Reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Why did it feel empowering to me? Lendo a Pedagogia do Oprimido de Paulo Freire: Por que ela me

Celebrating the work of Paulo Freire for his healing influence, this paper gives an auto-ethnographic account of the author’s personal, pedagogical and political liberation process reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Raised in a conservative patriarchal middle-class atmosphere in central Turkey, the author analyzes her own story of liberation as a woman, as a young scholar, as non-native English-speaking language educator and a citizen of a democratic republic. The author describes how she realized her own subjugation by reading Freire (2005) at a time of personal and political crisis and how she tried hard to find her personal voice. She also depicts the impact of the book on her pedagogy, on her relationships with students and on her liberatory praxis. Finally, the author tells how she transformed her understanding of the dynamics of social transformation reading Freire’s dialogic, problem-posing pedagogy of the oppressed.

I came across the name and work of Paulo Freire in an article on critical applied linguistics (Pennycook, 1990) when I was a doctoral student. I was in my early 30s back then (2010)(2011)(2012) and I was having a hard time on several grounds in my personal and professional Ensino, Saúde e Ambiente -v. 14 n. esp. (2021): Dossiê Paulo Freire para além dos 100 anos: construir utopias, transformar a realidade, p. 121-134.
As Epistemologias Freireanas ISSN 1983-7011 122 life. I was working full time as an instructor and doing graduate studies at an English language teacher education program in Ankara, Turkey. I was grappling with my conflicting roles as a faculty member and a graduate student in the same department. I felt insecure as a novice non-native English-speaking teacher educator in a program with faculty and students with native-like English accents. As a newly married woman, I was trying to mediate my busy work life with my home life refiguring out myself in my new role as a wife. I was often crashing into those gender roles some of which I had long challenged and some of which I never realized I had internalized in the conservative patriarchal family atmosphere I was brought up. Meanwhile, Turkey was going through hard times. As a middle-class woman embracing liberal and secular ideas, I felt desperate and threatened under the repressive neoliberal and neo-conservative regime. Furthermore, I had difficulty understanding how at least half of Turkey's population, including family members, gave consent to the ongoing corrupt and anti-democratic practices in the country.
Reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 2005) at such a time of personal and political crisis at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East was such an eye-opening experience to me it shattered my heart into pieces. It was devastating to see I was also being oppressed and I clearly saw how and why. The more I read, the more I started to name the intersections of oppression I had faced in my personal, educational and political life -as a middle-class woman, as a young scholar, as a non-native teacher/teacher educator of English, and as a citizen of a democratic republic. Unveiling some of the buried layers of the objective and subjective reality I was surrounded by was as agonizing as it was refreshing. Freire   (Canagarajah, 2012;Yazan, 2019). In that regard, here I intend to analyze my own story of liberation both to confront the culture of silence I had to live through and to direct attention to the personal, pedagogical and political dimensions of suppression and emancipation I experienced in my specific context. I expect this article will showcase how dynamics of oppression play out from the lens of a woman scholar in Turkey and demonstrate how the book itself is embraced by a woman educator living in this region. Narration of my personal experience from a subaltern context will hopefully serve as data for further research and theory for the pedagogy of liberation (Yazan, Canagarajah & Jain, 2021). Following Yazan (2019), I acknowledge narrating my liberatory process runs the risk of making my own vulnerabilities public. Though that is a fact, to depict a relatively more authentic version of your story, I assume it is necessary to risk being visible with your weaknesses, mistakes and conflicts. In spite of those concerns, the experience of writing this piece has itself been empowering allowing me to speak out. I hope my account will help readers from various contexts to (re)consider their own stories from a new perspective and to understand they are not alone (Eldemir & Yılmaz, 2021 Freire (2005), I discovered the roots of this mindset.
Because I was engaged in constant "self-depreciation" (p. 63) I was pushing myself too much "to do" and "to be" more. No matter how I looked confident and strong outside, I felt weak and indecisive inside. Being exposed to the deficit discourse in many realms of my life, unconsciously I got convinced of my own second-class position as a woman, as a young academic, as a non-native English-speaking teacher (educator) of English. Without realizing, I was trying hard not to feel "inferior." I had internalized the oppressor's voice implying I was not enough, and I was in a rush to convince my inner voice that I was. Reading Freire (2005), I was able to name my internalized view of the oppressor and started to confront it.
