Could Paulo Freire be tenured today?

• In Event: Knowledge production

Proposal

Almost since its publication in English, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has generated quite visceral debates, not only about the content and orientation of Freire’s work but also about how to understand his ideas and particularly about his long term scholarly impact. Perhaps the first questions to consider are: Why bother thinking about Freire today? In 2018 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 -we are well aware that this text is another small contribution to such industry- but we 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. 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 (Collini, 2012; Fischman & Ott, 2016). We 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, and especially the use of his ideas through translations are perhaps the best example of the limits and the risks of the simplimetrification of contemporary academic life. To be clear, Freire’s ideas and continuous intellectual relevance do not need to be demonstrated exclusively with the number of citations and translations, but not considering that the interest to translate and high volume of citations are also indicators of relevance is a mistake. 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 multiple translations that 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. Social sciences programs need to avoid simplistic solutions that end up producing more and mattering less, and engage in reflecting about the Freirean Factor by asking the significant questions about research and about translation: For whom and to what end?

Authors

• Sandra R Sales, Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro

• Gustavo E. Fischman, Arizona State University