Bibliographic Information
Title: Paulo Freire and the New Latin American Pedagogical Imaginings
Author: Adriana Puiggrós (Translated by Peter Lownds)
Year: 2008
Citation
Puiggrós, A. (2008). Paulo Freire and the Culture of Justice and Peace: The perspective of Washington vs. the perspective of Angicos. In Torres, C. A., & Noguera, P. (Eds.). (2008). Social Justice Education for Teachers (pp. 161-175). Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
Realms of Application
Summary
Puiggrós traces the origins of Paulo Freire’s liberatory pedagogy through his intellectual influences, with particular emphasis on Christianity, left-wing theory, and Latin American thought.
Puiggrós concludes her article by providing a succinct description of Freire’s pedagogy:
Quote
Paulo Freire created a pedagogical system, which allows Latin American educators to imagine alternatives to modern education. The system is founded on:
- an interior relationship between politics and education;
- education as the product of a historically and socially instituted relationship and, what is more, a politically mutable one
- the introduction of the concept of dialogical education, which is opposed to banking education, indicating that the educational process does not necessarily lead to the reproduction of the dominant power;
- the concept of dominant education as a result of political and social struggles;
- the concept of educator and educatee as non-essential, non-immutable positions which, moreover, are susceptible to being filled by distinct social subjects;
- the study of the particularities of the political-pedagogical fabric as an object of interest for all democratic pedagogy.
- p. 174
However, she is less interested in explaining the system than she is in tracing its roots and its influences. At its core, her ideas have application as Research, suggesting an answer to How and why do we document our evolving technologies and practices? In tying back the core tenets that she identifies in Freirean pedagogy to his influences, she teases out not just the evolution of his thought, but also the nuances of applying it a Latin America dominated by neo liberal education.
Her project of reconstruction of Freirean pedagogies for their enactment in Latin America is clear in how she describes the complex relationship between Freire, his influences and his peers. She is interested, for example, not just in how Liberation Theology informs Freirean thought, but also on Christianity was subsequently weaponized against him: “However, the dictatorship installed in Brazil beginning in 1964 punished him twice. First, it threw him into prison and into exile, accusing him of subversion, of being ‘a traitor of Christ and of the Brazilian People’” (p. 162). She describes a similar process of closeness and then rejection from the Latin American left. She highlights the influence of Marx’s concept of alienation and of Gramsci’s thought, and she notes Freire’s renunciation of positivism “by denouncing the supposed universality of pedagogical theory” (p. 163). Then, she shows how his uncompromising stance and his rejection of dogma put him at odds with his supposed ideological allies: “Freire’s detractors, like those of Gramsci, did not forgive the fact that he overlooked the ritual of punctually demonstrating how every cultural or pedagogical fact is linked to and mirrors material conditions. (…) In fact, the mixture of Latin Americanism, Third World Christianity, Marxism and democracy inscribed in the pedagogy of liberation discourse was strongly combatted” (p. 164). Nationalism, Populism and Marxism all take their turns approaching and then condemning Freirean thought when it refuses to adapt to their ideological political agendas.
Puiggrós highlights all these ideological conflicts not just to distinguish Freireanism from all these other currents, but to show how his pedagogy evolves in opposition to dominating powers, how it is shaped by this pressure to conform. In so doing, she highlights the key aspect to her reading of Freire: when his pedagogy is systematized by an ideological group, when it is used to transmit ideology rather than to question it and challenge it actively, it is no longer for liberation: “Its character as an instrument for the creation of a new culture was crushed by the obligation to act as a transmission belt of revolutionary theory for the proletariat” (p. 170).
Puiggrós’ article serves as an excellent example of the role tools of Research can play in developing a critical pedagogy. On the one hand, by tracing not just the origins of thought, but also the history of Freire’s conflict with former allies she teases out a key theoretical insight whose centrality to liberatory educations would be difficult to convey without analyzing its historical conflicts: the total rejection of established ideology in the educational mission. This does not mean rejecting the influence of other theoretical currents, but rather rejecting the prescription of ideological agendas upon education. On the other hand, by tracing this line of conflicts Puiggrós’ article serves as a road map for the conflicts that might arise when a teacher attempts to enact a liberatory pedagogy in Latin America. The ideological currents, the power groups and the expectations of militancy have changed little, and by studying the ways in which these groups have rejected critical pedagogies in the past Puiggrós asks the present teacher to prepare for these attacks, for they will come.