Critical pedagogy and quality education (UNESCO SDG-4): the legacy of Paulo Freire for language and intercultural communication

The legacy of Paulo Freire (1921–1997)

September 2021 marks the centenary of the birth of one of the most influential figures in the history and philosophy of education, Paulo Freire (1921–1997). This special issue of LAIC offers a critical analysis of the continuing international impact of his ideas. The editors solicited scholars and educators from around the world to give testimony to the extent to which Freire’s work on critical pedagogy has been influential in their contexts and how a Freirean perspective can contribute to the achievement of ‘Quality Education,’ the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s Sustainable Development Goal #4 (UNESCO SDG-4). Specifically, contributors were invited to discuss the continuing relevance of Freire’s vision to the provision of ‘Quality Education’ in the field of language and intercultural communication.

The celebration of a centenary leads us to honour the past while it recognises the importance of a figure, or an event, in the present and, therefore, its influence in the future. In the present case, we review and appraise the legacy of Paulo Freire. The creative interlinking between past, present and future, that is, between reflection and action, critique and possibility, between conscientização¹ and prática cidadã, ‘the practice of citizenship,’ represents Freire’s beacon for the present and future. Ultimately, Freire’s goal is to promote change, defined as a deep social transformation, not by imposing a linear model of progress, say ‘quality’ in the UNESCO terms, but by offering each community, indeed each individual, the opportunity to discover the distinctive contribution they can make to the overall improvement of the quality of life, be it within, for example, the ethos of buen vivir (‘living well’) or that of a ‘good’ society. To this end, Freire focused his attention on the political and dialogical character of education, on the validation of students’ heritage and local knowledge, and on the creative and critical role of the teacher. Gadotti (2007), in his preface to the Portuguese version of Freire’s Education and Change, considered that among Freire’s overall ‘generating topics’ (temas geradores), that is, concepts that can prompt action and inspire change, the most inspirational and urgent, were precisely conscientização and mudança, in the sense of ‘active awareness’ and ‘social transformation.’

Paulo Freire’s work has been studied around the world, with different interpretations, and put into practice through multiple adaptations to local cultural circumstances. His intention was precisely to offer an educational vision and examples of practice which could trigger profound change both in educational and in social contexts, anywhere discrimination and oppression were taking place. Though broadly applicable, the social and political environment of his praxis and the historical and cultural inspiration of his theory were profoundly rooted in Brazil and both actively converse with the ideas of the main Brazilian and Latin American educational scholars of his time.

Although he often found his recommendations ignored in his homeland, Freire became the best known Latin American scholar in the world, without peer as an educational theorist. His work, indeed, provides a systematic basis for the ‘Epistemologies of the South,’ a phrase later coined by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014, 2018), and he was one of the first to articulate a ‘decolonial turn’ which was later theorised by authors originating from, or established in Latin America. However, Freire was never alone in the promotion of Critical Pedagogy either in the world or in the Latin American arena. For example, Gadotti observes that the concept of conscientização which through Freire was disseminated internationally, was not in fact coined by him, but rather by a pedagogical network, ISEB, which ‘was attached to the Ministry of Education and Culture as an independent research group and banished by the military leaders of the 1964 coup’ (2019, p. 38). Freire’s vision continues to resonate precisely because his work reflects the inspiration he was himself able and eager to gather from a diversity of sources: from his academic colleagues and the communities he encountered both in rural and urban Brazil, as well as from his nomadic experiences in exile, in the Global North and South, in the Americas, Europe and Africa. In one of his late interviews, he reveals that it was during his exile that he had discovered the presence of the Third World inside the First and, therefore, he had also become aware of the First World inside the Third, namely, the dominating class (Freire & Macedo, 2011, p. 223).

Even though he acknowledged that it was one of his most influential concepts, Freire later confessed that he himself had stopped using the term conscientização because he felt it had become worn out, and to some extent, even stripped of the original meaning he had given to it. In the same way, he also felt that his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970a) had reached the ‘universality’ it also enjoys by being ‘saturated of time, history and culture’ (saturado de tempo, história e cultura) (Freire & Macedo, 2011, p. 228). This was perhaps the price of having his ideas ‘de-rooted’ and ‘re-rooted’ in practically every corner of the world. Freire’s pedagogy was, as a matter of principle, locally contextualised, and he watched with some reservation as his key concepts were globalised and ultimately glocalised, all the while sprouting wings and new roots.

