A CONTRIBUTION TO PAULO FREIRE’S THEORY AND PRACTICE: THE ‘CULTURAL EXTENSION SERVICE/UNIVERSITY OF RECIFE’ (1962–64)
o "Serviço de Extensão Cultural/Universidade do Recife" (1962-64)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5752/P.2318-7344.2022v10n19p159-193Keywords:
Brazil, extension service, Paulo Freire, literacy, University of Recife, Bourdieu.Abstract
This contribution is an historical account of Paulo Freire’s pedagogical and administrative praxis before his forced exile in 1964. It relies on interviews collected during a field research in 1976, a conversation with Paulo Freire in Geneva one year later and on the secondary literature up to date. Being the director of the first Extension Service of a major Brazilian university in the early 1960s gave Freire and his collaborators the space and time to experiment with the today world famous literacy method bearing his name. The concept of ‘Field of Cultural Production’ (Bourdieu) is used to elucidate better Freire and his team’s avant-gardist production within the spaces opened up by Brazil’s popular movements in the early sixties. The contribution shows how the ‘Paulo Freire System’ developed in the praxis of a cultural e political movement and received its academic consecration in an incremental and eclectic style.