Letters to Those who Dare Learn to Teach: Freire from the Classroom, in Times of Uncertainty and into the Future

Abstract

Universities have not traditionally been spaces for addressing Freirean thought and praxis, although there have been attempts to break this hegemonic perspective of concealment or denial of the political, pedagogical and ethical value of its proposal.
In a chair of the undergraduate degree in Ciencias de la Educación, called Tradiciones y Prácticas de la Educación Popular, a didactic proposal related to Paulo Freire was promoted by the teaching team. An activity was proposed to the students: they would write a letter to someone attending the career 10 years in the future or more, to whom they could in an imaginary way tell about this time of pandemic and how Freire's work was inspiring to them to continue thinking and doing educational processes even in times of uncertainty, doubt and despair.
Just as Freire used the letter as a pedagogical record where he spoke to many generations of educators, we try to invite the young women to use this communicational piece to build a dialogue from intimacy and by appealing to their own interpretation of the legacy of the Brazilian pedagogue, in the horizon of social emancipation.
In this article we will bring excerpts from the letters of the students as ethnographic facts that speak of how the author currently generates marks in university trajectories, how it can be interpreted in such a complex and strange time like this, how a curricular space can promote understanding as anchor to project teaching work with searches for equality, social justice, solidarity and the democratization of culture.