122 Marie-Cécile Bertau and John L. Roberts
interaction for their students who will then practice which each other and
finally be able to think in an effective way by themselves.
4.4. Liberating Learning
Dialogic learning aims at working in a border-crossing way, generating
awareness of our own and others’ perspectives and self-conscious
knowledge; it seeks to stay open to the unexpected voices; it is alert to
different voices of different power statuses and works with this multi-
voicedness explicitly. With this ethical standing, dialogic learning is
closely linked to dialogic pedagogy not only as its logical counterpart but
also regarding its ethical tradition. Indeed, there is a small, yet important
strand of dialogic pedagogy that starts with Freire’s Pedagogy of the
Oppressed (1970) and Freire and Shor’s A Pedagogy for Liberation
(1987).
The work of the Brazilian activist Paulo Freire makes clear that
learning is always occurring within a political context. We can and should
ask: Who is supposed to learn, and to learn not? (Poor people? Workers?
African-Americans? Native Americans? Women? Immigrants? Disabled?).
What types of tools and language skills (written as well as oral) are made
accessible or not for whom? What kind of education is provided for whom
in any given country? This returns to the historical considerations about the
learning agendas of societies (sect. 2), especially for the dominant societies
of WEIRD capitalistic countries. Freire distinguishes between two forms of
education with two very different attitudes to dialogue. In what he calls
banking education, “knowledge is considered a gift bestowed by those who
consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to
know nothing” (1970, p. 58); in contrast, in problem-posing education,
teachers enter into a dialogue with the students, they consider their students
as fellows and as co-investigators into a common reality. Here, learning
and education are an important moment in liberation from oppressive
conditions, from authorities pretending to ʻpossessʼ the real truth, and from
those who speak to students as empty vessels for selected information.