Freire, Literacy, and Gender Empowerment

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International Review of EducationJournal of Lifelong Learning ISSN 0020-8566 Int Rev EducDOI 10.1007/s11159-014-9424-2

Freire, literacy and emancipatory genderlearning

Nelly P. Stromquist

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Freire, literacy and emancipatory gender learning

Nelly P. Stromquist

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht and UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning 2014

Abstract The contributions to education of one of the great Latin American

thinkers, Paulo Freire, have been enormous. His voice and wisdom have inspired

educators globally. Three particular contributions – to emancipation, to literacy, and

to dialogue – are explored in this article through a critical lens. From a gender

perspective, Freire’s path to consciousness-raising is crucial for emancipation but so

also is empowerment, a notion contributed by the women’s movement. Adult lit-

eracy, Freire’s vehicle to raise consciousness, has been challenged by a recognition

of the complexity underlying its acquisition, a factor we still have to incorporate in

training and teaching programmes. Dialogical approaches in adult education,

essential as they are to the attainment of deeper understanding of social phenomena

and the possibility of consensual social action, build on a long trajectory of efforts to

use public space for collective advancement. Situating Freire against a denser

historical background enables the recognition of his merits and at the same time

rescues the confluence of similar perceptions as well as different ideas in the

construction of our contemporary world.

Keywords Literacy � Gender � Culture circles � Freire � Empowerment

Resume Freire, alphabetisation et apprentissage emancipateur a l’equite entre les

sexes – Les contributions a l’education de l’un des grands penseurs latino-ame-

ricains, Paulo Freire, sont immenses. Sa parole et sa sagesse inspirent des educateurs

dans le monde entier. Trois de ses contributions – a l’emancipation, a l’alphabeti-

sation et au dialogue – sont soumises dans le present article a un examen critique.

S’agissant de l’equite entre les sexes, la demarche de Freire en faveur de la con-

scientisation est decisive pour l’emancipation, mais tout autant l’autonomisation,

notion emanant du mouvement feministe. L’alphabetisation des adultes, pour Freire

N. P. Stromquist (&)

University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

e-mail: [email protected]

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Int Rev Educ

DOI 10.1007/s11159-014-9424-2

Author's personal copy

vecteur permettant d’accroıtre la prise de conscience, comporte le defi de tenir

compte de la complexite de son acquisition, facteur que nous devons encore integrer

dans les programmes de formation et d’enseignement. Les approches dialogiques de

l’education des adultes, aussi essentielles qu’elles soient pour mieux comprendre les

phenomenes sociaux et conduire a une action sociale consensuelle, dependent d’une

longue serie d’efforts pour exploiter l’espace public en vue du developpement

collectif. Positionner Freire dans un contexte historique plus dense permet de

reconnaıtre ses merites, mais aussi d’integrer des perceptions similaires et des idees

differentes dans la construction de notre monde contemporain.

This article contains ideas originally presented in a panel at the XV World Congress of

Comparative Education Societies (WCCES) in Buenos Aires in July 2013. The panel

focused on a paper by Carlos Torres (2013) on Paulo Freire’s various contributions to

popular education and a better world. My own paper and those of others in the panel were

responses to the main arguments proposed by Torres. My comments seek to situate

Freire’s contributions in a larger historical context involving knowledge production and

political emancipation. My perspectives are in the form of three points: Freire’s

contributions to emancipation along gender lines, the acquisition and assessment of

literacy in adulthood, and the notion of study circles as participatory venues.

Emancipation along gender lines

Women continue to constitute two-thirds of the world’s illiterates (UIS 2010), making

the gender aspect of illiteracy crucial. The persistent majority of women among

illiterates occurs not because women are less able learners but rather reflects the impact

of the domestic division of labour and beliefs about the role of men and women in

society which function to the disadvantage of women in low-income households.

