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On the first Saturday in May 1997, literacy lost one of its greatest champions, and teachers lost one of their most powerful role models. The death of Paulo Freire, a teacher of rare tenacity, integrity, and belief, seems to make the hope that teachers have taken from him less powerful, even less possible, than before. Freire's work has always been about making the connections, as he put it, between the "world and the word." Teachers now have only his words-and not the constant example of his action-to find the connections to their own worlds of teaching and learning.
As teachers struggle to connect world and word for ourselves, we need to remember and take heart from Freire's warning: "To read is to rewrite, not memorize the content of what is being read" (Critical Consciousness 100). Recognizing his popularity among educators in the United States, Freire cautioned: "It is impossible to export pedagogical practices without re-inventing them. Please, tell your fellow Americans not to import me. Ask them to recreate and rewrite my ideas" (Politics of Education xiii-xix). That warning, sounded over and over again by Freire during his many talks to teachers in the United States, should receive special attention now, when we no longer have his continual admonition as a guide. How teachers might re-create, rather than import, Freire into our own North American contexts-and so not lose the power of his ideas-is the subject of this essay.
To remake Freire, to exercise our own critical perception in contexts of real work and meaningful action, both in the classroom and in the discipline, teachers need to look at our particular North American contexts and use them in responding to Freire's educational imperatives. Here we want to place Freire's work alongside, if not within, a tradition of North American pragmatic philosophy that Cornel West terms "distinctly American" and "the best that America has to offer itself and the world" (American Evasion 8). This essay takes the method of pragmatism and connects it to Freire's concept of praxis to argue for pragmatic theory and practice in the work of teaching literacy. This connection, we believe, puts Freire into a new context where he becomes more than an "import" to North American classrooms. We are not suggesting...