Die Welt ist im Werden - Über die Aktualität von Paulo Freire

Abstract

Paulo Freire was the most outstanding popular educator in Brazil and founder of a proper pedagogy of liberation and a mass movement for adult literacy. His educational approach based on raising consciousness (conscientização) links action to reflection. This article analyses the contribution of Freire's stance and world-view to current development studies and education. The following arguments are presented in four sections: Firstly, reading the world is a critical undertaking to understand reality based on dialogue, dialectics, and a contextualized and problem-oriented approach. Secondly, writing the world acts in a world structured by domination and oppression, and so calls for a non-dualistic approach that links agency, structure, ethics, and rationality in an attempt to achieve overall democratisation. Section three is dedicated to case studies which aim at contextualizing Freire's approach for 21st century Vienna. Section four summarizes the argument, focussing on its implications for development studies by mobilising the research traditions introduced by Pierre Bourdieu and Roy Bhaskar.