Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (September 19, 1921 – May 2, 1997) was a
BrazilBrazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
ian educator and influential theorist of
critical pedagogyCritical pedagogy is a philosophy of education described by Henry Giroux as an "educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive...
.
Biography
Freire was born September 19, 1921 to a
middle classThe middle class is any class of people in the middle of a societal hierarchy. In Weberian socio-economic terms, the middle class is the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socio-economically between the working class and upper class....
family in
RecifeRecife is the fifth-largest metropolitan area in Brazil with 4,136,506 inhabitants, the largest metropolitan area of the North/Northeast Regions, the 5th-largest metropolitan influence area in Brazil, and the capital and largest city of the state of Pernambuco. The population of the city proper...
,
PernambucoPernambuco is a state of Brazil, located in the Northeast region of the country. To the north are the states of Paraíba and Ceará, to the west is Piauí, to the south are Alagoas and Bahia, and to the east is the Atlantic Ocean. There are about of beaches, some of the most beautiful in the...
. Freire became familiar with poverty and hunger during the
Great DepressionThe Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
of the 1930s. In 1931 the family moved to the less expensive city of
Jaboatão dos GuararapesJaboatão dos Guararapes is a city in the state of Pernambuco, Brazil. It is a part of the Recife metro area. The population was 687,688 according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics in 2009, making it the second most-populous city in the state of Pernambuco and the 26th in...
, and in 1933 his father died. In school he ended up four grades behind, and his social life revolved around playing pick up football with other poor children, from whom he learned a great deal. These experiences would shape his concerns for the poor and would help to construct his particular educational viewpoint. Freire stated that poverty and hunger severely affected his ability to learn. This influenced his decision to dedicate his life to improving the lives of the poor: “I didn't understand anything because of my hunger. I wasn't dumb. It wasn't lack of interest. My social condition didn't allow me to have an education. Experience showed me once again the relationship between social class and knowledge" (Freire as qtd in Stevens, 2002) .
Eventually his family's misfortunes turned around and their prospects improved.
Freire enrolled at Law School at the University of Recife in 1943. He also studied
philosophyPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
, more specifically phenomenology, and the psychology of language. Although admitted to the legal bar, he never actually practiced law but instead worked as a teacher in secondary schools teaching Portuguese. In 1944, he married Elza Maia Costa de Oliveira, a fellow teacher. The two worked together for the rest of their lives and had five children.
In 1946, Freire was appointed Director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in the State of Pernambuco. Working primarily among the illiterate poor, Freire began to embrace a non-orthodox form of what could be considered
liberation theologyLiberation theology is a Christian movement in political theology which interprets the teachings of Jesus Christ in terms of a liberation from unjust economic, political, or social conditions...
. In Brazil at that time,
literacyLiteracy has traditionally been described as the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently and think critically about printed material.Literacy represents the lifelong, intellectual process of gaining meaning from print...
was a requirement for
voting in presidential electionsVoting is a method for a group such as a meeting or an electorate to make a decision or express an opinion—often following discussions, debates, or election campaigns. It is often found in democracies and republics.- Reasons for voting :...
.
In 1961, he was appointed director of the Department of Cultural Extension of Recife University, and in 1962 he had the first opportunity for significant application of his theories, when 300
sugarcaneSugarcane refers to any of six to 37 species of tall perennial grasses of the genus Saccharum . Native to the warm temperate to tropical regions of South Asia, they have stout, jointed, fibrous stalks that are rich in sugar, and measure two to six metres tall...
workers were taught to read and write in just 45 days. In response to this experiment, the Brazilian government approved the creation of thousands of cultural circles across the country.
In 1964, a
military coupA coup d'état state, literally: strike/blow of state)—also known as a coup, putsch, and overthrow—is the sudden, extrajudicial deposition of a government, usually by a small group of the existing state establishment—typically the military—to replace the deposed government with another body; either...
put an end to that effort. Freire was imprisoned as a traitor for 70 days. After a brief exile in
BoliviaBolivia officially known as Plurinational State of Bolivia , is a landlocked country in central South America. It is the poorest country in South America...
