Paulo Freire And Multilingual Education Theoretical Approaches Methodologies And Empirical Analyses In Language And Literacy 1st Edition Taylor Francis Group

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PAULO FREIRE AND
MULTILINGUAL EDUCATION
This collection celebrates the work of Paulo Freire by assembling transnational
perspectives on Freirean-based educational models that reconsider and reimagine
language and literacy instruction, especially for multilingual learners. Offering
an international and comparative overview of Freire’s theories and critical peda-
gogies in relation to multilingualism, this volume presents innovative analyses
and applications of theories and methods and features case studies in public
schools, after-school and community literacy programs, and grassroots activism.
Part I features chapters that expand on Freire’s concepts and ideas, including
critical literacies, critical consciousness, and liberatory teaching principles. Part
II features chapters that discuss empirical analyses from applied research studies that draw from these philosophical concepts, making important connections to key topics on supporting students, curriculum development, and teaching.
Ideal for students and scholars in language education, bilingual/multilingual
methods, and sociology of education, the volume informs teacher knowledge and practice. In offering alternative paradigms to our dominant, homogenized monolingual status quo, the chapters present a shared vision of what multilin-
gual literacy can offer students and how it can transform educational spaces into sites of imagination, creativity, and hope.
Sandro R. Barros is Assistant Professor in the Department of Teacher Education
at Michigan State University, USA.
Luciana C. de Oliveira is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Graduate
Studies and a Professor in the School of Education at Virginia Commonwealth
University, USA.

Edited by Sandro R. Barros and
Luciana C. de Oliveira
PAULO FREIRE AND
MULTILINGUAL
EDUCATION
Theoretical Approaches,
Methodologies, and Empirical
Analyses in Language and Literacy

Cover image: © Liliana Duque Piñeiro, “Freirean Circles.”
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Sandro R. Barros and Luciana C. de
Oliveira; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Sandro R. Barros and Luciana C. de Oliveira to be identified
as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and
78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-032-00791-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-77355-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-17572-8 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003175728
Typeset in Bembo
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

CONTENTS
List of Figures viii
Editors’ Biographies ix
Contributors’ Biographies x
Foreword: “The People” Lost in Translation xvii
Samuel D. Rocha
1 From Angicos to the World: Paulo Freire and the Task
of Emancipatory Multilingual Education 1
Sandro R. Barros and Luciana C. de Oliveira
PART I
Theoretical and Methodological Approaches 25
2 Critical Biliteracies: The Mutually Reinforcing Endeavors
of Freirean Criticality and Bilingualism 27
Chris K. Chang-Bacon and Soria E. Colomer
3 The Critical Space Between: Weaving Freirean and
Sociocultural Pedagogies 42
Brandon J. Sherman and Annela Teemant
4 Transforming Privilege: The Four R’s of Pedagogical
Possibilities 59
Adam Howard, Patrick Dickert, Wallace Tucker, and Sam Jefferson
5 Reading the World and Conscientização: Teaching About
Multilingualism for Social Justice for Multilingual Learners 75
Heather Linville

vi Contents
PART II
Empirical Analyses 89
6 Involvement and Authenticity: Transforming Literacy
Curricula for Marshallese Students through
Community-Based Writing Projects
91
Anny Fritzen Case, Marcy Ray Dodd, and Gina Mikel Petrie
7 Learning English as an Additional Language from Children’s Points of View in a Public School in Brazil: A Freirean Perspective
110
Andrea da Silva Marques Ribeiro and Jessica F. Cruz
8 Critical Educulturalism in the Borderlands: Exploring Social Positionality and the Dialogic Processes of Culture Circles
127
Kelly Metz-Matthews and Michele McConnell
9 Kindergarteners as Co-Constructors of an Equitable Learning Community in a Dual-Language Class: A Freirean Analysis
143
Tatiana M. Cevallos and Rosa M. Floyd
10 (Re)Turning to Freirean-Philosophy in Preparing Content Teachers to Work with Multilingual Students
158
Kara Mitchell Viesca, Peiwen Wang, Brandon Heinz, and Alexa Yunes-Koch
11 Digital Storytelling as a Freirean-Based Pedagogy with Refugee-Background Youth
176
Carrie Symons and Kasun Gajasinghe
12 Ignoramuses and Sages: Using Freirean Concepts to Co-construct Socially Just Initial Teacher Education Practices
196
Gabriel Díaz Maggioli
13 Planting Seeds: Pre-Service Teachers Explore the Legacies of Projeto Axé and Projeto Semear
211
Amanda Montes and Miguel Fernández Álvarez

Contents vii
14 Rereading Learning, Schooling, and Race: Reflecting
on Dialogical Language Teacher Preparation Through
Participatory Action Research
229
Amanda J. Swearingen, Catherine McCarthy, Autumn E. Sanders, and Taylor M. Drinkman
15 Problematização and Poesis: Making Problems with Freire and Someone Else’s Syllabus
246
Cori McKenzie
16 Bridging Multimodality and Criticality to Language Education with a Twist from the Global South: Multimodal Critical Consciousness as Multimodal Conscientização
261
Raúl Alberto Mora, Andrés Tobón-Gallego,
Maria Camila Mejía-Vélez, and Elizabeth (Effy) Agudelo
Afterword 280
Valdir Borges
Index 284

3.1 Enduring principles of learning as critical sociocultural
theory in practice 44
6.1 Artwork created by students including the caption “Ocean
Dreamers” in Marshallese and Cebuano 101
7.1 First conversation circle 121
11.1 The picture drawn by Desire describing his hero 184
11.2 The brainstormed list of ideas for a shared story 187
11.3 The storyboard images for the youth’s shared story: trying to speak188
12.1 The E.N.A.B.L.E. model (Diaz Maggioli, 2021) 208
16.1 A student’s depiction of environmental degradation 269
16.2 MCZ as a form of compromise: Students’ composition of
human impact on the environment 270
16.3 Example of a multimodal composition on a controversial topic 272
16.4 Example of sociopolitical memes as spaces for MCZ 273
FIGURES

Sandro Barros, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University’s
Department of Teacher Education. He teaches and conducts research on
multilingualism, curriculum, and intercultural experiences of language across
schools, grassroots activism, community organizations, and other sites of
cultural production. Dr. Barros has authored dozens of articles and chapters that
foreground the centrality of the Humanities to the development of compassionate
practices in educational policy, curriculum, instruction, and emancipatory
movements of social justice vis-à-vis education as a broadly defined endeavor.
He is the author of Competing Truths: Narrating Otherness and Marginality in Latin
America (Floricanto Press) and The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas Queering Literature,
Politics, and the Activist Curriculum (University of Florida Press).
Luciana C. de Oliveira, PhD, is an Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
and Graduate Studies in the School of Education and a Professor in the
Department of Teaching and Learning at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Her research focuses on issues related to teaching multilingual learners at the
K-12 level, including the role of language in learning the content areas and
teacher education. Currently, Dr. de Oliveira’s research examines scaffolding in
elementary classrooms. She has authored or edited 24 books and has several and
has over 200 publications in various outlets. Her books include the Handbook of
TESOL in K-12 (Wiley, 2019), the first handbook focused exclusively in the area
of teaching multilingual learners in elementary and secondary classrooms. She
served in the Presidential line (2017–2020) of TESOL International Association
and was a member of the Board of Directors (2013–2016). She was the first
Latina to ever serve as President (2018–2019) of TESOL.
EDITORS’ BIOGRAPHIES

Elizabeth (Effy) Agudelo holds a BA (Honors) in English and Spanish
Education from Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Medellín, Colombia and
is currently an MA Candidate in Learning and Teaching Processes in Second
Languages at the same university. She is currently an elementary English teacher
at UPB School and belongs to the Literacies in Second Languages Project (LSLP)
research lab at U.P.B. Her research interests include the exploration of fandom
and membership in fan communities as catalysts for second-language learning
and how to implement lessons from fandom into the language classroom. She
is also interested in the intersection of multimodality and critical literacies with
the fandom culture.
Miguel Fernández Álvarez is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Linguistics Applied to Science and Technology at the Universidad Politécnica de
Madrid (Spain), where he teaches technical English for specific purposes within
the field of construction. His research areas include bilingual education, second-
language acquisition, and language assessment. He is currently working on
aspects related to linguistic mediation and their implications for both teaching
and assessment in the classroom.
Anny Fritzen Case is an Associate Professor in the Department of Teacher
Education at Gonzaga University. A former middle and high school ESL
teacher, she enjoys spending much of her professional time and energy working
alongside her students in local schools. She received her PhD in Curriculum,
Teaching, and Educational Policy from Michigan State University in 2010 and
her MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from Brigham
Young University in 2001. Her scholarship focuses on secondary multilingual
learners, particularly ways teachers and schools can provide access to equitable
and intellectually rich instruction.
CONTRIBUTORS’ BIOGRAPHIES

Contributors’ Biographies xi
Dr. Tatiana M. Cevallos is the Director of ESOL and Dual Language Programs
at George Fox University. A former elementary bilingual teacher and bilingual
coordinator in Oregon, she has also taught internationally at the university level
in Ecuador and in China. Her research interests include bilingual education,
biliteracy, and internationalization of teacher education. She is passionate about
preparing teachers who embrace diversity as an asset and create respectful,
equitable, and engaging learning environments.
Chris Chang-Bacon is an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia at
the Curry School of Education. His research emphasizes critical literacies in
bilingual education and English language teaching. He has published extensively
on Freirean critical pedagogies in language learning, including a framework for
critical English language teaching in the Journal of Literacy Research, and a chapter
in the upcoming Routledge Critical Literacies Handbook. Chang-Bacon received
the AERA Language and Social Processes SIG’s 2019 Emerging Scholar Award
and the second place 2020 Bilingual Education Research SIG’s Outstanding
Dissertation Award. He is also a member of the AERA Paulo Freire Research
SIG and received their 2016 Travel Award.
Soria E. Colomer is an Associate Professor of bilingual education in the
College of Education at Oregon State University. Her work is committed to
transforming the educational landscape for marginalized youth and exploring
the negotiation of language and identity in growing immigrant communities.
Her research explores how language teachers’ ethnic identities and linguistic
skills impact their roles and practices in schools with growing emergent
bilingual student populations. Her work can be found in the Journal of Literacy
Research, TESOL Quarterly, Bilingual Research Journal, Foreign Language Annals,
and Qualitative Research, among others.
Jessica Fernandes Natarelli da Cruz is a primary school and English teacher
at Fundação Municipal de Educação de Niterói, Rio Janeiro state, Brazil. She
has a Master’s degree in English teaching at Postgraduate Program in Basic
Education Teaching at the Institution of Application (CAp) at State University of
Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) and graduate studies in the same area at Colégio Pedro II.
At the moment, she is completing a doctorate degree in Applied Linguistics at
the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Applied Linguistics (PIPGLA) at the
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).
Patrick Dickert was a research assistant in the Education Department at Colby
College where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and educational
studies. Following graduation, he served as a basketball skills trainer for the

xii Contributors’ Biographies
Shenzhen Aviators in China. He is now a professional player for the Landstede
Hammers in the Netherlands.
Marcy Dodd is a middle school English Language Development teacher
focusing on writing instruction through community-based project learning. She
received an M.I.T. from Gonzaga University in 2016 and an M.F.A. in Creative
Writing from Colorado State University in 2010.
Taylor M. Drinkman is a senior research assistant in the Social Interaction
Lab in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota where
she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology with minors in Spanish and
teaching English as a second language (TESL). She is passionate about language
and identity development, as well as exploring how humans interact and learn
to take a critical perspective of looking at the world and understanding their
mental health.
Rosa M. Floyd originally from Guadalajara, Mexico, has worked in dual
immersion programs for nearly 30 years. She holds an MA from the Universidad
de Guadalajara, an MAT in bilingual education from Portland State University.
She currently works in the Woodburn school district where she has been an
instructional coach, teacher mentor, and dual immersion teacher. She combines
her knowledge of Mexican culture and Folkloric dance to involve students, staff,
and community in cultural events and celebrations, district and statewide. She
uses dance as a rich linguistic opportunity to unify families and communities in
a purpose that equalizes and integrates people from different groups.
Kasun Gajasinghe is a doctoral student in the Curriculum, Instruction, and
Teacher Education program at Michigan State University. He is a Lecturer in the
Department of English Language Teaching at the University of Peradeniya, Sri
Lanka. Also, he is a Fulbright alumnus. His research interests include curriculum
theory, language policy, community-engaged teacher research, education in
times of crisis.
Adam Howard is Charles A. Dana Professor of Education and Chair of the
Education Department at Colby College. His research and writing focus on
social class issues in education with a particular focus on privilege and elite
education. His books include Learning Privilege: Lessons of Power and Identity in
Affluent Schooling, Educating Elites: Class Privilege and Educational Advantage, and
Negotiating Privilege and Identity in Educational Contexts.
Sam Jefferson was a research assistant in the Education Department at Colby
College where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics with minors in

Contributors’ Biographies xiii
educational studies and mathematics. He is pursuing a Master’s degree in finance
at University College London.
Heather Linville, PhD, is Associate Professor and TESOL Director at the
University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. Her research explores how teachers act as
advocates for English learners and how personal, experiential, and contextual
factors influence advocacy beliefs and actions. Heather’s most recent publication
is the co-edited volume (with James Whiting) Advocacy in English Language
Teaching and Learning (Routledge, 2019). She has traveled and worked in
Chile, China, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, and Panama, among other locations.
Catherine McCarthy currently lives and works as a first-grade teacher in
Minneapolis, Minnesota. After completing her Master’s degree and initial
licensure in Elementary Education at the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities,
she now hopes to keep building a love of learning and passion for change in her
students through action research.
Michele L. McConnell, PhD has twenty-two years of combined experience
in teaching English and English as a second language for high school and
community colleges, and teacher education courses at a four-year university. She
has designed and facilitated international master’s level courses for pre-service
teachers and designed and facilitated online courses in educational equity and
social justice. She uses ethnographic methodologies and critical race theory to
study pedagogy and technology in secondary English classrooms. She currently
serves as the Director of the MAT at Fresno Pacific University.
Cori McKenzie (PhD, Michigan State University) is an Assistant Professor
of Adolescence English Education in the Department of English at SUNY
Cortland, USA. She teaches pedagogical methods courses for pre-service
teachers. Her current research considers how affect theory might help scholars
and teachers to reimagine both teacher education and the secondary English
Language Arts classroom.
Maria Camila Mejía-Vélez holds a Master of Teaching English to Speakers
of Other Languages from La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. She is
currently an English teacher at two undergraduate programs from Universidad
EAFIT and Universidad de Medellín. She is also a course coordinator and
curriculum designer in one of the programs and works part time as an English
teacher at an elementary school. She has been part of the Literacies in Second
Languages Project (LSLP) research lab at U.P.B since 2013, where she has
gotten engaged with different projects of literacy practices in Colombia. Maria
Camila’s research interests are centered on the integration of critical literacy and

language critical theories in early childhood education, as well as social justice
in education.
Kelly Metz-Matthews is the Faculty Learning Coordinator for San Diego City
College, where she also serves as faculty in the English and English Language
Acquisition departments. Kelly has spent nearly a decade teaching across the
disciplines of English, English for speakers of other languages, and teacher
education in both the community college system and the four-year university
system. She has served as an English Language Fellow with the US Department
of State and as a San Diego Area Writing Project Fellow. Kelly’s research
interests center on teacher navigation of language ideologies in multilingual
classrooms, gendered access to linguistic resources, and how English functions
as a form of gendered symbolic power for multilingual women in postcolonial
and patriarchal contexts.
Raúl Alberto Mora (PhD in Language and Literacy, University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign) is an Associate Professor of language education and
literacy studies at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Medellín, Colombia.
His research focuses on the critical rewriting of literacies theory in second-
language learning and teaching (the notion of “literacies in second languages”)
and the use of sociocritical theories to question existing frameworks in language
education today. At U.P.B., Dr. Mora chairs the Literacies in Second Languages
Project (LSLP) research lab and teaches undergraduate- and graduate-level
courses on language teaching methods, qualitative research, and introduction
to critical theory. In addition, Dr. Mora is one of the founding members of
the Transnational Critical Literacies Network and co-editor of The Handbook of
Critical Literacies (Routledge, 2021) and was a recipient of the Divergent Award
for Excellence in 21st-Century Literacies Research in 2019.
Gina Mikel Petrie, a Professor at Eastern Washington University, prepares
pre-service teachers to instruct English language learners. She received her
PhD in Education from Washington State University in 2005 and her MA in
Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from Indiana University in
1995. She researches the sociocultural contexts within which language learning
and teaching and teacher professional development occur.
Andrea da Silva Marques Ribeiro is an Associate Professor at the State
University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), where she teaches English at middle
and high schools as well as didactic subjects in undergraduate courses. She is a
permanent member of the Postgraduate Program in Basic Education Teaching
at the Institution of Application CAp-UERJ. She has a doctorate in Applied
xiv Contributors’ Biographies

