34.068 - Transforming Relations Through Community-Based Research and Projects: The Paulo Freire Democratic Project

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

In this symposium we explore the ways in which one university-based organization, the Paulo Freire Democratic Project (PFDP), strives to develop community-based research and projects with and alongside parents/families, students/youth, and community spaces within a large urban center in Orange County, California. We explore some of the contradictions that necessarily arise and the pitfalls that we fall into as we define ourselves as an activist democratic collective and learn in our work with communities and schools and other institutions and organizations (locally and internationally) to question and explore what it means to be collaborative, to be an activist, how change happens, and what constitutes transformation—seeking always to reinvent, in the Freirean sense, ourselves and our practices.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Paulo Freire, Critical Pedagogy, and Emancipation

Chair

• Yan Wang, Chapman University

Papers

• Community Education: A Critical Pedagogy of Place - Anaida Colon-Muniz, Chapman University

• Padres Unidos and Chapman University Partnership - Suzanne SooHoo, Chapman University; Patricia Rocio Huerta-Meza, Padres Unidos

• Ethnic Studies and Youth Participatory Action Research: Working With and Alongside Urban and Migrant Youth - Jose Paolo Magcalas, Chapman University; Miguel Zavala, California State University - Fullerton

• La Escuela Paulo Freire: Historic Possibility, Struggle, and Design in the Context of Neoliberal Privatization of Public Education - Anat Herzog, Chapman University; Thomas C. Wilson, Chapman University

Discussants

• Peter L. McLaren, Chapman University

• Lilia D. Monzo, Chapman University