Reading the Local, Transforming the World: Paulo Freire at a Community Program in Michigan

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: Freirean Perspectives on the Struggles for Social Justice

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to investigate how Paulo Freire’s educational praxis has contributed, or how it could contribute, to a community program in the United States that uses Place-based Education (PBE) to inform its practice. Besides the theoretical inquiry of Freire’s writings and PBE literature, I reviewed the organization's internal documents and observed its events. I described activities that teachers embedded in their practice, such as Discussing the Root Causes of Pollution, Mapping the Commons, Reading and Transforming the School Landscape, and Creating Local Art Projects. In these cross-curricular projects, we see that Freire's pedagogical praxis elements, such as the reading of the world and the word, have been reinvented according to the context of Southeast Michigan.

Author

• Miriam Furlan Brighente, Eastern Michigan University