, Freire worked in
ChileChile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...
for five years for the Christian Democratic Agrarian Reform Movement and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In 1967, Freire published his first book,
Education as the Practice of Freedom. He followed this with his most famous book,
Pedagogy of the OppressedPedagogy of the Oppressed is the most widely known of educator Paulo Freire's works. It proposes a pedagogy with a new relationship between teacher, student, and society...
, first published in
PortuguesePortuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
in 1968.
On the strength of reception of his work, Freire was offered a visiting professorship at
Harvard UniversityHarvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
in 1969. The next year,
Pedagogy of the OppressedPedagogy of the Oppressed is the most widely known of educator Paulo Freire's works. It proposes a pedagogy with a new relationship between teacher, student, and society...
was published in both
SpanishSpanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
and
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, vastly expanding its reach. Because of political feuds between Freire, a
Christian socialistChristian socialism generally refers to those on the Christian left whose politics are both Christian and socialist and who see these two philosophies as being interrelated. This category can include Liberation theology and the doctrine of the social gospel...
, and
successive authoritarian military dictatorshipsThe Brazilian military government was the authoritarian regime which ruled Brazil from March 31, 1964 to March 15, 1985. It began with the 1964 coup d'état led by the Armed Forces against the democratically elected government of left-wing President João Goulart and ended when José Sarney took...
, the book wasn't published in Brazil until 1974, when
General Ernesto GeiselErnesto Beckmann Geisel, was a Brazilian military leader and politician of German descent who was President of Brazil from 1974 to 1979.-Early life and family:...
became the then dictator president beginning the process of a slow and controlled political liberalisation.
After a year in
Cambridge, MassachusettsCambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
, USA, Freire moved to Geneva, Switzerland to work as a special education advisor to the
World Council of ChurchesThe World Council of Churches is a worldwide fellowship of 349 global, regional and sub-regional, national and local churches seeking unity, a common witness and Christian service. It is a Christian ecumenical organization that is based in the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva, Switzerland...
. During this time Freire acted as an advisor on
education reformEducation reform is the process of improving public education. Small improvements in education theoretically have large social returns, in health, wealth and well-being. Historically, reforms have taken different forms because the motivations of reformers have differed.A continuing motivation has...
in former Portuguese colonies in Africa, particularly Guinea Bissau and
MozambiqueMozambique, officially the Republic of Mozambique , is a country in southeastern Africa bordered by the Indian Ocean to the east, Tanzania to the north, Malawi and Zambia to the northwest, Zimbabwe to the west and Swaziland and South Africa to the southwest...
.
In 1979, he was able to return to Brazil, and moved back in 1980. Freire joined the
Workers' PartyThe Workers' Party is a democratic socialist political party in Brazil. Launched in 1980, it is recognized as one of the largest and most important left-wing movements of Latin America. It governs at the federal level in a coalition government with several other parties since January 1, 2003...
(PT) in the city of
São PauloSão Paulo is the largest city in Brazil, the largest city in the southern hemisphere and South America, and the world's seventh largest city by population. The metropolis is anchor to the São Paulo metropolitan area, ranked as the second-most populous metropolitan area in the Americas and among...
, and acted as a supervisor for its adult literacy project from 1980 to 1986. When the PT prevailed in the municipal elections in 1988, Freire was appointed Secretary of Education for São Paulo.
In 1986, his wife Elza died. Freire married Maria Araújo Freire, who continues with her own educational work.
Freire died of
heart failureHeart failure often called congestive heart failure is generally defined as the inability of the heart to supply sufficient blood flow to meet the needs of the body. Heart failure can cause a number of symptoms including shortness of breath, leg swelling, and exercise intolerance. The condition...
on May 2, 1997 in São Paulo.
Theoretical contributions
Paulo Freire contributed a philosophy of education that came not only from the more classical approaches stemming from
PlatoPlato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
, but also from modern Marxist and anti-colonialist thinkers. In fact, in many ways his
Pedagogy of the OppressedPedagogy of the Oppressed is the most widely known of educator Paulo Freire's works. It proposes a pedagogy with a new relationship between teacher, student, and society...
