Critical pedagogy and educational research in the U.S. and Brazil:

Tricia Kress,Simone Silveira Amorim,Patricia Krueger-Henney

doi:10.22409/resa2021.v14iesp..a52498

Tricia Kress, Simone Silveira Amorim + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.22409/resa2021.v14iesp..a52498

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Abstract

This text presents partial results of an international collaborative project, which has Paulo Freire's philosophy as a pillar. This article is both a descriptive report and also a register of individual and collective questions about the intentions of the project in relation to its outcomes and implications. The project was developed as an international partnership between three researchers from three different universities, Tiradentes University (Aracaju, Brazil), the University of Massachusetts Boston (Massachusetts, USA), and Molloy College (New York, USA). The perspectives of Freire's pistemological curiosity (2019) and critical awareness (1967) provide the foundation for our discussion, as this article aims to present the results of the International Dialogical Seminar as an integral part of the project. The voices of the participants (teachers and students) will be the focus with the intention to weave links between them, shedding light on the results of this collaboration of teaching and research across borders. Our work speaks to the importance of transnational and local dialogic spaces for teaching and researching as we have been doing in this work together. The intersections of our worldviews and lifeworlds enable us to see how much more needs to be done to ferret out social injustice locally and globally, and sometimes in our own practices as researchers and educators. Yet, our work also offers hope and possibility as we see the power of epistemological curiosity and dialogue in bringing about strengthened critical consciousness. Freire's work for and contributions to social change remains current and relevant.

Highlights

COLLABORATIVE INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH FIELDWORK The research portion of the project was three-fold
RESEARCHER REFLECTIONS This transnational teaching-research project confirms the numerous ways that Freire’s philosophy and pedagogy continues to speak to and hold the current historical moment, which is marked by the intensification of human and national crises that leave undeniable footprints on education systems around the world
What does Freire tell us about how critical pedagogy must help us, researchers, process and struggle against the horrors in the world, and not limit our scholarly work to only name and document them? In what ways does, or must, bearing witness to people’s lives under the reigns of injustice change, and require us to move our critically pedagogical practices from serving descriptive purposes to seeking collaborative curiosity, igniting critical inquiry, and participating in liberation? What are we to do with the physiological manifestations that are re/produced by this work?

Summary

Introduction

COLLABORATIVE INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH FIELDWORK The research portion of the project was three-fold. We witnessed the ways Freire’s work continues to pedagogically inform, guide and inspire various learning and teaching communities in three different geopolitical spaces: Aracaju (Brazil), New York City/Long Island (NY), and Boston (MA). This transnational collaboration was based on applying some of the particularities of Freire’s critical pedagogy to its design and implementation (i.e. respecting local struggles and acknowledging that the teaching and learning communities we visited already existed before and not as a result of this study). We each incorporated dimensions of Freire’s philosophy in our own classroom pedagogies and research practices with graduate students, including facilitating student-centered group work and experiential teaching and learning activities

Objectives

Conclusion