A praxis of hope: lessons from the ‘untested feasibility’ for twenty-first century education

ABSTRACT

This article offers a contemporary interpretation of the work of global educator, Paulo Freire, inspired by the concept of ‘untested feasibility’ which he first expounded in his work Pedagogy of Hope. Our purpose is to pay particular attention to some relevant lessons stemming from the imagination of what has so far been untested and yet is feasible, which Freire closely associates with his views on utopia. These lessons remain fully valid for education in the twenty-first century in a globalised world characterised by tensions and uncertainties. In this sense, these pages pay homage to Paulo Freire as global educator and respond to his willingness to revive and discuss his intellectual and human legacy in order to keep it alive. We share some reflections, inspired by Paulo Freire as a global educator, and his dialogues with other thinkers, so that, together, we may find encouragement for the kind of educational commitment that may contribute to improve the fate of the world. In short, this is an invitation to the praxis of untested feasibility that may provide us with the resources that are needed to set out for a journey of hope.

KEYWORDS:

• Paulo Freire
• untested yet feasible
• hope
• education for global citizenship
• utopia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It is not easy to translate the Portuguese expression ‘inédito viável’. Freire himself realised the difficulty of rendering its precise meaning in English. Manuela Guiherme points out that the translator of Pedgogy of Hope proposed the term ‘untested viable’, with which Freire agreed. However, Guilherme suggests the translation ‘viable unknown’ (Guilherme 2017, 433) while Carlos Alberto Torres adopts the term ‘untested feasible’, whose meaning in Spanish he also associates with ‘feasible not yet proved’ (‘factible no probado’) (Torres forthcoming).

2 The term ‘letter’ is not only metaphorical, but also real, as shown in Paulo Freire’s published Letters to Cristina. Reflections on My Life and Work (Freire 1996) and in his volume Teachers as cultural workers: Letters to those who dare to teach (Freire 2005). He also corresponded extensively with many of his friends, with university colleagues and with teachers, and this correspondence has been partially included in the third part of his posthumous work, Pedagogy of Possible Dreams (Freire 2015, 173–178).

3 Some examples, among others, are the recent bronze sculpture in the Faculty of Education Library at Cambridge University (https://news.educ.cam.ac.uk/paulo-freire-sculpture-installed), or the visual display dedicated to the Brazilian thinker at the Universitat de València Teacher Training Faculty (https://www.uv.es/uvweb/magisteri/es/noticias/cien-anos-paulo-freire-1285923389647/Novetat.html?id=1286223894892).

4 Utopian imagination, for Bloch, ‘has a correlate real possibility’. Hence, ‘much in the world is still unclosed’ (Bloch 1986, 196).

5 Even if the author first thought about its Spanish equivalent as a ‘neologism’ (apalabrar), it bears some resemblance with the notions, in English, of ‘languaging as world-making’ and ‘worlding the language’. (Demuro and Gurney 2021).

6 Translated from: Hölderlin (1970).