Conference Agenda

This paper examines a crucial but surprisingly understudied period in the life and work of Paulo Freire: his years in Geneva in the early 1970s, when he worked for the World Council of Churches (WCC) and became a truly global public intellectual. While Freire is widely known for Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) and for his role in Latin American critical pedagogy, his decade-long transnational activity based in Europe has received far less systematic historical and empirical attention.

The central research questions of the paper are: How did Paulo Freire become a global intellectual and a worldwide reference point for emancipatory education in the 1970s? What institutional, political, and organizational infrastructure made this global role possible? And how did the World Council of Churches serve as a hub for transnational pedagogical, political, and postcolonial networks during this period?

Empirically, the paper is based on original archival research conducted at the World Council of Churches archives in Geneva, which holds 17 boxes of documents related to Freire’s work in the WCC’s education department. This material consists mainly of correspondence, reports, memoranda, travel documents, and administrative papers produced during Freire’s work between 1970 and the late 1970s. Although the archive does not constitute a personal intellectual archive in the strict sense, it offers a unique window into the everyday institutional conditions, constraints, and possibilities of Freire’s global activity.

Methodologically, the paper approaches the archive both as a historical source and as an object of reflection in its own right. The WCC archive does not primarily reveal the internal development of Freire’s concepts; rather, it documents the practical, organizational, and political infrastructure of “world pedagogy”: the flows of invitations, requests, refusals, travel arrangements, and collaborations that made Freire a nodal point in a global network of educators, activists, churches, and liberation movements. The paper, therefore, treats the archive as a record of the material and institutional conditions of global intellectual work in the 1970s.

Theoretically, the analysis draws on transnational history, the sociology of intellectuals, and critical historiography of education. Freire is approached not only as a thinker but also as a historically situated actor embedded in specific institutional and geopolitical constellations shaped by decolonization, the Cold War, and the rise of international civil society organizations. Particular attention is paid to Freire’s intensive engagement with African liberation movements and postcolonial educational projects, which became a central dimension of his work during the Geneva years.

The paper argues that Freire’s Geneva period should be understood as a formative phase in the making of “Paulo Freire” as a global figure. It was through the WCC’s transnational networks that Freire’s pedagogy was translated, mobilized, and recontextualized across continents. At the same time, this period also reveals the tensions, limits, and overload inherent in global intellectual work: the archive is filled with unanswered requests, standardized refusals, and signs of the sheer scale of expectations projected onto Freire.

By reconstructing this institutional and transnational infrastructure of Freire’s work, the paper contributes to a more historically grounded understanding of critical pedagogy as a global project and to the historiography of education in the era of decolonization and internationalization.

On a spring day in 1934, children’s voices from Sagene School in Oslo resounded across Norway through the new national radio network. Broadcasting from their classroom, the pupils described the fishing village they had constructed in their urban school environment. The floor was covered with a relief map of Finnmark, and the children wore self‑sewn gáktis and Sámi hats while performing traditional Sámi songs.

Sagene School was an official experimental school and a cradle of modern reform pedagogy in Norway. The Finnmark project was a pupil‑initiated, transdisciplinary, phenomenon‑based learning endeavour that unfolded across all subjects for two months. The pedagogical approach centred on a principle of collective individuality: the class followed the children’s curiosity, exploring Finnmark through their own questions and discoveries, yet within a learning process subtly guided by a teacher adopting an intentionally unobtrusive pedagogical stance. Practical‑aesthetic modes of learning were central. The aim was to learn through head, heart, and hand—cognition, emotion, and action. As the fictive fishing‑village life‑world took shape in the classroom, each child found a meaningful role within the shared project, exemplifying the collective individuality that structured everyday life at the school.

At the core of these experiments stood the interdisciplinary subject heimstadlære (Heimatkunde), which represented a new conception of schooling in interwar Norway. The subject integrated local environment, everyday life, and cultural heritage, building a bridge from family and community to school, and from the local to the national and global. Work‑school didactics sought to break with the formalist, drill‑based rote‑learning tradition. In line with Ellen Key’s vision in The Century of the Child, the child—rather than inherited culture—was to be the centre of educational attention. Every pupil should find a secure place in the classroom community, just as they would later find their place in society.

This paper positions educational history as a research field by foregrounding also “the good example”: the life‑world of the 1934 radio classroom, and the detailed guidance for the teacher’s most consequential day—the first day of first grade. The aim is not to construct an eschatological narrative, nor a decline narrative. Instead, the past is treated as a knowledge space and a repository of pedagogical hope, innovation, and reflection—possessing intrinsic value as a horizon for future educational thought.

The Dutch historian Lea Dasberg introduced the notion of “pedagogies of hope” as a counterpoint to contemporary educational rationalities. Academic analysis often becomes synonymous with critique—deconstructing the past in order to “re‑imagine” a better future. Dasberg, as Verstraete shows, argued instead historical moments as sources of “good practice”: not to be replicated, but analytically meaningful experiences and inspiration. Thick descriptions of pedagogical experiments—such as the radio classroom or first day in school—offer resources for today’s educational debates, when calls for new reforms echo above a reform‑weary teaching profession.

