Ocupação Paulo Freire [english]

English

São Paulo, 2021

STAFF Editorial coordination Carlos Costa Editing Duanne Ribeiro, Fernanda Castello Branco and Milena Buarque Editorial board Amanda Lopes, Ana de Fátima Sousa, Carlos Costa, Claudiney Ferreira, Kety Fernandes Nassar, Letícia Santos, Mônica Abreu Silva and Thays Heleno Graphic design Guilherme Ferreira Editorial production Victória Pimentel Proofreading supervision Polyana Lima Translation John Norman (outsourced) Translation proofreading Denise Yumi (outsourced) Illustrations Catarina Bessell (outsourced)

“Every reading of the word presupposes a previous reading of the world, and every reading of the word implies a return onto the reading of the world, in such a way that ‘reading the world’ and ‘reading the word’ constitute a seamless movement, where you go back and forth. And ‘reading the world’ and ‘reading the word,’ at rock bottom, for me, imply a “rewriting” of the world. ‘Rewriting’ in quotes, that is to say, transforming it. The reading of the word should be inserted in the understanding of the transformation of the world, which brings about its reading and should always refer us to the new reading of the world.”

This School Called Life: Testimonials to the Reporter Ricardo Kotscho

SUMMARY

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Editorial ........................................................ 11 Paulo Freire: A nostalgia, an influence, an always positive interference in my life Ana Mae Barbosa .................................................. 17 Ways of using Paulo Freire’s toolbox ........... 31 Health Eymard Vasconcelos .............................. 33 Education Alice Akemi Yamasaki ..................... 46 Security Center of Orientation for the Adolescent of Campinas (Comec)........................................ 62 Music Estêvão Couto Teixeira ........................... 74 Theater Abel Xavier .......................................... 83 Photography ImageMagica .............................. 89 Architecture Usina – Center of Works for the Inhabited Environment (Ctah) .......................... 93 Inclusion Lana de Lima Teixeira D’Ávila ......... 98 Meeting with refugee children and women in Berlin Ilse Schimpf-Herken .................... 107 The “wanderer of utopia” in his roamings around the world André Bernardo ............. 115 Credits, captions and exhibition details ... 128

EDITORIAL “Thinking correctly means seeking to discover and understand the most hidden aspects in the things and facts that we observe and analyze.”

The Importance of the Act of Reading: in Three Complementary Articles

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“I want to say that I am not magical, that this method has underpinnings, and experience has already shown us that it is effective.” This is the beginning of one of the main documents of the first experiment in the en masse teaching of literacy to youths and adults in Brazilian education. In the municipality of Angicos, in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, in 1963, Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (1921–1997) headed up a team of teachers and monitors who had a bold aim in a country submersed in miserable educational indices: to teach the adult population to learn to read and write in around 40 hours and at a low cost per student.

The method developed by the Pernambucan philosopher, writer and educator taught the reading of the written word – and, thus, the possibility of reading the world – to 300 people, who thereby gained not only the right to vote but also an awareness of their role in the routine world of work. The experience, which began with a door-to-door movement, ended up by inspiring the National Literacy Plan – which stayed merely on the drawing board after the military coup of 1964 – while also causing a lot of commotion in the towns and countryside of the state’s arid backlands.

This celebrated undertaking, today known and revered worldwide, only became possible due to a combination of factors in a determined context. And outlining this scenario is crucial in order to begin to understand the studies traced out by Paulo Freire. Leaving a “library culture,” according to his own description, to “combat illiteracy,” a concrete result, Paulo moved among concepts such as plurality, transcendence, dialogue, humility, work and love, among many others, seeking to “grow and change” with

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the human. “A is related to B because both share the same feeling in search of something. Humility consists in not hypertrophying anything in this search.”

Thus, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of a man who traveled to more than 30 countries, who coordinated literacy projects far from his birth land – though always steeped in the “northeasterness” of his native region – who wrote more than three dozen works and was translated into 20 languages is a highly demanding and inexhaustible task. Every year, new developments concerning Paulo Freire’s thoughts and method arrive from new corners of the world, even though, on the other hand, there is a great lack of his philosophy in our classrooms.

Ontologically creative, Paulo Freire requested, in keeping with his definition of the human, to never be followed, but rather reinvented. Therefore, seeking to attest to the currentness and relevance of the fields of studies he began – would he have valued this undertaking? – we invited 10 representatives from different areas of knowledge and expression to tell, in this publication, how they have related their work to the knowledge acquired from Paulo Freire, in a practice that always leads to freedom, marking the world and being marked by it.

Beyond this publication, which also features the reverberations of the educator in other countries, the Ocupação Paulo Freire, produced entirely during the Covid-19 pandemic, presents a series of contents online. Visit itaucultural.org.br/ocupacao.

Itaú Cultural (IC)

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“The moment you start denying yourself the right to make value judgments at any moment, you begin to understand how to live by a virtue that I think is politically fundamental for this country: the virtue of tolerance. A tolerance which, by overcoming prejudices, teaches us to live with difference, thus allowing us, ultimately, to struggle better against the opposing forces. That is tolerance.”

This School Called Life: Testimonials to the Reporter Ricardo Kotscho

PAULO FREIRE: A NOSTALGIA, AN INFLUENCE, AN ALWAYS POSITIVE INTERFERENCE IN MY LIFE Ana Mae Barbosa

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Paulo Freire changed my life just as he changed that of thousands of people here in Brazil, allowing us to understand the social orders that oppress us and helping us to develop the ability to organize actions toward the realization of our ideals.

Today, I am one of the few people who had the privilege of awakening to the intellectual world through Paulo’s classes, learning notions of grammar to pass an exam to enter the college-level program in elementary education and also discovering myself and my historical circumstances.

I was 18 years old when I was his student not only in Portuguese, but also in education theory, in an intensive course in 1955. At the same time, I was studying for the law school entrance exam, against the wishes of my grandmother. She was the one who raised me – I was an orphan from a young age – and she was against women attending university. I am from a traditional and conservative family, which had already declined economically when I was born.

They had lost their money, but not their attitude and their conservatism.

In the first class in the Preparation Course for the Selection Process for Teachers of the Fourth Instance, already beginning his research in teaching based on the world of the student, Paulo asked us to write about why we wanted to become teachers. I responded by explaining that I did not want to be a teacher, but it was the only work that my family accepted as dignified for a woman. He did not return the essay to me; he asked me to arrive earlier the next day for us to talk. It was a long conversation, in which he convinced me that education was not repression, but

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rather a process of problematization, liberation and the raising of awareness.

From then on, Paulo Freire influenced not only my ideas and my choices, but also my life.

In the course organized by him and his first wife, Elza Freire, I, as someone who had always hated the classes in geometric drawing, got to know the modernist theories for the teaching of art with Noêmia Varela, one of the professors, and once again I was surprised about the mistaken education that I had received at a high school taught by nuns. Once, one of them tore up a drawing of mine in front of the entire class, because I had not copied exactly what she had drawn on the blackboard.

Having been successful in the selection process to become a teacher, I taught children how to read and write for two years under Paulo’s orientation and was a trainee at the Escolinha de Arte do Recife [Little Art School of Recife], of which he was president, and then I became a full-time teacher. Noêmia Varela was the director, and she and Paula would often talk by telephone about the projects at the school. Their children were students at the institution and, when he would go there to talk with Noêmia, in that unique way of his, he would also talk with the teachers.

That little school still exists and was part of a large movement focused on art education in Brazil which began in 1948. We had 140 little schools in Brazil, one in Paraguay, two in Argentina and one in Portugal.

I arrived in São Paulo at about the same time as Madalena, his daughter. We began to work together at a little school in that network, which I organized with the help

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of intellectual and bibliophile José Mindlin. Paulo helped us a lot by sending books and commenting on our work in letters. Madalena and I became good friends. I admire her very much.

My relationship with the Freire family was so intense that it was not interrupted even by the diaspora precipitated by the military dictatorship, which sent the family’s members to foreign countries and also made me move from Recife to Brasília, and later to São Paulo. I was Paulo’s student; Madalena was my informal student; Ana Amália, my daughter, was a student of Madalena and, later, a teacher of Carolina, Madalena’s daughter, at the elementary school. I consider Madalena, Fátima and Cristina – Paulo’s daughters – my sisters in spirit.

When I received my advanced degree in teaching at the University of São Paulo, he was on my evaluation panel.

My thesis was the book A imagem no ensino da arte [The Image in the Teaching of Art], the first in Brazil to espouse the entrance of the image in general, and art in particular, into the classroom, in order to improve the reading of images and critical thought. The stand I took scandalized half the world of the modern expressionist line. Paulo then reminded me about how, when I was in the third year of law school, I had gone to talk to him about quitting law school because of the male chauvinist attitude of that time, and he had advised me to persist, saying that law developed a hermeneutic ability that I would be able to apply in any area in which I would later work. He pointed out that I was including hermeneutics in the classes of visual art. I never more complained about the time lost studying law.

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Paulo Freire and the Arts The problem is that whoever researches Paulo Freire in the field of the arts learns that he was a great defender of them in all the institutions in which he worked, but he did not write about art in education. Nevertheless, his actions were a manifesto in favor of the arts – and it should be remembered that he was a professor at the School of Fine Arts of Recife (closed in the 1970s, its structure and collection integrated with that of the Center of Arts and Communication of the Federal University of Pernambuco – UFPE).

Together with Professor Miriam Didier, he and Elza Freire began a project for the teaching of reading and writing through art with children from a public school in Recife (PE) of which Elza was the director. And, with Raquel Crasto, a great educator, they had a school that prioritized art, as it still does today: the Instituto Capibaribe.

There is a book that connects Paulo Freire to the arts through the concept of dialogue. It is Dialogues in Public Art,

by Tom Finkelpearl, published 21 years ago by MIT Press, in which the author honors Paulo Freire with the simple phrase: “This book is dedicated to Paulo Freire (1921–1997), a theorist and practitioner of dialogue.”

The book contains an interview of the author with Paulo Freire, in which he compares his ideas about the relationship between the teacher and the student with those of various theorists, some from art – Rosalind Krauss, Johanne Lamoureux, Mikhail Bakhtin, bell hooks and Miwon Kwon – who defend art as communication. The author uses the educator’s texts to demonstrate that the relationship of communication between art and the public is also not a

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one-way street. The student and the public are not mere repositories. The aim of dialogue in Paulo Freire’s epistemology and in the statements by another 25 authors of articles and artists interviewed in the book – such as Mel Chin (one of my favorite artists), Maya Lin, Vito Acconci, Douglas Crimp, Elisabeth Sisco and Krzysztof Wodiczko – is not to convince anyone of something or some idea, it is to develop the capacity for criticism. Without it, no one transforms information into knowledge or establishes relationships between the knowledge of different areas.

Paulo Freire conceived the education of the oppressed, but was never a populist. In the book by Finkelpearl, he says that to work with communities it was not necessary to see them as owners of the truth and of virtue, but rather to respect their members. The educator also said that the error of the sectarians who work in community programs was not the criticism, negation or the rejection of arrogant academic intellectuals, but rather the disregard of theory, the need for rigor and intellectual seriousness.

The Conference of the Semana de arte e ensino I traveled twice to Geneva, Switzerland, to visit him in his exile. The first time, I went alone and stayed with the Freire family. Fátima helped me to explore the city. The second time, I went with my family, and my children never forgot the nights that we had dinner together enjoying that sort of conversation that one remembers forever. Paulo’s sadness for not being able to return was alleviated by Elza – who managed to find ingredients to make Brazilian foods, even tapioca – and by the cold, which he liked. Once, it was

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winter and I began to feel cold in the living room. I asked if there was heating. He said that yes, but he kept at least one window open to take advantage of the cold.

In the year that he returned from exile, in 1980, I invited him to open the Semana de arte e ensino [Art and Teaching Week] at the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo (ECA/USP), a congress that was one of the first movements of redemocratization in the country, perhaps the largest event of art education until today in Brazil. His lecture, which took place in the auditorium of the College of Architecture (FAU), for being the largest at USP, was heard by three thousand art educators.

It was necessary to request the help of TV Cultura to film and transmit the event on a screen outside the auditorium, in the place they called the Salão Caramelo.

His name had not been announced as a lecturer in the preprogram or in the press, to avoid the appearance of using him as an attraction for the event. His first appearance in public had been an apotheosis, heard by everyone who filled the Theater of the Universidade Católica de São Paulo (Tuca) and its environs.

In the program of the Semana de arte e ensino, handed out to the participants on opening day, I justified the absence of his name as follows: All the decisions, including the themes of the debates, were submitted for approval in general meetings open to the public and announced in newspapers.

It was decided who wanted to participate, and who could participate.

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Just one thing was kept secret: the participation of Paulo Freire as a lecturer.

My enormous respect for him and for the art educators made me fear that the announcement of his participation could look like a way of attracting participants to the Semana de arte e ensino. He will be talking to the art educators not because he is the greatest Brazilian educator, but because since the old times in Recife he and Elza have always maintained a close relationship and influence in art education.

The theme of his lecture is a lemma which, in the ways of the Northeast, I posed to him as a challenge. The day after an intriguing chat at the Escola da Vila I said to him: “You said that the parents learn from the children and the teachers from the students. So, you, who have two arteducator children and an art student (Joaquim), what have you learned from them about art education?”

He accepted the challenge of responding to the question for all of us during the week and also accepted that another person should give the title to this challenge. It was Haroldo de Campos who, talking to me about the program, named his lecture as “O retrato do pai pelos jovens artistas” [The Portrait of the Father by the Young Artists].

That day, rather dizzy due to an ear infection, he was glad to see, once again, friends and fellow Brazilians such as Noêmia Varela and graphic designer Aloísio Magalhães, and to make new acquaintances, such as art critics Mário Barata, Yan Michalski and Walter Zanini, as well as composer Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, also invited to talk and to

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attend his opening lecture.1 Strangely, the originals of the annals of the Semana de arte e ensino were lost in the phase of their review for publication.

An Educator of the Underdeveloped World, a Driver of Liberation in the Developed World I witnessed the influence that Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, transformed into theory, had at America, African, English and European universities in general.

His works are on Internet, you can read and judge their value for yourselves. If you have any doubt about their importance in the world, take a look at Pedagogia da libertação em Paulo Freire, edited by Ana Maria Araújo Freire (Nita), his second wife, who demonstrated to Brazil that Paulo is a key reference in the thinking of great philosophers and educators, such as Henry Giroux, Joachim Schroeder, Joe Kincheloe, Maxine Greene, Shirley Steinberg, Arantxa Ugartetxea, Donaldo Macedo, Joachim Dabisch and Arve Brunvoll. All of them wrote texts for the book published by Nita, who has bravely defended the memory of her husband.

When, in 1977, I entered the PhD program of the College of Education of Boston University, in the United States – with a letter of introduction from Paulo – a course about

1. Aloísio Magalhães was already honored by the Ocupação program. See the excerpts from the exhibition and other materials, such as interviews, at itaucultural. org.br/ocupacao. Concerning Hans-Joachim Koellreuter, the program Rumos Itaú Cultural supported a project that enlarged the physical and digital access to the artist’s collection. Learn more at bit.ly/ic-koellreutter.

