March 25th 2023

Paulo Freire is one of the best known, studied and admired educators in the world. Yet his legacy is little known by a considerable portion of Brazilians, which makes the relevance of his work somewhat misrepresented. To introduce and contextualize Freirian thoughts and practices, his adult literacy program in Angicos, Rio Grande do Norte, is a good gateway. This successful experience dialogues very well with language education and the challenges faced by teachers and students.

Angicos is a municipality with just over 10,000 inhabitants. It is located in the interior of Rio Grande do Norte, about 170 km from the capital Potiguara. In that small town, 60 years ago, a revolution in adult literacy took place, which was to be replicated in many places around the world, especially in Latin America and Africa. Freire's attentive, empathetic, and loving gaze helped him to escape traditional education, in which transferring knowledge is the rule. He arrived in that village to educate people, not to indoctrinate them. The difference consists in building knowledge based on the learners' own knowledge, instead of bringing information from another context and depositing it in the students. The words used to teach people literacy were those that were already part of each student's daily life, making the classes full of meaning and horizontality. Freire lived with the residents of Angico and got to know them better before starting his literacy program. Still in the early 1960s, Freire was already going against banking education, where the teacher is the holder of all knowledge and only deposits information in the student.

The successful experience of Angicos was criminally interrupted in 1964, with the advent of the military coup in Brazil. Due to this tragic event, Paulo Freire was forced to spend most of his pedagogical work abroad, in Bolivia, Chile, Nicaragua, Switzerland and the United States.

The relevance of Freire's pedagogy, which is based on popular education, can cross other areas of education as well, one of them being language education. Just like adult literacy, foreign language teaching also needs to go through fundamental reflections for the construction of knowledge; the lovingness to welcome the students and create an environment of cooperation and peace, the promotion of multiculturalism that expands their vision of the world, and the respect for the particularities of each individual. Students are human beings with unique life stories, as well as their own desires, wishes, and interests. Students are not numbers.

It is very common in a group of teenagers and young adults that people are diverse, with different worldviews and interests. This horizontality and lovingness that Freire proposes is a great way to open discussions to agree, disagree, and build new knowledge in a respectful, empathetic, and attentive manner, something so rare in a world that is increasingly polarized and focused on the interests of capital. It is also a way to deconstruct prejudices that the students may present.

When we work with foreign language teaching, the elaboration of reasoning tends to be slower in the first levels, especially when it is a language very far from the student's first language. Finding the best words to express what one feels or thinks is not an easy task. This elaboration time, however, is an opportunity for the learner to reflect on what is being said, instead of simply speaking his mind. This is also an opportunity to recover the wisdom of indigenous peoples, where the word is sacred.

Freire is one of the most respected and loved educators in the world. Teachers from the most diverse countries use his theory, his practices, and his reflections to build a political pedagogy of freedom, autonomy, and self-awareness. Thus, the educator who uses his teachings in the classroom has a greater chance of creating an environment of cooperation and friendship in the educational context. Freire is one of the Brazilians who best represents the soul of our people: diverse, loving, funny, simple, and fighting. His theory can and should be used not only within the national territory, but also in other countries, in the case, for example, of teachers of Portuguese as a Foreign Language. Just as the educator shared his pedagogy with marginalized people in Latin America, Europe and Africa, the Brazilian educator can be inspired by this great educator and do the same.

Independent of the language being studied, Freirian pedagogy can be an ally in the acquisition of this foreign language, because it is not only important whether we speak a language or not, but it is even more fundamental what we speak, how we speak, and why we speak what we speak. These reflections go against the banking education so criticized by Paulo Freire, which is only deposited in the heads of the students without any reflection. It is necessary to make words objects of social transformation, regardless of whether we speak English or Guaraní, in order to finally have a fairer, more egalitarian and cooperative world.

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