Linguistics and Language Studies at the Pontifical Catholic University of São
Paulo (PUC-SP) and a Master’s in Education at UERJ.
Amanda Montes is an Assistant Professor in the Bilingual-Bicultural Education
program at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, IL. She holds a PhD
in Applied Linguistics from Arizona State University. Her areas of interest
include examining bilingual educators from culturally and linguistically diverse
backgrounds, language attitudes, culturally responsive teaching, liberatory
pedagogy, and arts integration in bilingual education settings.
Autumn E. Sanders is an undergraduate student at the University of Minnesota
majoring in microbiology and minoring in public health and teaching English
as a second language. She is a volunteer English teacher at the Hmong American
Partnership and the Franklin Learning Center in Minneapolis.
Brandon Sherman (PhD, Penn State, 2016) is the Research Project Manager for
the US Department of Education grant-funded initiative, Partnering for Radical
School Improvement. His research interests include critical and sociocultural
pedagogies, nonlinear theoretical approaches to educational research, and
dialogic interaction. His current research focuses on pedagogical coaching,
professional learning, and equitable family/community/school partnerships.
Carrie Symons (PhD, University of Michigan, 2015) is an Assistant Professor of
Language and Literacy in the Department of Teacher Education and an affiliated
faculty member in the Second Language Studies Program at Michigan State
University, USA. As a community-engaged scholar, Carrie’s research focuses
on the development of, and inquiry into, innovative instructional practices that
promote additive acculturation, reduce xenophobia, and amplify multilingual,
immigrant-origin youth’s voices.
Amanda J. Swearingen is a doctoral student in Curriculum and Instruction
with a specialization in Second Language Education at the University of
Minnesota, where she teaches in the teaching English as a second language
(TESL) undergraduate program and serves as a research assistant on multiple
projects. She received her MA in TESL from the University of Texas at San
Antonio and a BA in Latin American Studies from Tulane University. She taught
English in Argentina for 2 years and in Korea for 8 years. Her scholarship focuses
on language teacher education for critical intercultural consciousness, critical
pedagogical approaches to teacher education, decolonizing teacher education
curriculum, and practitioner inquiry through participatory and action-oriented
research.
Contributors’ Biographies xv

Annela Teemant (PhD, Ohio State University, 1997) is a Professor of
Language Education at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.
Her scholarship focuses on critical sociocultural theory and pedagogy in teacher
preparation. She has been awarded five US Department of Education grants
focused on teacher preparation of general education teachers for multilingual
learners. Her mixed methods research focuses on pedagogical coaching, family,
community, and school partnerships, and quality teacher preparation.
Andrés Esteban Tobón-Gallego holds a Bachelor of Arts in Language
teaching from Universidad Católica Luís Amigó (2014) and a MA in Learning
and Teaching Processes in Second Languages at Universidad Pontificia
Bolivariana (UPB, 2020). He is a language professor at Universidad Nacional
de Colombia, Sede Medellín. Andrés is also a researcher at the Literacies in
Second Languages Project research lab at UPB, currently interested in the topics
of multimodality, critical literacies, and cultural consciousness in the second-
language scenarios. He has already had the chance to present his research at
national and international events and is at present working on publications based
on his thesis research.
Wallace Tucker was a research assistant in the Education Department at
Colby College where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in government and
educational studies. He is now a program manager for Morehouse School of
Medicine.
xvi  Contributors’ Biographies

Eu sou na minha fe [I am in my faith].
Paulo Freire
In his preface dated Autumn 1968, written from Santiago, Chile, Paulo Freire
remarks that his book for radicals, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, may only be read to
the end by Marxists and Christians. Sadly, for the monolingual English-speaking
world, and all those whose translations were based on the English translation, no
one has ever read the book to its original end. Not even Marxists and Christians.
I am a Christian, not a Marxist. In this prefatory note, I will explain why
those who have only read Freire in English, including Marxists and Christians,
have, in fact, never read his book to the end. I will also introduce the English-
speaking world to a part of the lost ending of Pedagogy of the Oppressed through
its main article of faith: the people.
“Amar” means “to love” in Portuguese and Spanish. It is the final word Freire
wrote by hand in blue ink in Pedagogia do Oprimido. “Menos difícil amar” means
“less difficult to love” in Brazilian Portuguese. They are the final three words
that Freire’s hand wrote in his famous book. The final eight words are “um
mundo em que seja menos difícil amar” that means “a world where it is less dif-
ficult to love.”
These words have all been lost to the Anglophone world because of a trans-
lation that omitted the final five full paragraphs. To this day, there is great
resistance to correcting this simple but profound literary mistake. The final sen-
tence reads as follows in its entirety: “Nossa fé nos homens e na criação de um
mundo em que seja menos dificil amar.” This translates to mean: “Our faith in
people and in the creation of a world where it is less difficult to love.”
The lost final paragraph of Freire’s Pedagogia do Oprimido reads as follows in
full: “Se nada ficar destas paginas, algo, pelo menos, esperamos que permaneça:
nossa confiança no povo. Nossa fé nos homens e na criação de um mundo em
que seja menos dificil amar.” In English, this says: “If nothing remains of these
pages, we hope something, albeit small, remains: Our confidence in the people.
FOREWORD
“The People” Lost in Translation
Samuel D. Rocha

xviii Foreword
Our faith in people and in the creation of a world where it is less difficult to
love.”
Listen to it again, in English. Imagine Freire speaking these words in his
Brazilian accent to you, by name, after reading every page of his Pedagogy of the
Oppressed to you in a fictional complete translation, like a bedtime storybook:
“If nothing remains of these pages, we hope something, albeit small, remains:
Our confidence in the people. Our faith in people and in the creation of a world
where it is less difficult to love.”
Freire here reduces his book down to a single element: the people. He is will-
ing to let the rest go, to empty himself, to separate the chaff from the wheat. He
is willing to purify his book in fire, like gold, trusting that “something, albeit
small” will remain and endure. Freire ends his most famous book with a wish, a
prayer, a hope, a longing for “something, albeit small,” a tiny remnant. “If noth-
ing remains of these pages …” It is especially poignant to think of this in light
of the reality that these very words themselves did not survive translation into
English which popularized and globalized the book from its distinctly South
American context.
What is this “something, albeit small” that Freire hopes will survive the death
of his own ideas and authorship? “Our confidence in the people. Our faith in
people and in the creation of a world where it is less difficult to love.” Freire
places his confidence and faith in “the people”—el pueblo, in Spanish—a theolog-
ical and spiritual expression that is commonly used in the Liberation Theology
of Latin America which Freire prefigured and took part in. Theologically, the
expression is short for “the people of God”—el pueblo de Dios, in Spanish. This
is not a purely sociological expression for a social plurality or group. It conceals
an even deeper meaning of “the people of God”: vox populi, vox Dei, in Latin—
the voice of the people is the voice of God. We, the people, are Christ’s hands
and feet, the body of Christ is the universal Church, the communion of saints.
Where two or more are gathered...
Freire puts his confidence and faith in “the people” because there, in the
voice of the people, he finds the voice of God, just as in the face of the person
he sees the face of Christ, his friend and comrade. His work with the Brazilian
people was precisely dedicated to the ontological problem of their voicelessness,
an illiteracy that is not analphabetic but, more deeply, spiritual poverty. Material
poverty acquires its moral harm and violence by its spiritual effects, robbing peo-
ple of their voice and vocation and even their very personhood, inverting their
being as active subjects with predicates into passive and dead objects, archiving
them in a perverse banking concept of education, one of many instruments that
threaten the people, that make them be less rather than their true vocation to
“ser mais,” to be more.
It is too easy to forget that the colonial enslavement of African people was
practiced in Brazil at a higher rate than any other place in the Iberian Union

Foreword xix
and the abolition of slavery in Brazil was the latest date in all of the Americas.
Without this context of distinctly Brazilian anti-Blackness, it is difficult to
appreciate the full sum of Freire’s efforts. Freire does not teach the people to read
the word and the world from the outside; he first and foremost sends them to find
their inner teacher, their conscience, their judgment, their freedom. Conversely,
the people teach Freire to have faith in their voice as the voice of the Divine
word, the logos, which creates and renews the face of the earth. While the work
begins in his native Brazil, he visits Africa, the USA, and Europe and always
finds its North Star in the people.
“If nothing remains of these pages,” Freire repeats, “we hope something, albeit
small, remains: Our confidence in the people. Our faith in people…” Confidence
and faith are forms of trust and belief; they are bonds born of love. To trust in
something is to believe what you may not yet know, to seek and yearn for “some-
thing, albeit small.” It is to say that even if everything else fails and goes wrong
and does not work out, even if the mountains fall and the hills turn to dust, “we
hope something, albeit small remains.” To have faith despite it all, to belief in
the face of trial, to listen for the voice of God in the people, even when they
are denied their true voice, to find the beloved here and now, today—not out
there, somewhere else, tomorrow, or long ago. The kingdom of God is always
already at hand in the love offered through communion with and of the people.
The kingdom of heaven, the people of God, the body of Christ: These are
expressions of an article of faith for Freire embedded in the pages of his book that
he hopes will survive the apocalypse of history. My own faith has been tested
since, too, as we have seen. Freire’s own original expression of hope did not sur-
vive, but that means that I must share the good news of this Freirean hope and
trust, as he did. I must repent of my disbelief and belief that it will endure and
live forever and ever, unto the ages of ages, amen. Though the mountains may
fall and the hills turn to dust, the love of the Lord will stand. Where do we find
Divine love, a love supreme? In the people, always with el pueblo.
But this is not where Freire’s prayer ends. He goes on to add to his “some-
thing, albeit small” hope: “Our faith … in the creation of a world where it is less
difficult to love.” Here the people of God, the voice of God, and above all those
who are robbed of the logos of their word, do not speak into nothingness or a
vacuum. The people are never wordless or worldless. There is a world for Freire
where the Divine word dwells and abides and delights: Sic Deus dilexit mundum,
in Latin—For God so loved (or delighted in) the world. This world is not only
the natural or physical nor the planetary or cosmic world, but, more radically,
it is a fragile world that must be continually created and recreated by the people
whose word and voice names and creates it anew. The world is always new and
in need of renewal.
Just as the people are the people of God, the world this word and voice creates
is a better world because it is a world where “it is less difficult to love.” One of

xx Foreword
the words Freire uses in Portuguese to describe the people who are oppressed
and robbed of their word is “desamados” which means “the unloved ones.” For
Freire, oppression is about power, yes, but his sense of power is ultimately a
matter of love-power. Those who are robbed of their voice by oppressive force
are not merely coerced by abstract political power: they are denied love, they
are unloved. A better world for Freire is a world where loving is less difficult,
where the unloved are fewer, where it is harder to suffer the ultimate harm of
being unloved.
Freire’s world is fragile and in that sense in need of creative love, which cre-
ates and recreates it, but this world’s fragility is also to be found in its capacity
to be made in ways that are better or worse. Again: The kingdom of God and
the voice of the people of God are not abstract and distant for Freire. In the
same way, the creation of “a world where it is less difficult to love” is more than
descriptive. It is ethical; it is amorous; it is political; it is theological.
There is a part of chapter three, on the banking concept of education,
where Freire shares the insight of a Chilean member of one of his “círculos
de cultura”—“cultural circles,” a pedagogical approach we read more about in
Educação Como Prática de la Liberdade, Education as the Practice of Freedom. This
Chilean rural person, uneducated by the standards of the banking concept, notes
the anthropological and cultural relationship between the people and the world.
Lacking this anthropology, he notes, we may still have a natural world of trees,
animals, rivers, and stars, but “faltaria quem dissesse isto é mundo”—“someone
who would say ‘this is the world’ would be missing.” And without this word
and voice of the people “faltaria a consciência do mundo que, necessariamente,
implica o mundo da consciência”—“the conscience of the world would be miss-
ing which, necessarily implies the world of conscience.” For Freire, the world is
not a Romantic primal and natural object, animated by an abstract Divine force.
Freire’s sense of world is a folk world, a world with a conscience and the world
of the conscience, the ethical place where the people create and recreate—or
destroy—the world.
What does it mean for something to be “less difficult”? Something less dif-
ficult remains difficult, but only becomes less so. In this world that Freire hopes
for the people to create, it is still difficult to love but it only less difficult than it
is now. Freire does not seek a utopia in the sense of a pure revolutionary place
that cannot exist but, instead, he humbly puts his faith in a more realistic and
immanent “world where it is less difficult to love.” Freire’s revolution is a gradual
conversion; like the heart, it falls in love by degrees and in stages. The faith placed
in “the creation of a world where it is less difficult to love” is not passive worship
to a deified or pantheistic nature. On the contrary, it is a repetition of trust in the
people to create this world through their voice, their word, their Divine logos.
Why did Freire single out Marxists and Christians as the ones who would
read his book to the end? Clearly, it is because, despite their many differences,

Foreword xxi
these two schools of thought share a common faith in the people. There are
surely many others just as there are Marxists and Christian who have abandoned
this article of faith in favor of more exclusive or sublime options.
Many today in educational research—who have yet to read Freire’s own
words in full—seem to prefer a less anthropological Romantic idea of the world
as a natural object because of the failure of the people to create a world where it
is less difficult to love. This is unfortunate. The fallibility of the people is not a
good reason to abandon hope in them. Freire does not promise us this world just
as he does not give the people their own word from without, from the outside.
No. Freire’s project is not a guaranteed outcome or a best practice. It is a dream,
a wish, a prayer, a desire, a longing, a deep and everlasting faith in the people
and their capacity to create a world where loving is still difficult but is only less
difficult: “Menos difícil amar.” “Less difficult to love.”

DOI: 10.4324/9781003175728-1
1
FROM ANGICOS TO THE WORLD
Paulo Freire and the Task of
Emancipatory Multilingual Education
Sandro R. Barros and Luciana C. de Oliveira
The present edited collection serves a dual purpose. On the one hand, it provides
an overview of how educators worldwide are reinventing Freire’s philosophies
across transnational settings. On the other hand, it reaffirms the endurance of
Freire’s ideas far beyond the grassroots and adult education contexts that inspired
and motivated the Brazilian educator’s life-long pilgrimage through popular
education movements. The chapters in this collection explore Freire’s theoreti-
cal analyses to unearth many of the dilemmas encountered in the educational
processes related to the teaching and learning of language. As such, this book
provides snapshots of the “history of the present” regarding Freire’s reinventions
(Foucault, 2012) as the authors draw from the Brazilian pedagogue’s model of
emancipatory education against the backdrop of recent scholarship and social
activism in multilingual education (de Korne, 2016; May, 2013).
The “multi/pluri” label that has emerged within applied and sociolinguis-
tic research has been operationalized to describe a myriad of communicative
phenomena tied to the intensification of global migration and technological
developments post-1990s (Blommaert, 2010). However, multilingualism has
a long history within educational linguistics (Spolsky, 1981, 2008). Since the
1970s—in the global north, at least—bilingual education researchers and bilin-
gualism advocates have grappled with the scientific community’s tendency to
uphold a willful ignorance toward othered communities’ sciences (Labov, 1972;
Fishman, 1989; Spolsky, 1981).
While the multi/pluri turn across the various subfields that comprise linguis-
tics has contributed significantly to advocating a shift in the ways communities’
linguistic repertoires are studied—moving us away from notions of native-
speakerism attached to nation-state constructs of language—challenges persist

