Pedagogy in Process by Paulo Freire

Author:Paulo Freire
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Coding and Generative Words

Once you have chosen the generative words, using the criteria with which you are already familiar, it is time to elaborate the coding in which they will be included. There is a necessary relationship between the generative words and the coding. Sometimes it is between the word and the coding as a whole. Sometimes only a word is to be abstracted from the coding.

An example of coding that refers to the whole:

Generative Word: “work”.

Coding: men and women working.

An example of a word to be found in the coding:

Generative Word: “brick”

Coding: men working on a construction project in which bricks are clearly in the foregound.

Your work, therefore, is to prepare material in which the coding corresponds to the 17 generative words that will constitute the literacy program for the experimental circles.

I am sending you, as an example, a set of slides that we used in Brazil, with the generative word in the corresponding coding and the slide in which the word appears broken down into syllables.

I shall also send another series of Brazilian slides. This set was produced on education as action expressive of freedom. In the Brazilian experience this material opened up the discussion on the concept of culture. This discussion, in the last analysis, is part of a critical apprehension of the relations between human beings and the natural world. From the transformation of this natural world the specifically human world of culture and of history emerges.

In Brazil this discussion preceded literacy work and continued parallel with it. In Chile, chiefly because the learners were so eager to begin immediately to learn to read and write, the discussion of culture took place during the literacy process. The important thing is that such an analysis take place.

You may find it interesting to test some of the Brazilian codings—those that are closest to your local reality—with some of your groups of learners and to study their reaction.

If you do make such a test, it will be important to record the discussions so that the team there can analyze them critically. In our next visit to Guinea-Bissau, one of the work sessions could center on the study of these recordings as well as on the multiple use of the conversations of the learners. We spoke of this last September when we were with you.

Another point we could work on together in Bissau next February, if Comrade Mario Cabral confirms the proposed dates, is how to motivate the learners so that they will also be able to do some coding in teams. Each team would then lead the discussion of their own codings.

As soon as we have received the material from you—the codings and the generative words broken down—we will make the sets of slides for the program of the reading circles.

Finally, within the next few days, we will send you a photocopy of the text of a book of mine to be published next year about which I spoke to you when I was there. Some of it may interest you.

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