Paulo Freire and the Concept of Education

In this article, I argue that Paulo Freire’s liberatory conception of education is interesting, challenging, even transforming because central to it are important aspects of education which other philosophers marginalise. I also argue that Freire’s critics are right when they claim that he paid insufficient attention to another important aspect of education. Finally, I argue for a conception of education which takes account of the strengths and at the same time overcomes the limitations of Freire’s liberatory conception.     

Paulo Freire,Critical Literacy,and Indigenous Resistance

Using several case studies drawn from Freire’s cultural context and contemporary Canadian Indigenous resistance movements, this article questions whether a Freirean approach to critical literacy can work with Indigenous literacy needs without reproducing colonial power structures. It also seeks to examine current scholarship in the literacy education of Maritime Aboriginal people in Canada and to illustrate the need for critical pedagogies honoring multiple cultural literacies and ways of knowing among Indigenous youth.     

Paulo Freire and the Politics of Education: A response to Neumann

Jacob Neumann provides a thoughtful reading of Paulo Freire in the 21^st century: Education, dialogue, and transformation. His comments on the importance of contextualising Freire’s work and the value of openness in engaging Freirean ideas are insightful and helpful. His use of the term ‘apolitical’ is, however, rather more problematic. Drawing on points made in Paulo Freire in the 21^st century, and with links to Freire’s wider philosophy and pedagogy, this article argues that education from a Freirean perspective is always political.     

Paulo Freire: Dialogue,Politics and Relevance

The paper seeks to present a reconceptualization of non‐formal education (NFE). The argument is based on developing nations of Asia, Africa and the Pacific. The reconceptualization is based on bringing together three different types of NFE: NFE as complement, alternative and supplement to the formal education system. The first type represents the role of NFE in providing a means of satisfying unfulfilled provision from the school system; the second type is equated with the use of traditional or indigenous learning; the third is related to the sorts of educational activities associated with development activities following the end of the Cold War. While it is argued that NFE is nation and culture specific, analytic tools are suggested that allow NFE in its three types to be discussed across nations as well as for any individual developing nation. The tools used for the analysis consist of methods to describe the providers of the various forms of NFE‐agencies and institutions‐and three concepts to examine the three types of NFE, namely as a system, setting and process.     

Paulo Freire in a Hall of Mirrors

Since first published in English in 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has inspired generations of scholars and social activists to examine the inherent potential of Paulo Freire's theories on grassroots intellectual emancipation and education in marginalized communities. The interpretive lineage of Freire's writings is vast, indeed. To date, scholars continue to mobilize Freire's ideas to establish meaningful connections between what he describes as “liberatory teaching” and the role progressive educators must play in bringing about a more just and humane society. Freire's popularity outside Brazil, however, has come with inevitable tradeoffs worth considering, particularly as regards the epistemological directions and labels affixed to his educational philosophy. Considering the “many Freires” phenomenon, Sandro Barros takes a genealogical approach in this essay to the metanarratives that have made up Freire scholarship outside Brazil. His analysis is guided by the following questions: (1) What kinds of hermeneutic cultures have enveloped Freire's ideas in academic contexts? (2) How have these cultures shaped the reading practices that surround his texts?     

Paulo Freire and the pedagogical traditions of the subject English

I seek here to explain and elaborate on how and why Paulo Freire’s work has significance for educators in today’s ‘affluent’ west, not least in reminding us powerfully of core critical and celebratory values at a time when many teachers, and not only of English, feel under huge pressure – a pressure that in fact verges on the oppressive. My focus here is on native language teaching and learning – English, in effect – thus echoing Freire’s concern for critical literacy and pedagogy and how these may relate constructively to fundamentally Romantic traditions of English pedagogy.     

(Re)centring students in learning analytics: in conversation with Paulo Freire

Abstract

Student data, whether in the form of engagement data, assignments or examinations, form the foundation for assessment and evaluation in higher education. As higher education institutions progressively move to blended and online environments, we have access to, not only more data than before, but also a greater variety of demographic and behavioural data. While the notion of ‘student-centred’ is well-established in the discourses and practices surrounding assessment and evaluation, the concept of student-centred learning analytics is yet to be fully realised by the sector. This article explores and extends this debate by introducing the teachings of Freire as a framework to examine the potential to include students as partners in the collection, analysis and use of their data. The exclusion of students in much of current learning analytics practices, as well as defining categories of analysis and making sense of (their) learning, not only impoverishes our (and their) understanding of the complexities of learning and assessment, but may actually increase vulnerabilities and perpetuate bias and stereotypes. In acknowledging the voice and agency of students, and recentring them as data owners, rather than data objects, learning analytics can realise its transformative potential – for students and institutions alike.     

Mrs. Klein and Paulo Freire: Coda for the Pain of Symbolization in the Lifeworld of the Mind

The preceding symposium articles speculate on the psychosocial dynamics of discrimination as reverberating with grief, mourning, melancholia, and denial. They invite a psychoanalytic paradox on the fate of inchoate loss and its complex relation to oppression and depression: constellations of attachment to loss met with its social and psychical disavowal render inexpressible to the other the work of mourning and drive its myriad expressions. A different way of putting the dilemma is that grief calls upon symbolic equation (collapse of subject with object) and the pain of symbolization (contingency without certainty). Deborah Britzman's coda reads the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein's consideration of depression as the origin of the human condition with Paulo Freire's call to educators for a radical humanization to release oppression. Between Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Klein's Love, Guilt, and Reparation, the coda traces a signifying loss that attests to the entwined roots of the self/other matrix with attention to the needed fluctuations within interiority and exteriority, loss and the depressive position, illness and health, and psychoanalysis with pedagogy.     

Process,Orientation, and System: The Pedagogical Operation of Utopia in the Work of Paulo Freire

Recent years have witnessed a renewed interest in utopianism within educational theory. In this essay, Darren Webb explores the utopian pedagogy of Paulo Freire in the context of what one commentator has dubbed “the educational comeback of utopia.” Webb argues that Freire's significance lies in the way he embraced both “utopia as process” and “utopia as system.” This is significant because the contemporary rejuvenation of utopianism has extended only so far, embracing utopia conceived as an open‐ended process of becoming but shying away from utopia conceived as the delineation of a normative vision to be struggled for and won. Webb outlines the pedagogical operation of utopia as process, cognitive‐affective orientation, and system, and he argues that Freire was right in insisting that each is constitutive of effective educational practice.