Celestin Freinet (1896 -1966). In Europe, and particularly in France, Freinet is considered to be the pedagogue who most developed the application of the project method and the project pedagogy.
According to his proposal, the child must understand the world in its complexity through the rigor of thinking based on reflective research.
With an experience in the pedagogies of autonomy of Bakunine and Ferrer, supporter and supporter of the New School, Freinet developed his method based on the idea of the Democratic School, where besides the pedagogical techniques, also the school environment and the social environment where the school inserts, should not be ignored by the educator. Its proposal starts from the objective of the educative action, to form human beings. Therefore, the educated should be involved in the life of their community, participating in social associations and movements, through which it is possible to contribute to the formation of students. In his philosophy, the educator’s work should be oriented towards the development of cooperative and supportive actions, using minimal resources (the recycling of materials derives from various pedagogical experiences in poor areas).
His experience in the first world war makes him a convinced pacifist. Also as a result of the injuries sustained, he developed the process of printing materials created in the classroom, wall papers and school newspapers, where students researched and discussed their results.
In 1924 Freinet created a working cooperative with teachers in the village where she lives, which is considered the cradle of the Modern School in France. Still in your poor village. Starts the school correspondence program. He publishes the book “The Press at School” and during the following years, with the increase of authoritarian tensions, is expelled from the education system and creates his own school, with Romain Rolland which became known as “Front of Childhood”. He is arrested in Nazi concentration camps. After the end of the war, he created ICEM, the Lay Teaching Cooperative. In the mid-1950s the International Federation of Modern School Movements (Fimem) is created, bringing together educators from around the world, with national representations known as the MEM – Modern School Movement.
Its pedagogical proposal aims to give the student a work that is connected with their experience. Part of identifying the child’s interests, analyzing the process of building their knowledge. Observation is a work tool of the teacher. Observing classroom work is the process that leads the educator to manage his time and intervention, based on the motivation of the student’s willingness to learn.
The student learns from the experience but needs the support of a tutor to proceed. Therefore, the teacher’s observation must also go to the environment where the student lives, allowing to capture the lived reality and create windows for pedagogical work proposals. All student work should be oriented towards critical reflection. The project should be communicated in pairs, but newspaper, study visit, and correspondence projects should also be done. The tutor should seek to use various tools to connect students with their realities.
In Freinet’s proposed pedagogy, Pedagogical Invariables are defined. It is a set of principles of educational practices that must be taken into account, regardless of place and time.
The pillars on which Freinet’s proposal is based are:
• The child is of the same nature as the adult.
• Being bigger does not necessarily mean being above others.
• A child’s school behavior depends on his or her physiological, organic and constitutional state.
• Children and adults do not like authoritarian impositions.
• Children and adults do not like strict discipline when it means passively obeying an external order.
• No one likes to do coercive work, even if in particular he does not dislike it. Every attitude imposed is paralyzing.
• Everyone likes to choose their job even if it is not the most advantageous choice.
• No one likes to work aimlessly, act as a machine, subjecting themselves to routines in which they do not participate.
• Motivation for work is critical.
• Scholasticism must be abolished.
• Everyone wants to be successful. Failure inhibits, destroys mood and enthusiasm.
• It is not the game that is natural in the child, but the work.
• It is not observation, explanation and demonstration – essential school processes – the only normal avenues of knowledge acquisition, but sense experience which is a natural and universal conduct.
• Memory, so praised by the school, is neither valid nor precious, except when it is integrated in the experimental groping, where it is truly in the service of life. • Acquisitions are not obtained by studying rules and laws, as sometimes believed, but by experience. To study rules and laws first is to put the cart in front of the oxen.
• Intelligence is not a specific faculty that functions as a closed circuit, independent of the other vital elements of the individual, as scholasticism teaches.
• The school cultivates only an abstract form of intelligence that acts out of reality is fixed in memory through words and ideas.
• The child does not like to receive authoritative lessons.
• The child does not get tired of a functional job, that is, that meets the directions of his life.
• Children and adults do not like to be controlled and sanctioned. This characterizes an offense to human dignity, especially if exercised publicly.
• Notes and ratings are always a mistake.
• Speak as little as possible.
• The child does not like to be subjected to herd work. She prefers individual or team work in a cooperative community.
• Order and discipline are required in class.
• Punishments are always a mistake. They are humiliating, do not lead to the desired end and are just palliative.
• The new life of the school implies school cooperation, that is, the management of life through school work by those who practice it, including the educator.
• Class overload is always a pedagogical error.
• The current design of large schools leads teachers and students to anonymity, which is always a mistake and creates barriers.
• Tomorrow’s democracy prepares for democracy in school. An authoritarian regime in school would not be able to form democratic citizens.
• One of the first conditions of school renewal is respect for the child and, in turn, for the child to respect his or her teachers; Only in this way is it possible to educate within dignity.
• The social and political reaction, which manifests a pedagogical reaction, is an opposition we have to count on, without being able to avoid or modify it.
• One must have optimistic hope in life.
Freinet’s pedagogical proposal implies a constant dialogue with other experiences. He argued that each teacher should keep a diary about their work, correspondence with their peers.
It gave great importance to work in the classroom, which considered the center of educational activity, but sought to stimulate the contamination of this pedagogical space by questions brought by students from the lived world. The school is seen as a laboratory of relevant experiences. In Freinet’s pedagogical proposal, it is the project work that allows reflective development, and the action is a gauge of the adequacy to reality.
For Freinet concrete action allows the construction of abstract thoughts.
The development of the pedagogical activity implies the research, the documentation collection, the analysis, and the formulation of a communication proposal, being the proper techniques. In this process the tutor intervenes, helping in the organization work, motivating the student and the group. A good learning process requires students who are motivated and focused on their tasks. Each student should feel free to seek answers to their problems. However, this is a relative freedom, because each one’s problems must also be collective problems. And it is in this interaction between the individual and the collective that the student’s freedom is exercised, each one seeking to contribute to the common result. Freinet’s education project can translate into a process of overcoming obstacles. A problem solving sled.
The modern method developed by Freinet is based on a set of techniques developed in the classroom:
• The class assembly, at the beginning of a learning period (school year, period, week), where the main objectives (project work) are defined, ideally by the students’ choice.
• The elaboration of PIT – Individual Work Plans. They embody the need for the realization of pedagogical exercises of expression (writing, graphic, movement, arithmetic) involving work and reflection on the student’s weaknesses. The PITs are the self-assessment instruments and are made up of forms completed by the students, as a way of recording their own learning.
• The Study Visit: with trips around the school about issues of interest to the students;
• Self-correction: modality of text correction made by the authors themselves, in this case the students, under the guidance of the educator
• Interschool Correspondence: an activity widely used by Freinet, in which students communicated with other students from different schools.
• The consultation binder: worksheets created by students and teachers to fill in the gaps left by conventional textbooks
• The School Press: The texts written by the students had a real social function, as they were not merely for evaluation purposes, as they were published and read by their peers.
• The Book of Life: A notebook in which students record their impressions, feelings, thoughts in various forms, which is a record of the entire school year of each class.
• Project work, which develops around group work, around a common theme, developed over a given period of time. These group assignments allow you to walk through the essential learning.
• Free Text: Type of text in which the student is not required to write as in traditional schools. It is free in format and theme. Relates to the technique of School Press, Life Book and Interschol Correspondence
The new school methodology is considered adequate for the development of critical thinking, analysis and development of scientific thinking.