Nevertheless, Freire never found himself short of phrases that have inspired educators around the world. In one of his later books, The Pedagogy of Hope: The Pedagogy of Oppressed revisited (A Pedagogia da Esperança: Um reencontro com a Pedagogia do Oprimido, our translation), he introduces the concept of ‘critical hope’. According to Freire, hope is not only an ontological necessity but also a critical one and the difference is that the latter is anchored in practice (Freire, 1993, p. 11). Ultimately, the interweaving of practice, criticality and utopia is what has grounded Freire’s critical pedagogy in the Epistemologies of the South. With regard to his literacy programmes, he confides that his words, his ‘generating themes’ and his reading of the world had the power to ‘southernise’ participants, that is, to root them in the South (tivessem o poder de ‘suleá-los’) (Freire, 1993, p. 24).

Yet, what does it mean to ‘root participants in the South’? In 1996, just before his passing away, Freire published a small book entirely dedicated to educational practice, Pedagogy of Autonomy: What you need to know for educational practice (our free translation). In it, he lists and expands on three sets of nine principles for teaching, which may be considered to summarise the main tenets of his previous theory of critical pedagogy (Freire, 2007b). Besides criticality, critical reflection, joy and hope, his advocacy of respect for the learner’s autonomy, knowledge and cultural identity is worth highlighting, the promotion of research activities by teachers and learners together. Ever present, too, is the drive for change, since education requires intervention and the utopian conviction that social transformation is possible and there can indeed be the annihilation of discrimination, exclusion, poverty and inequity. Finally, he affirms that the future cannot be determined a priori, as a condition to which the learner is expected to adapt, for this wipes out the possibility of hope, of critical hope, which makes feasible the dreaming and building of a better future.

From the above snapshots of Freirean thinking, we may gather that the transformational challenge put forward by the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goal #4 (UNESCO SDG-4) for Quality Education cannot be met by a given linear conception of progress and innovation towards a pre-determined future. Instead, the challenge needs to be addressed by communities of ‘glocally’ committed, inspired and inspiring, learners and teachers who need to define what ‘quality’ means in their own context. Elsewhere, in another interview, Freire speaks to this challenge:

For me education is simultaneously an act of knowing, a political act, and an artistic event.  … I say education is politics, art, and knowing. Education is a certain theory of knowledge put into practice every day, but it is clothed in a certain aesthetic dress. (Freire, 1985, p. 17)

In his foreword to The Pedagogy of Hope, Freire tells us about an experience at a UNESCO meeting in Paris where he was informed that some of the Latin-American representatives denied his role as an educator because his approach to education was too political; Freire remarks that it did not occur to these representatives that their own ‘neutrality’ was itself a political act that served an inequitable and indeed oppressive status quo. Education is inevitably epistemological and political, but, ultimately, it is also creative: it involves imagination, emotion and dreaming, which inspire acts of learning, knowing and social transformation. Thus, Freire’s ideas and praxis have creatively inspired replications in many (inter-)disciplinary fields, most often related to education; for example, Romão, 2014, on the intercultural dimension of citizenship education, and Haddad Baptista & Guilherme, 2019, on plurilingualism.

The articles collected in this special issue illustrate how Freire’s work and praxis remain inspiring and relevant to intercultural educators in diverse international contexts. The UNESCO SDG-4 seeks to promote ‘inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’ by emphasising gender equality and by highlighting the right of the vulnerable, for example, the disabled, and marginalised indigenous populations, to all levels of education. It also calls for sustainable lifestyles, the promotion of peace and cultural diversity, human rights and global citizenship. It stresses the importance of information and communication technology as well as vocational training for gender equality and levelling of education systems both in developing and developed countries.