2 Sandro R. Barros and Luciana C. de Oliveira
concerning how academic cultures’ paradigms compete to define language and
gain a share of the educational linguistic market. For instance, the code-switching
paradigms of past decades have given way to translinguistic perspectives prem-
ised on poststructuralist philosophies (Canagarajah, 2013; García and Lin, 2016;
Ortega, 2019). As Freire would likely argue, the struggle over the definition of
languages through competing paradigms represents both a spiritual and material
problem as it is connected to power and those who find themselves in positions
to advance language study and shape its curricular and instructional orientation
in schooling processes.
Whereas scholars researching the issue of code-switching in the 1970s
through the 1990s were concerned with a descriptive study of bilingual stu-
dents’ alternating patterns of language use across named languages and
additive approaches (e.g., Cummins, 1981; Faltis, 1989; MacSwan, 2000;
Martin-Jones, 1995), today’s scholarship has integrated multimodality, as well
as critical, ontological, and epistemological concerns that express a certain
skepticism toward universal definitions of language. A primary goal of this
paradigmatic shift has been to abandon deficit orientation seen in more tra-
ditional structuralist research to illuminate how bi- and multilingual students
shape the life of classrooms in creative ways and how educators might catalyze
features of bi/multilingual students’ practices to ameliorate persisting educa-
tional disadvantages (Barros et al., 2021; Caldas, 2019; de Oliveira et al., 2020;
Goodman, 2014).
In the last few years, research has shown what early code-switching work had
already identified. Simply stated, minoritized bilingual and multilingual students
mobilize their linguistic repertoires skillfully to make sense of new information
presented in another language, a fact that deserves the attention of educa-
tional researchers and practitioners. It would be unfair to suggest, however, the
early research on code-switching, with its separate treatment of languages and
deficit-oriented terminology—e.g., inter-language, semilingualism, etc.—did
not possess the activist edge that the present critical educational research features
(Gramling, 2021; Pennycook, 2017). In the broad field of educational linguistics,
a great deal of time and effort has been devoted to reversing the influence of
modernist assumptions about languages that continue to disadvantage minor-
itized groups in schools.
Still, despite its long history of advocacy, a cursory look at the empirical
research on bi- and multilingual education reveals that monolingual perspec-
tives endure as a rule (Barros et al., 2021), even though multilingualism remains
the norm worldwide (Grosjean, 2010). Over the past two decades, in particular,
language scholars have increasingly focused on the influences of standard lan-
guage discourse on classroom reality (Spolsky, 2008) to grasp how monolingual
habitus reproduction operates in schools’ curricula and instruction (Gogolin,
1997). Researchers have also considered how standard language discourse

From Angicos to the World 3
propagates notions of success and citizenship cultivated by ruling elites and how
this discourse permeates education congealing as a model narrative (Bauman
et al., 2003; Bourdieu, 1991). Furthermore, scholars have argued, from vary-
ing perspectives and across different fields, that socioeconomically and racially
minoritized bi- and multilingual groups have been constructed as such under a
pernicious linguistic deficiency characterization that has had a deleterious effect
on the academic challenges minoritized students face when educated in another
language, consequently affecting their sense of self-esteem and social belonging
(Alim et al., 2009; Rosa and Flores, 2017).
The present history of education reveals a growing excitement for the advo-
cacy of multilingualism as a new norm, whether through World Englishes
discourse or through the support of additional language study. Notwithstanding
this excitement, some have viewed the multi/pluri turn with a certain degree
of skepticism, especially in how it affects the education of minoritized stu-
dents—and for a good reason. As Kubota (2016) points out, the agenda of
multilingualism is easily co-opted by neoliberalism. Proponents of market-
oriented solutions are obsessed with commoditizing everything, education being
no exception. Consequently, the celebration of diversity buttressed by neoliberal
discourse around multilingualism cannot avoid the ironies that accompany it,
revealing just how complex the institution of linguistic regimes, no matter how
well-intended, risk the further disenfranchisement of vulnerable populations.
The first of these ironies relates to how urban multilingualism appears char-
acterized as a phenomenon of modernity. In contrast, there is ample evidence
of multilingualism’s prominence in earlier historical periods, before the rise of
nationalism and the nation-state and the present global migration and com-
munication patterns facilitated by technological advancements (Canagarajah,
2012). Another irony becomes apparent when we consider the lack of diversity
in linguistics research itself, as scholars active outside Western academic cul-
tures and paradigms are silenced for working in languages othered by English
or deploying methodologies regarded as “unscientific.” Outside Western
institutions, the study and advocacy of ecological analyses of multilingual-
ism, differently from the established scientific logic of academic knowledge
production, have been the norm for decades, long before the multi/pluri turn
became part of an academic agenda (Canagarajah, 2012). Because this work does
not conform to the standards of academic production, it has been dismissed
as valuable. One example is Freire’s own theorizations around “popular lan-
guage” within grassroots adult literacy movements, a theme to which we shall
return in the next sections of this chapter. Lastly, the celebratory tone around
multilingualism constitutes an ironic phenomenon as well, as scholars tend to
approach and study hybridity as something sui generis, a novelty that, in fact,
represents the sine qua non of the human condition—although there is some-
thing to be said about the particularities of recent patterns of language contact,

4 Sandro R. Barros and Luciana C. de Oliveira
transformation, and valuation associated with global migration and technologi-
cal processes (Foucault, 2012; Pennycook, 2017).
Within this scenario, we turn to Freire’s work; not to disregard the body
of critical observations conjectured about multilingualism research stated ear-
lier but to perhaps find common ground from which to collaborate and labor
toward making language education a humane and dialogical enterprise centered
on people’s voices and ideologies. In one way or another, the chapters that follow
this introduction touch upon a rich tradition of educational linguistics research
moving us forward in envisioning meaningful opportunities for minoritized
populations to thrive and for teachers to build capacity to realize multilingual-
ism’s promises. In this volume, we aim to underscore Freire’s critical literacy
work to advocate for its relevance to multilingualism in ways that give voice to
a scholarly tradition that, in some respects, displaces the dominance of World
English as the primary focus of multilingual education discourse.
Reconsidering Freire’s work within multilingual education debates can assist
us in revising many of the arguments that precede the multi/plural discussions
without recourse to the sophisticated conceptual tools invented to analyze and
situate multilingualism as a problem to be solved. We want to argue from the
offset, then, that the challenge for multilingual education is not to locate and
narrate multilingualism as the problem to be solved. Instead, we need to focus
on monolingualism as the challenge educational linguistics needs to address. In
other words, how might we approach and (re)present monolingualism as a mind-
set inherited from modernity’s epistemic regimes without reproducing the same
colonizing logic of modernity’s concerns for prediction, fatalism, and theoretical
hierarchizations (Mignolo, 2011)?
Coming to Freire: Reading the Multilingual
World to Read the Multilingual Word
As we know, the Brazilian educator Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (1921–1997)
was not a linguist. Nor did he consider himself a literacy expert. He was, first
and foremost, um andarilho do obvio [a wonderer of the obvious] (Freire, 1997,
2014a, 2014b), a cosmopolitan citizen avant le lettre who labored incessantly
across cultures and languages to expand what education meant and what lan-
guage and literacy could mean as emancipatory tools for free-thinking. In this
sense, Freire’s philosophy of emancipation does not suggest that individuals are
free from bonds. As co-inhabitants of the same planet, we are responsible for its
custody and, thus, responsible for each other. Accordingly, to become emanci-
pated, as Freire believed, we must seek out modes of conviviality that enable us
to become better attached. The most powerful way to become “better attached”
is to imagine more functional, supportive, and empowering relationships allow-
ing us to better relate to the world and contribute to its ecological balance.

From Angicos to the World 5
Freire’s literacy campaigns in the Brazilian backlands of Angicos, where
peasants reportedly learned how to read and write in about 40 hours, earned
him exile for its subversive critical stance on education (Gadotti, 1994). His
subsequent experiences with grassroots literacy occurred mostly outside of
Brazil and were conducted in languages other than Brazilian Portuguese.
Indeed, Freire’s involvement in grassroots movements of popular education in
exile helped him refine his views on language education and pedagogy as he
had to translate himself to international audiences to communicate his ideas
(Kohan, 2021). Freire notably systematized his emancipatory philosophy of
education in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1996), his most famous book, written in
Portuguese while working alongside grassroots literacy groups in Chile. The
book was first published in English in the 1970s. Freire continually revisited
the ideas laid out in his magnum opus until his death on May 2, 1997. A passing
glance at Freire’s writings reveals the work of a committed intellectual deeply
concerned with the political nature of language. As he remarks in Pedagogy of
the Oppressed (1996),
educators and politicians speak and are not understood because their lan-
guage is not attuned to the concrete situation of the people they address.
Accordingly, their talk is just alienated and alienating rhetoric. The lan-
guage of the educator or the politician (and it seems more and more clear
that the latter must also become an educator, in the broadest sense of the
word), like the language of the people, cannot exist without thought; and
neither language nor thought can exist without a structure to which they
refer. In order to communicate effectively, educator and politician must
understand the structural conditions in which the thought and lan-guage
of the people are dialectically framed.
(p. 96)
The phenomenological and sociocultural perspective on language Freire
espoused formed the basis of his understanding of critical literacy as a non-
dichotomist and de-hierarchical approach to educative processes instantiating
humane student-teacher relationships. Freire (1996) believed that “the object of
educational investigation is not persons (as if they were anatomical fragments),
but rather the thought-language with which men and women refer to reality,
the levels at which they perceive that reality, and their view of the world, in
which their generative themes are found” (p. 97). Thus, for him, “alphabeti-
zation”—the domain of the linguistic code—and “literacy”—the competence
in reading and writing about a subject—comprised the social domain of lan-
guage and should not be distinguished or dichotomized (Guilherme, 2021).
Accordingly, Freire regarded the respect for others’ language as a precondition
for realizing literacy education as a socially just and emancipatory enterprise. The

6 Sandro R. Barros and Luciana C. de Oliveira
non-dichotomous stance Freire maintained as an ideological principle did not
mean that he believed one should not confront the very idealizations of language
conditioned as an institutional practice. For instance, Freire’s characterizations
of language and literacy as “limiting situations” represent his conscious attempt
at avoiding modalities of behavior ostracizing difference by treating it as a subal-
tern expression of being in the world.
In a conversation with American educator Ira Shor, Freire reminisces on his
early experiences in reading and writing that posed to him questions leading
him to reflect on the nature of language authority and its power over our lives.
As the Brazilian pedagogue states, “In some moments, you have to fight against
grammar, in order to be free to write … when I was 19 years old … I remember
how ugly I wrote … I was following the so-called ‘literate’ patterns of the lan-
guage” (Shor, 1987, p. 20). In this statement and several others throughout his
extensive oeuvre, Freire remained keenly aware that, contrary to conventional
wisdom, the availability of a common language is not necessarily a precondi-
tion for communication. As Rajagopalan (2001) observes—and Freire would
likely have concurred—“it is the very sensation that one is somehow able to
communicate with the people around one that prompts one to hypostatize a
common language for the group” (Rajagopalan, 2001, p. 18). Thus, the key to
understanding Freire’s emancipatory education framework lies in our disposi-
tion to accept the radical equality of intelligence in others involved in the same
educational task as we are (Rancière, 1991). What ensues from this idea pivots to a
comprehension of language and literacy practices whereby teacher-students [edu-
cadores] relate to student-teachers [educandos] moved by common interests. The
Brazilian pedagogue insisted on the radicalism of compassion through dialogic
action as a precondition to improving upon the ways we imagine democracy vis-
à-vis the expansion of its exercise as the practice of freedom (Freire, 1976). This
idea is clearly imprinted in Freire’s international work.
After living and working in adult education programs in Bolivia, Chile, and
spending one year as a visiting scholar at Harvard University in the United
States, Freire finally settled in Geneva, where he and a group of Brazilian intel-
lectuals, also exiled, founded the Institute of Cultural Action (IDAC) at the
World Council of Churches (Gadotti, 1994). One of the main goals of the IDAC
was to offer educational services targeted at providing aid to developing nations
struggling to achieve their independence. The process of consciousness-raising
developed by Freire in his early grassroots literacy experiments served as the
basis for developing education programs spearheaded by the IDAC.
The years that followed the IDAC’s establishment were met with increased
requests for collaborations, mainly through the organization of seminars and
workshops that disseminated Freire’s emancipatory theories about literacy and
education. Freire himself, however, was not entirely comfortable with becom-
ing a guru of sorts to an international community of followers who increasingly

From Angicos to the World 7
viewed the work he did as an “evangelism of liberation.” Freire often went
to great lengths to distance himself from the images formed about him and
his work projected by both left- and right-wingers around the world to whom
his ideas exerted a considerable appeal, but for different reasons (Torres, 1998,
p. 107).
Certainly, as is to be expected, translational problems, epistemic and techni-
cal, exist regarding the treatment of Freire’s rich conceptual terminology and
neologisms, both inside and outside Brazil. A detailed description of appro-
priations of Freire’s work outside the field of adult education is beyond the
purpose of this introductory chapter (see Barros, 2020). Nevertheless, it is cru-
cial to note that Freire’s continual engagement with interlocutors worldwide
produced particular understandings of his ideas vis-à-vis others’ reinventions
of them without diminishing his commitment and resistance to the authority
bestowed upon him.
In 1975, Mário Cabral, revolutionary leader Amílcar Cabral’s brother and then
Minister of Education in Guinea-Bissau, contacted Freire and the IDAC team to
assist in developing a national literacy program in the former Portuguese colony.
In this small African country, Freire’s critical literacy theories would develop in
new and interesting directions. At the time, Guinea-Bissau counted with a lack
of material resources, low performance of teachers, and vestiges of the old ideol-
ogies of developmentalism common in the culture of the so-called Third World
nations dependent on external aid. Guinea-Bissau was not the only African
nation where Freire’s consultancy was requested but was certainly an experi-
ence that Freire reflected most in his writings. Between 1975 and 1980, Freire
also worked in São Tomé and Principe, Mozambique, Angola, and Nicaragua
(Kirkendall, 2010). The African State of São Tomé and Principe, newly liber-
ated from Portuguese colonization, entrusted Freire with a large-scale literacy
program that obtained more positive results than the more politically unstable
Guinea-Bissau. After four years, a letter from the then education minister of São
Tomé e Príncipe arrived at Freire’s IDAC office reporting that 55% of students
enrolled in schools after his literacy program was implemented were no longer
illiterate, and that 72% had graduated (Gadotti, 1989).
The specific challenges Freire encountered in Guinea-Bissau, about which he
reflects at length in Pedagogy in Process (2021), shifted his thinking in significant
ways regarding the connection between literacy programs and socioeconomic
development. In a sense, one could argue that Freire’s intervention in Guinea-
Bissau’s national literacy program, though unsuccessful by many accounts, had a
decisive influence on the overall trajectory of his thinking post-exile, including
his direct involvement in politics serving as Secretary of Education for the city
of São Paulo from 1988 until 1990, when he resigned (Gadotti, 1994).
In his relationship with the government of Guinea-Bissau, Freire was intro-
duced to the work of revolutionary leader Amilcar Cabral (1924–1973), an

8 Sandro R. Barros and Luciana C. de Oliveira
extraordinary intellectual for whom he nurtured a deep-seated respect, even
though Cabral was assassinated prior to his nation’s independence and both
intellectuals never met. Freire mentions Amílcar Cabral in many of his writings
post Pedagogy of the Oppressed, especially when discoursing about the usefulness
of Cabral’s revolutionary tactics to grassroots education efforts.
Freire’s advisement of the national literacy program in post-revolution
Guinea-Bissau led him to appreciate the complexity of multilingualism more
attentively as a fundamentally political issue, considering this nation’s linguis-
tic profile and history of colonial violence. Whereas early on in his writings
Freire understood the authenticity and complexity of the linguagem popular [liter-
ally the language of the people] as the basis of literacy development initiatives,
Africa, and particularly Guinea-Bissau, attuned Freire to the importance of
assuming an anti-dichotomist stance in the treatment of linguistic diversity in
formal education. Freire’s literacy programs were still premised on an anthro-
pological, phenomenological, and theological appreciation of language (Freire
and Macedo, 2005). However, African nations’ multilingualism added a new
dimension to his ideas related to the politics of popular education movements in
circumstances in which the people who inhabited the same territory had little in
common with one another besides a history biased against the common enemy:
the former Portuguese colonizer.
Guinea-Bissau’s literacy campaign was deemed crucial to the political recon-
struction of a multilingual and multi-ethnic nation after the liberation war
against Portugal was over (Kirkendall, 2010). At the time of Freire’s involve-
ment, the choice of the language that would serve as the medium of instruction
was a central point of debate. Should Portuguese be prioritized to the detriment
of local languages? The revolutionary leader Amilcar Cabral (1974b) enthusiasti-
cally defended Portuguese as a language of national unity, even though he knew
that approximately 80% of the population of his emerging nation did not speak
it (Gadotti and Romão, 2012). Creole was spoken by approximately 45% of the
groups. It was an oral language of great potential, yet it lacked a systematized
written form. Basil Davidson (1975, p. 50) makes an interesting analogy that
gives us an idea about the ignored possibility of Creole spoken in Guinea as
a unifying force within movements of popular literacy education. Creole was
equivalent to the old trade English spoken in the Niger Delta, a language with
an African base and a large fusion of Portuguese words facilitating communica-
tive bridges. Still, Amílcar Cabral believed, rather naively, that Portuguese was
the most “neutral” language as a foreign presence in Africa, thus auspicious to
national unification ideals as no ethnic group would be favored—except for the
urban elites who already spoke Portuguese.
Guinea-Bissau’s government opted not to use Creole as a medium of instruc-
tion for a myriad of ideological, pragmatic, and economic reasons that went
contrary to Freire’s counsel. The Brazilian pedagogue did not believe, as Amilcar

