The «Act and think» principle by Paulo Freire in the context of school literary education

Abstract

The author views literary education as a factor that stimulates students’ psychological development, including their thinking processes and ability to act. He shows an affinity between this approach and the «act and think» principle put forward by the Brazilian pedagogue Paolo Freire. He outlines the activity/thought paradigm of literature teaching and characterises the features of research literary and creative literary activities carried out by students. The author focuses on the ways of analysing literary works and studying historical and literary sources. These provide the primary guidance for working with literary material and give students’ activities a deliberate character.

Each way of analysing literary works is shown to be a thought algorithm, a programmed analytic scheme that directs students’ thinking and activity according to precisely defined rules. «Thinking and acting» means being a researcher and a creator of literature. The ways of analysis the article mentions (event-based, compositional, chronotope-based, image-based, verbal image-based, problem-based/thematic, ideational / conceptual, philosophical, genre-based and structural/stylistic), developed in the scholarly literature, fill school learning with activity and discourage learning literature by rote.

The presuppose a key role of the heuristic method and a large number of independent activities. The author of the article defends the idea that ways of analysing literary sources should be part of the theoretical knowledge system and guide practical (research, creative) activities of the students. Only then is the application of “think and act” principle justified as the students will be able to independently direct their learning activity in the context of literature study.