Among school-goers, girls perform better than boys in reading. This outcome

suggests gender effects, because masculinity conceptions of boys and men as more

active, particularly outdoors, foster the notion that reading (being at home, in solitude,

and being silent, usually passive) is a more feminine engagement. Other factors have

been identified: differences between girls and boys in cognitive development, lack of

role models to encourage boys to read more, and a curriculum content disconnected

from boys’ lives (Booth et al. 2008), but these factors likely play a weaker role than

different everyday practices between girls and boys. According to the latest PISA

results (2012), female adolescent students outperform their male counterparts in

reading in all participating countries, although the difference is slight (by an average of

39 points (6.5%) on a 600-point scale (OECD 2013). This curious situation, that so

many adult women in developing countries are unable to read while girls outperform

boys in reading in the industrialised world, should not be too surprising: in the absence

of infrastructure such as access to drinking water, fuel and electricity, poor women

conduct domestic chores which occupy a significant portion of their time; in more

advanced societies, women and girls spend more time than men and boys at home. In

both cases, gender forces are at work.

N. P. Stromquist

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Since the great majority of illiterates are poor women, efforts to provide literacy

cannot bypass the consideration of gender. Likewise, such efforts must be aimed at

enabling women participants to acquire higher levels of social engagement. In this

regard, the contributions of Freire have been considerable.

The writings of Freire, particularly those contained in Pedagogy of the Oppressed

(Freire 1970), have been critical to our understanding of the constant political nature

of education in everyday life and how education can be used as an effective space

for political transformation. He is one of the first scholars to argue that education is

political and as such can never be neutral, and that formal education works either for

the ‘‘domestication of learners’’ or for ‘‘liberation’’ (Freire 1985, p. 131). Freire has

contributed more than any other educator to the realisation that school is a place

where more than a formal curriculum is acquired. This has helped to deploy a

critical pedagogy in the classroom which creates an understanding of power,

oppression, domination and ideology.

Through Freire too, we have gained an understanding of the importance of

ideological struggle which, as extended by feminist thinkers, has meant an

awareness of the importance of fighting patriarchal ideologies. Freire’s concepts of

oppressed/oppressor, a binary situation in which we are all involved, has brought

challenges to a simplistic understanding of liberation. He advocated breaking the

culture of silence, an advice of particular relevance to the feminist struggle, as it

meant gaining a voice to address previously taboo or invisibilised subjects such as

domestic violence, rape and sexual harassment. His admonition to engage not just in

question-posing but in problem-posing inspired many to explore new forms of

learning, with both students and teachers engaged in a two-way learning

environment and thus the establishment of horizontal relations in the classroom.

The notion of consciousness-raising, perhaps the single most salient contribution by

Freire, has meant revisiting our daily realities. Through consciousness-raising, many

educators and students alike have grown to be more attentive to cause–effect

relationships, not taking social life for granted but questioning it.

Freire recognised disadvantage arising from class, race and gender. His usual

treatment, however, is essentially one of class awareness (Kincheloe and Steinberg

2007). During his exile in Chile during 1964–1969 (when Eduardo Frei, not

Salvador Allende, was president), Freire was greatly affected by the political

climate in this country, which had initiated a land reform to integrate poor farmers

into modern forms of organisation and production (Holst 2006). His major concern

at that time was indeed the abysmal difference between peasants and large

landowners. In later works, he could have identified (but did not) a specific group of

‘‘oppressors’’ or ‘‘oppressed’’. Though he recognised schools as sexist and

acknowledged the existence of patriarchy in his later works, he did not expound

on these issues. The most visible change regarding gender in Freire’s writing is his

occasional use of both masculine and feminine pronouns.1 This limited concession

1 bell hooks, an American feminist who has been greatly influenced by Freire, holds this was sexist,

given the language of his early works (hooks 1993). The English translation of Pedagogy of the

Oppressed, published in 1970, preceded the vibrancy of the women’s movement and it would not be

correct to judge him by current standards. However, in subsequent writings, Freire could indeed have

been more responsive to gender issues.


