1
MEDIA EDUCATION
FOUNDATION 60 Masonic St. Northampton, MA 01060 | TEL 800.897.0089 | info@mediaed.org | www.mediaed.org
Culture, Politics & Pedagogy A Conversation with Henry Giroux Transcript Introduction GIROUX: My name is Henry Giroux, and I’m at Mc Master University here in Hamilton Canada. I am the global TV network chair in English and Communications. On Paolo Freire GIROUX: I was a high school teacher in the early, in the early sixties and I was working with a principal a vice principal who was raising lots of questions about my pedagogy And I have been putting students in circle and sort defying what was then a very regimented sort of militaristic kind of utterly barring sterile form of approach to teaching. And he didn’t like it and he was asking me all sorts of questions about how I could justify this and the fact of the matter is I didn’t have the language to justify it. I felt it was right but I couldn’t really talk about it in a way that was convincing and somebody had given me a copy of Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy Of the Oppressed” in which all of a sudden I had a language the allowed me in a very fundamental way to sort not only explain what I was doing but to get a greater sense of why I was doing it, and soon afterwards I wrote a long review of Paulo’s book and I sent it to a journal called “Interchange” actually in Canada who then sent it to Paulo to review and Paulo wrote back something like this should have been reviewed the day before yesterday this should have been published the day before yesterday. He had an interesting sense of humor. He then wrote to me and said “I just love this, this is really captures the essence of my work,” and the a correspondence began and then we you know we eventually became friends and we became co-editors of a series we became coMEDIA EDUCATION FOUNDATION | www.MEDIAED.org This transcript may be reproduced for educational, non-profit uses only.
© 2006