Professor Larry Saha will present this session in the current seminar series.  It will take place in Room 2175 of the Haydon-Allen Building, ANU.

Paulo Freire (1921 – 1997) – a Brazilian, a teacher, a revolutionary, a political exile, a critical theorist, and some say, a mystic. During his life he was regarded as “the best known educator of our time”. However, his critics sometimes called him an idealist, a romantic, a Marxist, and “[intellectually] deformed”.  Theoretically, he was an eclectic and borrowed from a wide range of social theorists. He taught for a time at Harvard and received honorary degrees from over 20 universities. But he was, above all, an activist who believed in “praxis” and had as his primary goal the liberation of the poor, the oppressed and the illiterate from their social and political condition. In this seminar I will focus on Freire’s theory of critical pedagogy, and of his notion of conscientização and education for liberation. I will also discuss whether his literacy method actually worked, and the extent to which he influenced a number of campaigns among newly independent post-colonial countries from the 1960s to around 2000, especially the “controversial” Guinea-Bissau campaign. My main focus will be on the successes and failures of these campaigns, and the extent to which, or how, they contributed to socio-economic development. I will also show and discuss, technology permitting, a short video of the last interview with Freire before he passed away in 1997.