The Freirean factor

ABSTRACT

Why bother thinking about Freire today? Who cares about the accuracy or lack of it in the translation of his books? In 2018 after 50 years of the original publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, there is a large industry of people profiting from translating and repeating Freire’s ideas – we are well aware that this text is another small contribution to such industry – but we firmly believe that contemporary social scientists could greatly benefit from reflecting about Freire’s long-term powerful conceptual, pedagogical, and political impact, and in particular about the role of translations in the social sciences.

KEYWORDS:

• Paulo Freire
• translations
• influence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. It is important to acknowledge that there are many scholars and organizations who recognize the limitations of the simplistic models and seek to broaden definitions of scholarly impact like the signatories of San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA, http://www.ascb.org/dora/) and the Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics (http://www.leidenmanifesto.org/). See also O’Neill (2016), Simons (2008), and Vanclay (2012).

2. The hybrid character of Freire’s writing was also a source of a frequent criticism. As Daniel Schugurensky has noted in a review of Freire’s contributions: ‘In the writings of Freire we find, for instance, elements of Socratic maieutics, philosophical existentialism, phenomenology, Hegelianism, Marxism, progressive education, and liberation theology. Together with Marx and the Bible are Sartre and Husserl, Mounier and Buber, Fanon and Memmi, Mao and Guevara, Althusser and Fromm, Hegel and Unamuno, Kosik and Furter, Chardin and Maritain, Marcuse and Cabral. Even though Freire was influenced by these and other authors, his merit was to combine their ideas into an original formulation’ (1998, p. 23).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gustavo Fischman

Gustavo E. Fischman is a professor of education policy and director of edXchange, the knowledge mobilization initiative, at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University; [email protected]. His scholarship has been distinguished with several awards and he has been a visiting scholar in several universities in Europe and Latin America. Dr. Fischman has authored over 100 articles, chapters, and books. He is the editor of Education Review and a consulting editor of Education Policy Analysis Archives.

Sandra Sales

Dr. Sandra R. Sales is a professor of adult and youth education and chair of the School of Education at the Multidisciplinary Institute of the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ). She teaches in the Graduate Program on Education, Contemporary Contexts and Popular Demands (PPGEduc) at the Department of Education and Society of the UFRRJ. Her areas of specialization are Adult Education, Teacher Preparation and Higher Education.