(1970) may be best read as an extension of, or reply to,
Frantz FanonFrantz Fanon was a Martiniquo-Algerian psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer whose work is influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism...
’s
The Wretched of the EarthThe Wretched of the Earth is Frantz Fanon's most famous work, written during and regarding the Algerian struggle for independence from colonial rule...
(1961), which emphasized the need to provide native populations with an education which was simultaneously new and modern (rather than traditional) and anti-colonial (not simply an extension of the culture of the colonizer).
In
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Freire, reprising the
oppressors-oppressed distinctionOppressors-oppressed distinction or dominant-dominated opposition, is an influential political argument. One of its first uses was by Hegel in his 1802 The German Constitution, in which he said that "The Catholics had been in the position of oppressors, and the Protestants of the oppressed." Its...
, differentiates between the two positions in an unjust society, the oppressor and the oppressed. Freire makes no direct reference to his most direct influence for the distinction, which stems back at least as far as Hegel in 1802, and has since been reprised by many authors including Engels, Marx, Lenin, Gramsci,
Simone WeilSimone Weil , was a French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist.-Biography:Weil was born in Paris to Alsatian agnostic Jewish parents who fled the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. She grew up in comfortable circumstances, and her father was a doctor. Her only sibling was...
and others.
Freire advocates that education should allow the oppressed to regain their humanity and overcome their condition. However, he acknowledges that in order for this to take effect, the oppressed have to play a role in their own liberation. As he states:
No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption (Freire, 1970, p. 54).
Likewise, the oppressors must also be willing to rethink their way of life and to examine their own role in the oppression if true liberation is to occur; "those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly" (Freire, 1970, p. 60).
Freire believed education to be a political act that could not be divorced from pedagogy. Freire defined this as a main tenet of critical pedagogy. Teachers and students must be made aware of the "politics" that surround education. The way students are taught and what they are taught serves a political agenda. Teachers, themselves, have political notions they bring into the classroom (Kincheloe, 2008). Freire believed that "education makes sense because women and men learn that through learning they can make and remake themselves, because women and men are able to take responsibility for themselves as beings capable of knowing — of knowing that they know and knowing that they don't" (Freire, 2004, p. 15)
Banking model of education
In terms of actual pedagogy, Freire is best known for his attack on what he called the "banking" concept of education, in which the student was viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. He notes that "it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads men and women to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power" (Freire, 1970, p. 77). The basic critique was not new — Rousseau’s conception of the child as an active learner was already a step away from tabula rasa (which is basically the same as the “banking concept”). In addition, thinkers like
John DeweyJohn Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...
were strongly critical of the transmission of mere facts as the goal of education. Dewey often described education as a mechanism for social change, explaining that “education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction” (1897, p. 16). Freire’s work, however, updated the concept and placed it in context with current theories and practices of education, laying the foundation for what is now called
critical pedagogyCritical pedagogy is a philosophy of education described by Henry Giroux as an "educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive...
.
Student-teacher dualism
More challenging is Freire's strong aversion to the teacher-student dichotomy. This dichotomy is admitted in Rousseau and constrained in Dewey, but Freire comes close to insisting that it be completely abolished. This is hard to imagine in absolute terms, since there must be some enactment of the teacher-student relationship in the parent-child relationship, but what Freire suggests is that a deep reciprocity be inserted into our notions of teacher and student. He goes so far as to say that “Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously students and teachers” (Freire, 1970, p. 72). Freire wants us to think in terms of teacher-student and student-teacher – that is, a teacher who learns and a learner who teaches – as the basic roles of classroom participation.
Freire however insists that educator and student, though sharing democratic social relations of education, are not on an equal footing, but the educator must be humble enough to be disposed to relearn that which s/he already thinks s/he knows, through interaction with the learner. The authority which the educator enjoys must not be allowed to degenerate into authoritarianism; teachers must recognize that "their fundamental objective is to fight alongside the people for the recovery of the people's stolen humanity", not to "win the people over" to their side (Freire, 1970, p. 95).
