Freire, literacy and emancipatory gender

learning

Nelly P.Stromquist

International Review of Education

Journal of Lifelong Learning
ISSN 0020-8566
Int Rev Educ
DOI 10.1007/s11159-014-9424-2

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Author's personal copy

Int Rev Educ
DOI 10.1007/s11159-014-9424-2

Freire, literacy and emancipatory gender learning

Nelly P. Stromquist

Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht and UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning 2014

Abstract The contributions to education of one of the great Latin American

thinkers, Paulo Freire, have been enormous. His voice and wisdom have inspired
educators globally. Three particular contributions to emancipation, to literacy, and
to dialogue are explored in this article through a critical lens. From a gender
perspective, Freires path to consciousness-raising is crucial for emancipation but so
also is empowerment, a notion contributed by the womens movement. Adult literacy, Freires vehicle to raise consciousness, has been challenged by a recognition
of the complexity underlying its acquisition, a factor we still have to incorporate in
training and teaching programmes. Dialogical approaches in adult education,
essential as they are to the attainment of deeper understanding of social phenomena
and the possibility of consensual social action, build on a long trajectory of efforts to
use public space for collective advancement. Situating Freire against a denser
historical background enables the recognition of his merits and at the same time
rescues the confluence of similar perceptions as well as different ideas in the
construction of our contemporary world.
Keywords

Literacy
Gender
Culture circles
Freire
Empowerment

Resume Freire, alphabetisation et apprentissage emancipateur a` lequite entre les

sexes Les contributions a` leducation de lun des grands penseurs latino-americains, Paulo Freire, sont immenses. Sa parole et sa sagesse inspirent des educateurs
dans le monde entier. Trois de ses contributions a` lemancipation, a` lalphabetisation et au dialogue sont soumises dans le present article a` un examen critique.
Sagissant de lequite entre les sexes, la demarche de Freire en faveur de la conscientisation est decisive pour lemancipation, mais tout autant lautonomisation,
notion emanant du mouvement feministe. Lalphabetisation des adultes, pour Freire
N. P. Stromquist (&)
University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
e-mail: stromqui@umd.edu

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vecteur permettant daccrotre la prise de conscience, comporte le defi de tenir

compte de la complexite de son acquisition, facteur que nous devons encore integrer
dans les programmes de formation et denseignement. Les approches dialogiques de
leducation des adultes, aussi essentielles quelles soient pour mieux comprendre les
phenome`nes sociaux et conduire a` une action sociale consensuelle, dependent dune
longue serie defforts pour exploiter lespace public en vue du developpement
collectif. Positionner Freire dans un contexte historique plus dense permet de
reconnatre ses merites, mais aussi dintegrer des perceptions similaires et des idees
differentes dans la construction de notre monde contemporain.
This article contains ideas originally presented in a panel at the XV World Congress of
Comparative Education Societies (WCCES) in Buenos Aires in July 2013. The panel
focused on a paper by Carlos Torres (2013) on Paulo Freires various contributions to
popular education and a better world. My own paper and those of others in the panel were
responses to the main arguments proposed by Torres. My comments seek to situate
Freires contributions in a larger historical context involving knowledge production and
political emancipation. My perspectives are in the form of three points: Freires
contributions to emancipation along gender lines, the acquisition and assessment of
literacy in adulthood, and the notion of study circles as participatory venues.

Emancipation along gender lines

Women continue to constitute two-thirds of the worlds illiterates (UIS 2010), making
the gender aspect of illiteracy crucial. The persistent majority of women among
illiterates occurs not because women are less able learners but rather reflects the impact
of the domestic division of labour and beliefs about the role of men and women in
society which function to the disadvantage of women in low-income households.
Among school-goers, girls perform better than boys in reading. This outcome
suggests gender effects, because masculinity conceptions of boys and men as more
active, particularly outdoors, foster the notion that reading (being at home, in solitude,
and being silent, usually passive) is a more feminine engagement. Other factors have
been identified: differences between girls and boys in cognitive development, lack of
role models to encourage boys to read more, and a curriculum content disconnected
from boys lives (Booth et al. 2008), but these factors likely play a weaker role than
different everyday practices between girls and boys. According to the latest PISA
results (2012), female adolescent students outperform their male counterparts in
reading in all participating countries, although the difference is slight (by an average of
39 points (6.5%) on a 600-point scale (OECD 2013). This curious situation, that so
many adult women in developing countries are unable to read while girls outperform
boys in reading in the industrialised world, should not be too surprising: in the absence
of infrastructure such as access to drinking water, fuel and electricity, poor women
conduct domestic chores which occupy a significant portion of their time; in more
advanced societies, women and girls spend more time than men and boys at home. In
both cases, gender forces are at work.

