Freire's Theory of Dialogic Pedagogy

Credit for initiating the theory of dialogic pedagogy belongs to Paulo Freire. His perspective is outlined in his seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1993 [1970]), and further developed in other books such as Pedagogy for Liberation, jointly authored with Ira Shor (Freire & Shor, 1987). In most of the rest of this book, we draw more directly on dialogism, a theory of language associated with the Bakhtin Circle (Brandist, 2002), than on Freire's work. However, it is appropriate to acknowledge at the outset that without Freire there would be no theory of dialogic pedagogy, and his thinking has been enormously influential on the tradition of critical pedagogy that has emerged out of his pioneering work. We do not, therefore, see the perspective developed in this book as counterposed to Freire's vision, but as complementary to it. We have drawn on different theoretical sources to undertake a dialectical development of a view of pedagogy which has its origins in Freire's work. The understanding of language as socio-verbal interaction which derives from Bakhtinian dialogism enables us to pay close attention to patterns of teacher-student communication in naturalistic classroom conditions, to scrutinise them in fine detail and to illustrate alternative modes of interaction to the dominant form of teacher-led recitation. It would be wrong to suggest that Freire ignored this level of analysis in his own work, and indeed he has many suggestions to make which translate quite directly into possibilities to be explored in the concrete practice of teaching. However, later research has investigated classroom discourse empirically and revealed an in-depth picture of typical modes of interaction in this context and ways in which this can be challenged, in a manner which was implicit but sometimes left under-developed in Freire's more theoretical work.