Paulo Freire and Thematic Research

In the historical balance of participatory research in Latin America, Gajardo (1985) places “theme research” as the first research experience committed to social transformation. This was put forward by Paulo Freire in the sixties as part of his methodological proposal to educate adults and was known as the “Freire Method.”

Since 1961, this Brazilian educator had been a member of an ecumenical team of intellectuals who founded the Popular Culture Movement: Catholics, Protestants, and Marxists worked together on research aimed to reconstruct popular culture and the emancipation of the masses through education. As a result of these efforts, Freire offered a pedagogical proposal shaped around the production and communication of knowledge being part of the same process, an education for adults closer to the life of the educatees, a literacy program that enabled the subjects to “read reality to discover their own history.”

As Freire himself points out in Education as a Practice of Freedom, his proposal was the result of more than 15 years “of practice in the field of Adult Education in the proletarian areas, as well as in the urban and suburban areas” (Freire, 1970, p. 97). By the time he formulated this proposal, he had been teaching Portuguese for 20 years and had actively participated in the Popular Culture and Grassroots Education Movements. From his experience of working with teams, he coordinated the adult education programs from which emerged cultural circles. About these experiences Freire says, “We introduced group debates to clarify the situations as well as the action plans that arose from these clarifications” (Freire, 1970, p. 123). The topics in these discussions always came from the adults who had been previously and informally interviewed.

It was during this time that he felt motivated to teach adult literacy via the perspective of cultural democratization, where adults are themselves the subjects of their own education and the conscious creators of their reality. In 1962 Freire and his interdisciplinary team from the Cultural Extension from Universidad de Recife, in Pernambuco, taught 300 workers how to read and write in 45 days; the following year Freire was invited by President João Goulart to implement adult literacy courses throughout the entire country, a process that was interrupted by the military coup in 1964.

During his exile in Chile, Freire worked at the Institute for Capacitation and Research on Agrarian Reform, where he systematized his pedagogical proposals in the books Education as a Practice of Freedom and Pedagogy of the Oppressed. A characteristic of the literacy method proposed by Freire is that it is based on previous rigorous research advanced by both experts and by those learning to become literate.

This research seeks, first, to identify any problems in the local context in which the literacy program will take place, and second, to learn how the participants view these problems, their felt needs, their aspirations, and their expectations (the thematic universe). Another practical result of this kind of inquiry is the capacity to recognize the words and expressions that synthesize the interpretation of reality that the research group holds (the vocabulary universe), from which a set of words is established as generators and organizers of the content of the literacy program. In Freire’s words: “The interviews reveal the wishes, frustrations, disbeliefs, hopes, and motivations to participate, as well as highly aesthetic moments of popular language” (1970, p. 110).

These words and phrases are the generators and bases for cultural circle discussions. They are analyzed by and with the interviewed subjects to organize and create situations meaningful to their experiences. Once the words’ given social relevancy and phonetic potential are defined, the team recreates situations which are then applied and codified through simple drawings made into posters or slides (thematization). Once these materials are made into codes, as Freire suggests, they should serve to reveal in detail the problems and themes presented in the situations, as well as to distinguish the phonetic families that reference the vocabulary identified as generators.

Beyond the experiences of Freire in Brazil and in Chile at the beginning of the seventies, there were a few other thematic investigations in Latin America. The main one in Latin America and the Caribbean focused on agrarian reform, rural development, and community organization, and was called investigation-action research. It was elaborated by the Brazilian sociologist Joao Bosco Pinto, who was motivated by Freire’s principles of the liberatory education. Investigation-action research was a method to “diagnose, coordinate, execute, and evaluate action projects wanting to participate in a major social and educational learning process” (Garjardo, 1985, p. 13).

Generally undertaken by institutions and state programs, the Freirian proposal was premised as an education oriented toward the expansion of the peasant’s consciousness and his or her understanding of the implications of historical reality. This expansion was to be possible through access to universal and scientific knowledge and the development of creativity and social organizing skills. Beyond the political limitations, the widespread use of this kind of research was, in many cases, the motivation for many participants to become popular educators.