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Since the great majority of illiterates are poor women, efforts to provide literacy
cannot bypass the consideration of gender. Likewise, such efforts must be aimed at
enabling women participants to acquire higher levels of social engagement. In this
regard, the contributions of Freire have been considerable.
The writings of Freire, particularly those contained in Pedagogy of the Oppressed
(Freire 1970), have been critical to our understanding of the constant political nature
of education in everyday life and how education can be used as an effective space
for political transformation. He is one of the first scholars to argue that education is
political and as such can never be neutral, and that formal education works either for
the domestication of learners or for liberation (Freire 1985, p. 131). Freire has
contributed more than any other educator to the realisation that school is a place
where more than a formal curriculum is acquired. This has helped to deploy a
critical pedagogy in the classroom which creates an understanding of power,
oppression, domination and ideology.
Through Freire too, we have gained an understanding of the importance of
ideological struggle which, as extended by feminist thinkers, has meant an
awareness of the importance of fighting patriarchal ideologies. Freires concepts of
oppressed/oppressor, a binary situation in which we are all involved, has brought
challenges to a simplistic understanding of liberation. He advocated breaking the
culture of silence, an advice of particular relevance to the feminist struggle, as it
meant gaining a voice to address previously taboo or invisibilised subjects such as
domestic violence, rape and sexual harassment. His admonition to engage not just in
question-posing but in problem-posing inspired many to explore new forms of
learning, with both students and teachers engaged in a two-way learning
environment and thus the establishment of horizontal relations in the classroom.
The notion of consciousness-raising, perhaps the single most salient contribution by
Freire, has meant revisiting our daily realities. Through consciousness-raising, many
educators and students alike have grown to be more attentive to causeeffect
relationships, not taking social life for granted but questioning it.
Freire recognised disadvantage arising from class, race and gender. His usual
treatment, however, is essentially one of class awareness (Kincheloe and Steinberg
2007). During his exile in Chile during 19641969 (when Eduardo Frei, not
Salvador Allende, was president), Freire was greatly affected by the political
climate in this country, which had initiated a land reform to integrate poor farmers
into modern forms of organisation and production (Holst 2006). His major concern
at that time was indeed the abysmal difference between peasants and large
landowners. In later works, he could have identified (but did not) a specific group of
oppressors or oppressed. Though he recognised schools as sexist and
acknowledged the existence of patriarchy in his later works, he did not expound
on these issues. The most visible change regarding gender in Freires writing is his
occasional use of both masculine and feminine pronouns.1 This limited concession
1

bell hooks, an American feminist who has been greatly influenced by Freire, holds this was sexist,
given the language of his early works (hooks 1993). The English translation of Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, published in 1970, preceded the vibrancy of the womens movement and it would not be
correct to judge him by current standards. However, in subsequent writings, Freire could indeed have
been more responsive to gender issues.