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is surprising, given his assertion in a later book addressed to those who ‘‘dare teach’’

that ‘‘[t]here are no themes or values of which one cannot speak nor areas in which

one must be silent. We can talk about everything, and we can give testimony about

everything’’ (Freire 1998, p. 58). Aided by the experience of many women-led

NGOs throughout the world and the systematic analysis of gender studies in

universities, feminists have gone beyond Freire and learned the following three

lessons:

First, society’s public sphere is crucially important – as Freire suggested. But we

must also look at the private sphere, and at the two both separately and then jointly;

in other words, if we are to understand the constraints women face in public arenas,

we need to understand that the often unrelenting demands of the private sphere have

considerable consequences for their participation (or not) in the public sphere.

Women experience significant problems balancing home and work duties which

men simply do not face – a phenomenon that cuts across social class. Constant

household practices also have repercussions on the creation of distinct female and

male identities. This realisation has made it possible to identify the limits of many

social policies in advancing the condition of women.

Second, the notion of empowerment, enticing at first, is multidimensional and a

difficult undertaking, demanding the development of skills and strategies to engage

in political action, beyond awareness-raising and beyond reflection of one’s social

and economic environment. Feminists have learned that efforts to empower adult

women must include not only literacy training but also transformative education

content through non-formal and informal learning. Irrespective of whether or not the

programme content and processes raise one’s awareness of exploitation, literacy per

se does not empower students, although it does provide women with a greater sense

of self-efficacy, which can be taken as a precursor to empowerment (Stromquist

1997, 2002, 2009; Prins 2008). Women advocating for social change realise the

need for specific targets of action, in which the ‘‘oppressor’’ attains a concrete

embodiment while intersecting with such factors as social class, ethnicity and

religion (among other social markers). It should be noted that although the concept

of empowerment is often attributed to Freire, who frequently invoked the reality and

function of power, the term empowerment does not appear in his books.

Empowerment is clearly an extension of Freire’s consciousness-raising concept

and is a process in which many women throughout the world have engaged and for

whom a struggle specifically against patriarchal norms was indispensable.

The notion of empowerment, which circulated among feminist groups since the

late 1970s, received international attention when it was incorporated in 1994 into

the United Nations ‘‘Programme of Action of the International Conference on

Population and Development’’ (Presser and Sen 2000) as part of women’s demands

to obtain reproductive rights. Highly developed by Indian feminists, a core feature

of empowerment is the capacity to gain control over one’s own life. From their

experience, ‘‘Programs that change awareness without leading to greater access to

material resources can lead to frustration and high drop-out rates’’ (Sen and

Batliwala 2000, p. 19).

Third, women in the feminist movement have recognised the need to move from

formal to substantive citizenship – looking at the systematic barriers set up by

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patriarchal legacies. But they are also concerned with equal outcomes. Women’s

experience has taught them that organisation is one of the most effective means for

social change, which explains the large number of women-led NGOs throughout the

world. Cultivation of empowerment involves collective action as a tool for effective

agency, a task often conducted by women’s organisations (Stromquist 2002; see

also Parpart et al. 2002; Staudt 2002; Bodur and Franceshet 2002).

Certainly, Freire makes reference to praxis, but how one moves from

consciousness-raising to praxis is not problematised; in other words, he did not

dwell to any substantial extent on the need for organised and collective action. In

Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire (1970, p. 53) noted that ‘‘while no one liberates

himself by his own efforts alone, neither is he liberated by others.’’ He also

remarked that ‘‘the oppressed must confront reality critically, simultaneously

objectifying and acting upon that reality’’, adding that ‘‘a mere perception of reality

not followed by this critical intervention will not lead to a transformation of

objective reality – precisely because it is not a true perception’’ (ibid., p. 37). These

observations certainly envisage action, as much as do his references to praxis, but

Freire remains short on actual mobilisation. In fact, at one point he argues, ‘‘There is

not one stage for dialogue and another for revolution. On the contrary, dialogue is

the essence of revolutionary action’’ (ibid., p. 130, footnote 10). Many would find

the equation of dialogue with action extreme. Knowing about one’s reality

empowers a person, but to act upon reality requires additional knowledge, skills and

the creation of effective collective conditions. Esther Gottlieb and Thomas La Belle

(1990), examining the impact of consciousness-raising in many Latin American

popular education programmes over a 10-year period, concluded that there was

significant impact on the articulation of opinion regarding repression, corruption and

dependency, but that little change occurred in the absence of social organisation and

political action.