None of Freire’s precepts contradicts any of the UNESCO SDG-4 aspirations, instead, he offers a path to fulfil them in good faith. For example, in Freire’s final book on education and change, with regard to his precept that ‘teaching requires criticality’ he mentions the use of technology which, he says, he ‘neither deifies nor demonises’ (2007a, p. 32). His open-minded criticality serves as a counterweight to any naïve optimism, which might be prompted by the UNESCO declaration, that ICT will serve as a magical solution to all educational and social inequalities.

In short, Freirean pedagogy can serve to humanise the universalised concept of ‘quality education’ and ground it in local needs. Paradoxically, despite, or perhaps because of, Freire’s insistence on the local, his ideas have been explicitly adopted and developed all around the world, not least in north America too, where the work of Henry Giroux, Peter MacLaren, Antonia Darder and many others deserves mention. Freire is often compared in relation to the American educational philosopher, John Dewey, and their work coincides in some aspects, for example, with regard to citizenship education and their reflexive/active concept of knowledge production (Aronowitz and Giroux, 1986, p. 12). Crucially, however, their approaches to knowledge construction in education differ in that Dewey adopts a pragmatic ‘problem solving approach’ while Freire concentrates his attention on a resisting ‘problem posing approach.’ Each of them relies on ‘experience’ and ‘experiment’ in very different historical and cultural social contexts, which result from different colonial matrices (Guilherme, 2018).

Freire continued to insist on the importance of the immediate context, localised in both space and time, in his educational philosophy. For example, in her 2015 book, Darder shares a conversation between Paulo Freire, herself and Peter Park, in which Paulo makes strong statements about the then situation (1992) in the United States and in the world: ‘To be absolutely set on doing our politics like the 1960s or 1970s will not work. It’s impossible to understand history as determinism or stagnant. To conceive a democratic future, it is something that has to happen through our efforts, today.’ (Darder, 2015, p. 145). And he is harsh on those he calls ‘progressivists’ as well, who are expected ‘to create in his or her body the virtue of being coherent. Consistent.’ (p. 149) to whom he pleads for genuine comradeship and solidarity based on strong ethical positions.

There is a group of outstanding scholars who had the privilege to have collaborated directly with Freire and who have since devoted their lives to keeping Freire’s legacy alive, in part through the foundation of the Paulo Freire Institute in São Paulo and its affiliates throughout the world, and by mentoring many postgraduate programmes entirely dedicated to Freire’s works. This group includes Moacir Gadotti, Carlos Alberto Torres and José Eustáquio Romão. They had first-hand experience of Freire’s life and work and have acted as guardians of his legacy, while also expanding on and updating of Freire’s theories to address contemporary issues, both in Latin America and beyond.

Torres remains prolific in producing publications about Paulo Freire, the most recent being an edition of the early works of Freire (Torres, 2014) and a handbook that collects state of the art essays on Freire (Torres, 2019), both of which concentrate on Freire as a postcolonial thinker and on his focus on otherness, and highlight ‘cultural invasion’ as a central theme. Torres concludes that ‘From his own notion of cultural diversity, he [Freire] identified the notion of crossing borders in education, suggesting that there is an ethical imperative to cross borders if we attempt to educate for empowerment and not for oppression’ (2014, p. 110). For interculturalists, this insight may constitute one of the most important precepts of quality education, configured as a situation in which everyone can learn from everyone else, the cossetted elite also from the invisible and neglected members of the community, where the line between the ones who are deemed capable of teaching and the ones who are expected to learn is eroded, in order to build sustainable ecology of knowledge creation and development (Freire, 1970b). In his introduction to the Wiley Handbook of Paulo Freire (2019), Torres makes a striking statement: ‘In pedagogy, today, we can be with Freire or against Freire but not without Freire’ (p. 3).

These and other scholars have helped define Freire’s legacy, their authority bolstered by first-hand experience and partnership with him. They can testify directly to Freire’s human character, his perspectives on life, his educational vision, philosophical sources, and his social and political struggles. A close collaborator of Romão at UNINOVE in São Paulo, Mafra concludes a thorough study of Freire’s life and work by asserting that his publications are, to a great extent, unfinished, but necessarily convergent, that is, they are all connected to the Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2016, p. 197). In sum, we may perceive Freire’s pedagogy as simultaneously circular and open, since further elements keep being added to his core message, a process that mirrors his own continued labour. Since Freire never considered his own work complete or beyond critique, it invites more and more exploration within the established principles that he articulated.

