A Freirean watershed

Abstract

2025 marks the coming into reprint, after so many years, of Ira Shor and Paulo Freire’ s Pedagogy of Liberation. Dialogues on Transforming Education (Shor and Freire, 2025). In my estimation, this book represents a watershed in the development of Paulo Freire’s oeuvre in the English language. It was one of his first three books in English following his return to Brazil from exile after 16 years away. It was his first ‘talking book’ in English and it was a vol- ume in which he expanded and unpacked, also elaborating significantly on some of his precepts contained in his early work, notably his magnum opus, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 2018), publication of which, in English in 1970, was a landmark publication in Community Development, Education, Critical Inquiry, Critical Sociology, and Social Justice action. These precepts and concepts required further unpacking and a more nuanced approach, given their reappearance in a setting where two, at face value, different contexts were brought and exposed face to face. [excerpt]