Literacy acquisition and assessment in adulthood

Freire proposed a very creative blend of literacy acquisition, combining its

deployment as a political tool and as a content which resonated with adult learners.

As a political tool, literacy was conceived to promote conscientisation – or the

awareness of how macro-level economic and sociological forces impinge on

individual lives to create either advantage or disadvantage, which translate into

oppressing or oppressed classes. Literacy as content meant the use of emotionally

charged terms, the use of a vocabulary with which the learners were familiar, the

use of their own experience to break the distance between literacy and daily life – all

of which was accomplished through the selection of generative words and

generative themes.

Having honoured Freire’s contribution to literacy, it should be added that the

development of literacy skills is a complex process, one that needs time to be

acquired, constant practice over time, and a supportive print environment.


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The acquisition of literacy skills

The early attention given to Freire in Brazil was predicated on his claim that his

method could make a person literate in 40 days through the use of dialogue and

culture circles in which persons without literacy skills would not only understand

the word but also the world (Brandao 1981). The first massive testing of Freire’s

method took place with 300 sugarcane workers in February/March 1963 in Angicos,

a small town in an impoverished state in Northeast Brazil. This success led Joao

Goulart, then president of Brazil, to consider the creation of 20,000 culture circles

throughout Brazil, aimed at serving two million adults – a plan that was cut short by

a military coup d’etat. The possibility of such a short literacy programme being a

success was not restated in Freire’s subsequent work, including Pedagogy of the

Oppressed (Freire 1970), which he revisits in a later book, Pedagogy of Hope

(Freire 2004). That adults could gain literacy in as little as 40 h has not been

validated by any research studies. Indeed, one cannot acquire literacy in 40 h any

more than one can learn to speak English in 10 days or play the piano in 6 weeks.

Literacy is more easily acquired among children than adults, the same way children

can learn more easily than adults to speak a foreign language or to swim. Of course,

it also depends on what definition of literacy is being used. Writing one’s name and

crafting a simple sentence based on words and sentence structures the student knows

are certainly possible after a short time.

Nonetheless, the promise of literacy in only 40 h was made by Freire and

accepted by many. It is worth comparing Angicos with Cuba’s post-revolutionary

literacy campaign in 1961. This campaign was characterised by unusual care in its

design, training of literacy teachers, and logistical and pedagogical support during

its four-month run. Learners met four times a week for 90 min at a time, so the

literacy classes took 96 h to complete. Moreover, these skills were built upon by

widespread post-literacy programmes, so it is difficult to ascertain what was due

exclusively to the initial literacy classes.

Based on the experience with the 1961 literacy campaign, Cuban educators at the

Institute of Pedagogy for Latin America and the Caribbean (IPLAC) developed an

innovative programme called Yes, I Can (Yo, sı puedo) in 2000, by now

implemented in 28 countries. Yo, sı puedo uses generative themes (as Freire

proposes), but these do not seek consciousness-raising and are defined as issues that

make a specific point or raise an idea, while ‘‘each lesson contains a positive

message’’ (Boughton et al. 2013). The method provides 65 lessons, each of which

includes a DVD class 20 min in duration, around which literacy instructors develop

their classes totalling 2 h each. This means 130 h, 34 h more than the initial Cuban

literacy campaign.2

Freire’s Angicos experience has to be regarded with some caution, while taking

care not to diminish its merits. The literacy teachers or ‘‘monitors’’ were all

politically progressive university students, eager to work with the poor towards their

2 A formal evaluation of Yo, sı puedo sponsored by UNESCO (2006) found the method to apply a ‘‘rather

traditional view of language learning’’ (ibid., p. 4), as it did not incorporate new developments in literacy

or take into account the students’ prior learning. Yo sı puedo, however, has contributed to giving greater

salience to the problem of illiteracy in the Latin American region.