From Angicos to the World 9
Cabral did, that languages served as mere tools of communication. The learning
of Creole as an official and national language represented the best chance at cre-
ating the new society to which the revolutionary government aspired without
necessarily replicating the colonial logics inherited from Portuguese discursive
authority as a European language. Moreover, in Guinea-Bissau, the concept
of national language was alien to much of the population that conducted their
daily lives in and out of named languages. Regardless, Freire believed that
it would be impossible to “re-africanize” citizens, as Amilcar Cabral (1974a)
desired, without critically approaching the very medium that had de-africanized
them in the first place: the Portuguese language. The use of the Portuguese was
therefore not a neutral choice, as Cabral thought, and proved to have profound
consequences for the organization of education in the nascent African nation for
generations to come.
In Cabral’s book PAIGC: Unidade e Luta (1974), readers will find a passage that
Freire underlines in his own copy (Gadotti and Romão, 2012). The passage reads
as follows: “The Portuguese (language) is one of the best things that the Tugas
[pejorative form of the Portuguese people] left us, because language is nothing
more than an instrument for men to relate to each other: it is an instrument, a
means to speak to express the realities of life and the world” (Cabral, 1974b, p.
214). At the bottom of the page, Freire’s annotation makes the following asser-
tion, which works as a rejoinder to Cabral’s statement: “This is an unquestionable
mistake by Amilcar [Cabral].” In a footnote in his Por uma pedagogia da pergunta
(2014), written in partnership with Antonio Faundez, Freire further clarifies his
assessment of Cabral’s choice of Portuguese. He notes that Cabral had “failed to
realize the ideological nature of language, which [was] not something neutral,
that is, a phenomenon without a history, without affective entanglements and
emotional residues left by colonialism’s imprints” (Faundez and Freire, 2014, p.
126). Despite his disagreement with the choice of Portuguese as a medium of
instruction, Freire complied with the government’s desire to uphold the lan-
guage disregarding cultural, linguistic, tribal, ethnic, and economic differences.
The IDAC supplied the Bissauan government with the didactic materials
needed and technical support mainly from afar. Ultimately, the inefficiency of the
state apparatuses and the lack of cohesive leadership led to Freire-inspired literacy
program’s demise. In several passages of Pedagogy in Process (2021), Freire expresses
a posteriori how he believed that the support for Creole’s recognition within lit-
eracy and post-literacy instruction would have fared better in the government’s
efforts. For Freire, Creole was not a language to be introduced concurrently but
instead introduced through what we would recognize today as a translinguistic
instructional framework—though Freire did not employ such a term.
Throughout his consultancy work at the head of the IDAC, Freire remained
coherent in his ideology, insisting that to reconquer the word, colonized peoples
must first gain a greater awareness of their right to speak, pronounce, and name

10 Sandro R. Barros and Luciana C. de Oliveira
their world. In his letters to African educators compiled in Pedagogy in Process,
Freire asserts numerous times that the imposition of colonizer’s language on the
colonized represented an adherence to colonial domination, which extended to
neocolonial forms of control as well. As he remarks, it is not by chance that “the
colonizers speak of their own language as ‘language’ and the language of the
colonized as ‘dialect’; the superiority and richness of the former is placed over
against the poverty and inferiority of the latter” (Freire, 2021, p. 102).
The Guinea-Bissau government officialization of Portuguese as the language
of instruction, coupled with the ideological proclivities of educators agreeing
with Cabral’s views on the symbolic capital of Portuguese, limited the effects
of Freire’s professional development recommendations. His reflections on this
matter in Pedagogy in Process are particularly telling of how Freire understood
the challenges of literacy instruction within de-colonial and nation-building
efforts in superdiverse settings (Vertovec, 2007) where populations from dif-
ferent places, social classes, and cultures collide with different or no agendas at
all. While it is true that Freire’s involvement in the literacy campaign of post-
revolution Guinea-Bissau did not present the same results as other more
politically stable and resourceful African nations like São Tomé and Príncipe
(Kirkendall, 2010), the revolutionary government did accomplish some sensible
improvements. As Pereira and Motta note:
In the academic year 1971–72, PAIGC had a total of 164 schools in the
liberated zones where 258 teachers taught 14,531 students. Later, the best
students were selected to attend boarding schools set up in neighboring
countries by the Party. In addition, PAIGC was always very conscious
of the requirements of national reconstruction and not merely of those
created by the war with its need for young people in military service.
Therefore, particular attention was given to offering middle school and
higher education to many groups of students. These students counted with
the support of nearby countries for this purpose and the result has been
that a far larger number of Guinean students have completed advanced
courses during the war years than during the whole period of Portuguese
occupation. More classes graduated in ten years under PAIGC than in five
centuries of Portuguese domination.
(cited in Freire, 2021, p. 11)
Be that as it may, several of Freire’s critics have characterized Guinea-Bissau’s
literacy program as a failure, often blaming Freire’s ideas for its demise (see
Facundo, 1984; Harasim, 1985). However, these critics fail to mention that
Freire’s role was rather limited as a consultant, a fact that merits some attention.
By and large, the Brazilian educator worked with the Guinea-Bissau govern-
ment, as mentioned earlier, from afar, visiting the African continent only on two

From Angicos to the World 11
occasions (Freire, 2014). Moreover, those who disparage Freire’s literacy program
in Guinea-Bissau tend to rely on one empirical study, Linda Harasim’s PhD dis-
sertation (1985), where the author acknowledges the paucity of government data
available on the literacy campaigns, as well as the lack of common metrics used
to determine what reading achievement meant and what indicators were used
to measure literacy development across the board. Additionally, Guinea-Bissau’s
political instability, as to be expected, made it impossible for any initiative to suc-
ceed, thereby delaying the nation-building effort the revolutionary government
desired. A letter addressed to Freire on June 10th, 1985 by the then Minister
of Commerce, Fisheries and Crafts, Mário Cabral, explained the reasons
for the apparent “failure” of the literacy campaign in Guinea-Bissau as follows:
Were it not for the non-existence of the codification of the Portuguese
dialect in Africa and the absolute ignorance of Portuguese in rural areas,
I am sure, we would have had a great success, such was the political avail-
ability and popular receptivity. Years later, I still think that the analyses we
made then form the basis of any literacy venture. If Creole begins to have
the necessary elements for its use in teaching, the problem remains that
Portuguese continues to be the official and teaching language.
(quoted in Gadotti, 1996, p. 136)
Despite Cabral’s insightful observation above, and as Freire noted, any literacy
program is fated to fail under Guinea-Bissau’s conditions (Gadotti and Romão,
2012).
There is no denying that the literacy proposal advanced by Freire in Guinea-
Bissau was as idealistic as it was contradictory, considering it was paired with a
tradition of mechanical learning based on rote memorization. Notwithstanding
the poor results obtained in the post-revolution literacy program, the challenges
Freire encountered extended far beyond Cabral’s insistence on Portuguese
as a medium of instruction. To wit, at the time the Freirean-inspired liter-
acy campaigns in Guinea-Bissau took place, there were around 30 languages
spoken—and not written—across different ethnolinguistic communities. This
is remarkable for a nation of a little over a million inhabitants. Hence, the crite-
rion for choosing an official language was politically complicated from the start,
compounded by the country’s lack of infrastructure and its legacy of colonialism
imposing a particular mindset among the educated elites sympathetic to the rev-
olutionary cause. As Mario Cabral wonders reflecting on the post-independence
efforts to promote literacy in his nation:
suppose the criterion is to choose literacy in the mother tongue. In that
case, to recognize that every child has the right to be literate in his or her
own language, what to do then with the children belonging to linguistic

12 Sandro R. Barros and Luciana C. de Oliveira
minorities? The very choice of some of the national languages and the
nonchoice of others, probably based on statistics, would create a serious
problem from the point of view of the child’s rights, since the principle of
non-discrimination would be at stake.
(quoted in Freire and Guimarães, 2014, p. 177, our translation)
In the end, even if Guinea-Bissau’s Freirean-inspired literacy campaigns repre-
sented a failure by many accounts, in Freire’s case, at least, the experience was
an inherently pedagogical failure. His emancipatory model of critical literacy
showed a greater refinement and attunement to some deciding factors to con-
sider when planning large-scale interventions modeled after grassroots literacy
movements. If on the one hand Paulo Freire’s early experiences in Brazil and
Chile had focused intentionally on literacy as a process of conscientização—critical
consciousness achieved through action, reflection, and analysis—on the other
hand, after the African experience and upon his return to Brazil in 1980, Freire
began to stress the importance of accounting for communities’ economies within
literacy programs’ curriculum and instruction (Gadotti and Romão, 2012). In
this respect, Africa provided Freire with an opportunity to further develop his
theorization of the limitations organic intellectuals confront when organizing
social movements through education (see Mayo, 1999).
The association of the means of production and literacy curriculum was an
idea Freire developed in the didactics and training materials during his con-
sultancy work with Mozambique in 1976, where one realizes how much his
treatment of language mobilizes a semiotic repertoire that extends beyond what
one understands conventionally by language. Freire’s experiments in multilin-
gual Africa, blending a myriad of multimodal resources, anticipates the later
work of educational linguistics’ socio-semiotic turn (e.g., The Douglas Fir
Group, 2016). Through this line of inquiry, Freire crafted a discourse in which
he drew attention to the significance of space in literacy processes. Consider, for
instance, his remarks in Pedagogy in Process (2021) when reminiscing his encoun-
ter with the African soil:
My first encounter with Africa was not, however, with Guinea-Bissau
but with Tanzania, to which, for a variety of reasons, I feel very closely
related. I make this reference to underline how important it was for me
to step for the first time on African soil, and to feel myself to be one who
was returning and not one who was arriving. In truth, five years ago, as
I left the airport of Dar es Salaam, going toward the university campus,
the city opened before me as something I was seeing again and in which
I reencountered myself. From that moment on, even the smallest things,
like old acquaintances, began to speak to me of myself. The color of the
skies; the blue-green of the sea; the coconut, the mango and the cashew

From Angicos to the World 13
trees; the perfume of the flowers; the smell of the earth; the bananas and,
among them, my very favorite, the banana; the fish cooked in coconut
oil; the locusts hopping in the dry grass; the sinuous body movements of
the people as they walked in the streets, their smiles so ready for life; the
drums sounding in the depths of night; bodies dancing and, as they did
so, “designing the world”; the presence among the people of expressions
of their culture that the colonialists, no matter how hard they tried, could
not stamp out—all of this took possession of me and made me realize that
I was more African than I had thought.
(p. 1)
A few elements are worth remarking from the passage above, which gives us clues
about Freire’s treatment of language within intercommunicative and transcul-
tural educational processes concerning their needed sensitivity toward place. In
the excerpt, Freire hints at what it means to recognize oneself in the presence
of an Other, to search for familiarity in difference, and partake in experiential
practices conducive to the types of literacy the Other has to offer. But more
importantly, perhaps, he also describes nature as a semiotic resource that shapes
individuals’ literacy practices, underscoring how communicative practices are
embedded in the social milieu that characterizes communities’ understandings
and worldly practices.
Extrapolating from Freire’s observations, we might realize that the choices
we make to communicate across spaces invariably carry the residues of other
locations, our nomadic memories of histories, experienced directly or not, and
the ways we bear witness to the world as we labor to build places within it.
Pennycook (2010) states that language use represents a multifaceted expression
of the interplay between humans and the world. He notes while highlighting the
primacy of space in shaping communication that:
What we do with language in a particular place is a result of our inter-
pretation of that place; and the language practices we engage in reinforce
that reading of place. What we do with language within different institu-
tions—churches, schools, hospitals, for example—depends on our reading
of these physical, institutional, social and cultural spaces. We may kneel
and pray, stand and sing, direct classroom activity, write on the margins
of a textbook, translate between patient and doctor, ask when a cut hand
might get seen to, or spray-paint the back wall; and as we do so, we remake
the language, and the space in which this happens.
(p. 2)
Reflecting on Pennycook’s statement, it becomes clear how Freire’s experiences
in Africa reaffirmed the prominence of reading the social space as part and parcel

14 Sandro R. Barros and Luciana C. de Oliveira
of the emancipatory project he developed. It also underscores how such a reading
is necessary to the attainment of a more critical cognizance of what literacy can
mean to colonized peoples invested in recovering a collective sense of selfhood
after centuries of exploitative occupation. The use of the term “recovery” is not
meant as a search for an idealized lost paradise led by well-meaning intellectuals.
It is analogous to a collective effort toward developing activities enabling com-
munities to regain their consciousness of a particular way of relating to the land
outside the exploitative labor conditions imposed by colonial logics. This process
of recovery requires, according to Freire, a profound acknowledgement of what
language does in relation to the land (see Freire, 1985). As he states “no social
group or class or even an entire nation or people can undertake the struggle for
liberation without the use of a language. At no time can there be a struggle for
liberation and self-affirmation without the formation of an identity, and identity
of the individual, the group, the social class, or whatever” (Freire, 1985, p. 186).
However, the kind of politics that ensues from disenfranchised groups’ organi-
zation around identity causes of minoritized others is an issue that intellectuals
cannot resolve. Freire explains this idea thusly:
I am in total sympathy with women’s fantastic struggle, even though I
cannot fight their battle. Although I am a man, I can feel like a woman,
and I am not afraid to say this. But women’s liberation is their struggle.
They need to elaborate their own female language. They have to celebrate
the feminine characteristics of their language, which they were socialized
to despise and view as weak and indecisive. In the process of their strug-
gle, they have to use their own language, not man’s language. I believe
these language variations (female language, ethnic language, dialects) are
intimately interconnected with, coincide with, and express identity. They
help defend one’s sense of identity and they are absolutely necessary in the
process of struggling for liberation.
(Freire, 1985, p. 186, our emphasis)
If anything, Freire’s experiences in African soil brought to the forefront of
his awareness the problem of language and identity as something that should
evade dichotomist frameworks reinforcing solipsism as a byproduct of liberation
movements through education. Indeed, it was the dichotomization of language
and identity performed as politics as usual that Freire believed led many well-
meaning social causes to meet their demise. In his view, the centrality of iden-
tity questions within emancipatory literacy programs should not follow suit to
essentialist strategies found in many de-colonial strands of 1980s postcolonial
scholarship, which called for the deployment of identity as a means to build
intergroup solidarity within political movements (Kothari, 1998). Because non-
dichotomization was a part and parcel of Freire’s political praxis, it served him

From Angicos to the World 15
methodologically in examining the dangers of identity discourses that ultimately
deem certain forms more appropriate than others, as in the dichotomizing advo-
cacy of standard vs. nonstandard linguistic forms. From the passage cited above,
we may still surmise that Freire understood linguistic identity as a product of
the types of relationships human beings establish with one another and the land
they occupy. Thus, changing the ways individuals relate to one another and to
the land they inhabit inevitably changes how we view ourselves and others as
subjects (Freire, 1996).
What Freire learned in African soil is particularly useful to multilingual
education theorizing and praxis because it opens avenues for educators and
researchers to think about pedagogies sensitive to the relationship between the
location of culture, the power of languages used to represent it, and how, within
institutional settings, one might approach the study of language as a transcultural
communicative phenomenon—as opposed to introducing language practices
within “preferred language” discourses. As such, these discourses risk reifying
the authority of standard language in pernicious ways, in ways that isolate people
from their ancestral histories, the practices they’ve established in their modes
of relating to the land, in what they produce in their environment, materi-
ally or linguistically, through their creativity fueled by curiosity. Curiosity, as
Freire theorized, was the driving force of education, a phenomenon he believed
manifested spontaneously when teachers and students desired to approach any
educational task with child-like inquisitiveness open to what words mean in
their present but also to what they might mean.
Why This Collection Now? The Challenges of
Disinventing and Reconstituting Freire
Throughout the chapters of this book, the authors consider the many ways
Freire’s ideas work within and against public schools’ culture of framing lan-
guage instruction in monolingual terms or as a discrete diglossia. The ongoing
structural inequalities that are a deterrence to minoritized language learners
merits grave consideration, as millions of newcomers continued to be denied
equal voice and opportunities because their linguistic repertoires are system-
atically marked as inefficient or inappropriate for participation in the civic life
of classrooms. To date, many of the pioneering theories originated within the
domains of educational linguistics have aimed at improving the opportunities of
historically disenfranchised populations. In some ways, these theories hold great
promise. Nevertheless, when introduced to enthusiastic pre-service teachers who
go on to work in mainstream public systems, these theories struggle to become
an integral part of multilingual classrooms, a situation that needs to change.
To a certain extent, the resistance encountered in multilingual class-
rooms is expected. Schools are complex ecosystems that reflect the ideological

