Paulo Freire and the politics of disposability: creating critical dissent dialogue

Paulo Freire transformed my community development practice with the profound insight that education is politics, offering me the conceptual tools to understand power in society expressed in the stories of ordinary, everyday life and the practical tools to do something about it. He emphasized that his pedagogy had emerged from his own experience in its culture and times. He offered it, not as a blueprint, but as the basis for adapting liberating education in contexts over time and space. This vital perception, that critical pedagogy must be contextualized in its cultural and political times, is the focus of this dialogical paper.