N. P. Stromquist

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advancement of citizenship. About 30 per cent of these monitors came from schools

of education; the rest from other disciplines. Although they received a four-day

training, particularly as ‘‘dialogue coordinators’’ (Kirkendall 2010), there is little

evidence of their understanding of literacy among adults and there are no records of

the assessment tools used to register literacy improvement. But Angicos indeed had

high political visibility, as indicated by the fact that the then president of Brazil,

Joao Goulart, came to deliver the final literacy lesson.

Literacy as a complex cognitive process

Attainment of a useful level of literacy involves multiple aspects of language

acquisition and use. Complex models of literacy include phonological, phonemical,

orthographic and lexical aspects – all linguistic elements considered the basic

building blocks towards comprehension (Perfetti 2009). Comprehension, of course,

is the final objective of print literacy: if we cannot acquire meaning from text, the

activity of decoding is in vain.

Some important debates surrounding early literacy acquisition (i.e., literacy

among young children) – such as that between a pedagogical strategy which focuses

on phonemic awareness versus one which emphasises a whole language approach

(i.e., learning words as units) – have not significantly touched adult literacy

discussions. Evidence of the typically light approach to adult literacy is reflected in

the prevailing belief among literacy programme designers, especially in developing

countries, that anybody who can read can teach other adults to read, thus the use of

‘‘volunteers’’ to conduct literacy classes. Criticism of the ineffectiveness of this

light approach is also evident in the persistent call by those working on literacy for

the professionalisation of adult education, including greater involvement of

universities in supporting adult learning and education – a call most recently made

by representatives from 46 African countries at the African regional conference that

took place in preparation for CONFINTEA VI (UIL 2008). Today, the complexity

of our understanding of early literacy is increasing with developments in neurology,

which are leading to examinations of how the brain processes written messages

(Goswami 2008). In contrast, when considering adult literacy, a common

assumption is that reading is a straightforward skill, easily acquired in a short

time span.

The assessment of adult literacy

Globally, measurement of literacy – usually incorporated into census data – has

generally been reduced to either self-assessment (the case for most national

assessments of literacy) or a proxy measure (in which a certain number of years of

schooling is deemed to indicate literacy). We know, however, that people tend to

overestimate their literacy skills and that years of schooling per se are a poor

measure as the quality of such schooling affects what is learned (Wagner 2005).

In the past two decades we have made substantial progress in the conceptuali-

sation of literacy, abandoning the simple and binary measurement of literacy/

illiteracy. A framework developed in 1998 by Irwin Kirsch of the Educational


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Testing Service (ETS New Jersey) and Peter Mosenthal of Syracuse University

enables us to think of literacy as a continuum (Kirsch et al. 1998). In their

conceptualisation, literacy is taken mostly as synonymous with reading and involves

five levels, all the way from basic to advanced comprehension. Their test also

measures literacy along three dimensions: prose literacy (reading continuous text),

document literacy (reading discontinuous text such as tables, forms, maps), and

quantitative literacy (being able to perform arithmetic calculations).

Abandoning the binary measurement of literacy requires employing a fine-grain

test. The one developed by ETS takes 90 min to administer, which means it has to

be done through sampling and the use of more sophisticated tools as well as the

employment of someone competent to administer the test – a time-intensive and

expensive operation. But we are learning surprising facts through these assessments.

For instance, even though the U.S. has a literacy rate of 99 per cent based on the

proportion of its population with at least fourth-grade education, one out of three

fourth-graders in this country cannot read at even the basic level (National

Assessment of Educational Progress, cited in Perfetti 2009). A previous test, the

1994 U.S. National Literacy Survey, found that 50 per cent of the minority groups

with a tenth-grade education could read at only fifth-grade level (Wagner 2005).