16 Sandro R. Barros and Luciana C. de Oliveira
heterogeneity and political interests of the community in which they are inserted.
In this respect, we would do well not to lose sight of how neoliberalism’s affective
overreach as an economic discourse influences educators in treating languages
and theories as properties, thereby attaching value to what we claim as beneficial
to others without necessarily respecting what others expect from our activist
work. Following Freire’s emancipatory thinking can assist us in anticipating
those instances when our well-meaning collective efforts to understand mul-
tilingualism’s life can become limited by how we dichotomize and essentialize
linguistic phenomena.
Overview of the Book
The collection of chapters that follows is divided into two parts. Part I , Theoretical
and Methodological Approaches, expands Freire’s concepts and ideas in rela-
tion to multilingualism and multilingual education issues. Chapter 2 , Critical
Biliteracies: The Mutually Reinforcing Endeavors of Freirean Criticality and Bilingualism, by Chris K. Chang-Bacon and Soria E. Colomer, traces Freire’s theory of language through pedagogical concepts such as critical literacies, critical consciousness, and political clarity to signal toward the possible contri-
butions of Freire’s cannon to bi/multilingual education. The chapter introduces a framework that underscores the mutually reinforcing potential of critical bi/ multiliteracies, illustrating how the framework might be read through a criti-
cal analysis of the increasingly popular “Seal of Biliteracy” policies presently enacted across 36 US states.
Chapter 3, The Critical Space Between: Weaving Freirean and Sociocultural
Pedagogies, by Brandon J. Sherman and Annela Teemant, discusses how criti-
cal pedagogy and sociocultural theories of learning, considered in tandem, have implications for the practice and pedagogy of language and literacy instruction for emergent bilinguals. In this chapter, the authors articulate ped-
agogical principles through Freire’s critical lenses, using illustrations drawn from how teachers translate Freirean perspectives into their living educational
practices.
In Chapter 4, Transforming Privilege: The Four R’s of Pedagogical
Possibilities, Adam Howard, Patrick Dickert, Wallace Tucker, and Sam Jefferson report on how students at Takau English School (TES; pseudonym), an elite secondary school in Taiwan, engage in an international educational experi-
ence aimed at transforming their understandings of self, others, and the world around them as they participate in a weeklong service trip. Specifically, the authors explore the four tenets of this educational process to transform partici-
pants’ understandings of privilege and develop critical consciousness. The tenets are relevance, responsibility, relationships, and reflection. The authors connect their findings to Freire’s theories on critical consciousness development and the

From Angicos to the World 17
power of multilingual literacy to better understand how pedagogical interven-
tions might facilitate a greater conscientização about privilege.
Chapter 5, Reading the World and Conscientização: Teaching about
Multilingualism for Social Justice for Multilingual Learners, by Heather Linville,
suggests how teacher educators can incorporate Freire’s ideas to encourage a
pro-linguistic diversity stance in courses that prepare pre-service teachers to
work with multilingual learners (MLs). Using examples from an undergraduate
course, Linville mobilizes Freire’s theories on conscientização to illustrate how
pre-service teachers and teacher educators can go about fomenting multilingual
dispositions as an educational value while reflecting upon their role as commu-
nity members and educators.
The next part of the book, Part II
research studies drawing on Freirean philosophy. The studies reported in this
section have multilingualism at the core, focusing on students, curriculum devel-
opment, and teaching. In Chapter 6 , Involvement and Authenticity: Transforming
Literacy Curricula for Marshallese Students Through Community-Based
Writing Projects, Anny Fritzen Case, Marcy Dodd, and Gina Mikel Petrie sur-
vey two competing literacy programs that unfolded in a middle school English
as a Second Language (ESL) classroom with a large contingency of Marshallese
students. They compare these programs as each had a very different orientation:
one focused on formulaic academic writing to scaffold multilingual students’
literacy development, embodying Freire’s notion of narrative as a potentially
oppressive device. The other program reimagined writing as a dialogical tool
deployed to connect with the community at large.
Chapter 7, Learning English as an Additional Language from Children’s
Points of View in a Public School in Brazil: A Freirean Perspective, by Andrea
da Silva Marques Ribeiro and Jessica F. Cruz, problematizes the widespread
belief that Brazilian public schools are illegitimate places to learn English.
The authors describe how culture circles were mobilized to gauge elementary
students’ uptake of and reactions to English lessons. As the authors discuss, edu-
cational legislation in Brazil requires additional language learning starting in the
6th grade. Thus, this chapter focuses on how English education can become a
resource more equally distributed across the public education system, beginning
with the ignored elementary grades.
In Chapter 8, Critical Educulturalism in the Borderlands: Exploring Social
positionality and the Dialogic Process of Culture Circles, Kelly Metz-Matthews
and Michele McConnell report on work done with K-12 teachers and school
leaders in California to support multilingual students. Their chapter evaluates the
results of a mixed-method study of the effects of a course focused on identifying
and problematizing internalized linguicism, linguistic imperialism, or linguistic
privileging, with particular attention paid to the role of social positionality and
critical educulturalism in teacher preparation. The authors depart from the four

18 Sandro R. Barros and Luciana C. de Oliveira
queries set out in Zaytoun’s framework around theorizing what border-thinking
means to connect to Freire’s phenomenological model of critical literacy. The
authors illustrate how the intersection of guided critical self-study coupled with
critical educulturalism might facilitate the development of critical consciousness
through specific forms of social and cultural exposure enhancing novice teach-
ers’ critical skills.
Chapter 9, Kindergarteners as Co-constructors of an Equitable Learning
Community in a Dual Language Class: A Freirean Analysis, by Tatiana M.
Cevallos and Rosa M. Floyd, describes and analyzes how a Spanish-English dual
language teacher incorporates Freire’s principles of a liberatory education in her
practice. Through descriptive vignettes, the teacher reflects on the steps she
took to implement strategies geared toward assisting native-Spanish and native-
English speakers in a kindergarten class to challenge and transform English’s
hegemony prevalent across US schools. The chapter focuses on the teacher’s
deliberate attention to the planning of learning moments that enabled five-year-
olds to use their lived experiences as a starting point to learn English and Spanish
within a dynamic continuum of bi-literacy.
In Chapter 10, (Re)turning to Freirean-Philosophy in Preparing Content
Teachers to work with Multilingual Students, Kara Mitchell Viesca, Peiwen
Wang, Brandon Heinz, and Alexa Yunes discuss a course in which 29 under-
graduate pre-service secondary content teachers, grounded by Freire’s
philosophies, reflected in depth on the work they did alongside multilingual
students. Centered on self-actualization, reciprocity, and accountability as
guiding objectives, the course assisted students in making sense of their lin-
guistic orientations within the global and historical context of multilingual
teaching. The authors investigate whether the teaching and learning practices co-
constructed with pre-service teachers during the course generated the desired
outcomes, thereby illustrating the possibilities of (re)turning to Freire’s work to
support the development of strong anti-oppressive pedagogies in multilingual
classrooms.
Chapter 11, Digital Storytelling as a Freirean-Based Pedagogy with Refugee-
Background Youth, by Carrie Symons and Kasun Gajasinghe, reports on a
year-long afterschool digital storytelling project that provided opportunities
for a group of multilingual, refugee-background youth to develop multimodal
literacy skills and expand their linguistic repertoires through a Freirean-
inspired model of dialogic learning. Drawing from ethnographic field notes,
interviews with the youth and fellow facilitators, as well as artifacts created by
the participants, the authors narrate the dialogic unfolding of the curriculum’s
underwriting and the final product of the course, a short film created by the stu-
dents accompanied by an original soundtrack. The film’s composition addressed
the lived experiences of emergent bilingual students in the United States who
navigate competing discourses about English as an additional language while

From Angicos to the World 19
dealing with being misunderstood on multiple levels: by peers, teachers, and
administrators.
Chapter 12, Ignoramuses and Sages: Using Freirean Concepts to Co-construct
Socially Just Initial Teacher Education Practices, by Gabriel Díaz Maggioli,
showcases an application of Freire’s pedagogical principles in pre-service
education of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) professionals during their
teaching internship in Uruguayan public schools. The chapter depicts a case
study in which Freire’s theories were discussed to assist aspiring teachers in co-
constructing socially just teaching practices while responding to and negotiating
with the goals set by the Uruguayan national curriculum.
Chapter 13, Planting Seeds: Pre-service Teachers Explore the Legacies of
Projeto Axé and Projeto Semear, by Amanda Montes and Miguel Fernandez,
documents pre-service teachers’ trajectories as they began to critically examine
Freire’s banking education concept through their experiences as students and
educators. The authors discuss the participants’ uptake of conscientização and liber-
tação within two particular pedagogical settings: the Projeto Semear and Projeto
Axé, both Brazilian programs designed with Freirean philosophies in mind.
The authors report on how pre-service teachers’ impressions of the oppressive
realities of traditional educational systems assisted them in imagining suitable
pedagogies to address the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students.
In Chapter 14, Rereading Learning, Schooling, and Race: Reflecting
on Dialogical Language Teacher Preparation through Participatory Action
Research, Amanda J. Swearingen, Catherine McCarthy, Autumn E. Sanders,
and Taylor M. Drinkman report on a qualitative study in which pre-service
teachers and their teacher educator designed a Participatory Action Research
(PAR) project about the school-to-prison pipeline, initiated previously in a
required critical intercultural communication and English language teaching
course. Through vignettes and analysis of course reflections, the authors discuss
how their PAR initiative placed in evidence the intercultural relationships the
participants formed (Migliorini and Rania, 2017) and how their awareness of
these relationships reframed their critical intercultural consciousness through
local systems of meaning, knowledge, and action. As the authors argue, the PAR
design facilitated the dissolution of the language-culture divide, foregrounding
cultural hybridity and identity in ways that opened up spaces to explore par-
ticipants’ positions in the world as teachers of a lingua franca and the symbolic
weight it carries.
Chapter 15, Problematização and Poesis: Making Problems with Freire and
Someone Else’s Syllabus, by Cori McKenzie, narrates her attempts to engage
in problematização while adopting a colleague’s syllabus to teach a semester-long
course. Autobiographically, the author surveys the relationship between English
and the social and political contexts in which it is spoken, heard, read, and writ-
ten, considering competing theories of language acquisition.

20 Sandro R. Barros and Luciana C. de Oliveira
Chapter 16, Bridging Multimodality and Criticality to Language Education
with a Twist from the Global South: Multimodal Critical Consciousness as
Multimodal Conscientização, by Raúl Alberto Mora, Andrés Tobón-Gallego,
Maria Camila Mejía-Vélez, and Elizabeth (Effy) Agudelo, concludes this edited
collection by sharing how a research team in Colombia rethought the linkage
between multimodality and critical literacy. Taking a closer look at Freire’s ideas
of conscientização and praxis, the authors advance Multimodal Conscientização
(MCZ) as a way to rethink text design and meaning making practices from a
critical stance. The chapter introduces the conceptual underpinnings of MCZ to
later describe how it might operate in language classrooms.
In many ways, the aforementioned chapters add to the extant research docu-
menting the various expressions of resistance to normative language ideologies
materialized across grassroots literacy programs through activist work inside and
outside classrooms (Sandlin et al., 2011). Yet, it is important to bear in mind
that what is often perceived as academically valuable may end up reflecting the
cultural interests, ideologies, and practices of the hommos academicus’ appreciation
of what minoritized groups’ practices have to offer (Baker-Bell, 2020; Bourdieu,
1988). In the present educational scenario, the tensions in our responses to ques-
tions related to providing appropriate conditions for literacy programs to thrive
in just and humane ways will likely remain. Multilingualism, as May (2013)
correctly remarks, is no panacea. Still, the present challenges to develop more
socially just and humane models of language education rests on our disposition
to resituate the repertoires of learners more centrally in language curriculum,
pedagogy, and assessment practices (May, 2013). This re-situation could benefit
a great deal from attuning to Freire’s anti-dichotomist stance as an organizing
principle of educational inquiry (Borges, 2021). The analysis of his grassroots
efforts, for better or for worse, introduces generative spaces for a scholarly appre-
ciation of what movements of popular education can do for literacy, without
necessarily reifying monolingualism, standard languages, parallel monolingual-
isms, linguistic hybridity, or translingualism as concepts ready to be turned into
normative discourses, thereby risking authoritarianism and clashing against
individuals’ needs and circumstances that lead them to pursue an education (see
Charalambous et al., 2016; Jaspers, 2019).
In our many entrances and exits from the universe of Freire’s theoretical cor-
pus, applied to the universe of multilingual education, we will likely continue to
discover many Freires, versions of the same idea that assist us in improving upon
and expanding what language education and multilingual literacy can mean in
the 21st century. The chapters that comprise this collection represent an attempt
at rediscovering Freire’s theories’ relevance to multilingualism and multilin-
gual education in a moment when languages and indigenous ways of life are
threatened by our indifference to social injustices normalized within the educa-
tional system. Critical hope is still paramount if we are to labor toward building

From Angicos to the World 21
possible worlds through educational movements making it more viable for stu-
dents to become themselves as they learn how to read, write, and utter their
word and be heard in the process. Education as the practice of freedom, at least
how Freire envisioned it, must have as its goal the unrestrained imagination.
All critical knowledge that ensues from this goal facilitates the acquisition of a
genuine spirit of discovery nested in the objective of forging a more socially just
and humane society.
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1024–1054.

PART I
Theoretical and
Methodological
Approaches

DOI: 10.4324/9781003175728-3
2
CRITICAL BILITERACIES
The Mutually Reinforcing Endeavors of
Freirean Criticality and Bilingualism
Chris K. Chang-Bacon and Soria E. Colomer
Introduction
As we mark the 50th anniversary of Freire’s Pedagogia do Oprimido’s publication
in English, the importance of Freire’s work to language education is becom-
ing ever clearer. As the authors of this piece, we write from the contexts of
the United States, where migration and multilingualism increasingly character-
ize our schools. At the same time, regressive global movements such as science
denial and the embodiment of White nationalism have reaffirmed the impor-
tance of critical perspectives. Our chapter demonstrates the productive synergies
between Freirean approaches and bilingual education to address these dynamics,
exploring both the affordances and limitations of Freirean criticality to advance
social, educational, and linguistic justice in language education.
This chapter is primarily focused on Freirean notions of criticality as employed
by teachers and researchers in language education. A variety of approaches use
the term “critical” in language education, including critical literacies, critical lan-
guage teaching, critical consciousness, and critical language awareness . In this chapter,
we explore these varied approaches and Freire’s particular influence on these
bodies of work. Yet, rather than viewing this as a one-way “banking model”
in which Freirean criticality influences language education, we also explore the
contributions language education has made, and can continue to make, to criti-
cal approaches. Thus, we offer a framework of critical biliteracies to highlight the
mutually reinforcing endeavors of Freirean criticality and language education.
The two of us write as US-based scholars who primarily study bilingual
and English language education. Within this perspective, we focus our respec-
tive research on language education for racially and linguistically minoritized

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abreast was hauled down and replaced by another, for the vessels
nearest the French to pursue, to overtake, and to bring the enemy
to action, and for all others to come on at their best speed, pressing
into battle where and how they could. The two fleets swept on past
Belleisle, rolling and pitching in the rising sea. It was shortly after
two in the afternoon that the French admiral led his flying force
round the Grands Cardinaux, and already the battle had begun with
the ships behind him. The Warëéight , Sir John Bentley, and the
Dçrëetëhire, Captain P. Denis, were the first of the English ships to
come up with and open fire on the enemy. They were soon joined by
the Revenge , Magnanime , Tçrbay, Mçntagu, Reëçlutiçn , Swiftëure, and
Defiance . Thus, when the French ships ran between the Grands
Cardinaux and Plateau du Four, all those at the end of their line were
already mingled with their pursuers, and both the fleets came in
together locked in a savage embrace of battle.
Never in the long history of war was the truth that the timid is also
the dangerous course more convincingly shown than in this battle.
As the English ships overtook the French, ranging up on both sides,
they did not linger by the first they met, but pushed on ahead,
leaving the work of destruction to be completed by their comrades
coming on behind. Thus the French rear ships were successively
assailed by superior numbers firing into them from right and left. It
must also be remembered that when the ships turned round Les
Grands Cardinaux and headed to the north and north-west, they
turned their left sides to the wind and were pressed over to the
right. The slope, or list, given to them was so great that it was
impossible to open the ports of the lowest tier of guns on the lee
side. When any English captain came up on the lee side of a
Frenchman, he himself had the full use of his weather battery, while
his opponent could not fire his heaviest and most effective tier of
guns. Conflans, in fact, had so managed matters that he gave
Hawke’s superiority of numbers an effect it could not have had if the
French fleet had accepted battle outside Belleisle, in good order, and
in a united body. The rear of his line was miserably crushed. The
Formidable, 80, the flagship of the Chef d’Escadre Saint-André

