A contribution to Paulo Freire’s theory and practice: The ‘Cultural Extension Service/University of Recife’ (1962–64)

Abstract

This contribution to the special issue is an historical account of Paulo Freire’s pedagogical and administrative praxis before his forced exile in 1964. It relies on interviews collected during a field trip in 1976, a conversation with Paulo Freire in Geneva one year later and on the secondary literature up to date. Being the head of the first Extension Service of a major Brazilian university in the early 1960s gave Freire and his collaborators the space and time to experiment with the today world famous literacy method bearing his name. The concept of ‘Field of Cultural Production’ (Bourdieu) is used to elucidate better Freire and his team’s avant-gardist production within the spaces opened up by Brazil’s popular movements in the early sixties. The contribution shows how the ‘Paulo Freire System’ developed in the praxis of a cultural movement and received its academic consecration in an incremental and eclectic style.

Keywords:

• Brazil
• extension service
• Paulo Freire
• literacy
• University of Recife
• Bourdieu

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In addition to Portaria, (1962), cf. Goncalves Da Costa Lima (1962, pp. 3–5); Goncalves Da Costa Lima (1964, pp. 13–16, 73–76); Freyre (1962, pp. 31–35), Cavalcanti de Albuquerque, (1962, pp. 47–50).

2 In an article entitled ‘Extensão Cultural’ [Cultural Extension], he expanded on this approach, assigning an important role in adult education to an ‘authentic’ Brazilian university (Freire, 1962, pp. 8–10). Freire (1972/1983) should go back to the theme of university extension work during his exile in Chile blasting the very idea of university extension: It would give the wrong impression of a hierarchical possession of knowledge by academics. The others, outside its walls, thus would have none or very little knowledge. Strangely enough, in this book he does not mention his and others’ innovative experiences in SEC/UR before 1964.

3 In the literature, there is only little to be found about the leadership style of Paulo Freire himself. Herbert and Zitkoski (2010, pp. 245–247) dictionary entry on leadership in Freire’s work, e.g. focuses more on the determining ingredients for successful leadership in education and politics. There is nearly no focus on Freire as an educational and political leader himself since his full-time positions in the Social Service of Industry (SESI), as Director of a Sector for Education and Culture (1947–61), for a short time even as Superintendent of the whole organization (1954–56). Cf. also the biography of Freire’s second wife: Araújo Freire (2006, pp. 59–90).

4 Most important for the development and dissemination of the ‘Paulo Freire System’ within SEC/UR: Paulo Pacheco, Aurenice Cardoso, Almerí Bezerra, Roberto Cavalcanti, Jomard de Britto, Jarbas Maciel, Jorge Aurino, Luis Costa Lima, Paulo Gaspar de Menezes, Maria Adozinda Monteiro Costa and Freire’s wife Elza, the latter more in the background. Cf. Veras & Mendonça 2004/2005, pp. 11–22. Freire had been free to choose his team (Freire, 1978, p. 22).

5 Efforts to relate these courses more closely to one another and to give them more the character of research reports are mentioned in SEC/UR (1964),

6 ‘Plano de Atividades do SEC para 1963’ [Activity plan for 1963] in: SEC/UR, 1962, No. 3/4, pp. 3–6

7 This is the title of the first course conducted by the SEC/UR for secondary school graduates. It was held in the months of July/August 1963. Cf.: SEC/UR, 1962, No.3.

8 ‘Atividades do SEC/UR, Dois Cursos de Extensão’ [Activities of the SEC/UR, Two extension courses] in: SEC/UR, 1962 No. 2, pp. 18–21

9 ‘Atividades do SEC/UR, Dois Cursos de Extensão’ in: SEC/UR, 1962 No. 2, p. 20. Section III dealt with the ‘Economic Development of Brazilian Society’. The final point VI of the program was designed to serve as a summary discussion.

10 A similar curricular structure is found in a course given to students of the ‘Federal Agricultural University of Pernambuco’ (Universidade Rural de Pernambuco). Its title was ‘Education in the Rural Milieu’. Cf. ‘Atividades do SEC/UR, Dois Cursos de Extensão’ in: SEC/UR, 1962, No 2, p. 18

11 Cf. Part 5 of this article

12 Paulo Freire (1978, p. 24) considered it at the time of my interview with him politically too early to comment on the differences between the SEC/UR approach on one side and MCP/ MEB’s (Movimento de Educação de Base) work with a primer called ‘Livro de Leitura de Adultos’ [Reader for adults] on the other. Until his death he should not comment on it. Cf. for today’s discussions in relation to MEB and MCP: Veras & Mendonça 2004/2005 and the Cuban Scholar Pérez Cruz (2020, pp. 16): ‘Freire no compartía el método cubano y estaba en desacuerdo con la utilización del ‘Livro de Leitura de Adultos’. Proponía una enseñanza con base en textos populares. En su criterio los eslóganes producirían siempre efectos domesticadores, tanto a la derecha como a la izquierda’.