The literacy conditions of schooled people in developing countries are also poor. A

survey conducted by the World Bank in Bangladesh found that five years of

schooling produced at most the equivalent of a first-grade reading achievement

(Greaney et al., cited in Wagner 2005).

Complicating the assessment of adult literacy is that those who come to literacy

programmes comprise at least four kinds of ‘‘illiterate’’ persons: (1) those who never

went to school and may not even recognise letters of the alphabet, (2) those who

attended a few years of primary school and forgot much (but not all) of what they

learned, (3) those who attended several years of primary school but did not develop

a high reading competence, and (4) those who did not learn to read due to learning

problems. Confounding the understanding of literacy acquisition among adults is

that by now – the beginning of the 21st century – many adults have been through

school. Although those who come to literacy programmes – as I discovered in my

4-year study of Freire’s MOVA literacy programme for youths and adults in Sao

Paulo in 1989–1992 – may have problems reading and writing and may have serious

comprehension problems, many of them have had several years of basic education

(Stromquist 1997). Further, the context in which these persons live, which is of great

importance, ranges from ample access to print on a daily basis in urban settings (as,

for example, in the environment of a multi-million inhabitant city such as Sao

Paulo) to settings (mostly rural) without access to print messages. This means that

illiterates have faced and will continue to encounter varying opportunities during

their adulthood to increase their opportunity for developing literacy skills. It must be

noted that, sensitive to this disparity, Yo, sı puedo classifies literacy students in three

groups: absolute illiterates, semi-literates (defined as those who have been through

school), and special illiterates (those with learning difficulties).

Through an OECD initiative, a test similar to the one developed by ETS has been

applied recently in 24 countries for the first time. It goes by the name of Programme

for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). To be sure, this

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more sophisticated assessment of literacy did not exist at the time of Angicos. What

is surprising, however, is how little the concept of varying levels of participants’

literacy continues to be applied to adult literacy programmes. Consequently, even

today, ‘‘most program evaluation work does not use sufficiently robust methods that

would allow for serious skill measurement’’ (Wagner 2005, p. 13). I would add that

the evaluation of any literacy programme should include the use of both pre- and

post-tests because the mix of students (i.e., the varying levels of literacy they bring

with them) will impact their performance at the end of their participation, typically

the only measurement used to judge a programme’s success.

While we have made advances measuring literacy, we still have to increase our

understanding of the lives of adult illiterates, most of which are characterised by

poverty, unemployment, energy-intensive jobs, health issues, chronic physical

violence, and crime (Stromquist 1997; Boughton et al. 2013). As Bob Boughton

et al. (2013, p. 15) put it, literacy must confront the ‘‘chaos of life at the margins.’’

We must also come to terms with the realities of adult literacy: for them it is a

difficult process, one that is resource-intensive if it is to be sustainable. Concern for

the high cost of literacy at the time of adulthood, however, should not deter us from

recognising its crucial importance, as educated parents are the best predictors of

student success in schooling.

Study circles as participatory venues

It is amazing to observe how many crucial developments in society occur

simultaneously; it is also comforting to see how many innovations build on previous

human efforts. My third and final reflection is on one of those innovations: the

notion of study or culture circles – a pedagogical strategy central to the development

of political awareness or conscientisation.

The idea of creating a learning environment in which people arranged in a circle

debate their conditions, analyse them, and seek collective solutions has been in

existence for a long time. One of the earliest documented cases is the Folk Schools

in Denmark developed in 1844 by Nikolaj Grundtvig, an exceptional person who

was a pastor, a poet, a philosopher, a historian, and a politician (Rasmussen 2013).

