Paulo Freire Center

The Paulo Freire Center for Transdisciplinary Development Research and Dialogical Education offers space for the reflection of political practice. It considers practice (action and reflection) in research – education – politics as part of a process which ultimately aims at the abolition of oppression. The Austrian Research Foundation for International Development (ÖFSE) and the Mattersburg Circle for Development Policies at Austrian Universities (Mattersburg Circle) initiated the Paulo Freire Center 2004 in Vienna as joint project. Since 2009 the Freire Center is part of KommEnt.

The Paulo Freire Center advocates knowledge as public property. Even if one assumes, for the sake of the argument, that all obstacles to knowledge and education would be removed today (reality points into a different direction), the following questions would remain:

How can knowledge be imparted in order to be used to reach the ultimate goal of any development research, the abolition of oppression?! Is it enough to enable as many people as possible to get an education in traditional institutions? In the tradition of Paulo Freire, the Paulo Freire Center says: No, it is not enough! It is rather the teaching method and the ideological vision of education that matter.

Teacher = Bank Officer?

Paulo Freire coined the bankers' concept to describe the traditional system of education, the one holding up oppression: the omniscient teachers are being bank officers who add saving deposits (education) to the unknowing students. The more the teachers fill the containers (students), the more successful the process is considered. The students accept the deposits, put them in order and pile them up. The teachers control the way in which the students see the world. The passivity of the learning process adjusts students to the ruling system. The creativity of the students is being minimized or destroyed but the credulousness stimulated. This system serves those who have interest that "the world is neither recognized nor changed":

"The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is better "fit" for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquillity rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it." (1)

Teaching and Learning: Not a One Way Street

Paulo Freire confronts passive and system preserving education conceptions with a model of dialogical learning. In this model students are critical co-researchers in dialogue with their teachers. Teachers present the study material for their students own considerations. The teachers reconsider their previous considerations while the students formulate theirs. The distance between students and teachers dwindles; students are being motivated to observe the world with critical eyes.

"Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist, and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow." (2)

Objectives of the Paulo Freire Center

The Paulo Freire Center pursues three objectives (research – education – politics):

• Education as a reflection of practice: reflection on the future of development cooperation, and its connection with concrete everyday problems of development cooperation and its specific "project culture". This includes - in terms of Paulo Freire’s formulation "To learn how to read the world" – a political-economic alphabetization;
• The politicization of Austrian Development Cooperation: re-appropriation of the long term, creative and ethical element of development cooperation and development politics in favor of disadvantaged or oppressed groups;
• To organize the dialogue between practice and research: to encourage new forms of researching, teaching and learning in the interest of development cooperation and development politics.