The oppressor in my mind was most often a male authority figure in the micro, meso or macro scale. I had learnt to adhere to paternal authority first at home and then at school, which would be reproduced at the work context. "Adopting their guidelines" (Freire, 2005, p Ensino, Saúde e Ambiente -v. 14 n. esp. (2021): Dossiê Paulo Freire para além dos 100 anos: construir utopias, transformar a realidade, p. 121-134.

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Freire (2005) warned "Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift" (p. 47). I came to understand domination in my small world or repression in the world at large would not disappear by itself -me waiting patiently and submissively. Yet, getting out of my comfort zone was not easy at all. I experienced how painful liberation was in my bones: "Liberation is a childbirth" (Freire, 2005, p. 49). Yet, as a mother of a toddler now, I will claim emancipation is even more difficult than childbirth. Delivering a baby is a one-time event full of agony and amazement while daring to unlearn years of internalized suppression is a neverending process requiring a colossal amount of effort, discovery, patience, and tolerance.

PEDAGOGICAL LIBERATION
"Education suffers from narration sickness" (Freire,p. 71). I was hit by this sentence because it summarizes the years of banking of education I was exposed to. Even at the college level, we had a public speaking professor, who dictated us how to give a good public speech for two semesters reading from her hand-written papers, which turned yellow. In a speaking course, we were just sitting and writing the rules for giving a good talk! We all knew what the professor was doing was a farce at a translation & interpreting program, but we could not say anything. Culturally, we were not supposed to argue against authority figures, or we would be in trouble. This was what we had experienced formerly in family, at schools and in society at large as middle-class citizens of Turkey. Now we were at the best university of the country, and we were the best-scoring students in the university exam. But it did not matter. We had internalized the culture of silence (Freire, 2005, p. 88) and we were reproducing it in our new context at our public university. We probably felt more comfortable not having to speak with our limited English fluency, which was often being scolded by most of our professors. Not taking into account where we were coming from, those privileged professors of ours would look down on us and our Englishes -not attempting to support or encourage us do better.
They killed the remaining crumbs of courage we had for speaking English. Not having access to many resources in English, we had had a limited chance to hear or speak English before college. Internet had just come to Turkey and I was trying to learn how to use a computer and internet when I started university (1997)(1998). What is worse, that professor of publicspeaking was a chain-smoker. Believe it or not, she used to smoke during the class time in our small classroom for almost three hours! No matter how surreal it sounds now, this happened, and we could not open our mouths to say anything. It was clearly unacceptable. But we did not dare to speak! We did not see ourselves entitled to ask for our basic right for a nonsmoking classroom atmosphere, nor demand a quality education for speaking as prospective translators and interpreters. Looking back, this anecdote tells me how suppressed, silenced and domesticated we were and breaks my heart.
I remember when we were K-12 students, my friends and I had a tendency to resist our teachers' attempts to fill us with lifeless trivia and complained about having to memorize what year such and such war took place. We did not want to learn the names of rivers and mountains we had never seen. We did not get excited having to deposit the names of novels we had never read in our memory. Still, we followed the orders to survive and thrive in the system: "The more meekly the receptables permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are." (Freire, 2005, p. 72). There was not much space for inquiry, invention or questioning in most of the classes. We had to accept the passive role assigned to us and had to adapt to the world we took for granted: "When their efforts to act responsibly are frustrated, when they find themselves unable to use their faculties, people suffer" (Freire, 2005, p. 78).
We were suffering, but we could not quite understand what was happening to us. We could not imagine an alternative way of being. Neither could we realize all this was happening to kill our creativity and curiosity.
As Epistemologias Freireanas ISSN 1983-7011 127 Luckily, our schooling was not all about those teachers who treated us as objects.
There were those exceptional humanist teachers who did not narrate but engaged in dialogue with us. They related content to our lives. They respected us. They learnt with us. They read with us. They discussed ideas with us. They challenged us with new perspectives. They helped us see the world from a wider angle. We loved them, respected them and took them as role models. They were the ones letting in some light in the repressive system. Although they had a big impact on many of us, it would take longer for us to learn to ask for more light.