The form of popular education in Scandinavia, known as Folkbildning (or people’s

learning), has been crucial to the development of a democratic citizenship in that

part of the world. The Folk School used study circles, with farmers in rural areas and

workers in the cities, as a means to develop dialogue among participants regarding

the formation of Danish nationhood, given the considerable tensions with Germany

and Prussia. The model quickly expanded to Sweden and Norway and continues into

the present. In these study circles, a small group of people meet – mostly at night,

since many work during the day – to study a certain subject or theme. Through

exchanges of experiences, ideas, and analyses within the group, participants deepen

their social, cultural, and political understanding of their environment. Themes

include such issues as human rights and, today, global justice and multiculturalism.

Sweden, which has developed into the most adult education-sensitive country, uses

study circles as a key pedagogical strategy. These circles serve as public arenas in


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which different groups express their positions and develop their own knowledge. It

is estimated that in Sweden about 75 per cent of the population aged 18–75 has

participated in a study circle. The Scandinavian Folk High School (as it is now

known) model has also influenced popular educators in the U.S., the most famous

being the Highlander Folk School founded by Myles Horton in Tennessee in 1932,

which played a notable role in the formation of Civil Rights activists, including

Rosa Parks.

A similar model – of great importance from the political conceptualisation

perspective – is the ‘‘study circle’’ or ‘‘cultural circle’’ proposed by Antonio

Gramsci during the late 1910s and the 1920s (Gramsci 2007). The Italian

philosopher advocated adult programmes through factory councils, which used

study circles to enable the workers to educate themselves, gather experience, and

become aware of power relations (Mayo 2008). These circles were essential to

Gramsci’s notion of ‘‘war of position,’’ which he saw as a ‘‘process of wide ranging

social organization and cultural influence’’ (ibid., p. 420). Through these cultural

study circles, he sought to use education as the key to ‘‘the creation of systematic

and effective counter-hegemonic action’’ (ibid., p. 432). Gramsci created the

Institute of Proletarian Culture, further inspired by Russian efforts to politicise the

proletariat, but this institute lasted only a short time because of the arrival of fascism

in Italy. An essential feature of the Gramscian approach to adult learning is that the

teacher/student relationship must be active and reciprocal, so that ‘‘every teacher is

always a pupil and every pupil a teacher’’. Gramsci was convinced that the teacher

who limits himself/herself to the transmission of facts was ‘‘mediocre’’ – so he

advocated instead dialogue, participation, and critical analysis of one’s environ-

ment. In his view, the knowledge acquired in the workplace by the workers

themselves would lead to greater understanding of the functioning of society. The

sound political features of Gramsci’s cultural circles have inspired many popular

educators throughout the world.

Contributions from dialogical processes – the essence of study circles – have also

been made by critical theory, as proposed by the Frankfurt School3 from the 1940s

to the present, which addressed the importance of dialogue and the use of public

spaces (particularly Habermas 1987). Although the Frankfurt School did not

identify schools or classrooms as public spaces, they certainly are, for it is there that

students of various communities and social classes come together. Freire, through

his later writings, clearly utilises the school as a public sphere, and deepens this by

using the classroom as a site to discuss daily life. It must be remarked, however, that

as schooling is becoming increasingly segregated by social class throughout the

world, this public space will suffer as it also becomes homogenous by social class

and the opportunities for exchange of different experiences and points of view are

diminished.

Yet another effort to apply dialogical approaches to a public space has been

carried out by the feminist movement, which has implemented study circles or

3 Originating in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in Germany, the

‘‘Frankfurt school’’ gathered philosophers, sociologists, art critics, psychologists, among others, who held

that Western principles such as positivism and materialism needed to be questioned in order to advance

social development.

