Praxis

Spring/Summer2010:Volume3,Issue1

Dear Paulo
Eduardo Lopez, UCLA

Dear Paulo, For years I have wanted to share with you how you have impacted my lifes work, but for many reasons I had put off this task until now. Inspired by Sonia Nietos book Dear Paulo: Letters from Those Who Dare Teach, a group of students in the Teacher Education Program at UCLA invited me, as their teacher, and their classmates to write you a letter. To honor their request, and to finally express my gratitude for your work, I write the following letter in your honor. Growing up in the working class Mexican immigrant community of East Los Angeles, I quickly learned to associate school with boredom. I sat in the back of classrooms half listening and half asleep, wondering when in my life I would use anything taught in school. At the time I could not clearly articulate where this boredom came from but I continued to move through the educational pipeline because I feared what my parents would say when I showed them my report cards. Despite my resistance to schooling, I learned to love reading. Books gave me wings to fly above my world of frustration and boredom. My parents surrounded me with books and encyclopedias and the library became my sanctuary. Soon enough, I embraced an idealized notion that I would become a Jesuit scholar, able to completely immerse myself in studying without much distraction. I eventually enrolled in a Catholic Jesuit university majoring in psychology and theology with the goal of returning to East Los Angeles to offer counseling services as an ordained priest. During my sophomore year, I enrolled in a course where we read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and my life plans changed. Although you were writing about your work with Brazilian peasants, I saw my own schooling experiences reflected in these pages. With each page I turned, I felt like I was pulling back a veil that finally allowed me to clearly see what schooling had done to me. Your discussion of banking education gave me the language to name where my boredom of school came from. It allowed me to understand the impact made by high school teachers who over the years yelled that I would never amount to anything in life. Thereafter I understood why I had become ashamed of my language, culture, family and working class identity. My thoughts became inflamed with excitement as I struggled to understand what you meant by problem posing education,

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praxis, dialogue, and critical consciousness. If this was what humanizing education felt like, I wanted more! After finishing your book, I made a promise to devote my life to learning more about your ideas and to share them with others. Its been 16 years since I made that promise. I earned a doctorate degree in education in the Claremont Graduate School of Education where I was fortunate to work with one of your former students, Dr. Antonia Darder. In her presence, I saw your spirit invoked. I identified with her anger and struggle to transform schooling conditions in marginalized communities. For the first time in my life I experienced education as a practice of freedom. I learned to struggle with critical theory, critical pedagogy, cultural studies and the political economy of schooling. Most importantly, I learned to develop an educational vision of schooling that was linked to social and economic justice, human rights, and love. I have also found myself working in a number of different contexts in which I have attempted to reinvent your work. I have taught at an all boys Catholic high school, an after school program, college outreach programs, community college, adult education, and a public university. I currently work for UCLAs Teacher Education Program and I find it to be the most challenging work to date. What makes this work so difficult is that we are in the midst of one of the largest economic declines since the Great Depression. Urban public schooling conditions have steadily deteriorated as a result of school districts laying-off teachers and staff while increasing class sizes and slashing academic programs and resources. In the midst of these dire circumstances, I began to lose hope as my family, friends, students and I struggled to survive economically. Overwhelmed by the financial crisis and the reduction of social spending and investment in public education, I turned again to your work, hoping to find some guidance out of the sea of despair. Recently I read your book Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage and was particularly moved by the following passage: The world is not finished. It is always in the process of becoming. The subjectivity with which I dialectically relate to the world, my role in the world, is not restricted to a process of only observing what happens but it also involves my intervention as a subject of what happens in the world. My role in the world is not simply that of someone who registers what occurs but of someone who has input into what happens. I found your words affirming and healing. Your words touched and encouraged me to continue trying to implement your pedagogy. I realize now that no matter how bad things are, the world is not finished. My actions and words have an impact on how the world unfolds. Because I have witnessed firsthand how your work has empowered teachers, I remain hopeful that as educators we can transform conditions in urban schools. Over the last five years, I have worked with teachers on developing and writing a Masters inquiry project. The project requires teachers to develop a question based on their own curiosity, their students learning, or their teaching practice. As a framework to guide the inquiry

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Spring/Summer2010:Volume3,Issue1

process, I use three of your central ideas: helping teachers read their students as if they were texts, linking practice and theory, and grounding their work in love. Teachers learn to systemically and intentionally examine their work through an ethnographic lens. I ask them to keep a journal and record their observations of their students and reflections about practice. In class we use the journals to develop critical reflection and to link practice with theory. Praxis becomes a central component of the inquiry process as teachers seek to leverage positive change in the classroom, school and community. If you were still alive and had an opportunity to meet the inspirational teachers I have had the privilege to work with, you would see that these are educators who ground their work in love, as they challenge and demand the best from their students. They unrelentingly work to heal the deep psychological and spiritual wounds our educational system has inflicted upon working class students and despite being overworked and underpaid, these young teachers continue dreaming of a utopian future. Thank you Paulo for all your help and support. Your work has sustained and nurtured me over these years. In solidarity, Eduardo Lopez