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is surprising, given his assertion in a later book addressed to those who dare teach
that [t]here are no themes or values of which one cannot speak nor areas in which
one must be silent. We can talk about everything, and we can give testimony about
everything (Freire 1998, p. 58). Aided by the experience of many women-led
NGOs throughout the world and the systematic analysis of gender studies in
universities, feminists have gone beyond Freire and learned the following three
lessons:
First, societys public sphere is crucially important as Freire suggested. But we
must also look at the private sphere, and at the two both separately and then jointly;
in other words, if we are to understand the constraints women face in public arenas,
we need to understand that the often unrelenting demands of the private sphere have
considerable consequences for their participation (or not) in the public sphere.
Women experience significant problems balancing home and work duties which
men simply do not face a phenomenon that cuts across social class. Constant
household practices also have repercussions on the creation of distinct female and
male identities. This realisation has made it possible to identify the limits of many
social policies in advancing the condition of women.
Second, the notion of empowerment, enticing at first, is multidimensional and a
difficult undertaking, demanding the development of skills and strategies to engage
in political action, beyond awareness-raising and beyond reflection of ones social
and economic environment. Feminists have learned that efforts to empower adult
women must include not only literacy training but also transformative education
content through non-formal and informal learning. Irrespective of whether or not the
programme content and processes raise ones awareness of exploitation, literacy per
se does not empower students, although it does provide women with a greater sense
of self-efficacy, which can be taken as a precursor to empowerment (Stromquist
1997, 2002, 2009; Prins 2008). Women advocating for social change realise the
need for specific targets of action, in which the oppressor attains a concrete
embodiment while intersecting with such factors as social class, ethnicity and
religion (among other social markers). It should be noted that although the concept
of empowerment is often attributed to Freire, who frequently invoked the reality and
function of power, the term empowerment does not appear in his books.
Empowerment is clearly an extension of Freires consciousness-raising concept
and is a process in which many women throughout the world have engaged and for
whom a struggle specifically against patriarchal norms was indispensable.
The notion of empowerment, which circulated among feminist groups since the
late 1970s, received international attention when it was incorporated in 1994 into
the United Nations Programme of Action of the International Conference on
Population and Development (Presser and Sen 2000) as part of womens demands
to obtain reproductive rights. Highly developed by Indian feminists, a core feature
of empowerment is the capacity to gain control over ones own life. From their
experience, Programs that change awareness without leading to greater access to
material resources can lead to frustration and high drop-out rates (Sen and
Batliwala 2000, p. 19).
Third, women in the feminist movement have recognised the need to move from
formal to substantive citizenship looking at the systematic barriers set up by

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patriarchal legacies. But they are also concerned with equal outcomes. Womens
experience has taught them that organisation is one of the most effective means for
social change, which explains the large number of women-led NGOs throughout the
world. Cultivation of empowerment involves collective action as a tool for effective
agency, a task often conducted by womens organisations (Stromquist 2002; see
also Parpart et al. 2002; Staudt 2002; Bodur and Franceshet 2002).
Certainly, Freire makes reference to praxis, but how one moves from
consciousness-raising to praxis is not problematised; in other words, he did not
dwell to any substantial extent on the need for organised and collective action. In
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire (1970, p. 53) noted that while no one liberates
himself by his own efforts alone, neither is he liberated by others. He also
remarked that the oppressed must confront reality critically, simultaneously
objectifying and acting upon that reality, adding that a mere perception of reality
not followed by this critical intervention will not lead to a transformation of
objective reality precisely because it is not a true perception (ibid., p. 37). These
observations certainly envisage action, as much as do his references to praxis, but
Freire remains short on actual mobilisation. In fact, at one point he argues, There is
not one stage for dialogue and another for revolution. On the contrary, dialogue is
the essence of revolutionary action (ibid., p. 130, footnote 10). Many would find
the equation of dialogue with action extreme. Knowing about ones reality
empowers a person, but to act upon reality requires additional knowledge, skills and
the creation of effective collective conditions. Esther Gottlieb and Thomas La Belle
(1990), examining the impact of consciousness-raising in many Latin American
popular education programmes over a 10-year period, concluded that there was
significant impact on the articulation of opinion regarding repression, corruption and
dependency, but that little change occurred in the absence of social organisation and
political action.

Literacy acquisition and assessment in adulthood

Freire proposed a very creative blend of literacy acquisition, combining its
deployment as a political tool and as a content which resonated with adult learners.
As a political tool, literacy was conceived to promote conscientisation or the
awareness of how macro-level economic and sociological forces impinge on
individual lives to create either advantage or disadvantage, which translate into
oppressing or oppressed classes. Literacy as content meant the use of emotionally
charged terms, the use of a vocabulary with which the learners were familiar, the
use of their own experience to break the distance between literacy and daily life all
of which was accomplished through the selection of generative words and
generative themes.
Having honoured Freires contribution to literacy, it should be added that the
development of literacy skills is a complex process, one that needs time to be
acquired, constant practice over time, and a supportive print environment.