The articles in this special issue of LAIC represent a further contribution to the exploration of Freire’s pedagogy. As we noted above, the editors invited and solicited contributions that would attend to the global legacy of Paulo Freire to education in the twenty-first century, and, in particular, to education that engages with intercultural communication in light of the UNESCO sustainable development goal of delivering ‘quality education’ for all by 2030. The articles collected here speak eloquently, affectionately, and, at times, critically of Freire and his impact on educational philosophy and practices. Unsurprisingly, many of the contributions are from Latin America, where Freire remains a powerful but still controversial figure and where his pedagogical challenge to the forces of oppression sadly remains relevant.

For example, this special issue includes an interview with Romão, who has been among the most prominent of Freirean scholars in coordinating teams dedicated to exploring the philosophical, historical and methodological aspects of Freire’s work. Recently, Romão has devoted his attention to developing Freire’s message for higher education which had, in general, been overlooked by previous scholars and commentators. Romão’s research team has paid particular attention to the influence of Freire’s ideas on the foundation of ‘popular’ universities in Brazil (Santos et al., 2013), an initiative that has been simultaneous with a Latin-American movement to create ‘intercultural’ universities. This is a movement in Latin American higher education, contemporary to Paulo Freire, which started at the beginning of the twentieth century in a series of events that became known as ‘the Cordoba revolution,’ mainly led by students in Argentina. These educational activists demanded profound changes in the university curricula to the effect that they should henceforth be rooted in local epistemologies and cease simply to regurgitate European-based ‘knowledge’ that was alien to them.

As a result, Latin-American universities have implemented outreach programmes, so-called Programas de Extensão, aiming to link teaching, research and community service. Romão (2018) has enhanced the discussion initiated by Freire in his book Extension or Communication (1985; first published in 1969 while he was in exile in Santiago do Chile), about the actual goal and approach of such programmes, and whether the initiative should come up as a top-down, imposed ‘extension’ of the university canon to social communities or it should represent a real dialogical change in the communication between different epistemologies. In his interview with Manuela Guilherme, Romão gives a direct insight into his own experience of working with Freire and an appreciation of his legacy.

Among those who have taken up the challenge of applying Freire’s tenets, Catherine Walsh deserves a special mention. She can be described as an intellectual activist, linking and theorising in praxis in relation to postgraduate and outreach programmes in Latin America, specifically in Ecuador and Colombia. As she explains in this issue, she advocates for an understanding of ‘quality education’ in a Freirean perspective, inspired by the concept of ‘buen vivir,’² as an engagement with ‘decoloniality’ and ‘critical interculturality.’ Since her first book (1991), she has acknowledged how indebted she is to Freire in her perception of the pedagogical that ‘intertwines with intellectual militancy, activism, and action’ to which she refers as an ‘engaged pedagogy’ (2018, pp. 82–88). Walsh endorses ‘Praxis, in a Freirean sense, … [which] is reflexive, not merely reflective. It is critical and theoretical, and not merely pragmatic. It is intentional in that it acts upon and in reality to transform it, aware of its own processes and aims’, in accordance, so she says, with his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Walsh, 2018, p. 50).

In this issue, Catherine Walsh’s timely commentary on Freirean pedagogy in the midst and aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic makes, in places, bleak reading, particularly when she finds herself unable to subscribe to a pedagogy of hope, at least to hope of the kind of utopian social transformation that she sees envisaged in Freire’s writings. She is deeply sceptical of initiatives such as the UNESCO sustainable development goals, and their formulation of ‘quality education,’ on the grounds that globalising and universalising policies cannot attend to the local needs of specific communities. Hers is a nuanced position that deserves contemplation; it accords with Romão’s observation in his interview with Guilherme that ‘quality’ is not an attribute that can be understood or evaluated divorced from the myriad contexts of education. Walsh acknowledges that, out of context, there is little that can be challenged in a set of goals that promote targets such as inclusive education, universal adult and child literacy, gender equality, and opportunities for lifelong learning. However, educators do not deal in decontextualised situations.

