From Freire to Fuller: Implications for the 21st Century Multicultural English Education

Abstract

This presentation is about educational ideas from two important figures: Paulo Freire (1921-1997) and Robert W. Fuller (1936-). It will in particular present and discuss Freire’s (1970/2000) Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Fuller’s (2004) Somebodies and Nobodies extracting philosophical and existential ideas and pointing out how theirs are related to each other. It will then use their “critical lenses” to investigate into English educational situations in Korea. More specifically, it will examine responses from students who tend to sleep in English classes, to the question of what they want the school or teachers to do for them (so that you won’t sleep during class). The presentation will show that the Freire/Fuller points have a number of implications on English educational improvements in Korea in view of its on-going “multiculturalization”, will suggest a number of practices and/or projects drawing from them. Further it will show that their ideas shed a beacon light that methodologically schools and English educators need to pay more attention to student voices for achieving realistic improvements in their schooling practices.