1. Paulo Freire 1921- 1997 Liberatory Pedagogy
Leo R. Sandy

2. Paulo Freire
Freire was born September 19, 1921 to a middle-class family in Recife, Brazil. Freire became familiar with poverty and hunger during the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 1931, the family moved to the less expensive city of Jaboatão dos Guararapes, and on October 31, 1934 his father died.
In school, he ended up four grades behind, and his social life revolved around playing pick up football with other poor children, from whom he learned a great deal. These experiences would shape his concerns for the poor and would help to construct his particular educational viewpoint.

3. Freire cont’d
Freire stated that poverty and hunger severely affected his ability to learn. This influenced his decision to dedicate his life to improving the lives of the poor: "I didn't understand anything because of my hunger. I wasn't dumb
It wasn't lack of interest. My social condition didn't allow me to have an education. Experience showed me once again the relationship between social class and knowledge”. Eventually his family's misfortunes turned around and their prospects improved.

4. Freire cont’d
Freire enrolled in law school at the University of Recife in He also studied philosophy, more specifically phenomenology, and the psychology of language
Although admitted to the legal bar, he never practiced law. He instead worked as a teacher in secondary schools teaching Portuguese. In 1944, he married Elza Maia Costa de Oliveira, a fellow teacher. The two worked together and had five children.
In 1946, Freire was appointed Director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in the state of Pernambuco. Working primarily among the illiterate poor, Freire began to embrace a non-orthodox form of what could be considered liberation theology. In Brazil at that time, literacy was a requirement for voting in presidential elections.

5. Freire cont’d
In 1961, he was appointed director of the Department of Cultural Extension of Recife University. In 1962 he had the first opportunity for significant application of his theories, when 300 sugarcane workers were taught to read and write in just 45 days. In response to this experiment, the Brazilian government approved the creation of thousands of cultural circles across the country.
In 1964, a military coup put an end to that effort. Freire was imprisoned as a traitor for 70 days. After a brief exile in Bolivia, Freire worked in Chile for five years for the Christian Democratic Agrarian Reform Movement and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

6. Freire cont’d
In 1967, Freire published his first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom. He followed this with his most famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, first published in Portuguese in 1968.
On the strength of reception of his work, Freire was offered a visiting professorship at Harvard University in The next year, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published in Spanish and English, vastly expanding its reach.
Because of political feuds between Freire, a Christian socialist, and successive authoritarian military dictatorships, the book wasn't published in Brazil until 1974, when General Ernesto Geisel became the dictator president beginning the process of a slow and controlled political liberalization.

7. Freire cont’d
After a year in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, Freire moved to Geneva, Switzerland to work as a special education advisor to the World Council of Churches. During this time Freire acted as an advisor on education reform in former Portuguese colonies in Africa, particularly Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique
In 1979, he was able to return to Brazil and moved back in Freire joined the Workers' Party (PT) in the city of São Paulo and acted as a supervisor for its adult literacy project from 1980 to When the PT prevailed in the municipal elections in 1988, Freire was appointed Secretary of Education for São Paulo.

8. Freire cont’d
In 1986, his wife Elza died. People close to him felt that he had given up after the loss of his wife and worried that he might die. Freire was teaching a graduate course, and became reconnected with Maria (Nita) Araújo from Recife, who once was a pupil in the school where he was a principal.
Eventually, they fell in love. Freire married Maria Araújo Freire, who continues with her own education work. Freire often said that Nita saved his life: She was the culmination of the radical love he sought.
Freire died of heart failure on May 2, 1997 in São Paulo.

9. Freire cont’d
In 1991, the Paulo Freire Institute was established in São Paulo to extend and elaborate upon his theories of popular education.
In 1999 PAULO, a national training organisation named in honour of Freire, was established in the United Kingdom
The Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed (founded by Augusto Boal) Conference is held each spring and is guided by the theory and practice of these liberatory practitioners.
The Paulo and Nita Freire Project for International Critical Pedagogy was founded at McGill University

10. Freire cont’d
In 2012 a group of educators in Western Massachusetts received permission from the state to found the Paulo Freire Social Justice Charter School in Holyoke, Massachusetts, which opened in September 2013
At his death, Freire was working on a book of ecopedagogy, a platform of work carried on by many of the Freire Institutes and Freirean Associations around the world today. It has been influential in helping to develop planetary education projects such as the Earth Charter as well as countless international grassroots campaigns in the spirit of Freirean popular education generally

11. Freire cont’d
Freirean literacy methods have been adopted throughout the developing world.
Some of his books include Teachers as Cultural Workers, Pedagogy of the Heart, Pedagogy of Hope, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, The Politics of Education

12. Awards
King Baudouin International Development Prize Paulo Freire was the first person to receive this prize .
Prize for Outstanding Christian Educators with his wife Elza
UNESCO 1986 Prize for Education for Peace
Honorary Doctorate, the University of Nebraska at Omaha, 1996, along with Augusto Boal, during their residency at the Second Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Conference in Omaha.
An independent public high school in Holyoke, Massachusetts, called the Paulo Freire Social Justice Charter School, won state approval on 28 February 2012 and was scheduled to open in the fall of 2012.
Honorary Degree from Claremont Graduate University,
1992 Honorary Doctorate from The Open University,
1973 Inducted, International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame, 2008

13. Critical (Liberatory) Pedagogy
Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education described by Henry Girouxas an "educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action.” Critical pedagogue
Ira Shor defines critical pedagogy as:
"Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse." (Empowering Education, 129)

14. Banking System of Education
In terms of pedagogy, Freire is best known for his attack on what he called the "banking" concept of education, in which the student was viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. He notes that "it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads men and women to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power

15. Banking System cont’d the teacher teaches and the students are taught;
the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
the teacher talks and the students listen—meekly;
the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;
the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;
the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the
teacher;
the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted)
adapt to it;
the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional
authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students;
the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.”

16. Culture of Silence
According to Freire, the system of dominant social relations creates a 'culture of silence' that instills a negative, silenced and suppressed self-image into the oppressed.
The learner must develop a critical consciousness in order to recognize that this culture of silence is created to oppress. A culture of silence can also cause the "dominated individuals [to] lose the means by which to critically respond to the culture that is forced on them by a dominant culture

17. Culture cont’d
Social domination of race and class are interlaced into the conventional education system, through which the "culture of silence" eliminates the "paths of thought that lead to a language of critique.

18. Quotes
The problem-posing educator constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflection of the students. The students – no longer docile listeners – are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and reconsiders her earlier considerations as the students express their own
No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption

19. Quotes cont’d
Any situation in which some men prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence;… to alienate humans from their own decision making is to change them into objects
The educator has the duty of not being neutral
It is necessary that the weakness of the powerless is transformed into a force capable of announcing justice. For this to happen, a total denouncement of fatalism is necessary. We are transformative beings and not beings for accommodation
The multitude is always in the wrong

20. Videos Paulo Freire and Critical Pedagogy
Paulo Freire: An Incredible Conversation
Culture, Politics, and Pedagogy: A Conversation with
Henry Giroux
The Banking Method of Education

21. References
Paolo Freire Biography. Retrieved from
Paulo Freire and Critical Pedagogy. Retrieved from
Paulo Freire: An Incredible Conversation. Retrieved from
Culture, Politics, and Pedagogy: A Conversation with Henry Giroux. Retrieved from

22. References cont’d
The Banking Method of Education. Retrieved from