The Emergence of PE and Participatory Methodologies

PE emerged in Latin America as a consequence of the discussion and application of Freire’s proposals, which had been influenced by the radicalization of the popular struggles lived under the narrative of revolution. In fact, the seventies and eighties are known for the rise of community organizations and unionism among peasants, ecclesiastics, women, and youth, as well as the formation of leftist parties and political movements.

PE is the union of politics and education aimed at the emancipation of the marginalized classes of society. This union is developed in two ways; first, the politicization of education, where it has objectives associated with political action; second, the making of a pedagogical politics when political action is considered to be a space of learning. Thus, politics and education are taken to reach all spheres of life: we learn from everything, everything is political.

The influence that Marxist thought had on popular educators permitted a structural understanding of society and of transformative social action. However, by taking the conflict between capital and labor and between exploited and exploiters as the central issue, it led the analysis of the structural reality of Latin American toward a kind of reductionism. Consequently, PE was focusing mainly on aspects of life concerned with these dichotomies, rather than on the cultural educatees’ experiences, previous knowledge, and opinions.

The radicalization of the Latin American political spectrum at the end of the seventies was also felt among social scientists. After the initial adoption of functionalist approaches for the analysis of positivist research, the escalation of social conflicts generated by capitalistic modernization meant that many social researchers experienced dissatisfaction with the hegemonic frameworks and the neutrality of social science. The influence of Marxism and the progressive commitment of some social researchers to the popular struggle demanded integrated research methodologies capable of articulating the production of knowledge relevant to the political and social transformations of the time.

With this perspective and during the first half of the seventies, the Colombian Orlando Fals Borda, together with his team of researchers, elaborated and applied participatory action research (PAR) to support the peasant organizations on the Atlantic coast of Colombia. Based on the reflections and conceptualizations of this research experience, Fals Borda (1979, 1998) summarized the characteristics of PAR as the following methodological principles:

Fals Borda and his team brought these principles to many countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. In 1977 many participatory researchers met at the World Wide Symposium in Cartagena to exchange experiences, solidify their identity, and value the similarities and differences among the many kinds of research: participatory observation, observation–insertion, action investigation, and militant investigation. From that moment on, PAR presented itself as the most coherent methodology along with other liberator practices such as the theology of liberation and alternative communication, thus acquiring visibility within the Popular Education movement as another accredited methodology for the production of knowledge.

Vio Grossi (1983), at the beginning of the eighties, manifested a challenge: despite the great potential of participatory research for adult education in Latin America, “its findings continue to stay in an initial stage. There is still much to advance in the generation of experiences and in the techniques for ground work” (p. 33). Maria Cristina Mata (1981) offered a similar review for the First Meeting for Action Research and Popular Education in Santiago de Chile: “To talk about action investigation as a substantial practice within popular education is very common now, however, it is much less common to talk about how it has been integrated into the educational processes” (p. 114).

Recognizing the Historicity and Culture of the Popular World

Since the nineties, many educational initiatives have rooted and consolidated themselves in the popular sectors. This confronted educators’ abstract conception of “popular” and “popular classes,” with the reality of working with social collectives who had their own references of identity: neighbors, women, peasants, youth, Afro-Americans, and so on. Thus, for example, they discovered that the named “working-class districts” were instead territories inhabited by people from a wide range of social categories, although the presence of the countryside and the influence of mass media on their cultural practices were notable.

This discovery of the singular face of the popular classes imposed the need to understand it in its cultural and historical density; thus interest for rebuilding the processes of conformation of such classes’ territories to unveil the keys to their identity, their ways of seeing reality, of acting, and of relating, grew. PE began to speak about “recovering history,” “characterizing popular cultures,” of understanding people’s daily lives and their knowledge (Bigott, 1992).

This recognition of and interest in popular culture and history was also related to the ideas of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) about hegemony, subaltern cultures, common sense, and popular language. To this Italian Marxist, the revolutionary practice demanded as much to understand the cultural mechanisms by means of which the ruling classes had achieved the consent of the dominated classes, as the manner in which the common sense of the people went toward critical thinking, through the cultural and political actions of committed movements and parties.