[‘Freire in did not share the Cuban method (of teaching literacy) and did not agree to the use of the ‘Reader for adults’. He proposed classes based on texts from the people. In his judgment tag lines would only produce domesticating effects, be it on the right or on the left of the political spectrum’].

Freire visited Cuba one time, in 1987.

13 The structure of the programs corresponded to the organizational division of the SEC/UR into sectors for primary-, secondary-, and university-level further education, and included departments for documentation, for film and theatre and for radio and television. The heads of the sectors/departments formed the directorate under Freire’s chairmanship. Cf. ‘Organização Funcional do SEC/UR’ [Functional organization of the SEC/UR] in: SEC/UR, 1962 No. 1, pp. 7–8

14 This list was compiled from various sources, mainly the ‘reports’ (Boletins) of SEC/UR and the ‘Reports for Information (Boletins Informativos) of the University of Recife (further on the abbreviated as UR). The myriad of corporations was SEC/UR’s contribution to further the ‘emergence of the people’ (port: emersão do povo ) in Brazil’s transition phase, its transition from a colonial dependent society to one structured along democratic principles and the process of industrialisation. Freire at the time called upon the ‘elites dirigentes’ [leading elites] to accept their historic responsibility to further these transitions Freire, 1961, pp. 5–8, 21–25). The other part of the Brazilian elite, linked to the colonial dependent past, Freire calls them ‘elites directoras’ [ruling elites], anyhow was inconvincible (Freire 1962, pp. 16/17)

15 Elected student committees (‘Diretórios Centrais dos Estudantes’) and the federal sub-organizations of the National Union of Students (= UNE) repeatedly invited SEC/UR staff to lecture on the ‘Brazilian reality’.

16 Scientists and students from the USA, but also from Switzerland (Pierre Furter), West Germany, and France.

17 Following the literacy campaign in Angicos (Jan.–April 1963), the ‘Paulo Freire Method’ gained nation and worldwide attention: Cf. Gerhardt, 1983 and Guerra, 2013

18 Freire had lost out to Maria do Carmo Tavares de Miranda the tenured professorship for this Chair in 1959. This event still today resonates profoundly within the intellectual establishment in the State of Pernambuco: Cf. Cavalcanti Filho (2016) defending Miranda’s attribution of this tenureship in the very ‘Diario de Pernambuco’ mentioned further on. And as member of the Pernambuco Academy of Arts and Letters he defends her in the nationwide weekly ‘Veja’ again (Cavalcanti Filho, 2019). Miranda had been his confrère in the Academy, then and today the main playing field of the intellectual elite in Pernambuco.

19 In an commemorative interview revisiting SEC/UR nearly 50 years later Maciel comments on his 1963 article that at the time he wanted to enrich Freire’s original ideas and method through a ‘linguistic technology’ [tecnologia linguística] (Maciel 2005/2006, p. 39)

20 Cf. the announcement of such a course in the UR, Boletim Informativo, No. 14, p. 121

21 For the significance of the sentenças in literacy education according to the ‘Paulo Freire Method’, cf. Gerhardt, 1983.

22 de Meneses (1963, pp. 3–8) attempts to design a curriculum based on the categories of Christian existentialism that considers the situational and temporal determination of the ‘historical’ Brazilian. The aim of the proposal is to integrate the Brazilian person into the space and time of Brazil’s current, ‘pre-revolutionary transition phase’.

23 As an example, his course on the encyclical ‘Pacem in terris’ of Oct. 1963. Cf. UR, Boletim Informativo, No. 14:121

24 At the time a student of medicine. Cf. Nicéis De Almeida (2013) memories of this collaboration

25 Freire, 1978, p. 24. Cf. also Germano Coelho’s account of the work of the couple Freire within the Movimento de Cultura Popular in Recife. Coelho, 2002, p. 44

26 Boletim do SEC/UR, Nr. 3/4, Sept./Dez. 1962;19

27 W. S. Gray, Professor of Education at the University of Chicago, was commissioned by UNESCO to compile previous methodological approaches to child and adult literacy. His work is considered standard in this field: Gray (1956). Early on Freire (1963, p. 16) and the SEC team (SEC/UR 1962, p. 19) classified their approach as ‘eclectic’, a mixture of the ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’ word-building procedures. This approach was already used in the Brazilian literacy campaign ‘Campanha de Educação de Adultos’ (1947–1962) and is frequently cited by Gray (1956, pp. 88 and 97, e.g.). Freire’s critics during the Bolsonaro presidency in Brazilian tried to put away the originality of Freire’s approach with authors like Gray. Yet, Freire nor his team never boosted themself to have been original in educational matters Only: Their re-invented pedagogical approach ‘worked’ in the historical situation of Brazil 1962 to 1965 (cf. Cherewka & Prins, 2022)

28 Weffort (1965, p. 3) in his foreword to Freire 1965/1974 talks about an ‘atraso relativo da teoria’ (theoretical backlog) at this time.

