Interview with Donaldo Macedo - PART 2

Thursday, March 31st 2016 at McMaster Institute for Innovation and Excellence in Teaching and Learning, McMaster University

"What does critical pedagogy have to say about language, literacy, and empowerment?"

The Ethics of Linguistic Democracy in Schools and Societies
In this presentation, Donaldo Macedo will discuss the contradiction that often surfaces when liberal educators feel threatened by the legitimacy of a subordinate group’s struggle—a struggle that may not include them and demands that their liberal treatment of oppression be translated into concrete political action. By refusing to deal with the issue of linguistic racism, liberal educators often dogmatically pronounce that they empower linguistic minority students and give them voice so long as that voice is in English only. This position often leads to the creation of a pedagogy of entrapment: While proclaiming to empower students, educators risk strengthening their own privileged position by shielding themselves from the reality that created the oppressive conditions they supposedly want to ameliorate in the first place. Liberal educators need to understand that they cannot simply go to linguistic minority communities to provide services in English only while preventing marginalized community members from appropriating the very cultural capital from which they, as middle-class educators, have greatly benefited. In this presentation, Macedo will argue for the need to embrace a Freirean humanistic pedagogy designed to develop structures so that excluded linguistic communities can take their own initiative and chart their own course of action, thus eliminating the need for outside liberal and conservative educators’ continued colonialism through English only paradigms that often results in the suffocation of other languages. In other words, accessing educational content in languages that linguistic minority student’s master does not exclude English language acquisition. What educators need to be reminded of, according to Macedo, is bell hooks’s caution that, “it is not the English language that hurts me, but what the oppressors do with it, how they shape it to become a territory that limits and defines, how they make it a weapon that can shame, humiliate, and colonize.”

Donaldo Macedo is a professor of English and a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Education at the University of Massachusetts Boston. A critical theorist, linguist, and expert on literacy and education studies, Macedo is the founder and former chair of the Applied Linguistics Master of Arts Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Macedo has been a central figure in the field of critical pedagogy for more than 30 years. His work with Paulo Freire broke new theoretical ground, as it helped to develop a critical understanding of the ways in which language, power, and culture contribute to the positioning and formation of human experience and learning. Macedo was Freire’s chief translator and English language interpreter. His published dialogues with Paulo Freire are considered classic works not only for their elucidation of Freire’s theories of literacy but also for adding a more critical and theoretically advanced dimension to the study of literacy and critical pedagogy. Macedo’s and Freire’s coauthored book, Literacy: Reading the World and the Word, is central to critical literacy in that it redefines the very nature and terrain of literacy and critical pedagogy. Over the course of his illustrious career, Donaldo Macedo has published more than one hundred articles, books, and book chapters in the areas of linguistics, critical literacy, and multicultural education. His publications include Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (with Paulo Freire, 1987), Literacies of Power: What Americans Are Not Allowed to Know (1994), Dancing with Bigotry (with Lilia Bartolomé, 1999), Critical Education in the New Information Age (with Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, and Paul Willis, 1999), Chomsky on Miseducation (with Noam Chomsky, 2000), Howard Zinn on Democratic Education (with Howard Zinn, 2005), and Imposed Democracy: Dialogues with Noam Chomsky and Paulo Freire (2012).