Paulo Freire - Global Impact

Global Impact

Template:Improvimento section Freire's major exponents in North America are Peter McLaren, Donaldo Macedo, Joe L. Kincheloe, Ira Shor, and Henry Giroux. One of McLaren's edited texts, Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter, expounds upon Freire's impact in the field of critical education. McLaren has also provided a comparative study concerning Paulo Freire and the Argentinian revolutionary icon Che Guevara. Freire's work has also influenced the so-called "radical math" movement in the United States, which emphasizes social justice issues and critical pedagogy as components of mathematical curricula

In 1991, the Paulo Freire Institute was established in São Paulo to extend and elaborate upon his theories of popular education. The Institute now has projects in many countries and is currently headquartered at UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies where it actively maintains the Freire archives. The director is Dr. Carlos Torres, a UCLA professor and author of Freirean books including La praxis educativa de Paulo Freire (1978). Since the publication of the English edition in 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has achieved near-iconic status in America's teacher-training programs, according to Sol Stern, a social commentator critical of the entry of Freire's Marxist-inspired teachings into the mainstream curriculum. Connections of Freire's non-dual theory and pedagogy has also recently been made with eastern philosophical traditions such as the Advaita Vedanta

The Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Conference is held each spring and is guided by the theory and practice of these two liberatory practitioners. The Conference networks a wide variety of people with interests in Freire and Augusto Boal—liberatory education and theatre, community organizing, community-based analysis, TIE, race/gender/class/sexual orientation/geography analysis, performance/performance art, comparative education models, etc.

The Paulo and Nita Freire Project for International Critical Pedagogy has been founded at McGill University. Here Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg have worked to create a dialogical forum for critical scholars around the world to promote research and re-create a Freirean pedagogy in a multinational domain.

Freire's chief critic in the US is Dr Rich Gibson. "Paulo Freire and Revolutionary Pedagogy for Social Justice." http://richgibson.com/freirecriticaledu.htm

Paulo Freire's work also had a profound impact on Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa.

At his death, Freire was working on a book of ecopedagogy, a platform of work carried on by many of the Freire Institutes and Freirean Associations around the world today. It has been influential in helping to develop planetary education projects such as the Earth Charter as well as countless international grassroots campaigns per the spirit of Freirean popular education generally.