Conscientization

History of Conscientization

Freire first wrote about conscientization in his educational theories on the liberating power of literacy for the oppressed peasants in northeastern Brazil whom he was teaching. In this area of Brazil, blatant discrimination affected economic development and mobility for millions of peasants who, by virtue of their race, class, gender and culture, were sentenced to a perverse poverty with its ever-constant threat of death by hunger. Before he termed this mode of pedagogy ‘conscientization’, Freire had been working for some time with these peasants to develop their literacy in ways that would help them become critically aware of the socio-economic circumstances responsible for their dire poverty and to see how their silenced culture made them voiceless. The term is an approximate translation of the Portuguese word for Freire's pedagogical process that was given to Freire by Dom Helder Camara, a bishop from Recife, Brazil, who told Freire that the type of liberating literacy experiments he was engaging in with these peasants constituted a form of consciousness raising called conscientizacão.

For a while, Freire only used the Portuguese conscientizacão in his writings and teachings, despite being under pressure to translate the term into English. His initial refusal to translate the term was both political and pedagogical. It was political in that he saw the call to translate conscientizacão as emerging from the quasi-colonial expectation on the part of most English-speaking educators that published works in languages other than English be simultaneously translated because English speakers, unlike speakers of different languages, should not be expected to struggle reading works published in other languages. Freire, by refusing to translate his term into English, was in essence pedagogically challenging the parochialism of English monolingualism, which he believed, in the long run, constituted a type of linguistic de-skilling experienced by most English speakers, who remained unaware of the obvious benefits of multilingualism, unaware that their monolingualism sentenced them to a form of cultural and linguistic exile from the world of other languages and cultures, which incessantly produce myriad world views. He saw monolingualism, then, as a cultural cage that prevented English speakers from accessing the insights and knowledge so obvious to those educators who dared to cross cultural and linguistic borders. Eventually, however, Freire did agree to have conscientizacão translated into its approximate English translation, ‘conscientization’, and popularized the term in his writings.

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