Freirean contributions to a liberating educational practice in EJA

Abstract

Paulo Freire’s pedagogy is, above all, a humanization project. That is why it is always current, reinventing itself in time and reframing itself to face neoliberal projects that thrive on social inequalities and on the way men and women are oppressed and exploited, or on any other type of project that goes against human dignity. In this context, the education of adolescents and adults – EJA – arises from the social degradation of men and women who live, mostly, on the borderline of their humanity. This paper aims to reflect upon some of Freire’s concepts that are needed for a liberating education and to highlight some of the aspects in Freire’s pedagogy that are key to the construction of emancipating educational processes in the education of adolescents and adults. Educators must, at school spaces, assume the ethical and pedagogical task of exercising the commitment to individual and collective changes of these human beings who, in the classroom, are in search of this path that may lead them to a more humanized life.