We close this course with a discussion about social action. We've considered artistic initiative so far that serve a humanitarian, a political, or a social need. But it's important to think about the potentially problematic dimensions of artistic service, and some of the pitfalls we'd do well to consider. What are the risks for instance, of engaging in artistic work, that has a larger social purpose in mind? What might be the negative implications of a social model built on artistic foundations and in particular, with classical music? How do we take these pitfalls into account, as we work toward using art for social action? To explore this question, I turn to Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and author, whose work was concerned with the question of education for liberation or education for empowered freedom, particularly in populations who lack access and voice in public dialogue or public life. It's helpful to think about Freire's contexts, to understand his influential work from 1968, Pedagogy Of The Oppressed. Freire was working in government and university leadership positions and projects to educate rural poor adults in Brazil, especially to be literate and thereby empowered in the political process. The projects were geared specifically toward rural populations that couldn't gain a stake in land, ownership rights, and political rights without literacy skills. So the literacy work was really meant to fundamentally improve their positions in society. However, when Freire started into this work, a couple of problems really emerged that were formative for his work. One was that the standard materials used to teach literacy, had no relevance to the lives of his adult learners. He realized there was this tremendous opportunity on the one hand to engage people's existing knowledge by using materials that related to their lived experience, rather than materials that had examples from lives that were completely different from theirs. But also there's this risk if that was not true, that people would be disengaged or maybe worse marginalized by the standard materials that they were using. The second big issue, was that Freire understood that if the goal was empowerment in the classroom, if they were really looking to engage learners in a new empowered freedom, that they had to rethink the traditional methods and traditional notions of authority in the classroom. If the agenda of the program was empowerment and empowering people to have a voice and a sense of agency in the political process, the classroom itself had to change. It had to rethink what might be thought of as an authoritarian educational situation, so that they weren't continually reinforcing this sense of hierarchy and an oppressive conditions, that he was in a larger scale trying to undo. But through his writings, he starts, before education, for considering the educational aspects, such form more fundamental work at the conditions of oppression, that keep underclasses like those he used working with, form opportunities to change their position in society. He writes that, ''The oppressed populations are often lead to understand that the barriers preventing them from growing and changing, are themselves fixed and unchangeable.'' Before going further into this though, let's stop and think about his concept of oppression, the word oppression as Freire uses it. He talks about the oppressed as those who lack the freedoms, the potential to realize themselves as humans. This may be due to racist or classist systems, it may be due to economic or political systems that exclude certain populations. I think it's important to understand that Freire is describing conditions that may seem invisible or may be internalized to the population he is working with. That there are conditions that because they've become the norm, have been internalized by all members of society, seen as entrenched by both for those who are deeply affected and even for those who are not. Therefore, his philosophy and methods for education, involve what he calls critical consciousness. A capacity to examine the conditions present in a person's life to fully understand system, the various systems that may seem extra permanent. Liberation, as Freire describes then, is a condition of people becoming aware and becoming eventually freed from the limited conditions in their lives or societies. He writes, "In order for the oppressed to be able to wage their struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation, which they can transform.'' Freire is clear, that the process of liberation is not one that happens to a person, but rather is a process that needs to be empowering, a process of deep inquiry or practice of dialogue, of reflection, and a search for the meaning of things. Before people can fight for intellectual or social liberation, there's an important period of learning and of critiquing. He says, ''A critical and liberating dialogue which presupposes action, must be carried on with the oppressed at whatever the stage of their struggle for liberation." Critical and liberating dialogue. The opposition or the forces that counter what he calls liberation, he describes as those who don't see the humanity or the integrity of people, but who rather see underclasses as unworthy in some ways, because of maybe inherent weaknesses. It really makes a distinction between a charitable action for instance, that's empty of respect for those who are served by that action or by the charity, and a true act of love which acknowledges the worth and humanness of the people being served. A real humanist he says, ''Can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, then by 1000 actions in their favor without their trust. ''The real humans can be identified more by his trust in the people, than by 1,000 actions that take place without