Duverger, was shattered to pieces by our fire. Duverger himself and
200 of his men were slain, and his ship surrendered. The Thésée,
74, filled and went down with all hands, unquestionably because her
captain, M. de Kersaint, opened his lower deck ports to fire and
allowed the water to rush in. Keppel on the Tçrbay all but incurred
the same fate by running the same hazard, but his ship freed herself
of the water in time.
A detailed description of the battle is an impossibility. The wind
shifted suddenly from W.N.W. to N.N.W., and increased in violence
as it travelled round, adding to the already frightful confusion of the
forty and odd great ships manœuvring in the confined triangle of
water bounded by the coast and the islands. The sea was heaving
underfoot, driven in great waves before the wind, and dragged
seaward by the ebb. The storm howled through the rigging. The
ships under reduced canvas made short tacks to avoid the rocks all
around. Conflans, after stretching up to Quiberon Bay, turned back
to the help of the ships behind him, and the two fleets were mingled
in a wild whirl of storm and battle. Collisions were incessant between
enemies and friends, but the English, as being the more practised
seamen, avoided them better, and suffered from them less. To the
French admiral it suggested itself as a possibility that he might fight
his way out again, and get once more to windward of Belleisle.
Signals followed one another rapidly from the Soleil Royal, but they
were not, and they could not be obeyed. The rolling of the ships
rendered their fire ineffective, and the danger of wreck compelled
the captains to think constantly of the safety of their vessels. Sunset,
too, came early, and the dark put a stop to all manœuvring. Thus
there was neither time nor opportunity to take many prizes. One
other French ship, the Superbe, shared the fate of the Thésée, and
the Héros, dismasted and riddled by the English fire, hauled down
her flag and dropped anchor. But the enemy was none the less
completely beaten. Seven of his ships found refuge in the Vilaine by
grovelling over the mud bar of the river. Others fled down the coast
to the south, where one of them, the Juste, was stranded near St.
Nazaire. Her first and second captains, the brothers Allouar, had

both fallen. Conflans himself ran inside the Point du Four, and
anchored off Croisic. When darkness came down, Hawke made the
signal to anchor. It was, according to the code of the time, two guns
fired to leeward, and was naturally not distinguished while cannon
were being fired on all sides. Several of the English ships kept under
way all night, but most anchored between the Grands Cardinaux and
the little island of Dumet, which lies to north-east towards the mouth
of the Vilaine. Two English ships, the Eëëex and the Reëçlutiçn , were
lost on the Four in the dark. The captain of the Héros finding that he
was not boarded by an English prize crew, took advantage of the
darkness to cut his cables and allow his vessel to drive ashore near
Croisic, when Conflans had anchored in the Soleil Royal. In the
morning the admiral found himself alone, with the bulk of Hawke’s
fleet at anchor a few miles off. Hopeless of escape, he ran his
flagship ashore to prevent her from falling into our hands.
Judged by the fighting alone, the battle of Quiberon was less
arduous than many we have fought with the French and all we have
fought with the Dutch. But the fighting was in this case the least of
the battle. It stands in the first rank, if not at the head of all the
heroisms of the fleet, because it was won over the storm, the sea,
and the rocks, as well as over man. The boldness of Hawke in flying
at his enemy before his own force was thoroughly united, and the
magnificent seamanship of his captains in circumstances of
unparalleled difficulty set this battle apart. Although the French had
but one vessel taken and five destroyed, they were utterly routed.
The seven ships which fled into the Vilaine were lost for all practical
purposes, and the spirit of their navy was broken for the rest of the
war. There is a legend which tells how the sailing master of the Rçyal
Geçrge expostulated when ordered to take the ship among the rocks
of Quiberon, and how Hawke answered that his subordinate had
done his duty by pointing out the danger and was now to obey the
order. If this story has not an actual, it has a mythical, truth. What
gives its peculiar character to Hawke’s victory at Quiberon was its
magnificent military quality. To the mere seaman there was
something like madness in rushing just before dark into the most

frightful of the possible perils of navigation. But the admiral, though
a finished seaman, was also a great fighting leader, and to him the
occasion seemed one on which to use his skill, not to avoid but to
incur dangers, for a great purpose. Nothing equal in conduct will be
met for twenty-two years, and until we come to Hood’s fine, though
unsuccessful effort to save the island of St. Kitts from the Comte de
Grasse. Indeed the whole passage of the blockade of Brest and the
battle of Quiberon was without precedent in the history of the navy,
and without an equal successor for forty years. The tenacity with
which the fleet kept its watch into the stormy winter months would
have appeared the excess of temerity to the naval officers of former
times, who thought it dangerous to leave the great ships at sea after
September. What also was without precedent was the success with
which the crews were kept in health by the determination of the
admiral that they should be regularly supplied with fresh meat and
wholesome beer. After Quiberon the stormy weather made the
service of the victuallers difficult, and there was a change for the
worse which is recorded in the navy’s one contribution to
epigrammatic literature—
“Ere Hawke did bang
Monsieur Conflans
You sent us beef and beer;
Now Monsieur’s beat
We’ve nought to eat
Since you have nought to fear.”
It adds a grace to the heroic figure of Hawke that he was tender of
the lives and of the health of his men. But his good sense taught
him that sickly crews must needs make a crippled fleet.
The history of the invasion year may be concluded with a brief notice
of the fate of Thurot. He escaped from Dunkirk with five ships on the
17th October, and made his way to the coast of Norway. From
thence he came down to the Hebrides early in 1760. Two of his
vessels were disabled by weather at different times and left him. On
the 20th February he appeared off Carrickfergus in the north of

Ireland, and took the place. On the 28th of the same month Captain
Elliot of the Eçluë, with two other frigates, fell in with the three
Frenchmen and took them after a sharp fight, in which Thurot, a
brave humane man worthy of a better service and a better fate, lost
his life. And so went out the last spark of the French scheme for the
destruction of England.
When darkness closed down on the Bay of Quiberon on the 20th
November, the great operations of naval warfare came to an end, for
there was no longer any fleet to meet ours at sea. The navy had
duty to do both during 1759 and afterwards in co-operating with the
army in the conquest of French possessions. But its work, however
indispensable, was ancillary, and a repetition of the same tale with
the same moral would be tedious. I shall therefore, as in the case of
the operations of the reigns of King William and Queen Anne, simply
give a list of the expeditions.
Expedition.
When
Begun.
When
Ended.
Commodore Moore and Major-General Hopson
attack Martinique unsuccessfully, and
Guadaloupe successfully. The arrival of
Bompart’s squadron compelled Moore to
concentrate his ships, which gave the French
privateers an opportunity to do considerable
injury to our trade. Their activity confirmed the
British Government in its intention to deprive
them of their ports of supply by taking all the
French islands. No action took place with
Bompart.
End of
November
1758
May
1759.
Vice-Admiral Saunders and Wolfe sail from
Spithead, pick up the ships left on the
American coast, and take Quebec on the 17th
August. Saunders sailed for home two months
later.
17th
February
1759.
18th
October
1759.

Commodore Keppel and Major-General
Hodgson take Belleisle.
29th
March
1761.
7th June
1761.
Commodore Sir James Douglas and Lord Rollo
take Dominica in the Antilles. They sailed from
Guadaloupe.
4th June
1761.
8th June
1761.
Rear-Admiral Rodney and Major-General
Monckton complete the conquest of the French
settlements in the West Indies, except those in
Hayti.
8th
January
1762.
26th
February
1762.
After Spain had joined France, a great
combined expedition under Sir G. Pocock, with
Lord Albemarle as General, sailed from home,
and, after collecting forces in the West Indies,
took Havana.
5th March
1762.
11th
August
1762.
In the East Indies Admiral Cornish and Colonel
Draper took Manila.
1st August
1762.
6th
October
1762.
While the campaigns of 1758 and 1759 were being fought out in
Europe and America, the rivalry between France and England in the
Eastern Seas was decided to our advantage. In this struggle the
navy played a very essential part. The scene of its labours and final
triumph, was on the eastern or Coromandel coast of the Indian
Peninsula. Here the course of the war was dictated to a very large
extent by certain physical conditions. From March to October is the
season of the S.W. or rainy monsoon. Then the wind is favourable to
all ships entering the Bay of Bengal. It blows away from the land
and renders the coast safe. Immediately under the land, however,
there is a belt of water subject to variable winds, which blow
alternately on to the land from the S.E. and off it from the S. or W.
When the wind is from the S.E. the sea becomes rough, and the
coast, being very ill provided with harbours, is dangerous. All
currents during this season flow strongly to the north. Thus the
tendency of wind and water alike is to carry all ships into the Bay,
and to make the Coromandel coast safe. After October and till the

end of February comes the season of the N.E. monsoon, which,
blowing on to the land, makes a rough sea and a dangerous coast,
and also tends to blow all ships out of the Bay of Bengal. Thus in the
ordinary course of trade vessels would come in with the S.W.
monsoon, and arrange to start so as to get the help of the N.E.
monsoon on their homeward voyage. Thus too the period of
operation for fighting fleets would be during the S.W. monsoon,
since at that time the coast was safe, and both sides would take the
opportunity to send out reinforcements to its garrisons on shore,
while its commerce would be coming in at the beginning and going
out at the end of the period. With the N.E. monsoon all sails
disappeared from the Bay of Bengal—those of commerce on their
homeward voyage, those of war to their respective ports, which for
the French meant the island of Mauritius, and for the English,
Bombay on the western or Malabar coast. Here, as in Europe, we
had an advantage of position. The Malabar coast is nearer the
Coromandel than is the Mauritius, and therefore the British
squadron, when directed with common energy, could always be at
the scene of operations before its opponent, and could be placed so
as to intercept all French forces on their way to Pondicherry.
Mention has already been made of the co-operation of Admiral
Watson and Clive in the suppression of Geriah early in 1756. They
reached Madras on the 20th June, one day before the taking of
Calcutta by Suraj-ud-Daulah and the tragedy of the Black Hole. The
vengeance for this outrage is one of the most famous stories in our
history. But it belongs to the history of the East India Company
rather than to that of the navy. Against an enemy who possessed no
ships, the fleet could only act by providing for the transport of
troops, covering their landing, attacking forts on the coast, and
landing stores or naval brigades. Admiral Watson did his share in the
work actively in the early months of 1757, and he was passively
consenting to the fraud by which his name was forged for the
purpose of cheating Omichand. A small naval brigade shared in the
battle of Plassey. In any case the sudden extension of British power
which came out of the overthrow of Suraj-ud-Daulah, would

probably have led to a renewal of the conflict with the French
Company, but hostilities were precipitated by the European and
American quarrels of the two countries. In March 1757 the French
fort at Chandernagore, just above Calcutta, was occupied after a
sharp fight, in the midst of the complicated negotiations and
conflicts with the Nabob of Bengal. Admiral Watson did not live to
take part in the naval conflict with the French, but died in September
of 1757. He was succeeded by Rear-Admiral George Pocock, to
whom it fell to command at sea in the decisive struggle for
supremacy in India.
No attempt will be made here to describe the series of battles fought
during 1758 and 1759. These actions present little more than a
weary repetition of examples of the working of the pedantic Fighting
Instructions. Though Pocock was unquestionably a man of great
energy, strong mind, and the utmost zeal for the service, he wanted
the originality and independence of intellect to break away from the
traditional method. Thus action after action presents the same
monotonous picture. The British squadron works to windward to
secure the power to force on battle, and comes down in line to
engage the enemy from end to end. The French wait for the attack,
fire to cripple the rigging of those of our vessels which present
themselves first to its blows, and then slip away, damaged more or
less severely, but never so seriously that they cannot reach the port
they are steering for, while our crews are knotting, splicing, and
replacing ropes and spars. It was by no single well-delivered blow,
by no telling victory that we finally forced our opponent out of the
Indian Seas, but by persistence, by a better average of practical
seamanship, by the possession of greater resources—by, as it were,
slowly pushing him in front of us as by a steady application of
weight.
The conflict on the sea blazed up in 1758. The French Government
had realised the necessity for making an effort to preserve its East
Indian possessions in 1757. A squadron was fitted out at Brest under
M. D’Aché, and sailed on the 6th March. It was driven back by bad
weather, and two of the vessels belonging to it were taken to serve

in America with M. Dubois de Lamotte. On the 4th May M. D’Aché
sailed again with one king’s ship and five belonging to the Company,
carrying with him a body of troops under the headlong and
passionate Lally, the most unhappy and one of the least wise of the
Irishmen who have been the enemies to this country. The dates of
D’Aché’s cruise illustrate the slow progress of fleets at that time. He
reached Rio on the 23rd July, and remained there for two months to
recruit the health of his crews—no unusual stoppage in the Indian
voyages of the period. He reached the Île de France on the 28th
December, and sailed for India on the 27th January 1758. On the
26th April he reached the coast of Coromandel—little less than a
year after he had left Brest. While D’Aché was slowly sailing to the
East, Pocock had been reinforced in March by Commodore Charles
Stevens, and his squadrons had been raised to seven vessels of from
fifty to sixty-four guns. He knew that a French force was on its way
and must be now approaching the coast of Coromandel. On the 17th
April he sailed from Madras and worked to the southward in search
of the enemy, but did not succeed in meeting him. D’Aché had
passed unseen and had anchored at Carical, a French post to the
south of the English station of Cuddalore, which is to the south of
Pondicherry. Pondicherry itself is well to the south of Madras. The
French officer had with him eight vessels—for he had found some at
the Île de France—one more than Pocock, but only his flagship the
Zodiaque, 74, was a warship. The other seven were vessels
belonging to the French East India Company, were built for trade as
well as fighting, and even if they carried their full nominal
armaments of forty-four, fifty, or fifty-four guns, inferior in solidity to
Pocock’s. The one ship more of the French would barely put them on
an equality with our squadron.
From Carical D’Aché sent on Lally to assume his government at
Pondicherry, and he himself struck at the English station of
Cuddalore. He had the good fortune to cut off two small vessels, the
Tritçn and Bridgewater, which were driven ashore under the citadel
of the place, Fort St. David. Meanwhile Pocock was coming back
from his unsuccessful cruise to the South. On the 29th April the two

fleets sighted one another, and a confused action ensued. The dull
rules of the Fighting Instructions were badly executed by some of
Pocock’s captains, and one of D’Aché’s officers showed downright
cowardice. After the usual cannonade the two fleets separated in the
customary respective conditions of British and French squadrons
after an action fought according to rule. The French, whose ships
were crowded with Lally’s soldiers, had a heavy list of killed and
wounded, because we preferred to fire at our enemy’s hull. In the
British squadron several vessels were so crippled in their rigging as
to be unmanageable. D’Aché anchored at Alamparva, north of
Pondicherry, where one of his vessels became a wreck in the surf.
Pocock went on to Madras to refit and bring three of his captains to
court martial. One was dismissed the service, and the other two
sentenced to lesser penalties. The incident is an example of that
wholesome severity which, by assigning to every man a definite
responsibility and calling on him to answer for every failure, has
established the magnificent discipline of the Royal Navy, and has
been the austere parent of its splendid efficiency.
From Alamparva D’Aché went to Pondicherry and landed his soldiers
and his numerous sick and wounded. At the close of May Pocock
appeared off the port. The French Admiral, whose squadron was ill
fitted, had recourse to every device to avoid action, and all the rabid
driving of Lally could not make him incur risks. As the authorities at
Madras were rendered nervous for their safety by the strength of the
French military force they recalled Pocock, and thus enabled D’Aché
to co-operate with Lally in the capture of Fort St. David in June. In
July, however, the admiral was back off Pondicherry seeking battle.
D’Aché would fain have avoided a meeting and have returned at
once to the Île de France. Prayers and threats from the authorities
and Lally induced him to stay, and to play a game of hide-and-seek
in the calms and varying inshore winds of the coast. On the 3rd
August, after infinite confusing movements and varying breezes,
another barren cannonade took place off Negapatam. Again both
admirals anchored, Pocock at Carical and D’Aché at Pondicherry. On
the 3rd September the Frenchman sailed for the Île de France, and

the sea being now clear of enemies, Pocock went round to Bombay
to avoid the storms of the north-easterly monsoon.
This campaign has certain features of interest. Though Pocock’s
arms were tied by the Fighting Instructions, he showed a vigour in
attack and a persistency of effort which promised final victory over
his timid opponent. But the working of those instructions is full of
warning. It has been ingeniously argued by the late Admiral Colomb
that the presence of an effective naval force, for which he invented
—or to which he adapted—the name of “Fleet in Being,” on a given
coast will of itself so act as to stop all operations against that coast
on the part of an enemy. Yet in this case, though the British
squadron was at least a full match for the French, and Pocock’s will
to strike was of the best, we see that he failed both to prevent
D’Aché from landing soldiers at Pondicherry and from co-operating in
the taking of Cuddalore. He failed partly because of the timidity of
the Council which called him back to Madras, but mainly because he
was tied by formal rules of battle which did not allow him to develop
freely the whole strength of his command. Had he been free to take
his fleet always where he thought best, and to use it unbound by
foolish laws, had he been one of those great and original captains
who have the moral and intellectual courage to break away from
worn-out traditions, there can be no doubt that his campaign of
1758 on the coast of Coromandel would have been marked by a
decisive battle. It might well have been far more costly than the two
engagements actually fought, but we may assert, without undue
patriotic confidence in our own navy, that it would have broken the
French naval forces in those seas to pieces. As it was, the balance of
advantage was rather with the French than with us. The moral of the
story is surely, that it is not enough for a fleet to be “in being” if it is
not also in action, and that there is but little use in action which is
not allowed to drive its blows home to the heart.
The operations of 1759 bear some likeness to those of the previous
year, but with a marked difference. Our squadron well supplied,
strictly disciplined, grew in strength, efficiency, and confidence.
D’Aché was joined at the Île de France by ships of the navy from

