REENGAGING FREIRE: PAULO & ELZA IN GENEVA

This Learning Unit offers historical information about the ten years the pedagogue Paulo Freire (1921, Recife – 1997 São Paulo), his wife Elza and their children spent in Geneva in the 1970s. It also presents four experiments, realized by autonomous gallery educators, to reinvent and reengage Freire’s thinking in present-day Switzerland. Finally, it opens some ideas to translate those experimentations in other contexts.

The Reenagaging Freire Learning Unit is a first step to reinstate Paulo and Elza Freire in Geneva’s history of pedagogy, from which they are strikingly absent. It is also an attempt to imagine experimentations that interrogate the topicality of Freire today in Switzerland (as the gallery educators did in developing a feminist choir, a community garden, a construction workshop in a popular neighborhood or a long-term experiment around the future of asylum-seeker youth), imagining how concepts such as untested feasibilities, conscientização, codification or generativity could serve as tools to question the contemporary dominant models of arts education.