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The acquisition of literacy skills

The early attention given to Freire in Brazil was predicated on his claim that his
method could make a person literate in 40 days through the use of dialogue and
culture circles in which persons without literacy skills would not only understand
the word but also the world (Brandao 1981). The first massive testing of Freires
method took place with 300 sugarcane workers in February/March 1963 in Angicos,
a small town in an impoverished state in Northeast Brazil. This success led Joao
Goulart, then president of Brazil, to consider the creation of 20,000 culture circles
throughout Brazil, aimed at serving two million adults a plan that was cut short by
a military coup detat. The possibility of such a short literacy programme being a
success was not restated in Freires subsequent work, including Pedagogy of the
Oppressed (Freire 1970), which he revisits in a later book, Pedagogy of Hope
(Freire 2004). That adults could gain literacy in as little as 40 h has not been
validated by any research studies. Indeed, one cannot acquire literacy in 40 h any
more than one can learn to speak English in 10 days or play the piano in 6 weeks.
Literacy is more easily acquired among children than adults, the same way children
can learn more easily than adults to speak a foreign language or to swim. Of course,
it also depends on what definition of literacy is being used. Writing ones name and
crafting a simple sentence based on words and sentence structures the student knows
are certainly possible after a short time.
Nonetheless, the promise of literacy in only 40 h was made by Freire and
accepted by many. It is worth comparing Angicos with Cubas post-revolutionary
literacy campaign in 1961. This campaign was characterised by unusual care in its
design, training of literacy teachers, and logistical and pedagogical support during
its four-month run. Learners met four times a week for 90 min at a time, so the
literacy classes took 96 h to complete. Moreover, these skills were built upon by
widespread post-literacy programmes, so it is difficult to ascertain what was due
exclusively to the initial literacy classes.
Based on the experience with the 1961 literacy campaign, Cuban educators at the
Institute of Pedagogy for Latin America and the Caribbean (IPLAC) developed an
innovative programme called Yes, I Can (Yo, s puedo) in 2000, by now
implemented in 28 countries. Yo, s puedo uses generative themes (as Freire
proposes), but these do not seek consciousness-raising and are defined as issues that
make a specific point or raise an idea, while each lesson contains a positive
message (Boughton et al. 2013). The method provides 65 lessons, each of which
includes a DVD class 20 min in duration, around which literacy instructors develop
their classes totalling 2 h each. This means 130 h, 34 h more than the initial Cuban
literacy campaign.2
Freires Angicos experience has to be regarded with some caution, while taking
care not to diminish its merits. The literacy teachers or monitors were all
politically progressive university students, eager to work with the poor towards their
2

A formal evaluation of Yo, s puedo sponsored by UNESCO (2006) found the method to apply a rather
traditional view of language learning (ibid., p. 4), as it did not incorporate new developments in literacy
or take into account the students prior learning. Yo s puedo, however, has contributed to giving greater
salience to the problem of illiteracy in the Latin American region.

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advancement of citizenship. About 30 per cent of these monitors came from schools
of education; the rest from other disciplines. Although they received a four-day
training, particularly as dialogue coordinators (Kirkendall 2010), there is little
evidence of their understanding of literacy among adults and there are no records of
the assessment tools used to register literacy improvement. But Angicos indeed had
high political visibility, as indicated by the fact that the then president of Brazil,
Joao Goulart, came to deliver the final literacy lesson.
Literacy as a complex cognitive process
Attainment of a useful level of literacy involves multiple aspects of language
acquisition and use. Complex models of literacy include phonological, phonemical,
orthographic and lexical aspects all linguistic elements considered the basic
building blocks towards comprehension (Perfetti 2009). Comprehension, of course,
is the final objective of print literacy: if we cannot acquire meaning from text, the
activity of decoding is in vain.
Some important debates surrounding early literacy acquisition (i.e., literacy
among young children) such as that between a pedagogical strategy which focuses
on phonemic awareness versus one which emphasises a whole language approach
(i.e., learning words as units) have not significantly touched adult literacy
discussions. Evidence of the typically light approach to adult literacy is reflected in
the prevailing belief among literacy programme designers, especially in developing
countries, that anybody who can read can teach other adults to read, thus the use of
volunteers to conduct literacy classes. Criticism of the ineffectiveness of this
light approach is also evident in the persistent call by those working on literacy for
the professionalisation of adult education, including greater involvement of
universities in supporting adult learning and education a call most recently made
by representatives from 46 African countries at the African regional conference that
took place in preparation for CONFINTEA VI (UIL 2008). Today, the complexity
of our understanding of early literacy is increasing with developments in neurology,
which are leading to examinations of how the brain processes written messages
(Goswami 2008). In contrast, when considering adult literacy, a common
assumption is that reading is a straightforward skill, easily acquired in a short
time span.
The assessment of adult literacy
Globally, measurement of literacy usually incorporated into census data has
generally been reduced to either self-assessment (the case for most national
assessments of literacy) or a proxy measure (in which a certain number of years of
schooling is deemed to indicate literacy). We know, however, that people tend to
overestimate their literacy skills and that years of schooling per se are a poor
measure as the quality of such schooling affects what is learned (Wagner 2005).
In the past two decades we have made substantial progress in the conceptualisation of literacy, abandoning the simple and binary measurement of literacy/
illiteracy. A framework developed in 1998 by Irwin Kirsch of the Educational