29 Freire’s and collaborators’ efforts to distance themselves from the vanguard theory of the Communist Party resulted in an implicit call to scientifically substantiate and secure his own concept. Paiva hints at this necessity when she speaks of the demand, ‘obviously made for political motives’, for a ‘detailed exposition of the scientific basis of the method’. Attacks by the local press and intellectuals (Gilberto Freyre and others cf. above) may also have played a role. The SEC team was labeled ‘communist’. Paiva (1978, pp. 372 and 378) and Costa Lima’s (2004/2005, pp. 23–26) own account of the events.

30 It should be noted at this point that Freire’s way of producing theoretical evidence for his theses may be confusing for the European and North American reader. Freire follows the eclecticism and Eurocentrism of Brazilian intellectuals who prefer to draw on theorists from the European cultural sphere to back up their own individual theses, without bothering with the inner theoretical contradictions of writings of those theorists withinwithin themselves. . In this way, Freire can draw together Marcel, Mannheim, Jaspers and Popper under the aspect of the rationality of man, although the latter is likely to vehemently criticize Marcel’s historical determinism, and to explicitly reject Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge and Jasper’s ‘hysterical romanticism’. (Popper, 1958, pp. 7–9, 99–101, 260–263 and 403–405. It is also important to note the contradiction between Freire’s approach to the investigation of social reality with that of ‘critical rationalism’, which strictly forbids social interactions between the investigator and their ‘subject under study’.

31 On culturalism in the ISEB and the Catholic Radicals, and in their tradition also in Freire, see Paiva 1980, pp. 330–333.

32 Still in 2015 (p.1) Muniz de Brito emphasizes the use of the anthropological concept of culture ‘as the main motivational feature of the Paulo Freire method for the target groups at the time’.

33 Association in the Freirean method means approaching and remembering social reality and the experiences gained there.

34 The expression ‘Paulo Freire system’ is used by Freire himself: ‘Let us now consider the literacy method, which is part of something that can be called a system because of its scope’. Cf. Freire (1963, p. 16).In this designation, the already well-known concept of renewing the conventional Brazilian education system from the ground up shimmers through. In Freire’s view, the literacy method contained elements that could also be applied to other areas of education, e.g. audio-visual media, dialogue and coding principle, and the anthropological concept of culture.

35 There were a variety of local applications of the method, either led directly by the SEC/UR team or inspired by lectures heard in Recife. Cardoso (1963, pp. 71-80), in her report on the method at the first National Meeting on Literacy and Popular Culture, lists eight places where the SEC/UR had led literacy classes up to that point.

36 This is the name, given by journalists, under which the method was propagated and became known in Brazil and internationally. The main interest was in the presumedly short amount of time required to achieve literacy. Cf. e.g. Bandeira de Melo and da Costa Porto (1963, p. 14)

37 This arrangement could be described as ‘technical supervision’. However, it also included all content-related measures, from the selection of the generative words to the preparation of the coordinators’ instructions and the selection of the coordinator team. (Freire, 1963, p. 19)

38 Although all projects took place under the auspices of the ‘Paulo Freire Method’, the SEC/UR soon was no longer able to control the content and organization of the projects at this point. Freire’s method became what its respective users made of it (Maciel, 1976). This is also confirmed by that at the time, only locally famous playwright and author Ariano Suassuna, a close friend of Freire. At that time, Suassuna (1976) remembered, Freire often spoke out against the disregard of his methodological principles by communist coordinators who were only interested in enforcing their doctrine

39 In the ‘zona da mata’ region, Paes de Andrade ((1976) recalled, the method was able to build on pre-politicization work by agricultural workers’ unions and reinforced these tendencies through the sociological situations and generative words. Literacy and politicization rates benefited. Similar comments were made by Maciel, (1976) the i.

40 Following the military coup in 1964, the use of Freire’s method was banned on the grounds that it was part of an attempt by Freire to ‘bolshevize’ Brazil. This accusation had been common in Brazil’s right-wing press since the first campaigns involving the new approach (Araújo Freire, 2006, pp. 153–164)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heinz Peter Gerhardt

Heinz Peter Gerhardt wrote the ‘Paulo Freire’ Biography for UNESCO: www.unesco.org/education/uie/pdf/freire.pdf. Doctor of Philosophy from J. W. Goethe University, Frankfurt (Main), Germany. Taught and researched there, the USA (SUNY/Albany), Brazil (UFRN/Natal), and China (USJ/SAR Macau). Research interests and publications: Teacher Training and organizational Psychology, Critical Theory. www.heinzpetergerhardt.com