I was not educated to be a teacher, but when I became one, intuitively I followed the Freire's ideas. The more we read, the more we shared our stories of internalized oppression.
We revealed our schooling traumas and saw how most of us had suffered from similar wounds. We all realized we had taken some things for granted in the schooling system and it Ensino, Saúde e Ambiente -v. 14 n. esp. (2021): Dossiê Paulo Freire para além dos 100 anos: construir utopias, transformar a realidade, p. 121-134.
As ISSN 1983-7011 128 was enlightening for us to reconsider those ugly moments in our schooling histories from a new angle. Those conversations helped me clarify some of the mystified parts in my memory and better perceive the reality I had not discovered earlier.
Because most students enrolled in graduate classes are practicing teachers, we do not only go back to our schooling years, but also think about which roles we play as teachers with my students. Confronting reality, realizing how entrapped in the system we are, and noticing how we have played the imposed roles on us hurt even more. We question which side we are on -reproducing the system as it is or challenging it opening counter-hegemonic spaces in our specific contexts. Many of us understand for the first time that we have a choice. We often feel guilty having acted as depositors of knowledge serving the interests of the oppressors unknowingly. We talk about how hegemonic powers surround us and limit our space. We share stories of submission. We tell stories of resistance and struggle. We think about how to enlarge spaces for liberation. We consider the risks: which ones are easy to take, and which ones should be avoided? When is it worth to take the big risks? How do we decide?
As English language educators, we face other dilemmas and sources of injustice exercising our profession. As teachers of a world language, are we contributing to the linguistic imperialism from the metropolitan countries to the dependent ones or are we serving to spread languages of freedom in multiple languages in our repertories? How are we positioned and how do we position ourselves in relation to a global language considering our location and linguistic backgrounds? How do we place ourselves and our Englishes in the linguistic hierarchies? Do we consider ourselves as legitimate English language teachers?
Before reading Freire, I had already become familiar with the idea of native-speakerism (Holliday, 2005), Global Englishes (Rose & Galloway, 2019), and NNEST (Non-native English-Speaking Teachers) Movement (Braine, 2010 (Tezgiden-Cakcak, 2018, 2019a. In addition to reflecting on schooling, teacher roles and linguistic hierarchies during class discussions, I also ask both undergraduate and graduate students to engage in creative Ensino, Saúde e Ambiente -v. 14 n. esp. (2021): Dossiê Paulo Freire para além dos 100 anos: construir utopias, transformar a realidade, p. 121-134. ISSN 1983-7011 129 and critical research projects. They critically analyze themselves and English language teaching materials and they come up with critical auto-ethnographies, and critical language teaching materials. What is more, my students and I have also co-constructed critical reading and discussion circles at our university open to all those interested. Once we set up a critical reading circle and met almost every week to read and discuss a critical pedagogy work. We also built a cultural-educational student group called Maske to build community in our department with another group of students (for the details about my critical English language teacher education practices and these cultural circles, see Tezgiden-Cakcak, 2019b).

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Nowadays we are building a non-hierarchical trans-feminist pedagogy circle to exchange ideas, to hold on to our voices and to build solidarity under an extremely violent social climate towards women and LGTB+ individuals. Turkey. I knew I had to do something other than complaining to reverse the situation, but I felt helpless. I did not know where to start. I partly used social media to share critical ideas and to raise question marks in people, but soon we were strangled in that area, too. People were taken into custody, sued, or imprisoned because of peaceful messages shared on their twitter or facebook accounts. I felt desperate, paralyzed and enraged. Meanwhile, people, including family members, continued to support the oppressors without realizing. They were clearly manipulated, deceived and exploited by the myths deposited through media. But it was not possible to help them see the reality. They would not listen. They would not dare change their ideas. We were polarized. We could not talk. We could not discuss. There was no room for communication, which made all of us upset. I was sorry because I could not make myself heard and share "my informed knowledge" with my beloved ones. On top of all the political unease, not being able to reach my family touched me even more. I felt like my attempts for transformation were futile when I could not even "change" my own family.