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Testing Service (ETS New Jersey) and Peter Mosenthal of Syracuse University
enables us to think of literacy as a continuum (Kirsch et al. 1998). In their
conceptualisation, literacy is taken mostly as synonymous with reading and involves
five levels, all the way from basic to advanced comprehension. Their test also
measures literacy along three dimensions: prose literacy (reading continuous text),
document literacy (reading discontinuous text such as tables, forms, maps), and
quantitative literacy (being able to perform arithmetic calculations).
Abandoning the binary measurement of literacy requires employing a fine-grain
test. The one developed by ETS takes 90 min to administer, which means it has to
be done through sampling and the use of more sophisticated tools as well as the
employment of someone competent to administer the test a time-intensive and
expensive operation. But we are learning surprising facts through these assessments.
For instance, even though the U.S. has a literacy rate of 99 per cent based on the
proportion of its population with at least fourth-grade education, one out of three
fourth-graders in this country cannot read at even the basic level (National
Assessment of Educational Progress, cited in Perfetti 2009). A previous test, the
1994 U.S. National Literacy Survey, found that 50 per cent of the minority groups
with a tenth-grade education could read at only fifth-grade level (Wagner 2005).
The literacy conditions of schooled people in developing countries are also poor. A
survey conducted by the World Bank in Bangladesh found that five years of
schooling produced at most the equivalent of a first-grade reading achievement
(Greaney et al., cited in Wagner 2005).
Complicating the assessment of adult literacy is that those who come to literacy
programmes comprise at least four kinds of illiterate persons: (1) those who never
went to school and may not even recognise letters of the alphabet, (2) those who
attended a few years of primary school and forgot much (but not all) of what they
learned, (3) those who attended several years of primary school but did not develop
a high reading competence, and (4) those who did not learn to read due to learning
problems. Confounding the understanding of literacy acquisition among adults is
that by now the beginning of the 21st century many adults have been through
school. Although those who come to literacy programmes as I discovered in my
4-year study of Freires MOVA literacy programme for youths and adults in Sao
Paulo in 19891992 may have problems reading and writing and may have serious
comprehension problems, many of them have had several years of basic education
(Stromquist 1997). Further, the context in which these persons live, which is of great
importance, ranges from ample access to print on a daily basis in urban settings (as,
for example, in the environment of a multi-million inhabitant city such as Sao
Paulo) to settings (mostly rural) without access to print messages. This means that
illiterates have faced and will continue to encounter varying opportunities during
their adulthood to increase their opportunity for developing literacy skills. It must be
noted that, sensitive to this disparity, Yo, s puedo classifies literacy students in three
groups: absolute illiterates, semi-literates (defined as those who have been through
school), and special illiterates (those with learning difficulties).
Through an OECD initiative, a test similar to the one developed by ETS has been
applied recently in 24 countries for the first time. It goes by the name of Programme
for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). To be sure, this

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more sophisticated assessment of literacy did not exist at the time of Angicos. What
is surprising, however, is how little the concept of varying levels of participants
literacy continues to be applied to adult literacy programmes. Consequently, even
today, most program evaluation work does not use sufficiently robust methods that
would allow for serious skill measurement (Wagner 2005, p. 13). I would add that
the evaluation of any literacy programme should include the use of both pre- and
post-tests because the mix of students (i.e., the varying levels of literacy they bring
with them) will impact their performance at the end of their participation, typically
the only measurement used to judge a programmes success.
While we have made advances measuring literacy, we still have to increase our
understanding of the lives of adult illiterates, most of which are characterised by
poverty, unemployment, energy-intensive jobs, health issues, chronic physical
violence, and crime (Stromquist 1997; Boughton et al. 2013). As Bob Boughton
et al. (2013, p. 15) put it, literacy must confront the chaos of life at the margins.
We must also come to terms with the realities of adult literacy: for them it is a
difficult process, one that is resource-intensive if it is to be sustainable. Concern for
the high cost of literacy at the time of adulthood, however, should not deter us from
recognising its crucial importance, as educated parents are the best predictors of
student success in schooling.

