Rob J McCormack

In the English-speaking world, Hans-Georg Gadamer is known principally as a theorist of qualitative research. However, this was a role that was thrust on him by others, more especially by his English-language readership. On the Continent, by contrast, he is viewed as a leading philosophical student of Heidegger and renowned for developing philosophical hermeneutics, a highly innovative generalisation of the theory and practice of textual interpretation to encompass the whole of human experience. In educational endeavours generally, but particularly in language-oriented fields such as Academic Language and Learning, Gadamer, it seems to me, offers many insightful concepts that can enrich both our practice and our understanding of our practice.

Abstract: This paper presents the full version of the National Framework of Adult English Language, Literacy and Numeracy Competence. Information is presented under three headings: The Framework of Language, Literacy and Numeracy Competence; The Framework explained; Using the Framework. The paper discusses the context of current demands for language, literacy and numeracy in the workplace and the community. It describes the scope of the Framework and the three stages in the development and use of ...

INTRODUCTION The current trend towards the inclusion of workplace learning in tertiary education courses raises significant questions regarding the balance between learning to work and learning to learn. Recently, there have been three main approaches to workplace learning (Evans ...

The Learning (or Information) Commons concept has transformed and extended library services in universities worldwide and most university libraries have adopted aspects of the concept. At Victoria University (VU) the Commons has co-located related student services. Student Rovers are a key feature of the service offered. To build an online community of practice for the Rovers, VU experimented with open source social networking software. A central lesson is that, while web-based social networking is essential, the usability and ...

Abstract: This paper presents the full version of the National Framework of Adult English Language, Literacy and Numeracy Competence. Information is presented under three headings: The Framework of Language, Literacy and Numeracy Competence; The Framework explained; Using the Framework. The paper discusses the context of current demands for language, literacy and numeracy in the workplace and the community. It describes the scope of the Framework and the three stages in the development and use of ...

The Learning (or Information) Commons concept has transformed and extended library services in universities worldwide and most university libraries have adopted aspects of the concept. At Victoria University (VU) the Commons has co-located related student services. Student Rovers are a key feature of the service offered. To build an online community of practice for the Rovers, VU experimented with open source social networking software. A central lesson is that, while web-based social networking is essential, the usability and ...

Every adult literacy educator has heard of Paulo Freire, but is he still relevant? Can we still learn from him? Be inspired by him? If you're like me, the only book you have glanced at is Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, Macedo, & Shor, 2018; henceforth cited as PO). And, like me, you probably put it down many times and then never finished it: it's so unrelentingly abstract! needed to confront impending ecological disaster. In short, PO was just one short episode in a long and varied life of educational praxis. To demonstrate that PO did not encompass the full scope or richness of Freire's educational praxis nor of his efforts to articulate the grounds of this praxis in his writings and discourse, I will stage this article in three parts: • Freire: life and times describes Freire's educational journey. • Freire's theorising will argue that Freire is primarily concerned with inviting readers into an educational community of shared ideals. • Freire's praxis comprises two sections: the first is an examination of the 'Freire Method' of Adult Literacy, the second speculates on what Freire might say to us today.

This is the second in a three-part series examining the educational journey, theoretical approach and praxis of Paulo Freire. It is published here to mark the 50 th anniversary of the English translation of Freire's seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Part One, published in the last issue of Fine Print, described Freire's educational journey. This second part focuses on his educational philosophy and Part Three, to be published in the next issue of Fine Print, will examine the 'Freire Method' of adult literacy education and speculate on what Freire might say to us today. Reading the extensive commentary on Freire, one soon discovers two quite different attitudes sitting incongruously side-by-side. On the one hand, a discourse extolling how inspirational he is in his life, his educational work and writings. On the other, impassioned disputes about his theorising, about whether he is a Marxist, a Catholic, a Critical Theorist, a Humanist, a Phenomenologist, a Hegelian, an Existentialist, a Postcolonial, an Enlightenment thinker, a dialectician, a revolutionary or a reformer. As Rosas Torres (1998) observed: There are millions of Freires. In Part One of this article, I emphasised that there were many Freirean pedagogies both pre-and post-Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, Macedo & Shor, 2018. Henceforth cited as PO), even though PO is the only text most of us have encountered. Certainly, before writing this article, PO was the only Freire text I had tackled. In this second part, I will describe Freire's fundamental stance in terms of humanism but show how he was continually trying to bring together competing positions. In this way his theorising was always very dialectical. He was always saying: "We need to work with incompatible theories because each on their own is not enough". This to-and fro-ing helps explain why competing theories try to claim him, but then accuse him of not fully embracing their position. His writings were continually circling around these tensions, conflicts and opposing positions, trying to find a way to reconcile them. There is a second reason for the mutability of Freire's discourse. He trusted his experience and learnt from all the new contexts and experiences he encountered. His thinking was never static; he was not trying to produce a pedagogic system that could be simply 'applied' everywhere. He was attuned and responsive to the particularities of each of the new contexts he faced. His views grew and changed in response to his experience. What was Freire's central message? Educational philosophers, political theorists, Marxists, academics and progressive activists have created an industry arguing about whether Freire's theorising is consistent or makes sense, as well as over which theoretical paradigm he adhered to. My inclination is to simply say it was the ethics he learnt from and through his educational praxis that constituted the unifying core of Freire's life, not his theorising. His theorising was basically a reflective effort to give voice to this ethical core in ways that would be intelligible and credible for other educators and activists. But as his localised educational work became more widely known, he was forced to 'translate' his experience into generalised, more abstract vocabularies and concepts to participate in academic discourse. He was pushed by political circumstances beyond his original focus on developing localised adult education centres, culture circles 1 , and adult literacy in 'backward' northeast Brazil, a setting where he had simply wanted to make sure that poor families were not left behind or left out during the rapid modernisation of Brazil industrially, politically, educationally and culturally. In brief, the different political contexts he encountered, and his responses were: • He began in Brazil with the progressive modernist ideals of the modern democratic social nation state. • In Chile, he wrote to and for radical and revolutionary political activists from all across Latin America. • During his Geneva years, he mainly acted as the provocative coordinator of discussions all around the world for activist and educators. • In Africa, he worked with new postcolonial states setting up adult education networks. • In São Paulo, he was a CEO trying to re-brand the public education system, decentralise decision-making, and promote school-based curriculum development.