Defenders of the UNESCO sustainable development goals might reasonably argue that the formulation of SDG-4 regularly uses the term ‘appropriate’; there is no impediment in SDG-4 to sensitivity to local contexts. The Incheon Declaration (UNESCO, 2016, p. 28), for example, states the case in the following terms (emphasis added):

[Quality education] requires relevant teaching and learning methods and content that meet the needs of all learners, taught by well-qualified, trained, adequately remunerated and motivated teachers, using appropriate pedagogical approaches and supported by appropriate information and communication technology (ICT), as well as the creation of safe, healthy, gender-responsive, inclusive and adequately resourced environments that facilitate learning.

The problem, as Walsh so devastatingly demonstrates, is that power is a factor in determining what is ‘appropriate’ in different contexts. In her own case study of Ecuador, she argues, a nominally progressive government adopted the rhetoric of critical pedagogy but only to dismantle local provision and centralise public educational services. The goal was to bring local standards up to those advocated by international benchmarks; the reality was a fragmentation and weakening of local public education, which was then further decimated by the onset of COVID-19. Walsh’s salutary tale of the co-option of liberal rhetoric for neoliberal ends recalls Freire’s prescient words in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970a, p. 29):

The oppressors, who oppress, exploit and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to ‘soften’ the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this.

Walsh’s essay, in advocating in favour of a pedagogy of ‘hope’ (in small letters), celebrated in the modest victories of local activism, raises the urgent question of whether a grander scale of transformation can ever be attained. If the well-meaning efforts of organisations like UNESCO to coordinate governments in enhancing educational opportunities cannot ever exceed ‘false generosity’ then are critical pedagogues limited to lifetimes in uncoordinated opposition, focusing on contextualised praxis that can only be distorted if its practitioners refer to apparently analogous activities ongoing elsewhere? A related question also arises: if a transformative educational initiative were to succeed, how would we recognise that success, and would it be replicable?

In different guises, these questions are raised again in the other articles in this issue. The case studies by Amato in Brazil, and Montoya-Peláez, Mateos Cortés and Dietz in Colombia and Mexico, report on challenges faced by two grander-scale attempts to establish Freirean-inspired institutes of higher education in Latin America. In his interview with Manuela Guilherme, José Eustáquio Romão also talks positively about Freire’s contribution to higher education and spotlights specific tertiary institutes that are designed to follow Freirean principles, such as the Universitas Paulo Freire (UNIFREIRE) itself.

Amato reports on the founding of the Universidade Federal da Integração Latino-Americana (UNILA) during the latter part of the Lula government of 2003–2011. She observes that this institution was founded with the explicit aim of democratising education and integrating higher educational provision in the ‘three border region’ of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, and opening up provision to hitherto marginalised students from all over the Mercosul area. UNILA’s mission is, if not exactly a local initiative, then a regional one that privileges intercultural dialogue and plurilingualism in the forging of a transnational, integrative identity. Amato gathers a significant amount of data that indicates UNILA has been achieving its objectives; however, the most recent Brazilian government, which came to power in a populist surge in 2018, has reversed the policies of its predecessors and threatened to undermine UNILA’s gains.

Montoya-Peláez, Mateos Cortés and Dietz report analogous initiatives in Latin America, the founding of the Universidad Autónoma Indígena Intercultural (UAIIN) in Colombia, and the reformation of the pre-existing Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (UVI) in Mexico. Both of these institutions are now strongly influenced by Freirean principles, in particular the privileging of local epistemologies of knowledge. The institutions ally this tendency with a localised conception of interculturalidad, derived from the dialogues among popular social movements that represent diverse transnational communities in the Andes region. Montoya-Peláez, Mateos Cortés and Dietz depart from Walsh in arguing that the establishment of these ‘bottom up’ institutes of higher education, focused on the needs of local people and honouring local epistemologies, can be aligned with the spirit of UNESCO SDG-4. It is worth noting in passing that the local focus that Montoya-Peláez, Mateos Cortés and Dietz celebrate as a key pillar of ‘quality education’ is far from the standardising benchmarks and fixation with rankings that characterise higher education globally, and about which Walsh is so sceptical.