Study circles as participatory venues

It is amazing to observe how many crucial developments in society occur
simultaneously; it is also comforting to see how many innovations build on previous
human efforts. My third and final reflection is on one of those innovations: the
notion of study or culture circles a pedagogical strategy central to the development
of political awareness or conscientisation.
The idea of creating a learning environment in which people arranged in a circle
debate their conditions, analyse them, and seek collective solutions has been in
existence for a long time. One of the earliest documented cases is the Folk Schools
in Denmark developed in 1844 by Nikolaj Grundtvig, an exceptional person who
was a pastor, a poet, a philosopher, a historian, and a politician (Rasmussen 2013).
The form of popular education in Scandinavia, known as Folkbildning (or peoples
learning), has been crucial to the development of a democratic citizenship in that
part of the world. The Folk School used study circles, with farmers in rural areas and
workers in the cities, as a means to develop dialogue among participants regarding
the formation of Danish nationhood, given the considerable tensions with Germany
and Prussia. The model quickly expanded to Sweden and Norway and continues into
the present. In these study circles, a small group of people meet mostly at night,
since many work during the day to study a certain subject or theme. Through
exchanges of experiences, ideas, and analyses within the group, participants deepen
their social, cultural, and political understanding of their environment. Themes
include such issues as human rights and, today, global justice and multiculturalism.
Sweden, which has developed into the most adult education-sensitive country, uses
study circles as a key pedagogical strategy. These circles serve as public arenas in

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which different groups express their positions and develop their own knowledge. It
is estimated that in Sweden about 75 per cent of the population aged 1875 has
participated in a study circle. The Scandinavian Folk High School (as it is now
known) model has also influenced popular educators in the U.S., the most famous
being the Highlander Folk School founded by Myles Horton in Tennessee in 1932,
which played a notable role in the formation of Civil Rights activists, including
Rosa Parks.
A similar model of great importance from the political conceptualisation
perspective is the study circle or cultural circle proposed by Antonio
Gramsci during the late 1910s and the 1920s (Gramsci 2007). The Italian
philosopher advocated adult programmes through factory councils, which used
study circles to enable the workers to educate themselves, gather experience, and
become aware of power relations (Mayo 2008). These circles were essential to
Gramscis notion of war of position, which he saw as a process of wide ranging
social organization and cultural influence (ibid., p. 420). Through these cultural
study circles, he sought to use education as the key to the creation of systematic
and effective counter-hegemonic action (ibid., p. 432). Gramsci created the
Institute of Proletarian Culture, further inspired by Russian efforts to politicise the
proletariat, but this institute lasted only a short time because of the arrival of fascism
in Italy. An essential feature of the Gramscian approach to adult learning is that the
teacher/student relationship must be active and reciprocal, so that every teacher is
always a pupil and every pupil a teacher. Gramsci was convinced that the teacher
who limits himself/herself to the transmission of facts was mediocre so he
advocated instead dialogue, participation, and critical analysis of ones environment. In his view, the knowledge acquired in the workplace by the workers
themselves would lead to greater understanding of the functioning of society. The
sound political features of Gramscis cultural circles have inspired many popular
educators throughout the world.
Contributions from dialogical processes the essence of study circles have also
been made by critical theory, as proposed by the Frankfurt School3 from the 1940s
to the present, which addressed the importance of dialogue and the use of public
spaces (particularly Habermas 1987). Although the Frankfurt School did not
identify schools or classrooms as public spaces, they certainly are, for it is there that
students of various communities and social classes come together. Freire, through
his later writings, clearly utilises the school as a public sphere, and deepens this by
using the classroom as a site to discuss daily life. It must be remarked, however, that
as schooling is becoming increasingly segregated by social class throughout the
world, this public space will suffer as it also becomes homogenous by social class
and the opportunities for exchange of different experiences and points of view are
diminished.
Yet another effort to apply dialogical approaches to a public space has been
carried out by the feminist movement, which has implemented study circles or
3

Originating in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in Germany, the
Frankfurt school gathered philosophers, sociologists, art critics, psychologists, among others, who held
that Western principles such as positivism and materialism needed to be questioned in order to advance
social development.