In this presentation we engage in a critical reflection on the way museums confront past celebrations of colonialism. Curators are increasingly engaged in new truth-telling approaches that challenge students of history to look at difficult histories through hard hitting affect laden installations. We tell this story through an encounter with a three roomed exhibition in the National Museum of Wales entitled Reframing Picton, The Wound is a Portal, and Spirited.

The three rooms of the exhibition reveal different narratives of the colonial project. In the first room Picton’s grand portrait has been put into packing crates and placed on the ground. On the walls around that are the transcripts of his trial for the torture of young girls in Trinidad. The second room is a contemporary space with images and videos of Trinidadians today speaking back to the wounds of the colonial past showing resistance and resilience. The final room is an installation created by a collaboration of artists and museum workers. There are several delicate wire sculptures of a dancer, lit up and casting delicate shadows on the wall, while twee music emanates from a rotating cigar box. A circular path has been created with walls of paper messages, interspersed with large images of 19th century enslavement and compellingly young girls of the 21st century. Disturbingly loud sounds of rattling chains and screams join the soundscape. The path leads to the dramatic centre piece revealing that the petite figure is in fact the act of torture, known as “pictoning”. This double entendre dramatically castes innocence alongside the horrors of the colonial past entangling visitors in an extraordinary affective encounter.

As museum researcher/visitors we are open to the serendipitous, responding to the curatorial design and listening to our embodied reactions. This exhibition disrupted and challenged our senses at every turn. Indeed, what seemed like a petite ballerina figure would in fact represent something quite terrifying. Our emergent process therefore involved deliberate slow walking, close noticing, engaging in circular exploration of the spaces and a focus on listening to the sounds and silences. In this exceptional exhibition we found ourselves reconfigured and utterly entangled in the affective flows of colonial and postcolonial histories.

Thomas Picton was once regarded as a great figure of Welsh history, a governor of Trinidad and a hero who died at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. As museum visitors we are asked to engage consciously and conscientiously with an alternative history of Picton in Trinidad, that foregrounds the suffering of women and re-evaluates Picton as any sort of hero. This aligns with a movement throughout the UK and other parts of the British empire where museums are called to rethink colonial representations (Yuhl, 2013), where institutions are asked to divest themselves of historical slave-based sources, and where public symbols and nomenclature are being re-considered (Moscufi, 2022).

In this presentation we explore how postcolonial challenges impact museums and especially how they impacted the National Museum of Wales and its representation of Thomas Picton. We raise questions about how we can use post qualitative process methodologies and new materialism to recast difficult histories and enhance history education in museums.

Sami indigenous students at a national democracy workshop illuminate key aspects of the current Norwegian debate on social studies and citizenship education, aligned to the 2023 Truth- and Reconciliation Commission's (TRC) push for a revised historical narrative “we”. The report from 2023 led to a froaml appology from the Norwegian Parliament to the Sami Indigenous people and minorities. And in january 2026 the work establishing a national competance centre began. The report established a new truth and an indigenous and minority voice required to be heard. Now the difficult path towards reconciliation.

The article presents a living journey of becoming, following a group of Sámi students to a democracy laboratory at Utøya, and their return to peer-learning in Sápmi. Utøya is the site of the terrorist attack on Norway, 2011. Sápmi is the Sámi Indigenous homeland in northern Fennoscandia. The 2023 Norwegian Truth- and Reconciliation Report (TRR) stresses a urgent need to address Indigenous Children’s Rights in school.[1] The legal backdrop includes international Human Rights declarations, and conventions on Indigenous People and the Rights of the Child (1989), specifically latter’s §28, §29 and §30, addressing education in children’s language, culture and religion.[2] What better way to guide reconciliatory citizenship education than allowing these children’s minority-majority journey lead the way as a resource for new collective reflections?

In a post-colonial episteme, the Sámi occupy a subaltern south-in-the-north-position. When Prof Spivak criticizes UN perspectives and pedagogy for its immanent Western paternalism, she insists on “learning from below” listening to “future electorate” - children.[3] The Sami children’s voice simultaneously resemblance to Osler’s call to “re-imagine the nation as bout multicultural and cosmopolitan”.[4] From such an Indigenous and Childism perspective, the Sami voice could add real-life fresh dimensions to the postcolonial critiques of UN’s alienating universalism. In line with Osler, they transcend polarized lines between national particularities and international rights, essential when addressing the TRR imperatives for transformative history, democracy and citizenship curriculum and education. The TRC-era highlights local ethnic-cultural revival – as a voice from below.

The paper has three focal point:
1. Describe the context of The Norwegian Truth and Reconciliation Process, Report and the new National Competence Centre
3. Follow the Sami Children to the National Democracy Workshop at Utøya and their "memoirs from Utøya"
2. Illuminate the need for Narrative Refiguration of History and Citizenship Self Images
The intention of this paper is to add to the educational work of reconciliation of indigenous people, listening to the children's voices. The future is already here, sitting in the classrooms.