i'm loving matt damon

Matt Damon talks to Piers Morgan about President Obama, audacity and the difference between training and education!

Matt Damon gets it. He understands why "training" is not good enough for our kids.

What about adult literacy practitioners and policy makers? Do we understand the difference between training and education? I think we do.

It seems to me that more and more we are choosing training instead of education for adult literacy learners. Is that true? Is it what adult literacy learners want?

Sr. Freire is alive and well in...

West Sacramento, California...

For three months, a group of teens in West Sacramento, called the Sactown Heroes, took cameras and microphones to the streets to document what they liked and disliked about the city and talk about changes they would like to see.

Throughout the project, youth documented their views on West Sacramento through videos, photographs, and audio recordings, which are posted on this map.

They presented their work and their ideas at City Hall this week.

Describe your reality.

Reflect upon your reality.

Plan how to change your reality.

Transform your reality.

You can read more at the Sacramento Bee :: West Sacramento teens make their voices heard at City Hall

love

From the Freire conference.

While waiting for the Freire conference to begin, a colleague told us about being laid off. She was told that the organization could no longer afford her work and then left with a person contracted to escort her from the building. She told us, "They said that is how things are done now - it makes it easier for everybody. I think they thought they were doing the right thing."

In the introduction to Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire hopes for "the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love." The conference was about how people remember and reinvent Freire and we were told powerful stories of love and working to keep people at the centre of processes.

Funding cuts are hurting us, our friends and our field. When we say goodbye to our beloved co-workers, we miss them and everybody misses their contribution to our collective wisdom. Often we are unable to find ways for them to stay in literacy and that hurts too. A couple of my Freire conference friends helped me work in literacy during the year Literacies was not funded. It helped me stay connected and energized and, well, it helped me stay. Thank you.

My hope is that we can remember Freire and honour our best literacy traditions by keeping people at the centre of even the most painful processes and treating them with love.

freire!

There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘the practice of freedom,’ the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1999. p.16

toronto event... FREIRE!

For those of you who will be in Toronto on May 2...
Remembering Freire, Reinventing Freire
A half-day conference and dialogue
on the 10th anniversary of the death of Paulo Freire
May 2, 2007, 1.30-7.00 pm (followed by reception)
OISE/University of Toronto
252 Bloor ST. West, Toronto
7th floor, Peace Lounge
For more information and to register, please send a message to freireconference2007@gmail.com