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consciousness-raising approaches (which the feminist movement termed CR) since

the mid-1960s. CR called for meetings of small groups of women in private homes
to discuss and analyse womens conditions. These meetings soon spread throughout
the United States, prompting some observers to consider CR the backbone of the
womens liberation movement. The Red Stockings, a radical feminist group
located in New York and founded in 1969, developed this approach to discuss
womens personal experiences with male oppression and to find commonalities in
the struggle against patriarchy (see also Castells 2004, pp. 235243). Carol Hanisch,
one of the leading feminists of her time, explained the origins of CR thus:
Im pretty sure none of us knew Freires work. We developed consciousnessraising from experience in the Mississippi Freedom Movement in 196465,
from reading about the Chinese Revolution, and probably a little osmosis from
Marx via the parents of some in our group, New York Radical Women. Since
Im not familiar with Freire, I have no idea how closely his ideas resemble
ours or vice versa (personal e-mail communication, 3 March 2014).
The feminist CR is a remarkable example of how a concept can be developed
independently and simultaneously by different authors. CR practices continue in the
work of women-led NGOs throughout the world. Often, these CR approaches are
not conducted as separate exercises today but embedded in broader non-formal
educational interventions.
At the time of Freires use of culture circles, Brazil was in a period of great
ebullience, full of cultural popular movements (movimentos populares de cultura,
MCP), student-led popular culture centres (centros de cultura popular do
movimento estudiantil, CPC), and multiple grassroots efforts under the auspices
of the Catholic Church (Movimento de Educacao de Base da Igreja Catolica)
(Brandao 1981). This social energy inspired Freire, and Freires theoretical and
philosophical principles in turn enriched Brazilian popular education and beyond.
Later, when Freire offered assistance to the literacy campaign efforts going on in
Guinea-Bissau, he would remind us of the purpose of such circles:
A further example is that in some instances what we customarily refer to as
post-literacy is actually preceding basic literacy work This is an instance of
what I have always believed, namely, that the literacy education of adults is
really a process of cultural action. The very designation culture circles
rather than adult literacy classes was intended to emphasize this point. The
reading or rereading of reality as it is being transformed is the primary
consideration, taking precedence over the mere learning of the written
language. Even in teaching children, the process is social and involves
reading the world (Freire 1983, p. 160).

In summary
Paulo Freire, a philosopher and educator who has made enormous contributions to
adult education and emancipatory pedagogy, has seen many of his concepts resonate

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with educators concerned with social inequalities, motivating them to treat formal
education as transformative despite the many reproductive forces it carries.
Other social thinkers and movements, earlier and simultaneous to Freire, have
contributed to a deeper understanding of social phenomena and what it would take
to resolve pervasive and ingrained problems facing individuals and groups. Literacy
is a complex field that has been benefiting from advances in our mapping of
cognitive development; adult literacy is even more complex and progress in this
area has still miles to tread. Empowerment within the womens movement has
implied not only profound gender emancipatory learning and sociocultural
awareness but also an understanding of the indispensable need to have clear and
specific political goals, to seek allies, and to develop tools and strategies to foster as
well as to engage in political action. Empowerment, indeed, goes beyond
consciousness-raising. The association of dialogue with reflexivity and understanding of social inequities has had a long gestation across times and societies; in all of
these efforts, the small-size group and open discussion have been common features.
As beneficiaries of Freires immense legacy, we should put his contributions in a
wider historical perspective, acknowledging how his particular ideas and impact
built on and fit into the work of others who preceded him. Our future will be always
stronger when we recognise that knowledge is cumulative and thus a collective
process.

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The author
Nelly P. Stromquist is professor in the International Education Policy programme of the College of
Education at the University of Maryland, USA. She specialises on issues related to international
development education and gender, which she examines from a critical sociology perspective. Her
research interests focus on the dynamics among educational policies and practices, gender relations and
social change. Her most recent books include The World Bank and Education: Critiques and Alternatives
(co-edited with Steven Klees and Joel Samoff), Globalization and Education: Integration and
Contestation Across Cultures (co-edited with Karen Monkman), and Feminist Organizations and Social
Transformation in Latin America.

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