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The Pedagogy of the Oppressed was being given. I experienced an unimaginable emotional and cognitive thrill upon seeing, as an object of study, the liberating process that had rescued me from the banking models of mental operation. I was never so well treated and listened to at any university as I was there in Boston. Thanks to this very special treatment, I managed to complete all the requirements of the program in one year and I returned six months later to defend the thesis, saving me from having to be separated from my family.

Paulo Freire, Jonathan Kozol and Ivan Illich were two great heroes of education at that time. The others were forgotten, but Paulo continues, mainly for the fact that Pedagogia do oprimido is the basis for the two most significant movements in the theory of education today: critical pedagogy and cultural pedagogy, inspired in his concept of raising awareness and in John Dewey’s concept of experience, which are epistemological cousins. Indeed, the first book by Dewey that I read, Meu credo pedagógico [My Pedagogical Creed], was given to me by Paulo when I was still in Recife.

Pedagogia do oprimido was written in a period of intensive educational criticism, around 1968, and was the convincing response to the student protest movement in the developed world. It operated a curious contradiction: the educator of the underdeveloped world, with his theories constructed on the practice of poverty in the third world, acting as a driver for the liberation of the developed world.

But contradictions were always the food for Paulo Freire’s critical thought.

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My Most Important Cognitive Adventure These were the phenomenological bases that underpinned the postgraduate course Arte-educação e ação cultural [Art Education and Cultural Action] that Paulo Freire gave at (ECA/USP) in 1987, at my invitation.

He was reluctant to accept, but Elza helped me to convince him. The funds that I received from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) to pay him were very modest. We had 120 students, from all areas of USP, from law to engineering. Many were just auditing the class, others were special students, but there were many regular masters’ and doctoral candidates, which resulted in a huge amount of papers to be read and graded, an activity that I assumed, frequently consulting him. He gave nine classes and I only three, to substitute him when he traveled. It was the most important cognitive adventure in my life and today it is a historic milestone, as it was the only regular course that Paulo Freire gave at USP. The course was recorded in audio and transcribed by Professor Maria Helena Rennó, but was lost at the publishing house of the ECA, another strange occurrence.

It was necessary for the College of Education to be renovated, with new humanist researchers and a vocation for the social, in order for one of its professors, Moacir Gadotti, a faithful friend of our great teacher, to create the Instituto Paulo Freire (IPF), which honors and exalts his memory. I have heard nothing but praise from the researchers who seek out the IPF, where one of Paulo’s sons, Lute, works.

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My Activity in the São Paulo Secretariat of Education Soon after I took over as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) of USP, I organized a study group about museums at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IEA/ USP). Paulo was one of the people invited to talk and he gave us a valuable piece of advice, which I followed: consult the workers' unions to find out what their families understood as art, their cultural habits and how they were constructed, to then plan to extend the museum to the working class. We recorded his lecture, which I left in the archives of the IEA. Later, at Paulo’s request, the MAC was able to collaborate with his work at the Secretariat of Education of the Municipality of São Paulo. When he was Secretary of Education of the City Government of São Paulo (for two years), he put the studies of art at the same level of importance as all the other disciplines. This had taken place in Brazil in only two other projects, that of jurist Rui Barbosa, in 1882–1883, which was never fully implemented, and that of Professor Fernando de Azevedo, in the Federal District, in 1927–1930.

For about one year, I coordinated the study group for the restructuring of the arts curriculum with university professors and teachers from the school system. In the end, Maria Christina de Souza Lima Rizzi – a student I was advising and an art educator at MAC during that time – took over the coordination of this group that Paulo said was the most numerous in the secretariat, as it focused on all the arts, including film making. At the end of the mandate of educator Mario Sergio Cortella, who succeeded him bril-

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liantly as secretary, all the art professors had been updated.

For various years after that, the best art teaching in a public education network in Brazil was that of the city of São Paulo.

Some of us, who worked with Paulo, are gathering memories of that time of the secretariat. We should reactivate our memory in honor of him, who had a very keen recollection.

My Favorite, Pedagogia do oprimido To cap off these reminiscences, I should confess that my favorite book continues to be Pedagogia do oprimido. This work is philosophy, sociology, education and, above all, a treatise of epistemology. It is a book born from the struggle undertaken by its author to give to the individuals of all social classes the right to be the subject of their own process of knowledge and to awaken within them the interests, the incisiveness and courage necessary to participate in the process for the transformation of their societies. It is a pedagogy of cultural re + conhecimento1 and, mainly, the pedagogy of contextualized critical thought.

The awareness of the practice gave rise to the theory that pervades Pedagogia do oprimido. The concern was to ally the clarity of content with the means that allow students “to say their own words to name the world.” I was a subject of the pedagogy in favor of the oppressed of all social classes, all genders and all origins practiced by Paulo Freire.

1. A play on words, where conhecimento means “knowledge,” the prefix re- means “again,” as in English, and the two parts together spell reconhecimento [recognition], the overall idea being cultural recognition through a process of cultural “re-knowledge.”

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WAYS OF USING PAULO FREIRE’S TOOLBOX “Education is communication, it is dialogue, insofar as it is not the transfer of knowledge, but rather an encounter of human interlocutory subjects who are seeking the meaning of the meanings.”

Extension or communication?

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Teaching and learning at the same time, knowing how to listen, understanding the world of the other, constructing together. Beyond its initial aim – teaching literacy to adults – Paulo Freire’s method and philosophy can be applied to multiple areas.

This section features experiences of these practical and theoretical uses of Freire’s ideas. In interviews, researchers, artists and other professionals show how this reference is unfolded in realizations in the areas of health, architecture, photography, theater, music, inclusion, public safety and audiovisual works. This panorama evidences how the Freirean method is still alive: always inspiring and in continuous transformation.

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HEALTH

Eymard Vasconcelos

A pioneer in the research and practice of popular education in health, Eymard Vasconcelos points to Paulo Freire’s influence in his own education and training. In this talk, he emphasizes the transformative character of contact with the life experiences of the people and underscores the importance of paying attention to the user and to his or her social context, as a method. A professor emeritus of the Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB), Eymard coordinates the Popular Education and Health research group and the Popular Education and Health Network.

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In what aspects of your activity in research do you see Paulo Freire’s influence? How was your contact with the author and how did you use his method and/or his ideas?

I am 68 years old. My contact with Paulo Freire began when I was a student, in 1974. The students’ movement in the health area organized a national meeting, the first Sesac [Week of Studies Concerning Community Health, held by the academic center of the course of medicine of the Federal University of Minas Gerais], which provided a training program within which our group went to a small village in Jequitinhonha Valley.

We used a phrase by Paulo Freire: “When faced with major problems, do not seek to give answers, form a listening circle” – and were surprised by the results. When we did that, that small and very simple village revealed itself and we had access to a reality of health that we would have never imagined. I was in a crisis with the course in medicine – it was not what I had expected, I was even thinking of quitting – and, from then onward, I began to like it. This approach to health services gave meaning to my professional work.

Since then, I have become increasingly closer to Paulo Freire. I finished the course in 1975, I went to do a residency and, soon afterward, like various colleagues, I went to an urban periphery of Brazil, trying to work at a time of resistance by civil society against the military dictatorship. I came here to the Northeast, in the region known as the brejo paraibano, because there was a diocese that was listening to many people with the perspective of popular education and liberation theology.

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It was a large school of popular education, a very fascinating and surprising moment, I never expected to have such a rich sort of practice. But it was the time of dictatorship and I wound up being expelled from the region. I was already a university professor and the politicians arranged for my exit. I entered a master’s degree program in Minas Gerais, in the area of education, in which they highly esteemed Paulo Freire.

That was a strong practice – we participated in a movement of popular education – but it did not have much theoretical connotation. In that master’s program, I got a little closer to the theory and saw how it was present in practices, which I had observed in many places where the Popular Health Movement (Mops) had arisen. We used Paulo Freire a lot, but we did not know, we had no notion of the power of his thinking.

The first publication about popular education in the health area was my Educação popular no serviço de saúde [Popular Education in the Health Service], 1986. Prior to this, there were various experiments, a cultural soup of popular education, but the people had not perceived Paulo Freire’s power in all of this so clearly. From then on, I began to produce more theoretically, to participate in groups and extension projects. My role as a professor surprised me. By using popular education in the relationship with students, I saw very great transformations. We began to call this practice “popular extension” and, later, “Freirean university pedagogy.”

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The moment of the medical consultation, in your work, seems to echo many of Freire’s ideas. As he puts the learner and the educator on the same level, the physician-patient relationship seems to have the same quality, according to what I have read about your ideas. Do you agree with this comparison? What role can the consultation have and what exchange can there be between patient and physician – different from what we see in the field of health in general?

Popular education arrived at health through movements outside the State’s apparatus, which helped to form many of the references for what would be the Unified Health System (SUS). SUS was created in 1988, but there were already dozens, hundreds of experiments guided by popular education, with the participation of community agents, social control. All of this was much marked by popular education.

When SUS was created, a large part of the activists was displaced into the apparatus of the State and it seems that popular education lost its meaning, but we began to see, in the early 1990s, that popular education could be carried out in the official health services as well.

In these services there were popular educators, and their practice strengthened the popular participation and reoriented the globalness of the service. But they were isolated things, here and there, one service or another, so, the challenge was to generalize this participation, this perspective of popular education for the entire health service. We began to work on popular education no longer in a subversive way, but as something within the public health policies.

Then, we began to see that popular education was not only for the collective activities, the educational actions

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in the community, in the groups, but that it also entered in the consultations – which we began to call the “shared construction of the needed health solution.” I have some articles about this use of popular education in the consultation in various areas – general medicine, physiotherapy, nutrition, psychology. Popular education reoriented the traditional way of acting in each of these professions.

All of this is very different from the traditional, as you said; the doctor knows that if he or she is a more humane physician, then the information will flow well, through the process of listening, but it is the physician who defines how the process is conducted. The patient can be called on to participate in order to understand, but the conduction of the process is defined by the other. It’s just that we, as popular educators, perceived that we had never tried to understand the totality of the patient’s life, and, when we treat that patient, we call on him or her to participate in the construction of the care.

We constructed extremely innovative care practices.

And this creativity has attracted many people to popular education in health. Often, people see it as an ideological discourse, a critical discourse, but, above all, what fascinates them is these extremely innovative practices that are a breath of fresh air for holistic practice, a way to construct a more integral health practice.

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In the same sense, a writer states that, according to you, “we cannot continue to see only the existing needs in the population.” Moreover: “Eymard believes that we need to learn also from their potentials.” This sounds very Freirean. What can the physicians learn from those they treat? How can they be more open to this learning?

Yes. It doesn’t just sound that way, it is very Freirean.

Many of the workers in the health area that deal with popular education read very little of Paulo Freire, because he has a somewhat complex language. But they participate in groups and movements in which they learn while doing.

I feel that popular education is present in the everyday experience of many services, not so much through readings of Paulo Freire, but because of a cultural perspective that spread very powerfully in the health area.

They are all very Freirean, even though not everyone is aware of this. We had here the expansion of the Family Health Program – which is perhaps one of the largest job markets for the health professionals – the Family Health Strategy and Basic Care.

People were hired who did not have proper training, who did not know the popular world and its different cultures, and popular education became a field of learning. Because I might not understand the popular world or collective health very much, but, if I begin to listen to people, I delve into their reality even if I have not read Paulo Freire or a lot of theoretical things. Popular education – the practices, the participative way of doing it – was a way for professionals from traditional universities to open their perspective. They began to do, to be surprised and to be

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fascinated with this shared construction.

I see this a lot in the students who go to the communities with the notion that they are privileged people and should somehow repay the population. They go there as providers. And, when the project is oriented in this Freirean perspective, they begin to sense that they are learning much more than they are teaching. They totally change their perspective. This, which I experienced in 1974, I see reproduced on a daily basis among the students today: the discovery of this potential to act, a creative potential, of a breath of fresh air, which has the population as its basis; the discovery that their life has unusual aspects which, for as much as I study anthropology or sociology, I cannot account for – each situation is different; and the learning we obtain by taking a good look at their needs. This is usual for all professionals who approach the popular world. A popular world, classes of needy people.

It’s too bad that SUS has been getting bureaucratized, with a great push for efficiency by the managers, with quantitative goals. So, this dimension of working together with the community, of learning, gets a bit stifled by this very strong push for numerical productivity, but it is still present in some way. The pandemic we are now experiencing, with this challenge of the imponderable, is showing that a lot is being done based on this Freirean cultural legacy that is already pervasive in the health service.

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Another comparison. The same writer says that, for you, “individual care can be seen as an essential space for political activity.” Paulo Freire also emphasized that education is inseparable from politics. Do the physicians, in general, recognize this political role of their work? How do you define this relationship between health and politics?

In the health area, we have always had professionals – formerly, more physicians, because they had more leadership – many critics, progressivists, who, based on this position of power, had critical clashings in regard to the mode of social organization. But I feel that this is a traditional way of engaging in politics: empowered people – for being doctors – politically confronting the other powers.

I think that popular education presents a way of engaging in politics in a somewhat different way. First, it removes from the center this “I, a doctor, confronting the harmful powers of society.” No. I strengthen the people who are today silenced so that they will be able to carry out this confrontation.

There has always been a suspicion that Marxism and popular education were very close to one another, but, at the same time, there was always a great tension, because the Marxist people, more than the communist tradition, became very impatient with popular education, which prioritizes a longer-term, cultural action. In the time of the dictatorship, a communist leader said ironically: “You think that you will change the dictatorship by holding these little meetings over there, and discussing over here? We have to confront the organized military power.” What really changed the dictatorship was the change in the culture

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of civil society by this work, which, in large part, the church tasked itself with, during that time.

I remember that many leaders of the students’ movement were very much annoyed by our extension projects, because there things move forward at the pace of the relationship between the students in the population, based on the demands of the population, and, often, the question of the large confrontations is not posed – even though the protagonism of the people is posed in the confrontation of bossiness, of the husband, of the local violence, and in the relationship between children and parents.

We often see people without this Freirean perspective arrive in organized groups already wanting something, wanting to discuss. They confront and silence anyone who presents divergences, situating themselves as “the intellectual,” thus reproducing the domination of the doctor over people who are in a process of learning – and this is ambiguous, contradictory. It is necessary to accept all of these differences with patience, creating spaces of conversation.

If we arrive with an emotionally charged discourse, we silence these people.

Now, a longer-term and more profound thing is the way of carrying out the politics of popular education. It is by valorizing the strengthening of protagonisms which are currently silenced, and these are formative processes that take many years. I think that it is a displacement of politics into everyday life, and this has a great deal of political effectiveness.

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The previous question talks about “individual care,” which brings us back to the consultation, but you talk about expanding the treatment to the family and to the social group. In Paulo Freire, it is also necessary to have the social vision to better understand the individual. Is there a similar purpose in your proposal?

Yes. When we begin to talk with the people we are treating, the family relations and neighborhood relations involved in the problem being treated become very clear. If we are willing to go after this problem and understand more, this progressively expands.