Culture of silence
According to Freire, the system of dominant social relations create a culture of silence that instills a negative, silenced and suppressed self-image into the oppressed. The learner must develop a critical consciousness in order to recognize that this culture of silence is created to oppress. Also, a culture of silence can cause the "dominated individuals [to] lose the means by which to critically respond to the culture that is forced on them by a dominant culture."
Social domination of race and class are interleaved into the conventional
educational system, through which the “culture of silence” eliminates the "paths of thought that lead to a
language of critique”
Global impact
Freire's major exponents in North America are
Peter McLarenPeter McLaren is a Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles . He is the author and editor of forty-five books and hundreds of scholarly articles and chapters...
, Donaldo Macedo,
Joe L. KincheloeJoe Lyons Kincheloe, , was a professor and Canada Research Chair at the Faculty of Education, McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He wrote more than 45 books, numerous book-chapters, and hundreds of journal articles on issues including critical pedagogy, educational research, urban...
,
Ira ShorIra Shor is a professor at the City University of New York, where he teaches composition and rhetoric. In collaboration with Paulo Freire, he has been one of the leading exponents of critical pedagogy.-Biography:...
, and
Henry GirouxHenry Giroux, born September 18, 1943, in Providence, Rhode Island, is an American cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies,...
. One of McLaren's edited texts,
Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter, expounds upon Freire's impact in the field of critical education. McLaren has also provided a comparative study concerning Paulo Freire and the Argentinian revolutionary icon
Che GuevaraErnesto "Che" Guevara , commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat and military theorist...
.
In 1991, the
Paulo Freire Institute was established in
São PauloSão Paulo is the largest city in Brazil, the largest city in the southern hemisphere and South America, and the world's seventh largest city by population. The metropolis is anchor to the São Paulo metropolitan area, ranked as the second-most populous metropolitan area in the Americas and among...
to extend and elaborate upon his theories of
popular educationPopular education is a concept grounded in notions of class, political struggle, and social transformation. The term is a translation from the Spanish educación popular or the Portuguese educação popular and rather than the English usage as when describing a 'popular television program,' popular...
. The Institute now has projects in many countries and is currently headquartered at
UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information StudiesThe Graduate School of Education and Information Studies is one of the professional graduate schools at the University of California, Los Angeles...
where it actively maintains the Freire archives. The director is Dr. Carlos Torres, a UCLA professor and author of Freirean books including
La praxis educativa de Paulo Freire (1978).
Since the publication of the English edition in 1970,
Pedagogy of the Oppressed has achieved near-iconic status in America’s teacher-training programs, according to Sol Stern, a social commentator critical of the entry of Freire's Marxist-inspired teachings into the mainstream curriculum.
The Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Conference is held each spring and is guided by the theory and practice of these two liberatory practitioners. The Conference networks a wide variety of people with interests in Freire and Augusto Boal—liberatory education and theatre, community organizing, community-based analysis, TIE, race/gender/class/sexual orientation/geography analysis, performance/performance art, comparative education models, etc.
The Paulo and Nita Freire Project for International Critical Pedagogy has been founded at McGill University. Here
Joe L. KincheloeJoe Lyons Kincheloe, , was a professor and Canada Research Chair at the Faculty of Education, McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He wrote more than 45 books, numerous book-chapters, and hundreds of journal articles on issues including critical pedagogy, educational research, urban...
and Shirley R. Steinberg have worked to create a dialogical forum for critical scholars around the world to promote research and re-create a Freirean pedagogy in a multinational domain.
Paulo Freire's work also had a profound impact on
Steve BikoStephen Biko was a noted anti-apartheid activist in South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. A student leader, he later founded the Black Consciousness Movement which would empower and mobilize much of the urban black population. Since his death in police custody, he has been called a martyr of the...
and the
Black Consciousness MovementThe Black Consciousness Movement was a grassroots anti-Apartheid activist movement that emerged in South Africa in the mid-1960s out of the political vacuum created by the jailing and banning of the African National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress leadership after the Sharpeville Massacre in...
in South Africa.
At his death, Freire was working on a book of
EcopedagogyThe ecopedagogy movement is an outgrowth of developments in critical pedagogy, a body of educational ideas and practices influenced by the philosopher, Paulo Freire...