Similar concerns were being raised by some intellectuals and social researchers from the academic world. For example, the studies of García Canclini (1982) and Martín-Barbero (1987) understood popular cultures not as reflections of dominant ideologies but as frameworks of meanings from which the popular classes represent and act over their reality. Additionally, those authors proposed that multiple factors and elements converge in the conformation of popular culture, such as its history and its cultural practices, its access to the cultural capital of the society, and its complex relation with the hegemonic culture.

These researchers were also influenced by Gramsci and the emerging cultural studies and fascinated by themes of common interest to popular educators: the reception of mass media by the subaltern cultures, the uses of everyday knowledge, and practices of popular cultural resistance and cultural mediations. On the other hand, sociology and anthropology were including theoretical and methodological approaches that claimed the social construction of reality and the daily life dimension of the social reality (Berger & Luckman, 1976; Heller, 1977), the culture as a framework of meanings (Geertz, 1987), and the use of qualitative research methodologies.

In this way, some popular educators, in order to answer their concerns, looked at the contributions coming from social studies that incorporated or created the qualitative research methodologies and strategies of qualitative investigations such as the collective recovery of history, ethnography, and conversational analysis.

With the interest of writing the history of the popular classes in mind, popular educators intentionally distanced themselves from the conventional forms used to build history. Therefore, many practitioners of PE, along with some professional historians, proposed building a “history from the bottom up” concept, which had already been developed by Marxist historians such as G. Rudé, E. P. Thompson, E. Hobsbawm, and R. Samuels.

For instance, Samuels’s (1984) proposal coincided with PAR in that the protagonists of the labor movement should be the participants of the “history workshops.” Fals Borda, on the other hand, presented “historical recuperation” as a technique relevant to the rescue of the testimonials, archives, and historical experiences of the popular sectors. After working with peasants in Nicaragua, Mexico, and Colombia, Fals Borda (1985) wrote about the recuperation of the people’s history as “the process to put together the selective memories about the social class conflicts through activities of collective memory, individual remembrances, storytelling, and the gathering of documents and objects often kept in the old chest drawers of the humble houses” (p. 88).

With this kind of work, the collective recuperation of history (CRH) began to organize itself as a research mode with its own identity, objectives, and methodologies. Its efforts resulted in a simultaneous construction of designs and methodological strategies applied throughout many countries by PE centers that wanted to proudly expose their set of tools and contributions to the history from the bottom movement (Cuevas, 2008).

Based on critiques of the character and uses of the official and academic history, the new approaches to reconstruct the history of the marginalized classes and sectors of society vindicated the need to activate the personal and collective memory, the subject’s capacity to interpret his or her own past, and multiple forms of sharing (Cendales, Peresson, & Torres, 1990; Cendales & Torres, 2000; Rubio & Valenzuela, 1990; Torres, 1994). Even though there is a lack of rigorous studies on the production of participatory history in the PE movement, it is important to recognize the transitions that have taken place, one being the shift from a disciplinarian focus (a popular history) to a cultural focus (the social memories), and another being the need to move from producing or rescuing “the real history” to constructing and strengthening subordinate memories (Torres, 2016, 2017).

PE’s approach to ethnographic research was justified by the desire to understand realities and popular practices from the perspectives of both individuals and their communities (Mariño, 1992). As was recognized within this methodological tradition there were also different approaches; researchers who used it in the PE field opted for critical ethnographies (Rockwell, 1989) and advocated for articulation between PAR and ethnography. For Mariño (1994, p. 95), this “marriage” was justified insofar as what is missing in PAR is the ethnography (methodology) and what is missing in ethnography is PAR (transformer commitment). Despite the attractiveness of this approach, few developments and research experiences of this methodology have been developed.