We do not even need to read a lot of Paulo Freire, as reality shows this very loudly. We see this in the students of today: they might not even like to read Paulo Freire or anything more social, but, when they delve into this reality – by the humanism they have and which makes them go after this – suddenly, they are discussing community organization, neighborhood, religions. It is so extremely evident how much this marks people’s lives, the life of little Peter who has asthma; of the mother who faces difficulties living alone and needs to ask help from her neighbors; of the people at the church who lend support… All of these nodes, this network of relationships, are evident and, sometimes, this is a reality that affects students who have or have had reactionary theoretical stands, so they begin to read other things. Reality demands this.

The commitment we have to solving the problem leads us to enlarge his approach. Clearly, a theoretical vision aids in this, but often the technical commitment in a wider and more accessible way makes us take this journey from the individual to the social.

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Another concept that to me seems decisive in your thinking is that of care. I would like you to talk a little about what you understand by that. I read that, beyond the method and preciseness of the cure, the role of feeling, of lovingness, is fundamental – which also recalls Paulo Freire.

Many things are going to recall Paulo Freire because I have him as a source of inspiration –even when I was reading him very little, because his ideas were already so widespread, especially in the churches oriented by liberation theology. We learned with the comrades. In popular education, Paulo Freire is a key systematizer, but participates in a movement that is much larger than himself.

And this question of care, of attention in health, is one of the things that marks anyone who approaches the population not as a provider – a great wise man, the holder of necessary techniques – but in a more comprehensive way.

In the contact we have been having with the people, these techniques help, but they are very limited – and we continuously perceive that what they demand from us in terms of technique is something that we never imagined, it is conversation…

I very much like to use the metaphor of the knapsack.

You have a knapsack with the academic knowledge, but, when you arrive at a community, you don’t know what it will be good for. Often, you come along boasting a solution and the people pay no attention, because it doesn’t touch on them. But, suddenly, you say something and: “That is interesting, doctor.” Then, you start to see that there are other sorts of knowledge you can bring. We surprise ourselves with what is necessary in terms of technical knowl-

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edge for each particular situation. I think that this is a great innovation of popular education.

I remember that I was taught, when I was studying, that to deal with the problems I should dry my tears and be cold, because emotion clouds one’s scientific objectivity. This view is in some way still present, although it is somewhat worn. When we approach the popular world, we begin to perceive the power of feeling.

The Latin American popular world is extremely emotional, full of feeling, and this transforms us. You say things you never imagined you would say – and this is what transforms. It is not just because feeling is important for people to feel sheltered, I would say that this emotion gives rise to another epistemology. You become educated in a sort of knowledge steeped in feeling, with emotion. This is fundamental and it winds up making you look at objectivity with a little irony, because we see that there is a preciseness that passes through the things from the heart.

Paulo Freire used the so-called generative words to get his educational processes moving. Imitating this practice a little, I would like you to define the key words of your work.

Paulo Freire worked a lot with the generative word in the processes of teaching how to read and write. While popular education begins in the process of teaching literacy skills to adults, writing, dealing with words, has a different sense in the health area. We talk more about generative problems, of generative situations.

What are the keywords? I think that, actually, they are keywords of popular education, such as dialogue. It is very

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easy to talk about dialogue, but it presupposes the other’s confidence, which is something more profound. I can arrive at a community and the people talk a lot, but the veils are only going to fall to the extent that they perceive my commitment to them.

It is necessary to perceive in the popular world a wish to be more, that wish to be more that is in everyone, and which gives rise to knowledge and practice.

The wish to be more is an important concept, and based on it you keep dialoguing and have the question of commitment. If you are not committed, the people do not open up to you.

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EDUCATION

Alice Akemi Yamasaki

With a PhD and MA in education from the University of São Paulo (USP), Alice Akemi Yamasaki is a professor in the College of Education of Fluminense Federal University (Feuff ), in Niterói, in Rio de Janeiro. She carries out activities in the Society, Education and Knowledge Department (SSE) and is a professor of the Professional MA Program in Diversity and Inclusion (CMPDI), both at the same institution. She works with the following themes: diversity and inclusion; teacher training; popular childhood and education; popular culture and violence in the school context. She carries out projects of research and extension in the field of popular education and in that of cinema and education.

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Alice, before all else, how did Paulo Freire arise in your personal and professional path? How did your contact with the author take place and how have you used his method and/or his ideas?

I am a Freirean educator who was trained by way of critical and profound dialogue with various educators and students, participating in various formative processes in recent decades. My education took place and continues to take place in the confrontation that life brought to us. The episodes that forged my social formation include my participation and presence in the teacher’s movements in the public schools where I studied in the 1980s. A striking moment in my formation as a professor was the live testimony of my university professors with their struggles on the floor of the National Constituent Assembly. Those were important moments, as stated by Paulo Freire (1999), which showed that “it is not in resignation, but in rebellion, in the face of injustice, that we affirm ourselves.”

When I began working as a teacher, first in a public elementary school of São Paulo and, later, at the private-sector college level, our debates revolved around the challenge of recognizing education as a social right and a permanent process of formation for the exercise of citizenship. All those events drove my professional path toward the challenge of overcoming everyday limitations, in search of a “being more” which would patiently improve the practice of reflection-action-reflection.

In the last 20 years, as a professor in public universities, in courses of pedagogy and teacher training, we were able to develop a work that increasingly demanded more studies of Paulo Freire’s work and a deeper understanding of its

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theoretic-methodological elements. In the field of the relationship between the university and society, in the early 2000s we developed a training program that involved the creation of primers for the teaching of literacy to youths and adults. Nevertheless, the theoretical deepening came with my doctorate research, which sought to reflect on school violence and Freirean thought.

Projects that we developed under the perspective of Paulo Freire’s work include: Culture of Peace in the Schools (extension and specialization, 2007–2011); digital inclusion of rural youths; Popular Childhood (2011 and 2014); training of popular children’s educators (2014–2019) and the Teaching of Sciences of Nature and Human Rights (2016 until now). The curricular disciplines that we have taught with the presence of Paulo Freire’s theoretical references are at the undergraduate level (required and elective courses), at the specialization/postgraduate level and at the professional MA level. Thus, along different paths, we have spurred and challenged young people and future educators to assimilate the theoretic contributions and to design projects and experiences that reinvent the concepts and methodologies developed by the author. It should be noted that, in the last five years, we have been dedicated to deepening the possibilities of a problematizing approach to teaching for students with a gifted behavior, within a project that has been ongoing for nearly a decade in the university, contributing to educational practices aimed at the recognition of human dignity and the inclusion of students, with the offer of interactive workshops.

Akin to our process of intellectual maturation, we pro-

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mote practical activities, such as workshops, which seek to dialogue with people’s accumulated experiences: on the one hand, by inaugurating the dialogic educational practice, the trainer’s attentive listening picks up on reports that contribute to our getting to know a reading of the world installed in life stories; on the other, the reports of life experiences make each participating educator and future teacher recover his or her own reflections and questions involved in the classroom activity. With this, we seek to promote circles of culture in different educational spaces, whether scholastic or not, which recognize the participants as active, critical and reflexive subjects of learning and of the exchange of lived experiences. The process is tense, marked by internal and collective conflicts, as it gives rise to a split and rupture from the “banking” approach to education and learning, which positions the student as a passive and acritical subject in the thematic development of the classroom situations. The reflexive conversation about the perception of oneself and of the other, in and with the world, runs through the circle of culture and allows for the experience of one of the fundamental concepts for knowing and reinventing Paulo Freire: the dialogic educational practice. We had rich opportunities to experience the fundamental dialogue between educators who began the liberating practices of education with traditional communities and social groups, fostering a popular education on Paulo Freire. In some cases, the dialogic practice allowed for the establishment of training curriculums with the popular groups, who took on a leading role and voice in their own learning process.

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Paulo Freire says that it is necessary to always reinvent him.

How do you think you have reinvented him, what changes were necessary? What does the practice, the contact with the students and the different realities bring in the way of adaptations?

One of the first works that adopted the Freirean theoretic-methodological conception, in our professional path, was the formation of educators-students in agrarian-reform settlements in the region known as Bico de Papagaio, in the northernmost part of the state of Tocantins, carried out on the Tocantinópolis campus of what was then Tocantins University (Unitins), currently the federal University of North Tocantins (UFNT). On that occasion, the circle of culture involved university students from the pedagogy course, agriculturalists who had settled in various municipalities of that territory, and the professors and researchers of the state university.

As an outcome of this effort of the exchange of popular know-how and academic knowledge, we drew up the Cartilha de alfabetização dos assentamentos [Settlements Literacy Primer] and the foremost generative word was lama [mud]. The power of this word lay in the set of typical life experiences and phenomena of the Amazonian region, as the rainy season is known as inverno [winter], generally during the first months of the year. Mud also encapsulated the difficulties of access and movement between the settlements and the urban centers, since most of the roads were unpaved, cut through by the torrential rains of the period, which tended to isolate the local dwellers. With this experience, the discussion of a “reading of the world based on mud” allowed for a rich and impressive denouncement of

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aspects of real life in the settlements, with details unknown to the university community. On this basis, the introduction of the “reading of the word” – with the processes of the teaching of literacy in Portuguese and mathematics, coupled with the various dimensions of historical studies about the settlements – made the learning much more significant among everyone involved. At the end of the process and project, we were able to reinvent the idea that “no one educates anyone, nor does anyone educate him- or herself; the people are educated in communion, mediated by the world.”

Another rich moment in the reinvention of Paulo Freire was the work of teaching coastal-dweller children how to read and write, in the municipality of Paraty (RJ), with the community of Martim de Sá. In this experience, we were able to exercise the valorization of the traditional coastal-dweller culture, adopting various materials and didactic resources that sought to valorize the knowledge of the students and their families. If, on the one hand, the coastal-dwelling community was illiterate, on the other, it cultivated various important practices, well-known among them, for living along the Brazilian coast. Among other knowledge, we highlighted the construction of boats and their handling in the open sea, as well as the mastery of artisanal fishing techniques, such as the use of zangareio lures for catching squid and the use of enclosures to catch fish and other sorts of marine species. We titled the project Enclosure of Knowledge based on a circle of culture that brought together coastal dwellers and people from the university.

As a member of the Development and Innovation in

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the Teaching of Sciences (Dieci) research group of UFF, I have collaborated, in a most recent project, with interactive workshops for students with gifted behavior. The partnership involves three other researchers and future professors in the areas of the natural sciences (physics, chemistry and biology), while also relying on the presence of graduates in the areas of letters, mathematics and filmmaking and students of basic education from 9 to 16 years old. The planning and execution of the interactive workshops have been based on the perspective of Freirean problematizing education, with an interactive development that contributes with the transition from an ingenuous curiosity to another epistemological one, including in these times of pandemic and remote learning.

In your view, how can the Freirean pedagogy be associated to the language of filmmaking? What did you and the other two authors of the article “Reflections between Audiovisual Aesthetics, Cinema and Liberating Education: Dialogues with Formation in Social Pedagogy” experience during the specialization course in social pedagogy at UFF? At UFF, we have actively collaborated with the affirmation of the college-level course in filmmaking and audiovisual media, supported in Freirean presuppositions to foster and deepen the dialogue in the educational practices. The formation we have promoted to the audiovisual educators has been guided by aspects very consistent with Paulo Freire’s thinking, which allows me to state that there is a possible interaction of liberating pedagogy with the studies of the cinematographic language. By assuming filmmaking as an

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art and a politics, the course at UFF indicates dimensions that are also present in a liberating education: by creating and producing cinema and audiovisual works together with schools and other nonformal educational spaces, the educators being trained to promote practices that enlarge the possibilities of expression, the denouncement of reality, and the transformation of the world. In this sense, the interaction between (audiovisual) language and Freirean thought reveals a complementarity in the audiovisual educational practice. It is an encounter with the potential of revealing perspectives on reality, with narratives that trigger ruptures from established thinking and practice or from the common and massified place through the audiovisual expression of perspectives that are often oppressed and silenced.

Various levels of dialogue were present in this very rich process of exchange of knowledge between educators and students, in which different sets of knowledge of specific areas of social pedagogy and filmmaking were mobilized for the construction of a brand-new experience in our individual paths. The proposed workshop was entitled Audiovisual and Paulo Freire: Contributions for the Reading of the World. There was an initial exchange of knowledge in order to promote the aesthetic training of social educators, inserting knowledge of the cinematographic language among the typical contents of the professionalizing field of the social educator. In practice, the workshop had two parts: in the first, an exhibition about the audiovisual language, with a highlight on a brief history of cinema, including elements that compose the studies about the audiovisual media and a practical activity with colors and textures, enhancing the

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class’s sensitivity for the aesthetic dimension and for a reflection about the attractiveness present in the role assumed by the social educator. To dialogue with the knowledge of the students present in the workshop, images and videos were presented that illustrated the necessary concepts, allowing them to participate with their experiences around an education of the gaze. In the second part, we proposed another audiovisual exercise, which sought to break away from the exclusively marketing oriented and passive perspective of cinema through the “Narrated Photography” activity, a device of the Invent with a Difference project, coordinated by Cezar Migliorin. The exercises of language were being problematized and dialogued with the social educators, who brought their readings about the image and sound in their experiences in the field of social pedagogy.

How did the mentioned workshop arise and what were the major findings that were learned from it? Repeating a question raised in the article’s abstract: what dialogues did you establish between the audiovisual media, Freirean thinking, and social pedagogy?

I am one of the professors in the College of Education who has been surprised and thrilled by the formative potential of the college-level course in cinema. Since the first participations in the required disciplines for the training of professors of the course, we have been spurred by practices of audiovisual education, while also spurring them, seeking to fuel a dialogic, critical and creative teaching. The workshop brought together professors and undergraduate students in filmmaking, believing in the likely fertility of

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this dialogic interaction. The experiment brought together professionals with vigorous career paths, highly committed to their respective fields of study. Each one brought valuable contributions from his or her own personal background and there was an important willingness by everyone for the discovery of new knowledge, significantly deepening the knowledge of everyone’s accumulated experiences.

Among the students, we affirmed that the reinvention of Freire’s thinking, rather than the mechanical reproduction of his ideas and advice, meant that we should reflect profoundly on the relationship between what we live and the reality we want to reach with the educational project, in the case of an interface between cinema, audiovisual language and social pedagogy. The holding of the workshop Audiovisual Media and Paulo Freire: Contributions for a Reading of the World allowed us to create and to experience a borderline situation, in which we had no previous accumulation, it was a process involving the collective development of an “entirely new viable” moment of our academic life. The borderline situations that we experienced before getting involved in the workshop project were the existences we had delved into in our areas, in education and pedagogy and in cinema, in both formal and nonformal education. The encounter of these three authors, who embodied the relationship of communion between educator and student, allowing for the adventure of experiencing the Freirean reading of the world, with resources and knowledge of the audiovisual language, challenged us to go beyond who we had been up to then. In this sense, we agreed with Freire (1999) that “[…] education is an act of

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love, and therefore, an act of courage. One cannot fear the debate. The analysis of reality cannot eschew creative discussion, if it is to avoid being a farce.” Another great learning outcome was the deepening of knowledge on the part of the social educators and the audiovisual educator regarding the fields of aesthetics, of liberating education and of ethics: the workshop presented many aspects for us to reflect on the human values and the attractiveness of life, as well as the inseparability between decency and aesthetics.