Europe commanded by Froger de l’Eguille, who had taken part in the
action with Byng. But his very numbers were an embarrassment to
him. The French islands were too poor to feed the crews of the
squadron. They were only kept from starvation by sending some of
the ships to buy food at a great cost from the Dutch at the Cape of
Good Hope, and others to live from hand to mouth on the coast of
Madagascar. Stores were almost wholly wanting, and the work of
refitting the vessels was either not done at all, or was done by
sacrificing one necessary to serve as makeshift for another. It is
therefore not surprising that whereas Pocock was back from the
Malabar coast and was cruising in the Bay of Bengal in April, D’Aché
was unable to leave the islands till the middle of July. He was near
Batacaloa on the east coast of Ceylon at the end of August. He had
eleven ships to Pocock’s eight, but many were weak, all were badly
fitted, and there was little heart or confidence in officers or men. To
a large extent his crews were natives. The utmost he felt able to do
was to carry some reinforcements to Pondicherry, and his ambition
did not reach beyond effecting this service without being brought to
battle if he could. When then he was sighted by Pocock on the coast
of Ceylon, he applied himself to slipping away and succeeded. The
British admiral, having lost sight of him, hastened to cut his road at
Pondicherry, and another scene of cannonading, of damaged rigging
for us, and of final escape for the French, took place on the 10th
September. D’Aché reached Pondicherry while our ropes and spars
were being repaired at Negapatam. During the rest of the month the
British admiral made successive attempts to provoke his opponent to
battle. The furious Lally, whose one idea of government was to lay
about him with a flail, strove hard to get service out of his naval
colleague. But D’Aché, who was deep in the ruinous intrigues of the
French settlement, would do nothing. He would not even stay on the
coast though prayed to do so by his countrymen. His officers were
as eager to be gone as himself. At the end of September he sailed
for the islands, and the French flag disappeared from those seas.
When his opponent was gone Pocock went round to Bombay. From
thence he sailed for home with a great convoy, and arrived on the
22nd September. The naval war was at an end in the East Indies by

the utter collapse of the French. Their possessions being cut off from
help, fell before the superior forces of the English company.
Pocock was rewarded by the immensely lucrative command of the
fleet which sailed in the combined expedition against Havana in
1762, when Spain, in a moment of Royal folly, was dragged into the
war against us. On that enterprise and of the contemporaneous
expedition which Pocock’s successor in the East Indies command,
Cornish, led against Manila, no more will be said here than that they
were marked by a loyalty of co-operation between sailor and soldier
which was then a novelty.

T
CHAPTER VII
THE AMERICAN WAR TILL 1780
Authçrities .—See authorities for previous years; Mundy’s Life
and Correspondence of Lord Rodney; Barrow’s Life of
Howe; Chevalier, Histoire de la Marine Française
pendant la guerre d’independence Americaine;
Parliamentary History; Annual Register.
he interval of fifteen years which separates the end of the Seven
Years’ War from the beginning of the American War in 1778 saw
no change in the organisation of the navy. An improvement in
their half pay was given to the captains in 1773. In 1715 the right to
enjoy half pay when not on active service, which had hitherto been
limited to twenty-five officers of this rank, was extended to all. The
amount had come to appear insufficient by 1773, and the captains
petitioned Parliament for relief. Their case was stated by Howe, who
was then member for Dartmouth. Lord North, the Prime Minister,
began by opposing the motion, on the ground that it affected the
revenue, and ought therefore to have been made by a minister. But
the sympathy of the house was with Howe and his clients. A
committee of inquiry was appointed, and on its report Parliament
decided that the increase ought to be granted. A sum of £7000 was
finally voted, and the scale of half pay was fixed at 10s. a day for 50
captains, 8s. for 30, and 6s. for all the others, in their order of
seniority. Howe and the more fortunate naval officers, who were
members of the House of Commons and who gave him support,
acted an honourable part on behalf of their brothers in arms. They
would have done still better if they had gone on to represent the far
more cruel grievances of the men. Had they acted with spirit for
those fellow-seamen who did not belong to their own class, they
might have secured a hearing, and have saved the navy from the
long list of mutinies which were to disgrace the coming war. But so

much magnanimity and foresight was perhaps not to be expected in
those years of the eighteenth century. Nothing was done for the
sailors. The isolated mutinies were sometimes suppressed with
severity, but were sometimes concealed from public knowledge, and
condoned. A long course of neglect and weakness, with now and
then a spasm of ferocity, bore its natural fruit in the combined
mutiny at Spithead in 1797.
The discipline of the navy continued to benefit by the admirable
work done in the Seven Years’ War by the great chiefs and the less
famous officers whom they inspired. Their influence and example
went on bearing good fruit, and have indeed never ceased to be felt,
but have been carried from one generation to another of their
successors. Remote from the corruption of the dockyards and the
fury of political factions on shore, on solitary voyages, in long
cruises, in blockades, in battle and storm, the admirals and captains
who were trained in the schools of Anson and Hawke, Pocock and
Boscawen, and were themselves to train the admirals and captains
of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, went on perfecting the
seamanship and fighting efficiency of the fleet. An anonymous
officer, who wrote in 1788, could declare in answer to those who
boasted of the ancient discipline of the navy, that “if we compare the
past practices and methods, as they have been explained to us thirty
years ago by old seamen in the service, with the present, we shall
find, that in no one thing under the British Government has there
been so much improvement as in the art of fighting, sailing, and
navigating a British ship of War.” The reason he gives is full of
instruction, and deserves to be quoted at length:—
“The old method of enforcing discipline was without
method, by main strength and the frequent use of the
rattan, without which no officer, from the captain down to
the youngest midshipman, ever went upon deck. Even
twenty years ago there was much of this discipline (if it
can be called by the name) remaining in the service. Last
war [i.e. between 1778 and 1783] there is no doubt that
the internal discipline of His Majesty’s ships in general was

brought to as great a degree of perfection, almost, as it is
capable of receiving; I say in general. There were indeed
exceptions; but in captains bigoted to the old customs,
and whose ships might always be distinguished by their
awkwardness and inactivity and by the indifferent figure
they cut in action, though commanded with bravery. This
general improvement proceeded from a method adopted
in every branch of an officer’s and sailor’s duty, by dividing
and quartering the officers with the men, and making
them responsible for the performance of that portion of
the duty allotted them, without noise, or the brutal
method of driving sailors like cattle with sticks. Whether it
were to make or shorten sail, to manœuvre the ship, to
keep the men clean clothed, clean bedded, and berthed,
this method was practised.”
The writer attributes the efficiency of the crews and the good health
they enjoyed even in the West Indies, while under the command of
Rodney and Hood, to this more humane and intelligent system. He
claims that there were cases when out of twenty-two sail of the line
cruising together, there were not twenty-two men who could not
come to quarters. The reader who compares this with the terrible
ravages made by fever and scurvy in the naval expeditions of Queen
Anne’s reign and the beginning of the Seven Years’ War will see how
vast had been the change for the better. The example of Captain
Cook and the exertions of Rodney’s doctor, Gilbert Blane, brought
about improvements in the diet of the men which saved thousands
for the service of their country, who would have been thrown to the
sharks in former times. All this reform was the spontaneous work of
the navy. There was so little about it of Admiralty system that no
universal system of quartering men and dividing work was
established till far into the nineteenth century. Captains followed the
practice of the officers under whom they had first served, with
improvements of their own. The perfected discipline of the navy was
the result of the labours of hundreds of officers, many of whom are
completely forgotten, thinking, experimenting, and toiling, each in

his own sphere, but all with the same noble love of good work.
Therefore it had, and has, a grand life of its own, incomparably
higher, and far more enduring than the mechanical order enforced
by a minister or king. “It is the service” was the most emphatic
praise a naval officer could give, and “It is not the service” his most
severe condemnation. “The Service” was the formula standing for
that combination of smartness, of cleanliness, of precision of
movement, of exactness of stroke, of resolution to endure, and of
intrepidity to venture, which is the glory of the navy, its strength,
and the real explanation of its triumphs. It is of this too that the
nation has the best reason to be proud. There is something rather
servile and more than rather blind in the habit of attributing all
success to the commander. In the long run the Roman Legion will
wear down Hannibal, and it is a greater feat for any people to
produce the organism which is animated by the virtue of tens of
thousands of its sons, than the exceptional leader, whose genius
does not always last even for the whole of his own life. We do well
to put up monuments to Nelson, and it would be to our honour to
remember other admirals more fully than we do. The navy itself is
the living memorial raised to the generation of forgotten men whose
names have passed into forgetfulness, but whose work lives to this
day on the quarter-decks and forecastles of every ship flying the
cross of St. George.
While the seamen were steadily perfecting the discipline of the navy,
their rulers on shore were allowing the administration to drift back to
the corruptions of Walpole’s time. The cause of this unhappy
reaction is easily stated. George iii. came to the throne with the
determination to be king. This meant that he would not consent to
be a puppet in the hands of the Whig oligarchy of Revolution
families, who had dominated his grandfather. He could not crush
them by the use of force, and was consequently compelled to fight
them with their own weapons, which were interest and corruption.
Interest meant that he bought the obedience of Members of the
House of Commons by bribery. Every branch of the public service,
and the Royal Household also, suffered because places were given to

buy votes, and no reform could be effected without losing the
support of members of Parliament who profited by the abuse. The
evil was particularly bad in the navy. Parliamentary boroughs and
dockyard seats were regularly filled with henchmen of the king’s
ministers, on the understanding that they gave their help to
suppress inquiry. Money voted with a great appearance of precision
for specific purposes was not applied to the ends for which it was in
theory granted. What became of it nobody was ever able to discover.
On paper the system of accounts was so rigid that fraud might have
appeared to be impossible, but its very severity made it
cumbersome, and the men in office were not even honest. When
taxed with misuse of the nation’s money they were in the habit of
boasting that they did not take it for themselves. It is probable that
they did not put it directly into their own pockets, but their defence
was sophistical. Corruption was needed to keep them in place—and
place was lucrative. Every department had its own treasury. The
money paid out by the Exchequer was put to the account of the
minister. The bankers paid interest on it, and this interest was the
perquisite of the members of the ministry. It was their interest to
delay payments and conceal the actual use made of the funds.
Brougham repeats a story which illustrates the spirit of the
politicians of that generation. When Lord North was appointed
Paymaster of the Forces he found that he had to divide the
emoluments with another politician. His disgust was great, and he
revenged himself by a characteristic jest. A dog made a mess in the
passage outside his room. Lord North sent for one of the servants,
ordered him to carry the offensive matter away, and take care that
his colleague received his due share, for said he, “Mr. Cooke is to
have half of everything that comes into the office.”
When the war with France came in 1778 the mischief had been in
full swing for seven years under the administration of Lord
Sandwich, which began in 1771. During that period he had received
for the building and equipping of the navy £6,472,072, besides large
sums charged on the debt. This was nearly twice as much as had
been voted between 1755 and 1762, and considerably more than a

million beyond the votes of 1763 to 1771. These sums did not cover
the whole expense of maintaining the navy. The supplies were voted
under three heads. There was the Ordinary of the Navy, which
meant the maintenance of the dockyards, care of the ships not in
commission, and half pay. Then there was the Extraordinary of the
navy, the “building, rebuilding, and repairs” and all “extra works over
and above what was meant to be done upon the heads of wear and
tear in ordinary.” The third vote was for so many men at £4 a head
per month of twenty-eight days. Of this sum £1, 16s. was for wages
of all ranks, 19s. for rations, and the balance covered current
expenses in replacing rigging and ammunition. This was naturally
the largest sum of all. The votes for 1779 for example were
respectively: for the Ordinary, £369,882, 6s. 1d.; for the
Extraordinary, £579,187; and for 70,000 men “for 13 months,
including ordnance,” £3,640,000. The £6,472,072 supplied to
Sandwich between 1771 and 1778 did not include the vote for men.
Though the sum was so considerable, the Admiralty was unable to
find fifty line-of-battle ships for sea in the summer of 1778.
Why so much money produced such unsatisfactory results was well
shown in the course of a discussion in the Commons on the 13th
January of this year. Mr. Temple Luttrell quoted figures to show that
as much had been voted for the repairs of the Namur, the Defence ,
and the Arrçgant , as would have built them new from the keel at the
most extravagant rate. Yet they were not fit for service. An even
more scandalous case was that of the Dragçn, 74. She had been
launched in 1760 in the heat of the Seven Years’ War, and was one
of the vessels then hastily constructed of green timber to meet a
pressing need. They were rotten by 1771, and Sandwich was in the
habit of taking credit to himself for his exertion to replace them by
better ships. What had happened with the Dragçn was this—that
between 1771 and 1778 the Admiralty came to Parliament for
successive sums, amounting to £27,000, for her repairs, and
£10,273 for her stores. Yet in the latter year she was notoriously
lying in a rotten state at the head of Portsmouth Harbour, and not
one penny of this money had ever been spent upon her. The facts

were not disputed. All that the Sea Lords, who answered for the
Admiralty, could say was, that they had not pilfered the money
themselves, and that this sort of thing had always been done. The
answer was, that it was directly contrary to the representation of the
House of Commons in 1711. It was on this occasion that Burke
threw the book of the estimates across the Speaker’s table, knocking
over a candle, and all but breaking the shins of the Treasurer of the
Navy, Welbore Ellis. He said, that it was “treating the House with the
utmost contempt, to present them with a fine gilt book of estimates,
calculated to the last farthing, for purposes to which the money
granted was never meant to be applied.” Burke was right, but the
Whig Opposition had done nothing to amend the evil in its days of
power, and had little right to take a lofty moral line with its
successors. Contempt was the exact word for the attitude taken
towards all criticism by Sir Hugh Palliser and Lord Mulgrave, the
naval representatives of the Admiralty in the Lower House. Palliser
was arrogant and laconic, lying as to the state of the fleet with a
burly assurance. Lord Mulgrave, the Irish peer, better remembered
as the Captain Constantine Phipps, with whom Nelson made his
early voyage to Spitzbergen, was fluent, jocular, and insolent. A
docile majority supported them by voting “the previous question” as
the most convenient way of stifling inquiry.
Indignant contemporary critics declared that accounts made in this
fashion were in fact deliberately designed to “envelope in utter
darkness the true appropriation of the immense sums they (the
Ministers to wit) extort thereupon from the public.” The respective
shares of deliberate design and mere convenient use and wont in
producing the disorder present a nice question. What is beyond
dispute is, that when the gilt book of the estimates showed the
expenditure of such and such sums for repairs and stores, and when
the money was devoted to other purposes, and the vessels named
were lying rotten and unfit for sea, it must have been impossible
even for the best informed officials to know the effective strength of
the navy. Indeed, nothing is more difficult than to find what was the
real available force of the fleet at this crisis. The common printed

authorities, Beatson’s Naval and Military Memoirs, Schomberg’s
Chronicle, and Derrick’s Memoirs of the Royal Navy (all good books
in their different ways), contradict one another. It is only natural
they should, for there were no accurate sources of information. It
was not till 1773 that the Admiralty itself began to try to take stock
of its vessels. In that year it was ordered that a return, to be known
as the “Progress of the Dockyards,” should be made every week,
showing what ships of all classes were under the care of the
officials. There was also a monthly list of ships in full sea pay. It
ought to have been possible to make an exact return of the strength
of the navy by adding the one to the other. But these papers were
avowedly untrustworthy. A ship in full sea pay, or commission, might
go into the dockyard for repairs. She would then appear in the
Weekly Progresses, and if the totals alone were looked to, she would
be counted twice. Then a vessel was considered to be in full sea pay
when her captain was appointed, but months might pass before he
joined her, and in the meantime she lay unmanned. So she, again,
would be included twice. The Weekly Progresses were drawn up by
the clerks of the Navy Office, and the monthly lists by the Admiralty
officials. They were independent and might not agree. Some
allowance must be made for mere blunders. It is obvious, too, that
the dockyards returned such rotten hulks as H.M.S. Dragçn among
the ships under their charge, while the fact that a man-of-war was in
full sea pay hardly established a presumption that she was manned,
rigged, or as much as in good repair. These official papers are
therefore but blind guides. When the great reform of the navy
administration was begun in the early years of the nineteenth
century, a manuscript book called the “Progress of the Navy from
1765 to 1806” was compiled in the Admiralty. The author warns all
who may use it that his sources were untrustworthy, but he
professes to have done his best to get at the truth and to have made
the necessary deductions. It may be accepted as giving the nearest
attainable approach to an exact statement of the paper strength of
the navy during the years which it covers.