Another qualitative research approach that has been used to study PE practices has been conversational analysis by Sergio Martinic (1987, 1992, 1995, 1996) from the Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de la Educación (CIDE) in Chile. Starting from the assumption that social and educational practices are an intersubjective social construction mediated by language, Martinic compiled and put into practice an investigative proposal which privileges the reconstruction and analysis of conversations that develop the subjects who participate in the reconstruction and the conversation analysis developed by those who participate in shared social contexts. In his studies Martinic has confirmed the centrality of language in the construction of reality by educators in organizations, institutions, and social processes, as well as the need to innovate methodologically. This methodological perspective, which is of a qualitative nature, has also contributed to the configuration of the systematization of experiences, such as interpretative research modality.

Redefinitions of PE and the Systemization of Practices

Toward the end of the eighties, popular educators started to express a dissatisfaction with their work and its orienting assumptions. Although this preoccupation had already been expressed in Chile several years earlier, due to the Soviets’ socialism crisis, represented by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Sandinista regime, and the implementation of democracy in various Latin American countries, it was not until 1991 that this concern was able to make it onto the agenda of the Consejo de Educación Popular de América Latina y el Caribe (CEAAL) in the assembly held in Havana, Cuba (Osorio, 2004).

For Osorio (2004, p. 9), the major critique of PE was how it had become reduced to a community-organizing option that lacked a pedagogical discourse and had remained insensitive to changes in the political and conceptual context of Latin America and the wider world. For others, PE had failed to produce the expected results; it was weak in the systemization of its practices and did not develop efficient strategies to dialogue with other critical thought perspectives. It was also considered that its conceptual approach meant its focus remained on understanding society, politics, subjects of change, popular culture, and pedagogy.

On a contextual level, some authors, such as Mejia (1993), insisted that the world was going not through a superficial or conjectural crisis, but through a period of crisis in which many of the bases and institutions of the modern world were being thrown over; therefore, the PE and the critical thinking movements needed to assume that those changes were unavoidable challenges. In Latin America the challenges were even more pressing due to the impact of neoliberalism on the economy and society.

Consequently, new popular educational practices started to institutionalize themselves to generate stable networks of communication through national and international projects, seminars, and continental publications. During the eighties and nineties many small centers of development and research became very influential nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with large budgets and professional teams, some of which were composed of renowned popular educator practitioners who were later called on by the new governments to direct educational, social, and local development programs.

The discourse on society and politics suffered significant transformation; to understand social movements as protagonists of great importance for social change meant a transition from viewing them as forms of revolutionary change to seeing them as part of a gradual construction of a substantial democracy, that is, the state and the political parties were no longer seen as the only channels of political action. Thus, in the last decade of the 20th century there is an agreement that Popular Education should place itself at the service of the new social movements. For instance, Osorio (1991) suggests that the process of building new subjects and social movements for a new society has been able to bring into being a different way of doing education—an education that comes from the needs of specific social subjects, allied with their immediate interests in the struggle for a better life.

Along with the recent symbolic value of the social movements, and the new social fabric being represented, PE was also actively informing the new ways of seeing and doing politics. Thus, the emergence of a grassroots political culture in everyday life in Latin America was assumed to be an objective reached through PE activity. The priority now is to strengthen civil society and other organizations rather than gain access to political power through traditional political parties or through an assault on power.

From an initial experience with adult education in different countries, many actions focusing on women emerged in areas such as human rights, citizenship education, environmental education, and others. These new educators looked for current sources to renew their sense of the work. Paulo Freire was one of the practitioners who, in his commitment to always improve and update his work, and after recognizing the limitations of his first proposals, revised and radicalized his own pedagogical ideas in publications such as Pedagogy of the Hope (1993).

With regard to the production of knowledge in PE, two contributions were developed in the nineties: one, how production of knowledge is understood through a reevaluation of PE’s classical paradigm; two, the practices led by this kind of production of knowledge that brought a gradual positioning of the systematization of the practices, now considered a legacy of PE, to the field of participatory research.

