What Is Important About the Importance?

• In Event: Reading Critical Pedagogies, Reading Paulo Freire

Abstract

This session has been created as a dialogue with Freire, all of us attempting to contextualize critical pedagogies within the present and future. Seeking to find a definitive piece from Freire to do so, we wanted to speak not only to his development of the field, but to his own professional etymology. We sought an example of his work that could elicit memories within those who began in the 1980s and early 90s, many of whom knew Paulo. Finding this accessible piece, including pinches of social theory, we knew it spoke to both teachers and scholars. Significant to this endeavor was to locate writing that would elicit a critical pedagogical nostalgia, remind us of Freire's oeuvre, and to allow thoughts to associate freely with his words.

This text takes us to the essential beginnings of our own critical pedagogies, to context, and to the essence of how we came to be. Freire's piece witnesses the union of the personal and the political self within Freire, and sets up our own scholarship as we reflect within this session.

Author

• Shirley R. Steinberg, University of Calgary