Educational starting points must be the participants’ own lived situations, not unfamiliar ones.

Evidence

The first requirement is that these codifications must necessarily represent situations familiar to the individuals whose thematics are being examined, so that they can easily recognize the situations (and thus their own relation to them). It is inadmissible (whether during the process of investigation or in the following stage, when the meaningful thematics are presented as program content) to present pictures of reality unfamiliar to the participants. The latter procedure (although dialectical, because individuals analyzing an unfamiliar reality could compare it with their own and discover the limitations of each) cannot precede the more basic one dictated by the participants’ state of submersion, that is, the process in which individuals analyzing their own reality become aware of their prior, distorted perceptions and thereby come to have a new perception of that reality. — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 331

Categorization

• XREF: Experiential learning premise — building from the learner’s concrete lifeworld, echoing Dewey and Kolb. — connects to: Insiders are best positioned to elucidate their own situation.