Stuff you write when you get an advanced journalism degree

Critical Review
Sept 6, 2010
MC620 Dr. Benavides

Said’s modern intellectual has the potential to manifest him or herself in today’s newsrooms and on the Internet as a source of alternative truth and activism in increasingly more powerful ways. Freire’s original ideas about changing the actual meanings of teaching and learning to encompass something altogether greater and more fulfilling is not only inspiring but, as proven in MC620 during my facilitation of the discussion, practical.

What I can’t fail to notice is how Freire and Said’s ideas work in congruence with one another and can be applied at the same time to the same learning situations; the intellectual can serve their role as a teacher and be learning at the same time, transforming reality for the positive through the creation of new ideas and exchanges with students.

While preparing for the discussion in class which I was to facilitate on both Freire and Said, I abandoned the concept of using a mechanized learning tool (the PowerPoint presentation) for a much more communication-based learning method inspired by my reading of Freire. I supposed it would be ironically poor taste to attempt to ‘teach’ Freire’s radically empowering definition of ‘knowledge’ to the class in precisely the way Freire denounces in his article. Assuming a roundtable discussion would not only be more in tune with what we’d been learning about but also intrinsically more enjoyable, the class of MC620 embarked on a journey that ended with not only an overall agreement with Freire’s ideas and the Professor’s suggestion we try to use his methods more frequently in class, but an understood acknowledgement that we had all defined ourselves as ‘intellectuals’ by Said’s standards.

The transformative experience of declaring ourselves thus and delineating our roles as journalists and intellectuals was exactly the kind of reality-defining communication Freire would call ‘learning’. We decided what an ‘intellectual’ was, prompted by Said’s book but interpreted by the class as a group, making that definition ‘real’ for us. I’m interested in how an intellectual can be both a teacher and a student using Freire’s methods, and how a student or teacher must strive to be an intellectual, according to Said’s definition, in order to understand the power that their experience has to make changes in their own lives and the lives of others.

Freire is adamant that words, and their creation and use, are tools of domination and power. Speaking words transforms reality by changing the way people understand those words. Learning also transforms reality by bringing about a change in consciousness. Especially when it is based on an exchange of ideas. According to Freire, the student must constantly be aware of their own existential situation in order to facilitate this kind of transformation, as must an intellectual by Said’s definition. Freire specifically points to ‘denunciation’ and ‘annunciation’ of dehumanizing situations and a thorough analysis and understanding of the situation before words that ‘denounce’ inequality or that ‘announce’ a positive change can be pronounced and become reality. This is not so different from Said’s notion that intellectuals provide an alternative way of thinking to the status quo and a path to finding the truth. Said sees the intellectual as a fighter of oppression and a ‘denouncer’, in a way, of inequality. The intellectual communicates ideas much in the same way a teacher communicates with a student in a dialogue-based learning situation – they seek truth and the empowerment it brings.

“Man and experience is the essence of learning,” according to Freire (Freire, Literacy as Cultural Action, pg 9), and an illiterate is a person who lives in the margins of society because they are ‘cut off’ from the power to transform their own reality. Said draws a parallel to Freire’s illiterate in his definition of an intellectual, but only in that an intellectual’s ideals go against the prevailing norms and the intellectual often finds themselves living in and for the margins of their culture. An intellectual can and should be either a physical or metaphoric exile, or both, because they are a marginal figure outside the comforts of privilege, power, and home. Said suggests that it is not just the job of an intellectual to represent a minority voice, it is their duty. An intellectual works on the fringes of culture to transform the reality of those who lack the power to do so themselves through words, annunciation and denunciation, and teaching.

Freire repeats that transforming reality should be done with the goal of a more equitable and just future in mind. Dialogue-driven learning is a path towards creating a better future through understanding the transformative power of language. The intellectual, hopefully an amateur and not hampered by the pitfalls of professionalism, is “moved not by profit or reward but by love… and unquenchable interest" (Said Reflections on the Intellectual, pg 76.) The intellectual’s motives are pure. Because of the dynamic power and potential change that can come from this type of intellectual and dialogue based learning, both authors are keenly aware of the dangers present when it is put into practice. The propaganda, teachings, words, and cultural illiteracy of those under the influence of the Nazi party, for instance, resulted in cultural turmoil created by power struggles that began with only words and advanced to a sickening physical level.

In MC620, we spent the class time figuring out who we were and what we believed in, using Freire and Said as a jumping-off point. Traditional classrooms would have had us memorize the main ideas of both authors and move on; we attempted to take a step further and actually apply these theories to our own lives at that moment. It is an interesting instant when students and teacher accept a serious change in the power dynamic and are willing to expand and share on a real basis despite the unnerving self-consciousness that comes from the unfamiliar. We were not just talking about Said and Freire at this point; we were seeking to define the power relationships and the risk-taking we were willing to do during the discussion itself. I struggled with how much to let the class discuss without an agenda and weighed it against how much the professor was counting on a structured class and how that would affect my grade. I wondered how much my own input was taken as textbook because I was the facilitator and how much was really just my own train of thought – would people resent that? It isn’t comfortable to enter an unfamiliar, unmechanised learning routine. It is easy to discuss, in lofty and pretentious pseudo-academia ideas about ‘what is the role of the intellectual’, but having to apply it and look inward is infinitely more difficult. It is that struggle, the inner-reflection and threat of actual figurative exile, that is terrifying to us. That’s the kind of change that Freire and Said meant by 'communication'. They should have included a chapter on how intimidating accepting a new definition of ‘reality’ and ‘power’ can be. Then again, maybe they didn’t want to scare us away.

References

Freire, P. (1998). The adult literacy process as cultural action for freedom. Harvard
Educational Review, 68(4), 480-498. Retrieved from PsycINFO database.

Said, E. W. (1996). Representations of the intellectual: The 1993 Reith lectures. New
York: Vintage Books.