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consciousness-raising approaches (which the feminist movement termed CR) since

the mid-1960s. CR called for meetings of small groups of women in private homes

to discuss and analyse women’s conditions. These meetings soon spread throughout

the United States, prompting some observers to consider CR ‘‘the backbone of the

women’s liberation movement’’. The Red Stockings, a radical feminist group

located in New York and founded in 1969, developed this approach to discuss

women’s personal experiences with male oppression and to find commonalities in

the struggle against patriarchy (see also Castells 2004, pp. 235–243). Carol Hanisch,

one of the leading feminists of her time, explained the origins of CR thus:

I’m pretty sure none of us knew Freire’s work. We developed consciousness-

raising from experience in the Mississippi Freedom Movement in 1964–65,

from reading about the Chinese Revolution, and probably a little osmosis from

Marx via the parents of some in our group, New York Radical Women. Since

I’m not familiar with Freire, I have no idea how closely his ideas resemble

ours or vice versa (personal e-mail communication, 3 March 2014).

The feminist CR is a remarkable example of how a concept can be developed

independently and simultaneously by different authors. CR practices continue in the

work of women-led NGOs throughout the world. Often, these CR approaches are

not conducted as separate exercises today but embedded in broader non-formal

educational interventions.

At the time of Freire’s use of culture circles, Brazil was in a period of great

ebullience, full of cultural popular movements (movimentos populares de cultura,

MCP), student-led popular culture centres (centros de cultura popular do

movimento estudiantil, CPC), and multiple grassroots efforts under the auspices

of the Catholic Church (Movimento de Educacao de Base da Igreja Catolica)

(Brandao 1981). This social energy inspired Freire, and Freire’s theoretical and

philosophical principles in turn enriched Brazilian popular education and beyond.

Later, when Freire offered assistance to the literacy campaign efforts going on in

Guinea-Bissau, he would remind us of the purpose of such circles:

A further example is that in some instances what we customarily refer to as

‘‘post-literacy’’ is actually preceding basic literacy work This is an instance of

what I have always believed, namely, that the literacy education of adults is

really a process of cultural action. The very designation ‘‘culture circles’’

rather than ‘‘adult literacy classes’’ was intended to emphasize this point. The

‘‘reading’’ or ‘‘rereading’’ of reality as it is being transformed is the primary

consideration, taking precedence over the mere learning of the written

language. Even in teaching children, the process is social and involves

‘‘reading’’ the world (Freire 1983, p. 160).

In summary

Paulo Freire, a philosopher and educator who has made enormous contributions to

adult education and emancipatory pedagogy, has seen many of his concepts resonate


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with educators concerned with social inequalities, motivating them to treat formal

education as transformative despite the many reproductive forces it carries.

Other social thinkers and movements, earlier and simultaneous to Freire, have

contributed to a deeper understanding of social phenomena and what it would take

to resolve pervasive and ingrained problems facing individuals and groups. Literacy

is a complex field that has been benefiting from advances in our mapping of

cognitive development; adult literacy is even more complex and progress in this

area has still miles to tread. Empowerment within the women’s movement has

implied not only profound gender emancipatory learning and sociocultural

awareness but also an understanding of the indispensable need to have clear and

specific political goals, to seek allies, and to develop tools and strategies to foster as

well as to engage in political action. Empowerment, indeed, goes beyond

consciousness-raising. The association of dialogue with reflexivity and understand-

ing of social inequities has had a long gestation across times and societies; in all of

these efforts, the small-size group and open discussion have been common features.

As beneficiaries of Freire’s immense legacy, we should put his contributions in a

wider historical perspective, acknowledging how his particular ideas and impact

built on and fit into the work of others who preceded him. Our future will be always

stronger when we recognise that knowledge is cumulative and thus a collective

process.

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The author

Nelly P. Stromquist is professor in the International Education Policy programme of the College of

Education at the University of Maryland, USA. She specialises on issues related to international

development education and gender, which she examines from a critical sociology perspective. Her

research interests focus on the dynamics among educational policies and practices, gender relations and

social change. Her most recent books include The World Bank and Education: Critiques and Alternatives

(co-edited with Steven Klees and Joel Samoff), Globalization and Education: Integration and

Contestation Across Cultures (co-edited with Karen Monkman), and Feminist Organizations and Social

Transformation in Latin America.

N. P. Stromquist

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Freire, Literacy, and Gender Empowerment

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