A Conceptual Dialogue Between Freedom, Education, and Democracy: Freire’s Pedagogy of Freedom and a Research Project on Education for Democracy

• In Event: Education for Democracy in the Age of Neoliberalism

Abstract

The choice of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of Freedom for AERA’s 2014 conference not only honours Freire’s legacy but also offers the opportunity for scholars and activists to make tangible and critical linkages with contemporary socio-educational issues. This proposal seeks to use the Pedagogy of Freedom as a conceptual framework to analyze, interrogate and extrapolate from a research project entitled Democracy, political literacy, and the quest for transformative education. The project relates to how future and present educators experience and conceptualize education in/with/through and, specifically, for democracy. Freire’s work allows us to re-consider and re-examine political literacy, social justice and democracy in relation to education. The notion of freedom is also further problematized with the assistance of Freire’s work.

Authors

• Gina Thesee, University of Quebec - Montreal

• Paul R. Carr, Université du Québec en Outaouais