In Reading the World and Reading the Word: An Interview with Paulo Freire (1985), Brazilian educator, scholar, and community activist, Paulo Freire, explained his conception of literacy: “If we think of education as an act of knowing, then reading has to do with knowing. The act of reading cannot be explained as merely reading words since every act of reading words implies a previous reading of the world and a subsequent rereading of the world. There is a permanent movement back and forth between ‘reading’ reality and reading words – the spoken word too is our reading of the world. Reading the word is not only preceded by reading the world, but also by a certain form of writing it or rewriting it. In other words, of transforming it by means of conscious practical action” (p. 18).
Known for his progressive literacy pedagogy, Freire’s emphasis on the relationship between the world and the word exemplifies how we, at Summers-Knoll School (SK), prioritize the development of students’ academic knowledge in relationship to the development of their understanding of the world – while students learn how to read and write print text in the early grades and become critical readers and writers in the latter grades, concomitantly, they are also deepening their understanding of the world and translating their learning into action.
As a project- and place-based school, projects provide students with a real purpose for their work, which includes having an authentic audience beyond their grade-level peers and classroom teacher; cross-grade peers, parents, and community members serve as authentic audiences. Students not only present their work to audiences outside of the school; they also learn from community members outside of the school who are experts in relevant and related fields of study. Our in-house SK buses enable teachers to take students out into the community and learn about, and from, the world outside the school walls.
During the past two weeks, SK teachers have launched their first projects and taken their first field trips of the year. In preschool, they kicked off their Deserts, Rainforests, and Aquatic Life project with a field trip to the Malletts Creek Ann Arbor Public Library to browse for books on deserts, oceans, and rainforests. In Young 5s/Kindergarten, they launched their Identity Book project with learning about how authors use both text and illustrations to communicate their ideas. In the 1st/2nd graders’ Light, Emotion, Color, Sound project, students have been using all of their senses to explore the relationships among light, emotion, color and sound – this week, they went to the Ann Arbor Hands On Museum to experience these phenomena through interactive, science-based exhibits. The 3rd/4th graders have launched their place-based investigation of local water health through weekly walks and visits to Malletts Creek. The 5th-8th graders just started their Science Demonstration project. After an introduction to Newton’s 3 Laws of Motion, they began conducting experiments to more deeply understand the physics principles underpinning these laws. On their field trip to Tillers International, the 5th – 8th graders witnessed Newton’s Laws in action as they interacted with with farming tools and practices that were developed prior to the advent of electricity and are still used today.
At SK, students make connections among who they are, what they are learning in school, and the world around them. As one Upper School student, Hasan Rehman, said when reflecting upon his experience with Walk with Little Amal (see previous post), “Empathy for me means that you have a shared feeling. Or a feeling that you can get when you see someone in a bad situation. Learning about Little Amal and the refugee crisis has made me feel empathetic for the people who have actually dealt with all these hardships. I used to always think that home is just another word for house. However as I grew older and learned more about the world I learned that home can be things other than my house. It can be my family or pets. Even after that I started to feel like my home was still my house until I moved and started thinking that my home was actually not my house and I am now here.” As Hasan’s reflection demonstrates, “reading the world” can literally lead to a deeper understanding of a word. As students continue to delve deeper into the meaning of words, their understanding of the world deepens and vice versa, which brings us back to where we started in this post: the Freirean notion of the iterative relationship between reading the world and reading the word.
For more on Freire and how his work has influenced my teaching and scholarship, see Symons, C. & Gajasinghe, K. (2022) Digital storytelling as a Freirean-based pedagogy with refugee-background youth. In S. Barros & L. de Oliveira (Eds.) Paulo Freire and Multilingual Education: Theoretical Approaches, Methodologies, and Empirical Analyses in Language and Literacy (176 – 195). Routledge. ISBN: 9780367773557.
(Photo: Lake Erie Metropark, July 24, 2023, SEMIs Coalition Summer Intensive Professional Development.)