We emphasized some aspects of this learning during the collective walk: 1. the audiovisual languages leverages and enriches the dialogic educational practice of the social pedagogues. Some of the activities with the audiovisual language suggested workshops to be developed also with the social groups served by the educators in the socially vulnerable communities; 2. the circles of Freirean culture with audiovisual educators enrich the artistic, creative and aesthetic training of educators and students, revealing entirely new dimensions of pedagogical practice. In projects of social pedagogy, the use of photographs, of professional films and of audiovisual creation can leverage the different practices of the social educators with their publics. We had the opportunity to accompany the experience of an NGO that works with victims of domestic violence through audiovisual workshops, centered on the exploration of devices proposed and re-created by the Invent with a Difference project, of Laboratório Kumã. This proved to be very for-

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mative and creative for the participants, allowing the youths involved to have an entirely new experience; 3. knowledge about the audiovisual language contributes to emancipatory educational processes insofar as it breaks away from the passive condition of the one who exclusively “consumes” the existing cinematographic production. When these sorts of knowledge are grasped, it becomes possible to give the communities and social groups marginalized by the society of classes the possibility to narrate their own histories, assuming their voice in the denouncement of wounds and in the announcement of alternatives for good living, in another possible world.

Paulo Freire used the generative words to put his educational processes into motion. Imitating this practice a little, I would like you to define the fundamental words for your work and what meanings you take from them.

The words (“power-ideas”) that I consider fundamental for my teaching work are: a commitment to life and against necrophilic and necropolitical practices; ethics and attractiveness are inseparable; dialogic practice, circles of culture and respect of the knowledge of the students in the school and in educational spaces; and the encouragement of critical and creative projects of teaching that aim to confront the violation of human rights. To comment on the meanings that these fundamental words and ideas bring to my teaching work, I will underscore each one.

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Commitment to life. When we assume an ethical commitment to life, we consider that it is necessary to combat the practices of oppression, violence and necropolitics. To cultivate biopolitics, we confront on a daily basis forms and contents of the silencing and negation of the other. This confrontation is collective, requiring firmness and lovingness so that we can nourish our capacity to be more, breaking away from the limitations historically imposed on the working class oppressed by contemporary society.

Ethics and attractiveness are inseparable. It is fundamental for the educators and future educators to be challenged to exercise the ethics and values necessary for the conquest of human dignity. In a country that experienced 400 years of slavery and currently experiences various violations of human rights, such as the extermination of indigenous peoples, the themes of human dignity and the respect of life need to be emphasized in our classrooms.

Without ethics, which valorizes the diversity of the cultures of people, it is not possible to find and recognize the attractiveness of the human among us, because as Paulo Freire already warned us in his work Pedagogia da autonomia, “the necessary promotion of ingenuity to criticalness cannot or should not be made at a distance from a rigorous ethical training always alongside aesthetics. Decency and attractiveness go hand in hand.”

Dialogic practice, circles of culture and respect of the knowledge of the students in the school and in educational spaces. In the training of educators, it is necessary

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to consistently challenge ourselves to reinvent Paulo Freire in the schools and in the nonformal educational spaces. In the undergraduate programs and professional master’s programs, we have found fertile terrains for a critical and humanistic training, as we have already been able to emphasize in courses such as nursing and filmmaking, as well as the postgraduate program in diversity and inclusion. The future educators contribute with their questionings and their life stories, supplying rich perspectives to the circle of culture of our classes, deepening the problematization in regard to teaching and learning. The readings of the world brought by future educators are important ingredients for fueling the dialogue that takes as its starting point the knowledge that each person brings with him- or herself, radically provoking us to seek the respect of the knowledge of the students. The questioning interaction abolishes the comfort zone of each participant, amplifying the more specialized academic languages and inserting the human being and his or her dignity as content for training and education.

Projects in teaching that propose to problematize the violation of human rights. In all areas of knowledge, including those which are dedicated to formulas and algorithms, it is necessary to give future educators the opportunity to experience situations that exercise the wish to “be more.” An academic exercise that has proven to be very rich and challenging is the creation of teaching projects that promote dialogue between the area of specific knowledge and the theme of the violation of human rights, considering humanity’s various generations of struggles and achieve-

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ments. In the training of future educators, it is important that they can be called upon to exercise their own pedagogy of autonomy, mobilizing their creativity and formulating feasible proposals that denounce violations and promote the education of subjects of law. Thus, we end with a little more of the necessary knowledge that Paulo Freire (1999) has given us: “If I work with children, I should pay attention to the responsibility of my presence, which can either be helpful or become disturbing for the restless search of the students; if I work with youths or adults, I should be no less attentive to the relationship that my work can signify as an encouragement or not to the necessary rupture with something defectively established and waiting to be overcome.”

References FREIRE, P. Pedagogia da autonomia: saberes necessários à prática educativa. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1999.

NOGUEIRA, S. R. A.; CARDOSO, F. S.; YAMASAKI, A. A.; BASTOS, A. L. Freire, “Renzulli e as oficinas interativas para alunos superdotados.” Educação em foco, Juiz de Fora, v. 25, n. 3, Sept./Dec. 2020, pp. 147–170.

NOGUEIRA, S. R. A.; CARDOSO, F. S.; YAMASAKI, A. A. “Contribuições à formação de professores das ciências da natureza e matemática na educação em direitos humanos.”

In: IV congresso nacional de formação de professores; XIV congresso estadual paulista sobre formação de educadores, Águas de Lindóia, 2018.

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NOGUEIRA, S. R. A.; YAMASAKI, A. A.; CARDOSO, F. S.; RANGEL, A. C. N.; SILVEIRA, G. V. C. “Reflexões sobre ensino de ciências com jovens atingidos por barragens na educação do campo no Rio de Janeiro.” Humanidades & inovação, Tocantins, v. 7, n. 12, 2020, pp. 261–274.

PEREIRA, F. A.; YAMASAKI, A. A. “A prática pedagógica dos monitores-alfabetizadores do Pronera no assentamento Santa Cruz II /Tocantins: tentativas, acertos, conquistas.” Formação docente: história, políticas e práxis educacional, v. 1, 1. ed. Uberlândia: Composer, 2015, pp. 183–196.

SOUZA, V. M.; MONGE, R. P. M.; YAMASAKI, A. A. “Paulo Freire e a cultura caiçara: a amorosidade no ‘cerco de saberes.’” In: IX encontro internacional do Fórum Paulo Freire. Revista UniFreire. Turin: Instituto Paulo Freire, 2014, pp. 16–22.

YAMASAKI, A. A. “Fertilizar e semear educação popular com Paulo Freire: desafios à universidade, à formação de educadores e educadoras do campo e à educação audiovisual.” In: GADOTTI, Moacir; CARNOY, Martin (eds.)

Reinventando Freire: a práxis do Instituto Paulo Freire. São Paulo: Instituto Paulo Freire; Lemann Center/Stanford Graduate School of Education, 2018, pp. 201–230.

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SECURITY

Center of Orientation for the Adolescent of Campinas (Comec) Focused on the education of “adolescents and youths in conflict with the law,” the Center of Orientation for the Adolescent of Campinas (Comec) was created in the 1980s. Its practice is inspired in the ideas of Paulo Freire: it has “the word has an instrument for the transformation of people and society” and teaches the students “to read the world and to intervene positively in it,” based “on the principles of ethics, the respect for dignity and the encouragement of autonomy.” Participating in this interview are occupational therapist and coordinator Larissa Mazzotti Santamaria and the psychologists Ana Flávia Silva Luz and Natasha Contro de Souza.

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How is the structure and routine of Comec’s work? What work forces does it rely on and which sectors of the public does it impact?

We have been active for more than 40 years serving adolescents and youths (aged 12 to 21) and their families. Our work is special insofar as it carries out socioeducational actions with adolescents and youths in conflict with the law, preceding the standards about the service and incorporating the laws that came after it, the basic ones being the Statute for the Child and the Adolescent (ECA, 1990), the Single System for Social Assistance (Suas, 2005) and the National System for Socioeducational Service (Sinase, 2006).

The structure, composed of this legal scenario, executes the socioeducational measures of Assisted Freedom program and the Community Service program, and its physical space is characterized by the practice of caring for and welcoming its users. Our interventions are focused on group activities, while also including service to individuals. For carrying out its actions, Comec relies on a staff of directors and 35 workers, ranging from the support team to the technical team, the latter consisting of professionals from the areas of psychology, social service, education, occupational therapy, social sciences and others.

Our current activity includes the monthly monitoring of 240 adolescents and youths in their fulfillment of the socioeducational measures for the Assisted Freedom program (160 users) and the Community Service program (80 users). The time period of each case is determined by the Children and Youth Court, varying from 6 months to 3 years in the Assisted Freedom program and from 1 to 6

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months in the Community Service program.

For carrying out the programs, Comec signs an agreement with the municipal government, where each party has different specificities in light of the judicial determinations that concern these youths. In general lines, each case involves an interdisciplinary team (psychologist, social assistant, social educator and/or guidance counselor) who, based on their specific knowledge sets, combine their efforts with the institutional knowledge to construct an individual service plan (PIA) for each user, aligned with the decisions of the Children and Youth Court.

The fulfillment of the socioeducational measures is intrinsically related to the execution of the PIA, which considers different axes pertinent to the development of these adolescents and youths, such as citizenship (guarantee of rights, juridical orientation and organization of personal documentation), schooling (insertion and monitoring), work (training and professional insertion ), health (orientations, evaluation and referrals), dwelling and family life (pertinent referrals and interventions).

Comec’s interventions are not limited to weekly service to adolescents, youths and their families. It also monitors the users in the necessary services, being articulated in various areas through discussions of cases and periodic reports sent to the city’s social assistance network and to the Children and Youth Court of Campinas, while also including visits to households and other actions pertinent to the execution of the PIA. The workforce is constituted by the performance of the hired professionals and the institution’s directorship

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of volunteers. The actions of this collective directly impact the life of the 240 adolescents and youths served monthly, and on their family members. We also consider that there is a personal and professional repercussion in the daily life of the professionals who work here.

You say that you take the Freirean pedagogy, among others, as a reference. I would like you to describe how Paulo Freire’s ideas are evident in your activities.

Our central action is in the combined development between the adolescent, the family, Comec’s technical team, the Children and Youth Court and other services involved or necessary in the intervention of each case for the construction and execution of the PIA. Based on these initial and normative questions, we adopt as essential precepts the ideas of Paulo Freire’s philosophy in regard to the interaction of the professionals with the adolescents and youths and their families.

Socioeducation therefore consists of the ability of the educators to establish bonds of affection with the adolescents and their families, to create feelings of empathy, service, the valuing of ideas, the appreciation and understanding of diversity, these aspects being essential for the strengthening of the human values of solidarity, alterity and respect.

To this end, it is necessary to have a sincere communication among all those involved, able to produce human love, slowly and progressively developed, which requires actual life experience. In short, our proposal of socioeducation contains a series of facts, attitudes, experiences, values, ideas and actions with perspectives for individual

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and social humanization, which we tirelessly seek while observing Paulo Freire’s ideas referring to the pedagogy of love, given through concrete actions inspired in the social, ethical and critical-reflexive dimensions.

In our activities, we strive to build a true communication with the users, with the construction of the actions taking place in a combined way, in keeping with Freire’s ideas. We professionals have a directing and formative role, leading the adolescents and youths to certain sorts of knowledge, but not as absolute truths. This process allows for the learning to be mutual. For this, it is necessary that the relationships be affective and democratic, guaranteeing the possibility of expression to everyone.

This relationship has become the hallmark in the socioeducational service carried out by Comec. The development of the PIE considers the subjective and objective characteristics of the user, his or her family and community, in order to understand the user’s social context and to propose actions that make sense for his or her life and daily experience. In the socioeducational space, we seek to foster exchanges between the adolescent and his or her advisor; and, for the communication to be true, there needs to be an encounter, which cannot be superficial, theoretical or external. It has to be experienced, lived, forming a relational unit with the human being encountered at that moment.

The encounter requires, on the part of the advisor, gentleness, acceptance, understanding, knowledge, service, love and a belief in the goodness that there is in the other, by the simple fact that he or she exists as a human person.

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Paulo Freire says that it is necessary to always reinvent him.

How do you think that you have reinvented him, what changes were necessary? What does your practice, your contact with the users and the different realities you encounter bring in terms of adaptations?

Paulo Freire’s philosophy is based on the educational process in the school; that is a difference, as Comec does not teach its users how to read and write, but rather accompanies their school development. We carry out nonformal education through socioeducational actions and, therefore, we reinvent the practices proposed by Paulo Freire. Our action includes education as politics, in a non-partisan way, but rather as an emancipatory process for the forming of citizens more aware of their rights and able to conduct a critical reading of the world. This is, without a doubt, Freire’s pedagogy.

In the socioeducation that we carry out, done on the basis of the real experience of real people, it is necessary to recognize the personal history of the users, protecting them from the stigmas that criminalize their existence, especially for having committed some infraction. This macro view that our professionals have and seek to construct with the users finds support in Paulo Freire’s work, in the works Educação como prática da liberdade (1967), Pedagogia do oprimido (1968), Pedagogia da esperança (1992), and Pedagogia da autonomia (1996).

In all of our actions, we consider the word as an instrument for the transformation of people and society, and it is part of our responsibility to teach them to read the world and to intervene positively in it, based on the principles of

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ethics, on respect for dignity and on the encouragement of autonomy as a basis for an emancipatory education. The main adaptation takes place in the combined and collective construction of what the PIA should possess as strategies and goals, as it needs to be meaningful, in order for the adolescent and his or her family to appropriate this construction.

How does this basis of “not only on Paulo Freire, but on a thought developed on pedagogy,” as you describe it in your writings, make Comec different from other institutions focused on young infractors? To put it another way, what is the context of Comec’s activity in comparison with other agencies, such as Fundação Casa?

We believe that Comec’s service is different from that of the other agencies that work with socioeducational measures in regard to its methodical rigor and ongoing research. The indissoluble alliance between ethics and aesthetics, the ceaseless commitment to professional competence, the respect for the knowledge of the person being educated and the recognition of cultural identity, coupled with the rejection of all and every form of discrimination, with a view to the critical reflection of the pedagogical practice, to the embodiment of the example, knowing how to dialogue and listen, wishing the best for the people being educated, to have happiness in hope, freedom and authority and the awareness of the unfinished: these are elements that embody the essential principles of our practice.

It must be emphasized that the context of Comec’s activity is different from that of Fundação Casa, since the confinement units are characterized by the denial of

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freedom, being denominated as total institutions. Their closed-off or total character is symbolized by the barrier to social relationship with the outer world. On the other hand, the measures that are somewhat open, such as assisted freedom and the providing of community service, enjoy the guarantee of freedom, that is, the right of the adolescents and youths to come and go. This means that we must cope with the unpredictability of everyday life, so, the adolescent’s and youth’s link with the technical team becomes fundamental for his or her development. In this sense, the social relationships established by the users with their families, friends, the territory where they live, the health services, education, social assistance, etc., as well as their team of reference in the socioeducation measure, are valued in order that they may help him or her in new choices and in his or her life project.

