The Fundamentals of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy
A workshop with education and social work professionals from Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Germany
In February 2026, the Paulo Freire Gesellschaft e.V. offered an introduction to the fundamentals of Paulo Freire’s pedagogy as part of an international exchange project on conflict resolution. The workshop took place in Berlin in cooperation with the organisation act4transformation. Participants included professionals from the fields of education and social work from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Turkey and Germany. Together, we explored the question of what insights Paulo Freire’s thinking offers for their work in the current context.
Following a brief introductory talk on the significance of the ‘word’ – through which, according to Paulo Freire, we learn to interpret the world in order to change it – the participants broke into small groups to explore various core concepts of Freire’s pedagogy. They discussed the respective significance of these concepts for the development of critical consciousness and exchanged views on direct links to their personal and professional lives.
The theoretical analysis of the core concepts of Paulo Freire’s pedagogy was complemented by various creative activities, in which the results of the joint reflection were transformed into sculptures and participants also utilised their own body language.
The exchange project gave rise to the handbook “Build Bridges not Walls: De-radicalisation and Non-violence in Youth Work” (2026), which is available for free download.