Paulo Freire Academic Conference – Democracy, Citizenship, & Sustainability: A Celebration of Freire’s Centennial Year

Democracy, Citizenship, & Sustainability: A Celebration of Freire’s Centennial Year

The UCLA School of Education, the University of Southern California (USC), and Soka University of America are pleased to organize an academic conference to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Paulo Freire’s life.

One of the single most important developments in educational reform over the past five decades across the world has been the influence of Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy and the ascendancy of popular education and participatory action research as models for adult learning education.

Popular education is highly critical of mainstream education, seeking to empower the marginalized, the disenfranchised, and the poor, while increasing the degree of participation of the populace in the educational project. Systematic dialogues about paradigms of learning and education are long overdue.

The conference event seeks to highlight ways in which Freire’s concepts can be employed in a 21st century context and with the aim of building a more just world through ethics-based educational programs and policies.​

We hope that conference attendees develop an understanding of Paulo Freire as an academic scholar and will be able to better understand educational problems on a global scale, and subsequently identify remedies that are rooted in social justice, liberation, and civic engagement.

The conference will be international in scope and virtual. More information about the conference agenda will be posted on the UCLA Paulo Freire Institute website by March 2022.

We invite students and academic faculty to submit abstracts of their research into Freire’s work.

Please reach out to Heidi Vitug at vitug@gseis.ucla.edu with any questions.