, a platform of work carried on by many of the Freire Institutes and Freirean Associations around the world today. It has been influential in helping to develop planetary education projects such as the
Earth CharterThe Earth Charter is an international declaration of fundamental values and principles considered useful by its supporters for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society in the 21st century...
as well as countless international grassroots campaigns per the spirit of Freirean popular education generally.
Recognition
- King Baudouin International Development Prize 1980. Paulo Freire was the very first person to receive this prize. He was nominated for the prize by Dr. Mathew Zachariah, Professor of Education at the University of Calgary.
- Prize for Outstanding Christian Educators with his wife Elza
- UNESCO 1986 Prize for Education for Peace
- Honorary Doctorate, the University of Nebraska at Omaha, 1996, along with Augusto Boal, during their residency at the Second Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Conference in Omaha.
See also
- Adult literacy
- Adult education
Adult education is the practice of teaching and educating adults. Adult education takes place in the workplace, through 'extension' school or 'school of continuing education' . Other learning places include folk high schools, community colleges, and lifelong learning centers...
- John Asimakopoulos
John Asimakopoulos, born September 10, 1970, is associate professor of sociology at the City University of New York-Bronx. He is also a social justice activist, author, and public intellectual.-Background:...
- Theatre of the Oppressed
The Theatre of the Oppressed describes a range of theatrical forms that the Brazilian theatre practitioner Augusto Boal first elaborated in the 1960s, initially in Brazil and later in Europe. Boal was influenced by the work of the educator and theorist Paulo Freire. Boal's techniques use theatre as...
- Che Guevara
Ernesto "Che" Guevara , commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat and military theorist...
- Conscientization
- Critical consciousness
Critical consciousness, conscientization, or conscientização , is a popular education and social concept developed by Brazilian pedagogue and educational theorist Paulo Freire, grounded in Marxist critical theory...
- Critical pedagogy
Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education described by Henry Giroux as an "educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive...
- Cultures of silence
- Ecopedagogy
The ecopedagogy movement is an outgrowth of developments in critical pedagogy, a body of educational ideas and practices influenced by the philosopher, Paulo Freire...
- Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon was a Martiniquo-Algerian psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer whose work is influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism...
- Landless Workers' Movement
Landless Workers' Movement is a social movement in Brazil; it is the second largest social movement in Latin America with an estimated 1.5 million landless members in 23 out of Brazil's 26 states. The MST states it carries out land reform in a country it sees as mired by unjust land distribution...
- Lewis Gordon
Lewis Ricardo Gordon is an American philosopher who works in the areas of Africana philosophy, philosophy of human and life sciences, phenomenology, philosophy of existence, social and political theory, postcolonial thought, theories of race and racism, philosophies of liberation, aesthetics,...
- Marxist Humanism
Marxist humanism is a branch of Marxism that primarily focuses on Marx's earlier writings, especially the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in which Marx espoused his theory of alienation, as opposed to his later works, which are considered to be concerned more with his structural...
- Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Pedagogy of the Oppressed is the most widely known of educator Paulo Freire's works. It proposes a pedagogy with a new relationship between teacher, student, and society...
- Peer mentoring
Peer mentoring is a form of mentorship that takes place in learning environments such as schools, usually between an older more experienced student and a new student. Peer mentors should not be confused with prefects...
- Peter McLaren
Peter McLaren is a Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles . He is the author and editor of forty-five books and hundreds of scholarly articles and chapters...
- Popular education
Popular education is a concept grounded in notions of class, political struggle, and social transformation. The term is a translation from the Spanish educación popular or the Portuguese educação popular and rather than the English usage as when describing a 'popular television program,' popular...
- Praxis
- Praxis intervention
Praxis Intervention is a form of participatory action research. Where other forms of participatory action research emphasize the collective modification of the external world, the praxis intervention model emphasizes working on the Praxis potential of its participants...
- Raya Dunayevskaya
Raya Dunayevskaya was the founder of the philosophy of Marxist Humanism in the United States of America. At one time Leon Trotsky's secretary, she later split with him and ultimately founded the organization News and Letters Committees and was its leader until her death.-Biography:Of Jewish...