There is also a miasma of unease that arises from the two case studies that, in a way, are required to calcify the dynamism of Freirean critical pedagogy in the necessary bureaucratic jargon of university charters, general regulations, assessment regimes, and quality assurance procedures. The reader is required to return to the question that arises from a reading of Walsh: can a truly transformational pedagogy arise from an institution, whether it is UNESCO or a government department, or a duly established university, when that institution necessarily wields power, and so oppresses at least some of the learners who pass under its governance? The defenders of such institutions might reasonably argue that they do empower many of the learners who benefit from their services. They might also argue that critical pedagogues are obliged to take on the responsibility of assuming authority when that authority is aimed at the greater good. Romão observes that the ‘new blueprint’ of the Universitas Paulo Freire takes as its model the original founding of Bologna University, which arose from the desires and demands of its potential students, not from the demands of any corporate, secular or religious body. As the historical episode suggests, the very act of determining what the criteria might be for measuring the extent to which an institutionally sponsored transformational initiative can be judged a success is always deeply ideological and fundamentally contested. The impetus towards a universalised set of ‘quality assurance’ procedures that can be applied to globalised universities across the world (and so produce rankings) is inimical to the locally attuned aims of critical pedagogy. A challenge for all institutions of higher education is how to slip from the yoke of such deadening standardised procedures and ensure ‘quality’ that is sensitive to local conditions.

In some ways, the reader is on more comfortable ground with the two articles that conclude this special issue. Both are more focused in their scope, addressing the microcosm of the classroom rather than the macrocosm of the institution; the pedagogical transformations they aspire to thus present feasible models to individual educators, even as they remain challenging. The final two case studies also demonstrate the reach of Freirean pedagogy from its origin in Brazil, beyond South and Central America, to the Middle East and Africa. Geduld, Sathorar and Mdzanga report on how Freirean pedagogy has inspired their application of the concept of a ‘transect walk,’ a means of engaging trainee teachers with the local communities they serve. In post-apartheid South Africa, communities are still separated by invisible barriers based on factors such as race, class and profession. Educators from different social strata need to be equipped to be intercultural mediators among and between these communities, and the transect walk is an instrument of Freirean conscientização, that is an experiential means of raising awareness of political, social and economic contradictions so that educators and their pupils can take effective action to address them. The transect walk immerses trainee teachers in the unfamiliar communities that are home to their pupils, and so they become sensitised to their learners’ local needs.

Awayed-Bishara’s article also shows how Freirean philosophy can be used to understand and respond to an educational context that at first seems paradoxical: school pupils whose community is engaged in an ongoing and violent struggle against the state are taught conflict resolution as part of a state curriculum innovation; however, the course materials make no reference to the conflict they are themselves caught up in. In short, Palestinian school pupils in Israel are taught conflict resolution that makes no mention of the crisis in Gaza. Awayed-Bishara’s ethnographic study of a Palestinian educator who found himself in this situation draws on a Freirean framework to understand the contradictory forces at play, and she demonstrates how the teacher uses structured dialogue as, again, a means of achieving conscientização among pupils who find their own experience erased from a curriculum that seems expressly designed to address it.

The case studies from South Africa and Israel exemplify what Walsh might refer to as the pedagogy of ‘hope’ in small letters: exercises in transformative local activism that are modest in scale but no doubt powerfully effective on the level of the individual teacher trainee or pupil. As we move beyond the milestone of the centenary of Paulo Freire’s birth, there is no doubt that his pedagogies of counter-oppression, hope and dignity are still powerfully relevant and inspirational to educational practices across the globe. One question that this special issue poses is the extent to which Freire’s philosophy can be institutionalised in universalising targets such as the UNESCO SDG-4, in university charters, or even in intended curricula outcomes. Even if they can, then that does not mean that the social transformation that Paulo Freire envisioned has been accomplished. It simply means that another phase in the critical dialogue has begun.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 According to Freire, conscientização, which is sometimes glossed as ‘active awareness,’ should be used in Portuguese, in the same way he himself borrowed stress from English (Freire & Macedo, 2011, p. 218).

2 ‘Buen vivir’ refers to an indigenous concept of ‘living well’ in social solidarity and harmony with nature.