Paulo Freire: film rescues the origin of an educational method – 04/04/2023 – Educação

60 years ago, educator Paulo Freire began an experiment in the small town of Angicos, in the interior of Rio Grande do Norte, which would mark his biography and intellectual trajectory forever.

It was there that the philosopher tested and honed his method of literacy for young people and adults, which involved teaching them to read and write in 40 hours based on words and situations from local daily life.

The success of this pedagogical laboratory served as the basis for Freire’s theory of knowledge, presented in works that won the world, such as the famous “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (1968), the third most cited book in social sciences on the planet, according to a study by the London School of Economics (LSE) in the United Kingdom.

At a time when illiterates did not have the right to vote in Brazil, the result of Freire’s emancipatory process in Angicos would produce a revealing index: at the end of the 40 hours of class, 300 students from the course signed up to vote in the electoral zone of the Potiguar city, which until then it had only 800 registered voters.

The success of the experience, which earned Freire an invitation from then-president João Goulart to nationalize the initiative from the Ministry of Education and Culture, also generated fears and distrust.

After the 1964 coup, the military government arrested Freire and abruptly ended the project in Angicos. Rumors that students would be similarly persecuted led the newly literate to burn notebooks and books so that no trace of their student days would remain.

In recent years, the educator was treated as a public enemy by former president Jair Bolsonaro and his surroundings. This year, the São Paulo government of Tarcísio de Freitas (Republicans), aligned with Bolsonarism, decided to change the name of a future station on the 2-green line from Paulo Freire to Fernão Dias. The Public Ministry was activated and a public petition tries to revert the measure.

But it is about the educational revolution sown in that hinterland that the documentary “Fonemas de Liberdade”, by the American director Catherine Murphy, is about. The film will be shown in Angicos this Wednesday (5th) during the celebrations of the sexagenarian experience.

The celebration of the 60th anniversary of Angicos will be attended by former students of Freire’s pioneering project and educators who coordinated the first 40 hours of classes on site, then called Culture Circles. Many of them will be watching their own testimonials for the documentary on a movie screen for the first time.

“In the world of education and, in particular, adult literacy, all roads lead to Paulo Freire”, says the documentary filmmaker, who is in Brazil to deepen the investigation into the Angicos experiment in a second film about the birthplace of the Freirean method .

“Paulo Freire’s work is so influential all over the world, and in areas as diverse as public health and theater, that it seemed important to me to understand concretely what was the basic work carried out by him in the communities before publishing his books”, explains Murphy.

Between the conception and realization of “Fonemas de Liberdade”, however, there was a pandemic. And the Covid-19 emergency made the travel and interview schedule for the film unfeasible.

Murphy had participated in an international conference in Juazeiro do Norte (CE) at the end of 2019, when he presented his film “Maestras”, about the young teachers who worked in the Cuban Literacy Campaign in 1961. By analogy, the debate after the session was being led to the base work of Paulo Freire, declared in 2012 patron of Brazilian education.

“Many people in the audience had worked with Freire on his return from exile, in 1979, and the complaint emerged that there was no film of equal size about the origins of Freire’s method”, he reports. “At the time, I committed to working with them on a documentary project on the subject”, she recalls, who in 2004 founded the production company The Literacy Project, focused on investigating literacy projects in Latin America.

A few months later, however, the world closed down to contain the new coronavirus. “Since the pandemic showed no sign of abating, we delved into the existing files on Angicos to start a film without footage”, he explains.

Murphy found period images, testimonials by Freire about the method, interviews with students of different ages, explanations by coordinators of the Culture Circles. “Sixteen different sources were used, including original recordings of classes made by journalist Luiz Lobo at the time and which only survived the dictatorship because they were hidden in the backyard of a friend’s house”, he reveals.

The result is an exciting thread about the birth of the Paulo Freire method and the impact of literacy on the lives of the country people of Angicos.

“It was necessary to challenge the groups of illiterate adults based on certain representations of the concrete reality they experienced”, explains Freire in the film, pointing to the drawings used in the classes to present questions to the students. “The illiterate, in the first place, see themselves in the concrete situation of their existential experience (…) and realize that transforming reality with their work, with their action and their reflection is a way of creating and recreating the world, therefore, to assume the role of a transforming subject and not an object.”

With the end of the pandemic, Murphy assembled a team of Latin American women and has been conducting investigations and interviews throughout Brazil to complement and expand her extensive archival research with original material.

“On this journey, the most exciting thing was diving into Freire’s concrete experience in the community, something fascinating and extremely relevant for Brazil and the world today”, he says. “Based on these pioneering experiences, it is possible to resume essential debates about what education is and what it lends itself to and what kind of training we want for our society. Paulo Freire’s work touches on all of this.”