The magazine La Piragua became the privileged medium by which to document the questioning and redefinition process undertaken by PE. For instance, in editions 7 (1993), 10, and 11 (1995), various articles refer to contemporary changes in the production and circulation of knowledge in the scientific, social, and cultural worlds, and to the implications of a “paradigm crisis” in PE and its research practices. The importance of this documentation was such that CEAAL coordinated two important endeavors during the nineties: an entire publication of La Piragua (No. 9, 1994) to make an assessment of the research done on education in Latin America, and a seminar (CEAAL, 1996) dedicated to the “Process for Knowledge Production in Popular Education.”

Although the so-called “systematization of experiences” has been a technique used for the production of knowledge since the mid-eighties, it was in the nineties when this kind of activity gained ground. Thereafter, its method was taken, adapted, and developed by diverse institutions such as Centro Latinoamericano de Trabajo Social (CELATS), Consejo Regional de Fomento a la Educación de Adultos (CREFAL, Mexico), Net ALFORJA, CIDE (Chile), and the Asociación Dimensión Educativa (Colombia). Even CEAAL itself created the Programa Latinoamericano de Sistematización (PLAS).

During this period, meetings, seminars, and systematization workshops become dominant, while books, magazines, anthologies, and manuals on the theme of systematization were published as well. The methodology documented presents an integration of a vast spectrum of projects undertaken by education and socially conscious institutions. Also during the nineties, some universities incorporated the systematization of experiences into their social work and undergraduate and graduate curriculums.

Systematization can have different emphasis. While some see it as a strategy to organize educational and social projects (Cadena, 1987), others (Bernechea, Gonzalez, & Morgan, 1999) take it as a self-reflection done by professionals about their own knowledge. Still others (Jara, 1994, 2014) insist that systematization possesses a “dialectic method”; others, however, prefer to see it as a way to develop constructions of the language and conversationary patterns that configure social and popular educational efforts (Falkembach, 1991, 2008; Guiso, 1999; Martinic, 1987, 1999).

From a critical interpretative perspective, systematization can be understood as a collective production of knowledge about applied interventions and social actions that look to critically reconstruct and to interpret the meanings and logics that constitute these practices, to empower and contribute to the conceptualization of the thematic field in which they are inscribed (Barragán & Torres, 2017; Torres, 1999). Such a definition involves the following central aspects that, in our perspective, characterize systematization.

Intentional production of knowledge. Simply registering and sharing research results is not considered systematizing, for systematizing seeks recognition in the depth and advancement of the knowledge and meanings communicated by actors. Systematizing requires researchers to hold a conscious position about the where, what, and how of this social knowledge production, as well as a clear understanding of the reach of its incidences. The research team has to be explicit about how they understand the reality to be systematized, the character of the knowledge they are able to produce in relation to this reality, and the type of methodological strategy they use.

Collective production of knowledge. The systematization process also recognizes the actors as subjects. Without ignoring the work of the external experts, the subjects are those who make the main decisions about the what, why, and the how of the research.

Complexity of practice. It is aware of the complexity of the practices, which are the systematization’s object. These practices are much more than the simple sum of objectives, activities, actors, roles, and institutional processes. Because they are conditioned by the political, social, and cultural contexts that inform the initial hypothesis, they have the capacity to use the emerging kinds of actors, relationships, institutions, rituals, meanings, and perceptions as feedback to the familiar context while also working with possible contingencies that might arise.

Documenting the process. Systematizing first looks to produce a description of the experience, then to reconstruct its trajectory and complexity from the actor’s diverse perspective. Multiple techniques are used to provoke the stories that expose the readings, themes, and meanings in the experiences of the actors. These partial perspectives, sometimes even contradictory, build the narrative that describes the practice of systematization.

Critical interpretation of the logic that shapes the experience. Systematizing, besides reconstructing the experience, aspires to explain the logic that gives order to it. In order to reveal the “grammar” that is at the base of the structure of the experience, the team needs to name the external and internal influences, the structural relations, and the cultural codes that give unity to and/or are the source of fragmented versions of stories. In other words, the systematization process must produce an interpretation that goes beyond the stories of its actors and that broadens the view of its practice.