For us, there is an undeniable importance of the gaze for the reality of the adolescents and youths in conflict with the law from the perspective of Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, keeping in view the historical-contextual character in which every oppressed reality is located. Therefore, the adolescents who are fulfilling the socioeducational measure, as a social group, participate in societal life, even though excluded, harmed in their way of thinking, feeling, creating and transforming. The relevance of the socioeducational measures is further highlighted through objectifying the humanization of the adolescent who committed the infractional act, this being an important aspect in the analysis and criticism regarding the act committed.

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Do you think that the institutions focused on adolescents in conflict with the law, generally, can be improved with an approach based on Paulo Freire’s ideas? If so, in what sense? With what possible benefits?

Yes, we believe that Paulo Freire’s ideas are extremely relevant for institutions that work with adolescents in any situation. In the context of adolescents in conflict with the law, we experience the possibility of establishing an authentic relationship, recognizing that they are often stigmatized and discredited in many of their social relationships. The empathic relationship and the combined construction of a PIA are elements, in our point of view, which are essential for the construction of a link between the adolescent who is fulfilling the measure and his reference team. On this basis, it is possible to have a true circulation of the word, that is, to open a space of speech so that he or she can feel free to verbalize his or her stories, experiences, anxieties and risks, and other issues.

We believe that this form of empathic communication presents a potential for the transformation of contexts of exclusion, as on this basis it is possible to place the user into a protagonist role in actions for changing him- or herself and the community to which he or she belongs.

The methodological proposal that is developed in keeping with the precepts of popular education described by Paulo Freire is therefore committed to the construction of knowledge that fosters conditions for the overcoming of situations of exclusion and social oppression, this being a primary benefit for the execution of the measures. This partnership allows the adolescent to create a path for con-

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sidering and resignifying his or her actions. And, once free from the alienating clichés, he or she will continue and create the path of his or her learning and the formation of a political awareness.

In current Brazilian society, various groups are pressuring for heavier punishment on adolescent infractors, as well as on the lowering of the age for being tried as an adult. How do you see these movements? Which public policies do you espouse for this area?

There is growing concern about violence and criminality in everyday life, which includes the adolescent population segment. With different positionings about the realities, news articles, television programs and other forms of media news have spotlighted adolescents in actions considered violent, fueling the discussions about more coercive punishments, including the lowering of the age for being tried as an adult. At Comec, the infractions considered serious do not represent this dyad constructed around adolescence and violence; what we observe is a large number of adolescents and youths being harassed for work in narcotraffic, a question that Brazil should discuss in regard to public policies (exploitation of child labor), instead of this age lowering.

At Comec, we take a definitive stand against such actions. We see that movement as a way of blaming the adolescent, separating him or her from social, cultural, political, economic and family contexts, among various other aspects. That is to say, we consider that such arguments criminalize poverty without considering the life experienc-

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es, the everyday reality and the violations of rights linked to acts by adolescents in conflict with the law.

We espouse reflection concerning the phenomenon of adolescents and youth, especially of those adolescents recognized as “in conflict with the law,” within a proposal of pedagogical and socioeducational work.

Besides divulging its work and researches in the area, Comec is also active on the managing committee of the Municipal System of Socioeducational Service of Campinas, which takes as a precept the guarantee of rights to adolescents who are fulfilling socioeducational measures, remaining in opposition to the reduction of the age for being tried as an adult.

We observe that the population in general does not know about the existing socioeducational process and, sometimes, does not understand the correct and complete application of what is established by the ECA and by Sinase.

The legislations, in regard to service to adolescents and youths in conflict with the law, need to be duly effectuated and implemented in their totality, in order to allow for the operation of the ideals prescribed in them, and to allow for the discussion of plausible restructurings.

Paulo Freire used the so-called generative words to set his educational processes in motion. Imitating this practice a little, I would like you to define the fundamental words for your work and what meanings you take from them.

For us, at Comec, some of the fundamental words of this work can be found in the institutional values shared by the professionals who work here. These values are consistent

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with the workgroup, and are aligned to the institution’s vision and mission. This being the case, we emphasize: — ethics: qualified professional activity, based on the norms and guidelines of the authoritative councils in this field, committed to hearing, sheltering and guiding the users and to the transparency of our actions; — respect: promotion of the socioeducation of adolescents and youths while also working with their guardians and family members, contributing to the elimination of any form of negligence, discrimination, exploitation, violence, cruelty and oppression; — human and cultural diversity: respecting the similarities and differences among people and cultures, coupled with the defense of human rights; — social responsibility: promotion of freedom, of liberty, of equality and of the integrity of the human being, supported on the values that underlie the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and critically and historically analyzing the political, economic, social and cultural realities; — continuing education: successive professional improvement, contributing to the development of the area as a scientific field of knowledge and practice.

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MUSIC

Estêvão Couto Teixeira With an MA in education from the Centro de Ensino Superior de Juiz de Fora (CES/JF) and a BA in music (flute) from the School of Music of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Estêvão Couto Teixeira is the author of the study “Alfabetização musical – o legado de Paulo Freire e a aprendizagem da música” [Teaching Musical Literacy – Paulo Freire’s Legacy and the Learning of Music].

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A professor of perception, chamber music, piano and transverse flute of the Haidée French-American State Conservatory of Music, in Juiz de Fora (MG), he is the inventor of the Didactic Keyboard for the Teaching of Music (Tedem), an innovative technology for teaching and learning based on the visualization of musical forms on the keyboard.

The Tedem method is the object of a municipal law in Juiz de Fora (nº 10.861/2004), with the aim of reinserting the teaching of music in the municipality’s public elementary schools. The law was promulgated in Decree n. 8587, of July 7, 2005.

On the invitation of the Paulo Freire Institute of Portugal, Estêvão presented music performances and workshops with the method for around 800 children from public and private schools of that country in December 2005 and in May 2007.

How did Paulo Freire arise in your personal and professional path? How did your contact with the author take place?

My first contact with Paulo Freire was at school, as a teenager, in the classes of human and Christian formation in a high school where I was studying in Juiz de Fora. In the third year – what was formerly called the third scientific year – I switched over to another high school, the Academy of Commerce, in the same city, where I participated in study groups, in which we also had contact with his texts.

My true immersion into the Freirean work, however, came later, during my master’s program, with the research I made into the teaching of musical literacy with Tedem, in which I needed to study how I would relate Paulo Freire’s

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theory in my musical practice.

It was a gradual process, where I increasingly discovered a new way of using Freire’s ideas in my day-to-day musical practice. Valorizing the repertoire of the students and what they had to show me, because Freire said that if you teach while learning, you learn while teaching. So, I gradually discovered how I could take maximal advantage of the musical experience and background of each of the students.

In your view, how can Freirean pedagogy be related to the musical field?

Freirean pedagogy always provides an opportunity to those who are excluded from our society, the valorization of those who never had a voice to express themselves, the right to literacy. This is why the author worked so much with teaching youths and adults how to read and write, because our country, Brazil, had a very high percentage of people who lacked fundamental literacy skills.

Transferring this to music, I say that Brazilian popular music had very little space in the universities, conservatories and academies, and only began to gain this space recently. In the early 20th century, popular music was totally excluded from the schools, even being considered an inferior category.

The teaching of music was largely based on concepts and works by European authors. It was only with the Modern Art Week of 1922 that Brazilian popular music began to be valorized.

So, the Freirean outlook is associated with the musical field precisely in this valorization of genuine Brazilian ex-

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pression, of the popular expression by popular musicians, which is so rich and diverse, and in how it can be brought into the academic world.

And what is the teaching of musical literacy? In your opinion, how should it be inserted in the schools?

The teaching of musical literacy is the act of teaching music, of teaching to read it and write it, but also to listen to it.

And, in a Freirean viewpoint, this is enlarged to the question of reading the world, of forming a critical vision.

In this sense, the teaching of musical literacy should be inserted in a context in which the child first learns to deal with sounds, with music, to perceive high tones versus low tones. Later, he or she should have contact with the paper, with the musical score.

Now, the schools, the universities and the conservatories are concerned more about this aspect of valuing the perception of hearing, but it is very common for us to see, in these institutions, the valorization of written music, of music on paper. In a certain way, this enslaves and can later hinder the understanding of music in a more playful and creative way, which works on the side of improvisation, for example.

And I say this because, observing the children themselves, they do not learn to write first. They learn to talk, and later will go through the process of learning how to write, of course. Actually, before all else, the child sings, and later begins to develop the verbal spoken language.

So, this is the valorization that I bring to the field of music. With a basis in Freirean concepts – and Tedem works precisely on this basis – before introducing music on paper,

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it is necessary to work on the idea of high and low pitches, visualizing these geographies on the keyboard. And this will provide another sort of conception and formulation of the knowledge of musical structure, in order to then understand it on paper.

Musical practice is also a political act, since the popular musical culture should be accepted, it should be inserted in the processes of education in the traditional schools and universities.

Each person has his or her own manner, his or her own forms of musical expression. How can a musician who supposedly has no musical theory pick up a guitar, an accordion, and play it the entire night, nonstop, one song after another, without ever learning how to read and write music?

Would you say that such a person is musically illiterate?

This new concept of teaching musical literacy is also a Freirean principle of valorizing these new forms, these popular musical expressions. The academy, the conservatories and the universities should learn and study this form of grasping the musical language through popular musicians, valorizing all of this content.

Paulo Freire said that it is necessary to always reinvent him.

How do you think that you have reinvented him with your work in the field of music?

In the case of music, I believe I have made a reinvention through the Tedem instrument. It is a prototype of a keyboard that does not have sound and, at first, this is an incongruity, because music is the art of sounds, but this is precisely where the process of reinvention within music

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lies, in the Freirean perspective.

The students first exercise and work on their musical perception, on hearing, without understanding music on paper. The process of musical writing should come after this assimilation of the language of sounds; this is very important. It is the practice of working on this playful, freer, happier and more pleasant side of music.

And each student should always bring something new to the teacher, which is why Paulo Freire’s notion that one teaches while learning is interesting and important.

Talking about Tedem, could you tell us a little more about it and how it resembles the Freirean principles of teaching literacy, in this case, teaching musical literacy?

It is a keyboard that I use to teach music in a different way.

It is an instrument that has no sound, it only serves as a panel for the visualization of musical forms, whether they be scales, chords or intervals. The Tedem device arose unexpectedly, I did not think that I was creating a keyboard, a method, or much less a prototype of something that did not exist: I imagined that other people had already thought about this way of teaching music, with the keys rising on the surface of the keyboard.

Later, when I went to work on the text for the patent, I was surprised to find that there were many technological inventions with chips, electronic means, but none that were so simple, with a didactic keyboard where the keys rise up. There had never been anything patented like that.

The Tedem device arose starting in 1987, when I began to give classes at the Centro Ian Guest de Aperfeiçoamento

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Musical, in Rio de Janeiro. I was already giving a class in harmony applied to the keyboard and I always had to call the students to see the harmonic occurrences that I played on the piano. They would all get up from their chairs to watch me playing the chords and, later, sit back down.

Based on this need, I came up with a keyboard which was, basically, the keys of a piano attached to a panel. The keys move and when they are raised, it was possible to show the students the formation of that chord.

That was how it arose and, from then on, new ways of applying it were discovered. And new ways were also found for how it could be worked on within the Freirean concept where the musical background and experience of each student is valorized in the classroom, in regard to each of these contents that should be inserted and absorbed in the process of musical education.

Paulo Freire used the so-called generative words to set his educational processes into motion. I would like you to define the fundamental words for your work and what meanings you draw from them.

My generative words in the field of music would mainly be about the musical notes, which everyone knows. What are the musical notes that all of us know?

Do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do, ti, la, so, fa, mi, re, do – actually, there are seven musical notes.

And how do I work, what is the beginning of my work in the process of teaching musical literacy with the Tedem device?

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I initially work with a generative group of just two words, which in this case would be two notes: so and la.

And why? First, because these two notes are in an easily sung vocal region; second, because the teaching of musical literacy in schools is very much associated with the recorder, on which these two notes are easily played. I also work with the berimbau, which is an instrument that basically plays just two notes.

They are two notes, a higher note and a lower note. So, these would be – comparing this with the Freirean methodology – the generative words. Based on them, I create the different rhythms, changing the sounds, maintaining the same interval, but working with other sounds so that the student becomes aware that he or she can execute the same interval in other tones.

Then, after the student is confident, I begin to work with three musical notes – so, la and ti – and so on and so forth, until completing the diatonic scale of do with the seven notes.

You are the author of a song about Paulo Freire, aren’t you?

That song was created to be played at an international meeting about Paulo Freire that was held in São Paulo. For that event, I said that I would compose a song in honor of the educator.

The day was approaching and I did not have any inspiration to compose a song. One month before, I had still not written anything.

Then, I remembered that Paulo Freire had learned

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to write in the shadow of the branches of a mango tree, scratching with sticks on the ground.

I went under one of the trees in the condominium where I live and said: “Paulo Freire, please, give me inspiration here, I have to fulfill my commitment to play the song at the international meeting.” As incredible as it may seem, the melody of the song came in its entirety and I soon put it on paper. Thus arose “Alegria de Paulo Freire” [Joy of Paulo Freire], which was played at the event.

It was at the opening, with a full, packed auditorium.

I with the flute. I delivered the original score I had written to Lutgardes Freire. It is archived at the Instituto Paulo Freire. It was a thrilling moment for everyone there.

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THEATER

Abel Xavier

A PhD candidate in the College of Education of the University of São Paulo (Feusp) and a professional in the area of arts in education, Abel Xavier has researched the thought of Paulo Freire in the practice of theater pedagogy since 2015. Previously, he earned an MA in performing arts from the Escola Superior de Artes Célia Helena (ESCH) and a specialization degree in cultural projects management from the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo (ECA/USP), producing an article in which he studies the curriculum of the performing arts course of the Department of Performing Arts of USP (CAC/USP).

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How did your interest in Paulo Freire arise as an object of interest and what was your previous relationship with his work?

I first heard about Paulo Freire in 2005, when I was earning my BA in performing arts at Campinas State University (Unicamp). But it was only a name that I heard from classmates who were closer to pedagogy. Nearly ten years later, when I was already a theater professor and had read some of his books, I perceived that an artistic-pedagogical process could very easily be related to Paulo Freire’s practices and propositions. In his reflections, there was a way of thinking about the education of people that was very similar to the methodologies of teaching theater that I was aware of at that time.

In your research, Paulo Freire’s thought enters to valorize the learner’s reality and social context. Have you seen this applied in practice, in the learning process of someone in the performing arts course?

As the field of my research when I was earning my specialization degree was strictly documental, I never saw, in practice, how the students and professors of the Department of Performing Arts of USP dealt with the Freirean ways of teaching and learning. But at the same time, in another context, I was leading a class in the former Free Center of Theatrical Arts (Clac) of São Bernardo do Campo, in São Paulo. There, we were indeed able to experience Paulo Freire’s thought in the practice of theater pedagogy.

