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This chapter highlights Freire's history and ideologies allow the text to act as in introduction work for those interested in looking at education from a Freireian perspective, and as such it also helps pull together the many aspects of Freire's life and ideas. These points are important because a lot of existing texts and journal articles tend to view Freire from very distinctive perspectives. For example, far and away his most popular text is Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but this chapter explores what he wrote about in the 20 other books and dozens of journal articles he wrote. Freire wrote about oppression in education, but also in government, by race and language, and throughout these explorations is a myriad idea about how oppression works, and why the oppressed let themselves be controlled by a minority. Highlighting these facts is a key starting point to the book.

This chapter provides an overview of Freire's primary approach to how governments control people, why governments dictate what is being taught and why they seek out control over educators. This chapter investigates the similarities Freire found between the most oppressive governments and dictatorships that rules by violence, to how our educational institutions are controlled. The stakes might be entirely different in these scenarios, but he knew the ultimate objective in all these situations was to remove power from the people, give it to a powerful few and ensure the people would never be able to regain control once more. These ideas and suggestions are key moving forward because it provides a baseline to understand how Freire thought about manipulative behaviours, and why tactics used in extremely violent situations can essentially be watered down and used to control people in universities in much the same way.

This chapter is focused on what we can learn from oppressive governance, in this case specifically relating to university governance in terms of vice chancellors and presidents, to the deputy vice chancellor and deputy president and down the ever-growing university hierarchy to deans and heads of schools and their deputies, from a Freirean perspective. Freire wrote at length about how leaders ‘controlled’ education and why they did so, but he also wrote at length about how governments control populations – himself being both a political prisoner and a person in exile to escape persecution. This chapter subsequently examines Freire's ideas around what techniques people employ to control populations and applies them to a higher education setting because the similarities are numerous and the tactics familiar.

My aims in this chapter are to discuss alternative ways of doing education and research, and thereby highlight key contributions from Paulo Freire, Orlando Fals-Borda and Dorothy Lee, to active learning, participatory action-research and intercultural dialogue. These scholars were heirs of the university reform movements of the twentieth century, and their vital legacy is alive as shown in this book. The enclosed ideas and illustrations of transformative research and education draw from my academic experience in various corners of the world and points in time.

Because Pedagogy of the Oppressed has received worldwide acclaim, influenced many, and has uniquely defined Paulo Freire, it is noteworthy to highlight the book’s evolution from concept to publication. What were the contextual factors that prompted Freire to write the book? What was his approach for converting his thoughts to prose? How long did it take him to write the book? To that end, this article examines those and other questions that brought the world Paulo Freire’s seminal text.

Educator‐philosopher Paulo Freire (1921‐1997) is internationally known for his adult literacy work with peasants and workers in his native Brazil. Through a process of “conscientization”, the oppressed become active subjects in the making of culture and history, as opposed to passively accepting that which is imposed on them by society’s élite. Freire’s pedagogy has been embraced by many in the Third World and adapted to a First World context by North American educators. The annotated bibliography that follows presents a selection of Freire’s work, as well as that of other educators who have adopted a “Freirean” approach to education. In addition, several books recount Freirean inspired literacy campaigns instituted in countries rocked by political conflict and revolutionary change.

In the face of the erosion of democracy and the reemergence of authoritarian styles of rule and leadership in the contemporary world scene, the author reintroduces the anthropological and pedagogical insights of Dorothy Lee and Paulo Freire in the ongoing debate on active learning and higher education. In the case of Dorothy Lee, these insights refer to “valuing the self” of the student, and to the value of learning (values) from “remote cultures” and, last but not least, on the meaning of freedom and autonomy bounded by culture and structure in the teaching–learning process. In the case of Freire, the author selectively points to: (1) the value of community as a sociocultural anchor of identity, freedom, and autonomy, (2) the view of education as a tool for raising awareness, critical thinking, inspiration, hope, empowerment, cultural action, and social transformation, and (3) the view on citizenship education. The author discusses, in this regard, the significant role assigned by Dorothy Lee and Paulo Freire to the neglected notions of dialogue, freedom, culture, self, autonomy, and structure. Lastly, the author argues in favor of reincorporating the pedagogical insights of Dorothy Lee and Paulo Freire in the curricula and structure of higher education and also reminds those concerned with upholding democracy that these formative values and concepts were acknowledged in the early conception and development of active learning.

Here, the authors present a case study of how two professors from different disciplines at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, managed to interweave dialogic components of Paulo Freire’s pedagogy into an institutional context full of requirements and demands that restrict pedagogical choices. Enacting Freire’s ideal of a liberatory epistemology, as Freire calls it, is extremely difficult, because institutional constraints increase the psychological and emotional distance between our students and instructors. In spite of this, the instructors devised ways to create a classroom based on Freire’s dialogic approach to education. Using Martin Buber’s terminology, the authors work to establish their students as “Thous” rather than as “Its.” Together with their students, the authors explore their texts, and generate free discussions based on the notion of co-constructing our classroom and co-constructing what knowledge is and means to us. Establishing this “open space” of inquiry and acceptance involves practicing Freire’s strategies producing authentic dialogue. Here, instructors participate actively with students. They engage in classroom exercises and even write with the students. The atmosphere in the classroom is relational and inter-subjective. Instructors also enact behaviors explained in Julien Mirivel’s Positive Communication model that bridge the gulf of separateness that work to decipher the unknown.

This paper is designed to introduce readers to teacher-philosopher-practitioner, Paulo Freire and to illustrate the power of his educational ideals for the task of teaching leadership. Readers will encounter Freire, understand how one’s definition of leadership needs to match one’s approach to teaching leadership, review a proposed Freirean leadership pedagogy, and consider ways this pedagogy has been used in practice. Finally, I will offer a series of recommendations for getting started with these ideas.