trust." So with this philosophy as a backdrop, for we contrast two approaches to education. The banking method and the problem posing method. The banking method, what it describes as the banking method, we might recognize from a familiar or stereotypical formal traditional classroom environment, where the teacher has the knowledge and the students are empty vessels. The teacher banks knowledge into the students, filling up these vessels in a sense. In this banking method, the teacher's basic assumption about the students that they are empty, contributes to what he calls a dehumanizing of them. By not recognizing the humanness, the uniqueness, the particular perspectives and strengths and stories of the students, by not engaging the students existing knowledge and questions, the teacher may not only makes students feel less involved. But also teacher doesn't open the possibility that through education, students can develop a critical consciousness about the particular forces that make up their world and that may limit or press their lives. Clearly, the other kind of education, the problem posing method that Freire advocates for involves dialogue, collective inquiry together with teacher and student, where the teacher is a co-learner with a student, where the teacher sees the students perspectives as important to their collective understanding of the world around them. Freire makes the point that in such a process of mutual quest for information or mutual project to discover the conditions of their shared world, the teacher as well as the student grows. He says, "For the humanist, revolutionary educator her efforts must coincide with those of the students to engage in critical thinking and the quest for mutual humanization. Her efforts must be imbued with a profound trust in people and their creative power. To achieve this, they must be partners of the students in their relations with them." He later says, "The problem-posing educator." Again the contrast between that banking and the problem posing. "The problem-posing educator constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflection of the students. The students no longer docile listeners are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and reconsiders his or her earlier considerations as the students express their own." This problem-posing method refers to the idea that the mutual examination of issues in the world that can bring students and teachers into a position of inquiry together. That this kind of educational program works in a non-hierarchical way. By continually examining their world and the conditions particular to the people in the classroom, like students and teachers, people have the best chance of understanding the reality that's affecting them all. Then the best chance of transforming that reality when necessary. In problem-posing education he says, "People develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves. They come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation." I think this is such a key word, not a static reality. But the teacher isn't presenting something finished but really it's always changing, it's always on-going. There's always something to discover depending on what day it is and who the students are in front of them. So let's circle back now to what this means for artistic service in the world. There are several questions that I find important for our discussion in this course. As we think about artists, serving people affected by limiting social or political issues like those we've studied so far, be their conditions of war, limits on speech, regional conflict, or entrenched urban poverty. How does an artist view the people they serve? How do we think about artistic service and how can we use Freire's perspectives to make sure that we as artists you those we're serving not for the demographics statistics that so often define people. But for their uniqueness and their contributions. As artists look to understand and to contribute to an issue, can their work be a dialogical? Involving the people served through dialogue so that together, artists and their students or their audiences begin to work together to understand the conditions of what Freire would call oppression. Then, identify how the art may provide an intervention or a helpful tool to help people move beyond those limits. Is there a way that when we're teaching as in the urban education projects we've discussed, that the art forms aren't presented as fixed and unmovable. But rather are presented as dynamic and responsive to various students who were involved. In classical music which is my discipline, this presents many important and difficult questions. To be fury for instance, do we need to abandon the repertoire of classical music in favor of developing new materials or new repertoire that relates to the student's world and their culture. Or another hand, do we incorporate the repertoire and the body of techniques that are part of this musical tradition but approach students with choices, help them to identify links between their lived experiences and the music, help them to live within the art as Maxine Greene would say, in such a way that they can make connections to their lives and their families traditions. Or maybe is the answer somewhere in between. That the art form needs to continually evolve to account for the various cultures and participants and students, and that we need to find ways to continually allow people to identify with the existing repertoire and perhaps in fresh ways. I provide these questions as important points to consider, but not necessarily as finished answers. The pivoting from this, will now explore Robert Greenleaf's ideas of servant leadership, which pick up on some of these same threads and help us conceive of roles for artists serving an important new ways.