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When you define the student who enters the theatrical arts course, you report that, in general, he or she possesses “a very keen critical capacity.” Is it easier, for this reason, to apply Paulo Freire’s philosophy in this learning process?

Through theatrical language, the students gradually became aware of their social position, and we sought, as a group, for possibilities of artistic and political activity.

Anyone who seeks out theater as a professional activity, that is, as a practice of social participation in the world, somehow already recognizes that art has a transformative role. Generally, because the person has witnessed this transformation in him- or herself. Upon experiencing theater, whether in childhood or adolescence, he or she underwent some transformation in the field of his or her personal identity. Therefore, theatrical practice begins to be a condition of existence, part of one’s identity. Gradually, the person learning theater realizes that this art, by transforming people, can transform social structures as well. This is where, for me, Paulo Freire comes in, to make us understand that a historically constructed knowledge (in our case, the theatrical language) is something alive, changeable, manipulable, determined by historical time even while it is also a determinant of it. The learner gradually perceives that his or her action on the stage has power.

The power of reading and writing new worlds. Becoming theatrically literate is a way of understanding that one’s presence and one’s action have power and make a difference in the social time and in the social space.

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One contradiction pointed out in your research is that, despite that the course in theatrical arts at CAC/USP provides for “the development of methodologies able to generate a critical spirit in historical awareness,” Paulo Freire is not part of the bibliography. Could you explain this absence? Would you say that from that time until now, this has changed?

I have not kept tabs on the bibliographic transformation of the course between 2015 and now. Very likely there have been changes. What I can say today is that, in many cases, the theater professor’s practice is Freirean, but he or she is either not aware of this or does not refer to his or her practice in this way. There is something between the doing and the conceiving of the pedagogical practice that excludes the reference to Paulo Freire. But this has a reasonably simple explanation: we do not consider him as a thinker in art. He is understood as a thinker in education. Art and education, although they have points of contact, each has their own specificities, of course. But it just so happens that Paulo Freire is so universal and fundamental that his ideas have overflowed from the education field. What he proposes is on the order of culture, of social relationships, of politics; it is larger than the school and scholastic education.

What I proposed in the research of that time (and continue thinking today) is that we can read Paulo Freire in light of the theatrical field. Everything that is said in Pedagogia da autonomia (1996), for example, should be read by everyone who works with theater (actors, directors, teachers, critics, etc.). When we read this work, we become better people, better actors.

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In a theater course, how is the individual and critical thought of each student reconciled with the teaching of the techniques?

Does one complement the other, without any possibility of noise?

As Paulo Freire said, knowledge is historical, linked to a determined context and developed by determined social agents. The same is true of technique, insofar as it is knowledge. It represents a point of view, a necessity of time, a solution for problems created in and by the historical time. This is how we can read the techniques of theatrical language. Within a course for the training of actors or theater teachers, the teaching of techniques is also the teaching of how to relate with them in a critical and lively way. The technique is a path. It is as though I were showing a path (a technique) to arrive at a goal, but it is very clear that there are other unexplored paths and that the current terrain requires new explorers and trailblazers. Thus, the relationship with the technique stops being submissive and begins to be critical, because it is understood as a historical construction, open to questioning, rereading, subversion, surpassing or assimilation. If it is like that, there is no noise.

How did your research evolve between your specialization degree and your doctorate, and how does Paulo Freire continue in this investigation?

After the specialization, I earned my MA at ESCH. Transversely, Paulo Freire helped me to think about the pedagogical practice of Casa do Teatro, an art school for children and youths which was the field for that research.

There I was able to go deeper into the applicability of

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Freirean education in the teaching of theater.

For the doctorate, at Feusp, I considered aspects of the stage presence, which is a condition of theatrical practice, a bodily state of the here and now, typical of the stage. The work is to think about which relationships we can establish between the state of stage presence and the state of historical presence. By historical presence, I understand this taking of a stand in the world, the comprehension of being both an agent and an outcome of a certain context. How can being present in history be related to being present on the stage, and vice versa? Paulo Freire, clearly, is part of the theoretical scope, precisely for pointing out this education that plants the learner with both feet in his or her time, in the social here and now. And what does one see with both feet in the present? What should be done with this presence, with this capacity for action?

Paulo Freire used the generative words to put his educational processes into motion. What are the fundamental words for your research work and what meanings do you take from them?

The word “presence” is the one that has been driving me currently. Not only because it is a word (and a skill) important for theater, but also because I think it is necessary to discuss what is present in life nowadays. In common life, in everyday experience, in commonplace practice. I have the sensation that our historical time has stripped us of the sensation of presence. And I am concerned about the consequences of this.

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PHOTOGRAPHY

ImageMagica

Active since 1995, ImageMagica is a public interest civil society organization (Oscip) that considers and practices photography as expression and education, reaching around 400 thousand people with its actions. Since the first years, the organization has developed an activity with a Freirean approach, even without knowing it – it was only after making contact with the educator’s work, that they could go deeper into his ideas. Talking with us in this interview is André François, photographer and founder of ImageMagica.

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How is the structure and work routine of ImageMagica? What work force do you rely on, and which publics do you impact?

Today, we rely on 12 people who work on a fixed basis at the organization. For executing the field projects, we call on and train other educators. The main public that we impact consists of public school students, who multiply their learning to their teachers and even their families.

Founded in 1995, the organization steadily developed its educational methodology and, in 1995, when it made contact with the thinking of Paulo Freire, it discovered a filiation. I would like to know more about how this development took place and, secondly, what the points of contact with Paulo Freire were.

Yes, when I began the work of ImageMagica, I had not yet made a relationship with Paulo Freire’s philosophy. When they said that our methodology had a lot to do with his, I researched it and saw that they really were connected. The process that we apply has always been in the sense that the learning is constructed in the doing, that there is not a oneway street (a teacher passing the content to the student), but rather something more horizontal.

In the same sense, did Paulo Freire’s pedagogy help to improve what you were already doing?

Yes. We began to polish our activities more and to appropriate the Freirean pedagogy. In this way, we could delve into this philosophy and absorb even more knowledge, bringing the methodology in a more conscious way into our projects.

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Paulo Freire said that it is necessary to always reinvent him.

How do you think you have reinvented him, what changes were necessary? What did the practice, the contact with the students and the different realities you encountered bring in terms of adaptations?

Much of what we use from Paulo Freire’s pedagogy is related to the act of doing. Educating through doing, through action. Thinking about this, and operating with the projects of photography, what happens the most in our fields is this dynamism during the learning process. Sometimes, the students bring specific themes they want to work on, or they propose dealing with a theme in a different way. So, it is a very dynamic process and very different at every moment.

For example, when we present the theme of the natural environment, everyone wants to photograph a tree, but brings different angles and perspectives, and life is like that. Sometimes, life is interpretation – and this interpretation is open during this learning process You are in the field of image, art and technology. How do you transpose Paulo Freire’s pedagogy – which has to do with the teaching of literacy, reading and language – to these other contexts?

I think that our intersection with Paulo Freire is learning while doing. And this can be anything – technology, photography… And we bring photography to the school in such a way that everyone – students and teachers of different ages – can join together in the search to learn through images. I think it is interesting because, in this way, we put people’s learning on the same level, which is a difference.

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Paulo Freire used generative words to put his educational processes into motion. Imitating this practice a little, I would like to know what the fundamental words are for your work and the meanings you extract from them.

Generally, we propose three basic questions for all the participants in our projects: “How do you see your world?”

“How would you like this world to be?” “What can you do to reach that ideal world you created?”

And we always spur the participants in order for the response to bring empowerment. Sometimes, some answers are: “I would like a better world, but the politics, my district…,” seeing the problem as lying outside of themselves.

And we ask again: “But what can you, as an individual, do to change your world?” I believe that, using the method based on the person’s life experience and reality, we are able to extract unique reflections and learning.

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ARCHITECTURE

Usina – Center of Works for the Inhabited Environment (Ctah)

Usina – Center of Works for the Inhabited Environment (Ctah) provides consulting for social movements in the struggle for land and dwelling. In this activity, Paulo Freire’s concepts are intertwined: “We seek to work based on generative problems, in such a way as to approach the architectural design based on the most direct concrete needs of families.” In this interview, we talk with architect and urbanist Flávio Higuchi Hirao. He also talked about Usina in an edition of Brechas urbanas, a cycle of debates held by Itaú Cultural about life in the cities. To watch, visit: bit.ly/brechas_construirjuntos.

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What is the structure and routine of Usina’s work? What work force do you rely on, and which publics do you impact?

Usina is a nonprofit entity whose aim is to provide technical consulting to organized groups that struggle for dwelling. Its structure is defined in its charter, with coordinators elected in an assembly (general, financial and operational coordinators). On a daily basis, we organize ourselves through self-management, divided into work teams and with weekly general meetings – an occasion at which we gather the entire collective for the main decisions. The team’s size has changed over the 30 years of Usina’s existence; it is made up largely of professionals, from the area of architecture, but also from sociology, history, the arts, cinema, and other fields.

In Usina’s activity, where can you point to Paulo Freire’s influence? At its origin, in the relationship with dwellers and the students? Is there use and/or development of Freire’s method or of his ethical and pedagogical ideas?

Paulo Freire’s conceptions are important at various moments, but mainly on the construction site (in the relationship with the workers) and at the moment of the participative design. We seek to work on the basis of generative problems, in such a way as to approach the architectural design based on the most direct and concrete needs of the families, rather than on forms and representations that are common to the disciplinary field, but contribute little to the direct participation of these families.

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Usina’s work is based on the “workers’ own capacity to plan, design and construct,” the description on the site says. What is this contact with the workers like, and what have you learned from this relationship?

For us, the work of architecture is situated in a larger field, that of construction. It is therefore part of a productive sphere, in which the civil construction workers are the main protagonists. Thus, there is a permanent challenge to practice architecture in direct relationship with the knowledge of the construction workers, understanding architecture as spanning from the moment of conception (design and planning) up to the actual construction. At the same time, our role in technical consulting is linked with the self-organization of the families involved, who directly carry out the management of the space’s production. Moreover, as workers, we understand not only the construction workers, but also the families that struggle for land and dwelling. These families, when they organize collectively, occupying lands and demanding public funds for construction, are positioned as active agents, taking an attitude as protagonists, from low to high, and breaking away from the prevailing patterns of the state housing policy, according to which these people are mere numbers of housing deficit. Moreover, we focus on the house’s use value, as opposed to its exchange value (the principal aim of houses constructed by the market, even when their construction is ordered by the state). This emphasis on the use value is manifested in the productive field, by reducing the tendency to engage in business-oriented thinking aimed at getting the greatest value-added, while increasing the

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presence of the families themselves in the direct management of the production.

In Paulo Freire, we read how the students become gradually empowered, how they become aware of their potentials of making the world. Does this compare to your experiences with Usina? How? Yes. The perception that the families themselves can decide how their house will be, how the construction will be, coupled with the awareness that the collective organization and mobilization lead to this realization, have great potential for enlarging the struggle to other spheres.

On the website, it also says that your activity takes place “in the context of struggle for urban and agrarian reforms.” Paulo Freire emphasized that education is not separate from politics.

Is this also true of architecture and urbanism?

There is no separation, since architecture is part of the production of the world. Any architecture that says it is separate from politics is, actually, one that conceals it.

Mario Sergio Cortella comments that the word “mutirão” [house-raising bee] is derived from the Tupi potiron, meaning “hands together.” And he says: “Paulo Freire is a great inspirer of this house-raising bee. Men and women who come together in daily life and in history to construct another reality. To make the utterly new possible.” How do you see these ideas and the role of the house-raising bee as a resource in popular construction?

The house-raising bee is a popular practice based on mutual help, very common in the traditions of the countryside,

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but which continues in the self-construction of urban dwellings. Thus, mutual help has always been one of the elementary ways to make houses possible in the peripheries of the large Brazilian cities. What the movements for dwelling, in conjunction with Usina’s technical consulting, achieve is the enlargement and upgrading of this logic, bringing together a larger number of families, increasing the collective organization and mobilization and impacting directly on the struggle for land and for public resources.

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INCLUSION

Lana de Lima Teixeira D’Ávila

A teacher in the municipal school system of Fortaleza (CE), Lana D’Ávila teaches first-grade students. She also worked at the Instituto Hélio Góes and at the school of the Society for Assistance to Blind People (SAC) of Fortaleza, where she applied Paulo Freire’s ideas in the education of youths and adults: “it was a very important moment, where I learned more than I taught.”

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First, I would like you to talk about your relationship with Paulo Freire. How did he contribute to your activity?

Paulo Freire is a master teacher for anyone who works in the teaching of literacy to youths and adults. Therefore, it is nearly natural to use his methodology in this activity – especially since, in my own education in secondary school, when I was also taking the technical course in education, a good part of the orientation for the teaching of literacy was already anchored in Freire’s principles. Likewise, my college degree in education was also based and consolidated in Paulo Freire. Thus, when I had the opportunity to work with students in their process of learning to read and write at Instituto Hélio Góes, his method was the basis for a good part of my pedagogical practice.

I would like you to comment on your work with the education of youths and adults at the SAC. Paulo Freire is cited in your article about that experience. In what way were his ideas part of that work? Did you use something from Freire’s method for the teaching of literacy?

The context was favorable for Paulo Freire’s method to be applied in that experience. The classes were small, with between six and twelve students, some of them blind since birth, others who had lost their vision during childhood, or later in life. They all, however, shared in common the problem of never having learned to read and write, for different reasons. Thus, based on the worldview that those students possess, using their knowledge of their world and the examples that they had brought, I began the literacy teaching.

I gradually developed the process of their learning to read

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and write in the Braille system, having as a main resource the cycles of conversations, in which we discussed about their family and love lives, sexuality, difficulties of orientation and moving about, funny things that happened in their lives… And this is part of Paulo Freire’s methodology.

What are the specific difficulties of teaching literacy to blind people or disabled people in general? How can Paulo Freire help you with this sort of educational activity?

The main difficulty in working with students with a visual or other disability lies in their knowledge of the literate world, since, if there are already difficulties for students without disabilities, these are much greater with children, youths and adults who never had vision or who lost it early in life. This will require a greater use of audio resources (we used the Dosvox at that time) and tactile resources.

Another particular condition of the students is that they are in the education for youths and adults program, already outside the regular teaching, and they can be much older. What are the challenges in the teaching of students with this profile? This was more or less the field in which Paulo Freire’s method was developed, with adults.

What I say right now is based mainly on my practice as a pedagogue and teacher, and this being the case, what I really think is that giving classes to youths and adults is not a challenge, but a privilege. Because I believe that a teacher who is willing to give classes to youth and adults already has a different perception concerning how to treat the students who need this sort of teaching. To avoid implying that it’s all

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a bed of roses, however, I should say that the student with a visual disability who did not learn the Braille system at the right moment will face a much larger difficulty. Besides getting to know the Braille cells, they will have to develop their tactile perception, the correct use of the slate and stylus [a device for writing in Braille] and the coordination for writing on 40-kg paper. The greatest challenge is to develop the tactile sense, as tactile reading is three times more tiring than visual reading, and it is the main resource the student will need for learning to read and write, which requires a greater diversification of tactile resources.

