Paulo Freire, Diálogo e Empoderamento: O potencial libertador dos círculos de leitura literária, por adolescentes em condição de vulnerabilidade social

Abstract

Based on Freire's concepts of dialogue and empowerment, the article discusses how collective literary reading, by socially vulnerable young people, can constitute education as a practice of liberty. The theoretical-conceptual study covers three guiding questions. The findings indicate that the fact that adolescents from the peripheries are more vulnerable to forms of prejudice, violence, as well as the negative impacts of inefficient public policies indicates that freeing themselves from this reality implies a process of construction and reconstruction of collective consciousness. When they read, teenagers are able to seek autonomy, emancipation, self-affirmation and, above all, promotion of their knowledge, as reading allows a dialogue between readers, literary characters and the historical materiality that surrounds them. Collective, dialogical, non-prescriptive and fruitful literary reading presents favorable conditions for the empowerment of the group, as it constitutes a critical and reflective practice, through the full exercise of language, which becomes social practices of liberty. Offering reading circles to young people can, in addition to training them critically and reflectively, make them multipliers of this practice, expanding the practice of literary reading to an increasingly larger group of young people.