Could Paulo Freire Be Considered an Influential Scholar Today?

• In Event: From The Pedagogy of the Oppressed to the Struggles Against the Oppressors

Abstract

In 2021 after 50 years of the original publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, there is a large industry of people profiting from repeating Freire’s ideas -I am well aware that this text is another small contribution to such industry- but I firmly believe that contemporary social scientists could greatly benefit from reflecting about Freire’s long term powerful conceptual, pedagogical, and political impact, and in particular about what’s worth measuring to assess the relevance of contemporary social sciences. In this conceptual paper, I propose to reflect on Freire’s unique approach to scholarship as way of avoiding the simplistic models of research assessment and seek to broaden definitions of scholarly relevance.

Today it is rare to find a college that is not asking faculty to provide annual reports of their scholarly output, measured by such yardsticks as the number of articles published in High Impact Factor Journals, provide their H factors, citations obtained, money obtained through grants, and recognition of awards. For the social sciences and humanities, and particularly for large numbers of scholars working in and researching using languages other than English, this convergence between demands for increased productivity, oriented to obtain higher rankings and accountability appear as almost utopian, generating what appears to be increasingly unsolvable challenges. I call this phenomenon the simplimetrification of social sciences research because it confuses continuous increases of countable items (more articles, more citations in harder to publish journals) with scholarly impact and scientific relevance, but there are no clear and compelling indicators that the quality, access, relevance, and usability of social sciences scholarship have significantly improved.

Paulo Freire’s long-lasting influence, is perhaps the best example of the limits and the risks of the simplimetrification of contemporary academic life. The biggest challenge to developing more usable social science research is not to produce more or better data. The field is already doing that. Rather, we need to keep working on reinvent Freire’s path of asking big questions rooted in ethical and political commitments while maintaining analytical rigor and attention to multiple forms of evidence. As social scientists we also need to confront the sense of comfort that the current system of simplistic incentives provides, where the rewards are the same for publishing scholarship that concludes with the statement “more research is needed” as they are for producing knowledge that may eventually bring value to a scientific field, help practitioners and professionals to improve practices or provide rigorous evidence to families, communities, and policymakers. We could move in this direction by expanding our debates beyond the important, yet insufficient, question, “how we are going to assess this research?” and carefully consider the questions we ask about research responsibility, relevance and impact.

Author

• Gustavo Fischman