Paulo Freire emphasizes that the educator and the student learn from each other. In your article, you talk about the teacher getting to know the student, his or her social context and needs.

How do you see this relationship of mutual learning and what have you learned in the actual contact with the blind students?

The work carried out in the teaching of youths and adults at Instituto Hélio Góes was actually a very important professional moment because I learned more than I taught. It might sound like a cliché, but the individualities of those students made me reflect much more on the respect we should have in regard to the differences of each person and his or her social context. The difficulties and backgrounds of the students made me see simple aspects of life that we did not learn in the university.

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Beyond what you said in the article, what other experiences in your activity as a teacher has a dialogue with Paulo Freire?

What stories can you tell in this sense?

The other experiences I have had in teaching youths and adults were the night classes of the municipal school system of Fortaleza, my first contact with this mode of teaching, in the early 2000s. It was an experience in another context, as those classes consisted of students who were civil construction workers, scrap collectors, single mothers, women who worked in general services and with reports of family violence, unemployed people, and even young drug users. There are so many stories, it is hard to come up with a specific one, but what really sticks in my memory is the feeling of work accomplished, since, even in the conditions where the classes take place, it was possible to conduct a relationship between teacher and students where we maintained friendship and respect over the years.

How do you see the current situation of the teaching of literacy to blind people and/or people with other disabilities in your state? What lacks exist and what needs to be done, with a view to the students, teachers, educational structure, etc.?

In the teaching of literacy in the Braille system, in and of itself, there were no significant changes, but in regard to the use of technical resources, there was an improvement, as platforms and applications have arisen that are an aid to students with visual disabilities. In what regards the state teaching system, including the Reference Center in Education and Specialized Service of Ceará (Creaece), an agency of the Secretariat of Education that offers support to inclu-

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sive education, the services leave much to be desired and even today there is no adequate planning for providing quality service to people with visual disabilities. There are various lacks and one of them is the absence of the development of qualified educational professionals to work with them. And the most aggravating one is that there is no broad-scope and effective policy for dealing with these lacks, including the structural ones.

Paulo Freire used the so-called generative words to get his educational processes moving. Imitating this practice a little, I would like for you to say what the keywords are in your work.

For example, which words made the most sense in the teaching of blind students and what meanings do they bear?

The many words that were worked on and come to mind are: prejudice, acceptance, discrimination, love, a world for everyone, friendship, dating, family, house, school (as a second home, a place where they were sheltered), music (they liked very much to sing and play forró music) and love letters. These words were highly significant because it was a moment of working with feelings, the discussions worked with the feelings experienced there and they helped in the day-to-day life of each one of us.

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“Thus, as I do not believe any pedagogy made for the student and much less made over him, I do not believe in any revolutionary transformation made for the popular masses, but rather with them. Which is to say: from an action based on the critical understanding of their common, everyday life […]”

This School Called Life: Testimonials to the Reporter Ricardo Kotscho

MEETING WITH REFUGEE CHILDREN AND WOMEN IN BERLIN Ilse Schimpf-Herken

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On September 4, 2015, when Angela Merkel, the chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, announced that she was opening the borders to refugees from the war zones of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, our country was faced with a great challenge. For months, members of the Paulo Freire Society of Berlin protested in the streets – alongside hundreds of thousands of committed citizens in Germany and many other countries in Europe – against the inhumane policy of not giving refuge to victims of acts of war, dictatorial oppression and displacement in their countries. In the press, generally, the refugees and their sufferings were invisible, as though they did not exist, as though the events in their countries were not the long-term consequence of a European and North American colonial policy, of their geopolitics around petroleum.

Being a relatively small institute, at first, we made our active contribution to an elementary school in the district of Moabit, in Berlin, where we held a welcoming class1 for refugees with 12 children and an Egyptian teacher once a week. On the one hand, the aim was to get to know and to obtain practice in the group’s multilingualism – the chil-

1. The establishment of welcome classes was the first attempt by the Berlin Senate for the schooling of refugee children, in small groups and close to their recently established homes. Unfortunately, the integration of refugee children to regular school life remained on the level of a desire, as few were invited to spend time with students of the same age and there were few opportunities of organized meetings by the school. Instead, the educational authority furnished intercultural didactic materials and resources for the work with the parents. There was no concept for everyday shared experience.

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dren were coming from places such as Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Bosnia, Serbia and Albania. On the other, we wanted to give them a happy introduction to the German school, through singing, games and theater, with readings aloud in the district’s library, coupled with outings.

Accompanying the teacher, our task was to motivate the children to exchange ideas with one another through conversations about their daily lives. We made experiments, we saw that they really enjoyed rhythmic singing, for example, and in this way they easily learned their first words in German. Games in circles and theatrical improvisations about scenes from day-to-day life were also very popular, as they allowed the children to move about freely, to act and to express themselves. These were ways of overcoming the effort of the extreme conditions experienced by the refugees, who had to cross through thick forests in total darkness or were exposed for hours to massive violence by border police or soldiers.

Another sort of approach was the work with the parents.

In this we had good experiences with monthly meetings – the mothers showed great interest in eating and drinking, exchanging recipes and, at the same time, learning about the German educational system. We observed, however, that only some of them appeared at the meetings and we did not receive clear responses from the parents about the reasons why the mothers were not present. The explanations they gave were, generally, “they had medical appointments” or “sick child at home,” but we could not confirm these in more thoroughgoing evaluation discussions.

On this basis, a team from the institute developed the

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project’s second idea: to work exclusively with refugee women. It was a project carried out with women near the two homes for refugees in Moabit. I and a colleague, Pia Langeheine, organized meetings to explore the interest for a possible course in German and we tried to verify the possibility that the women would attend the classes regularly.

We discovered that there was a lot of interest, especially among young women. Many of them, however, were occupied with household tasks and many had commitments with the authorities. With this in mind, we developed a flexible curriculum, with fixed times, but with contents that were determined by the women themselves.

Before we began the “lessons,” however, it seemed essential to develop a relationship with these women through a biographical process, that is, to meet with them in small groups in a protective and sheltering environment, drinking coffee and eating cake, asking them to talk about their lives. At first, we talked with the entire group, for them to get to know and trust each other more; later, we always asked one or two of the women to tell about aspects of life in her family, in the school, and in the wider social context. It soon became clear that there were large differences among them. Although most of the women from Syria and Iraq had attended school for various years, nearly all the women from Afghanistan were illiterate and had been refugees for many years. They had lived in Iran with their families, where they were discriminated against and could not attend a school in their mother language, only the schools of the Koran, where classes were given in Arabic and whose curriculum lacked scientific disciplines.

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This significantly limited their general education. After the exit of the Soviets, the women returned to Afghanistan and were newly threatened by the Taliban. Thus, in Germany, in 2015, they were trying to restart their lives.

In our groups, there were also many Palestinian women who had lived in refugee camps of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in Iraq and in Syria, who had a higher education level. Nevertheless, because of their sociocultural uprooting, they had joined religious groups that determined their lives to a large extent.

For our team, this great heterogeneity in the life experiences of the women was a continuous challenge. Moreover, they seemed to be closely dependent on their husbands, even though in their family they bore the main responsibility for important everyday decisions. These aspects impacted their freedom to participate in our courses and meetings.

After the transcription of 32 interviews with the biographies of these women, we began the course in German lasting about six months, to give them an opportunity to learn the language and to know how to deal with German society.

Our knowledge of the women’s previous experience, of their flight through the Mediterranean region, helped a lot. It became obvious that they were less concerned about large problems than about the exchanges about family life, pregnancy and health problems. We therefore developed a vocabulary about the female body, about household work and about a positive self-image of the woman in war, being responsible for the family and, above all, for the education of her children. We learned a lot with them about the understanding of the roles in the family and we also shared

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our knowledge. We had very intimate dialogues, which gave rise to a profound reflection on other cultures. These were encounters that were only possible in a private environment and in small groups, a nonsustainable context for larger organizations involved in the work with refugees.

We, of the team at Paulo Freire Institute, were very grateful for those special meetings.

In the project’s third phase, besides the dialogue groups, we tested a new approach, developed by Pia Langeheine and by the Brazilian Cibele Kojima de Paula, entitled “Pedagogy and Space.” The aim was to make the women emotionally related with their immediate surroundings and to think with them about the importance of the places, documenting them on maps. We took walks with them through their district and asked them to express their feelings about the stores, the streets, and the trees, also asking them to manifest these observations in images, thus creating, in this stage, a map of the surroundings of their refugee homes. In a second task, they named their favorite place, bringing the group to that place to explain its meaning to everyone. Later, the spaces were once again drawn on a map: each woman could describe, paint or take photos of “her” place. The challenge of integrating this tridimensional reality to the surface of a bidimensional map was very difficult for many of them.

During the presentation of the project, at a party with their families, with their cell phones in hand, the children managed to carry out these tasks much more easily, which resulted in a marvelous dialogue between the generations.

The many other parties – for which there were always new

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occasions – also furnished a fertile structure for the expression of the cultural forms and of the women’s improvisational skills. For example, a mother of four small children, who was constantly overburdened with all the work, turned out to be a very expressive singer and drum player; other women proudly played their traditional dances, laughed together or danced to their own songs. These were especially appreciated moments of happiness, in light of their terrible experiences along their path as refugees to arrive in Germany.

The work of the Freirean process of teaching people how to read and write always involves encounter, opening, adjusting to others, and it is always a great joy. As a team, we prepared the rooms, we made a beautiful setting with flowers, tablecloths and candles, but the important thing was always the curiosity, the joy of experimenting and learning as a group. The experiences with the refugee women are part of our many experiences in the intercultural projects in Berlin.

Ilse Schimpf-Herken, founder and director of the Paulo Freire Institute in Berlin, Germany

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THE “WANDERER OF UTOPIA” IN HIS ROAMINGS AROUND THE WORLD “Culture is the drum that is played into the night.

Culture is the rhythm of the drum. Culture is the swinging of the people’s bodies to the rhythm of the drums.”

The Importance of the Act of Reading: in Three Complementary Articles

André Bernardo

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On the 100th anniversary of the birth of Paulo Freire, specialists from different countries talk about the Brazilian educator’s importance for education worldwide If one day the genie of the lamp had appeared and asked Paulo Freire what his three wishes were, the Pernambucan educator would have had no doubts in responding: to get a ball, ride a bicycle, and drive a car. Well, the first of them, his widow Ana Maria Araújo Freire, also known as Nita, arranged to fulfill on Christmas in 1995. “Paulo had received 36 honorary doctorates, but no one had ever given him a soccer ball,” said Uruguayan writer and journalist Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015). In regard to the other two, making them come true, Nita admits, would have been a little more complicated. “It was very hard for Paulo to balance on two wheels and to find his way in cities. He used to say: ‘I was born without a compass,’” explains the doctor in education from Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC/SP) in the biography Paulo Freire – uma história de vida (2017).

Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (1921–1997) did not need a car or bicycle to blaze trails around the planet. In his “wandering through the world,” as he liked to say, he visited, alone or accompanied by his wife, 56 countries: from Botswana to Japan, from Haiti to Germany, from the Fiji Islands to Canada.

Not by chance, his various nicknames included “the wanderer of utopia.” “In this wandering pilgrimage, for more than half a century, he sowed hope and utopia,” Nita proudly says.

The tireless Paulo wandered a lot and rested little, four or five hours a night. “From his exile onward, Paulo did not live

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to travel, but traveled to live: he did not seek travels in life, but found life in his travels,” says Walter Kohan, a professor of philosophy of education of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (Uerj) and author of Paulo Freire mais do que nunca: uma biografia filosófica (2019).

In Pedagogia da solidariedade (2009), Nita reports that, on a certain occasion, someone asked Paulo: “What can we do to follow your ideas?” Surprised the educator had responded: “If you follow me, you destroy me. The best way for you to follow me is to reinvent me.” “Paulo Freire did not want adherents or followers. He wanted reinventors,” explains German educator Heinz-Peter Gerhardt, who holds a PhD from the University of Frankfurt, in Germany, and is a professor at the University of St. Joseph, in Macao, China. “He wanted educators to adapt his pedagogy to the reality of each country. In Germany, for example, there are initiatives aimed at teaching literacy to refugees.”

One of the 56 countries visited by the “wanderer of utopia” was Guinea-Bissau. The African nation even inspired one of his first books: Cartas à Guiné-Bissau – registros de uma experiência em processo (1977). In it, he describes his first year of work in the construction of a model for teaching literacy to adults in that country, which had its independence from Portugal declared in 1973 and recognized one year later. “Paulo did not limit himself to reconstructing the educational system of countries, such as Guinea-Bissau. He developed literacy campaigns, counseled workers' unions, inspired Catholic communities… If I had to list all his accomplishments, I would need to write a book…” jokes United States academician Peter McLaren, of

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the University of California, in Los Angeles. And he adds: “It would not be an exaggeration to state that Paulo was a very courageous man who taught us to overcome insurmountable obstacles. Anyone else, in his place, would have given up.”

A star with a long-lasting shine it was inspired in Paulo Freire’s pedagogy that, in 2018, the teacher Ramatulai Djalo took nine children who had classes in the street and brought them to the veranda of a house.

One year later, when the number of students began to increase, she had to go out looking for a larger house. With little money, the solution was to remodel a four-bedroom house and transform it into a kindergarten. When it came to naming the school, she didn’t think twice: Jardim Infantil Paulo Freire [Paulo Freire Kindergarten]. “He is not only the key mover of Brazilian education. He is the key mover of education worldwide,” the professor gushed, by WhatsApp, from Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau.

Finding a house to rent was only one of the difficulties faced by the 40-year-old teacher. Other challenges were to get tables, desks, a blackboard and even chalk to begin the classes and convince the parents to allow their children to attend school. Today, the Jardim Infantil Paulo Freire has three teachers and serves 63 children, aged 3 to 6. “Unfortunately, there was no money left over to buy the students’ lunch. The little that I managed to get with two friends pays the salary of the teachers and the rent on the house,” the teacher explains.

The title of “defender of Brazilian education,” conferred

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by President Dilma Rousseff in 2012, is just one of the many that have been given to Paulo Freire. The greatest Brazilian educator is also who has the largest number of honorary PhDs conferred by institutions in Brazil and abroad. Altogether, he was awarded 41 honorary doctorates and another 5 honorary degrees, more than Dom Hélder Câmara (32), Fernando Henrique Cardoso (29) and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (28). “Paulo Freire did not seek recognition. On the contrary. Looks of adoration made him feel uneasy. Even so, many desired his courage, while others were inspired by his ideas,” states Ronald David Glass, professor of philosophy of education of the University of California, in Santa Cruz, in the United States. “Paulo is like a star in the sky.

Although he already went out many years ago, he continues to light up our life. His shine is long-lasting, like the light of the sun, which is born every morning.”

Protagonists in their own learning process The kindergarten founded by Ramatulai Djalo in the district of Antula, in the capital of Guinea-Bissau, is not the only one to have been christened with Paulo Freire’s name.

