring
literacy on members of an oral culture would make them, in
Havelock's words, "wake up from the dream." Nunavummiut have
serious reservations about the Freirean rescue mission, especially
when it seems to lead to the undoing of established ways of life.
The two main life-preservers the Rescuers offer the world are
Education and Economy, otherwise known as print and price,
alphabet and money, bank books and school books. However, what
the rescuers view as tools of salvation, the rest of the world
experiences as the things which cast them further adrift. We
Euro-Americans -- and I include Paulo Freire here -- we believe
that we are compassionate. We don't like to see suffering. The
Buddha said : "Cease to do evil, learn to do good, that is the way
of the awakened ones." Well, 80% of the worlds resources are
being diverted to us--the 20% of the worlds' richest people.
Instead of spending a lot of time and money trying to help the
rest of the world learn our economic system or learn our
educational system -- maybe it would be better if we focused on
putting our own houses in order. Maybe this could be thought of
as a "pedagogy for the oppressor."
Derek
Rasmussen is a policy advisor to Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated (NTI), the representative
body for the Inuit of Nunavut Territory in Canada. In 1993, after a 20 year struggle,
the Inuit of the Eastern North American Arctic settled a land claims agreement
with the Canadian government in addition to Inuit title to 350,000 square kilometers
of land. Derek advises NTI on economic and social policies, including education
policy; he has lived in Iqaluit, the new capital of Nunavut, since 1991.
Derek Rasmussen received an MA in Education from Simon Fraser
University and prior to moving to Nunavut, attended a Buddhist
seminary school in Ontario for three years. He has also been active
in peace and anti-intervention movements, as a cofounder of the
Canadian East Timor Program in the early 1980's.
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Susana
Nakamoto-Gonzalez
Susana Nakamoto-Gonzalez was born in Lima, Peru and was educated in
Peru, North America, and Hawaii. She holds her BA in Sociology and MA
in Linguistics and Literature. She has taught at the University of
Hawaii and at the High School and community college levels in
California. While conducting her doctoral studies she also served as
a faculty associate in the School of Education at Claremont Graduate
University. During the nineties Susana served as coordinator and
regional director of the California Reading and Literature Project
(CRLP). It was during this period of study that Freirian pedagogy and
philosophy guided her literary curriculum. Recently Susana completed
her doctoral coursework and dissertation proposal at Claremont
Graduate University, Center for Educational Studies. Inspired by her
doctoral studies and personal and teaching experiences her research
interests have focused on multi-racialness, pedagogy of spirituality,
and spirituality and science. Currently Susana is member of Pi Lambda
Theta International Honor Society and Professional Association in
Educational Studies at Claremont Graduate University. She is a
full-time faculty member of Golden West College in
California.
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