This is the third in a three-part series published here to mark the 50 th anniversary of the English translation of Paulo Freire's seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. So far in this series, I have approached Freire from two different angles. Part 1 emphasised the variety and range of practical contexts over his lifetime of experience and learning that shaped and prompted changes to his thinking. Part 2 reframed his eclectic theorising, suggesting that his theoretical writings were not concerned so much with theory as such, but more with articulating an ethico-political ethos, a way-of-being he had discovered in his educational praxis, especially with the culture circles of the Brazilian social movement, Movement of Popular Culture (MCP). Both parts suggested that there was much more to Freire than Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970; henceforth PO). PO represented just one short 4-year phase in a long life of reflection. This instalment examines the actual curricula Freire was involved in designing. This is not an easy task because Freire tends to focus on abstract principles governing the design of curriculum, not concrete procedures or processes themselves. This means it is difficult to figure out what actually does happen-or might happen-in Freirean education. This is not an oversight on Freire's part; he wanted to discourage others from simply imitating his curriculum. But it was also, in my opinion, because he had never really been a classroom teacher. Right from the start, he was a program developer mainly involved in professional development sessions, not actual classroom teaching. As we have seen, his most famous program, the Brazilian adult literacy program, never actually ran. This meant he was more comfortable talking about principles of curriculum design than about actual classroom practices. Admittedly, late in his life, when responsible for public schools and technical institutes of São Paulo, Freire did address his books more towards teachers (Freire, 2005). But, even here he spent more time on general principles than detailed descriptions of actual curriculum in terms of their structures, activities and practices. Teachers have the right and in fact duty to understand what implications for actual classroom practice are implied by Freirean principles. Otherwise, actual pedagogic practice could not be informed by Freirean principles and would be prey to one kind or another of debilitating banking teaching. So, I will try to describe a typical Freirean curriculum because, to my knowledge, he fell back on the same pattern and practices in all his many curriculum designs across quite different contexts. Key elements of Freirean curriculum The overriding goal of Freirean pedagogy is humanism As detailed in Part 2 of this series, humanism is a 2000-year old tradition of education embodied in the liberal arts that is dedicated to producing wise ethical political leaders who can engage in free, reasoned discussion and offer discerning judgements about practical matters in order to bring accord and act collectively on an issue (McCormack, 2011a). These matters elude the grasp of abstract knowledge. This pedagogic tradition, called 'practical philosophy', is concerned with fostering phronesis, practical judgement (McCormack, 1999). It contrasts with 'theoretical philosophy' which fosters Paulo Freire. https://mst.org.br/2017/05/02/20-anos-sem-paulo-freire/

Abstract: This paper presents the full version of the National Framework of Adult English Language, Literacy and Numeracy Competence. Information is presented under three headings: The Framework of Language, Literacy and Numeracy Competence; The Framework explained; Using the Framework. The paper discusses the context of current demands for language, literacy and numeracy in the workplace and the community. It describes the scope of the Framework and the three stages in the development and use of ...

INTRODUCTION The current trend towards the inclusion of workplace learning in tertiary education courses raises significant questions regarding the balance between learning to work and learning to learn. Recently, there have been three main approaches to workplace learning (Evans ...

If you do not wish to construe philosophical discourse as simply a discourse of cognition, a theoretical discourse; if you think it is also a practical, ethical discourse: how should you write? How should you frame the ethos, the authority of your discourse? This article re-presents an extended preface I wrote and rewrote obsessively over a period of nearly two years in an effort to forge a voice and mode of address adequate to my sense of philosophical discourse as a practical discourse, whilst also being accountable to the generic requirements of a PhD. As the textual record of this struggle, the value of this text must remain primarily in its capacity to evoke or provoke similar generic memories or ambitions in the reader.