- Rouge Forum
The Rouge Forum is an organization of educational activists, which focuses on issues of equality, democracy, and social justice.- Origins :The Rouge Forum emerged from a series of political controversies within the National Council for the Social Studies during the 1990s...
- Steve Biko
Stephen Biko was a noted anti-apartheid activist in South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. A student leader, he later founded the Black Consciousness Movement which would empower and mobilize much of the urban black population. Since his death in police custody, he has been called a martyr of the...
- Structure and agency
The question over the primacy of either structure or agency in human behavior is a central debate in the social sciences. In this context, "agency" refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. "Structure", by contrast, refers to the recurrent...
- Teaching for social justice
Teaching for social justice is an educational philosophy designed to promote socioeconomic equality in the learning environment and instill these values in students. Educators may employ social justice instruction to promote unity on campus, as well as mitigate boundaries to the general curriculum...
- Transformative Studies Institute
The Transformative Studies Institute is an independent 501 nonprofit educational think tank based in the United States. It “was created to provide an inclusive educational space for research and practice for social justice by academics, community organizers, activists, and political leaders”...
- Wretched of the Earth
Further reading
- Coben, Diana (1998), Radical heroes. Gramsci, Freire and the Politics of Adult Education, New York: Garland Press.
- Darder, Antonia
Antonia Darder, Ph.D. is an internationally recognized scholar, artist, poet, activist, and public intellectual. Dr. Darder holds the Leavey Presidential Endowed Chair in Ethics and Moral Leadership in the School of Education at Loyola Marymount University...
(2002), Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love, Boulder: Westview.
- Elias, John (1994), Paulo Freire: Pedagogue of Liberation, Florida: Krieger.
- Freire, Paulo (1997) "Mentoring the mentor: a critical dialogue with Paulo Freire," Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education, Vol 60, 1997, ISBN 0820437980
- Gadotti, Moacir (1994), Reading Paulo Freire. His Life and Work, Albany: SUNY Press.
- McLaren, Peter (2000) Che Guevara, Paulo Freire and the Pedagogy of Revolution, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
- McLaren, Peter and Leonard, Peter (eds.) (1993), Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter, London and New York: Routledge.
- McLaren, Peter and Lankshear, Colin (eds.) (1994), Politics of Liberation. Paths from Freire, London and New York: Routledge.
- Mayo,Peter
Peter Mayo is Professor and Head of the Department of Education Studies, Faculty of Education, University of Malta, Malta. He teaches in the areas of sociology of education and adult continuing education, as well as in comparative and international education and sociology in general...
(1999), Gramsci, Freire and Adult Education. Possibilities for Transformative Action, London and New York: Zed Books.
- Mayo,Peter
Peter Mayo is Professor and Head of the Department of Education Studies, Faculty of Education, University of Malta, Malta. He teaches in the areas of sociology of education and adult continuing education, as well as in comparative and international education and sociology in general...
(2004, 2008), Liberating Praxis. Paulo Freire's Legacy for Radical Education and Politics, Westport, Connecticut: Praeger; Rotterdam and Taipei: Sense.
- Morrow, Raymond A. and Torres, Carlos .A. (2002), Reading Freire and Habermas. Critical pedagogy and Transformative Social Change, New York and London: Teachers College Press.
- O’Cadiz, Maria del Pilar, Wong, Pia L. and Torres, Carlos A. (1997), Education and Democracy. Paulo Freire, Social Movements and Educational Reform in São Paulo, Boulder: Westview Press.
- Roberts, Peter (2000), Education, Literacy, and Humanization Exploring the Work of Paulo Freire, Westport, Connecticut: Bergin & Garvey.
- Rossatto, Cesar A. (2005), Engaging Paulo Freire's Pedagogy Of Possibility: From Blind To Transformative Optimism, Lanham: Rowman & Littleield.
- Taylor, Paul V. (1993), The Texts of Paulo Freire, Buckingham: Open University Press.
- Torres, Carlos A and Noguera, Pedro (eds.) (2008), Social Justice Education For Teachers. Paulo Freire and the Possible Dream, Rotterdam and Taipei: Sense.
Paulo Freire Institutes around the world
External links