Berlin--the guy, not the city or 80s pop group

This (_Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures_)is officially one of my favorite books--seriously.

In my last post I mentioned how I was influenced by _Pedagogy of the Oppressed_, and while Berlin explicitly acknowledges Freire, I found it helpful to connect some dots for myself, especially vis-a-vis what amounts to a critique of the position by Hairston. Here's the move that Berlin is making, in my opinion, starting with Freire:

I had a professor (Dr. Prahlad, actually) who made a connection between _Pedagogy of the Oppressed_ and Frantz Fanon's _The Wretched of the Earth_, the latter of which included a call for native populations of decolonizing countries to be educated as a means of empowerment and while I agree with the assessment, it also led me to think about how easy it probably would be to regard_Pedagogy_ as something outside of the realm of education in the U.S. But, of course, though the moves Berlin makes here, it's apparant that the U.S. is precisely where Freire's pedagogy can and should be employed. Freire's critique of the "banking" concept of education, in which the student is viewed as "tabula rasa," to be written by the teacher, lends itself to the postmodern critique as outlined by Berlin. Berlin asserts that "Placing Freire within a postmodern frame enables us to relate this silencing of citizens through literacy education to the formation of subjects as agents" (101). This brings to mind *for me* Althusser's concept of *interpellation* that we've discussed in class, where the individual is *made* the subject within a discourse--called forth, literally (the classic example is of a police officer shouting "Hey you!"--at the moment one acknowledges and responds to the officer's call, one becomes the subject of it--one is interpellated). As has already been discussed, the presupposition (to which I happen to agree) is that we are all subjects--we all exist within and indeed are constructed by discourses. Freire (and Berlin) want to empower the subject of the discourse of education--that is, the student. Freire possessed a strong aversion to the student-teacher dichotomy of traditional pedagogy--like Berlin, he sought to democratize the classroom, to *enact* democracy as a pedagogical tool (it *is* hard to operationalize, as many have noted, but one simple move, in my opinion, is the simple acknowledgment that teacher--in the traditional sense--can also be students in their own classrooms, learning from their students as much as their students learn from them).