According to this authority, the total nominal force of the Royal Navy
in January 1778 was 399 vessels, of which 274 were in full sea pay,
or commission, while 125 were in ordinary, or reserve. The usual
phrase of the time was “lying by the walls”—that is to say, in the
dockyards. The advance during the war will be seen from the
following list:—
Vessels in Full Sea Pay.Total of all Vessels.
1st January 1778 274 399
  〃         〃       1779 317 432
  〃         〃       1780 364 481
  〃         〃       1781 396 538
  〃         〃       1782 398 551
  〃         〃       1783 430 608
This, however, is paper strength. It includes battered hulks fit only
for harbour duty, prizes needing a refit, yachts and ships building.
Even at the very end of the war such authorities as Keppel and
Howe could not agree as to the number of vessels really available for
service. Ships were put into commission simply in order to please
supporters by conferring professional favours on them, their
relations, or clients. A great display of pennants might be made by
this device, but it was a show out of all proportion to the effective
strength. Then, as in much later times, it was the dishonest official
practice to include vessels building in the list of the navy. Thus, in
the last year of the war, it was said that we had four first-rates of
100 guns. In reality there had been three, which were reduced to
two by the sinking of the Rçóal Geçrge at Spithead. Another was
ordered to replace her, and a fourth, the Queen Charlçtte, which
afterwards carried Howe’s flag on the 1st June, was also begun.
They were not ready for years, but they were counted in to make up
the tale of four.
Where our evidence is confessedly not sound, it is idle to make
confident assertions about the strength of the fleet. But the sea pay
lists represent what was the utmost claimed by the Government as

ready for immediate service. The figures for the beginning and the
end of 1778 will show what was the disposition of the fleet, and also
what was the first effect of the outbreak of hostilities with France.
Januaró 1778. December 1778.
Station. Number. Station. Number.
East Indies 6East Indies 5
Jamaica 22Jamaica 21
Leeward Islands. 19Leeward Islands 10
North America 92North America 85
Mediterranean 6Mediterranean 5
Newfoundland 13Newfoundland 15
Convoy and Cruising22Convoy and Cruising36
Ships at home 94Ships at home 97
——Western Squadron 43
274 ——
317
The difference between the two lists is partly accounted for by
transfer of vessels from one station, or duty, to another. The high
figure of the North American station came from the use of numbers
of small craft to co-operate with the troops employed against the
insurgents from 1775 onwards. In the main, however, the second list
differs from the first by the addition of the Western Squadron—that
is, the great force of battleships collected under Keppel to meet the
French at Brest.
It will be seen that there is an increase in the vessels employed on
“Convoy and Cruising.” We tell only half the service of a navy in war
when we confine ourselves to the movements of the squadrons and
the battles. The other half consists in the patrol duty done to protect
trade and keep down the enemy’s attacks on commerce. To explain
it by narrative would be tedious and confusing to the reader, but the
following list of the warships of various classes employed in this way
at and about home when the war began will help the reader to
realise how the duty was provided for:—

Cruisers
Shié. Guns. Diséçsitiçn .
Thetis 32To come to Plymouth.}
Channel Islands.
Actæçn 44        〃         Spi thead.}
Seafçrd 20        〃         F almouth.}
Hóæna 20        〃         Spi thead.}
Cógnet 16}
To the Downs.Grasshçééer 14}
Pheasant  8}
Bçstçn 28
To cruise between Belfast Lough and the
Mull of Cantyre.
Stag 28To cruise in the Irish Channel.
Sèuirrel 20
To cruise between the Dodman and the
Land’s End.
Haréó 18}To convoy the trade from Ireland to
England.Wçlf  8}
Wasé  8At Plymouth.
Beaver’s Prize 14
To cruise between Flambro’ Head and
Yarmouth.
Merchant A. S.20}
To cruise from Flambro’ Head to Shields.
Cçntent A. S. 20}
Queen A. S. 20North Shields.
Heart çf Oak A.
S.
20Liverpool.
Three Sisters A.
S.
20}
Leith.
Leith A. S. 20}
Three Brçthers
A. S.
20Bristol.
Satisfactiçn A. S.20Greenock.
Cutter Meredith 6·10To cruise from Beachy Head to Portland.
Cutter Sherburne 6·8To cruise from Portland to Ram Head.

Cçnvçó
Shié.Guns. Diséçsitiçn .
Belleisle 64
To proceed to St. Helena to convoy the East
India trade home.
Juéiter 50}To cruise on coast of Spain and Portugal till the
20th October, and return with the trade.Medea 28}
Warwick 50
To convoy the trade to Canada from Cork, and
return to Spithead.
Chatham 50}
To cruise between Stromness and the isle of
Bona, for the protection of the Hudson’s Bay
trade, and repair with it to the Nore.
Pçrtland 50}
Jasçn 28}
Atalanta 16}
Mçntreal 32
To convoy trade to the Mediterranean and repair
to Spithead.
Hussar 28To cruise between Oporto and Lisbon.
Pelican 24To cruise between Finisterre and Lisbon.
Fló 14
To convoy trade to Holland and return with it to
the Nore.
Savage 14
To proceed to New York with dispatches and
return to Spithead.
Hawke 10
To proceed to Newfoundland with dispatches and
return to Plymouth.
Endeavçur 10To proceed with dispatches to Jamaica.
Ranger  8
To attend the Yarmouth Herring Fishery and
return to the Nore.
Resçlutiçn 12·12″}
In remote parts.
Discçveró8·8″}
The letters A.S. stand for “Armed Ship.” These were merchant craft
bought into or hired for the navy, and armed with small guns. The
Resçlutiçn and Discçveró were the ships of Captain Cook, then on his
last voyage. It must be remembered that these lists represent the
cruisers and convoy ships at home or sent directly from home. On

every station the admiral would detail part of his command for such
duties as these.
The manning of the navy continued to present the old difficulties,
aggravated by the fact that we had lost the services of the
thousands of American seamen who had been found in our ships in
the last war. They were now manning the privateers which preyed
on our commerce as far abroad as the Channel and the
Mediterranean. All the old complaints were heard of the cruelty, the
unconstitutional character, and the inefficiency of the press. A Bill to
abolish it was introduced and favourably received in the House of
Commons, but went no further. The fact is that the press was
indispensable. We would not train men in peace. The merchant
seamen would never enlist of their free will in the navy, and were
the less likely to do so because the first effect of a war was to send
up wages in the trading-ships. But the press was not only needed for
the sailors. They indeed were sought by it with particular zeal,
because their skill was indispensable in the ships as riggers and to
set an example to other men in handling masts and sails in all
conditions of weather. It was on them, too, that the captain relied in
the greater perils of navigation. But they never formed the bulk of
the crews of our warships, nor was it possible they should. In a
debate on the Bill to abolish the Press, held on 11th March 1777,
Lord Mulgrave declared that the total number of seamen in the
country was only 60,000, while the number required for the navy in
war had sometimes risen to 80,000. If the whole body of our
merchant seamen had been swept into the navy and their places in
our trading-ships taken by foreigners who swarmed in to earn the
high war wages, there would still have been a deficiency. In truth we
never secured all the merchant sailors. The list of men rated as
seamen was made up by taking landsmen, who either volunteered
or were impressed, and were not uncommonly vagabonds and jail-
birds. Though all might be known officially by the same name, a
wide distinction was always made among the crews themselves, and
in the opinion of the officers, between the “prime seamen” who had
served their apprenticeship in the long sea voyages and could turn

their hand to anything, and the mere “man-of-warsman,” who had
not been bred to the sea and had only been taught the work of his
particular station. It was inevitable that in crews composed in this
fashion there should have been wide differences of quality and that
some of their elements were worthless and criminal. Neither was it
denied by the representatives of the Admiralty that this was the
case. On the 11th November of 1777, Mr. Temple Luttrell said in the
Commons, “Your bounties procure few good seamen, and your press
warrants, though enormously expensive, fewer still, while great
numbers are daily deserting from your ships and hospitals to commit
robberies and murders in the interior counties.... I am assured that
fifty have lately deserted from the Mçnarch while in dock, forty from
the Hectçr, and twenty-five from the Wçrcester , six of these are
confined at Winchester for felonies, and there are two committed to
Exeter jail on a charge of murder.” Lord Mulgrave’s answer was that
fifty men had indeed deserted, from the Mçnarch , because Captain
Rowley was humanely unwilling to treat his men as slaves, and that
the deserters were not to be regretted, because “the health of the
rest was preserved, as the service was freed from a number of men
not to be depended on.” No reply was given on other points. Lord
Mulgrave’s tone of jaunty flippancy was characteristic of the
incompetent Government which led the country unprepared into the
most disastrous of its wars.
Yet in 1777 the navy was beginning to reap the benefit of the
General Press warrant issues in October 1776, when the king and his
ministers were at last forced to recognise that the rebellion in
America was very serious. It was now possible to lay hands on good
men by force. Until this was the case, our ships were not
uncommonly manned in the fashion described in the following letter
from Captain Price of the Viéer sloop on the North American station
in 1775, as quoted by Beatson in his Naval and Military Memoirs:—
“I am very much distressed for Petty officers, as well as
Warrants. My Carpenter infirm and past duty, my Gunner
made from a livery servant, neither seaman nor gunner;
my Master a man in years, never an officer before, made

from a boy on board one of the guardships, he then
keeping a public house at Gosport. Petty officers I have
but one, who owns himself mad at times. A Master’s Mate
I have not, nor anyone I can make a Boatswain’s mate. I
have not one person I could trust with the charge of a
vessel I might take to bring her in.”
What complication of slovenliness and jobbery there was behind that
master who had been borne as a boy on a guardship and yet kept a
public-house at Gosport, we do not know, but it must be allowed
that H.M.S. Viéer differed vastly from the smart British man-of-war
with her crew of fine seamen which is supposed to have represented
the navy of the eighteenth century. It is probable, however, that she
only differed in degree from the average vessel in commission at a
time when jobbery was common, and there was no press at work to
sweep in the thoroughbred seamen.
When our navy was weakened by corrupt administration and political
faction, it was about to be matched against more formidable foes
than it had met since the Dutch wars of the seventeenth century.
The Americans were only privateers, but they were active and skilful.
The French joined battle with us in 1778, the Spaniards in the
following year, and the Dutch in 1780. Of these the first and second
were not only more numerous but far more efficient than they had
been in the two previous struggles. The disasters of the Seven Years’
War had stung the pride and patriotism of the French, and they had
made serious efforts to restore their strength at sea. Public
subscriptions had been opened to supply ships, and though the
money promised was not always paid, they did something to supply
the Government with funds. Choiseul, who was minister at the end
of the war, tried hard to restore the naval service. Some of his
changes and intended reforms were fantastic and could not last. Yet
he did not a little to provide ships and to give the officers
opportunities for practice. When he was driven from office by the
king’s fear that he meant to provoke another war with England, his
work was for a time lost. But after the death of Louis xv. and the
accession of Louis xvi. the French Navy became again an object of

attention to the Government. With the encouragement of the young
king, two able ministers, Turgot and M. de Sartine, strove hard to
make it worthy of the rank of France among nations. These efforts
were greatly increased as the progress of the American insurrection
began to afford hope that an opportunity would be found to take
revenge for the disasters of past years. In 1778 the French Navy
consisted, according to official papers, of 122 vessels, of which 73
were of the line. A very large proportion of these were new, and
were admirably built. The French naval officers had studied hard,
and were animated by pride, both patriotic and professional, and the
desire to retrieve their reputation.
Spain was a nerveless power, as Burke said years afterwards, and
had not recovered even in the mere number of her population, still
less in intellect and character, from the terrible exhaustion of the
seventeenth century. Yet her king, Charles iii., had tried seriously to
supply his dominions with a navy. Happily for us, he was a man of
limited intelligence, and made the common mistake of supposing
that numbers constituted strength. In 1778 his navy presented a list
of 141 vessels, in all of which 62 were of the line. Though his liners
were with few exceptions two-deckers of 60 and 70 guns, they were
fine ships. Some of them had been built by English shipwrights in
the Spanish service. If Charles iii. had been content with forty line-
of-battle ships, and had spent the money economised on the
building vote on giving practice to his squadrons and on forming a
good corps of seaman gunners, his navy would have been a more
serious opponent than it was. Still, the addition of the sixty-two
Spanish liners with all their defects to the French seventy-three
constituted a combination able to try the resources of our navy to
the utmost.
The Dutch Navy had fallen far below the standard of its great days.
In 1780, when the United Provinces joined the alliance against us,
they had only twenty-six line-of-battle ships of from 50 to 76 guns,
and twenty-nine lesser vessels. Great efforts were made to add to
this short list during the course of the war, but the additions were
made too late to have any considerable effect. Holland, too, though

it had not withered to the same extent as its old enemy Spain, had
sunk from its former energy. Yet the seamanlike skill of the Dutch
crews, their steady gunnery and phlegmatic valour, made them rank
higher in the opinion of our navy than the French, and far higher
than the Spaniards. The best contested battle of the war took place
between an English and a Dutch squadron.
The beginning of the great naval war with France in the spring of
1778 was preceded by three years of warlike operations. They were
mainly of an ancillary character, and the scope of this book does not
allow them to be told in detail. It must suffice to say that they may
be divided into two classes. On the Atlantic seaboard and the
American lakes our officers and men were engaged in supporting the
military forces employed to subdue the insurgents, or to repel
inroads on Canada. Captains Douglas and Pringle did good and
gallant service both in aiding Sir Guy Carleton to repel the invasion
of Montgomery and Arnold, and in clearing the way for Burgoyne’s
advance into the valley of the Hudson during the autumn of 1777.
Here it was possible to force the enemy to action with the advantage
of better discipline and larger resources in our favour. Less success
was achieved along the far-stretched seacoast of the plantations.
The fault lay to a very great extent with the Ministry, which would
not recognise the magnitude of its task. It estimated the case so ill
that in 1775, the year of Lexington and Bunker Hill, and of the
publication, on the 23rd August, of the proclamation for
“Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition in North America,” it reduced
the establishment of the navy. The vote for men was cut down by
2000, and the total estimate was lowered from £2,104,917 to
£1,674,059. From this figure it rose to £5,001,895 in 1778. In
October 1776 the General Press warrant was issued. The bounty,
though raised to twelve guineas, failed to draw volunteers. At that
date there were on the muster books at home 8933 men. By the
December of 1778, and under the strain of stern compulsion, the
complements of our ships had been collected, at least on paper, on
an adequate scale. The return for the 1st January 1778 is 62,719,

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