Portuguese
“Nobody frees anybody, nobody frees itself alone, people free themselves in communion”.
Paulo Freire
Paulo Freire International Colloquium is one of the main activities of Paulo Feire Center – Studies and Researches, a nonprofit civil society, with educative and cultural finality that proposes to perpetuate Paulo Freire’s memory, recreating and/or keeping alive his ideas. The Center was founded in May 29, 1998, having been its status officially in November of this same year. It works provisionally in the Education Center of the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). The Administrative Council of this university, however, recently yielded a ground in its campus to the construction of the Center’s definitive headquarter and this construction process is ongoing.
UFPE, on the other hand, is a university that, according to some words in its institutional mission, “search to build a knowledge that contributes for the sustainability of society, through teach, research, extension and management, cultivating in all areas of pure and applied knowledge the achievement of research and incentive to creator activities, always expanding teach and the research to the community, by courses and special services, focused in the Brazilian reality so this way it can collaborate to the development of the country and Brazilian northeast in particular”.
In this sense, as result of the articulation of freirean ethos and impetus of the Center for the extension in UFPE, the Colloquium has by intention to work as a dialogue tool between the genesis of Paulo Freire thought and his actuality, as well as projections or manifestations of this actuality in both local and global dimensions. The Colloquium is an activity synthesis of the Center that has allowed to incorporate, increasingly, all actions that shape it, aiming to constitute itself in a time-spacewhich has been possible to show the results of studies, researches and reports of educative experiences developed both inside and outside the school.
VII Colloquium, in 2010
The last Paulo Freire International Colloquium, held from 16 to 19 of September of 2010, also in the Federal University of Pernambuco, had as theme “Paulo Freire: contributions for the popular education and cultural”. The diversification of public remained and settled in it, compared to other editions, and was catalyzed by a growing number of participants: the last three Colloquium account with over 1.500 registered and over 500 papers presented. It is an event, also and mainly, that has relied on several partners in its accomplishment, among them the Ministry of Education, Government of Pernumbuco, several Municipal Authorities of Brazil, Federal University of Pernambuco and other institutions of higher education both public and private of the country and the Social Service of Industry (SESI). In 2010 the goal was to socialize social-educative-cultural experiences referenced in the freirean thought and to foment the propagation, in national and international level, of works and investigations of education and culture, in this freirean horizon. In 2013, in its eighth edition, the event will have as theme Education as Practice of Freedom: knowledge, experiences and (re)reading in Paulo Freire.
The Colloquium will be held on the campus of UFPE in Recife city, from 19 to 21 of September of 2013, birthday of Paulo Feire. It is expected for the meeting the participating of members of Latin America, Africa and Europe, in an amount that may reach around 1200 entries, among freirean thought scholars, educators, professionals of different areas of knowledge, members of social movements, students of graduation and post graduation and any person interest in education and the ideas of Paulo Freire. The participation only requests registration in the event, via website of the VIII Colloquium.
The theme of the colloquium is outspread in axes to subsidize and classify the works and discussions:
(1) Education and Culture
(2) Popular Education and Social Movements
(3) Education of Youth and Adults and Rural Education
(4) Education and Work
(5) Education and Sustainability
(6) Human Rights and Culture of Peace
(7) Formation of teacher and Higher Education
(8) Relations of Gender and Sexuality
(9) Ethnic-Racial Relations
(10) Curriculum and Formation of Teachers in the Basic Education.
In the Colloquium, for the presentation of works, each exhibitor will have up to 20 (twenty) minutes to present of their contributions, and should reserve 50 (fifty) minutes for the debates, that will occur in the form of Circles of Culture.
The Circles of Culture are a methodological procedure proposed by Paulo Freire that aims to promote autonomy and (un)oppression to the process of teach and learning. Fulfilled inside a debate on central questions of daily basis such as work, citizenship, feeding, health, people’s organization, freedom, happiness, ethical values, politic, oppressed, economy, social rights, religiousness, culture, among others, in these Circles of Culture the groups/individuals are consulted and called to the pedagogical actions and suggest a theme to be debated from an auto-reading of the world where they live.
“(…) The Circles of Culture were spaces where dialogically was taught and learned. Where it was possible to understand rather than make transference of knowledge. Where knowledge was produced rather than juxtaposition or superposition of knowledge made by the educator or about the student. Where new hypothesis of reading the world were built” (Freire, 1994:155). By the way, in the book of 1983 that gave title and theme to the Colloquium, Education as Practice of Freedom, Paulo Feire defines even better, despite of long before quotation from the post mortem work of 1994, the idea of Circle of Culture: “Instead of school, which seems to us a concept, between us, too loaded with passivity, in face of our own formation (even when given the attribute of active), contradicting the dynamic phase of transition, we launch the Circle of Culture. Instead of professor, with traditions strongly donor, the Coordinator of Debates. Instead og discursive class, the dialogue. Instead the student, with passive traditions, the member of the group. Instead of points and alienated programs, compact, reduced and encoded programming in units of learning” (Freire, 1983:103).
During the VIII Colloquium will work also a space entitled ÁGORA, such as the Greek Ágora – that means a meeting place, the public space by excellence of culture and politic in social life of Greeks –, will work in the terrain where will be build the headquarter of Paulo Freire Center. It aims to be a point of meeting, discussion, entertainment, launch, exhibition and sale of books, handcraft, artworks, feeding and presentations of artistic groups.
Since we are at the Ágora topic, that will have in the Colloquium, it is our job to weave the link that the theme of education as a possible affirmation of freedom remounts a previous period to the birth of liberal thought. It was already in the Greeks and in the Western humanism and widely incorporated to several trends of modern pedagogy. In Socrates, for example, the knowledge is conquer through the free exercise of consciences. According to Francisco C. Weffort, that writes an introductory article on and for the very work of Freire of 83, “The starting-point to the work in the circle of culture is to assume the freedom and critic as men way of being.”
That means that the notion of freedom only reaches an integral, diachronic and universal signification when it is tied to men will for free themselves and may reach the fullness when there is communion of people for people’s freedom.
Nothing more pertinent, then, than a colloquium that has that title.
On the website of the Colloquium, besides the registration, it is possible to find some pictures and the link for the website of previous edition, hits of accommodation and feeding.
http://coloquio.paulofreire.org.br/participacao/index.php/coloquio/viii-coloquio/schedConf/registration
VII Colloquium, in 2010