II Paulo Freire Colloquium – Freirean Dialogues

“If education alone can not transform the society, either without it the society changes”.

Paulo Freire

 

The Center of Human Sciences and Education (Faculty of Education – Faed), of University of Santa Catarina state (UDESC), promoted its 2º Paulo Freire Colloquium – Freirean Dialogues – in the month of August (between the days 5 and 7), on the campus of Florianópolis city.

UDESC is a university which was born in 1965 with the mission of produce, systematize, socialize and apply the knowledge in the several fields of know, through the teach, research and extension, blend together, to contribute for a society more justice and democratic to improve quality of life and sustainable development of Santa Catarina state, embodied in the teaching units distributed today by 10 different cities.

UDESC is evolving from its initial objective of form and qualify human resources to put in practice the constitutional principle of inseparability between teach, research and extension.

In the I Paulo Freire Colloquium, held on June 04 and 05 of 2012, organized by the Program of Support to Graduation’s Teach (PRAPEG – in Portuguese), the theme was “Between themes: Pedagogy of Action”. The opening lecture, “The actuality of Paulo Freire’s thought”, was given by Professor José Eustáquio Romão, from Paulo Freire Institute (IPF – Brazil), currently teacher of Universidade Nove de Julho, in São Paulo, Brazil.

In the following day, there was a round table with the title: “Freirean dialogues in our wanderings through education”, with Prof. Adilson De Angelo (FAED/UDESC), Prof. Lourival José Martins Filho (FAED/UDESC) and Prof. Patrícia de Moraes Lima (CED/UFSC).

 

 

Paulo Freire understands that the professor should comprehend the culture multiculturally. When is discussed something on the content of a class program/plan, this thing is not and will never be universal, it has its regional dimensions, until the family, and is in this moment that the class players enter in the dialogues, both content methodologically.

Both culture and language of class exist. It is necessary to know how reinvent the language, understanding the diversity of these syntaxes. As former, it is possible to testify daily the own posture and promote a reflection on the dialectic between tactic and strategy. This means that is necessary to think daily in how to overcome the exclusivity of a close cultural comprehension.

The II Colloquium will focus in the Circles of Culture of both directions: as methodological procedure, legacy of Paulo Freire, as well as the own culture will be corpus for the Circles. To make this split, the organizing committee distinguished the circles in two modalities: Circle of Culture (anchored in the original conception of Paulo Freire) and Epistemological Circles, that enter in the second dimension of the circle point above. The first revolutionizes the language to understand the syntaxes. The second investigates the syntaxes to understand better.

 

 

To understand better the split, is necessary to understand what means ‘epistemological’. Epistemology¹ is a concept of philosophic nature, which refers to the study of human knowledge. It is formed from the Greek term “gnosis”, which means “knowledge”, and “logos”, which means “doctrine, theory”. Accepting it as general theory of knowledge, which reflects on a concordance of thought between individual and object, object can only be something outside to the spirit, an idea, a phenomenon, a concept etc., but seen consciously by the subject, that is, the subject is taken to investigate itself by investigate its cognitive processes (how learn, how know). In this sense, call the Circles of ‘epistemological’ means that these will be Circles which will depart from individuals (language) but to focus the scientific knowledge (syntax).

The celebration of the birthday of 50 years of freirean experience of literacy, which was internationally known as the 40 hours of Angicos, that marked the launched of the political-pedagogical project that literate around 300 people and that would try to be enlarged in national terms, mobilized a lot the study groups for the realization of another colloquium.

The coordinator of the event is the professor Adilson de Angelo from the Group of Freirean Studies, UDESC, with the support of Directions of Teaching and Expansion, Culture and Faed’s Community, and the Program of Support to Graduation’s Teach (PRAPEG). The event approached the thematic “Freirean Dialogues” and the program accounted with conferences, cultural moments, circles of culture:

 

Summary of the Program

 

08/05/2013:

18h30 – Reception and opening of the Colloquium – Emerson Campos

19h30 – Opening Conference – Carlos Rodrigues Brandão (Unicamp)

08/06/2013:

8h00 – Gnosiologic Circle: “Dialogues with/in Paulo Freire”

10h00 – Gnosiologic Circles: “Paulo Freire, Eco-pedagogy and Planetary Citizenship”; “The infant education as political, ethics and esthetics act”; “Formation of Teachers and necessary knowledge to educative practice”; “Educative processes in the non-school contexts”; “Language, esthetics, education and Paulo Freire”

14h00 – Circles of Culture: “Education and Technology”; “Education of Youth and Adults”; “Education of Ethics-Racial Relations”; “Popular Education and Social Movements”

18h30 – Conference: “The connections of praxis of Paulo Freire”

08/07/2013:

8h30 – Closing Conference: “Curriculum and Pedagogy in Paulo Freire”

 

1. The context in which we use the word “epistemology” in this text, in fact, in Portuguese, does not contemplate the meaning intended. ‘Gnoseologia’ and ‘epistemology’ are concepts used to refer the study of knowledge, but are different because the first one relies on the validity of the knowledge in function of the cognoscente subject, that is, the one who knows the object, the second is relative to the field of research in each branch of sciences, to method, to procedure.