Throughout the world, there is an incalculable number of schools, libraries and research centers bearing his name in countries such as Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Spain and Cape Verde. Lourenço Garcia was born in Cape Verde but, since 2010, has been directing Revere High School, in the outskirts of Boston, Massachusetts, United States. In 2014, it was elected, by the National Center for Urban School Transformation, an entity linked to the University of San Diego, in Texas, as the best public high school in the United

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States. In 2016, there came another award: the gold medal in the Schools of Opportunity category conferred by the National Education Policy Center, headquartered at the University of Colorado in Boulder, also in the United States.

Among its 2,000 students, 34% come from low-income families and 12% are immigrants that have little or no familiarity with the English language.

But what does Paulo have to do with this? Everything.

Garcia is an authentic Freirean. Much of what has gone well at Revere, the Cape Verde principal admits, was inspired

by Freire’s pedagogy of teaching. “In the traditional format, the protagonist is the teacher. Not by chance, all the tables and desks are turned in his or her direction,” explains Garcia, from Boston, by Zoom. “But, by the Freirean conception, the student stopped being a mere spectator or co-actor to assume the leading role in his or her own learning process.

Today, the rooms are made up of study groups, where some students learn from the others.”

At the University of Massachusetts, where he finished his doctorate, Garcia read many books by Paulo Freire. His favorite is Pedagogia do oprimido. Written during Freire’s exile in Chile, it was published in the United States in 1970 and in Brazil in 1974. It is estimated that it has been translated into more than 30 languages and has sold close to 1 million copies. In the book, Paulo criticizes what he calls “banking education.” That is, the educator is always the one who educates, and the student is always the one who is learning. And he proposes a more humanist, revolutionary and liberating education. An education in which the educator teaches and learns, and the student educates him- or

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herself by teaching. “The student is not a bank account in which the educator deposits knowledge during the classes and, later, withdraws by way of tests and exams. The student is in charge of his or her own learning,” explains historian Erick Morris, a PhD candidate in global citizenship and postcolonialism at the University of Coimbra, in Portugal. “What Paulo Freire did – since his experiment in Angicos, in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, when, in 1963, he taught a group of bricklayers how to read and write – is based on the context in which they live. He thus created a much more consistent and long-lasting methodology.”

Conjugating the verb “to give hope” Pedagogia do oprimido is considered, by many theoreticians of education, Paulo Freire’s masterpiece. And with good reason. According to a survey by Syllabus Explorer, which monitors the most highly demanded books by teachers of four English-speaking countries – USA, England, Australia and New Zealand – the book’s English version is the 99th most cited book in academic works. But, if we consider only books about education, Pedagogy of the Oppressed leaps to second place, surpassed only by Teaching for Quality Learning in University: What the Student Does (1992), by Australian psychologist John Biggs.

According to the same research, the book had 1,021 citations. “It’s no small thing,” Nita emphasizes. “It came ahead of classics like King Lear, by William Shakespeare, Moby Dick, by Herman Melville, and Symposium, by Plato.” It is curious that of the hundred most recommended authors for reading in English-speaking universities, Freire

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is the only Brazilian. Syllabus Explorer is a project by the Sloan Foundation, a nonprofit organization that brings together researchers from universities in the United States, such as Harvard and Columbia. “Paulo Freire’s contributions to education are many. The main one is that which establishes a strong relationship between education and freedom. Education only makes sense if it is liberating,” says Colombian educator Ramon Moncada. “Another lesson: ‘It’s not that the world is, rather, it is being.’ This is why it is so important to read him. The reading of the world, Paulo said, precedes the reading of the word. Reading the world means understanding it, interpreting it and, above all, transforming it.”

On the other side of the Atlantic, Professor Eliott Green, of the London School of Economics, analyzed Freire’s works that were most cited in articles written in English using Google Scholar, a research tool dedicated to academic literature created in 2004. The study revealed that Pedagogia do oprimido is the third most cited book in the social sciences. According to the author of that study, Pedagogy of the oppressed is mentioned 72.3 thousand times, only surpassed by philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) and sociologist Everett Rogers (1931–2004), both Americans. Kuhn was mentioned 81.3 thousand times and Rogers 72.7 thousand. Once again, Paulo Freire came out ahead of heavyweights of universal literature, such as the French Michel Foucault (1926–1984) and the German Karl Marx (1818–1883). “His greatest legacy was to have taught us how to conjugate the word ‘to give hope.’ Instead of passively and resignedly hoping for things to change, we must act

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proactively for the desired change to become a reality. The future does not construct itself. It is we who construct it,” says Peruvian educator and sociologist Oscar Jara Holliday, president of the Council of Popular Education of Latin America in the Caribbean (Ceaal). “Paulo Freire did not die. He lives in the heart and mind of educators who seek to achieve his utopias in their day-to-day lives.”

In Europe, Paulo Freire’s work is as respected as it is in Africa or the Americas. Proof of this is the school by the name of Escola da Ponte, created in 1976 by Portuguese educator José Pacheco in the city of Porto, Portugal. Unlike other institutions, the Escola da Ponte does not have classes, disciplines, classrooms or tests. There, students of different ages get together based on common interests, such as languages, arts or sciences, to develop individual or group research projects. Each student chooses someone to act as his or her tutor, which can be any individual from the school community: parents, staff or teachers. Together, the student and tutor evaluate how the learning process is going, if the questions were cleared up and the contents assimilated. “Paulo Freire taught that schools are people and not buildings. More than ever, we need to humanize education,” José Pacheco stated by Zoom. “We cannot continue to give classes from the 19th century, with teachers from the 20th century, to students of the 21st century.”

Power through education Besides his honorary doctorate degrees, Paulo Freire also received invitations to lecture at universities such as Harvard, in the USA; Hamburg University, in Germany; and the Uni-

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versity of British Columbia, in Canada. Curiously, Paulo could read English well, but spoke and understood little in that language. Due to the insistence of his first wife, Elza Maia Costa de Oliveira (1916–1986), he sought to learn the language. “He used to joke that his English was so Brazilian northeastern that even Elza, who didn’t know the language, was able to understand it,” explains Sérgio Haddad, a doctor in history and philosophy of education from the University of São Paulo (USP) and author of O educador: um perfil de Paulo Freire (2019).

One of the many invitations to lecture abroad came from Martin Carnoy, a professor of education and economics at Stanford University, in the US. Until today, the economist has not forgotten the day he watched one of Freire’s famous literacy classes for adults in Nicaragua, in 1983. An old peasant, Carnoy describes, was standing at the blackboard, writing a word with a piece of chalk. At the same time that he was marking out the letters, he tried, with great difficulty, to spell them. After some minutes, which seemed like hours, he managed the feat. “For us, what that man did was something simple, commonplace. But for him, learning to read and write changed his life,” explains one of the organizers of the book Reinventando Freire (2018). “It is for this and other reasons that Paulo’s ideas are seen, by some, as a threat. In the US, he is an intellectual. But, in Brazil, he is a revolutionary who could empower the poorest people through education.”

Another person who had the opportunity to know Paulo Freire was Argentine sociologist Carlos Alberto Torres. A professor in the College of Education of the University

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of California, in Los Angeles, he is, in the words of Freire himself, “the person who most interviewed [him] in life.”

The interviews were so numerous that not even Torres remembers how many there were. One of them, however, he has never forgotten. It took place on the day Torres’s father died, in 1984. At that time, Torres was living in Mexico and, by coincidence, Freire was there working. When Freire heard about the death of his friend’s father, he asked to visit him. Torres hesitated. Due to Freire’s insistence, he invited him to dinner. When he opened the door, Paulo hugged him and said: “If you need a father, you can count on me!” “More than a simple pedagogue, Paulo Freire was a great philosopher. More than teaching students how to read and write, he wanted to form citizens.”

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“It is not possible, however, to reconcile democratic substantivity with the elitist authoritarian practices and attitudes of those who, deeming themselves the owners of revolutionary truth, transform the popular classes into a mere incidence of their words of order. Rather, democratic substantivity requires that we enter into communion with the popular masses, from whom we learn and to whom we teach in the common practice of liberation.”

This School Called Life: Testimonials to the Reporter Ricardo Kotscho

CREDITS , CAPTIONS AND EXHIBITION DETAILS

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ITAÚ CULTURAL President Alfredo Setubal Diretor Eduardo Saron OCCUPATION PAULO FREIRE Research, conception, curatorship and realization Itaú Cultural Exhibition design Thereza Faria Audiovisual research Ilka Hempfing (outsourced) Accessibility design Itaú Cultural AUDIOVISUAL IN LITERATURE TEAM Manager Claudiney Ferreira Coordination Kety Fernandes Nassar Audiovisual production Amanda Lopes, Camila Fink and Letícia Santos Editing Karina Fogaça EDUCATION AND RELATIONSHIPS TEAM Manager Valéria Toloi Coordination of public service and special projects Tayná Menezes Service team Amanda Freitas, Caroline Faro, Matheus Paz, Natasha Bernardo Marcondes, Victor Soriano and Vinícius Magnun Special projects team Thays Heleno Coordination of training Samara Ferreira Team Alessandra Silva Constantini (intern), Edinho dos Santos, Edson Bismark, Elissa Sanitá, Joelson Oliveira,

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Lucas Batista, Mayra Reis Rocha, Mônica Abreu Silva, Silas Barbosa (intern), Tonne de Andrade, Victória de Oliveira, Vítor Luz and Vitor Narumi COMMUNICATION AND RELATIONSHIPS TEAM Manager Ana de Fátima Sousa Coordinator Carlos Costa Editing and production of content Duanne Ribeiro, Fernanda Castello Branco and Milena Buarque Proofreading supervision Polyana Lima Translation John Norman (outsourced) Translation proofreading Denise Yumi (outsourced) Graphic design Guilherme Ferreira Visual communication Girafa Não Fala (outsourced), Guilherme Ferreira and Liane Tiemi (outsourced) Editorial production Victória Pimentel Graphic production Lilia Góes (outsourced) Photography editing André Seiti and Matheus Castro (intern) Social networks Helen Souza Couto (intern), Jullyanna Salles and Renato Corch INFRASTRUCTURE AND PRODUCTION TEAM Manager Gilberto Labor Exhibitions coordinator Vinícius Ramos Production Carmen Fajardo, Erica Pedrosa, Fabio Marotta, Priscila Tavares and Wanderley Bispo Events coordinator Januário Santis Production Eduardo Maffeis, Isadora Disero, Marcelo Rocha, Rafael Desimone and Wanderley Bispo

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Infrastructure coordinator Roseane Arbex Castro Production Agenor Silva Neto, Cintia Surianie, Fernanda Jesus, Matheus Feitosa (apprentice) and Wellington Rodrigues LEGAL CONSULTING Manager Anna Paula Montini Coordinator Daniel Lourenço Team Rafael Del Piero Fernandes ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Adriana Palú, Ana Mae Barbosa, Ana Maria Araújo Freire, Angela Antunes, Beá Meira, Célia Gambini, Cristina Freire, Escola Municipal de Saúde de São Paulo, Fátima Freire, Frei Betto, Gleyce Kelly Heitor, Helena Leal David, Instituto Francisco Brennand, Joaquim Freire, Lícia Morais, Lilian Contreiras, Lutgardes Freire, Madalena Freire, Marcos Guerra, Mario Sergio Cortella, Moacir Gadotti, Museu da Pessoa, Paulo Santiago de Augustinis, Secretaria Municipal de Educação de São Paulo, Sérgio Haddad, Sônia Madi, Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp), Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie and Walter Kohan Itaú Cultural (IC) made every effort to locate the holders of copyrights pertaining to the images/works shown and published herein, as well as the people photographed. If anyone recognizes himself or identifies some photograph they took, please contact us by the email atendimento@ itaucultural.org.br.

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In 2019, IC became part of the Fundação Itaú para Educação e Cultura, with the aim of furthermore ensuring the longevity of its actions and its legacy in the world of culture, enlarging and strengthening its proposal to inspire creative power for the transformation of people.

CAPTIONS AND CREDITS The illustrations of the present publication were made by illustrator Catarina Bessell. The collages were made based on photographs of Paulo Freire and members of his family.

Cover Image 1:Man wearing a hat | unknown photographer Image 2: Paulo Freire | photo: Amancio Chiodi Page 6 Image 3: Paulo Freire | photo: Amancio Chiodi Page 10 Image 4: Paulo Freire | photo: Amancio Chiodi Page 15 Image 5: Paulo Freire | Serviço Social da Indústria de Pernambuco (SESI/PE) Page 16 Image 6: House where Paulo Freire was born, on September 19, 1921. Estrada do Encanamento, 724, Casa Amarela, Recife (PE) | unknown photographer Image 7:

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Child with bicycle. Image from the "baby book" written

by Paulo Freire's mother to her son, during his childhood | Ana Maria Araújo Freire Collection Page 30 Image 8: Coordination meeting, Angicos (RN) | Secretariat of Education and Culture RN/Secern/archive Marcos Guerra and Moema Barreto Image 9: Paulo Freire | Serviço Social da Indústria de Pernambuco (Sesi/PE) Page 104 Image 10: Elza Freire and Paulo Freire | unknown photographer Image 11: Paulo Freire accompanied by a dog | unknown photographer Page 106 Image 12: Paulo Freire seated in an armchair, with chin resting on his hands | unknown photographer Page 114 Image 13: Paulo Freire and his son Lutgardes Freire | unknown photographer Image 14: Paulo Freire in 1947 | unknown photographer Page 127 Image 15: Edeltrudes Neves Freire, the educator’s mother | Lutgardes Freire collection Page 136 Image 16: Paulo Freire | photo: Amancio Chiodi

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OCUPAÇÃO PAULO FREIRE Opening Saturday September 28, 2021 at 11 a.m.

Visiting hours until Sunday December 5, 2021 Tuesday through Sunday 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Multiuse floor Free admission (appropriate for all ages) Itaú Cultural Avenida Paulista, 149, São Paulo, SP (near the Brigadeiro Subway Station)

Memória e Pesquisa | Itaú Cultural Ocupação Paulo Freire / organização Itaú Cultural. - São Paulo : Itaú Cultural, 2021.

8,5 Mb ; PDF Exposição realizada de 18 de setembro a 5 de dezembro de 2021, no Itaú Cultural.

ISBN 978-65-88878-22-4 DOI: https://doi.org/10.53343/9786588878224 Tradução: inglês 1. FREIRE, Paulo, 1921-1997. 2. Educação. 3. Pedagogia. 4.

Alfabetização. 5. Filosofia. I. Instituto Itaú Cultural. II. Título.

CDD 370.1 Bibliotecário Jonathan de Brito Faria - CRB-8/8697

Typographic families Giorgio Sans and Lyon Text Digital publication in PDF format Sao Paulo, Brazil, September 2021

“[...] for me, it is impossible to exist without a dream. The question that is posed, first, is whether the dream is historically viable. Second, if the dream’s viability requires a bit of time and space to walk. Third, if it requires an even longer space to walk and to become viable, it is the case of learning how to walk and, in walking, to also learn to make the dream come true, that is, to seek the paths of the dream.”

This School Called Life: Testimonials to the Reporter Ricardo Kotscho