Empowering the social intervention practice. Along with the cognitive benefits of systematization comes its methodological compromise to update itself as required during the development of the project being systematized. This continual updating is not done mechanically; it takes place throughout the entire process so that as the actors gather results, these results may reciprocally inform the dynamics, relationships, and readings of the research, should the case need to be reoriented in its focus or approach.

Research nourishes the conceptualization of social practices in general. Systematization intends to comprehend the general and particular ideas specific to some social practices with the intention of interpreting the material within an appropriate social context. Publicizing the method of systematization should expand the knowledge available about a specific social reality; for instance, of social movements, popular organizations, and PE. The results from various systematization processes focused on the same theme can generate deep theoretical reflection.

Self-reflection by active subjects. We can define systematization as the self-reflection of those subjects who take social or educational action in their communities. In order to strengthen and transform such communities they start by acknowledging what they already have and know as well as by identifying their intentional and shared efforts to rebuild these with an understanding of the contexts, factors, meanings, and elements that recreate them. Therefore, the systematization is, in itself, an experience that shapes and shares new meanings about the practice and its practitioners (Falkembach, 2008).

The Current Revival of PE and the Incorporation of New Research Strategies

In the 21st century, PE has experienced a process of revitalization and renewal: changes in the political and social context in some Latin American countries, the emergence of new fields and ways of educational action, and the incorporation of new actors, content, and practices, has caused a real renascence of PE (Falkembach & Torres, 2015).

First of all, the devastating effects of neoliberal economic policies (rising poverty, unemployment, and inequality) soon became apparent, the legitimacy of transitional governments began to wane, political clienteles and corruption practices spread throughout the region, and crime rates and social tensions soared. In certain countries in the region these circumstances led to the reactivation of traditional social movements (indigenous, rural) and the emergence of new political organizations (anti-neoliberal, environmental, youth). New left-wing parties or movements also emerged or regained support and some even gained power in local and national governments.

It is thanks to the rebirth of these social struggles, as well as the indignation, desires, and hopes that they express, that PE has once again come to mean so much to so many people and groups, becoming a key reference point for many of the political, ethical, and pedagogical activists in the region. A brief summary of the fields, participants, and areas of activity in PE, as well as an outline of the changes in established and emerging issues that currently characterize and challenge PE practices, will be now be provided.

As an emancipatory educational activity, PE has been closely linked to other alternative currents such as liberation theology, alternative communication, feminism, and PAR. Thus, its participants and practices have been involved in other projects, processes, and movements related to the solidarity economy, ecclesiastical and cultural dynamics, and political processes aimed at gaining ground for and expanding democracy and citizenship. Currently, emerging topics are coming to light, such as food sovereignty, agroecology, youth, interculturality, the rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) population, and community justice.

From the outset, due to its emancipatory mission PE practices have focused on populations considered to be oppressed, exploited, or discriminated, such as the inhabitants of rural areas and working-class neighborhoods and other worker classes. With the expansion of its scope and perspectives for action, PE currently works with teachers and students at formal educational centers, and with youths, local leaders and authorities, the LGBT community, and native and Afro-American peoples.

In recent years, educational strategies have been enhanced in the sense that they are no longer aimed solely toward the creation of a critical awareness, but also provide training in other sensitivities, desires, and spiritual and corporal identities, which bring about diverse and, at the same time, converging paths of resistance, emancipation, and the construction of alternatives. This is also evident in the expansion of methodological strategies that include narratives, journeys, and aesthetic and corporal expression, in addition to dialogue, the use of new participatory techniques, and the collective building of knowledge.

With regard to knowledge production, the new generation of educators have incorporated strategies and creative and interactive research techniques that look to recognize new dimensions and senses of reality such as territory, personal testimonies, the expression of feelings, and visions of the future. Such strategies and techniques include the creation of concept maps and the use of social mapping, conducting tours through the territory in order to gain information about relevant problems for the community, and conversational encounters in public places where the expression of ideas and feelings through oral, visual, plastic, or corporal narratives is encouraged.