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Antonia Darder.; Colorado: Westview Press, 2002. 288pp. Paperback. ISBN: 0-8133-3968-5
Antonia Darder brings great political clarity and intensity to the reinvention of Paulo Freire's work. Freire wanted his work to remain alive and vibrant as others reinvented his ideas through their own experiences and political work. Together with progressive teachers, Darder and Freire illustrate what it means to understand teaching as an act of love for democracy and freedom.
The book is alive with Darder's humanity and her own love for teaching. She invites us to see and participate in an intense personal, political, and intellectual engagement with Paulo Freire - a dance filled with love and joy, and also with struggle and pain. As we circle and glide, we begin to experience what it would mean to live democratically and critically. This is a joyful dance full of possibilities - the possibilities a democratic life brings - but also of pain and struggle. Democracy, after all, will not be obtained by chance, but will be the result of an on-going struggle to reinvent power (45-46).
The reader moves with Darder and Freire from recognizing the linkages between a capitalist economy and schools to seeing how an elementary teacher, Alejandro Segura-Mora, links the book La Nina Bonita and the racial issues it raises for his students with the hegemonic control preserving the status quo . This movement up and down and back up again, exploring the intricacies of oppressive structures and their ruthless and efficient work, shows Darder's depth of knowledge and capacity for careful analysis.
If we cannot see, we may have been blinded by force
As I read the book, the questions that I was seeking to have answered were: How far and for how much longer can the conservative backlash continue? How much misery can be inflicted?
Like many progressive intellectuals, Darder acknowledges that we are experiencing a "disconcerting" historical moment. This can be seen when she makes the connection between the 1990s North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its "...debilitating effect on the labor participation in the United States of Latinos, African Americans, and other workers through the swift transfer of factories to countries in Latin America and the Pacific Rim" (3). Darder finds "[e]ven more disconcerting [the] ever increasing...