I would discover later in Freire (2005) that discourse about "enlightenment" that I invested in for many years along with my comrades on the left is not a serum to be injected to someone else. Without one's deliberate effort, it would not be possible to liberate anyone: "We cannot say that … someone liberates someone else, nor yet that someone liberates himself, but rather that human beings in communion liberate each other" (p. 133). For Freire, imposing yourself or your knowledge was not the solution, it was necessary to dialogue with the people synthesizing your knowledge with theirs. The methods of oppressors in depositing knowledge and treating people as objects would not help in liberatory education. Only by posing problems, you could invite them into conversation -not to give or teach them anything but to learn with them. Otherwise, "they may become frightened by a 'word' which threatens the oppressor housed within them" (p. 135). In our case, that was the case -my family members did not want to face the ugly truth. They were "fearful of freedom" (p. 166). If the reality became unveiled, as Freire (2005) indicated, that would mean a collapse in their entire world. They would not stand the fact that all those principles they believed in -equality, justice, democracy -were only being paid lip service. Unfortunately, there is an elitist discourse among Turkey's democrats insulting those people who blindly support the oppressors and I was heavily influenced by that until I met Freire (2005). While they see themselves as the sages, they project ignorance to the masses.
They think that they can "win the masses over" (Freire, 2005, p. 95) through manipulation just like the oppressors do. While some groups see them as their enemies, others call them "the sheep" for following the orders. Although their objective is ultimate liberation, equality and justice for all, they also engage in suppressive acts to achieve their purposes. While this attitude does not help anyone, it worsens the situation for all. Those supporting oppressors take part in their own domination without realizing and become even more attached to those in power. Freire (2005) thought this "divide and rule" technique works efficiently to turn the oppressed each other and to further alienate them. This polarization among the oppressed, conquering their consciousness and anti-dialogic action are necessary conditions for the oppressive system to be maintained. Populist manipulation techniques such as providing welfare programs and aids for the oppressed and promising individual success usually pay off well because they cater for their needs at least for a short time. Although they do not end exploitation of the oppressed at all, they are good distractors (Freire, 2005). I observe all those strategies Freire (2005) mentioned are used in Turkey effectively.
The cure Freire (2005)  However, he knew this was not easy task due to the divisive acts of the oppressors. For one thing, Freire (2005) argued, the oppressed are divided beings. They cannot see the objective reality as their perception is masked by the oppressor housed within them. They are hopeless, as they perceive the world as static. They feel so paralyzed they cannot see they have the power to intervene in the world if they act together. The only way for them to unveil reality is through dialogic reflection and action. Only after that may they realize their potential as transformers of reality. By developing a humanistic unity and organizing, they may build a strong bloc to struggle collectively against tyranny.
As Epistemologias Freireanas ISSN 1983-7011 132 I drew many political lessons from Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed. First of all, I learnt that I cannot change anyone or liberate anyone. That is not only impossible, but it is also dehumanizing treating people as objects (Freire, 2005). I stopped being judgmental about people's ideas, feelings and beliefs. Instead, I started to get into conversation with them to understand their viewpoints. I now know that I can learn something from every single person and we could reach a more developed and diverse understanding together. I do my best to be inclusive in conversation and not to make anyone feel excluded or discriminated. I believe in the possibility of change. Although our conversation may seem to be leading nowhere and people become more attached to their views, I assume our dialogue might raise a question mark in their minds, as it does in mine. From my own experience, I know that I resisted some ideas strongly when I heard them for the first time. But my mind changed many years later.
When it comes to organization and unity, I now pay extra attention that they should not be dehumanizing, limiting people's freedoms and turning them into things. Having experienced some of the anti-dialogical practices in the name of liberation, I stay away from those alienating organizations. Instead, I join and co-construct those communities of practice that have humane relationships and help us work in solidarity. Along with like-minded people, I do my best to take small steps to create change in our world.

CONCLUSION
In this paper, I narrated my ongoing process of developing critical consciousness and taking critical personal, pedagogic and political action with the help of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Although my story is unique to my person and to my specific context, it might resonate with the readers. It is my hope that this paper might join others in the literature for expanding our space and enlarging our solidarity for liberatory action. I wrote this paper to celebrate the work of Paulo Freire and to show that its area of influence is still wide and his legacy is alive. Even though some might claim such critical pedagogy work did not feel empowering in their Western context for various reasons at a certain time in history (Ellsworth, 1989) As Epistemologias Freireanas